The Jim Rutt Show

The Jim Rutt Show

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Crisp conversations with critical thinkers at the leading edge of science, technology, politics, and social systems.

EP 292 Emil Ejner Friis on Building a Listening Society

Jim talks with Emil Ejner Friis about political metamodernism and what comes after postmodernism. They discuss the "woke vacuum" & its failure to include common folks, psychosocial problems vs material challenges in Western countries, Jim's pushback on postmodernism, Trump as the first postmodern president, personal vs institutional change, emotional states & leadership, late-stage financialized capitalism's effects on communities, European vs American approaches to industry/manufacturing, milit

Mar 18, • 0:00

EP 291 Jeff Sebo on Who Matters, What Matters, and Why

Jim talks with Jeff Sebo about the ideas in his book The Moral Circle: Who Matters, What Matters, and Why. They discuss the concept of the moral circle, harming cats vs harming cars, the case study of Happy the elephant, Descartes' view of animals, phenomenal consciousness, Thomas Nagel's bat argument, the Google engineer who claimed LaMDA was conscious, the substrate dependence of consciousness, a factory waste disposal dilemma, animal rescue triage scenarios, probability calculations in moral

Mar 13, • 1:23:54

EP 290 Mark Stahlman on Trump as the Avatar of the Digital Paradigm Shift

Jim talks with Mark Stahlman about Trump as an avatar of the current digital transformation. They discuss the GameB movement & complexity theory, predictions made to the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, security through development as alternative to war, the three spheres (East, West, Digital), China's approach to digital vs. the Western approach, Catholic social teaching principles, neo-feudalism vs. the scribal paradigm, Humanity 2.0, Aristotelian concepts of soul & hylomorphism, Cyber Sab

Mar 11, • 1:24:55

EP 289 Adam B. Levine on AI-Powered Programming for Non-Developers

Jim talks with Adam B. Levine about AI programming aids for non-techies and the future of Bitcoin. They discuss Adam's background as a "technical non-technical" person, the evolution from manual LLM prompting to using IDEs, Windsurf as an AI-first IDE, Claude 3.7's thinking mode, productivity improvements with AI coding tools, different platforms like Cursor and Cline, the "pure idea space" vs technical execution, the role of liberal arts people in tech teams, Bitcoin as digital gold, Schelling

Mar 6, • 1:26:02

EP 288 BJ Campbell on Cops, Belief, and Chainsaw-Faced Robot Dogs

Jim talks with BJ Campbell about the ideas in his Substack essay "On Cops, Belief, and Chainsaw Faced Robot Dogs." They discuss forms of social control, absolute police states vs. belief states, the role of belief vs. actual enforcement in maintaining order, the noble lie concept & Plato's original formulation, the 2020 crime spike & "defund the police" movement, the history of police forces & alternative methods of maintaining order, the "God-shaped hole" concept, membranes & group coherence, a

Mar 4, • 1:19:03

EP 287 Jonathan Rauch on the Epistemic Crisis

Jim talks with Jonathan Rauch about the ideas in his book The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. They discuss the epistemic crisis, Plato's Theaetetus, Trump & propaganda techniques, the Constitution of Knowledge as a framework for epistemics, the "marketplace of ideas" metaphor, the reality-based community, the personal-institutional spiral, the social funnel of knowledge, social media's impact on epistemics, advertising vs subscription models, meme space pollution, the anti-vax mov

Feb 27, • 1:37:21

EP 286 Bob Levy on the Use and Abuse of Presidential Power

Jim talks with Bob Levy about presidential powers, their history, and their potential for abuse. They discuss the nature of the presidential pardon, recent controversial pardons by Trump & Biden, proposed reforms, 3 main purposes of the pardon, court blocks on executive actions, the firing of federal employees, the Impoundment Control Act, immigration & deportation under Trump, presidential power over tariffs, courts as guardrails, the timeline for legal challenges, potential constitutional cris

Feb 24, • 1:04:45

EP 285 Josh Bernoff on AI, Writing, and Thinking

Jim talks with Josh Bernoff, author of Writing Without Bullshit, about the impact of AI on writing education and professional writing. They discuss Josh's background and career, Stephen Lane's recent op-ed arguing that AI should take over writing mechanics, problems with AI-generated writing, the role of writing in thinking, ChatGPT's "deep research," Jim's ScriptHelper project, the decline in math & navigation skills, the importance of memos for corporate decision-making, literacy as a fundamen

Feb 18, • 52:47

EP 284 Jordan Hall on AI, the Commons, and the Church

Jim talks with Jordan Hall about the relationship between humanity and advanced AI. They discuss the false dichotomy of state vs market control of AI, the commons & the church as organizing principles, community vs society, why alignment with humanity is by definition impossible, the role of symbols & organizing principles in communities, how Moloch & Mammon shape AI development, hyper-concentration of power, neo-feudalism, the possibility of an AI singleton, entropy in communities, an alternati

Feb 13, • 1:19:16

EP 283 Brian Chau on the Trump Administration and AI

Jim talks with Brian Chau about what the new administration could mean for AI development. They discuss recent actions by the Tump administration including repealing Biden's executive order & the Stargate infrastructure project, Biden's impact on AI, the formation of the Alliance for the Future, regulatory bureaucracy, state patchwork laws, censorship, the Gemini controversy & DEI in AI, safety restrictions in chat models, the meaning of DeepSeek, economic implications of model distillation, his

Feb 11, • 1:08:04

EP 282 Tyson Yunkaporta on Indigenous Law, Lore, and Learning

Jim talks with Tyson Yunkaporta about the ideas in his new book Right Story, Wrong Story: Adventures in Indigenous Thinking. They discuss a symbolic emu visitor on Jim's farm, Aboriginal collective pronouns, Sand Talk's impact, wrong canoes, lore vs law, how Aboriginal law adapted to invasion, ritualized violence & rule-governed fighting, Aboriginal knowledge systems & peer review, signals & spirit in natural systems, the sacred as a way to deal with complex systems, Plato's noble lie, restricte

Feb 6, • 1:34:27

EP 281 Jeff Hawkins and Viviane Clay on the Thousand Brains Theory

Jim talks with Jeff Hawkins and Viviane Clay about the Thousand Brains Project and Jeff's book A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence. They discuss Mountcastle's theory of the neocortex's universal algorithm, cortical columns & their structure, learning modules in AI sensory systems, reprogramming of the neocortex, the 6 layers of cortex, mini-columns & macro-columns, the visual cascade, reference frames as essential for knowledge representation, "voting" for perceptual consensus, how t

Feb 4, • 1:32:15

EP 280 Rob Henderson on Luxury Beliefs

Jim talks with Rob Henderson about his book Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class and the concept of luxury beliefs. They discuss Rob's journey from foster care to Yale and Cambridge, Jim's background, the decline in two-parent families from 1960 to 2005, changing forms of elite hypocrisy, intra-elite competition, corporate adoption of woke beliefs, enforcement of ideological conformity, the spread of academic ideas into mainstream culture, attributions of success, drugs an

Jan 30, • 1:14:01

EP 279 Samuel Scarpino on H5N1 and Pandemic Risk

Jim talks with epidemiology expert Samuel Scarpino about the recent spread of H5N1 (bird flu) in dairy cows and its implications for public health. They discuss the historical context of H5N1, fatality rates, modeling the spread, network effects in disease transmission, current surveillance efforts, H5N1 transmission mechanisms, challenges of human respiratory transmission, lessons learned & mislearned from Covid-19, the current state of the H5N1 vaccine preparation, extreme pandemic response sc

Jan 9, • 1:06:19

EP 278 Peter Wang on AI, Copyright, and the Future of Intelligence

Jim has a wide-ranging conversation with recurring guest Peter Wang on AI copyright frameworks and the rapidly changing tech landscape. They discuss "the Chattening" (ChatGPT's release in November 2022) & its impact, parallels between current AI & the invention of science, humans as narrow-band sensors, cybernetics & control systems, the unbearable slowness of being, the Platonic Representation Hypothesis, language & intelligence, why eyeballs are white, copyright challenges with AI, the Anacond

Jan 2, • 1:31:55

EP 277 Kristian Rönn on Darwinian Traps and How to Escape Them

Jim talks with Kristian Rönn, co-founder of the carbon accounting tech company Normative, about his book The Darwinian Trap: The Hidden Evolutionary Forces That Explain Our World (and Threaten Our Future). They discuss Darwinian traps & demons, the parable of Picher, Oklahoma, the "cost of doing business" mentality, beauty filter arms races, perverse incentives in science, Goodhart's law, how nature deals with defection vs cooperation, kamikaze mutants, pandas as evolutionary dead ends, close ca

Dec 20, 2024 • 0:00

EP 276 Carolyn Dicey Jennings on Attention and Mental Control

Jim talks with philosopher and cognitive scientist Carolyn Dicey Jennings about her book Attention and Mental Control. They discuss mental control vs self-control, the ping pong metaphor, prioritization vs single-threaded focus, voluntary vs automatic attention, perceptual processing & conscious attention, 3 forms of interest, meditation & mind wandering, hyperfocus as a superpower, ADHD & neurodiversity, the emergence of control, wave activity in the brain, local vs global brain activity, and m

Dec 19, 2024 • 1:36:21

EP 275 Rachel Winkler on Mass Deportation

Jim talks with lawyer and former DHS policy person Rachel Winkler about Trump's promise to carry out a large-scale deportation operation. They discuss estimates of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., mixed-status households & the aging undocumented population, the legal standing of an undocumented immigrant, types of undocumented immigrants, the process for pending deportation orders, potential policy changes, prosecutorial discretion, practical constraints on mass deportations, private detenti

Dec 17, 2024 • 1:07:17

EP 274 Richard Overy on Why War?

Jim talks with historian Richard Overy about his new book Why War? They discuss historians' shyness in thinking about the nature of war, a correspondence between Einstein & Freud, the meaning of the term, the "pacified past," the interplay between warfare & cooperation, recent ethological studies of chimpanzees, conformity, 4 major types of anthropological evidence, the status of warriors over time, ecological drivers of war, Marxian analyses of war, hubristic warfare, Rome's centuries of warfar

Dec 13, 2024 • 59:21

EP 273 Gregg Henriques on the Unified Theory of Knowledge

Jim 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 wisd

Dec 3, 2024 • 1:34:44

EP 272 Loribeth Ford Jarrell on Bespoke Education

Jim talks with Loribeth Ford Jarrell, the director of Sumplicity Math, a mathematics enrichment program for children. They discuss working with the neural characteristics & firing patterns of individual children, education going modular, the microschool movement vs supplementary education, tutorial services, individual assessment, 10 vector dials, Jim's education in proving the teacher wrong, identifying Jim's learning profile, why education should belong to the child, the 10-frame dot model, du

Nov 19, 2024 • 1:17:12

EP 271 Lorraine Besser on the Art of the Interesting

Jim talks with Lorraine Besser about the ideas in her book The Art of the Interesting: What We Miss in the Pursuit of the Good Life and How to Cultivate It. They discuss the turning point in Lorraine's life that inspired the book, the meaning of the good life, pleasure vs eudaimonia, Stoicism & Epicureanism, unstructured cognitive engagement, the interesting, Seinfeld's relationship to happiness, problems with the pursuit of pleasure & meaning, the arrival fallacy, saints vs human beings, psycho

Nov 5, 2024 • 1:26:49

EP 270 Nancy Jacobson on No Labels and the 2024 Election

Jim 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 No Labels - Book

Oct 30, 2024 • 18:27

EP 269 Alex Ebert on the War on Genius

Jim talks with Alex Ebert about his recent essay "Suboptimal Revolution: In Defense of Inefficiencies." They discuss what optimization does, genius vs democracy, negating the spatiotemporal experience of becoming a master, the decision-by-committee problem, intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation, dimensional collapse, the app Shazam, what happened to movies, preferred energetic states & the feat of problematizing, status burning, audience capture, the signature of a medium, the human ability to spot

Oct 29, 2024 • 0:00

EP 268 Brendan Graham Dempsey on the Evolution of Meaning

Jim talks with Brendan Graham Dempsey about the ideas in his new book, The Evolution of Meaning: A Universal Learning Process. They discuss Jim's love for the book, the thinking behind the title, future books in the series, why Brendan avoided the word "religion," the nature of meaning, dissipative systems, Shannon information vs semantic information, relations vs static objects, meaning as adaptive information, the meaning of value, Gregg Henriques's Unified Theory of Knowledge, the meaning of

Oct 25, 2024 • 0:00

EP 267 Richard Hanania on the Presidential Election and More

Jim talks with Richard Hanania in the third of four interviews with heterodox political thinkers on the upcoming US presidential election. They discuss the danger of "heterodox orthodoxy," Trump's election denial, disagreeing with the Democrats on policy, Jim's critiques of both parties, religion's impact on policy, Republicans as the party of low human capital, the idea of Trump derangement syndrome, the number of people who served under Trump who are not supporting him, guardrails against over

Oct 23, 2024 • 52:56

EP 266 Marcia Gralha on the Common Core of Psychotherapy and Wokeism in Academia

Jim talks with Marcia Gralha about her and Gregg Henriques's work identifying the common core of psychotherapeutic traditions. They discuss her collaboration with & recent engagement to Gregg, framing psychotherapy, the enlightenment gap, the development of eclecticism, common factors between approaches, the integration movement, approaches to integration, the 3(+1) elements of the Common Core, the quality of the therapeutic bond, cultural legitimization, choosing interventions, rituals, the Uni

Oct 22, 2024 • 1:13:45

EP 265 Aravind Srinivas on Perplexity AI

Jim talks with Aravind Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of the AI-powered search engine Perplexity. They discuss Jim's use of Perplexity, its wide range of use cases, why Google search is limited by fear of mistakes, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), citations, coming up with the idea, leveraging existing tools vs inventing everything, the core product experience, how the orchestration engine works, semantic vector databases, testing Perplexity as a hedge fund strategist, the Perplexity API, Per

Oct 17, 2024 • 48:50

EP 264 Bret Weinstein and Jim Argue Politics

Jim 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 tea

Oct 13, 2024 • 1:09:06

EP 263 Evan McMullen on Self-Driving Cars

Jim talks with Evan McMullen about the state of self-driving car technology, with a special focus on simulators. They discuss the purpose of simulators, levels of simulation, how the world is modeled, gradually ramping up the complexity of the testing world, Tesla's approach, hardware-in-the-loop testing, Waymo's first-mover advantage, simulating the availability of a human intervener, driverless solutions vs driver aid, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), the question of which theorie

Oct 9, 2024 • 1:17:09

EP 262 Cliff Maloney on a Libertarian's Case for Trump

Jim 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

Oct 6, 2024 • 1:21:03

EP 261 Nikos Salingaros on What Went Wrong with Architecture

Jim talks with Nikos Salingaros about architectural theory, urbanism, and urban planning. They discuss inherited knowledge, the capability to distinguish between ugly & beautiful buildings, John Vervaeke's 4 kinds of knowing, vertical vs horizontal design, how architecture went so wrong, backward evolution, a Messianic futurism cult, the destruction of living geometry, how the real estate racket works, biophilic design, the correlation between modern architecture & modern art, the human scale, J

Oct 3, 2024 • 1:24:08

EP 260 Ben Goertzel and Trent McConaghy on a Crypto Merger for AGI/ASI

Jim talks with Trent McConaghy and Ben Goertzel about the merger of Ben's SingularityNET AGIX token, Trent's Ocean Protocol, and Fetch. They discuss the relative size of the merger, motivations for pulling together the three networks, distinguishing this from a standard corporate merger, how the communities of the projects reacted, leveraging the benefits of scale, changing the ticker symbol, defining AGI vs ASI, forecasts on AGI, considering the arc of self-driving cars, data bottlenecks, the l

Oct 1, 2024 • 1:36:20

EP 259 Toufi Saliba on Crypto AI Networking

Jim talks with Toufi Saliba about the Toda/IP protocol and HyperCycle, a decentralized network for AI-to-AI communication. They discuss the high-level view of Toda/IP & HyperCycle, enabling communication of value, what Toda adds on top of UDP, time & cost constraints, cryptographic proof in the first handshake, how Toda transfers value in very small quantities, how settlement occurs, who has custody of a dollar, transaction machines, where money is kept & what prevents stealing, an actual non-fu

Sep 10, 2024 • 1:17:06

EP 258 Stephen Webb on Where Are the Aliens?

Jim talks with Stephen Webb about his book If the Universe Is Teeming With Aliens... Where Is Everybody?: Seventy-Five Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life. They discuss Jim's obsession with the Fermi paradox, the meaning of the Fermi paradox, the Drake equation, discounting claims about UFOs, a question that everyone can contribute to, Perplexity AI's estimates, optimistic scenarios, anthropic principles, Kardashev civilizations, the principle of mediocrity, g

Aug 29, 2024 • 1:52:35

EP 257 Malcolm and Simone Collins on Fertility Rates and Pronatalism

Jim 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 t

Aug 27, 2024 • 1:34:12

EP 256 Glenn Loury on Confessions of a Black Conservative

Jim talks with Glenn Loury about his recent memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative. They discuss the problem of self-regard, Glenn's mentorship under Thomas Schelling, his upbringing in the South Side of Chicago, his matriarch aunt Eloise, his best friend Woody, the one-drop rule, the social construction of race, the influence of his uncles, stealing a car for prom, the Illinois Institute of Technology, working at a printing plant, community college classes, discovering the

Aug 22, 2024 • 1:55:05

EP 255 Jordan Hall on the Logical Necessity of the Holy Trinity

Jim talks with Jordan Hall about his arguments for the logical necessity of the Christian Holy Trinity and what that might mean about our relationship with the world. They discuss points of agreement & resonance between their views, relational ontology vs substance ontology, belief as mental operation vs existential commitment, a hierarchical stack of concepts, the complexity lens, the conceptual level on which relationship belongs, relata as contained within relationship, relationship as the mo

Aug 20, 2024 • 2:10:24

EP 254 John Robb on What Went Wrong with America

Jim talks with John Robb about the ideas in his recent Substack essay, "What Went Wrong With America?" They discuss why there's a need to address what went wrong, tribal conspiracy theories following the Trump assassination, a breakdown in collective sense-making, cohesion, coherence, legitimacy, OODA loops, the importance of orientation, reorienting after career retirement, America's choice to orient on globalism, open borders, the end of America's tribal narrative, Pat Buchanan, the Ross Perot

Aug 19, 2024 • 46:19

EP 253 Alexander Bard Part 3: Process and Event

Jim talks with Alexander Bard in the last of three conversations about his and Jan Söderqvist’s recent book Process and Event. They discuss the barred absolute as that which is hidden to us in the world, the barred subject, the mamilla in Lacan, barred absolutes vs the Barred Absolute, dissolving nihilism, accepting death as absolute, trans-determinism, Grand Project A, exodology, paradigmatics, the tyrant's lynch mob, oikophobia, Trumpism as a reaction to oikophobia, attentionalism, the aboliti

Aug 15, 2024 • 1:50:58

EP 252 Alexander Bard Part 2: Process and Event

Jim talks with Alexander Bard in the second of three conversations about his and Jan Söderqvist's recent book Process and Event. They discuss eventological monotheism vs nomadological iconology, dualism vs monism, substance dualism, Spinoza's monism, graded relationality, emergence vector theory, Syntheism & its concepts, God as the ultimate dream, creating God, 4 dimensions of time, a more complete metaphysics, the problem with oneness, the two-headed phallus, priests & chiefs, the 3 fundamenta

Aug 13, 2024 • 1:51:39

EP 251 Pamela Denise Long on Kamala Harris and Blackness in America

Jim talks with Pamela Denise Long about the nomination of Kamala Harris and what it might mean for American Freedmen. They discuss the meaning & value of the term "Freedmen," what it means to be Black & why it matters, misallocated affirmative action, Barack Obama's ethnicity, the history of Bantu & Nilotic Africans, Kamala Harris as a metaphor, parallels between Harris & Obama, the question of Harris's Blackness, Harris's decision to identify as Black, the influence on public policy, her statem

Aug 9, 2024 • 37:41

EP 250 Alexander Bard Part 1: Process and Event

Jim talks with Alexander Bard for the first in a series of conversations about his and Jan Söderqvist's recent book Process and Event. They discuss Jim's process for reading the book, metaphysics, narratology, the socion, dividuals vs individuals, a biochemical definition of individuality, eventology, Alexander's conversion to Zoroastrianism, nomadology, Nietzsche's concept of the eternal recurrence, 4 varieties of time, a defense of armchair philosophy, phallic linear time, the phallic gaze & d

Aug 8, 2024 • 1:56:30

EP 249 Seth Lloyd on Measuring Complexity

Jim talks with Seth Lloyd about the many ways of measuring complexity. They discuss the difficulty of measuring complexity, the metabolism of bacteria, Kolmogorov complexity, Shannon entropy, Charles Bennett's logical depth, cellular automata, effective complexity & its discovery, the effective complexity of a bacterium, coarse graining, fractal dimensions, Lempel-Ziv complexity, the invention of Morse code, epsilon machines, thermodynamic depth, mutual information, integrated information as a m

Aug 6, 2024 • 1:04:45

EP 248 Timothy Clancy on the Israel-Hamas War

Jim talks with Timothy Clancy about the Israel-Hamas War following Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel. They discuss the sorting-out period that follows the end of an empire, Jerusalem as a perpetual battleground, 3 questions for understanding conflict, a missed opportunity for Jordan to take back the West Bank, what happened on October 7, recovering the sense of security, the scale of the atrocity, strategic limitations of bloodlust, unconditional surrender, grievance, pulling weeds vs addressin

Jul 16, 2024 • 1:06:35

EP 247 Sergey Kuprienko on Drone Warfare in Ukraine

Jim talks with Sergey Kuprienko, CEO and co-founder of Swarmer, about drone warfare in the Russo-Ukrainian War. They discuss the parallels between drones in Ukraine & the advance in aviation during World War I, the history of drone warfare in the conflict, Russia's electronic countermeasures, the niche Swarmer occupies, autonomy for coordinated robots, pilots vs operators, swarm vs swarm warfare, AI vs human decision-making, greener warfare, distribution of ability among drone pilots, current pr

Jul 11, 2024 • 51:48

EP 246 A.M. Hickman on Hitchhiking in America

Jim and A.M. Hickman trade stories about the pleasures and tribulations of hitchhiking. They discuss Andy & his wife's recent hitchhiking honeymoon, how he started hitchhiking as a teenager, growing up in Utica, New York, the Adirondacks, multi-generational itchy-foot syndrome, "hobo college," Jim's earliest hitchhiking experience, hitchhiking on the East Coast, crazy happenings, fertilized chicken eggs, a four-year-old driver, psychoactive chemicals, a shift against hitchhiking in the Eighties,

Jul 5, 2024 • 1:12:39

EP 245 Bob Levy on the Second Amendment and the Supreme Court

Jim talks with Bob Levy about the Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms, in the Supreme Court. They discuss Robert's late-career move to law, never being too old to reinvent yourself, how Robert got involved in a pivotal Supreme Court case in establishing the modern interpretation of the Second Amendment, the text of the Second Amendment, District of Columbia v. Heller, United States v. Miller, United States v. Emerson, the scholarship around framing the Second Amendment as an indivi

Jul 2, 2024 • 1:16:20

EP 244 Samo Burja on Lessons from the Russo-Ukrainian War

Jim talks with Samo Burja about lessons military strategists should take from the Russo-Ukrainian War so far. They discuss why military stockpiles are less useful than previously assumed, the scaling up of drone production, the impossibility of envisioning what tech will be needed, 4 factors that caused Russian miscalculation, offensive vs defensive dominance, the possibility of a U.S. military draft, the changing role of conscription, the high average age in Russia & Ukraine, the rapid evolutio

Jun 27, 2024 • 1:27:03

EP 243 Yaroslav Trofimov on Ukraine's War of Independence

Jim talks with Yaroslav Trofimov about his new book Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence. They discuss the reporting that went into the book, Yaroslav's connection to Ukraine, a brief history of Ukraine, the Golden Horde's conquering of modern-day Ukraine, Russia's inheritance of the Tatar-Mongol state, Ukraine's brief period of independence at the end of WWI, the complexity of Ukrainian identity, the Orange Revolution, the Maidan Revolution & its outco

Jun 25, 2024 • 1:13:28

EP 242 Magatte Wade on a Vision for African Economic Development

Jim talks with Magatte Wade about the ideas in her book The Heart of A Cheetah: How We Have Been Lied to about African Poverty, and What That Means for Human Flourishing. They discuss the origins of the book's title, the issue with aid, George Ayittey's "cheetahs vs hippos" frame, a leapfrogging strategy, Magatte's childhood in Senegal, recognizing lies about African poverty, business school in France, nine months in Columbus, Indiana, the meaning of African prosperity, criticizing by creating,

Jun 6, 2024 • 1:10:11

EP 241 Tor Nørretranders on the User Illusion of Consciousness

Jim talks with Tor Nørretranders about the ideas in his 1991 book The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size. They discuss the dialogue between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein, defining consciousness, primary vs extended consciousness, the origins of the user illusion in computer interface design, the mind as an attempt to create a relevant myth, measuring the human mind in terms of information theory, consciousness as a story of reduction & compression, the physics of information, Max

Jun 4, 2024 • 1:08:24

EP 240 Stuart Kauffman on the Construction of Space-Time

Jim talks with Stuart Kauffman about cosmology, fundamental physics, and the nature of dark matter, dark energy, and inflation. They discuss how Stuart moved into these fields, the Michelson-Morley experiment, special relativity, cosmic background radiation, the new period of precision cosmology, dark energy, why the universe is expanding faster, the Hubble tension, the baryonic Tully-Fisher relation, entanglement, nonlocality & whether it is fundamental, quantum gravity, why particle physics is

May 24, 2024 • 0:00

EP 239 Alex Fink on Improving Information Quality

Jim talks with Alex Fink about his company Otherweb, which uses AI to filter out fake news and create a more reliable news ecosystem. They discuss how Alex came to care about this problem, the decline of news media, how advertising wrecked the internet, the idea of an info agent, Otherweb's curation engine, information filtering systems, unhooking the internet from advertising, the fight between AdBlock and Facebook, the decision to disinclude paywalled websites, economic tradeoffs of paywalling

May 21, 2024 • 1:00:02

EP 238 Sam Sammane on Humanity’s Role in an AI-Dominated Future

Jim talks with Sam Sammane about the ideas in his new book The Singularity of Hope: Humanity's Role in an AI-Dominated Future. They discuss the hype around generative AI, obstacles to AGI, reinforcement learning, intuition & emotion, human-AI augmentation, rules of thumb, the plausibility of the brain as a quantum computer, Jim's ScriptHelper project, machine-like jobs that will likely be automated, the age of retraining, using AI to self-augment, the digital proletariat, a compassionate approac

May 14, 2024 • 0:00

EP 237 Simon DeDeo on the Odds of Major Civil Violence

Jim talks with Simon DeDeo about their wager concerning the likelihood of civil violence and mass killings in America in the next decade. They discuss the terms of the wager, the appropriate orders of magnitude, Alex Garland's Civil War, the American readiness to use violence, honor cultures, the movement from violence to political violence, industrial mass murder, polarization, the one-dimensionality of current elites, basins of attraction, statistical distributions of violence, Rene Girard's t

May 2, 2024 • 1:32:49

EP 236 Gregg Henriques on Free Will vs Determinism

Jim talks with Gregg Henriques about his take on the free will versus determinism debate. They discuss the importance of definitions, the enlightenment gap, the complexity lens, why "will" is confusing & choice is a better referent, free choice vs determinism, levels of analysis, description vs explanation, freedom as description, the tree of knowledge system, ontological jumps in evolutionary complexification, a stack of emergences, systems of justification, the concept of agency, layered agenc

Apr 23, 2024 • 36:32

EP 235 Robin Hanson on Beware Cultural Drift

Jim talks with Robin Hanson about the ideas in his essay "Beware Cultural Drift: Thoughts on modernity's monoculture mistake." They discuss drift in fundamental cultural values, the current unprecedented rate of change, boutique multiculturalism, weak selection pressures, drift without selection, understanding small cultures, agency risk, comparing corporate cultures with macro-cultures, the decrease in macro-cultures, the convergence of global elite culture, worldwide norms vs cultural sphere n

Apr 17, 2024 • 0:00

EP 234 Richard Bartlett on an Experiment in Co-Living

Jim talks with Richard Bartlett about the ideas in his essay "What we learned from a 3-month co-living experiment." They discuss Jim's visit to a co-living house, community & its recent decline, starting small & iterating, the co-living experiment in Andalusia, pre-registration, co-living plus events, finding the right place, the importance of landscape, the vibe, finances, membrane design, organizing transit, events, the emergent TPOT network, paying community organizers what they're worth, wea

Apr 9, 2024 • 1:03:09

EP 233 Robert Conan Ryan on Seven Ethical Perspectives

Jim talks with Robert Conan Ryan about seven ethical perspectives and why everyone should know them. They discuss why understanding ethical stances is valuable, a horseshoe spectrum, pragmatism, virtue ethics, consequentialism, deontology, elitist power, deification, social justice, stacking up ethical stances, Aristotle's golden mean, sociopaths in the military, running the polis, coherent pluralism, the multi-perspectival lens, Cornel West's positional complexity, paideia, DEI (Diversity, Equi

Apr 4, 2024 • 0:00

EP 232 Matthew David Segall on Process Philosophy and the Origin of Life

Jim talks with Matthew David Segall about the ideas in his and Bruce Damer's new essay, "The Cosmological Context of the Origin of Life: Process Philosophy and the Hot Spring Hypothesis." They discuss the "philosophy as footnotes to Plato" idea, the hot springs origin of life hypothesis, closing the gap between chemistry & life, Whitehead's idea of concrescence, metaphysics in philosophy, minimum viable metaphysics, why physical law doesn't imply biological organisms, process-relational philosop

Apr 3, 2024 • 1:26:50

EP 231 Vance Crowe Interviews Jim Rutt on AI Risk

Vance 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 im

Mar 27, 2024 • 1:04:44

EP 230 James Lindsay on a National Divorce

Jim talks with James Lindsay about the ideas in his recent essay "National Divorce Is National Suicide." They discuss the meaning of a national divorce (where the United States would split into two countries), different shapes it could take, the possibility of parallel experiments in civilization design, statistics on support for the idea, the proposed Belgian split, steelmanning the opposition, reducing the chances of a Civil War, the divide over gun rights & abortion, the Big Sort, why nationa

Mar 12, 2024 • 1:12:02

EP 229 Jonathan Rowson on the Antidebate

Jim talks with Jonathan Rowson of Perspectiva about a new social practice they're creating, the antidebate. They discuss the nature of debate, the spectacle of endemic polarization, why debate may be irredeemable, multiple ways of knowing, the Oxford Union debates, the debate apocalypse of 2020, the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debate, the elitist aspect of debates, longtermism, the dialectic fallacy, presencing confusion, anti-debate as a practice, developing the form & facilitation skills, anti-debate

Mar 7, 2024 • 55:46

EP 228 Jeremy Sherman on the Emergence and Nature of Selves

Jim talks with Jeremy Sherman about the ideas in his book Neither Ghost nor Machine: The Emergence and Nature of Selves. They discuss how Jim found Jeremy's work, Jeremy's relationship with Terrence Deacon, the mystery of purpose, teleology, Aristotle's four causes, the natural history of trying, crypto-Cartesianism, aims, emergent constraints, hylomorphism, regularity, Kolmogorov complexity, the second law of thermodynamics, the struggle for existence, autocatalytic networks, leading theories o

Mar 5, 2024 • 1:13:02

EP 227 Stuart Kauffman on the Emergence of Life

Jim talks with Stuart Kauffman about the ideas in the recent paper he co-authored with Andrea Roli, "Is the Emergence of Life an Expected Phase Transition in the Evolving Universe?" They discuss the fragmentation of the origins of life field, Pasteur's test of spontaneous generation, primitive soup, Watson & Crick's discovery of the structure of DNA, mutually catalyzing molecules, molecules as combinatorial objects, random catalysis, collectively autocatalytic sets, the origin of metabolism, com

Feb 29, 2024 • 1:19:52

EP 226 Hannah Rosenberg on An Answer to Red Pilldom

Jim talks with Hannah Rosenberg about the ideas in her essay "An Answer to Red Pilldom." They discuss the meaning & origins of red pilldom, how Hannah encountered red pilldom in close friendships, the idea that women are submissive, differences between men & women, pair-bonding instincts, balancing mixed instincts, the idea of hypergamy, adulting, how dating apps may skew human interactions, nostalgia for the 1950s trad wife, the actual lives of 1950s housewives, the idea that motherhood is the

Feb 22, 2024 • 50:54

EP 225 Bruce Damer on a New Path for Psychedelics

Jim talks with Bruce Damer about the new Center for MINDS and the ideas in his essay "Downloads from the Modern Dawn of Psychedelics." They discuss alternate ways psychedelics could have been introduced, Aldous Huxley & Humphry Osmond's speculative Outsight project, convergent vs divergent thinking, Bruce's mushroom trip with Terrence McKenna, concrescence into novelty, the stoned ape theory, the unreported influence of psychedelics on breakthroughs, Bruce's coming-out as a psychedelics user, ps

Feb 20, 2024 • 51:38

EP 224 Samo Burja on Geothermal Energy

Jim talks with Samo Burja about the ideas in his recent article "Geothermal Energy Turns Planets Into Power Sources." They discuss the heat beneath the earth's surface, contributors to the heat, technological dependency between fracking & geothermal, the math of electricity, earthquake risk, the limits of current geology, the value of better drilling tech, new approaches to drilling, gyrotrons, plasma torches, whether our civilization actually needs more energy, the local optimum of fossil fuels

Feb 13, 2024 • 51:17

EP 223 Jordan Hall on Cities, Civiums, and Becoming Christian

Jim 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, te

Feb 8, 2024 • 1:59:45

EP 222 Trent McConaghy on AI & Brain-Computer Interface Accelerationism (bci/acc)

Jim talks with Trent McConaghy about the ideas in his recent essay "bci/acc: A Pragmatic Path to Compete with Artificial Superintelligence." They discuss the meaning of BCI (brain-computer interfaces) and acc (accelerationism), categories of AI, how much room there is for above-human intelligence, whether AI is achieving parallelism, the risks of artificial superintelligence (ASI), problems with deceleration, AI intelligences balancing each other, decentralized approaches to AI, problems with th

Feb 7, 2024 • 1:08:11

EP 221 George Hotz on Open-Source Driving Assistance

Jim talks with George Hotz about running Comma, an open-source driving assistance company. They discuss breaking the carrier lock on the iPhone at seventeen, Google's Project Zero, zero days, Mobileye & proprietary perception algorithms, cameras vs lidar, 6 levels of self-driving automation, the reliability of human driving, self-driving cars as "demo complete," why corner cases aren't the issue, integrated world models, the challenge of defining lane lines, recognizing the right part of the roa

Feb 6, 2024 • 58:36

EP 220 Lene Rachel Andersen on Polymodernity

Jim 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

Jan 30, 2024 • 1:10:43

EP 219 Katherine Gehl on Breaking Partisan Gridlock

Jim talks with Katherine Gehl about her and Michael Porter's book, The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy. They discuss Jim's past familiarity with Michael Porter's work, Porter's five forces, the "what the hell is water" phenomenon, the Schoolhouse Rock problem, political industry theory, political payback for unhelpful activities, why political competitors are doing better as "customers" become more dissatisfied, the current American

Jan 25, 2024 • 1:07:45

EP 218 Max Borders on Christopher Rufo’s New Right Manifesto

Jim talks with Max Borders about the ideas in his two-part essay series responding to Christopher Rufo's recent manifesto "The New Right Activism." They discuss the commentary form of the essays, pillar saints vs boy Pharoahs, the Gray Tribe, Rufo as a rockstar gladiator, the white-paper industrial complex, the Gramscian model of capturing the institutions, the tit-for-tat approach to politics, recapturing the power of the state to indoctrinate the youth, the wartime point of view, the means & e

Jan 24, 2024 • 1:05:13

EP 217 Ben Goertzel on a New Framework for AGI

Jim talks with Ben Goertzel about a paper he co-wrote, "OpenCog Hyperon: A Framework for AGI at the Human Level and Beyond." They discuss the way Ben defines AGI, problems with an economically oriented definition, the rate of advancement of a society, the history of OpenCog, mathematical models of intelligence, Jim's early use of OpenCog, a distributed Atomspace, Atomese vs MeTTa languages, knowledge metagraphs, why Ben didn't write a custom programming language for the original OpenCog, type th

Jan 23, 2024 • 1:01:38

EP 216 Kevin Dickinson on A Short History of the F-Word

Jim talks with Kevin Dickinson about the ideas in his recent essay "A Short History of the F-Word." They discuss the mystery of the F-word's origins, a damn fucking abbot in the sixteenth century, the hierarchy of curse words, religious profanities, the poet William Dunbar's use of "fukkit," the case of Roger Fuckedbythenavele, folk etymologies, false acronyms, movies with the most fucks, fucks per minute vs absolute number of fucks, a high Ngram watermark in 2017, the Lady Chatterley's Lover ob

Jan 11, 2024 • 42:36

EP 215 Cody Moser on Inequality and Innovation

Jim 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

Dec 19, 2023 • 1:01:30

EP 214 Douglas Rushkoff on Leaving Social Media

Jim talks with Douglas Rushkoff about the ideas in his podcast monologue/Substack post "Why I’m Finally Leaving X and Probably All Social Media." They discuss Douglas's history with social media, the early social internet, Facebook's parasitism of legacy news, the decontextualization of content, The WELL, owning your own words, leaving Facebook in 2013, Jim's social media sabbaticals, the opportunity to create an info agent, the number of daily interruptions, attention-deficit disorder as an ada

Dec 7, 2023 • 1:12:15

EP 213 Robin Hanson on Declining Fertility Rates

Jim talks with Robin Hanson about the ideas in his recent Substack writings on human fertility rates. They discuss why the fertility rate is important, fertility decline as a harbinger of societal decline, how income impacts fertility rate, investing in status markers vs fertility, runaway selection effects, copying elites, absolute vs relative levels of wealth, South Korea's low fertility rate, implications of the decline, losing scale economies, pay-as-you-go retirement plans, innovation as li

Dec 5, 2023 • 57:39

EP 212 Joy Hirsch on How the Brain Responds to Zoom

Jim talks with Joy Hirsch about the findings in her paper "Separable Processes for Live 'In-Person' and Live 'Zoom-like' Faces," which explores how humans respond at the neural level to Zoom calls versus in-person interactions. They discuss the advantages of near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) & how it works, the speed of imaging, brain imaging for social interactions, what fNIRS can do that fMRI can't, previous work on face processing, the design of the experiment, controlling for distance, angl

Nov 30, 2023 • 1:09:28

EP 211 Ben Goertzel on Generative AI vs. AGI

Jim talks with recurring guest Ben Goertzel about the ideas in his paper "Generative AI vs. AGI: The Cognitive Strengths and Weaknesses of Modern LLMs." They discuss the exponential acceleration of AI development, why LLMs by themselves won't lead to AGI, OpenAI's integrative system, skyhooking, why LLMs may be useful for achieving AGI, solving LLM hallucinations, why Google hasn't replicated GPT-4, LLM-tuning lore, what differentiates AGI from other forms of AI,  conceptualizing general intelli

Nov 28, 2023 • 1:08:20

EP 210 Frank Lantz on the Beauty of Games

Jim talks with Frank Lantz about the ideas in his new book, The Beauty of Games. They discuss Frank's analysis of Benjamin Soule's arcade game Serpentes, reflecting on the enjoyment of games, panicking & choking, levels of understanding, Jim and his wife's experience playing Othello, Hanabi, partnership games, games as an aesthetic form, art vs aesthetics, playing for its own sake, thinking & doing, fulfilling the desire to be a coherent agent in the world, the performance of desire, games as sy

Nov 20, 2023 • 1:26:12

EP 209 C. Owen Paepke on the Purple Presidency

Jim talks with C. Owen Paepke in part three of a mini-series on the No Labels potential third-party presidential campaign. They discuss Owen's early chemistry career, being without a political party, the situation of voting against instead of for candidates, the distribution of conservatism between parties over time, the Ross Perot 1992 campaign, the nomination of Antonin Scalia, primaries as the root of all partisan evil, the 2022 elections, the percentage of voters who want neither Biden nor T

Nov 7, 2023 • 1:08:53

EP 208 Jack Visnjic on Anacyclosis

Jim talks with Jack Visnjic, aka Lantern Jack, about Polybius's theory of anacyclosis and cyclical history. They discuss the origins of the name Lantern Jack, cyclical patterns in history, a one-minute history of the first millennium B.C., public gain vs private gain, Polybius's concept of anacyclosis, great man theory vs processes & institutions, examples of anacyclosis, whether Rome was ever a democracy, critiques of anacyclosis, corruption & collective reaction, imperialistic growth, the Glor

Nov 2, 2023 • 1:08:01

EP 207 Paul Watson on Adventures in Eco-Activism

Jim talks with Paul Watson about his recent book Hit Man for the Kindness Club: High Seas Escapades and Heroic Adventures of an Eco-Activist. They discuss an early friendship with a family of beavers, cruelty to animals, the Kindness Club, moral commitments, rescuing cattle from a slaughterhouse, less cow farts & more whale poop, the 3 laws of ecology, the issue of eating animals, the growth of the vegetarian/vegan movement, an occupation at Stanley Park, co-founding Greenpeace, the strategy of

Oct 31, 2023 • 1:04:38

EP 206 Ryan Clancy on No Labels

Jim talks with Ryan Clancy, the chief strategist for No Labels, in the second of a 3-part series exploring different aspects of the No Labels possible third-party presidential campaign. They discuss the origins & history of the campaign, the idea of an independent unity presidential ticket, increasing polarization, realistic energy policy, avoiding a second Trump term, an open process for nomination to the ticket, proper environmental conditions for running, the problem with fixing democracy by

Oct 26, 2023 • 43:41

EP 205 Matthew Pirkowski on Time Preference and Cooperation

Jim talks with Matthew Pirkowski about the ideas in a recent tweet thread on time preference and its relationship with cooperation. They discuss the definition of time preference, defining parasitism, asymmetrical relationships, mutualism, commensalism, the increase in short-term thinking, a decrease in qualitative change, realization & potential, an increase in uncertainty, the interruption of attentional loops, a gossip protocol, the complexity catastrophe, the maximum number of daily interrup

Oct 24, 2023 • 1:08:09

EP 204 Matt Bennett on the Case Against No Labels

Jim talks with Matt Bennett about his arguments against the third-party political campaign No Labels. They discuss Matt's steelman of the campaign, being politically homeless, nuclear energy & the American left's unrealistic energy policies, the problem with No Labels' theory about moving candidates in their direction, the credibility of winning the election, two theories of preventing another Trump presidency, the 1992 Ross Perot campaign, candidates for the No Labels ticket, growing disgust wi

Oct 19, 2023 • 1:03:55

EP 203 Robert Sapolsky on Life Without Free Will

Jim talks with Robert Sapolsky about the ideas in his book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will. They discuss what motivates his writing about the topic, turtles all the way down, closing off the escape valves, the general critique of determinism, 4 positions on free will, naturalism vs determinism, intent, free will vs agency, Phineas Gage's famous brain injury, disruption of cognitive abilities, the limitations of metacognition, Benjamin Libet's volition experiments, why consciousne

Oct 17, 2023 • 1:47:54

EP 202 Neil Howe on the Fourth Turning

Jim talks with Neil Howe about the ideas in his new book, The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us About How and When This Crisis Will End. They discuss 3 ways humans have understood time, the break with cyclical time, how linear progress gives rise to social cycles, generational change, how phase of life alters the impact of events, coining the term Millennial, generational cycles, the meaning and nature of saecula, the Great Awakenings, Turnings & commonalities between t

Oct 12, 2023 • 1:10:11

EP 201 Tobias Dengel on the Age of Voice Technology

Jim talks with Tobias Dengel about the ideas in his book The Sound of the Future: The Coming Age of Voice Technology. They discuss the idea that voice tech will be the biggest shift since mobile, the problem of public babble, positives & negatives of current voice tech, changing norms around speaking to devices, Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), using LLMs through a voice interface, improving communication cycles for incapacitated people, smart speakers vs smart mics, problems with the voice-

Oct 10, 2023 • 1:10:11

EP 200 Brian Chau on AI Pluralism

Jim talks with Brian Chau about recent advancements in AI and viewing AI's relationship to society and politics through a pluralistic lens. They discuss fixed frames on AI, the horseless carriage fallacy, AI as a million dumb people, how LLMs invert the film archetype, Jim's ScriptHelper project, intuitive recombination, creating a fake political party, why AI threatens the legacy press, the significance of house style, incentivizing pluralism, why AI could power the periphery, the information a

Sep 28, 2023 • 1:00:05

EP 199 Yascha Mounk on the Identity Trap

Jim talks with Yascha Mounk about the ideas in his new book The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power. They discuss tribalism among progressives, universalism, the story of Kila Posey, how over-emphasizing ethnic identity fosters zero-sum racial conflicts, how identitarianism led to excess Covid deaths, Foucault's rejection of grand narratives, Edward Said's post-colonialism, Gayatri Spivak's strategic essentialism, being blind to race vs being blind to racism, critical race theory, Derrick

Sep 26, 2023 • 1:34:39

EP 198 Cory Doctorow on Seizing the Means of Computation

Jim 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, definin

Sep 19, 2023 • 53:42

EP 197 Susan Neiman on Why Left Is Not Woke

Jim talks with Susan Neiman about the ideas in her latest book, Left Is Not Woke. They discuss the history & meaning of wokeness, the underlying reactionary assumptions of wokeness, making leftism & socialism acceptable terms, how the New Left of the Sixties set leftism back for a generation, disentangling left & woke, the right & tribalism, progressivism as a child of the Enlightenment, normative vs descriptive claims, refuting the idea of reason as an instrument of violence, why Hume doesn't b

Sep 7, 2023 • 1:21:09

EP 196 Pamela Denise Long on Affirmative Action for Freedmen

Jim talks with Pamela Denise Long about the ideas in an open letter from the Coalition of Concerned Freedmen to college presidents, responding to the U.S. Supreme Court's decision on race-based affirmative action. They discuss the organizational developmental consultancy Youthcentrix, the Coalition of Concerned Freedmen, the meaning of the freedmen moniker, the different types of manumission, the use of the term Negro, the four points of the Coalition's press release, certification of lineage, t

Aug 24, 2023 • 1:04:40

EP 195 Michael R.J. Bonner on Civilization, Collapse, and Renewal

Jim talks with Michael R.J. Bonner about the ideas in his book In Defense of Civilization: How Our Past Can Renew Our Present. They discuss the meaning of civilization, Gobekli Tepe, why technological change didn't bring about civilization, how civilization produces clarity, beauty, and order, why civilization is preferable to the alternatives, the limits of cities, the dynamics of collapse, Francis Fukuyama's end of history idea, revivals, how interconnectivity leads to fragility, the Bronze Ag

Aug 22, 2023 • 1:32:57

EP 194 Bob Reid on User-Owned Identity

Jim talks with Bob Reid about identity verification and the financial stack behind his global financial platform Everest. They discuss decentralized user-owned identity, identity as a trillion-dollar opportunity, competing with customers, Know Your Customer, types of identity, the breakout fraud, biometric systems, building societal trust, India's Aadhar system, Justin Trudeau's freeze on protesters' bank accounts, preventing governmental choke points, how to use Everest, the application stack,

Aug 17, 2023 • 1:12:40

EP 193 Aydan Connor on Rethinking Food Systems

Jim talks with Aydan Connor about improving American food systems and reducing waste. They discuss Aydan's experience in the craft brewing industry, extremification of beer styles, wastefulness in beer production, how Aydan became interested in food systems, the obsession with consumer choice, how the current system prices in waste, food waste ratios in different countries, where in the chain food waste occurs, the requirement of processed food, unintentional communities, maximizing communal fre

Jul 20, 2023 • 57:19

EP 192 David Krakauer on Science, Complexity and AI

Jim has a wide-ranging talk with David Krakauer about the ideas in his forthcoming paper "The Structure of Complexity in Machine Learning Science" and how AI may alter the course of science. They discuss data-driven science vs theory-driven science, a bifurcation in science, the protein folding problem, brute force methods, the origin of induction in David Hume, the origin of neural networks in deductive thinking of the '40s, super-Humean models, crossing the statistical uncanny valley, ultra-hi

Jul 18, 2023 • 1:35:32

EP 191 Alicia Juarrero on Context, Constraints, and Coherence

Jim talks with Alicia Juarrero about her new book Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence. They discuss Aristotle's four causes, applying them to complex dynamical systems, the overfocus on efficient cause, naive Newtonianism, nothing-but-ism, reconceptualizing causality in terms of constraints, mereology, constraint regimes, ascribing causal powers to emergent properties, the roots of panpsychism, Searle's comparison of consciousness with digestion, kinds of constraints, th

Jul 13, 2023 • 1:23:28

EP 190 Peter Turchin on Cliodynamics and End Times

Jim talks with Peter Turchin about the field he founded, cliodynamics, which applies the scientific method to history. They discuss the meaning & origins of cliodynamics, distinguishing cliodynamics from previous approaches, regularizing historical data, the interface between models & data, average height as a proxy for biological well-being, the Seshat data collection project, observed patterns in collapsing societies, the overproduction of elites, relative vs absolute wage, the wealth pump, re

Jul 6, 2023 • 1:15:39

Currents 100: Sara Walker and Lee Cronin on Time as an Object

Jim talks with Sara Walker and Lee Cronin about the ideas in their Aeon essay "Time Is an Object." They discuss the history of the idea of time, Newton's clockwork universe, the capacity for things to happen, the impossibility of time travel, Einstein's block universe theory, making time testable, conceptions of the arrow of time, irreversibility as an emergent property, the core of assembly theory, measures of complexity, recursive deconstruction, distinguishing random & complex, Kolmogorov com

Jul 5, 2023 • 1:23:29

Currents 099: Samuel Scarpino on Preparing for the Next Pandemic

Jim talks with Samuel Scarpino about what we've learned from Covid-19 and how to apply those lessons to preparing for the next pandemic. They discuss takeaways from cross-national comparisons, the social misery index, the failure to control the spread in the U.S., the efficacy of border closure, the test-trace-isolate strategy, what the U.S. should be ready to do in the event of the Big One, capacity for rapid test development, how universities responded in the first wave, Covid as a warning sho

Jun 27, 2023 • 1:43:29

Currents 098: Damien Walter on Science Fiction and the Rhetoric of Story

Jim talks with Damien Walter about science fiction and the mechanics of myth. They discuss the roles of pathos & ethos in science fiction, Damien's lifelong fascination with sci-fi, the symbolon of "science fiction," Star Trek vs Star Wars, categorizing Star Wars, Asimov's idea of psychohistory, The Lord of the Rings & the value of myth, the Inklings literary group, the metaphysics of Tolkien, fostering a creator culture, creating as an alternative to consumption, Jim's Script Helper program & o

Jun 23, 2023 • 1:18:21

EP 189 Forrest Landry on Civilization Design

Jim talks with recurring guest Forrest Landry about civilization design. They discuss the meaning of the concept, toolkits for problem-solving, why this work matters now, local hill-climbing, preconditions for sustainability, cultivating an epistemic commons, non-relativistic ethics, value ethics, grounding good choices in relationship, the endurance of cities, how metaphysics provides a foundation for ethics, going beyond explore & exploit, accounting for human nature, transmission of cultural

Jun 22, 2023 • 1:29:57

Currents 097: Frank Lantz on Network Wars and Games

Jim talks with Frank Lantz, game designer and director of the Game Center at New York University, about Network Wars and the art of game-making. They discuss Frank's first reaction to Network Wars, how the game works, elegance in game design, the simplest possible expression of an idea, Frank's overall score record, high stochasticity in the combat results, the combination of high skill & high variance, the tendency to bend randomness in favor of the player's instincts, learning from poker, whet

Jun 20, 2023 • 1:29:41

EP 188 Robert Tercek on Intellectual Property in the Time of AI

Jim 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

Jun 13, 2023 • 1:14:15

Currents 096: Jim & Michael Garfield Talk About Everything

Jim 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 t

Jun 6, 2023 • 1:25:26

EP 187 Carlos Perez on A Pattern Language for Generative AI

Jim 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

Jun 1, 2023 • 1:14:44

EP 186 Charles Eisenstein on Climate: A New Story

Jim talks with Charles Eisenstein about the environment and the ideas in his book Climate: A New Story. They discuss Charles's involvement with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s presidential campaign, his first encounter with the idea of global warming, the problems with carbon fundamentalism, environmental derangement, the importance of forests to the water cycle, a world of concrete & shit, escaping the mentality of domination, humans as a custodial species, reversing the course of separation, the heal

May 24, 2023 • 1:00:47

Currents 095: Matt Welsh on the End of Programming

Jim talks with Matt Welsh about the ideas in his essay "The End of Programming," arguing that coding as we know it will soon be obsolete. They discuss ChatGPT's ability to perform logical reasoning, whether it thinks, its utility as a programming aid, skipping code entirely, using language models as computational engines, problem decomposition, streamlining the interface between models and databases, complex customer service, the accessibility of fine-tuning, Jim's LLM scriptwriting project, cus

May 9, 2023 • 1:01:24

Currents 094: Matthew Pirkowski on Blockchain Consensus Mechanisms

Jim 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 referen

May 4, 2023 • 1:49:54

Currents 093: Rafe Kelley on Natural Movement

Jim talks with Rafe Kelley about the parkour-based movement system he created and teaches, Evolve Move Play. They discuss electromagnetic pulses, combining parkour & martial arts, the importance of nature exploration for children, the historical roots of parkour, using limbs to overcome obstacles, what makes parkour natural, rough play as an antidote to infantilization, healthy play culture, humans as arboreal animals, the quantification of extreme sports, love & amateurism, ekstasis, building s

May 2, 2023 • 1:07:41

Currents 092: Peter Wang on The Meaning Crisis and Consequentiality

Jim talks with Peter Wang about his idea that meaning comes from making consequential choices. They discuss the immediacy of consequences, the modeling of causal loops, the subjective aspect of causality, two hundred varieties of shampoo, the intersubjective realm, middle-class consumer culture, the desire to be a live player, examples from Succession and Mad Men, the manufacture & commodification of desire, alternative systems of meaning, levels of patterns, false consequence, atomized individu

Apr 27, 2023 • 1:17:12

Currents 091: Bruce Damer on Psychedelics as Tools for Discovery

Jim talks with Bruce Damer about genius and the use of psychedelics for creative thinking. They discuss the roots of genius, the discovery of fire, Einstein's four great discoveries, building blocks of genius, endotripping vs exotripping, set, setting, & setup, the danger of over-relying on LLMs for knowledge, geniuses in the scanner, crosstalk in the brain, the prepared mind, Bruce's lifelong experience of endotripping, rapid retripping, lucid dreaming, getting psilocybin from Terence McKenna,

Apr 25, 2023 • 1:13:13

EP 185 Daniel Suarez on the Near Future of Space Exploration

Jim 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,

Apr 20, 2023 • 1:36:44

EP 184 Dave Snowden on Managing Complexity in Times of Crisis

Jim talks with Dave Snowden about the document he co-authored, "Managing Complexity (And Chaos) In Times of Crisis." They discuss the Cynefin framework, its development into a complexity-informed framework, distinguishing complex from complicated, emergence, enabling constraints vs governing constraints, openness in complex systems, short-term teleology vs top-down causality, lines of flight, six sigma, Taylorism, distributed decision-making, the meaning of crisis, preparing for unknowable unk

Apr 18, 2023 • 1:27:47

Currents 090: BJ Campbell and Patrick Ryan on Egregores

Jim talks with BJ Campbell and Patrick Ryan about understanding the present moment through the concept of egregores. They discuss the meaning of the term, its roots in early occultism, social media as the fertile ground, an analogy with neural nets, measuring egregores with grammar velocity, LLMs as a Broca's area for tech, how guns have won the culture war, translating word frequency distributions into psychological profiles, one grand egregore vs multiple competitive egregores, NPC speedrunnin

Apr 11, 2023 • 1:15:22

Currents 089: Erik Torenberg on Status Games

Jim 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,

Apr 6, 2023 • 1:10:53

EP 183 Forrest Landry Part 2: AI Risk

Jim continues his conversation with recurring guest Forrest Landry on his arguments that continued AI development poses certain catastrophic risk to humanity. They discuss the liminal feeling of the current moment in AI, Rice's theorem & the unknowability of alignment, the analogy & disanalogy of bridge-building, external ensemble testing, the emergence of a feedback curve, the danger of replacing human oversight with machine oversight, Eliezer Yudkowsky's AI risk work, instrumental convergence

Apr 4, 2023 • 1:43:47

Currents 088: Melanie Mitchell on AI Measurement and Understanding

Jim talks with Melanie Mitchell about her critique of applying standardized exams to LLMs and the debate over understanding in AI. They discuss ChatGPT and GPT-4's performance on standardized exams, questioning the underlying assumptions, OpenAI's lack of transparency, soon-to-be-released open-source LLMs, prompt engineering, making GPT its own skyhook to reduce hallucinations, the number of parameters in GPT-4, why LLMs should be probed differently than humans, how LLMs lie differently than hum

Mar 30, 2023 • 53:12

EP 182 Brad DeLong on An Economic History of the 20th Century

Jim talks with Brad DeLong about his book Slouching Toward Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century. They discuss how everything changed around 1870, the idea of a polycrisis, Friedrich von Hayek's affirmation of the market system, the calculation problem, Karl Polanyi's response, a quantitative index of technological knowledge, the pace of growth, the necessity of a grand narrative, Malthusianism, the lead-up to the Industrial Revolution, the invention of the industrial research lab

Mar 29, 2023 • 1:36:22

Currents 087: Shivanshu Purohit on Open-Source Generative AI

Jim talks with Shivanshu Purohit about the world of open-source AI models and a significant open-source LLM coming soon from Stability AI and EleutherAI. They discuss the reasons for creating open-source models, the release of Facebook's LLaMA model, the black box nature of current models, the scientific mystery of how they really work, an opportunity for liberal arts majors, OpenAI's new plugin architecture, the analogy of the PC business around 1981, creating GPT-Neo & GPT-NeoX, the balance be

Mar 24, 2023 • 1:07:22

EP 181 Forrest Landry Part 1: AI Risk

Jim talks with recurring guest Forrest Landry about his arguments that continued AI development poses certain catastrophic risk to humanity. They discuss AI versus advanced planning systems (APS), the release of GPT-4, emergent intelligence from modest components, whether deep learning alone will produce AGI, Rice's theorem & the impossibility of predicting alignment, the likelihood that humans try to generalize AI, why the upside of AGI is an illusion, agency vs intelligence, instrumental conve

Mar 23, 2023 • 1:36:56

Currents 086: Monica Anderson on Bubble City

Jim talks with Monica Anderson about her paper "Bubble City Design Proposal: A Twitter Alternative Which Is Not a Social Medium." They discuss the origins of the Bubble City idea, its architecture, quenching the flood of social media information, only seeing the messages you want, research bots, the difference between a bubble and a Slack channel, fine-tuning bubbles, law enforcement, filtering, the place of curators, federating feeds into the system, how the system supports itself financially,

Mar 16, 2023 • 53:49

Currents 085: Jonny Miller on Self-Unfoldment

Jim has a wide-ranging conversation with Jonny Miller about self-development and emotional resilience. They discuss being a natural human, self-help as deconditioning, self-unfoldment, ecologies of practices, giving power back to the individual, Jamie Wheal's hedonic engineering, pushing outside the window of tolerance, emotional anti-fragility, facilitated breath repatterning, affirming anger, principles of decision-making, decision paralysis, self-destructive patterns in relationships, common

Mar 14, 2023 • 1:18:50

Currents 084: Mirta Galesic on Global Collective Behavior

Jim 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,

Mar 7, 2023 • 1:12:00

EP 180 Lynne Kiesling on the Electrical Grid

Jim talks with Lynne Kiesling about the electrical grid and what could and should change in its architecture in the years to come. They discuss electricity as a product, the move away from centralized control rooms, energy storage as the holy grail, base load vs peak load, distributed & intermittent energy resources, moving power to & from the grid, temporal patterns of supply & usage, varying demand to meet supply, programming thermostats, digitization of the electric grid, how rooftop solar sy

Mar 3, 2023 • 1:20:21

Currents 083: Joscha Bach on Synthetic Intelligence

Jim talks with Joscha Bach about current and future developments in the generative AI space. They discuss the skepticism of the press, small productive applications, questions about intellectual property rights, confabulation in human thinking, nanny rails, 3 approaches to AI alignment, Aquinas's 7 virtues, issues of consciousness-like agency, love as an answer to the alignment problem, the difficulty with fairness, serving shared sacredness, dealing with entropy, integrated information theory &

Feb 28, 2023 • 1:16:44

Currents 083: Joscha Bach on Synthetic Intelligence

Jim talks with Joscha Bach about current and future developments in the generative AI space. They discuss the skepticism of the press, small productive applications, questions about intellectual property rights, confabulation in human thinking, nanny rails, 3 approaches to AI alignment, Aquinas's 7 virtues, issues of consciousness-like agency, love as an answer to the alignment problem, the difficulty with fairness, serving shared sacredness, dealing with entropy, integrated information theory &

Feb 28, 2023 • 1:16:44

EP 179 Gregg Henriques Part 3: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap

Jim 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 co

Feb 24, 2023 • 1:45:16

Currents 082: Dan Shipper on Practical Applications of GPT-3

Jim talks with Dan Shipper about practical uses of GPT-3 and ChatGPT at the personal scale. They discuss how Dan started playing with these tools, the feeling of new generative AIs, GPT-3 vs ChatGPT, writing a screenplay using ChatGPT, using GPT-3 to analyze journal entries, circumventing the context window limitation, GPT-3 as a journaling tool, how ChatGPT does embedding, the coming market for chatbot personas, the value of guardrails, the monetary cost of using GPT-3, solving the organization

Feb 22, 2023 • 58:31

EP 178 Anil Seth on A New Science of Consciousness

Jim talks with Anil Seth about his book Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. They discuss the curious non-experience of general anesthesia, defining consciousness, the difference between consciousness & intelligence, experiential vs functional aspects, the hard problem vs the real problem, measuring consciousness, consciousness vs wakefulness, Lempel-Ziv complexity, zap & zip, consciousness as multidimensional, psychedelic states of consciousness, integrated information theory & phi, Scott

Feb 21, 2023 • 1:45:30

EP 177 Gregg Henriques Part 2: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap

Jim 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 branc

Feb 16, 2023 • 1:35:38

EP 176 Gregg Henriques Part 1: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap

Jim 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 metamo

Feb 15, 2023 • 1:38:10

EP 175 Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater on The Language Game

Jim talks with Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater about their new book The Language Game: How Improvisation Created Language and Changed the World. They discuss the game of charades & its relevance to the evolution of language, the false myth of a pure language, language as self-organizing system, Captain Cook's encounter with indigenous South Americans, pidgins & creoles, gesture & vocalization, language & tool construction, the communication iceberg metaphor, misunderstandings in relationship

Feb 10, 2023 • 1:33:52

EP 174 Fred Beuttler and Mark Stahlman on Trivium University

Jim talks with Fred Beuttler and Mark Stahlman about their new online graduate program, Trivium University. They discuss the trivium & the quadrivium, instilling a better sense of grammar, the current digital paradigm, five paradigms in communication technology, the outsourcing of memory, retrieving scribal ways of thinking, why we need another university, re-centering professor-student interaction, cost disease in higher education, three spheres in geopolitics (East, West, and digital), the rep

Feb 3, 2023 • 1:31:25

Currents 081: Layman Pascal Interviews Jim Rutt on Twitter as Collective Intelligence

Layman 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, whet

Feb 3, 2023 • 1:09:46

Currents 080: Joe Edelman and Ellie Hain on Rebuilding Meaning

Jim talks with Joe Edelman and Ellie Hain about their new movement, Rebuilding Meaning, and two recent talks introducing ideas towards a better world. They discuss tools for building toward more meaningful lives, the meaning of meaning, looking behind the void, the litany of shit, exercises in eliciting meaning, coherent pluralism, containers vs meanings, how religions lost their grounding, values articulacy, the importance of aesthetics, using language learning models to extract meaning profile

Jan 30, 2023 • 1:20:27

EP 173 Hanzi Freinacht on Metamodern Self-Help

Jim talks with Hanzi Freinacht about his book 12 Commandments: For Extraordinary People to Master Ordinary Life. They discuss the book as a response to Jordan Peterson & his "12 rules" books, metamodernism, fostering sober crazy people, magical thinking in highly developed personalities, integrations of science & spirituality, stabilizing higher phenomenological states, lower average states as a phenomenon of late-stage Game A, living in a mess moderately, fucking like a beast, sincere irony, qu

Jan 17, 2023 • 1:52:10

EP 172 Brendan Graham Dempsey on Emergentism

Jim talks with Brendan Graham Dempsey about his book Emergentism: A Religion of Complexity for the Metamodern World. They discuss the meaning crisis & its symptoms, reciprocal narrowing, the pre-modern & the modern, the emergence of reductionism, the meaning of complexity & emergence, sacralizing the scientific creation narrative, Prigogine's theory of dissipative systems, the universe as a process of endless complexification, marrying Bobby Azarian's Unifying Theory of Reality & Gregg Henriques

Jan 9, 2023 • 2:07:48

Currents 079: Douglas Rushkoff on Tech Escapism and Critiques of GameB

Jim talks with Douglas Rushkoff about the ideas in his essay series, "What's a Meta For?" They discuss Facebook's renaming to Meta, the semantic web, ChatGPT, a Turing test recalibration period, Rocco's Basilisk, the conversion of the real world into a meta-world, Elon Musk as techno-monarch, the limitations of his understanding of free speech, returning Twitter to the people who use it, Zuckerberg's Caesar obsession, Rushkoff's criticisms of GameB, the dangers of an abstracted "omega point," un

Jan 5, 2023 • 1:25:41

Currents 078: John Ash on AI Art Tools

Jim talks with John Ash about his use of AI art tools and their implications for society... Jim talks with John Ash about his use of AI art tools and their implications for society. They discuss the basics of how the latest models work, using AI to communicate complexity, removing noise from noise, style transfer, pursuing knowledge for the sake of knowledge, expressing complex ideas through images, iterative de-noising in human conversation, stochastic gradient descent, receptivity to meaning,

Jan 3, 2023 • 1:06:20

Currents 077: Serge Faguet on Consciousness and Post-AGI Ethics

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...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

Dec 29, 2022 • 1:26:46

EP 171 Bruce Damer Part 2: The Origins of Life – Implications

Jim continues his discussion with Bruce Damer on the origins of life... Jim continues his discussion with Bruce Damer on the origins of life. They discuss Darwin's "warm little pond" hypothesis, hydrothermal fields as selection engines, wet-dry cycling, proto-cells, competing theories, implications of the hypothesis, niche construction theory, the origin of life as mostly collaborative, the Probability Interaction Memory (PIM) model, effects of crowding together, sharing results, the emergence

Dec 20, 2022 • 1:25:26

Currents 076: Jamie Joyce on The Society Library

Jim talks with Jamie Joyce about the organization she founded and directs, The Society Library... Jim talks with Jamie Joyce about the organization she founded and directs, The Society Library. They discuss the Library's mission, its ontological structure, offering diverse interfaces, methods for overcoming limitations & biases, operating with integrity, contextualizing information deeply, intellectual honesty, intellectual independence, intellectual inclusion, the example of flat-Earth theory,

Dec 12, 2022 • 1:03:00

Currents 075: Michael Nielsen on Metascience

Jim talks with Michael Nielsen about the ideas in his and Kanjun Qiu's recent essay, "A Vision of Metascience: An Engine of Improvement for the Social Processes of Science"... Jim talks with Michael Nielsen about the ideas in his and Kanjun Qiu's recent essay, "A Vision of Metascience: An Engine of Improvement for the Social Processes of Science." They discuss the meaning of metascience, a vivid example in Genovese maritime insurance, attracting intellectual dark matter, creation & limitations o

Dec 5, 2022 • 1:01:41

EP 170 John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall on The Religion That Is Not a Religion

Jim talks with John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall about Vervaeke's concept of "the religion that is not a religion"... Jim talks with John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall about Vervaeke's concept of "the religion that is not a religion." They discuss the need to create a home for ecologies of practices, Jordan and John's ongoing collaboration, the meaning crisis & our wisdom famine, meaning of life vs meaning in life, the category error of prioritizing propositions, limitations of the Axial Age religions,

Dec 2, 2022 • 2:07:43

Currents 074: Serge Faguet on Building Metacommunity

Jim talks with Serge Faguet about emerging transnational networks of cooperation...Jim talks with Serge Faguet about emerging transnational networks of cooperation. They discuss the mismatch between rates of technological development & cooperation abilities, building a good Singularity, uniting an already-existing movement, "the right way to live" as a root of evil, coherent pluralism as a basis for metacommunity, taking responsibility for the world, a coming fork in humanity's future, bringing

Nov 28, 2022 • 57:05

Currents 073: Owen Cox and Daniel Fraga on Game C

Jim talks with Owen Cox and Daniel Fraga of the Technosocial podcast about their critique that the GameB movement has underestimated the importance of sex and violence... Jim talks with Owen Cox and Daniel Fraga of the Technosocial podcast about their critique that the GameB movement has underestimated the importance of sex and violence. They discuss the attempt to deal logically with illogical forces, the origins of the Game C joke, the limits of analytical systematization, coherent pluralism,

Nov 25, 2022 • 1:11:27

EP 169 Roar Bjonnes on Growing a New Economy

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... 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 finan

Nov 14, 2022 • 1:22:20

EP 168 Nate Hagens on Collective Futures

Jim talks with Nate Hagens about his new book co-authored with DJ White, Reality Blind: Integrating the Systems Science Underpinning Our Collective Futures, volume 1... Jim talks with Nate Hagens about his new book co-authored with DJ White, Reality Blind: Integrating the Systems Science Underpinning Our Collective Futures, volume 1. They discuss Nate's Reality 101 course, the core fundamental drivers of our current situation, writing "through an alien lens," steering away from optimism and pes

Oct 31, 2022 • 1:26:47

Currents 072: Ben Goertzel on Viable Paths to True AGI

Jim talks with Ben Goertzel about the ideas in his recent essay "Three Viable Paths to True AGI"... Jim talks with Ben Goertzel about the ideas in his recent essay "Three Viable Paths to True AGI." They discuss the meaning of artificial general intelligence, Steve Wozniak's basic AGI test, whether common tasks actually require AGI, a conversation with Joscha Bach, why deep neural nets are unsuited for human-level AGI, the challenge of extrapolating world-models, why imaginative improvisation mi

Oct 18, 2022 • 1:50:29

EP 167 Bruce Damer on the Origins of Life

Jim talks with Bruce Damer about the origins of life... Jim talks with Bruce Damer about the origins of life. They discuss what Earth was like 4 billion years ago, how the oceans formed, the new concept of urability, the distinction between supporting life & bringing it into being, the source of organic building blocks, combinatorial selection, the ocean vents theory vs the warm little pond hypothesis, the Murchison meteorite, wet-dry cycling, the water problem, using stromatolites & other natu

Oct 13, 2022 • 1:56:03

Currents 071: Liam Madden on Rebirthing Democracy

Jim talks with Liam Madden, a congressional candidate in Vermont who strongly resonates with the GameB ethos... Jim talks with Liam Madden, a congressional candidate in Vermont who strongly resonates with the GameB ethos. They discuss Liam's decision to run as a Republican, Vermont's primary laws, personal responsibility & community as reciprocal values, stewarding complex & godlike technologies, the Consilience Project, the sacredness of life, the meaning crisis, Ted Kaczynski's critiques, endi

Oct 10, 2022 • 1:11:14

Currents 070: Brian Chau on Propaganda & Populism

Jim talks with Brian Chau about seeing the world as it is, not as we wish it to be... Jim talks with Brian Chau about seeing the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. They discuss the firehose of bullshit, how modern-day propaganda works, QAnon & Pizzagate, the idea of egregores, adapting our biases against a drastically increased sample size, paranoia about child safety & kidnapping, why the vast majority of Americans are populist, the perception that our institutions are bankrupt, the golde

Oct 6, 2022 • 53:23

Currents 069: Bonnitta Roy and Euvie Ivanova on Collective Intimacy

Jim talks with Euvie Ivanova and Bonnitta Roy about a recent Twitter exchange exploring intimacy as "both the problem and the solution"... Jim talks with Euvie Ivanova and Bonnitta Roy about a recent Twitter exchange exploring intimacy as "both the problem and the solution." They discuss the context of the exchange, today's shallowness & loneliness epidemics, Bonnitta's recent retreat at the Monastic Academy, intimacy as the breakdown of self-other boundaries, somatic markers of the truth-sense,

Oct 3, 2022 • 45:00

EP 166 Lene Rachel Andersen Part 2: Libertism

Jim talks with Lene Rachel Andersen in the second of a two-part series about her new book Libertism: Grasping the 21st Century, picking up where they left off in the book's 18 sub-patterns of being... Jim talks with Lene Rachel Andersen in the second of a two-part series about her new book Libertism: Grasping the 21st Century, picking up where they left off in the book's 18 sub-patterns of being. They discuss selfish genes & memes, Rene Girard's mimetics, the responsibility of replication in t

Sep 30, 2022 • 1:42:00

EP 165 Lene Rachel Andersen Part 1: Libertism

Jim talks with Lene Rachel Andersen in the first of a two-part series about her new book Libertism: Grasping the 21st Century... Jim talks with Lene Rachel Andersen in the first of a two-part series about her new book Libertism: Grasping the 21st Century. They discuss rediscovering the word libertism, hypermodernity vs. metamodernity, combining experience from different epochs in fruitful ways, distinguishing metamodernity from metamodernism, why culture is ours and we can change it, gardening

Sep 22, 2022 • 1:25:18

Currents 068: Jonathan Rowson on the Chess Drama

Jim talks with Grandmaster chess player and philosopher Jonathan Rowson about the recent drama between Magnus Carlsen and Hans Niemann in the Champions Chess Tour...Jim talks with Grandmaster chess player and philosopher Jonathan Rowson about the recent drama between Magnus Carlsen and Hans Niemann in the Champions Chess Tour. They discuss Rowson's chess background, the bare facts of the kerfuffle, Niemann's persona & career trajectory, present evidence for whether Niemann cheated & the reasonab

Sep 22, 2022 • 35:28

EP 164 John Markoff on the Many Lives of Stewart Brand

Jim talks with John Markoff about his new biography, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand...   Jim talks with John Markoff about his new biography, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand. They discuss the meme of Brand as a Zelig, his role as a catalyst, the Pace Layers model, why Brand wasn't a pure libertarian, a Hemingwayesque boyhood, a commitment to conservation, relentless networking, the influence of Frederic Spiegelberg, involvement with psychedelics, his work at a logging

Sep 19, 2022 • 1:23:04

EP 163 Benedict Beckeld on Western Self-Contempt

Jim talks with Benedict Beckeld about his new book Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilizations... Jim talks with Benedict Beckeld about his new book Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilizations. They discuss the meaning of oikophobia—hatred of one's homeland—its recurrence throughout history, the prevalence of oikophobia in the U.S., a continuum from xenophobia to oikophobia, finding the Aristotelian golden mean, oikophobia in academia, the development

Aug 25, 2022 • 1:34:36

EP 162 Max Borders on Decentralism

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... 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, v

Aug 15, 2022 • 1:56:33

Currents 067: Zak Stein on Ending Nihilistic Design

Jim talks with recurring guest Zak Stein about the Consilience Project's article "Technology is Not Values Neutral: Ending the Reign of Nihilistic Design"... Jim talks with recurring guest Zak Stein about the Consilience Project's article "Technology is Not Values Neutral: Ending the Reign of Nihilistic Design." They discuss how technologies actualize & encode values, 2nd- & 3rd-order effects of technologies, the "invisible hand" approach to design, effects of cars on culture, landscapes, & sexu

Jul 25, 2022 • 1:06:35

Currents 066: Matthew Pirkowski on Emergence in Possibility Space

Jim continues his discussion with Matthew Pirkowski on ideas of emergence and how they can be applied to today's meta-crisis... Jim continues his discussion with Matthew Pirkowski on ideas of emergence and how they can be applied to today's meta-crisis. They discuss the meaning of emergence, treating potential as ontologically real, exaptation & meta-adaptation, path dependency in the history of science, the naivety of closed systems, the apparent tension between energy efficiency & energy produ

Jul 22, 2022 • 1:07:41

EP 161 Greg Thomas on Untangling the Gordian Knot of Race

Jim talks with Greg Thomas about American democracy & the problems created by racial essentialism & racialization... Jim talks with Greg Thomas about American democracy & the problems created by racial essentialism & racialization. They discuss the Jazz Leadership Project, jazz as metaphor, the connection between racism & the concept of race, the slave trade's role in producing racial essentialism, Bacon's Rebellion & subsequent divide-and-conquer legislation, justifications for exploitation,

Jul 18, 2022 • 1:21:42

EP 160 Curtis Yarvin on Monarchy in the U.S.A.

Jim talks with Curtis Yarvin about his proposal to replace our current government with a monarchy, part of an ongoing exploration of problems with and alternatives to democracy... Jim talks with Curtis Yarvin about his proposal to replace our current government with a monarchy, part of an ongoing exploration of problems with and alternatives to democracy. They discuss a regime-change thought experiment beginning with liquid democracy, the goals of democracy & the feeling of being in charge, why

Jul 7, 2022 • 1:49:38

EP 159 Bobby Azarian on the Romance of Reality

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"... 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 re

Jul 6, 2022 • 2:01:26

Currents 065: Alexander Bard on Protopian Narratology

Jim 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 myt

Jun 30, 2022 • 57:07

Who Are You EP 01: Seth Jordan on Social Threefolding

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... 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 v

Jun 16, 2022 • 1:19:57

Currents 064: Michael Garfield and J.F. Martel on Art x AI

Jim talks with Michael Garfield and J.F. Martel about the intersection of AI and art... Jim talks with Michael Garfield and J.F. Martel about the intersection of AI and art. They discuss DALL-E & Midjourney, whether conscious agency is necessary for art, artifice vs discernment, Jung's synchronicity, AI art as dreaming, discernment & consecration, the modern vs the algorithmic self, the CIA's role in funding abstract expressionism, the imaginal aspect & Walter Benjamin's historicity, Borges's Li

Jun 13, 2022 • 1:01:24

EP 158 Remzi Bajrami on Flow Currency

Jim talks to Remzi Bajrami about the ideas in his book Common Planet: A New Game of Life...    Jim talks to Remzi Bajrami about the ideas in his book Common Planet: A New Game of Life. They discuss what GameB means to him, three classes of players, whether property or profit is the engine of GameA, the source of value, the value of careful labor, the generator function of money-on-money return, historical origins of GameA, the good GameA has done, one meaning of anarchism, rules without rulers,

Jun 9, 2022 • 1:30:27

Currents 063: Jessica Flack on nth-Order Effects of the Russia-Ukraine War

Jim talks with Jessica Flack about nth-order effects of the war in Ukraine... Jim talks with Jessica Flack about nth-order effects of the war in Ukraine. They discuss the meaning of second- and nth-order effects, black swans, Gaussian vs fat-tailed distribution models of extreme social events, factoring in Ukraine's wheat & Russia's fertilizer production, agency & reflexivity, how perceptions of events as extreme can amplify second-order effects, the "hot hand phenomenon" in sports, the black sw

Jun 6, 2022 • 1:05:39

EP 157 Terrence Deacon on Mind’s Emergence From Matter

Jim talks to Terrence Deacon about the ideas in his book Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter... Jim talks to Terrence Deacon about the ideas in his book Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter. They discuss the story of zero, integrating absence into physical theories, systems that generate entropy to stave off entropy, the history of emergence & the risk of mysterianism, reframing emergence as removal & constraint, orthograde vs contragrade processes, 3 layers of emergence,

May 16, 2022 • 1:59:50

EP 156 James Poulos on Remaining Human

Jim 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 McLu

May 5, 2022 • 1:31:08

Currents 062: Stephanie Lepp Interviews Jim Rutt on 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"... 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

May 2, 2022 • 59:15

EP 155 Iain McGilchrist Part 2: The Matter With Things

Jim has a second talk with Iain McGilchrist about the ideas in his book The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World... Jim has a second talk with Iain McGilchrist about the ideas in his book The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. They discuss whether the continuity of time matters on the human scale, randomness as a real attribute of the universe, differentiating between unpredictability & randomness, deterministic

Apr 18, 2022 • 1:16:00

Currents 061: Nora Bateson on a Return to Earnestness

Jim talks with Nora Bateson about ecologies of communication and the value of earnestness... Jim talks with Nora Bateson about ecologies of communication and the value of earnestness. They discuss simple irony, dramatic irony, post-irony, & meta-irony; irony & the ecology of communication, the mistake of pitting earnestness directly against irony, questioning forms of cynicism vs despairing cynicism, the conditions for morale, full honesty as a starting point, rebuilding the meso-scale, the inst

Apr 11, 2022 • 46:38

EP 154 Iain McGilchrist on The Matter With Things

Jim talks with Iain McGilchrist about his new book, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World... Jim talks with Iain McGilchrist about his new book, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. They discuss issues created by having one word for "know," the separation, asymmetry, & function of brain hemispheres, deprogramming pop-cultural right-brain/left-brain caricatures, the need for two kinds of attention, vigilance

Apr 4, 2022 • 1:47:19

Currents 060: Panos Siozos on Online Education

Jim talks with Panos Siozos, CEO and co-founder of LearnWorlds, a platform for online education, about alternative routes in education delivery... Jim talks with Panos Siozos, CEO and co-founder of LearnWorlds, a platform for online education, about alternative routes in education delivery. They discuss how Panos transitioned from science to entrepreneurship, why adult lifetime learning is important right now, an increasing overlap between skills & hobbies, remote learning for brick-and-mortar s

Mar 28, 2022 • 43:35

Currents 059: Samo Burja on RU->UKR 23-MAR-2022

Continuing his series of expert interviews on the Russia-Ukraine War, Jim talks again with Samo Burja about the state of the Russian advance one month in... Continuing his series of expert interviews on the Russia-Ukraine War, Jim talks again with Samo Burja about the state of the Russian advance one month in. They discuss Putin's maximum acceptable atrocity level, the complex relationship between public opinion and intervention, Russia's need for a symbolic victory, meaning & impact of the Wes

Mar 24, 2022 • 55:42

EP 153 Forrest Landry on Small Group Method

Jim talks with Forrest Landry about his Small Group Method and the obstacles to scaling it up... Jim talks with Forrest Landry about his Small Group Method and the obstacles to scaling it up. They discuss why studying group processes is important, the difficulty of doing new things with old structures, 3 classes of decision-making structures (consensus, meritocracy, & democracy), advantages & disadvantages of each, how to use each model as a check against the other two, treating internal & exte

Mar 22, 2022 • 1:38:09

Currents 058: John Robb on Russia-Ukraine Outcomes

Continuing his series of expert interviews on the Russia-Ukraine War, Jim talks again with John Robb, this time about the likelihood of a settlement... Continuing his series of expert interviews on the Russia-Ukraine War, Jim talks again with John Robb, this time about the likelihood of a settlement. They discuss the pressures currently pushing both sides against negotiating, why Russia is opposed to Ukraine joining the EU, the likelihood of an ongoing stalemate, why WWI is a better analogue fo

Mar 21, 2022 • 56:30

Currents 057: Timothy Clancy on Russia’s Mid-Game

Continuing his series of expert interviews on the Russia-Ukraine War, Jim talks with Timothy Clancy about forecasting the conflict through mid-May... Continuing his series of expert interviews on the Russia-Ukraine War, Jim talks with Timothy Clancy about forecasting the conflict through mid-May. They discuss five likely mid-game scenarios, Ukraine as a Go board, how urban combat has changed in the 21st century, the "belt" strategy, Grozny Rules, creating feral cities, Putin's unknown "maximum

Mar 16, 2022 • 46:54

Currents 056: Julyan Davey on Weaving a Non-Dual Civilization

Jim has a talk with Julyan Davey inspired by Julyan's essay series "Weaving a Non-Dual Civilisation"... Jim has a talk with Julyan Davey inspired by Julyan's essay series "Weaving a Non-Dual Civilisation." They discuss the "sublimewe" modality as a means of shifting into a GameB mindset, incorporating the intersubjective world into our models, interweaving inner & outer work, initiation camps for the GameB paradigm, a non-Jungian application of the shadow, how GameA dynamics self-perpetuate, qu

Mar 9, 2022 • 52:18

Currents 055: Paul Goble on Putin’s Strategic Mistakes

Continuing his series of expert interviews on the unfolding situation in Ukraine, Jim talks with Paul Goble, a longtime specialist on ethnic and religious issues in Eurasia... Continuing his series of expert interviews on the unfolding situation in Ukraine, Jim talks with Paul Goble, a longtime specialist on ethnic and religious issues in Eurasia. They discuss Putin's view of Russia as neglected & ignored, Russians' difficulty making ethnic distinctions between Ukrainian & Russians, Putin's uni

Mar 4, 2022 • 1:04:38

Currents 054: Samo Burja on the Russia-Ukraine War

Jim has a timely talk with Samo Burja about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and what it might mean moving forward... Jim has a timely talk with Samo Burja about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and what it might mean moving forward. They discuss the consequences of a (likely) Russian victory, Russia's bet on new arctic ports & liquid natural gas, a final decoupling of Russia from Europe, the stalemate scenario, Ukraine's dearth of young men, its remarkable job so far at maintaining morale, the l

Mar 1, 2022 • 48:19

Currents 053: Matthew Pirkowski on Grammars of Emergence

Jim talks with Matthew Pirkowski about new frameworks in the study of emergence... Jim talks with Matthew Pirkowski about new frameworks in the study of emergence. They discuss the concept's roots in the work of J.S. Mill, 19th-century tensions between reductionism & vitalism, Terrence Deacon's ententional properties, ententionality as a result of constraints, giving reality status to relations, pruning rules as key to emergence, possibility space as unconstrained, chirality, spin glasses, view

Feb 28, 2022 • 1:05:33

Currents 052: John Robb on War in Ukraine

Jim has a forward-looking talk with recurring guest John Robb about the meaning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine... Jim has a forward-looking talk with recurring guest John Robb about the meaning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. They discuss the likelihood that the event is a major historical hinge, Russia & China's different rule set, costs & benefits of strong national cohesion, Putin's hard-power intentions, short-term unfolding of the Russian campaign, likely effects on China's relations wit

Feb 25, 2022 • 48:30

Currents 051: Douglas Rushkoff on the Once and Future Internet

Jim talks with Douglas Rushkoff about where the internet came from, where it might go, & how to move from dystopian despair to productive engagement... Jim talks with Douglas Rushkoff about where the internet came from, where it might go, & how to move from dystopian despair to productive engagement. Loosely following the syllabus for (Re-)Designing the Internet, a course Douglas co-teaches at CUNY with Jeff Jarvis, they discuss the internet as a read-write medium, reclaiming control of attenti

Feb 24, 2022 • 1:14:23

Currents 050: Greg Lukianoff on Free Speech

Jim talks with Greg Lukianoff, president & CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and co-author, with Jonathan Haidt, of The Coddling of the American Mind... Jim talks with Greg Lukianoff, president & CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and co-author, with Jonathan Haidt, of The Coddling of the American Mind. They discuss FIRE's mission of non-partisan free speech advocacy, recent high-profile cases & repeat offenders in higher-ed censorship,

Feb 21, 2022 • 49:55

EP 152 Gary Bengier on Hard-Science Futures

Jim talks with Gary Bengier about his science fiction novel Unfettered Journey, depicting a hard-science view of a possible world 140 or so years in the future... Jim talks with Gary Bengier about his science fiction novel Unfettered Journey, depicting a hard-science view of a possible world 140 or so years in the future. They discuss the need for sci-fi that addresses real problems & that is grounded in real science, the coming impact of bioscience, AI, & robotics, why robots may take longer

Feb 7, 2022 • 1:29:41

Currents 049: Ashley Colby & Jason Snyder on Doomer Optimism

Jim 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

Feb 4, 2022 • 1:02:54

EP 151 Daniel Mezick on Ritual and Hierarchy

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... 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

Jan 31, 2022 • 1:15:25

Currents 048: Welf von Hören on Potential

Jim 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

Dec 27, 2021 • 47:14

EP 150 Jeremy Lent on the Web of Meaning

Jim has a wide-ranging talk with Jeremy Lent about his latest book, The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe... Jim has a wide-ranging talk with Jeremy Lent about his latest book, The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe. They discuss the dominant worldview in today's advanced economies, its lack of scientific basis, how worldviews shape the direction of history, myths of selfishness

Dec 20, 2021 • 1:19:24

Currents 047: Samuel Scarpino on the Epidemiology of Covid-19

Jim has a wide-ranging talk with Samuel Scarpino on Covid-19 epidemiology and disease surveillance... Jim has a wide-ranging talk with Samuel Scarpino on Covid-19 epidemiology and disease surveillance. They discuss some of the biggest surprises in Covid research since its beginning, the importance of understanding the evolutionary trajectory of the virus, the oscillation pattern of case rates, wastewater-based epidemiology, current bottlenecks in gene sequencing, the latest evidence about Omicr

Dec 15, 2021 • 47:04

EP 149 Joshua Vial on Enspiral

Jim has a wide-ranging talk with Joshua Vial, co-founder of the multifaceted social-impact support network Enspiral... Jim has a wide-ranging talk with Joshua Vial, co-founder of the multifaceted social-impact support network Enspiral. They discuss Enspiral's origin story, its organizational structure, tradeoffs between exploration & exploitation, coherent pluralism, how to do a company without bosses, keeping product & consulting companies separate, the origins of Loomio in Occupy Wall St. con

Dec 13, 2021 • 1:26:42

Currents 046: Henry Elkus & Sam Feinburg on Solving Societal Problems

Jim talks with Henry Elkus and Sam Feinburg, founders of the global problem solving organization Helena...Jim talks with Henry Elkus and Sam Feinburg, founders of the global problem solving organization Helena. They discuss how Helena identifies society's big problems, the group's origin story, how they attracted a large membership of people who are first-class in their domains, facilitating The Covid Network to quantitatively prioritize supply distribution, creating the Shield Project to addres

Nov 29, 2021 • 46:04

EP148 Antonio Damasio on Feeling and Knowing

Jim has a wide-ranging talk with neuroscientist Antonio Damasio about his latest book, Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious... Jim has a wide-ranging talk with neuroscientist Antonio Damasio about his latest book, Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious. They discuss the importance of separating intelligence from the nervous system, feeling as the inaugural event of consciousness, distinguishing consciousness from mind, the permeability of intellectual & affective processes, debunking Wil

Nov 22, 2021 • 1:12:38

EP147 John Vervaeke Part 5: 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... 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

Nov 15, 2021 • 1:56:38

Currents 045: Dorian Abbot on Protecting Academic Freedom

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... 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) framewor

Nov 4, 2021 • 44:15

EP146 John Vervaeke Part 4: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis

John Vervaeke joins Jim for the fourth 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 fourth of a five-part series examining the ideas put forward in Vervaeke’s popular YouTube series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. They discuss Nietzsche as a prophet of the meaning crisis, the politicization of the quest for meaning, recreating religion, the deep functionality of Christianit

Nov 1, 2021 • 1:40:37

EP145 John Vervaeke Part 3: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis

John Vervaeke joins Jim for the third 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 third of a five-part series examining the ideas put forward in Vervaeke’s popular YouTube series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. They discuss altered states of consciousness, phenomenology as clue to functionality, fluency, weakening egocentrism, ecologies of practice, the Solomon effect, com

Oct 25, 2021 • 1:50:15

EP144 John Vervaeke Part 2: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis

John Vervaeke joins Jim for the second 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 second of a five-part series examining the ideas put forward in Vervaeke’s popular YouTube series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. They discuss virtue & virtuosity, Plato's man-monster-lion model, hyperbolic discounting, agent & arena, Plato's parable of the cave, the continuity between Plato

Oct 18, 2021 • 1:56:37

EP143 John Vervaeke Part 1: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis

John Vervaeke joins Jim for the first 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 first of a five-part series examining the ideas put forward in Vervaeke's popular YouTube series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. In this episode they focus on defining core concepts, including meaning, non-reductive science, symptoms of the meaning crisis, attention, shamanism, psychotechnolo

Oct 11, 2021 • 1:52:24

Currents 044: Zak Stein on Propaganda and the Information War

Zak Stein & Jim have a wide-ranging talk inspired by two recent Consilience Project essays on the information war & propaganda... Zak Stein & Jim have a wide-ranging talk inspired by two recent Consilience Project essays on the information war & propaganda. They discuss the culture wars as a case of mutually assured destruction, distinguishing education from propaganda, developing widespread resistance to propaganda, epistemic nihilism, key indicators of propaganda, the function of thought-te

Oct 7, 2021 • 1:35:21

Currents 043: Lene Rachel Andersen on Bildung

Lene Rachel Andersen & Jim have a wide-ranging talk about the meaning of Bildung & the growing Bildung movement, inspired by last week's Global Bildung Festival... Lene Rachel Andersen & Jim have a wide-ranging talk about the meaning of Bildung & the growing Bildung movement, inspired by last week's Global Bildung Festival. They discuss easily transferable "horizontal" knowledge vs. emotional, social, & bodily development, the need to confront exponentially increasing rates of change, appropri

Sep 30, 2021 • 48:45

EP142 Robert Tercek on the Metaverse

Jim has a wide-ranging talk with returning guest Robert Tercek about competing visions of the metaverse... Jim has a wide-ranging talk with returning guest Robert Tercek about competing visions of the metaverse, centralized vs. decentralized models, the importance of interoperability standards, differences between VR & AR, digital twins, digitization of the supply chain, AI-enabled creation of artificial worlds, Unity’s democratizing approach to 3D creation tools, the metaverse's potential f

Sep 27, 2021 • 1:32:20

EP141 Heather Heying on Confronting Hyper-Novelty

Jim has a wide-ranging talk with evolutionary biologist Heather Heying about her & Bret Weinstein’s new book, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life... Jim has a wide-ranging talk with evolutionary biologist Heather Heying about her & Bret Weinstein’s new book, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life. They discuss hyper-novelty & its challenges, niche-switching as the human niche, the natu

Sep 14, 2021 • 1:28:44

EP140 Robin Dunbar on Friendship

Jim talks to Robin Dunbar (of Dunbar's number) about his new book, Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships... Jim talks with evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, discoverer of Dunbar's number, about his latest book, Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships. They cover the importance of friendship, the loneliness epidemic, loneliness as a signal rather than a disease, oxytocin & endorphins, physical touch, synchrony & other ways of

Aug 30, 2021 • 1:46:05

Currents 042: John Robb on Afghanistan Withdrawal

John Robb & Jim meet for a timely discussion about the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan... John Robb & Jim meet for a timely discussion about the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the current mess at the Kabul airport, how the Taliban are controlling the flow of evacuations, likely backroom negotiations, dynamics of the intelligence and command failures that led us here, the U.S.’s failure to switch from guerilla warfare to maneuver warfare, the overreliance on diplomacy, OODA loops & shears,

Aug 19, 2021 • 42:09

EP139 Robert Tercek on Education Today

Robert Tercek & Jim continue their conversation in this wide-ranging chat about learning & education... Robert Tercek & Jim continue their conversation in this wide-ranging chat about learning & education. They discuss the dematerialized economy, technological unemployment risk, underestimating software automation, AI as a career superpower, changing cost & quality of college, what education is for, Bryan Caplan’s challenge to the value of college, COVID & online education, online education

Aug 16, 2021 • 1:27:04

Currents 041: Jonathan Rowson on Our Metacrisis Pickle

Jonathan Rowson & Jim continue their conversation by exploring Jonathan's recent essay, Tasting the Pickle: Ten flavours of meta-crisis and the appetite for a new civilization... Jonathan Rowson & Jim continue their conversation by exploring Jonathan's recent essay, Tasting the Pickle: Ten flavours of meta-crisis and the appetite for a new civilization. They cover contextualizing our entangled meta-crisis, finding better language, limits of intellect & usefulness of felt experience in sensema

Aug 9, 2021 • 1:02:55

Currents 040: Jim Rutt Show Changes & Reflections

Jim 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 o

Aug 2, 2021 • 49:08

EP138 W. Brian Arthur on the Nature of Technology

W. Brian Arthur & Jim have a wide-ranging talk about his book, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves... W. Brian Arthur & Jim have a wide-ranging talk about his book, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves. They talk about the surprisingly little work on the nature of technology, invention vs innovation, understanding technology as harnessed phenomena, human purpose, the fluid relationship between economies & tech, technology as building on existing compon

Jul 26, 2021 • 1:31:03

Currents 039: Alexander Beiner on Psychedelic Turf Wars

Alexander Beiner & Jim have a wide-ranging talk about Beiner’s recent essay “Who’s in Charge of Psilocybin?”... Alexander Beiner & Jim have a wide-ranging talk about Beiner’s recent essay “Who’s in Charge of Psilocybin?”. They discuss the state of play regarding psilocybin’s legality, its effectiveness in therapeutic contexts, therapeutic versus personal-growth uses, the value and limitations of clinical trials, metaphors for psychedelics risk, the differences between synthesized and natural-

Jul 18, 2021 • 51:27

Currents 038: Connor Leahy on Artificial Intelligence

Connor Leahy continues his conversion with Jim in this wide-ranging chat about Artificial Intelligence... Connor Leahy continues his conversion with Jim in this wide-ranging chat about his new GPT-J model, the background & approach of Aleph Alpha, attention in AI, our food maximizer & AGI risk, narrow algorithm impacts, proto-AGI, risk thresholds & timelines, safeguard complexities, slow vs fast AI take-off, Connor's brilliantly strange Counting Consciousness series, biological blockchain & t

Jul 15, 2021 • 1:05:40

EP137 Ken Stanley on Neuroevolution

Ken Stanley & Jim have a wide-ranging talk about one of his co-authored papers, "Designing neural networks through neuroevolution"... Ken Stanley & Jim have a wide-ranging talk about one of his co-authored papers, "Designing neural networks through neuroevolution". They cover neuroevolution dynamics, resistance to evolutionary thinking in AI, the evolutionary timescale, understanding genetic algorithms, neural networks & their role in neuroevolution, Ken's unifying NeuroEvolution of Augment

Jul 13, 2021 • 1:30:50

Currents 037: Sam Harris on Surviving Our Smartphones

Reason.fm co-founder Sam Harris talks to Jim about his TEDx talk, "The Genius You Need to Listen to Is Yourself"... Reason.fm co-founder Sam Harris talks to Jim about his TEDx talk, "The Genius You Need to Listen to Is Yourself". They cover technology attention highjacking, putting our phones away, social media algorithms, playing games you can win, utilizing rules, natural social interactions, online dating dynamics, time blocking, the value of boredom, where humanity is heading, and much mo

Jul 10, 2021 • 36:24

EP136 Harvey Reid on Troubadour Music

Songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, writer, and music educator Harvey Reid talks to Jim about his book, The Troubadour Chronicles: A History, A Celebration and A Manifesto... Songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, writer, and music educator Harvey Reid talks to Jim about his book, The Troubadour Chronicles: A History, A Celebration and A Manifesto. They talk about Harvey's musical background, what a troubadour is, solo performance & collaborations, Jim & Harvey's favorite troubadours & performan

Jul 6, 2021 • 1:41:47

EP135 Dennis Waters on Behavior & Culture in One Dimension

Jim has a wide-ranging talk with Dennis Waters about his book, Behavior and Culture in One Dimension: Sequences, Affordances, and the Evolution of Complexity... Jim has a wide-ranging talk with Dennis Waters about his book, Behavior and Culture in One Dimension: Sequences, Affordances, and the Evolution of Complexity. They chat about the challenges of interdisciplinary work in academia, value in understanding sequences, emergent behavior, constraint dynamics, instructive & descriptive seque

Jul 1, 2021 • 1:22:25

EP134 Forrest Landry on Non-Relative Ethics

Forrest Landry & Jim continue their exploration of metaphysics by diving deep into the Non-Relative Ethics that arise from Forrest’s Immanent Metaphysics... Forrest Landry & Jim continue their exploration of metaphysics by diving deep into the Non-Relative Ethics that arise from Forrest’s Immanent Metaphysics. They cover ethical philosophies, defining effective choice, ethics vs morality, the relationship of choice & ethics, defining self beyond the human, localization in perception, the un

Jun 28, 2021 • 1:43:44

Currents 036: Melanie Mitchell on Why AI is Hard

Jim talks to Melanie Mitchell about her recent paper, "Why AI is Harder Than We Think"... Melanie Mitchell & Jim talk about her recent paper, "Why AI is Harder Than We Think". They cover AI fantasies, self-driving cars, prediction failures, AI winters & summers, Melanie's four fallacies, common sense, theory of mind, defining understanding, embodied cognition, the role of emotions in intelligence, the future of AI, and more. Episode Transcript "Why AI is Harder Than We Think" JRS: EP33

Jun 26, 2021 • 42:31

Currents 035: Steve Barbour on Mining Bitcoin with Methane

Steve Barbour talks to Jim about his company, Upstream Data Inc. — a company that uses natural gas to mine bitcoin... Steve Barbour talks to Jim about his company, Upstream Data Inc. — a company that uses natural gas to mine bitcoin. They cover the dynamics of excess natural gas release, how methane is normally vented or burnt up, Upstream's environmental impact, mining hardware setup & efficiency, cost per kilowatt, customer RIO, bitcoin uses, monetary theory, 2nd & 3rd generation cryptocurr

Jun 24, 2021 • 1:00:21

EP133 Robert Tercek on Digital Strategies

Robert Tercek has a wide-ranging talk with Jim about his book, Vaporized: Solid Strategies for Success in a Dematerialized World... Robert Tercek talks to Jim about his book, Vaporized: Solid Strategies for Success in a Dematerialized World. They cover the usefulness of the vapor metaphor, centralization vs decentralization, the impact of closed application ecosystems, value in intangible assets, hardware vs software profitability, the telling story of Tower Records, rapid consumer market c

Jun 21, 2021 • 1:39:56

EP132 Britt Adkins on Celestial Civilization

Britt Adkins & Jim on the space industry: prioritization, funding, misconceptions, meaning, cultural & political impact, policy, and much more... Britt Adkins has a wide-ranging talk with Jim about the space industry. They explore prioritizing space funding & common misconceptions, power of the overview effect, global vs celestial community, cultural & political impacts, public participation strategies, physical / psychological adaptation to space & other planets, scaling humanity, urban pl

Jun 17, 2021 • 1:31:19

Currents 034: Samo Burja on the Consilience Project

Samo Burja joins Jim to talk about the Consilience Project: a project that aims to create positive cultural change in unique ways... Samo Burja joins Jim to talk about the Consilience Project: a project that aims to create positive cultural change in unique ways. They cover its founding goals & approaches, big tech's ability to amplify negative externalities, the rise of Trump, memetic noise & virality, how digital cultures change, types of articles, sense-making, meaning-making, choice-makin

Jun 15, 2021 • 56:13

EP131 Jason Mauck on #FarmWeird

Jason Mauck talks to Jim about starting Constant Canopy and the dynamics, technologies & economics of innovative farming strategies... Jason Mauck talks to Jim about what lead him to farm, how & why he started Constant Canopy, agriculture innovation dynamics & economics, finding crop combinations, turning manure into methane, utilizing Biochar, acquiring a meat-packing business, building direct-to-consumer meat distribution & strategy, farm integration models (livestock, agro, food, enterta

Jun 14, 2021 • 1:06:57

EP130 Ken Stanley on Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned

Ken Stanley and Jim talk about his wide-ranging book Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective... Ken Stanley and Jim talk about his wide-ranging book Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective. They cover the no free lunch theorem, exploitations vs exploration, the myth & issues of objectives, the room of all images & adjacent possible, the problems & dynamics of deception, the power of serendipity, gradients of interestingness, intuition & novelty search,

Jun 7, 2021 • 1:28:50

Currents 033: Connor Leahy on Deep Learning

Connor Leahy has a wide-ranging chat with Jim about the state & future of Deep Learning... Connor Leahy has a wide-ranging chat with Jim about the state & future of Deep Learning. They cover the history of EleutherAI, how GPT-3 works, the dynamics & power of scaling laws, ideal sampling rates & sizes for models, data sets, EleutherAI's opensource GTP-Neo & GTP-NeoX, PyTorch vs TensorFlow, TPU's vs GPU's, the challenge of benchmarking & evaluations, quadradic bottlenecks, broad GTP-3 applicati

Jun 4, 2021 • 53:25

EP129 Stephanie Lepp on Deep Reckonings

Stephanie Lepp & Jim have a wide-ranging talk on her two-time Webby Award winning video series, Deep Reckonings... Stephanie Lepp & Jim have a wide-ranging talk on her two-time Webby Award winning video series, Deep Reckonings. They start by covering the history & intentions of Deep Reckonings, deep fake technology, our post-truth crisis, and the pros & cons of irony. They then go on to talk about the Deep Reckonings videos: how she chose people to include, reflections on the Mark Zuckerber

May 31, 2021 • 1:21:50

EP128 Forrest Landry on Immanent Metaphysics: Part 3

Forrest Landry & Jim continue their exploration of Forrest's Immanent Metaphysics by diving deep into its Incommensuration Theorem (ICT)... Forrest Landry & Jim continue their exploration of metaphysics by diving deep into a theorem that arises from Forrest's Immanent Metaphysics called Incommensuration Theorem (ICT). They start by defining the key concepts of ICT: symmetry & continuity, domains & their three elements, what it means to know something, measurement & comparison, sameness & di

May 27, 2021 • 1:45:56

EP127 Jonathan Rowson on The Moves That Matter

Jonathan Rowson & Jim have a wide-ranging talk about his book, The Moves That Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life... Jonathan Rowson & Jim have a wide-ranging talk about his book, The Moves That Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life. They cover chess as a meta metaphor, partial vs full info, randomness, freedom, concentration vs flow states, chess player ratings, mastery, embodied intuition, AI, fundamental dimensions of chess, utilizing time, climate change, wisdom, t

May 24, 2021 • 1:34:01

EP126 Jordan Gruber & James Fadiman on Our Symphony of Selves

Jordan Gruber & James Fadiman talk with Jim about their new book, Your Symphony of Selves: Discover and Understand More of Who We Are... Jordan Gruber & James Fadiman talk to Jim about their book, Your Symphony of Selves: Discover and Understand More of Who We Are. They cover our multiple selves, self vs mood, arguing with ourselves, David Bowie, history of the single-self assumption, connecting with our younger selves, self-switching benefits & methods, authenticity, contextuality, connect

May 17, 2021 • 1:32:24

EP125 Samo Burja on Societal Decline: Part 2

Samo Burja & Jim continue their convo about Great Founder Theory: history, bureaucracy vs delegation, competition, ambition, empire theory, and much more... Samo Burja & Jim continue their conversation about his book, Great Founder Theory. They talk about Samo's interest in exploring why there's never been an immortal society, lack of historical Greece documentation, defining functional bureaucracy & delegation, competition pros/cons & dynamics, skill distribution & capitalization, measurin

May 10, 2021 • 1:20:36

Currents 032: Tyson Yunkaporta on Spirits, GameB & Protopias

Tyson 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 sou

May 7, 2021 • 1:09:52

EP124 Jim Hackett on Ford, Electric Cars & More

Former 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, electri

May 3, 2021 • 1:35:36

Currents 031: Trent Loos on Family Ranching

Trent Loos talks to Jim about his multi-generational Nebraska-based ranching operation... Trent Loos talks to Jim about his multi-generational Nebraska-based ranching operation. They cover the deep history of the family ranch, types of animals, dealing with predators,  pork production & breeding, the decline in quality of industrial pork, beef production and breeds, grass vs grain-fed beef, old-time animal trailing, 4-H fairs and auctions, slaughterhouse labor shortages, food economics & cult

Apr 29, 2021 • 1:00:41

EP123 Jamie Wheal on Recapturing the Rapture

Jamie Wheal talks to Jim about his new book, Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That's Lost Its Mind... Jamie Wheal talks to Jim about his new book, Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That's Lost Its Mind. They talk about the world losing its mind & the meaning crisis, the pros & cons of modernism, the danger & dynamics of rapture ideologies, alignment beyond agreement, dehumanization, commonalities of political poles, hyper-capita

Apr 26, 2021 • 1:52:03

Currents 030: Daniel Schmachtenberger on The Consilience Project

Daniel Schmachtenberger & Jim talk about his newly launched project, The Consilience Project... Daniel Schmachtenberger & Jim talk about his newly launched project, The Consilience Project. They start by covering some background for the project: why start it, primary focuses, cultural renaissance, the role of education & press, eroding knowledge commons, rapidly changing culture & scales, and learning from history. They then talk about the project's approaches & strategies: bottom-up problems

Apr 22, 2021 • 1:26:03

EP122 Ashley Colby on Subsistence Agriculture

Ashley Colby & Jim talk about her book, Subsistence Agriculture in the US, moving to Uruguay, starting the Rizoma Field School, and much more... Ashley Colby & Jim start this episode by talking about her book, Subsistence Agriculture in the US: Reconnecting to Work, Nature and Community. They cover Gemeinschaft vs Gesellschaft, Dual Process Theory, bottom-up change, arriving at paradox & the purist failure, creating social capital, food producer demographics & insights, modern industrial al

Apr 19, 2021 • 1:17:55

EP121 Broke in America with Joanne Goldblum & Colleen Shaddox

Joanne Goldblum & Colleen Shaddox talk to Jim about their book, Broke in America: Seeing, Understanding, and Ending U.S. Poverty... Joanne Goldblum & Colleen Shaddox talk to Jim about their book, Broke in America: Seeing, Understanding, and Ending U.S. Poverty. They cover the "give a man fish" fallacy, poverty quicksand, two vs one-parent households, nurture vs nature, poverty's impact on children, poverty definition & demographics, rural vs urban poverty, water access issues & pricing, mal

Apr 12, 2021 • 1:29:32

EP120 James Ehrlich on ReGen Villages Part 2

James Ehrlich & Jim continue their conversation on ReGen Villages: smart houses & neighborhoods, regulatory hurdles, status/progress, and much more... James Ehrlich & Jim continue their conversation on ReGen Villages. They cover smart houses in dumb neighborhoods, defining smart, what COVID exposed about cities, ReGen Village dynamics & their permacultural core, rural jobs, UBI, rural regulatory challenges, village funding & costs, electric self-sufficiency approach, media & making ReGen Vi

Apr 8, 2021 • 1:04:05

EP119 Max Borders on Post-Collapse

Max Borders & Jim continue their last conversation on his book, After Collapse: The End of America and the Rebirth of Her Ideals... Max Borders & Jim continue their last conversation on his book, After Collapse: The End of America and the Rebirth of Her Ideals. They cover fully automated luxury communism, utilizing traditional economics & markets, Elinor Ostrom's commons, institutional experimentation, post-scarcity economics, Joseph Pine's experience economy, bottom-up collaboration, mascu

Apr 5, 2021 • 1:15:29

EP118 Matt Ridley on How Innovation Works

Matt Ridley talks to Jim about his latest book, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom... Matt Ridley talks to Jim about his latest book, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom. They cover innovation vs invention, improbable order, the value of technological innovation, the importance of the steam engine, innovation as a team sport, the history of vaccination, fossil fuel's role in the industrial revolution, negative impacts of patents, the light bulb & simul

Mar 30, 2021 • 1:04:27

EP117 Samo Burja on Societal Decline

Samo 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

Mar 23, 2021 • 1:54:14

EP116 Doug Erwin on the Cambrian Explosion

Doug Erwin talks to Jim about his book, The Cambrian Explosion: The Construction of Animal Biodiversity... Doug Erwin talks to Jim about his book, The Cambrian Explosion: The Construction of Animal Biodiversity. They cover the unprecedentedly rapid evolution of life seen during the Cambrian explosion (approx 540 million BCE), archeological dating techniques & accuracy, micro-evolution vs macro-evolution, environmental potential, ecological opportunity and challenges, genetic/developmental c

Mar 15, 2021 • 1:24:28

Currents 029: Vance Crowe on the “Well-Actually” Graph

Jim talks to Vance Crowe about what led him to work at Monsanto, how he discovered & uses the "Well_Actually" Graph, GameB, VR & much more... In this currents episode, Jim talks to Vance Crowe about what led him to work at Monsanto & the dynamics of its public narrative, how he discovered the "Well_Actually" Graph, limitations of PR firms & communications training, the value of skeptics & deep understanding, navigating the "Well-Actually" Graph, disagreeable nerds, GameB & alignment beyond ag

Mar 12, 2021 • 53:14

EP115 Max Borders on America’s Collapse

Max Borders with Jim on his new book, After Collapse: The End of America and the Rebirth of Her Ideals: GameB, complexity, climate, wokism... Max Borders talks to Jim about his new book, After Collapse: The End of America and the Rebirth of Her Ideals. They cover the definition of collapse, the potential role of debt in triggering a collapse, what a post-collapse scene might be like, cryptocurrencies, GameA vs GameB, complex vs complicated systems, the risks of scientism, climate change and

Mar 8, 2021 • 1:21:36

EP114 John Bunzl on his Simpol Solution

John Bunzl talks to Jim about the multi-faceted approach to global cooperation he created, Simpol - The Simultaneous Policy... John Bunzl talks to Jim about his Simpol approach to global cooperation. They cover simultaneous implementation, connections to GameB, feasible viable support, the first-mover disadvantage, regulatory chill, the veto issue, destructive global competition, utilizing competition & cooperation, global problems, the myth of sovereign nations, wokism vs trumpism, the dea

Mar 1, 2021 • 1:23:20

Currents 028: Simon DeDeo on Explaining Explanation

Jim & Simon DeDeo on his recent paper, "From Probability to Consilience: How Explanatory Values Implement Bayesian Reasoning"... In this currents episode, Jim talks to Simon DeDeo about his recently co-authored (with Zachary Wojtowicz) paper, "From Probability to Consilience: How Explanatory Values Implement Bayesian Reasoning". They cover its connection to AI & human development, description vs power in explanation, the value & challenge of using multiple conceptual lenses, the difference be

Feb 25, 2021 • 42:35

EP113 Zak Stein on Hierarchical Complexity

Zak Stein & Jim have a wide-ranging talk about the history & dynamics of hierarchical complexity & human development... Zak Stein & Jim have a wide-ranging talk about hierarchical complexity: its history, horizontal vs vertical development, the chunking property in development, emergence & evolution, success vs understanding, child development, the development advantage of youth, representational thinking & abstraction, the connection of social complexity & hierarchical development, limitat

Feb 22, 2021 • 1:33:36

Currents 027: Charles Hoskinson on Cardano Blockchain Project

Charles Hoskinson & Jim on blockchain history, his history with the Ethereum project & what led him to found Cardano, a 3rd gen project, and much more... In this currents episode, Charles Hoskinson talks with Jim about the history of blockchain projects, his history with the Ethereum project and what led him to found Cardano, a 3rd gen project. They cover interoperability & decentralization, other projects & protocols, transactions per second considerations & dubious relevance, downside of pr

Feb 17, 2021 • 1:18:27

EP112 Annie Duke on Bets & Better Decisions

Annie Duke & Jim have a wide-ranging talk about how key themes in her last two books lead to making better bets & decisions... Annie Duke & Jim talk about some of the key themes in her last two books. They cover how she became a championship level poker player, the deep differences between poker and chess, the complexity of poker & winning strategies, "resulting" and outcome bias, skill vs luck, "thinking in bets", making better decisions, system 1 vs 2 thinking, optionality, the 10/10/10 m

Feb 15, 2021 • 1:22:25

EP111 Anatol Lieven on Climate & Nationalism

Anatol Lieven & Jim have a wide-ranging talk about his latest book, Climate Change and the Nation State: The Realist Case... Anatol Lieven & Jim talk about his latest book, Climate Change and the Nation State: The Realist Case. They cover motivating populations to take actions on climate change, the key role of nations & nationalism, the huge problem of residual elites, funding alternative energy, western government incompetence & political failures, individuality, Bernie & the green new de

Feb 11, 2021 • 1:26:50

EP110 Brad Kershner on Education & Complexity

Brad 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,

Feb 8, 2021 • 1:26:34

Currents 026: Bill Ottman on Minds.com

Bill 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, to

Feb 6, 2021 • 1:13:02

EP109 Forrest Landry on Immanent Metaphysics: Part 2

Forrest Landry & Jim build on the foundation they built in his last JRS episode to continue to flesh out Forrest's Immanent Metaphysics... Forrest Landry & Jim build on the foundation they built in his last JRS episode to continue to flesh out Forrest's Immanent Metaphysics. They explore the self, subject/object relationship, perception, the nature of choice & process, causality & determinism, realism vs idealism, dualism, the foundational triplicate, the three modalities, statement & impli

Feb 4, 2021 • 1:48:57

EP108 Bernard Baars on Consciousness

Bernard Baars talks to Jim about some of the key ideas in his book, On Consciousness: Science & Subjectivity... Bernard Baars talks to Jim about some of the key ideas in his book, On Consciousness: Science & Subjectivity. They start by covering some of the history of the scientific study of consciousness & its taboo reputation in science, the philosopher's zombie, and the limits of philosophy to study consciousness. They then go into some of the specifics of Bernards global workspace theory

Feb 1, 2021 • 1:34:46

Currents 025: Ben Goertzel on Decentralizing Social Media

In this Currents episode, Ben Goertzel & Jim have a wide-ranging talk about the urgent need for decentralized tech platforms. They cover Jim's recent banning from Facebook & how it might have happened, the danger of kafkaesque algorithms & the challenge of building AI's that explain their decisions, the challenges around creating alternatives to big tech, politics power & corruption, game theory for today’s social platforms, Signal vs Telegram, moving Gameb off Facebook, alternative app framewor

Jan 29, 2021 • 1:17:11

EP107 Tristan Harris on Our Social Dilemma

Tristan Harris & Jim on his hugely successful documentary, The Social Dilemma: social media good, harms, regulation, bold interventions, and much more... Tristan Harris talks to Jim about his hugely successful documentary, The Social Dilemma. They start by identifying the good aspects of social media, the obvious harms & exploitation tactics, AI-enabled race to the bottom dynamics, digital regulation approaches, the big tech oligarchs, combating cultish dynamics, AI-powered algorithmic infl

Jan 28, 2021 • 1:25:51

Currents 024: BJ Campbell on the Woke Religion

BJ Campbell has a wide-ranging talk with Jim about article, "Social Justice is a Crowdsourced Religion", reflects on the future of wokeism, and much more... In this Currents episode, BJ Campbell has a wide-ranging talk with Jim about his article, "Social Justice is a Crowdsourced Religion": the history of the wokeism & how it can be seen as a religion, what makes religions efficacious, the falsification problem, woke scientific contradictions, protestant similarities, woke prevalence, its rap

Jan 27, 2021 • 52:51

EP106 Michael Strevens on the Irrational History of Science

Michael Stevens talks to Jim about some of the ideas & stories in his book, The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science... Michael Stevens talks to Jim about some of the ideas & stories in his book, The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science: what the great method debate is & how Popper & Kuhn added to the topic, falsification & scientific progress, the messy history of testing Einstein's theories, understanding the theoretical cohort, Michael's iron

Jan 25, 2021 • 1:24:10

EP105 Christof Koch on Consciousness

Christof Koch & Jim have a wide-ranging conversation about the science of consciousness and his book, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread But Can't Be Computed... Christof Koch and Jim have a wide-ranging conversation about the science of consciousness. They start by exploring some key topics brought up in his book, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread But Can't Be Computed: defining conscious experience, the importance of feeling, the historic

Jan 21, 2021 • 1:24:25

EP104 Joe Henrich on WEIRD People

Joe Henrich talks to Jim about some of the key insights from his book, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar & Particularly Prosperous. Joe Henrich talks to Jim about some of the key insights from his book, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar & Particularly Prosperous. They cover who the WEIRD people are & what impact their WERDness has on academic research, the impact of literacy on cognition, nature & nurt

Jan 19, 2021 • 1:05:07

Currents 023: Terry Gainer on the January 6th Riot

Former U.S. Capitol Police Chief, Terry Gainer talks to Jim about his views on the January 6th riot at the U.S. Capitol... In this Currents episode, Former U.S. Capitol Police Chief, Terry Gainer talks to Jim about his views on the January 6th riot at the U.S. Capitol. He discusses shortcomings in preparations, intelligence, and operations, highlights failure to adjust as new information came in, describes issues with the chain of command that impacted both preparation and response,  the role

Jan 18, 2021 • 47:36

Currents 022: Curtis Yarvin on Institutional Failure

Jim talks to Curtis Yarvin about his recent article, "2020, the year of everything fake": presentism, history, COVID-19 response failures, and much more... In this Currents episode, Jim talks to Curtis Yarvin about some key points in his recent article, "2020, the year of everything fake". They start by talking about the ability &/or inability to take the world seriously, presentism, history, political formulas & their connection to governmental failure, the fall of the soviet union, and the

Jan 14, 2021 • 1:12:53

Currents 021: John Robb on Jan 6th, 2021

John Robb talks to Jim about the Jan 6th events at the US Capitol: intel & ops failures, opensource insurgency, social media, Trump, and much more... In this Currents episode, Jim talks to John Robb about the Jan 6th events at the US Capitol. They cover the intelligence & operations failures, the event as an example of domestic opensource insurgency, heterogeneous motivations & intentions among the protesters, self-organizing network tribal dynamics of the right & left, the conspiracy attract

Jan 12, 2021 • 53:32

EP103 James Ehrlich on ReGen Villages

James Ehrlich talks to Jim about ReGen Villages: community types, de-urbanization & rural living, materialism, agriculture, and much more... James Ehrlich talks to Jim about what makes a ReGen Village, potential community organization types, how ReGen Villages could learn from each other, utilizing machine learning, working with existing government regulations, the importance & urgent need for ReGen Villages, the COVID-19 impact on demand, city living & de-urbanization, misconceptions of ru

Jan 11, 2021 • 1:05:06

EP102 Debora Spar on Technological Impacts on Culture

Debora Spar & Jim have a wide-ranging chat on some of the insights in her book, Work Mate Marry Love: How Machines Shape Our Human Destiny. Debora Spar and Jim have a wide-ranging conversation on some of the insights in her book, Work Mate Marry Love: How Machines Shape Our Human Destiny. They start by focusing on our transition from forager to agricultural life: the creation of property & new family structures, roles & lifestyles of women, polygyny, hoe vs plow cultures, and bastard childr

Jan 7, 2021 • 1:27:59

EP101 Clayton Banks on the Digital Divide

Clayton Banks talks to Jim about essential tools & digital literacy, why & how he started Silicon Harlem, community dev, the FCC, and much more... Clayton Banks talks to Jim about bridging the digital divide & the importance of internet access, essential tools & digital literacy, prioritizing digital infrastructure, possible COVID-19 impacts on the digital divide, capitalism with empathy, why & how he started Silicon Harlem, key relationships for community development, online meetups & busi

Jan 4, 2021 • 1:16:17

EP100 Sam Bowles on Our Cooperative Nature

Sam Bowles talks to Jim about his book, A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution: competition, hierarchy, game theory, and much more... Sam Bowles talks to Jim about his book, A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution, co-authored with Herbert Gintis. They start by exploring cooperation in hunter-gatherer living: how human cooperation is different from other species', collaboration needed for big game hunting, egalitarianism & competition, hierarchy myths,

Dec 21, 2020 • 1:31:13

Currents 020: Barbara Oakley on Teaching Fluency

Barbara Oakley talks to Jim about fluency across domains, understanding-centered learning, education evolution, online learning, and much more... In this Currents episode, Jim and Barbara Oakley start by talking about her eclectic background & career, then go on to talk about her article, How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math: how a liberal arts person learned advanced math and became an engineering professor, fluency across domains, understanding-centered learning & the limits of p

Dec 17, 2020 • 48:30

EP99 Jason Wiener on Alternative Business Structures

Jason Wiener talks to Jim about prioritizing missions in business, downfalls of profit-maximizing, employee ownership structures, and much more... Practicing business entity attorney Jason Wiener talks to Jim about prioritizing the mission in a business, downfalls of profit-maximizing models & intentions, employee ownership structures, understanding & planning for trade-offs, adaptive vs rigid structures, types of fundraising & their long-term business implications, cooperatives including t

Dec 14, 2020 • 1:11:31

EP98 Morag Gamble on Permaculture

Morag Gamble talks to Jim about the history & dynamics of permaculture, education, regenerative farming, Crystal Waters EcoVillage, and much more... Morag Gamble talks to Jim about the history & definition of permaculture, the different places & styles in which it can be implemented, the best ways of introducing it to others, seeing permaculture as a mycelial network, emersion over theory, Morag's experience with refugee communities embracing permaculture, redefining human value, Damanhur,

Dec 10, 2020 • 1:23:28

EP97 Emery Brown on Consciousness & Anesthesia

Emery Brown talks to Jim about anesthesiology as a probe on consciousness, brain networks & relationships, EEG dose calibration, and much more... Emery Brown joins Jim as the first in a series of guests exploring the science of consciousness. They cover anesthesiology as a probe on consciousness, types of brain observation (EEG & fMRI), propofol's impact on brain networks, brain waves in various frequency ranges, phase and frequency, breakdown of long-range networks under anesthesia,  comin

Dec 8, 2020 • 1:20:56

EP96 Forrest Landry on Immanent Metaphysics: Part 1

Forrest Landry talks to Jim about his immanent metaphysics theory: the self, choice, interaction, time, soundness, mind vs matter, and much more... Forrest Landry talks to Jim about the value of metaphysics, how his immanent metaphysics compare to past metaphysical theories, his unique definition of self & its relationship with choice, quantum foundations, the nature of choice, interaction & time, observer as an epiphenomenon, limits of perception, soundness vs validity, reifying power & me

Nov 30, 2020 • 1:24:30

EP95 Alexander Bard on God in the Internet Age

Alexander Bard talks to Jim about Syntheism's new take on theology, religious history, science, Zoroastrianism, Facebook, wokeness, and much more... Alexander Bard talks to Jim about Syntheism's new take on theology, the purpose of & roles in religion, post-contemporary God, the role of science in religious history, Zoroastrian history & its western influence, the digital exodus, the early internet, the failure of Facebook, #metoo, virtue ethics & game theory, damaging wokeness impacts & it

Nov 23, 2020 • 1:39:03

EP94 Shahin Farshchi on Self-Driving Tech

Shahin Farshchi talks to Jim about self-driving tech: 5 automation levels, safeguards, the consumer market, costs, policy, and much more... Shahin Farshchi talks to Jim about self-driving technology. They cover Waymo's driverless taxi launch, the 5 levels of automation, teleoperation, redundant safeguards, self-driving deployment approaches & challenges, planning for corner cases, consumer market speculations, operating costs, Tesla's aspirations & shadow testing advantage, the simulator in

Nov 19, 2020 • 1:20:11

Currents 019: Alexander Beiner on Indigenous Narcissism

Jim 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, postmode

Nov 17, 2020 • 1:00:48

EP93 Brent Cooper on Critique, Consensus & Politics

Brent 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

Nov 16, 2020 • 1:26:12

EP92 Alexa Clay on Intentional Communities

Alexa Clay talks to Jim about intentional communities: diversity, governance, cult dynamics, longevity, scale, norms, values, rituals, and much more... Alexa Clay talks to Jim about similar characteristics of intentional communities & startups, common personalities & intentions in intentional community, meeting their need for diverse skillsets & demographics, governance approaches, avoiding cult dynamics, planning for generational transition, community scales & boundaries, monetary systems,

Nov 14, 2020 • 1:12:32

EP91 Joe Brewer on Applied Cultural Evolution

Joe Brewer talks to Jim about applied cultural evolution, planetary human impact, regenerative agro, collapse, ethics, social capital, and much more... Joe Brewer talks to Jim about the power & elements of applied cultural evolution, carrying capacity & human impacts on the planet, industrial vs regenerative agriculture, the likelihood of large-scale collapse & mass extinction events, the transition to regenerative living, human potential & responsibility, cultural evolution ethics, disastr

Nov 9, 2020 • 1:14:43

EP90 Joshua Epstein on Agent-Based Modeling

Joshua Epstein talks to Jim about agent-based modeling, differential equations, computational archeology, COVID-19 failures, and much more... Joshua Epstein talks to Jim about Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) as a powerful tool in the social sciences. They start with the history of Sugarscape, an early ABM framework, the dynamics of ABM systems, types of agents, ABM vs models based on systems of differential equations, predicting vs explaining systems, Axelrod's demonstration of emergent racial s

Nov 5, 2020 • 1:15:53

EP89 Lene Rachel Andersen on Metamodernity

Lene Rachel Andersen talks to Jim about how metamodernity addresses our complex problems, postmodernism, meaning-making, education, and much more... Lene Rachel Andersen talks to Jim about the growing number of complex challenges we face today, the need for cultures to evolve, our cultural history & the need to integrate pre-modern norms back into culture, the value & danger of postmodernism, metamodernism vs metamodernity, the aesthetic & academic history of metamodernism, wokism, fascism

Nov 2, 2020 • 1:32:46

EP88 Nancy Hillis & Bruce Sawhill on Art & Complexity

Nancy Hillis & Bruce Sawhill talk to Jim about the similarities of complexity science & art: emergence, order & chaos, luck, and much more... Nancy Hillis & Bruce Sawhill talk to Jim about the commonalities & dynamics of complexity science & art: innovation & imitation, breaking rules, inseparability, phase transitions, combinatorics & restraints, aesthetics, process vs result orientation, simplicity, paradox, uncertainty, emergence, navigating the edge of order & chaos, known unknowns & un

Oct 30, 2020 • 1:06:08

Currents 018: The Future Thinkers Smart Village

Jim talks to Euvie Ivanova & Mike Gilliland about their Future Thinkers Smart Village: region, scaling, governance, economics, fundraising, and much more... In this Currents episode, Jim talks to Future Thinkers co-founders Euvie Ivanova & Mike Gilliland about their new Smart Village. They cover details about their selected bioregion, their short & long-term building & scaling plans, governance approaches, the economic models for residents & emphasis on remote working, regenerative agricultur

Oct 29, 2020 • 1:00:35

Currents 017: Bret Weinstein on Unity 2020

Jim 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 o

Oct 27, 2020 • 1:26:55

EP87 Joscha Bach on Theories of Consciousness

Joscha Bach talks to Jim about his views on popular consciousness theories, thinkers, dynamics, artificial intelligence, and much more... Joscha Bach and Jim start by talking about the difference between mind & brain, and the body & environment's connection to mind & emotions. Joscha then offers his views on some popular consciousness theories & thinkers: consciousness as frequency, Global Workspace Theory, Integrated Information Theory, Functionalism, Daniel Dennet, and Roger Penrose. Whil

Oct 26, 2020 • 1:23:54

EP86 Nadav Zeimer on Educational Reform

Nadav Zeimer talks to Jim about being a high school principal, our educational failures, dynamics of his proposed academic platform, and much more... Nadav Zeimer talks to Jim about his background & how it informs his work as a high school principal, the educational system's failure to build the right skills, consumption vs information literacy, COVID-19 impacts on education, what digital nativism & media creation means to Nadav, hands-on non-digital learning, out-dated education incentives

Oct 22, 2020 • 1:27:01

Currents 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

Oct 21, 2020 • 49:53

EP85 Gar Alperovitz on Reinventing Our Systems

Gar Alperovitz talks Jim about system dynamics of ownership, control, politics, economics, US unions, governance, evolution, and much more... Gar Alperovitz talks to Jim about what his definition of systems & their relationship to ownership & control, economic & political components in systems, GameB, the legitimacy crisis & systems collapse, the failure mode of the political process, pervasive corporate influences, theory & experimentation, the past dynamics & current decline of US unions,

Oct 19, 2020 • 1:24:03

Currents 015: Jessica Flack & Melanie Mitchell on Complexity

In this Currents episode, Jim talks to Melanie Mitchell & Jessica Flack about the complexity of COVID, randomness, robustness, collective intelligence, misinfo, and much more... In this Currents episode, Jim talks to Melanie Mitchell & Jessica Flack about their recent Aeon article, Uncertain times. Why R(0) is not a good measure for COVID contagion, network contagion & super spreaders, global non-linear causes & effects, feedback dynamics in complex systems, some hopeful views on COVID-19 imp

Oct 18, 2020 • 53:04

Currents 014: Steve LeVine on COVID-19 Futures

In this Currents episode, Jim talks to Steve LeVine about his article, Remote Work Is Killing the Hidden Trillion-Dollar Office Economy, the US city exodus, and much more... In this Currents episode, Jim talks to Steve LeVine about his article, Remote Work Is Killing the Hidden Trillion-Dollar Office Economy, cultural hysteresis & homeostasis, the challenge of predicting post-pandemic changes & looking to history, the emerging remote business fluency, designing for virtual serendipity, the bi

Oct 15, 2020 • 47:03

EP84 William Perry & Tom Collina on The Nuclear Button

Former Sec of Defense William Perry & Tom Collina talk about their book, The Button: The New Nuclear Arms Race & Presidential Power, and much more... Former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry & Tom Z. Collina of the Ploughshares Fund talk to Jim about their book, The Button: The New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential Power from Truman to Trump. They cover today's nuclear weapons amnesia, the current nuclear situation, the growing number of nuclear-armed countries, US presidential nuclear

Oct 12, 2020 • 1:12:56

EP83 Michel Bauwens on Our Commons Transition

Michel Bauwens talks to Jim about P2P plurality, agro & regeneration, capitalist impact on social media, blockchains, cosmo-localism, and much more... Michel Bauwens talks to Jim about the forms of P2P (peer to peer) implementations & core elements, cosmo-local production, P2P in agriculture & regenerative processes, artificial rivalrous dynamics, capitalist impacts on social media & sensemaking, political polarization, creating better social media habits, centralized vs distributed & for-p

Oct 8, 2020 • 1:22:37

Currents 013: Rob Malda on the Slashdot Story

Rob Malda (AKA: CmdrTaco) talks to Jim about the history & tech of Slashdot while speculating on what social media could learn from it. In this Currents episode, Jim talks to Rob Malda (AKA: CmdrTaco) about the history & creation of Slashdot, its opensource tech, rapid growth & eventual decline, unique moderation system & community involvement, utilization of scarcity, the down-side of open rating systems, the game theory of social media & the evolution of manipulation tactics, moderation tra

Oct 8, 2020 • 44:41

EP82 Hanzi Freinacht on Building a Metamodern Future

Hanzi 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 interventi

Oct 5, 2020 • 1:33:15

EP81 Renée DiResta on Social Media Warfare

Renée DiResta talks to Jim about social media dynamics, foreign influence, disinformation vs misinformation, political ads, conspiracy, and much more... Renée DiResta talks to Jim about her work at the Standford Internet Observatory, identifying foreign social media influence, the challenge of defining state media, her work on the Election Integrity Project, sourcing social media data, foreign vs domestic disinformation & misinformation, the value & danger of political advertising, targetin

Oct 1, 2020 • 1:28:52

EP80 Daniel Schmachtenberger on Better Sensemaking

Daniel Schmachtenberger talks to Jim about sensemaking & how it's impacted by algorithms, addiction, authority, conspiracy, education, and much more... Daniel Schmachtenberger talks to Jim about the increasing importance of sensemaking in our globalized culture, internet algorithm impacts on narrative warfare, digital dopamine hijacking & addiction dynamics, dangerous contemporary authority dynamics, global government vs governance & other coordinating processes, the history of democracy, t

Sep 28, 2020 • 1:38:27

EP79 Seth Lloyd on Our Quantum Universe

Seth Lloyd talks to Jim about the fundamentals of quantum physics, quantum computing, seeing the universe as a quantum computer, and much more... Seth Lloyd starts this episode by talking to Jim about the fundamentals of quantum physics: the quantum vs classical world, quantum interpretations, causality & randomness, the many-worlds theory, entanglement, and coherence. They then go on to talk about the emerging field of quantum computing: its incredible power & potential impacts on encrypti

Sep 24, 2020 • 1:49:04

Currents 012: Andrew Taggart on Narcissism, Culture & Dying

Andrew Taggart talks to Jim about philosophy, our psychotherapeutic culture, the good life & virtue, narcissism, community living, dying well, and more... In this Currents episode, Jim talks to Andrew Taggart about what philosophy is & once was, the impacts of our psychotherapeutic culture, the good life & virtue, narcissism, friends of utility, changing family dynamics, GameB, close community living, what polling tells us about meaning & happiness, promoting & scaling the good life at the ri

Sep 23, 2020 • 59:18

EP78 Ran Abramitzky on the Mystery of the Kibbutz

Ran Abramitzky talks to Jim about the kibbutz movement's history, social & economic impact, family life, other egalitarian projects, and more... Ran Abramitzky talks to Jim about his book, The Mystery of the Kibbutz: history of the kibbutz movement, social and economic impact in Israel, group governance, family life, the role of coherence & homogeneity, economic forces vs egalitarianism, kibbutz life as social insurance, educational dynamics, changing governmental relationships after 1977,

Sep 21, 2020 • 1:15:26

EP77 Kamal Sinclair on Science, Storytelling & VR

Kamal Sinclair talks with Jim about fiction & science, the power of storytelling, new media & tech, VR, augmented & mixed reality, and much more... Kamal Sinclair talks with Jim about being an art doula, the role of fiction in science, the power of storytelling, impacts of new media & technology, mind & perception, the Question Bridge project's view into the lives of black men, storytelling in VR, the challenges of creating & funding VR content, the promise of augmented & mixed reality, art

Sep 14, 2020 • 1:35:11

EP76 Max Borders on the Social Singularity

Max 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

Sep 7, 2020 • 1:32:25

EP75 Nick Chater: “The Mind Is Flat”

Nick Chater talks to Jim about his flat mind theory, depth psychology, the grand illusion, memory, emotion, confabulation, and much more... Nick Chater talks with Jim about his bold argument that the human mind is a lot flatter than we think.  That what we think of as “answers from our mental depths” are an illusion.  When we report on our “depths” what we say sounds like an explanation – but really it is a terrible jumble that we are making up as we go along. Nick uses the examination of f

Aug 31, 2020 • 1:39:49

EP74 Daniel Christian Wahl on Regeneration Dynamics

Daniel 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

Aug 27, 2020 • 1:45:25

EP73 James Lindsay on Cynical Theories

James Lindsay talks with Jim about the history of social progress, illiberalism from postmodernism & its impact on science & culture, and much more... James Lindsay talks with Jim about his parody scholarly article project, intentions of his latest book, liberalism as a process, history of social progress, illiberalism from the left, the history of postmodernism & its impact on science, cultural & economic power dynamics, postmodern principals & themes, the postmodern applied turn, identity

Aug 24, 2020 • 1:47:58

EP72 Joscha Bach on Minds, Machines & Magic

Joscha Bach talks to Jim about AI, human vs animal intelligence, GPT-3, realism, emergence, magic, hybrid AI approaches, cybernetics, and much more... Joscha Bach talks to Jim about better understanding ourselves via AI, narrow vs general AI incentives, AGI & human-level intelligence, philosophy of AI, limitations of the human brain, GPT-2 & 3, understanding language, layers of meaning, brains columns & mini columns, human vs animal intelligence, matter vs information, physics, realism, spi

Aug 17, 2020 • 1:49:16

Currents 011: Robin Hanson on RightTalkism

Jim 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",

Aug 11, 2020 • 39:40

EP71 Philip Howard on Computational Propaganda

Philip Howard talks with Jim about organized & paid disinformation, tech & politics, the lie machine, journalism, privately-held data, and much more... Philip Howard talks with Jim about the impacts of organized & paid digital disinformation, the interconnection of technology & politics, foreign election influence, how narrow targeting compares to older direct marketing strategies, political advertising, political lies, visual misinformation, the broad range of manipulation tactics, the lie

Aug 10, 2020 • 1:02:41

EP70 Art Brock & Ferananda Ibarra on Currencies

Art 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, specula

Aug 3, 2020 • 1:28:21

EP69 Rachel Haywire on Free Thinking & Expression

Rachel Haywire talks to Jim about running for president, acting vs philosophizing, the art right, aesthetics, today's left & right, dark bohemianism, and much more... Rachel Haywire talks to Jim about running for president in the transhumanist party, her Elixer Salon, her Pulling out of the Narrative article, GameB, acting vs philosophizing, taking our work & selves seriously, neo-reactionaries, understanding & working with people who have dark triad traits, NLP, understanding the art right

Jul 31, 2020 • 1:07:48

Currents 010: Tyson Yunkaporta on Humans As Custodial Species

Jim 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 gett

Jul 28, 2020 • 52:06

EP68 Mara Zepeda on Innovative Collaboration

Mara 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

Jul 27, 2020 • 1:27:55

EP67 Tomas Björkman on The Nordic Secret

Tomas Björkman talks to Jim about what made Nordic countries thrive, psychological development, the disappearance & possible re-emergence of the Bildung, and much more... Tomas Björkman talks to Jim about the danger of reifying systems, understanding the Bildung, what made the Nordic countries exceptional, inner development, Scandinavia's retreat centers, cultural modernity, the self-authoring shift & emergent levels in psychological development, influential philosophers & their impact on e

Jul 20, 2020 • 1:32:10

Currents 009: Gregg Henriques on Theory Of Meta-Cultural Transition

Jim 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 de

Jul 18, 2020 • 1:11:57

EP66 Tyson Yunkaporta on Indigenous Knowledge

Tyson 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, clo

Jul 16, 2020 • 1:36:10

EP65 Tyson Yunkaporta on Indigenous Complexity

Tyson Yunkaporta talks to Jim about his Apalech Clan, human domestication, connected bioregions, cultural narcissism, value in ordeal, indigenous instinct, and much more... An important new thinker only comes around every few years. Tyson Yunkaport is that thinker right now. We talk about his amazing new book, Sand Talk, in which he looks at the meta-crisis of our contemporary scene through the dual lenses of complexity science and his Indigenous Australian culture. We talk about: his Apale

Jul 13, 2020 • 1:32:36

EP64 Colin Wright on The New Evolution Deniers

Colin 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,

Jul 9, 2020 • 1:08:48

EP63 Michel Bauwens on P2P & Commons

Michel 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

Jul 6, 2020 • 1:25:34

Currents 008: Christopher Conselice: Finding Extraterrestrial Intelligence

In this Currents episode, Jim talks to astrophysicist Christopher Conselice about his recent paper that estimates the number of communicating intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. Topics include: the history of the 'life off earth' question, current methods of looking for extraterrestrial intelligence, how Chris builds on and modifies the Drake equation, supernovas & star formation, possible communication methods, estimating intelligent civilization lifespans, SETI and METI, dangers and benef

Jul 5, 2020 • 53:33

EP62 Zak Stein on Education, Tech & Religion

Zak Stein talks with Jim about tech in education, what advertising is teaching us, the role of religion in education, self-transcendence, Zak's 13 social miracles, and much more... Zak Stein talks with Jim about the pros & cons of technology in education & the role of the teacher, unrealized education potentials in TV & internet, what advertising is teaching us, the role of religion in education, good vs bad science & religion, emerging eclectic religion & spirituality, spirituality as seen

Jun 29, 2020 • 2:00:21

Currents 007: David Fuller on the IDW

In this Currents episode, Jim talks to Rebel Wisdom founder David Fuller about what the IDW is & how it relates to GameB, common IDW perspectives & its prescient points, the decline of journalism & sensemaking, postmodernism, how Integral theory views the IDW, memetic mediation, coherence & plurality, the IDW's future, online platform limitations, the value of critique, types of audience capture, and more. Episode Transcript JRS: EP24 Bret Weinstein on Evolving Culture Eric Weinstein &

Jun 24, 2020 • 51:58

EP61 Howard Rheingold on Our Digital Past & Future

Howard Rheingold talks with Jim about his involvement in early computing & the internet, collaboration, internet risks, privacy, COVID-19, attention, and much more... Howard Rheingold talks with Jim about his interest & experiences with early computers & the internet, online collaboration & sharing, The Source & Well.com, 'realtime' online tribes, 3 risks to the future of the internet, online privacy, social media power & responsibility, the EFF & other great things the internet enables, di

Jun 22, 2020 • 1:21:57

Currents 006: Jim Coan on Our Social Recession

In 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 Virgini

Jun 19, 2020 • 47:07

Currents 005: John Robb on Protest Tactics & Reforms

In this Currents episode, Jim talks to John Robb about an article that describes the military-style tactics leading to the capture and burning of a police headquarters in Minneapolis: specialized units, weapons & tactics, and decentralized communications.  How the violent use the non-violent.  Also: the dangers of police militarization, police reform, the potential for cultural change post protests & pandemic, possible return of the Occupy movement, Minneapolis police abolishment, future protest

Jun 17, 2020 • 32:36

EP60 Zak Stein on Educational Systems Collapse

Zak Stein talks with Jim about existential risks of our education systems, revolutions, attention, educational tech, standards, 4 quadrants of systems, and much more... Zak Stein talks with Jim about the existential risk of oppressive & unjust education systems, the inefficiency of injustice, how Zak sees social justice, Rawls veil of ignorance, creating new types of people, dynamics of revolutions, limitations of cognitive science & neuroscience, the power of attention & imitation in educa

Jun 15, 2020 • 1:42:28

EP59 Gregg Henriques on Unifying Psychology

Dr. 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

Jun 11, 2020 • 1:35:21

Currents 004: Michael Vassar on Passive-Aggressive Revolution

In this Currents episode, Jim talks to Michael Vassar about how he defines the passive-aggressive revolution & the ways it could manifest in the US, how the George Floyd protests impact the revolution, police bureaucracy vs bad actors, potential investigative & prosecution rights for private citizens, Trump's church photo op, the pandemic economic response, Trump voter types, white nationalism, and more. Episode Transcript Michael Vassar is an American futurist, activist, and entrepreneur.

Jun 9, 2020 • 45:58

EP58 Jake Bornstein on Leadership & Clarity

Jake Bornstein talks to Jim about Game A vs Gameb, exploration vs exploitation, uncertainty & clarity, leadership, decentralization, psycho-tech, and much more... Jake Bornstein talks to Jim about what he learned from his eclectic career, understanding value, competing with Game A, collapse-first vs construction-first approaches to systems change, how Talentism works with & impacts Game A, corporate exploration vs exploitation, the cognitive science behind Talentism's processes, non-adaptiv

Jun 8, 2020 • 1:27:53

Currents 003: Joe Norman on Localism & Scales of Cooperation

In this Currents episode, Jim talks to Joe Norman about appropriately-sized community collaboration, family & local organization, government & market dysfunctions, cooperation-based sacrifice, bad actors & sociopaths, unique dynamics of local markets, localism as a complex ecosystem, emergence, the limits of diversification & trade, multi-scale localism, wicked societal risks, the politicization of masks, and more. Episode Transcript Joe's Community Tweet Jim's article, A Journey To Gam

Jun 2, 2020 • 35:12

EP57 Zak Stein on Education in a Time Between Worlds

Zak Stein talks to Jim about, societal change, intergenerational transmission, the nature of education, teacherly authority, parenting, schooling, and much more... Zak Stein has a wide-ranging talk with Jim about our culture's dwindling capacity to understand & address today's increasingly complex problems. Zak starts by defining this moment as a time between worlds & draws its connection to societal transformation. They go on to talk about the meta crisis, intergenerational transmission, n

Jun 1, 2020 • 1:49:54

EP56 Art Brock on Holo Tech

Arthur Brock talks to Jim about Holochain -- agent-centric design, key management, data integrity, validation, zomes, DNA, hApp's, search, HOT token, and much more... Arthur Brock & Fernanda Ibarra talk to Jim about how Holochain works, its agent-centric design & how it's different from Etherium and Blockchain, key management, intrinsic data integrity, decentralized validation, micro-service development architecture, zomes, DNA, hApp's, UI development, distributed hash tables & searchabilit

May 28, 2020 • 1:17:28

Currents 002: Brian Hanley on Releasing the Vaccines

In this Currents episode, Jim talks to Brian Hanley about his view on the economic impact & recovery of COVID-19, the dramatic social impacts emerging, his views & experience with vaccine creation, vaccine risks & effectiveness, his proposal for rolling out vaccines immediately, immunity dynamics, and more. Episode Transcript Brian Hanley is the founder and chief scientist for Butterfly Sciences. Brian holds a Microbiology PhD from UC Davis with honors completed in under three years. Brian

May 26, 2020 • 35:03

EP55 Jack Murphy on Leaving the Left

Jack Murphy talks to Jim about The Liminal Order, attacks on masculinity, gender, post-modernism, impacts of social justice, racism, Trump, localism, and much more... Jack Murphy talks to Jim about his professional & political background, why he started The Liminal Order, his book, Democrat to Deplorable, the left's attack on masculinity, Jack's view on the manosphere & men's rights movement, the toxic masculinity meme, gender equality vs equity, post-modernism, the authoritarian left, Game

May 25, 2020 • 1:38:40

EP54 Robert Conan Ryan on Boom & Bust Cycles

Robert Conan Ryan talks with Jim about Neo Schumpeterianism: boom & bust cycles, 6 paradigms, organic vs digital, meaning-making, utopias, and much more... Robert Conan Ryan talks with Jim about Neo Schumpeterian economic theory, booms & busts dynamics, leverage cycles, golden ages, nuclear power propaganda & legislation, 5 paradigms of Neo Schumpeterianism & the emerging 6th organic paradigm, organic vs digital dynamics, the cultural dimension of revolution, culturally constructed & levera

May 18, 2020 • 1:39:25

Currents 001: Simon DeDeo on University Censorship

In this inaugural Currents episode, Jim talks to Simon DeDeo about speech censorship at elite Anglosphere universities, differing generational perspectives on personal liberty, the coddled mind & postmodern neo-Marxist theories, Simon's platonic cocktail party model, hospitality as a norm, College incentives, alternate metaphors for collective education, and more. Episode Transcript Simon on Twitter Jonathan Haidt Jordan Peterson Simon DeDeo is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mell

May 14, 2020 • 45:59

EP53 Hanzi Freinacht on the Nordic Ideology

Hanzi Freinacht talks to Jim about his book, Nordic Ideology; code, depth, complexity, cultural changeability, attractor points, game change, protopia, and much more... Hanzi Freinacht, political philosopher, historian, sociologist, & author talks with Jim about effective value memes, cultural code, what it means to have high depth, dynamics of cognitive complexity, the changeability of culture & systems, social engineering, compulsion vs seduction, prioritizing subjective states, cultural

May 11, 2020 • 1:32:45

Extra: Memetic Warfare & Pandemic Responses with John Robb

Jim 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

May 7, 2020 • 36:22

EP52 Steven Levy on Facebook: The Inside Story

Steven Levy talks with Jim about his new book, Facebook: The Inside Story. Which covers the people, circumstances & philosophies that define Facebook. Steven Levy has a wide-ranging conversation with Jim about his new book, Facebook: The Inside Story. They cover Steven's multi-year access to Facebook & Mark Zuckerberg while researching the book, Facebook’s initial denial of impact on the 2016 election, hate speech vs free speech, engagement metric incentives, micro-targeting & political adv

May 4, 2020 • 1:30:47

EP51 Richard Bartlett on Self-Organizing Collaboration

Richard 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 towar

Apr 27, 2020 • 1:18:51

Extra: Key COVID-19 Decisions with John Robb

In this short extra episode, Jim talks to John Robb about network decision making & consensus vs dissent dynamics, COVID as a decision making test, herd immunity vs social distancing, key population dynamics, John’s big tech solution & its main roadblocks, reflections on UBI & stimulus, the value of simple solutions, the failed US political response & potential fixes, regional compacts & local responses, managing the backside of the curve, broad testing feasibility, and more. Episode Transcri

Apr 23, 2020 • 40:57

EP50 Joe Brewer on Earth Regeneration

Joe Brewer talks to Jim about homeostasis in living systems, future collapse, fat-tail risks, evolutionary transitions, collaboration, bioregionalism, and much more... Joe Brewer talks to Jim about the memetics of regeneration & its connection to homeostasis in living systems, eco pessimism & Joe's view of future collapse, foodchain fragility, fat-tail risks, the role of emotions in existential risk, understanding manufacturing disruptions, potential silver linings in collapse, incremental

Apr 20, 2020 • 1:30:10

Extra: COVID-19 Transformations with Nora Bateson

In this short extra episode, Jim talks to Nora Bateson about how the pandemic is changing our relationship to time & mortality, recontextualizing the essential, non-linear future speculation, opportunities & dangers, the fragility of efficiency, changing how we work & travel, our political priorities, prioritizing community, family, locality, health and more. Episode Transcript JRS: EP30 Nora Bateson on Complexity & the Transcontextual Nora Bateson is an award-winning filmmaker, writer

Apr 17, 2020 • 36:42

Extra: COVID-19 Network Epidemiology with Michelle Girvan

In this short extra episode, Jim talks to Michelle Girvan about the network dynamics of COVID-19 spread, fat-tailed risks, unintuitive network insights, social distancing dynamics, efficiency vs robustness, challenges of modeling the backside of the curve, the need for testing, economic analysis, potential corporate roles, the Network Epidemiology Online Workshop Series, and more. Episode Transcript JRS: Extra: On COVID-19 Strategies with Robin Hanson JRS: Extra: On COVID-19 Opportunities

Apr 14, 2020 • 34:31

EP49 Laurence Gonzales on Deep Survival

Laurence Gonzales talks to Jim about his book “Deep Survival” a look at survival in extreme conditions from a cognitive science & “you are there” POV, and more... Author Laurence Gonzales talks to Jim about his book “Deep Survival” a fascinating look at survival in extreme conditions from both a cognitive science and “you are there” narrative perspective. Includes: multiple survival stories, the value of being cool in survival situations, preparing for an emergency, his perceive & believe h

Apr 13, 2020 • 1:32:46

Extra: On COVID-19 Opportunities with Jessica Flack

In this short extra episode, Jim talks to Jessica Flack about stressing & testing cultural organization styles, optimizing for wholistic robustness, acting-oriented sensemaking, a department of wicked risks, top-down vs bottom-up response dynamics, liminal spaces, speculative market safeguard techniques, long-term thinking, safety nets, inequality, and more. Episode Transcript JRS: EP48 Jessica Flack on Complex System Dynamics Hedonometer Long-Term Stock Exchange Jessica Flack is a

Apr 13, 2020 • 37:35

Extra: On COVID-19 Strategies with Robin Hanson

In this short extra episode, Jim talks to Robin Hanson about possible dosage related effects on exposure and the related trade-offs of viral dose & deliberate infection strategies, the need for more investment in robustness, capacity vs flexibility, optimizing for adaptability, our lack of leadership, and more. Episode Transcript JRS: EP2 Robin Hanson – Decision Making and “The Age of Em” Robin Hanson is an Associate Professor of Economics, and received his Ph.D in 1997 in social science

Apr 9, 2020 • 25:56

Extra: On Post-COVID-19 Impact with Simon DeDeo

In this short extra episode, Jim talks to Simon DeDeo about what moving out of social isolation could be like, social norms for risk management, the wide diversity of COVID reactions, making sense personally & collectively, homeostasis & hysteresis, post-COVID impacts on data privacy, travel, free time, education, and more. Episode Transcript Simon's post on Getting the quarantine end game right... JRS: EP1 Simon DeDeo – The Evolution of Consciousness Simon DeDeo is an Assistant Profes

Apr 7, 2020 • 33:37

EP48 Jessica Flack on Complex System Dynamics

Jessica Flack talks to Jim about causality in complex systems, theoretical biology, emergence, agent-based modeling, social policing, & much more... Professor Jessica Flack talks to Jim about micro vs macro causality in complex systems, coarse-graining, primate power hierarchies, downward causation, robustness, free will as a feeling, consciousness theories, theoretical biology, laws in adaptive systems, the non-spookiness of emergence, her work's philosophical connections, question asking

Apr 7, 2020 • 1:29:53

Extra: On COVID-19 Potentials with Bonnitta Roy

In this short extra episode, Jim talks to Bonnitta Roy about what it means to ‘stay with the trouble’, habitual behavior, the value of reflection, consumerism, scarcity & abundance, resourcefulness, the allure of going back to the rat race, system dependence vs interconnection, lack of community in the capitalist system, Game B, the downsides & narrow capabilities of monetary efficiency, and more. Episode Transcript Referenced Quote Bonnitta Roy teaches insight practices for individuals

Apr 2, 2020 • 34:29

Extra: On Post COVID-19 Impacts with Ben Goertzel

In this short extra episode, Jim talks to Dr. Ben Goertzel about the economic & cultural impacts we could expect after the peak of COVID-19, the end of the tech backlash, income inequality, homeostasis & hysteresis, business travel bets from Jim & Ben, in-person vs virtual events, potential opportunities, cryptocurrency & blockchain, answering the cultural wakeup call, dynamics of centralized responses in decentralized systems, and more. Episode Transcript SingularityNET Blog EP3 Dr. Ben

Apr 1, 2020 • 31:11

Bonus: Jim on The Stoa, COVID & Game B

On 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

Mar 30, 2020 • 53:24

Extra: On COVID-19 & UBI with Bob Reid

In this short extra episode, Co-Founder & CEO of Everest Bob Reid talks with Jim about the core elements of an effective UBI, short vs long term UBI approaches for the US, the Everest platform’s UBI capabilities & implementation timelines, biometrics, fraud, security, feasibility, and more. Episode Transcript Everest.org Extra: On COVID-19 & Complexity with Jordan Hall Bob Reid: GM, BitTorrent, Partner Kai Labs (blockchain consultancy), CEO & Co-founder VelocityBits, Strategy & Biz Dev

Mar 27, 2020 • 37:11

Extra: On COVID-19 & Complexity with Jordan Hall

In this short extra episode, Jim talks with Jordan Hall about the lessons we are learning with respect to complex system dynamic response capabilities including: our current sensemaking & limitations, distributed decision-making, finding warning signals in cultural noise, potential prevention & preparedness measures, bottom-up resilience, cultural change-management, exponential vs linear thinking, applying agile processes at the cultural scale, modernizing digital, physical, & operational infras

Mar 25, 2020 • 36:15

Extra: On COVID-19 with John Robb

In this short extra episode Jim talks with John Robb about how prepared we were for a pandemic like this, manufacturing, the economic & health impacts, CA & NY trends, impacts of ignoring quarantine, what is needed for a societal recovery, the political response, UBI vs bailouts, and more. Episode Transcript John’s Global Guerrillas Report EP19 John Robb on Asymmetric & Networked Conflict & Strategy John is an author, inventor, entrepreneur, technology analyst, astro engineer, and mili

Mar 24, 2020 • 36:24

EP47 Mark Burgess on the Physics of Money

Mark 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 macr

Mar 23, 2020 • 1:24:13

EP46 Daniel Schrag on Climate Dynamics

Daniel Schrag talks with Jim about global collective action, climate models & data collection, geoengineering, long-term thinking, our uncertain future, and much more... Professor Daniel Schrag talks with Jim about Geology’s connection to climate change, the dynamics & scope of abrupt climate changes, global collective action, the value & limits of climate models, thermal inertia in the ocean, the potential impacts of ocean acidification, climate data collection, pros & cons of geoengineering

Mar 16, 2020 • 1:30:50

EP45 Beth Pyles on Faith, Peace & Community

Beth Pyles talks to Jim about why she left trial law to become a pastor, affluenza, spirituality & religion, peacemaking, foreign intervention, and much more... Beth Pyles talks to Jim about small community living, why she left trial law to become a pastor, the dynamics affluenza & the hedonistic treadmill, how she views meaning & faith, spirituality vs religion, metaphysics, Presbyterianism vs Methodism, the value of community in religion & faith, hell & the devil, her peacemaking experien

Mar 9, 2020 • 1:32:06

EP44 Steve LeVine on EV Battery Tech

Steve LeVine talks with Jim about battery tech's role in sustainable transportation, his writing process for The Powerhouse, EV predictions, and much more... Steve LeVine talks with Jim about why battery innovation is so important for sustainable transportation, the challenges & promises of transitioning to electric vehicles, how Steve researched & wrote his book (The Powerhouse), key milestones for electric vehicle range & costs, Tesla’s advantages, Volkswagen's electric aspirations, why c

Mar 2, 2020 • 1:16:34

EP43 Daniel Christian Wahl on a Regenerative Future

Daniel Christian Wahl talks with Jim about bioregional regeneration, Game B, complexity theory, epistemic modesty, questions vs answers, money, spirituality, and much more... Daniel Christian Wahl talks with Jim about catalysis, Game B, geo therapy vs geoengineering, the short-term perspective of fossil fuels & limited resources, viewing population projections in relation to climate impact, the difference between sustainable & regenerative, the bioregional approach, diversity in ecosystems, h

Feb 24, 2020 • 1:51:15

EP42 Jessika Trancik on Tech & Research vs Climate Change

MIT professor & researcher Jessika Trancik talks with Jim about the dynamics & state of renewable energy tech & policies, decarbonization, carbon taxes, climate despair, and much more... MIT professor & researcher Jessika Trancik talks with Jim about energy return on investment (EROI), the power of learning curves, the feasibility of an all-electric society, base vs intermittent renewable energy, ‘energy storage plus’, the role & power of soft technologies, ‘soft costs’ of energy production,

Feb 17, 2020 • 1:36:23

EP41 Daniel Mezick on the Agile Organization

Daniel 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, le

Feb 13, 2020 • 1:33:32

EP40 Eric Smith on the Physics of Living Systems

Eric 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

Feb 10, 2020 • 1:26:55

EP39 John Koza on Bleeding Edges

Jim 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

Feb 3, 2020 • 1:16:37

EP38 Tristan Harris on Humane Tech

Tristan Harris & Jim talk about his background in design ethics, dangers of ad targeting, game theory, time well spent, the global information war, trends to be optimistic about, and much more... Tristan Harris & Jim start by talking about how Tristan’s career & education in design ethics are informed by being a magician in his youth. They then go on to talk about his experience at the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, the history of psychologically informed business, the power of persona

Jan 27, 2020 • 1:34:32

EP37 Jared Janes on Spirituality

Jared 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, atten

Jan 23, 2020 • 1:27:21

EP36 Hanzi Freinacht on Metamodernism

Hanzi 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 comple

Jan 20, 2020 • 1:37:26

EP35 Ken McCarthy on the History of Online Business

Ken McCarthy talks with Jim about the commercial shift of the internet, the evolution of internet media, online market potential, the high cost of free, and much more... Internet pioneer Ken McCarthy talks with Jim about why & how he first got on the internet in 1993, what it was like to be in tech in the 90’s, the walled gardens of the early internet, the birth of email, Well.com, the pre-commercial internet, brand vs direct response advertising & how they made their way to the internet, K

Jan 16, 2020 • 1:26:37

EP34 Joe Edelman on the Power of Values

Joe Edelman talks with Jim about values, social norms & ideological commitments, pluralism & coherence, ‘time well spent’, ethical advertising, and much more... Joe Edelman, philosopher, social scientist & designer starts this conversation with Jim by talking about how meaningfulness is connected to values, social norms & ideological commitments. Then, they go on to talk about the pros & cons of pluralism & coherence in today’s digital world, why Joe coined the phrase/metric ‘time well spen

Jan 13, 2020 • 1:25:05

EP33 Melanie Mitchell on the Elements of AI

Melanie Mitchell & Jim talk about the many approaches to creating AI, hype cycles, self-driving cars, what can be learned from human intelligence, and much more... Professor & Author Melanie Mitchell and Jim have a wide-ranging talk about her work in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). They explore the differences between deep learning, symbolic techniques & hybrid systems, AI springs/winters & hype cycles, self-driving cars, strong (general) vs weak (narrow) intelligence, the black-

Jan 6, 2020 • 1:21:01

EP32 Jason Brennan on Irrational Democracy & Academia

Author & 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, so

Dec 30, 2019 • 1:31:54

EP31 Forrest Landry on Building our Future

The multi-talented Forrest Landry talks with Jim about what motivates him, ethics & metaphysics, meaning & sense-making, collective action, collapse, and much more... Forrest Landry, philosopher, writer, researcher, scientist, engineer, craftsman, and teacher talks with Jim about his company (Magic-Flight), what motivates his work, how he defines ethics, metaphysics & its connection to realism, free will & choice, the nature of time, how he defines & utilizes meaning, value & purpose, interact

Dec 16, 2019 • 1:34:34

EP30 Nora Bateson on Complexity & the Transcontextual

Nora Bateson talks with Jim about her recent book, her father & grandfather’s academic impact, thinking transcontextually, Game B, warm data labs, and much more... Nora Bateson, award-winning filmmaker, writer, educator, and President of the International Bateson Institute talks with Jim about the work of the International Bateson Institute, her father (Gregory Bateson) & grandfather’s (William Bateson) academic histories & the impact they had on her work, complex systems, the dangers of me

Dec 9, 2019 • 1:24:37

EP29 Michael Mauboussin on The Success Equation

Michael Mauboussin talks with Jim about his latest book, SFI, investment, using variance & complexity, luck & skill, bias, IQ vs RQ, forecasting, and more... Michael Mauboussin, Director of Research at BlueMountain Capital Management, Author, and Adjunct Professor at Columbia University talks with Jim about how he came to be the Chairman of the Board at the Santa Fe Institute, his perspective on investing & its challenges, the Colonel Blotto game, using variance & complexity in game theory,

Dec 2, 2019 • 1:27:51

EP28 Mark Burgess on Promise Theory, AI & Spacetime

Author, founder & scientist Mark Burgess talks with Jim about his career, physics skill set, CFEngine, Promise Theory, AI, free will, spacetime, and much more... Author, founder & scientist Mark Burgess talks with Jim about why he made the switch from theoretical physics to computer science, the widely applicable skill set of physicists, what led him to create CFEngine, computer immunology, how he came up with Promise Theory & its connection to physics & network science, the relativity of s

Nov 25, 2019 • 1:45:38

EP27 Jamie Wheal on Flow & the Future of Culture

Jamie 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 bypas

Nov 21, 2019 • 1:03:13

EP26 Jordan Hall on the Game B Emergence

Jordan Hall & Jim outline Game B's advantage over Game A, explore embodied wisdom, meaningfulness, Game B transitions & life, parasitizing Game A, and much more... Jordan Hall and Jim have another wide-ranging conversation about Game B. They start with a quick overview of Game A and then move on to talk about the emerging collaboration of Game B & how it happened, its competitive advantage over Game A, liminal spaces, embodied wisdom, sovereignty & sense-making, the pre-B phase, changing ou

Nov 19, 2019 • 2:03:27

EP25 Gary Marcus on Rebooting AI

Author & 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 & human

Nov 14, 2019 • 1:17:47

EP24 Bret Weinstein on Evolving Culture

Bret 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

Nov 11, 2019 • 1:29:45

EP23 Jeff Gomez on Narrative & Cultural Change

Jim 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

Nov 5, 2019 • 1:23:28

EP22 Sara Kindsfater-Yerkes on the Evolution of Business

Consultant Sara Kindsfater-Yerkes & Jim talk about leadership today, HR teams, embracing change, team engagement, honesty, gender dynamics, being offended, and much more... Business Consultant Sara Kindsfater-Yerkes and Jim start this episode by reflecting on working together in their earlier careers. They then go on to talk about today’s multi-generational workforce, commonalities of Gen Z & Boomers, workplace mindsets, recruitment strategies & HR teams, shifts in today’s leadership approa

Oct 31, 2019 • 1:01:25

EP21 Roman Yampolskiy on the Outer Limits of AI

AI expert Roman Yampolskiy & Jim have a wide-ranging talk about simulation theory, types of intelligence, AI research & safety, the singularity, and much more... This conversation with Jim and Dr. Roman V. Yampolskiy–author, tenured associate professor, founding director of Cyber Security Lab–starts by covering the vast variance of possible minds. They then go on to talk about Boltzmann brains, the implications of an infinite universe, simulation theory’s limits & if we could find its glitc

Oct 28, 2019 • 1:11:59

EP20 Pamela McCorduck on Her Life & Times with AI

Author Pamela McCorduck talks to Jim about her new book, the humanities & sciences divide, her friendships with AI pioneers, risks of AI, feminism, and more... Author Pamela McCorduck talks with Jim about themes of her latest book, This Could Be Important: My Life and Times with the Artificial Intelligentsia. They talk about C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures thesis that explores the divide between the humanities & sciences, Pamela’s professional & personal friendships with AI pioneers (Julian Feldman

Oct 24, 2019 • 1:08:07

EP19 John Robb on Asymmetric & Networked Conflict & Strategy

Author, 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 insu

Oct 21, 2019 • 1:27:03

EP18 Stuart Kauffman on Complexity, Biology & T.A.P.

Professor, MacArthur Fellow & author Stuart Kauffman talks with Jim about complexity, biology & the origins of life, social/technical evolution, and much more... Professor, MacArthur Fellow and author Stuart Kauffman talks with Jim about the major themes of his career: complexity, auto-catalytic chemical sets, protocells and the origins of life, the problem of the error catastrophe, human evolution, social and technical evolution, the Fermi Paradox and much more. Stuart also introduces his

Oct 17, 2019 • 1:00:51

EP17 – Bonnitta Roy on Process Thinking and Complexity

Bonnitta 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. Throu

Oct 14, 2019 • 1:46:54

EP16 Anaconda CTO Peter Wang on The Distributed Internet

Peter 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. Pet

Oct 7, 2019 • 1:26:09

EP15 Futurist David Brin on The Case for Optimism

David 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 Aw

Sep 30, 2019 • 1:24:17

EP14 Astrophysicist Jill Tarter on SETI and Technosignatures

Jill 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 f

Sep 23, 2019 • 1:05:25

EP13 Trent McConaghy: Blockchain, AI and DAOs

Trent 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, crea

Sep 16, 2019 • 1:16:26

EP12 Brian Nosek – Open Science and Reproducibility

Brian 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 occu

Sep 12, 2019 • 1:19:49

EP11 Dave Snowden and Systems Thinking

Dave 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.

Sep 9, 2019 • 1:14:57

EP10 David Krakauer: Complexity Science

David 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 t

Sep 3, 2019 • 1:10:13

EP9 Joe Norman: Applied Complexity

Joe 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 h

Aug 27, 2019 • 1:08:14

Special Episode: Zachary Vorhies

Zachary 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,

Aug 21, 2019 • 50:45

EP8 Jordan “Greenhall” Hall and Game B

Jordan 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 ti

Aug 19, 2019 • 1:33:47

EP7 Daniel Schmachtenberger and the Evolution of Technology

Daniel 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

Aug 12, 2019 • 1:22:57

EP 6 Douglas Rushkoff – Memetics, Money + TeamHuman

Douglas 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 minut

Aug 5, 2019 • 1:12:23

EP5 Lee Smolin – Quantum Foundations and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution

Lee 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 t

Jul 26, 2019 • 1:19:20

EP4 Cory Doctorow – “Radicalized,” Race and Resilience

Cory 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 U

Jul 19, 2019 • 1:31:01

EP3 Dr. Ben Goertzel – OpenCog, AGI and SingularityNET

Dr. 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 Br

Jul 15, 2019 • 1:24:33

EP2 Robin Hanson – Decision Making and “The Age of Em”

Robin 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 P

Jul 8, 2019 • 1:38:30

EP1 Simon DeDeo – The Evolution of Consciousness

Simon 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. T

Jul 7, 2019 • 1:38:45