The Jim Rutt Show

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 & performances, Bob Dylan, musical education's failure to support troubadours, over-emphas...

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 sequences, emergent patterns, why "talk is cheap", co-evolution, the Fe...

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 uncertainty of choice & limits of reason, the role of integrity,...

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.

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 cryptocurrencies, inflationary...

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 changes, big tech bundling strategies,...

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 planning in space, orbital debris & waste, environmen...

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-making & social norms, de-energizing & ca...

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, entertainment...), robotic berry picking, and m...

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, social change & inno...

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 app...

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 Zuckerberg video, the challen...

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 & difference, content & context, access control l...

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, the strong vs the weak, religion &...

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, connections to mental illness, psychedelics & med...

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, measuring & defining skills over time scales, utilizing & nurturing am...

Tyson Yunkaporta joins Jim for another wide-ranging yarn that starts off with DMT & machine elves. They cover Jim's misspent youth, police violence, nuance vs Occam's razor, Tyson's impressions of GameB & the sensemakers, Tyson's unpublished Survivance essay, Jim's recent emu encounter & live intentional ego death, utilizing drugs, selling our souls to social media, debt jubilee & the road to Game...

Former Ford CEO, Jim Hackett & Jim have a wide-ranging talk about the history & future of electric cars. They cover Ford & Edison's first electric car, the current state of the electric cars, understanding scaling & natural systems, business change vs death, the evolution of car models & sizes, all-electric car plausibility, carbon taxes, electric range & charging time, electricity demand & smart...

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...

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-capitalist incentives & impacts, social media...

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 problem...

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 alienation, the value of shadow structures, the urba...

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, malnutrition, low-cost food plan, time p...

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 Villages sexy, protecting villages with kindness, ReGen Vi...

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, masculine & feminine, eros & thanatos, the...