The Jim Rutt Show

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...

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 of the h-index, frozen accidents in our scientific operating system, what all...

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, the two worlds...

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...

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, whether GameB is a neo-Benthamism, sex & conflict as spiritual practice...

Jim talks with Roar Bjonnes about the ideas in his new book co-authored with Caroline Hargreaves, Growing a New Economy: Beyond Crisis Capitalism and Environmental Destruction. They talk about a quote from Naomi Klein, interlocking crises, COP27, the collective cognition problem, replacing the real economy with a financial economy, the idea of inherent selfishness, 4 integrated circles, the carbon...

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 pessimism, the tradeoff between accuracy and helpfulness, telling the tru...

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 mig...

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 wate...

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, ending war menta...

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 bankr...

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, porous membranes, "actual thought rath...

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 the era of electronic media, TikTok's threat to an open society, the sacred as highest organizing princi...

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 rather than designing, random...

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 reasonable odds that he won fairly, how Carlsen might know whether he che...

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 out...

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 of self-criticism in...

Jim talks with recurring guest Max Borders about the ideas in his new book The Decentralist: Mission, Morality, and Meaning in the Age of Crypto. They discuss happiness as a common ground, a eudaimonistic sensibility, the marshmallow experiment & deferred gratification, how inflation affects behavioral discount rates, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, von Mises's praxeology, reconciling individual & co...

Jim talks with 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, & sexuality, the work of historian of technology Lewis Mumford, how smartphones...

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 production, how GameA status sign...

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, the horrors of chat...

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 our government doesn't actually have an executive branch, democracy's broken ste...

Jim talks with Bobby Azarian about the ideas in his new book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity, which Jim calls "the most Jim Rutt Show-ish book ever." They discuss the meaning & limits of reductionism, why the universe may not be moving toward an increasingly disordered state, life as a channel for dissipating energy, di...

Jim talks with Alexander Bard, continuing a series of encounters between GameB and the Dark Renaissance movement. They discuss the Grand Narrative Trilogy Bard has been writing with Jan Söderqvist, the kinds of stories we tell about ourselves, why Hiroshima remains the signal event of modern history, fostering symbiotic intelligence, the difference between the GameA & the GameB mythos, imploitatio...

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 focus on how we view society, the differences between complicated & complex & between operati...