PODCAST · science
The Jim Rutt Show
by The Jim Rutt Show
Crisp conversations with critical thinkers at the leading edge of science, technology, politics, and social systems.
Episodes
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EP 346 Cory Doctorow on Why the Internet Got Worse and What to Do About It
Jim talked with Cory Doctorow—prolific sci-fi and nonfiction author, journalist, activist, EFF special adviser, and author of Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It—about how structural forces degraded the internet, and what citizens (not consumers) can…
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EP 345 Worldviews: Tyson Yunkaporta on Ceremony, Skepticism, and Seeing in 3D
Jim talks with Tyson Yunkaporta—indigenous Australian scholar and author of Sand Talk, one of Jim's top ten favorite books—about his metaphysics and worldview, the ecology of sex and creation, and how to wear rationalist and traditional knowledge frameworks simultaneously. They discuss: Jim's...
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EP 344 Lisa Buckingham on Hiring for the AI Era
Jim talks with Lisa Buckingham—a veteran HR leader at Vialto Partners, US Soccer, Lincoln Financial, and Thomson—about how the LLM era is reshaping hiring and job architecture, and how companies and workers can roll with the changes. They discuss: Jim and Lisa's shared history in natural language...
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EP 343 Worldviews: Peter Wang on the Metaphysics of Quality, Sucker’s Bets, and Ofness
Jim talks with Peter Wang—chief AI officer, cofounder and CEO of Anaconda, board member of the Center for Humane Technology, and founder of the Austin STEM Center—about Robert Pirsig's metaphysics of quality, how modernity encourages defection, and a secular conception of the sacred. They…
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EP 342 Worldviews: Jordan Hall on Reality as Relationship and Why the Dead Are Still With Us
Jim talks with recurring guest and deep systems thinker Jordan Hall about the scaffolding of his worldview. They discuss the waking-up scenario as a window into consciousness and personal identity, Jordan's phenomenology of waking and the "latent potential of all possible memory," the soul as the...
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EP 341 Worldviews: Bonnitta Roy on Post-Formal Actors, Stage Theory, and the Character Void in Leadership
Jim talks with Bonnitta Roy, interdisciplinary thinker and founder of the Pop-Up School and the Divinity School, about her worldview, the deep foundations of her work, and an upcoming conference in Cambridge. They discuss the phenomenology of waking up and recomposing, life as a stream of...
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EP 340 Worldviews: Liv Boeree on Poker, Moloch, and the Art of Finding Win-Wins
Jim talks with Liv Boeree—science communicator, former professional poker player, and host of the Win-Win Podcast—about consciousness, egregores, multipolar traps, and the ethics of factory farming. They discuss the nature of personal identity across sleep, the teleportation machine thought...
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EP 339 John Krakauer on Why Neuroscience Needs Behavior
Jim talks with John Krakauer—professor of neurology and neuroscience, director of the Center for Study of Motor Learning and Brain Repair at Johns Hopkins, and external faculty at SFI—about his 2017 paper "Neuroscience Needs Behavior: Correcting a Reductionist Bias." They discuss defining…
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EP 338 Jeff Giesea on Dionysian Futurism, Reading Great Books in the AI Era, and Rebalancing Generational Power
Jim talks with Jeff Giesea, entrepreneur, writer, and founder of the Boyd Institute, about his essay "Dionysian Futurism" and the broader question of what's missing from our visions of the future. They discuss Nietzsche's Apollo/Dionysus framework from The Birth of Tragedy, the critique that...
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EP 337 Worldviews: Philip Rosedale on Emergent Worlds, Localism, and What Building Second Life Taught Him About Humanity
Jim talks with Philip Rosedale, founder and CEO of Linden Lab and creator of the game Second Life, about the nature of self, society, and the design of virtual worlds. They discuss the phenomenology of waking up and coalescing into a self, the polycrisis and whether to work on AI or on software...
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EP 336 Rufus Pollock on the Wisdom Gap and the Second Renaissance
Jim talks with Rufus Pollock—entrepreneur, activist, Zen practitioner, founder of Life Itself and the Open Knowledge Foundation, and author of Open Revolution—about the metacrisis, the wisdom gap, and what a Second Renaissance might look like. They discuss Jim's own early belief that accessible...
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EP 335 Worldviews: Samantha Sweetwater
Jim talks with Samantha Sweetwater about her book True Human: Reimagining Ourselves at the End of Our World and the question of what it means to be human at this moment in planetary history. They discuss her verb-based rather than noun-based self-identity, Lisa Feldman Barrett's construction…
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EP 334 Worldviews: Joscha Bach
Jim talks with cognitive scientist and AI researcher Joscha Bach about the computational and representational foundations of consciousness, mind, and reality. They discuss the phenomenology of waking up and coalescing into a self, language as a representational architecture and natural language…
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EP 333 Worldviews: Iain McGilchrist
In this Worldviews episode, Jim talks with Iain McGilchrist about consciousness, matter, and the nature of reality. They discuss consciousness as the basis of everything we know, matter as a phase of consciousness that provides resistance and persistence, pan-experientialism and the belief that...
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EP 332 Worldviews: Jim Rutt
In a special edition of the new Worldviews series, Brendan Graham Dempsey asks Jim about his life and worldview using a faith development interview. They discuss Jim's life chapters from growing up through becoming a complexity guy and GameB advocate, his age 11 epiphany that religion is bullshit...
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EP 331 Worldviews: Michael Shermer
Jim talks with Michael Shermer about his worldview and his new book, Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters. They discuss Michael's self-identification as a monist and realist who believes in a physical objective world, the concept of fallibilism, intersubjective verification...
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EP 330 Worldviews: Ben Goertzel
Jim talks with Ben Goertzel about his worldview. They discuss Ben's morning experience of consciousness crystallizing from ambient awareness, his identification as a panpsychic, the concept of pattern being more fundamental than stuff, Charles Peirce's ontology of first/second/third, the idea of...
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EP 329 Worldviews: David Krakauer
In the inaugural episode of a new series, Jim talks with David Krakauer about his intellectual formation and worldview. They discuss what woke up as David this morning, his commitments to chance and pattern seeking, his epiphany about the idea of the idea at age 12 or 13, his perverse attraction…
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EP 328 Brendan Graham Dempsey Interviews Jim Rutt on Minimum Viable Metaphysics
In this flipped episode, Brendan Graham Dempsey interviews Jim about the ideas in his recent Substack essays "A Minimum Viable Metaphysics" and "What I Mean by 'Metaphysics'." They discuss metaphysics as assumptions for learning and reasoning, the difference between deduction, induction, &...
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EP 327 Nate Soares on Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All
Jim talks with Nate Soares about the ideas in his and Eliezer Yudkowsky's book If Anybody Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All. They discuss the book's claim that mitigating existential AI risk should be a top global priority, the idea that LLMs are grown, the opacity of...
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EP 326 Alex Ebert on New Age, Manifestation, and Collective Hallucination
Jim talks with Alex Ebert about the ideas in his Substack essay "New Age and the Religion of Self: The Anatomy of a Rebellion Against Reality." They discuss the meanings of New Age and religion, the New Thought movement, the law of attraction, manifesting, Trump's artifacts of manifestation, the...
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EP 325 Joe Edelman on Full-Stack AI Alignment
Jim talks with Joe Edelman about the ideas in the Meaning Alignment Institute's recent paper "Full Stack Alignment: Co-Aligning AI and Institutions with Thick Models of Value." They discuss pluralism as a core principle in designing social systems, the informational basis for alignment, how...
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EP 324 John Preston on 40 Flushes to Grow Your Business
Jim talks with John Preston about his book 40 Flushes to Grow Your Business: The World's #2 Business Series, which is designed to be read during bathroom breaks. They discuss breaking free from being a one-person show, hiring self-guided employees, the importance of business owner support…
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EP 323 Pablos Holman on Deep Tech
Jim talks with Pablos Holman about the ideas in his new book Deep Future: Creating Technology That Matters. They discuss deep tech versus shallow tech, computational modeling and simulation for real-world problems, the hacker mindset, the role of inventors, nuclear power and renewable energy...
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EP 322 Brendan Graham Dempsey on Psyche and Symbolic Learning
Jim talks with Brendan Graham Dempsey about the ideas in his book Psyche and Symbolic Learning, volume 2 in his Evolution of Meaning series. We discussed hierarchical complexity, stage theories of development, constructivism & realism, dynamic skill theory, the Lectical Scale, ego development &...
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EP 321 James Fadiman and Jordan Gruber on Microdosing Psychedelics
Jim talks with James Fadiman and Jordan Gruber about the findings in their recent book Microdosing for Health, Healing, and Enhanced Performance. They discuss the definition of microdosing, "subthreshold" vs "subperceptual," typical doses, current usage statistics & demographics, its legal status…
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EP 320 David Shapiro on Mastering AI Tools for Research
Jim talks with David Shapiro about how to use AI language models as research and writing tools. They discuss post-labor economics, the evolution of AI tools from GPT-2 through GPT-4, using AI as a learning companion vs. relying on it completely, David's AI tool stack, exploring new domains, using...
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EP 319 Lawrence Cahoone on Emergence and Natural Order
Jim talks with Lawrence Cahoone about his book The Orders of Nature and his systematic approach to naturalist philosophy. They discuss fallibilist & local metaphysics, objective relativism, the rejection of simples, Jim's materialism which grants emergence first-class existence, Wimsatt's notion…
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EP 318 Adam B. Levine on Thinking on Demand
Jim talks with Adam B. Levine about humanity's rapidly changing relationship with AI and "thinking on demand." They discuss the GPT-5 release & pricing, open-source AI models, the three-dimensional framework of AI advancement (models & hardware & agent frameworks), the evolution of vibe coding,...
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EP 317 David Shapiro on Post-Labor Economics
Jim talks with David Shapiro about his six-part series on "post-labor economics." They discuss historical economic transitions, the logic of labor substitution, automation & AI's impacts on employment, the four basic human economic offerings (strength, dexterity, cognition & empathy), labor as a...
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EP 316 Ken Stanley on the AI Representation Problem
Jim talks with Ken Stanley about the Fractured Entanglement Representation hypothesis in deep learning neural networks. They discuss open-endedness in AI systems & evolution, the Picbreeder experiment & its significance, the objective paradox of finding things by not looking for them, comparisons...
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EP 315 Ed Latimore on Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business
Jim talks with Ed Latimore about his new book Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business: Boxing and the Art of Life. They discuss Ed's chess playing & street hustling, size differences in modern heavyweight boxing, growing up in Pittsburgh's Hill District, childhood trauma & violence, relationships…
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EP 314 Zak Stein and Marc Gafni on the Nature of Everything
Jim talks with Zak Stein and Marc Gafni about consciousness, attention, and value as fundamental aspects of reality. They explore continuity & discontinuity in evolution, phenomenology & naturalism, emergence, value theory, selection theory, mathematics as both discovered & created, pre-life...
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EP 313 Chris Colin on Why Customer Service Sucks
Jim talks with Chris Colin about his recent Atlantic article "That Dropped Call with Customer Service? It Was on Purpose." They discuss customer service hell & Chris's personal story with Ford, the concept of sludge, intentional friction in customer service systems, call center operations &...
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EP 312 Lee Cronin on Automating Chemistry
Jim talks with Lee Cronin about Chemify, his startup that aims to automate chemistry through "chemifarms" that turn code into molecules. They discuss the development of the ChemChi programming language & its evolution to Turing completeness, quantum vs classical chemistry computation, open source...
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EP 311 Nicholas Humphrey on the Invention of Consciousness
Jim talks with Nicholas Humphrey about the ideas in his 2023 book Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness. They discuss the distinction between sentience & consciousness, access consciousness vs phenomenal consciousness, terminology in consciousness studies, ring-fencing theories, Nicholas's...
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EP 310 Samo Burja on Anduril’s Plan to Modernize the US Military
Jim talks with Samo Burja about his report on the defense startup Anduril's plan to modernize the U.S. military. They discuss "live players vs. dead players," AI adoption & cognitive tools, Anduril's background & naming origin, military technology modernization, software-defined conflicts,...
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EP 309 Richard David Hames on the Final Performance of Western Civilization?
Jim talks with Richard David Hames, picking up from the ideas in his recent Facebook essay about the decline of Western civilization. They discuss the retreat from truth in politics & institutions, postmodernism's impact on rationality, China's governance model, the failure of democratic...
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EP 308 David Chapman on Rethinking Nobility
Jim talks with David Chapman about rethinking nobility for the modern age through his recent "nobility tetralogy" of essays. They discuss character & virtue as "risible" concepts, noblesse oblige & elite education, nobility as intention vs status, "The Battle of Maldon" poem & its lessons,...
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EP 307 Thomas Schindler on Heliogenic Civilization
Jim talks with Thomas Schindler about heliogenic civilization as a vision for a regenerative future. They discuss the current multipolar trap shitshow of global civilization, M3 money supply & GDP growth requirements, the doubling of energy demand, exit to planet as an alternative to traditional...
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EP 306 Anders Indset on The Singularity Paradox
Jim talks with Anders Indset about his book The Singularity Paradox: Bridging the Gap Between Humanity and AI, co-authored with Florian Neutkart. They discuss the "final narcissistic injury of humankind," Freud's three historical narcissistic injuries, machine consciousness vs human…
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EP 305 J. Doyne Farmer on Complexity Economics
Jim talks with J. Doyne Farmer about his book Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World. They discuss deterministic chaos & strange attractors, how chaos makes time possible, bounded rationality, economic equilibrium & Nash equilibrium, traditional economics' failures, standard...
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EP 304 Samuel Arbesman on The Magic of Code
Jim talks with Samuel Arbesman about the ideas in his book The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World—and Shapes Our Future. They discuss Sam's motivation for writing the book, the wondering vs. utilitarian stances toward computing, early personal computing…
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EP 303 Mark Stahlman on Pope Leo XIV and the Catholic Church’s Missionary Turn
Jim talks with Mark Stahlman about the new Pope Leo XIV and the Catholic Church's evolving role in a digital age. They discuss Trump as an avatar of the digital paradigm shift, the significance of Leo XIV's name choice, Francis as a thug, Francis's background as chemical engineer and bouncer,...
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EP 302 Daniel Mezick on Games and Governance
Jim talks with Daniel Mezick on the theme of games and their relationship to governance. They discuss Jane McGonigal's four properties of games, the nature of authority, position-based vs role-based authority, formal vs. informal authority structures, finite & infinite games, mutable games, the...
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EP 301 Zak Stein on K-12 Education in the AI Era
Jim talks with Zak Stein about the psychological & developmental risks of AI in K-12 education. They discuss education vs schooling, technology's role in human-to-human interaction, GPS & skill atrophy, prosthetic vs enhancement technologies, multipolar traps in AI, cognitive diminishment & skill...
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EP 300 Daniel Rodriguez on AI-Assisted Software Development
Jim talks with Daniel Rodriguez about the state of AI software development and its implementation in industry. They discuss Daniel's background at Microsoft & Anaconda, transformer-based technologies, software engineering as hard vs soft science, vibe coding, barriers to entry in software...
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EP 299 Ryan Blosser on Permaculture for Food and Friendship
Jim talks with Ryan Blosser about the ideas in his book Mulberries in the Rain: Growing Permaculture Plants for Food and Friendship, co-authored with Trevor Piersol. They discuss the motivation behind writing a permaculture book, the human sector in permaculture design, financial challenges of...
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EP 298 Adam Lake on Rebooting American Democracy
Jim talks with Adam Lake about Reboot America, a project aimed at reforming American democracy. They discuss existential threats facing humanity, the two-party corporate duopoly, a Princeton study on policy preferences, first-past-the-post voting problems, campaign finance issues, social media's...
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EP 297 Sara Walker on the Physics of Life’s Emergence
Jim talks with Sara Walker about the ideas in her new book Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence. They discuss Sara's path from theoretical physics to astrobiology, the biggest scientific questions, philosophy of science & theory development, historical approaches to origin of...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Crisp conversations with critical thinkers at the leading edge of science, technology, politics, and social systems.
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The Jim Rutt Show
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How many episodes does The Jim Rutt Show have?
The Jim Rutt Show currently has 461 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
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Crisp conversations with critical thinkers at the leading edge of science, technology, politics, and social systems.
How often does The Jim Rutt Show release new episodes?
The Jim Rutt Show publishes regularly with 461 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
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