The Jim Rutt Show

In this podcast, Jim Rutt and Matthew Pirkowski discuss time preference, defining parasitism, mutualism, and commensalism. They explore the increase in short-term thinking, interruption of attentional loops, and the complexity catastrophe. The conversation also covers trustless infrastructure, coordination at a higher level, Bitcoin as a metacentralizing attractor, and the disintegration of network statistics. They delve into topics such as social immune systems, structural prerequisites of parasitism, and building a modeling toolkit to understand causal closures within networks.

Jim Rutt 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 with the political establishment, and much more.

Robert Sapolsky, author of Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, discusses topics such as determinism, Phineas Gage's brain injury, metacognition limitations, Benjamin Libet's volition experiments, the theory of grit, cusp decisions, deterministic chaos, emergent complexity, and the impact of free will on society.

Neil Howe and Jim Rutt discuss the Fourth Turning, generational change, and the impact of events on different phases of life. They delve into the growing gender divide, stages of a Fourth Turning, and the chances of a cataclysmic event. They also explore the commonalities between Turnings, the strengthening of families, and the need for crisis for major reforms.

Tobias Dengel, author of The Sound of the Future: The Coming Age of Voice Technology, discusses the biggest shift since mobile, changing norms around speaking to devices, improving communication for incapacitated people, problems with the voice-to-voice paradigm, multimodal use cases, finetuned LLMs in combination with voice tech, the state of the art in voice-to-text, privacy issues & industry's violation of trust, a new horizon for video games, defending attention & flow, and more.

Mathematician Brian Chau joins Jim Rutt to discuss recent advancements in AI, the impact of AI on society, the potential of language models, AI's impact on information flood and the legacy press, liquid democracy and AI, AI processing tweets and online content, AI critics in scriptwriting, and the frustrations of using GPT 432K and attempts to generate restricted content.

Yascha Mounk discusses tribalism among progressives, the impact of identity politics, excess Covid deaths due to identitarianism, rejection of grand narratives, critical race theory, the logic of collective action, statistics on police violence, and the importance of recognizing progress while addressing current problems.

Cory Doctorow discusses his book on destroying Big Tech instead of fixing it, the consolidation of power in the tech industry, the challenges of enforcing antitrust laws, the potential unionization of the tech sector, the evolving relationship between technology and intellectual property, and the complexities of copyright infringement and hosting responsibility on the internet.

Susan Neiman, author of 'Left Is Not Woke', discusses wokeness, the reactionary assumptions of wokeness, making leftism and socialism acceptable terms, disentangling left & woke, progressivism as a child of the Enlightenment, refuting the idea of reason as an instrument of violence, rates of police killings by race, liberal universal humanism, identitarianism, and the belief that everything is power.

Jim Rutt talks with Pamela Denise Long about the ideas in an open letter from the Coalition of Concerned Freedmen to college presidents. They discuss the meaning of the freedmen moniker, lineage-specific structuring, the impact of immigration on multi-generational Black Americans, skepticism of a Black-Brown Coalition, the blending of Black and LGBTQIA+ agendas, and Denise's view on the Republican presidential primaries.