The Jim Rutt Show

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 natural analogs to test conjectures, finding the oldest evidence of life in a hot spring setting, shouting matches as evidence of paradigm shifts, what warm pools were made of, a one-pot solution that's testable at every stage, the source of vesicles, why the ocean is implausible as a starting point, chemical gardens, the great search for the origins of emergence, semipermeable membranes, "the ignoble sludge of the Progenitor," the jacuzzi origin of life, the origin of life as a communal unit, the ratchet to greater complexity, thermal change in near-real time, the error catastrophe in evolutionary computing, actual experiments being performed, the Fermi paradox & astrobiological implications, a hot spring on Mars, urability scores, the Drake equation, where complexity theory meets biology, the rarity of complex life & the responsibility that comes with it, bringing the universe to life, and much more. Episode Transcript Bruce Damer's TEDx talk: The Origin & Purpose of Life JRS EP40 - Eric Smith on the Physics of Living Systems The BIOTA Institute "The Hot Spring Hypothesis for an Origin of Life," by Bruce Damer & David Deamer JRS EP18 - Stuart Kauffman on Complexity, Biology & T.A.P. "The Water Paradox and the Origins of Life" (Nature), by Michael Marshall "Urability: A Property of Planetary Bodies That Can Support an Origin of Life," by David Deamer and Bruce Damer Canadian-born Dr. Bruce Damer has spent his life pursuing two questions: how did life on Earth begin? and how can we give that life (and ourselves) a sustainable pathway into the future and a presence beyond the Earth? A decade of laboratory and field research with his collaborator Prof. David Deamer at UCSC and teams around the world resulted in the Hot Spring Hypothesis for an Origin of Life, published in Scientific American in 2017 and the journal Astrobiology in 2020. The scenario has now passed its first key experimental tests in the laboratory and at volcanic hot springs around the world and has emerged as a leading contender for a general theory of abiogenesis. Implications of the work are now spreading through evolutionary biology, philosophy, AI and the search for life beyond Earth. New work with collaborators has proposed the urability framework, how life can start on many different worlds, and addresses some aspects of the Fermi Paradox.

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, ending war mentality, multipolar traps, fixing the machinery of democracy, liquid democracy, ranked-choice voting, proportional representation, election finance reform, qualified democracy, the possibility of a constitutional convention, an alternative to universal basic income, monetary reform, ending the growth imperative, creating a Public Service Corps, risks of exponential technology, how the campaign is going so far, what Liam would need to win, Jim's endorsement, and much more. Episode Transcript Rebirth Democracy (Liam's website) @LiamAwakening on Twitter Game-B.org The Consilience Project Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition, by Charles Eisenstein Nate Hagens (website) Daniel Schmachtenberger (website) JRS EP32 - Jason Brennan on Irrational Democracy & Academia Liam Madden is a Marine Corps veteran who became the leader of America's largest antiwar organization of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, and winner of the Institute for Policy Studies Human Rights Award. As an entrepreneur Liam won M.I.T.'s Solve award for organizations innovating solutions to climate change. His work has been covered by 60 Minutes, the NY Times, & most other major media. Liam is an independent who won a Congressional primary election on a platform centered around reforms to the two-party system.

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 golden rule of institutions, the CDC's banning of Covid tests, status as the ability to efficiently align with power, mainstream media as status engine, why populism is growing & where it might lead, the Edelman Trust Barometer, the difficulty of converting public sentiment into actual policy, and much more. Episode Transcript From the New World (Substack) "All Hail the Firehose of Bullshit" by Brian Chau "Playing Both Sides: Russian State-Backed Media Coverage of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement" - Stanford Internet Observatory JRS Currents 024: BJ Campell on the Woke Religion JRS EP 161 Greg Thomas on Untangling the Gordian Knot of Race The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff JRS Currents 050: Greg Lukianoff on Free Speech "'SADLY, PORN': Propaganda for a Future that Forgot History," by Brian Chau Brian Chau is a mathematician by training and is tied for the youngest Canadian to win a gold medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics. He writes software for a living while posting on his spare time. He writes independently on American bureaucracy and political theory and has contributed to Tablet Magazine. His political philosophy can be summed up as “see the world as it is, not as you wish it to be.” Everything else is application.

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, porous membranes, "actual thought rather than simulated thinking," Euvie's experience of collective intimacy at an Emerge conference, Dunbar numbers & nested group coherences, embodied conceptualization & why it's needed now, Jim's experience at early GameB meetings, intimacy & risk-taking, the limits of pro-sociality, speaking dangerous ideas, regaining bodily play, attachment as a feature not a bug, why intimacy isn't attachment, and much more. Episode Transcript JRS EP17 - Bonnitta Roy on Process Thinking and Complexity Currents 018: The Future Thinkers Smart Village The Pop-Up School (Substack) by Bonnitta Roy Earth Mother (Substack) by Euvie Ivanova Future Thinkers Monastic Academy Diana Fosha (Wikipedia) Euvie Ivanova is a media producer, speaker, educator, and mama. She is the co-founder of FutureThinkers.org, a podcast and community dedicated to the evolution of society, technology, and consciousness towards a regenerative future. She is currently in the early stages of building a regenerative village in Canada. Bonnitta Roy teaches insight practices for individuals who are developing meta-cognitive skills, and hosts collective insight retreats to help groups break away from limiting patterns of thought. 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. In 2021 she started the POP-UP School to bring her teaching to a larger audience. Through her company, C-LABS,  Bonnitta is developing applications that can visualize changing patterns as teams work through complex problems. Her research shows how simple but powerful protocols that underlie these patterns can be used to represent various dispositional states of human systems. Bonnitta is the author of the popular Medium publication Our Future at Work. She is an associate editor of Integral Review where you can also find her articles on process approaches to consciousness, perception, and metaphysics.

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 the era of electronic media, TikTok's threat to an open society, the sacred as highest organizing principle, culture bildung & the challenge of transfer, training empathy, schismogenesis, coherent pluralism, tolerating & understanding other people's values, culture capitalism, danger of the growth imperative, the possibility of AI arbitrage in virtual currencies, bank debt & money-on-money return, the need for functional post-capitalist operating systems, exponential growth & the possibility of an environmental singularity, limits to growth, whether answers will come from politics, the possibility of phase transition, the AGI timeline & danger scenarios, benefits of liberal democracy, bimodality in democracies, starting a political party, the vertical axis in politics, balancing between the three major political ideologies, and much more. Episode Transcript EP 165 Lene Rachel Andersen Part 1: Libertism Libertism: Grasping the 21st Century, by Lene Rachel Andersen Metamodernity: Meaning and Hope in a Complex World, by Lene Rachel Andersen JRS EP89 – Lene Rachel Andersen on Metamodernity JRS Currents 043: Lene Rachel Andersen on Bildung JRS EP59 – Gregg Henriques on Unifying Psychology The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins The Meme Machine, by Susan Blackmore The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow EP 153 Forrest Landry on Small Group Method Lene Rachel Andersen is an economist, author, futurist, philosopher and Bildung activist. She heads the think tank Nordic Bildung in Copenhagen and is a member of the Club of Rome. After studying business economy for three years, she worked as a temp teacher before studying theology. During her studies, she wrote entertainment for Danish television until she decided to quit theology, become a full-time writer, and focus on technological development, big history, and the future of humanity. Since 2005, she has written 18 books and received two Danish democracy awards: Ebbe Kløvedal-Reich Democracy Baton (2007) and Døssing Prisen, the Danish librarians’ democracy prize (2012). Among her books are The Nordic Secret (2017), co-developed and edited by Club of Rome member Tomas Björkman, Metamodernity (2019), and Bildung (2020).

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 rather than designing, random variation in populations, catering to & learning from the outliers, reasoned free speech on the internet, why people with reach have a responsibility to speak up, evolutionarily stable strategies (ESS's), how the steam engine destroyed craftsmanship, the welfare state as an ESS, the species exclusion principle, coherent pluralism, loops within loops in complex systems, why the bunker-builders will all die of cholera, regenerative agriculture, soil as the real basis of our civilization, finding inflection points, the global climate as a chaotic system, the meaning crisis, how language created the inner/outer duality, providing the services of religion without the metaphysical baggage, participating in the loops of nature, different historical conceptions of the sacred & why we need all of them, religion & social infrastructure, scale-free networks & hubs of meaning-making, whether AI & capitalism can coexist, and much more. Episode Transcript Libertism: Grasping the 21st Century, by Lene Rachel Andersen Metamodernity: Meaning and Hope in a Complex World, by Lene Rachel Andersen JRS EP89 - Lene Rachel Andersen on Metamodernity JRS Currents 043: Lene Rachel Andersen on Bildung "Notes on Metamodernism" (2010), by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker JRS EP36 - Hanzi Freinacht on Metamodernism JRS EP59 - Gregg Henriques on Unifying Psychology Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, by Douglas Rushkoff Lene Rachel Andersen is an economist, author, futurist, philosopher and Bildung activist. She heads the think tank Nordic Bildung in Copenhagen and is a member of the Club of Rome. After studying business economy for three years, she worked as a temp teacher before studying theology. During her studies, she wrote entertainment for Danish television until she decided to quit theology, become a full-time writer, and focus on technological development, big history, and the future of humanity. Since 2005, she has written 18 books and received two Danish democracy awards: Ebbe Kløvedal-Reich Democracy Baton (2007) and Døssing Prisen, the Danish librarians’ democracy prize (2012). Among her books are The Nordic Secret (2017), co-developed and edited by Club of Rome member Tomas Björkman, Metamodernity (2019), and Bildung (2020).

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 reasonable odds that he won fairly, how Carlsen might know whether he cheated, Carlsen's special information access, theories about how cheating in chess might be accomplished, the risk of paranoia in chess & chess culture, and much more. JRS Currents 041: Jonathan Rowson on Our Metacrisis Pickle The Moves That Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life, by Jonathan Rowson Jonathan Rowson is co-founder and director of the research institute Perspectiva based in London. He is also the former director of the Social Brain Centre at the Royal Society of Arts and is a chess grandmaster and three-time British Chess Champion. His books include The Seven Deadly Chess Sins, Chess for Zebras, Spiritualize: Cultivating Spiritual Sensibility to Address 21st Century Challenges, and, The Moves That Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life.

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 outfit, a strong negative reaction to tribalism & why tribal resonances are never the edge, Brand's reading habits, North Beach bohemianism, periods of womanizing, Al Hubbard & the roots of the human potential movement, the Sequoyah Seminar, military service, the International Foundation for Advanced Study, working as organizer with Kesey & the Merry Pranksters, Brand's resistance to being "on the bus," creation & significance of the Whole Earth Catalog, influence of Buckminster Fuller, failure of the Whole Earth Software Catalog, creation of The Well, the Ecopragmatist Manifesto & Brand's defense of nuclear energy, the Global Business Network, the Long Now Foundation & getting people to think long-term, and much more. Episode Transcript Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand, by John Markoff The Long Now Foundation Sometimes a Great Notion, by Ken Kesey The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, by Eric Hoffer The Well The Art Of The Long View: Planning For The Future In An Uncertain World, by Peter Schwartz How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built, by Stewart Brand "The Maintenance Race," by Stewart Brand John Markoff is an affiliate fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human Centered Artificial Intelligence and a staff historian at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. He has written about technology and science since 1977. From 1988 to 2016 he reported on technology, science, and Silicon Valley for the New York Times. His work has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize four times, and in 2013 he was awarded a Pulitzer in explanatory reporting. Markoff is the co-author of The High Cost of High Tech, Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier, and Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw. He is the author of What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry and Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots. He and his wife live in Palo Alto, CA.

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 of self-criticism in ancient Greece and in Rome, the relationship between oikophobia & decadence, the conquest of Rome by Christianity, how freedom & religion regulate oikophobia, the Enlightenment & its relation to progressivism, the noble lie, the "religion that is not a religion," two opposite oikophobic tendencies, the double-edged sword of liberty, liberation without progressivism, the civilizational problem of boredom, and much more. Episode Transcript  Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civlizations, by Benedict Beckeld  The Open Society and Its Enemies, by Karl Popper JRS EP 160 - Curtis Yarvin on Monarchy in the U.S.A. JRS EP 143 - John Vervaeke Part 1: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, by John Vervaeke (YouTube series) The Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom Benedict Beckeld is a philosopher and writer who holds a PhD in Philosophy and Classical Philology from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. His latest book is Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilizations (2022), published by Cornell University Press.

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, von Mises's praxeology, reconciling individual & collective agency, coherent pluralism, Chomsky's syndicalism, Enlightenment liberalism, practices of morality, Bitcoin's deflationary tendency, Holochain, recessions as times of healing, guided mutation in crypto, DAO contracts, stacks of authority, asymptotic anarchy, the doctrine of subsidiarity, imagining high-trust societies, the tension between welfare & moral responsibility, breaking up the state's monopoly on policing, compulsion & persuasion, the 3 governors, masculinity & femininity X eros & thanatos, 6 moral spheres & approaching them coherently, and much more. Episode Transcript JRS EP 119 - Max Borders on Post-Collapse "Understanding Addiction as a Pathology of Temporal Horizon," Warren Bickel et al. JRS EP 160 - Curtis Yarvin on Monarchy in the U.S.A. "Curtis Yarvin: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly," by Max Borders "Dividend Money: An Alternative to Central Banker Managed Fractional Reserve Banking Money" by Jim Rutt (lecture) The Network State, by Balaji Srinivasan JRS EP 153 - Forrest Landry on Small Group Method The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without the State, by Bruce L. Benson JRS EP148 - Antonio Damasio on Feeling and Knowing Max Borders is the founder and Executive Director of Social Evolution—a non-profit organization dedicated to liberating humanity through innovation. Max is also co-founder of the Future Frontiers event. He is the author of After Collapse and The Social Singularity.