The Jim Rutt Show

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.

Jim talks with recurring guest Zak Stein about the Consilience Project's article "Technology is Not Values Neutral: Ending the Reign of Nihilistic Design"... Jim talks with recurring guest 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 affect structures of communication & cognition, how the bathroom scale changed the meaning of health, clock time & capitalism, the deskilling tradeoff of technology, how Facebook became a case study in nihilistic design, the difficulty of predicting nth-order effects, monitoring & predicting psychosocial externalities, Jim's role in early social-media design choices, axiological design, our accidental planetary computational stack, developing co-responsibility in tech, whether banning advertising could change everything, 5 propositions towards axiological design, thinking about tech & its users in the whole context, and much more. Episode Transcript JRS EP113 - Zak Stein on Hierarchical Complexity Technology is Not Values Neutral: Ending the Reign of Nihilistic Design," by The Consilience Project  Currents 063: Jessica Flack on nth-Order Effects of the Russia-Ukraine War Free: The Future of a Radical Price, by Chris Anderson The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution, by Micah White Zachary Stein is a writer, educator, and futurist working to bring a greater sense of sanity and justice to education. He studied philosophy and religion at Hampshire College, and then educational neuroscience, human development, and the philosophy of education at Harvard University. While a student at Harvard, he co-founded what would become Lectica, Inc., a non-profit dedicated to the research-based, justice-oriented reform of large-scale standardized testing in K-12, higher-education, and business. He has published two books. Social Justice and Educational Measurement was based on his dissertation and traces the history of standardized testing and its ethical implications. His second book, Education in a Time Between Worlds, expands the philosophical work to include grappling with the relations between schooling and technology more broadly. He writes for peer-reviewed academic journals across a range of topics including the philosophy of learning, educational technology, and integral theory. He’s a scholar at the Ronin Institute, Co-President and Academic Director of the activist think-tank at the Center for Integral Wisdom, and scientific advisor to the board of the Neurohacker Collective, as well as a co-founder of The Consilience Project.

Jim continues his discussion with Matthew Pirkowski on ideas of emergence and how they can be applied to today's meta-crisis... 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 signaling limits solution space, slack in metabolism & civilization, how greater energy inputs could synchronize with regenerative agriculture, carbon tax as a signal, the infosphere substrate of human self-organization, inertia vs conertia, artifactual membranes old & new, humanity's giant exaptic leap into a new possibility space, destabilization & continuity of creative expression, the tradeoff between exploration & exploitation, unifying mathematics, thermodynamics, & free energy mathematics, systems as model-generating agents, the representation of values & the lack of telos in online interaction spaces, an invitation to collaborate, and much more. Episode Transcript JRS Currents 053: Matthew Pirkowski on Grammars of Emergence Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter, by Terrence Deacon JRS EP 157 - Terrence Deacon on Mind's Emergence From Matter The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex, by Harold Morowitz JRS EP 159 - Bobby Azarian on the Romance of Reality The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves, by W. Brian Arthur Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature, by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future, by Vaclav Smil Energy and Civilization: A History, by Vaclav Smil "On the Phenomenology of Hyper-Connectivity," by Matthew Pirkowski Matthew Pirkowski works at the intersection of software, psychology, and complex systems. These interests first took root while studying Evolutionary Psychology and assisting with Behavioral Economic research at Yale’s Comparative Cognition Laboratory. From there Matthew began a career in software engineering, where he applied these interests to the development of software interfaces used by millions around the world, most notably as a member of Netflix’s Television UI team, where he worked on experimental initiatives conceptualizing and prototyping the future of entertainment software. Presently, Matthew consults on systems architecture, advises companies within the startup space, and writes about topics related to the evolution of human socioeconomic, technological, and representational systems–in particular the emergence and impact of cryptoeconomic protocols, as outlined in his Crypto Beyond Capitalism essay series. He spends most of his free time maintaining, restoring, and growing food on 6 recently acquired acres of Oregon woodlands.