The Jim Rutt Show

Jim talks with Greg Thomas about American democracy & the problems created by racial essentialism & racialization... 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 chattel slavery, a mutual love of Stanley Crouch & Fifties jazz, transcending race & including culture, Albert Murray's "omni-American identity," 3 foundational American archetypes, the developmental challenge of overcoming tribalism, legacy media's structural bias toward conflict, why Ibram X. Kendi & Robin DiAngelo's anti-racist books reify race, the blues as tragicomic & affirmative, varieties of racism, the impact of not thinking & acting in racial terms, appropriation as the way culture works, searching for something better than the past, and much more. Episode Transcript "Resolving the Race(ism) Dilemma" (event) The Omni-Americans: Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy, by Albert Murray The All-American Skin Game, or, The Decoy of Race, by Stanley Crouch Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, by Karen & Barbara Fields Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That's Lost its Mind, by Jamie Wheal Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility, by James P. Carse "Why race-based framings of social issues hurt us all," by Greg Thomas American Humor: A Study of the National Character, by Constance Rourke Greg Thomas is CEO of the Jazz Leadership Project. He curates and facilitates business workshops and humanities programs for a range of organizations, including JPMorgan Chase, Verizon, NYPD, TD Bank, Jazz at Lincoln Center, and Google. He’s written on jazz and democratic life for Areo, New Republic, The Root, New York Daily News, The Developmentalist, and his blog, Tune In To Leadership. Greg is a Senior Fellow of the Institute for Cultural Evolution and an Advisor to The Consilience Project. As an educator, he has presented on virtual platforms such as Rebel Wisdom and The Stoa, and served as a lead instructor for courses on Cultural Intelligence and “Stepping Up: Wrestling with America’s Past, Reimagining Its Future, Healing Together.” He’s also a co-producer of the annual “Shaping an Omni-American Future” event. Greg has lectured at institutions such as Columbia, Hamilton, Ben Gurion University, and Harvard.

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... 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 steering linkage, the negative characterization of "politics," optimizing liquid democracy to take & hold power, delegation as power projection, why the French people didn't revolt against the Jacobins, forces that led to Trump's election, the relationship between binding & power, the Yellow Vest protests, the problem of finding a philosopher-king, democracy as a claim to legitimacy, our minimal level of political activation, Julius Caesar's innovation, joyous regime change, monarchy as a unifying force, polarization as a product of institutional design, monarchic regimes in recent history & their relevance, and much more. Episode Transcript JRS Currents 022: Curtis Yarvin on Institutional Failure Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, by Albert Jay Nock The Origins of Contemporary France, by Hippolyte Taine (Project Gutenberg)  Curtis Yarvin is author of the Gray Mirror Substack. He previously wrote the blog Unqualified Reservations under the pen-name Mencius Moldbug. As Moldbug, he was the founder of the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic movement known as Neo-Reaction (NRX).

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"... 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, dissipative adaptation, self-organization as Darwinian process, the Fermi paradox, an evolutionary arms race of complexity, biology as knowledge creation, the emergence of agency, the Bayesian Brain Hypothesis, how symbolic thought opens up design space, the probability of complex life, teleology at local & universal scales, Teilhard de Chardin's omega point, global workspace theory, phenomenal vs access consciousness, whether the internet is a global brain, applying the weak & strong anthropic principle to multiverse theory, cosmological natural selection, life as central to reality, and much more. Episode Transcript The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity, by Bobby Azarian JRS EP 157 - Terrence Deacon on Mind's Emergence From Matter JRS EP 105 - Christof Koch on Consciousness JRS EP 18 - Stuart Kauffman on Complexity, Biology & T.A.P. JRS EP 116 - Doug Erwin on the Cambrian Explosion At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, by Stuart Kauffman The Phenomenon of Man, by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, by John Barrow & Frank Tipler JRS EP 108 - Bernard Baars on Consciousness JRS EP 5 - Lee Smolin – Quantum Foundations and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution Bobby Azarian is a science journalist and a cognitive neuroscientist with a PhD from the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University. He has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, Scientific American, BBC, Slate, and Aeon. His blog Mind in the Machine hosted by Psychology Today has over 8 million views. He worked on the Emmy-nominated show Mind Field, and he is the author of the new book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself To Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity.

Jim talks with Alexander Bard, continuing a series of encounters between GameB and the Dark Renaissance movement... 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, imploitation vs exploitation, 3 historical roots of GameA, why AI & not humans may conquer space, jettisoning the Gnostic dualism of Greek philosophy, protopianism over utopianism, voluntary communist protopias, increasing well-being while reducing energy consumption, designing membranes & protocols, reclaiming "gated community," a designed opposition between GameB & the Dark Renaissance, reversing the ban on pathos, the Zoroastrian approach to contingency & ethics, and much more. Episode Transcript JRS EP95 - Alexander Bard on God in the Internet Age An Initiation to Game~B The Stoa: Game B Meets the Dark Renaissance w/ Jim Rutt, Zak Stein, Alexander Bard, and Cadell Last Syntheism: Creating God in the Internet Age, by Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist Digital Libido: Sex, Power and Violence in the Network Society, by Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist Netocracy: The New Power Elite and Life After Capitalism, by Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist Alexander Bard is a philosopher, futurologist, and political and spiritual activist, based in Stockholm, Sweden. He is the author of five books: The Netocrats, The Global Empire, The Body Machines, Syntheism – Creating God in The Internet Age, and Digital Libido – Sex, Power and Violence in The Network Society with his co-writer Jan Söderqvist. Bard is a radical process philosopher, merging Hegel and Nietzsche with Whitehead and Deleuze, using humanity as the constant and technology as the variable while working toward the deepest possible understanding of human history, contemporary society, and the intensely technology-driven future that humanity is facing. Bard has also enjoyed a highly successful 25-year-career as a producer and artist in the international music industry, followed by ten years as a tough love, reality-checking judge on TV shows “Swedish Idol” and “Sweden’s Got Talent”, and is an outspoken and provocative YouTube and Twitter celebrity.

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... 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 view of society, the differences between complicated & complex & between operating systems & organisms, the contingency of human systems & methods of nudging, starting with human nature, a tripartite picture of government functions, breaking society into political, economic, and cultural realms & whether they should be kept separate, the dominance of culture by the economic realm, organizing at the meso-scale, the Amish & other intact local cultures, giving full autonomy to educators, the post-WWI creation of the nation-state & the advantages of separating nation from state, making participation a reality, moving from “me” to “we,” honoring cross-cultural autonomy, separation of church & state, the challenge of community coherence, and much more. Episode Transcript The Whole Social (Substack) Transforming Society: Seeds for a New Social Understanding (course) JRS EP65 - Tyson Yunkaporta on Indigenous Complexity JRS EP66 - Tyson Yunkaporta on Indigenous Knowledge Capital and Ideology, by Thomas Piketty Game~B Film Towards Social Renewal, by Rudolf Steiner Seth Jordan has been working with Steiner’s social ideas, often called “social threefolding,” since 2007 when he co-founded and directed Think OutWord, a peer-led training for young adults in threefolding that ran intensive workshops and conferences for 8 years. Seth has organized and taught throughout the USA, Europe, Scandinavia, and the Philippines, and in recent years he's consolidated much of that work into a 12 lesson distance-learning course called "Transforming Society" (educaredo.org/transforming-society). Seth writes regularly about current events from a threefolding perspective at The Whole Social (thewholesocial.substack.com).

Jim talks with Michael Garfield and J.F. Martel about the intersection of AI and art... Jim talks with Michael Garfield and J.F. Martel about the intersection of AI and art. They discuss DALL-E & Midjourney, whether conscious agency is necessary for art, artifice vs discernment, Jung's synchronicity, AI art as dreaming, discernment & consecration, the modern vs the algorithmic self, the CIA's role in funding abstract expressionism, the imaginal aspect & Walter Benjamin's historicity, Borges's Library of Babel & problems with infinity, biological reproduction as the central technological issue, the tension between prediction and understanding, art's inherent unpredictability, garage bands, noise & play in artistic creativity, returning to the analog world, and much more. Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, by J.F. Martel Weird Studies (podcast) Future Fossils (podcast) "AI Art Isn't Art," by Erik Hoel "An Oral History of The End of 'Reality'," by Michael Garfield "The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction," by W.J.T. Mitchell Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, by Douglas Rushkoff "The Future Is Noisy," by Michael Garfield JRS EP130 - Ken Stanley on Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned "Harnessing Chaos and Predicting the Unpredictable with A.I." (video lecture), Michelle Girvan @ SFI Artist and philosopher Michael Garfield helps people navigate our age of accelerating weirdness and cultivate the curiosity and play we'll need to thrive in it. As host and producer of both Future Fossils Podcast & The Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Podcast, Michael acts as interlocutor for a worldwide community of artists, scientists, and philosophers — a practice fed by and and feeding back into his fifteen years of synthetic and transdisciplinary "mind-jazz" performances in the form of essay, avant-guitar, and live painting. Bearing the standard for a new generation of mystic-scholars and refusing to be enslaved by a single perspective, creative medium, or intellectual community, Michael walks through the walls between academia and festival culture, theory and practice — speaking and performing everywhere from Moogfest to Burning Man, SXSW to Boom Festival, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia to Long Now's Ignite Talks to The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors while raising two kids. J.F. Martel is a Canadian writer, filmmaker, and podcaster. He is the author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, published in 2015 by Evolver Editions. In addition to making several dramatic short films, he has worked as screenwriter and director on numerous television documentary programs for French and English broadcasters, in Canada and abroad. With musicologist Phil Ford, Martel co-hosts Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast. His Twitter handle is @jf_martel.

Jim talks to Remzi Bajrami about the ideas in his book Common Planet: A New Game of Life...    Jim talks to Remzi Bajrami about the ideas in his book Common Planet: A New Game of Life. They discuss what GameB means to him, three classes of players, whether property or profit is the engine of GameA, the source of value, the value of careful labor, the generator function of money-on-money return, historical origins of GameA, the good GameA has done, one meaning of anarchism, rules without rulers, why socialists & capitalists have both been playing GameA, why Universal Basic Income isn't enough, how money supply works in GameA, moving from circulation to flow currency, advantages of a central ledger, addressing the calculation problem, unpacking proof of value, how collective decisions would be handled, participating by choice rather than by force, and much more. Episode Transcript Common Planet: A New Game of Life, by Remzi Bajrami Game~B Film Game-B.org The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, by David Graeber Debt: The First 5,000 Years, by David Graeber JRS EP 153 - Forrest Landry on Small Group Method

Jim talks with Jessica Flack about nth-order effects of the war in Ukraine... Jim talks with Jessica Flack about nth-order effects of the war in Ukraine. They discuss the meaning of second- and nth-order effects, black swans, Gaussian vs fat-tailed distribution models of extreme social events, factoring in Ukraine's wheat & Russia's fertilizer production, agency & reflexivity, how perceptions of events as extreme can amplify second-order effects, the "hot hand phenomenon" in sports, the black swan of war in Europe, swift coordination against Putin as an effect of collective intelligence failures around Covid, Russia's "escalate-to-de-escalate" doctrine, arena selection & lessons China might take from the war, the possibility of a bipolar war between democratic-leaning & authoritarian countries, network effects of excluding Russia permanently, and much more. Episode Transcript JRS EP48 - Jessica Flack on Complex Systems Dynamics JRS Currents 015: Jessica Flack & Melanie Mitchell on Complexity JRS Currents 058: John Robb on Russia-Ukraine Outcomes "Robustness mechanisms in primate societies: a perturbation study," by Jessica Flack, David Krakauer & Frans de Waal JRS Extra: On COVID-19 Opportunities with Jessica Flack Jessica Flack is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Flack directs SFI's Collective Computation Group (C4). Flack was formerly founding director of the Center for Complexity and Collective Computation in the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Flack received her PhD from Emory in 2003, studying cognitive science, animal behavior and evolutionary theory, and BA with honors from Cornell in 1996. Flack's work has been covered by scientists and science journalists in many publications and media outlets, including Quanta Magazine, the BBC, NPR, Nature, Science, The Economist, New Scientist, and Current Biology. Flack's research focuses on collective computation and its role in the emergence of robust structure and function in nature and society. A central philosophical issue behind this work is how nature overcomes subjectivity inherent in information processing systems to produce collective, ordered states.

Jim talks to Terrence Deacon about the ideas in his book Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter... Jim talks to Terrence Deacon about the ideas in his book Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter. They discuss the story of zero, integrating absence into physical theories, systems that generate entropy to stave off entropy, the history of emergence & the risk of mysterianism, reframing emergence as removal & constraint, orthograde vs contragrade processes, 3 layers of emergence, the special case of end-directed (teleodynamic) processes, a simple model of autogenesis, contrasting & integrating Shannon, Boltzmann, and Bateson, moving toward sentience, nested teleodynamic processes, feeling as primary to consciousness, rethinking the nervous system in non-computational terms, consciousness as a self-undoing process, inverting the hard problem, and much more. Episode Transcript Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, by Terrence W. Deacon JRS - EP10 David Krakauer: Complexity Science JRS - Currents 053: Matthew Pirkowski on Grammars of Emergence JRS - Currents 015: Jessica Flack & Melanie Mitchell on Complexity JRS - EP148 Antonio Damasio on Feeling and Knowing Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature, by Ilya Prigogine, Isabelle Stengers, & Alvin Toffler The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex, by Harold J. Morowitz JRS - EP105 Christof Koch on Consciousness Professor Terrence W. Deacon has held faculty positions at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School, Boston University, and the University of California, Berkeley. His laboratory research has combined human evolutionary biology and neuroscience, with the aim of investigating the evolution of human cognition. This work extends from cellular-molecular neurobiology and cross-species fetal neural transplantation to the study of semiotic processes underlying animal and human communication, especially language. These topics are explored in his 1997 book, The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of Language and the Brain. Currently, his theoretical interests have focused on the problem of explaining emergent phenomena, in such unprecedented transitions as the origin of life, the evolution of language, and the generation of conscious experience by brains. His 2012 book, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, explores how the interrelationships between thermodynamic, self-organizing, evolutionary, and semiotic processes are implicated in the production of these emergent transitions.

Jim talks with James Poulos about the ideas in his new book Human Forever: The Spiritual Politics of Digital War... Jim talks with James Poulos about the ideas in his new book Human Forever: The Spiritual Politics of Digital War. They discuss his decision to publish the book on the blockchain, going beginner's-mind on media & communications theory, the meaning of Gnosticism, responsibility as worship & its transfer to machines, returning worth to the human, a short introduction to Marshall McLuhan, raising the first fully digital generation, expert engineers vs ethereal ethicists, "peak woke" & the collapse of wokeness, religion as "the only permanent state of mankind," resisting the temptation to call down apocalypse, the hubris of messiah-hood, Hebraic British Protestant theology & its incongruence with American civilization, how queerness & transgender identity became culturally dominant, the left's abandonment of liberalism for a new post-human religion, differentiating transhumanism & human-maxing, and much more. Human Forever: The Digital Politics of Spiritual War, by James Poulos Human Forever mailing list The Art of Being Free: How Alexis de Tocqueville Can Save Us from Ourselves, by James Poulos "Reclaiming Our Cognitive Sovereignty," by Jim Rutt James Poulos creates and advises brands and ventures at the intersection of technology, media, and design. He is the Cofounder and Editor of The American Mind at the Claremont Institute and the Founder and Publisher of RETURN at New Founding. He is the author of Human, Forever and The Art of Being Free, and his writing has appeared in The Claremont Review of Books, Le Figaro, National Affairs, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, among many other publications. He lives on the edge of Los Angeles.