The Jim Rutt Show

Jim talks with Daniel Mezick about two books on leadership & social coherence, Michael Suk-Young Chwe's Rational Ritual & Christopher Boehm's Hierarchy in the Forest... Jim talks with Daniel Mezick about two books on leadership & social coherence, Michael Suk-Young Chwe's Rational Ritual & Christopher Boehm's Hierarchy in the Forest. They discuss ritual as a mechanism for large-scale coordination, mimicry in beer choice and Super Bowl ads, fragmentation of audiences through microtargeting, the relationship between common knowledge & ritual, China's management of common knowledge, America's weak-sauce rituals, meetings as games, how egalitarianism increases group decision quality, role-based vs position-based leadership, anti-puffing-up mechanisms, social values of hunter-forager groups, how weapons may have enabled egalitarianism, personal sovereignty as careful authorizing, Jim's guest selection algorithm, authority information as social glue, rapid adaptability of informal authority systems, Graeber & Wengrow's critique of Boehm, egalitarianism as a game, making role-based leadership scalable, leadership invitation, and much more. Episode Transcript JRS EP41 - Daniel Mezick on the Agile Organization Rational Ritual: Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge, by Michael Suk-Young Chwe Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, by Chris Boehm Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, by Rene Girard @Jim_Rutt on Twitter Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos and Complexity - A Platform for Designing Business Architecture, by Jamshid Gharajedaghi Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, by Johan Huizinga JRS EP140 - Robin Dunbar on Friendship The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber and David Wengrow Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, by Jane McGonigal Coaching executives and teams in Agile since 2006, Daniel Mezick leads Improving Agility. Daniel has guided dozens of organizations in the art and science of Agile improvement. An author and co-author of three books on organization change, Daniel is a frequent keynote speaker at industry conferences and events. He is the originator of OpenSpace Agility, an engagement model for enabling authentic and lasting organizational improvement. He is also an Advisory Board member and co-Founder of The Open Leadership Network, a certification body and community of practice dedicated to implementing Open patterns and practices inside business enterprises worldwide.

Jim has a wide-ranging talk with Welf von Hören, co-founder of the recently beta-launched Potential app... Jim has a wide-ranging talk with Welf von Hören, co-founder of the recently beta-launched Potential app. (Listeners who download the app can use the invitation code "jimruttshow".) They discuss Potential's goal of upgrading the human capacity for omni-considerate choices, the co-evolutionary relationship between increasing individual capacity & improving institutions, the risk of creating "more efficient destroyers of the universe," GameB's three-part model of sovereignty, online as the primary conditioning environment, asymmetry between the human mind & AI-driven platforms, bridging the intention-action gap, the decision to be a public-benefit for-profit corporation, aligning the value proposition with the user's best interests, how the app actually works, a more monastic digital environment, enabling communities of practice, facing the moral challenges of data collection, and much more. Episode Transcript Potential app (invite code: "jimruttshow") "Sovereignty is the Way," by Welf von Hören "Advancing Human Sovereignty," by Daniel Schmachtenberger "Reclaiming Our Cognitive Sovereignty," by Jim Rutt A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life, by Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying The Stoa Rebel Wisdom Welf von Hören is an applied philosopher, designer and entrepreneur. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Potential, a public benefit corporation dedicated to making technology that’s aligned with our best interest. He’s an expert for the intersection between Humane and Persuasive Technology.

Jim has a wide-ranging talk with Jeremy Lent about his latest book, The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe... Jim has a wide-ranging talk with Jeremy Lent about his latest book, The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe. They discuss the dominant worldview in today's advanced economies, its lack of scientific basis, how worldviews shape the direction of history, myths of selfishness & separation, how viewing nature as resource leads to self-reinforcing feedback loops, money-on-money return, origins of capitalism & colonialism, the extractive mindset as a European development, a complex-systems approach to spirituality, "natural attractors" as spirits, discovering Taoism, wu wei & yu wei, animate vs conceptual consciousness, integrated consciousness, yu wei as multipolar trap, problems with using GDP as a metric, improving the relationship between I & self, a democracy of consciousness, contemplative & embodied practices as a way of moving the brain toward new attractors, false ideas about evolution e.g. the selfish gene, how cells began cooperating, how humans might do the same, changing our social operating system, stepping off the hedonic treadmill, fixing transnational corporations, and much more. Episode Transcript The Web of Meaning (website) The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning, by Jeremy Lent Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350, by Janet L. Abu-Lughod JRS EP148 - Antonio Damasio on Feeling and Knowing My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey, by Jill Bolte Taylor Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff & Mark Johnson Neural Darwinism (Wikipedia) Selfish gene (Wikipedia) JRS EP116 - Doug Erwin on the Cambrian Explosion B corporation (Wikipedia) JRS - EP107 Tristan Harris on Our Social Dilemma Jeremy Lent is an author and speaker whose work investigates the underlying causes of our civilization’s existential crisis and explores pathways toward a life-affirming future. Born in London, England, Lent received a BA in English Literature from Cambridge University, an MBA from the University of Chicago, and was a former internet company CEO. He is founder of the nonprofit Liology Institute, dedicated to fostering an integrated worldview that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on the Earth. He lives with his partner in Berkeley, California. Lent also writes topical articles exploring the deeper patterns of political and cultural developments at Patterns of Meaning.

Jim has a wide-ranging talk with Samuel Scarpino on Covid-19 epidemiology and disease surveillance... Jim has a wide-ranging talk with Samuel Scarpino on Covid-19 epidemiology and disease surveillance. They discuss some of the biggest surprises in Covid research since its beginning, the importance of understanding the evolutionary trajectory of the virus, the oscillation pattern of case rates, wastewater-based epidemiology, current bottlenecks in gene sequencing, the latest evidence about Omicron's contagiousness & severity, obstacles created by HIPAA protections, how to build a data system that will be ready for the next pandemic, the role of interdisciplinary complex-systems research centers, a disaster scenario that keeps Scarpino up at night, herd immunity, social contact data from phones & what it would cost to process it all, how much more the US spends on weather data & defense than on pandemic data, and much more. Episode Transcript Pandemic Prevention Institute - Omicron & Other Covid-19 Variants The Complex Alternative: Complexity Scientists on the COVID-19 Pandemic, ed. David Krakauer and Geoffrey West Transmission: SFI insights into COVID-19 Samuel V. Scarpino, Ph.D. is the Managing Director of Pathogen Surveillance at The Rockefeller Foundation's Pandemic Prevention Institute. In addition, Dr. Scarpino is an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and holds appointments in the Network Science Institute, Institute for Experiential AI, Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Global Resilience Institute, and Roux Institute at Northeastern University. Scarpino has 10+ years of experience translating research into decision support and data science/ML tools across diverse sectors from public health and clinical medicine to real estate and energy. From 2017 to 2020, he was Chief Strategy Officer and head of data science at Dharma Platform–a social impact–technology startup. Scarpino has nearly 100 publications in academic journals and books. His expert commentaries on science and technology have appeared in publications such as: Nature, Science, PNAS, and Nature Physics. His research has been covered by the New York Times, Wired, the Boston Globe, NPR, VICE News, National Geographic, and numerous other venues. For his contributions to complex systems science, he was made a Fellow of the ISI Foundation in 2017, an External Faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute in 2020, and an External Faculty member of the Vermont Complex Systems Center in 2021. Scarpino earned a Ph.D. from The University of Texas at Austin in 2013 and was a Santa Fe Institute Omidyar Fellow from 2013 – 2016.

Jim has a wide-ranging talk with Joshua Vial, co-founder of the multifaceted social-impact support network Enspiral... Jim has a wide-ranging talk with Joshua Vial, co-founder of the multifaceted social-impact support network Enspiral. They discuss Enspiral's origin story, its organizational structure, tradeoffs between exploration & exploitation, coherent pluralism, how to do a company without bosses, keeping product & consulting companies separate, the origins of Loomio in Occupy Wall St. consensus processes, how to invite external investors without shitshow VC culture, building to sell vs building to keep, Enspiral as intentional-contributor collider, face-to-face vs virtual collaborations, effects of international growth, the Golden Pandas livelihood pod, unsettling permission-seeking habits in communities, management theories as picking grounds for practices, Dev Academy & cutting out "ball-chasing" in education, Web3 as a chance for citizens to win, DAOs as possible next unit of human culture, worthy social-impact projects in the blockchain space, and much more. Episode Transcript JRS EP51 - Richard Bartlett on Self-Organizing Collaboration Game-B.org Microsolidarity JRS EP140 - Robin Dunbar on Friendship The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies, by Scott Page Loomio P’s in a pod: Purpose, Proximity & Product — the journey of the Golden Pandas Enspiral Handbook Better Work Together (book) Dev Academy GitCoin ecodao Regen Network Cosmos DEVxDAO Joshua Vial is an entrepreneur, programmer and educator with a passion for business, technology and social change. He has been running technology businesses since 2004 and launched Enspiral in 2010. In 2013 he co-founded Enspiral Dev Academy and has been focused on teaching and accelerated education since then.

Jim talks with Henry Elkus and Sam Feinburg, founders of the global problem solving organization Helena...Jim talks with Henry Elkus and Sam Feinburg, founders of the global problem solving organization Helena. They discuss how Helena identifies society's big problems, the group's origin story, how they attracted a large membership of people who are first-class in their domains, facilitating The Covid Network to quantitatively prioritize supply distribution, creating the Shield Project to address dire vulnerabilities in the electrical grid, Energy Vault's method of gravity energy storage, over-siloing of issue areas & problem-solving modalities, why it's important to proliferate both social & hard technologies, and much more. Episode Transcript Helena.org EMP Commission Report (2008) Henry Elkus is Founder and CEO of Helena. He cares immensely about creating systems that can be leveraged to enact global, scalable, and systemic change. Henry dropped out of Yale in his second year to lead Helena full time. Sam Feinburg is the Chief Operating Officer and Executive Director of Helena. He cares deeply about building a fairer and stronger civilization for all in the presence of growing catastrophic and existential risks.

Jim has a wide-ranging talk with neuroscientist Antonio Damasio about his latest book, Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious... Jim has a wide-ranging talk with neuroscientist Antonio Damasio about his latest book, Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious. They discuss the importance of separating intelligence from the nervous system, feeling as the inaugural event of consciousness, distinguishing consciousness from mind, the permeability of intellectual & affective processes, debunking William James's "stream of consciousness" metaphor, interoception, proprioception, & exteroception, how anesthesia works, attention as the cursor of consciousness, introducing vulnerability into AI, and much more. Episode Transcript Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious, by Antonio Damasio JRS EP97 - Emery Brown on Consciousness & Anesthesia Antonio Damasio is Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology and Philosophy, and Director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Trained as both neurologist and neuroscientist, Damasio has made seminal contributions to the understanding of brain processes underlying emotions, feelings, and consciousness. His work on the role of affect in decision-making has made a major impact in neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. He is the author of several hundred scientific articles and is one of the most eminent psychologists of the modern era (see Damasio, A. Feelings and Decisions. In: R. Sternberg, S. Fiske, D. Foss (Eds.), Scientists Making a Difference: One Hundred Eminent Behavioral and Brain Scientists Talk about Their Most Important Contributions, 2016). He is one of the most cited scientists worldwide.

John Vervaeke joins Jim for the final episode of a five-part series examining the ideas put forward in Vervaeke’s popular YouTube series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis... John Vervaeke joins Jim for the final episode of a five-part series examining the ideas put forward in Vervaeke’s popular YouTube series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. They discuss relevance's lack of essence, sacredness as inexhaustibility, separating cognitive indispensability from metaphysical necessity, religio & the perennial problems, whether Enlightenment++ principles can offer a place to stand, the need for new symbols of self-transcendence, reverse-engineering Enlightenment, mindfulness practices as serious play, the "religion of no religion," signal detection theory, a "collective dynamic Socrates," rationality's malleability, active open-mindedness, and much more. Episode Transcript JRS EP143 - John Vervaeke Part 1: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis JRS EP30 - Nora Bateson on Complexity & the Transcontextual Nora Bateson's Warm Data Labs The Open Society and Its Enemies, by Karl Popper "A Journey To GameB," Jim Rutt What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought, by Keith Stanovich John Vervaeke is an Associate Professor, in the teaching stream. He has been teaching at the University of Toronto since 1994. He currently teaches courses in the Psychology department on thinking and reasoning with an emphasis on insight problem solving, cognitive development with an emphasis on the dynamical nature of development, and higher cognitive processes with an emphasis on intelligence, rationality, mindfulness, and the Psychology of wisdom. He is the director of the Cognitive Science program where he also teaches courses on the introduction to Cognitive Science, and the Cognitive Science of consciousness wherein he emphasizes 4E (embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended) models of cognition and consciousness. In addition, he teaches a course in the Buddhism, Psychology and Mental Health program on Buddhism and Cognitive Science. He is the director of the Consciousness and the Wisdom Studies Laboratory.  He has won and been nominated for several teaching awards including the 2001 Students' Administrative Council and Association of Part-time Undergraduate Students Teaching Award for the Humanities, and the 2012 Ranjini Ghosh Excellence in Teaching Award. He has published articles on relevance realization, general intelligence, mindfulness, flow, metaphor, and wisdom. He is first author of the book Zombies in Western Culture:  A 21st Century Crisis, which integrates Psychology and Cognitive Science to address the meaning crisis in Western society. He is the author and presenter of the YouTube series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.

Jim has a timely discussion with geophysicist Dorian Abbot, whose public lecture was recently canceled by MIT—Jim's alma mater—due to Dorian's views on affirmative action... Jim has a timely discussion with geophysicist Dorian Abbot, whose public lecture was recently canceled by MIT—Jim's alma mater—due to Dorian's views on affirmative action. They discuss the (unrelated) scientific content of the canceled lecture, Abbot's & Ivan Marinovic's proposed Merit, Fairness, and Equality (MFE) framework, the Chicago Principles, the Kalven Report, mainstream support for merit-based hiring decisions, the relationship between liberal humanism & academic freedom, results of a secret-ballot poll of MIT faculty, how Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) functions in current hiring systems, the goal of a university, what listeners can do to fight for academic freedom, a proposal for a Center for a Free Society at the University of Chicago, and much more. Episode Transcript "The Diversity Problem on Campus," Dorian Abbot & Ivan Marinovic "The Political Problem on Campus," Dorian Abbot, Sergiu Klainerman, & Ivan Marinovi (the latest op-ed) Pew Research Center report on diversity and hiring "Academic Freedom and Cancel Culture," Eric Kaufmann Change.org Petition MIT Free Speech Alliance Dorian Abbot is an associate professor in the Department of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. He uses mathematical and computational models to understand and explain fundamental problems in Earth and Planetary Sciences. He has worked on problems related to climate, paleoclimate, the cryosphere, planetary habitability, and exoplanets.

John Vervaeke joins Jim for the fourth of a five-part series examining the ideas put forward in Vervaeke’s popular YouTube series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis... John Vervaeke joins Jim for the fourth of a five-part series examining the ideas put forward in Vervaeke’s popular YouTube series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. They discuss Nietzsche as a prophet of the meaning crisis, the politicization of the quest for meaning, recreating religion, the deep functionality of Christianity, meaning cultivation, Newell & Simon's error, the essentialism heuristic, combinatorial explosions, the no-free-lunch theorem, relevance realization as the engine of general intelligence & its role in religio, secular wonder, "I" & "me," transjectivity & flow, the sense of sacredness, the importance of meta-meaning systems, the function & dangers of symbols, and much more. Episode Transcript JRS EP143 - John Vervaeke Part 1: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis "Relevance Realization and the Emerging Framework in Cognitive Science," John Vervaeke, Timothy Lillicrap, Blake Richards Nelson Goodman (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Awakening from the Meaning Crisis EP33 - The Spirituality of RR: Wonder/Awe/Mystery/Sacredness "A Secular Wonder," Paulo Costa (paywalled) John Vervaeke is an Associate Professor, in the teaching stream. He has been teaching at the University of Toronto since 1994. He currently teaches courses in the Psychology department on thinking and reasoning with an emphasis on insight problem solving, cognitive development with an emphasis on the dynamical nature of development, and higher cognitive processes with an emphasis on intelligence, rationality, mindfulness, and the Psychology of wisdom. He is the director of the Cognitive Science program where he also teaches courses on the introduction to Cognitive Science, and the Cognitive Science of consciousness wherein he emphasizes 4E (embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended) models of cognition and consciousness. In addition, he teaches a course in the Buddhism, Psychology and Mental Health program on Buddhism and Cognitive Science. He is the director of the Consciousness and the Wisdom Studies Laboratory.  He has won and been nominated for several teaching awards including the 2001 Students' Administrative Council and Association of Part-time Undergraduate Students Teaching Award for the Humanities, and the 2012 Ranjini Ghosh Excellence in Teaching Award. He has published articles on relevance realization, general intelligence, mindfulness, flow, metaphor, and wisdom. He is first author of the book Zombies in Western Culture:  A 21st Century Crisis, which integrates Psychology and Cognitive Science to address the meaning crisis in Western society. He is the author and presenter of the YouTube series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.