The Jim Rutt Show
Crisp conversations with critical thinkers at the leading edge of science, technology, politics, and social systems.
Episodes
November 4, 2025 • 55 mins
In this flipped episode, Brendan Graham Dempsey interviews Jim about the ideas in his recent Substack essays "A Minimum Viable Metaphysics" and "What I Mean by 'Metaphysics'." They discuss metaphysics as assumptions for learning and reasoning, the difference between deduction, induction, & abduction, Jim's belief that there are no paradoxes in the real world, the reality principle, the asymmetry principle, the lawfulness principle,...
Mark as Played
October 15, 2025 • 97 mins
Jim talks with Nate Soares about the ideas in his and Eliezer Yudkowsky's book If Anybody Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All. They discuss the book's claim that mitigating existential AI risk should be a top global priority, the idea that LLMs are grown, the opacity of deep learning networks, the Golden Gate activation vector, whether our understanding of deep learning networks might improve enough to pre...
Mark as Played
October 14, 2025 • 73 mins
Jim talks with Alex Ebert about the ideas in his Substack essay "New Age and the Religion of Self: The Anatomy of a Rebellion Against Reality." They discuss the meanings of New Age and religion, the New Thought movement, the law of attraction, manifesting, Trump's artifacts of manifestation, the unmooring from concrete artifacts, individual and collective hallucinations, intersubjective verification of the interobjective, the subje...
Mark as Played
October 7, 2025 • 72 mins
Jim talks with Joe Edelman about the ideas in the Meaning Alignment Institute's recent paper "Full Stack Alignment: Co-Aligning AI and Institutions with Thick Models of Value." They discuss pluralism as a core principle in designing social systems, the informational basis for alignment, how preferential models fail to capture what people truly care about, the limitations of markets and voting as preference-based systems, critiques ...
Mark as Played
September 11, 2025 • 94 mins
Jim talks with John Preston about his book 40 Flushes to Grow Your Business: The World's #2 Business Series, which is designed to be read during bathroom breaks. They discuss breaking free from being a one-person show, hiring self-guided employees, the importance of business owner support networks, clarity on business goals & personal objectives, the five-gear growth machine business metrics model, marketing fundamentals & investme...
Mark as Played
September 9, 2025 • 87 mins
Jim talks with Pablos Holman about the ideas in his new book Deep Future: Creating Technology That Matters. They discuss deep tech versus shallow tech, computational modeling and simulation for real-world problems, the hacker mindset, the role of inventors, nuclear power and renewable energy solutions, population growth, development challenges, space-based solar power, the likelihood of fusion power, mistakes in German energy polic...
Mark as Played
September 4, 2025 • 113 mins
Jim talks with Brendan Graham Dempsey about the ideas in his book Psyche and Symbolic Learning, volume 2 in his Evolution of Meaning series. We discussed hierarchical complexity, stage theories of development, constructivism & realism, dynamic skill theory, the Lectical Scale, ego development & consciousness, meaning systems & worldviews, cross-cultural developmental patterns, statistical distributions of developmental stages, the ...
Mark as Played
September 2, 2025 • 89 mins
Jim talks with James Fadiman and Jordan Gruber about the findings in their recent book Microdosing for Health, Healing, and Enhanced Performance. They discuss the definition of microdosing, "subthreshold" vs "subperceptual," typical doses, current usage statistics & demographics, its legal status & classification history, LSD, psilocybin, why cannabis isn't suitable for microdosing, mechanisms of action, dosing protocols, anti-infl...
Mark as Played
August 26, 2025 • 55 mins
Jim talks with David Shapiro about how to use AI language models as research and writing tools. They discuss post-labor economics, the evolution of AI tools from GPT-2 through GPT-4, using AI as a learning companion vs. relying on it completely, David's AI tool stack, exploring new domains, using NotebookLM for document management & searching, AI writing and editing techniques, critique and perspectives through personas, the rapid ...
Mark as Played
August 21, 2025 • 92 mins
Jim talks with Lawrence Cahoone about his book The Orders of Nature and his systematic approach to naturalist philosophy. They discuss fallibilist & local metaphysics, objective relativism, the rejection of simples, Jim's materialism which grants emergence first-class existence, Wimsatt's notion of emergence & nonaggregativity, downward causation & pruning rules, natural complexes, Aristotle's four causes & the use of purpose in bi...
Mark as Played
August 14, 2025 • 75 mins
Jim talks with Adam B. Levine about humanity's rapidly changing relationship with AI and "thinking on demand." They discuss the GPT-5 release & pricing, open-source AI models, the three-dimensional framework of AI advancement (models & hardware & agent frameworks), the evolution of vibe coding, development tools, agent-based development, AI implementation strategies with humans in the loop, the Midnight Protocol project, Vendor Rel...
Mark as Played
August 12, 2025 • 99 mins
Jim talks with David Shapiro about his six-part series on "post-labor economics." They discuss historical economic transitions, the logic of labor substitution, automation & AI's impacts on employment, the four basic human economic offerings (strength, dexterity, cognition & empathy), labor as a societal pillar, the pyramid of prosperity (universal basic services, collectively owned public & private assets, conventional private as...
Mark as Played
August 8, 2025 • 56 mins
Jim talks with Ken Stanley about the Fractured Entanglement Representation hypothesis in deep learning neural networks. They discuss open-endedness in AI systems & evolution, the Picbreeder experiment & its significance, the objective paradox of finding things by not looking for them, comparisons between Picbreeder & SGD networks, visual differences in internal representations, weight sweep experiments, modular vs tangled decomposi...
Mark as Played
August 5, 2025 • 129 mins
Jim talks with Ed Latimore about his new book Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business: Boxing and the Art of Life. They discuss Ed's chess playing & street hustling, size differences in modern heavyweight boxing, growing up in Pittsburgh's Hill District, childhood trauma & violence, his relationships with his single mother & absent father, middle school & gifted programs, the cocaine prank incident, his high school football career, aca...
Mark as Played
August 1, 2025 • 98 mins
Jim talks with Zak Stein and Marc Gafni about consciousness, attention, and value as fundamental aspects of reality. They explore continuity & discontinuity in evolution, phenomenology & naturalism, emergence, value theory, selection theory, mathematics as both discovered & created, pre-life organic chemistry, sexual selection & evolutionary dynamics, attraction/allurement across different emergent layers, evolving value, first pri...
Mark as Played
July 25, 2025 • 44 mins
Jim talks with Chris Colin about his recent Atlantic article "That Dropped Call with Customer Service? It Was on Purpose." They discuss customer service hell & Chris's personal story with Ford, the concept of sludge, intentional friction in customer service systems, call center operations & tactics, high-quality customer service approaches, the impact of short-term CEO tenures on service quality, the Biden administration's attempts...
Mark as Played
July 24, 2025 • 64 mins
Jim talks with Lee Cronin about Chemify, his startup that aims to automate chemistry through "chemifarms" that turn code into molecules. They discuss Chemify as an AWS for chemistry, the development of a chemical programming language & its evolution to Turing completeness, quantum vs classical chemistry computation, open source tools & academic access, robotics & automation in chemistry, catalyst discovery & optimization, integrati...
Mark as Played
July 22, 2025 • 89 mins
Jim talks with Nicholas Humphrey about the ideas in his 2023 book Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness. They discuss the distinction between sentience & consciousness, access consciousness vs phenomenal consciousness, terminology in consciousness studies, ring-fencing theories, Nicholas's early experiments with phosphenes, the discovery of blindsight in monkeys, his relationship with Helen the monkey, color preferences in monk...
Mark as Played
July 10, 2025 • 78 mins
Jim talks with Samo Burja about his report on the defense startup Anduril's plan to modernize the U.S. military. They discuss "live players vs. dead players," AI adoption & cognitive tools, Anduril's background & naming origin, military technology modernization, software-defined conflicts, autonomous & software-enabled weapons, sensor deployment & data collection, the Lattice software platform, hardware offerings including drone & ...
Mark as Played
Jim talks with Richard David Hames, picking up from the ideas in his recent Facebook essay about the decline of Western civilization. They discuss the retreat from truth in politics & institutions, postmodernism's impact on rationality, China's governance model, the failure of democratic institutions, wealth inequality & social stratification, the liberation of women as our era's defining achievement, climate change denial, the fut...
Mark as Played
Popular Podcasts
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, And Charlamagne Tha God!
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com