The Jim Rutt Show

Mar 31 2025 410 ep. 76 mins 6.5k

The Jim Rutt Show Podcast artwork

Crisp conversations with critical thinkers at the leading edge of science, technology, politics, and social systems.

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EP 295 John Robb on How a Networked Organization Blitzed D.C.

Mar 31 2025 58 mins

Jim talks with John Robb about the ideas in his recent essay "Blitzing DC," about how a networked organization took over Washington. They discuss the early roots of network warfare in Iraq, McLuhan-esque societal rewiring, open source dynamics & plausible promise, the Arab Spring & Occupy movements, empathy triggers, Trump's 2016 campaign as a hybrid swarm, The_Donald as a meme amp

EP 294 Timothy Clancy on an AI Cold War

Mar 28 2025 75 mins

Jim talks with Timothy Clancy about wicked mess problems & the potential for a new Cold War centered on AI. They discuss the evolution from chat-based to reasoning AI, military applications, social & systemic complexity in national security, the scaling hypothesis, China vs US competition, DeepSeek R1 model implications, export controls on GPU chips, Taiwan's strategic importance,

EP 293 Brendan Graham Dempsey on Cosmic Teleology and Emergence Vectors

Mar 25 2025 75 mins

Jim talks with Brendan Graham Dempsey, picking up on a disagreement they had on Facebook about the teleology of the universe. They discuss Aristotle's influence on the topic, Terrence Deacon's work on naturalizing teleology, the distinction between purpose & goal-directed behavior, cosmic teleology, Telhard de Chardin's "Omega Point," Whitehead's relational teleology, Ilya Prigogin

EP 292 Emil Ejner Friis on Building a Listening Society

Jim talks with Emil Ejner Friis about political metamodernism and what comes after postmodernism. They discuss the "woke vacuum" & its failure to include common folks, psychosocial problems vs material challenges in Western countries, Jim's pushback on postmodernism, Trump as the first postmodern president, personal vs institutional change, emotional states & leadership, late-stage

EP 291 Jeff Sebo on Who Matters, What Matters, and Why

Mar 13 2025 83 mins

Jim talks with Jeff Sebo about the ideas in his book The Moral Circle: Who Matters, What Matters, and Why. They discuss the concept of the moral circle, harming cats vs harming cars, the case study of Happy the elephant, Descartes' view of animals, phenomenal consciousness, Thomas Nagel's bat argument, the Google engineer who claimed LaMDA was conscious, the substrate dependence of

EP 290 Mark Stahlman on Trump as the Avatar of the Digital Paradigm Shift

Mar 11 2025 84 mins

Jim talks with Mark Stahlman about Trump as an avatar of the current digital transformation. They discuss the GameB movement & complexity theory, predictions made to the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, security through development as alternative to war, the three spheres (East, West, Digital), China's approach to digital vs. the Western approach, Catholic social teaching princ

EP 289 Adam B. Levine on AI-Powered Programming for Non-Developers

Mar 06 2025 86 mins

Jim talks with Adam B. Levine about AI programming aids for non-techies and the future of Bitcoin. They discuss Adam's background as a "technical non-technical" person, the evolution from manual LLM prompting to using IDEs, Windsurf as an AI-first IDE, Claude 3.7's thinking mode, productivity improvements with AI coding tools, different platforms like Cursor and Cline, the "pure id

EP 288 BJ Campbell on Cops, Belief, and Chainsaw-Faced Robot Dogs

Mar 04 2025 79 mins

Jim talks with BJ Campbell about the ideas in his Substack essay "On Cops, Belief, and Chainsaw Faced Robot Dogs." They discuss forms of social control, absolute police states vs. belief states, the role of belief vs. actual enforcement in maintaining order, the noble lie concept & Plato's original formulation, the 2020 crime spike & "defund the police" movement, the history of pol

EP 287 Jonathan Rauch on the Epistemic Crisis

Feb 27 2025 97 mins

Jim talks with Jonathan Rauch about the ideas in his book The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. They discuss the epistemic crisis, Plato's Theaetetus, Trump & propaganda techniques, the Constitution of Knowledge as a framework for epistemics, the "marketplace of ideas" metaphor, the reality-based community, the personal-institutional spiral, the social funnel of knowle

EP 286 Bob Levy on the Use and Abuse of Presidential Power

Feb 24 2025 64 mins

Jim talks with Bob Levy about presidential powers, their history, and their potential for abuse. They discuss the nature of the presidential pardon, recent controversial pardons by Trump & Biden, proposed reforms, 3 main purposes of the pardon, court blocks on executive actions, the firing of federal employees, the Impoundment Control Act, immigration & deportation under Trump, pre