The Jim Rutt Show

Jan 30 2025 395 ep. 76 mins 6.4k

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 280 Rob Henderson on Luxury Beliefs

Jan 30 2025 74 mins

Jim talks with Rob Henderson about his book Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class and the concept of luxury beliefs. They discuss Rob's journey from foster care to Yale and Cambridge, Jim's background, the decline in two-parent families from 1960 to 2005, changing forms of elite hypocrisy, intra-elite competition, corporate adoption of woke beliefs, enforcemen

EP 279 Samuel Scarpino on H5N1 (Bird Flu) and Pandemic Risk

Jan 08 2025 66 mins

Jim talks with epidemiology expert Samuel Scarpino about the recent spread of H5N1 in dairy cows and its implications for public health. They discuss the historical context of H5N1, fatality rates, modeling the spread, network effects in disease transmission, current surveillance efforts, H5N1 transmission mechanisms, challenges of human respiratory transmission, lessons learned &

EP 278 Peter Wang on AI, Copyright, and the Future of Intelligence

Jan 02 2025 91 mins

Jim has a wide-ranging conversation with recurring guest Peter Wang on AI copyright frameworks and the rapidly changing tech landscape. They discuss "the Chattening" (ChatGPT's release in November 2022) & its impact, parallels between current AI & the invention of science, humans as narrow-band sensors, cybernetics & control systems, the unbearable slowness of being, the Platonic R

EP 277 Kristian Rönn on Darwinian Traps and How to Escape Them

Jim talks with Kristian Rönn, co-founder of the carbon accounting tech company Normative, about his book The Darwinian Trap: The Hidden Evolutionary Forces That Explain Our World (and Threaten Our Future). They discuss Darwinian traps & demons, the parable of Picher, Oklahoma, the "cost of doing business" mentality, beauty filter arms races, perverse incentives in science, Goodhar

EP 276 Carolyn Dicey Jennings on Attention and Mental Control

Dec 19 2024 96 mins

Jim talks with philosopher and cognitive scientist Carolyn Dicey Jennings about her book Attention and Mental Control. They discuss mental control vs self-control, the ping pong metaphor, prioritization vs single-threaded focus, voluntary vs automatic attention, perceptual processing & conscious attention, 3 forms of interest, meditation & mind wandering, hyperfocus as a superpower

EP 275 Rachel Winkler on Mass Deportation

Dec 17 2024 67 mins

Jim talks with lawyer and former DHS policy person Rachel Winkler about Trump's promise to carry out a large-scale deportation operation. They discuss estimates of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., mixed-status households & the aging undocumented population, the legal standing of an undocumented immigrant, types of undocumented immigrants, the process for pending deportation ord

EP 274 Richard Overy on Why War?

Dec 12 2024 59 mins

Jim talks with historian Richard Overy about his new book Why War? They discuss historians' shyness in thinking about the nature of war, a correspondence between Einstein & Freud, the meaning of the term, the "pacified past," the interplay between warfare & cooperation, recent ethological studies of chimpanzees, conformity, 4 major types of anthropological evidence, the status of w

EP 273 Gregg Henriques on the Unified Theory of Knowledge

Dec 03 2024 94 mins

Jim talks with Gregg Henriques about his new book UTOK: The Unified Theory of Knowledge. They discuss the problem the book addresses, 3 vectors of knowing, the metacrisis, avoiding despair & techno-optimism, the enlightenment gap, the iQuad coin, the UTOK garden frame, a descriptive metaphysics for science, behavior & mind, endo-naturalism, 3 kinds of mindedness, webs of justificat

EP 272 Loribeth Ford Jarrell on Bespoke Education

Nov 19 2024 77 mins

Jim talks with Loribeth Ford Jarrell, the director of Sumplicity Math, a mathematics enrichment program for children. They discuss working with the neural characteristics & firing patterns of individual children, education going modular, the microschool movement vs supplementary education, tutorial services, individual assessment, 10 vector dials, Jim's education in proving the tea

EP 271 Lorraine Besser on the Art of the Interesting

Nov 05 2024 86 mins

Jim talks with Lorraine Besser about the ideas in her book The Art of the Interesting: What We Miss in the Pursuit of the Good Life and How to Cultivate It. They discuss the turning point in Lorraine's life that inspired the book, the meaning of the good life, pleasure vs eudaimonia, Stoicism & Epicureanism, unstructured cognitive engagement, the interesting, Seinfeld's relationshi