The Jim Rutt Show The Jim Rutt Show

Jim talks with Charles Eisenstein about the environment and the ideas in his book Climate: A New Story. They discuss Charles's involvement with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s presidential campaign, his first encounter with the idea of global warming, the problems with carbon fundamentalism, environmental derangement, the importance of forests to the water cycle, a world of concrete & shit, escaping the mentality of domination, humans as a custodial species, reversing the course of separation, the healing potential of land, developments in regenerative land use, the commodification pressure of our money system, changes in consciousness, the co-evolution of consciousness & systems, diverting resources from the military to restoration, and much more.

Jim talks with Matt Welsh about the ideas in his essay "The End of Programming," arguing that coding as we know it will soon be obsolete. They discuss ChatGPT's ability to perform logical reasoning, whether it thinks, its utility as a programming aid, skipping code entirely, using language models as computational engines, problem decomposition, streamlining the interface between models and databases, complex customer service, the accessibility of fine-tuning, Jim's LLM scriptwriting project, custom hardware for language models, learning to speak with aliens, democratizing computing abilities, moral conundrums & value-laden choices, training introspection, avoiding an erosion of trust, short-term opportunities for small dev teams, advice for recent college grads, and much more.

Jim talks with Matthew Pirkowski about the kinds of consensus mechanisms that can be used to secure blockchains. They discuss active inference, proof of work vs proof of stake & the relationship between them, auto-catalytic networks, proof of work in emergent nature, what consensus means & why it needs to be protected, integrity of the ledger, an analogy with clocks, accelerating entropy, photosynthesis, exploring vs exploiting tensions in emergent systems, coordinating central points of reference, energetic openness, the relationship between energy & information, resistance to manipulation, postmodernity & symbols untethered to reality, the evolution of evolvability, adaptive drift, a stable foundation for building infrastructure, the tight relationship between information theory & thermodynamics, whether existing cryptocurrencies exist in a Goldilocks zone vs an arbitrary spot in design space, bugs of global reserve currencies, whether investing in Bitcoin is an anti-social act, currency vs wealth, personal stores of abstract potential energy, and much more.

Jim talks with Rafe Kelley about the parkour-based movement system he created and teaches, Evolve Move Play. They discuss electromagnetic pulses, combining parkour & martial arts, the importance of nature exploration for children, the historical roots of parkour, using limbs to overcome obstacles, what makes parkour natural, rough play as an antidote to infantilization, healthy play culture, humans as arboreal animals, the quantification of extreme sports, love & amateurism, ekstasis, building selves worth esteeming, the professionalization of sexuality, dangers of AI porn, building alternative communities, building virtues, values, and norms, EMP as virtue development, parkour as an exemplar of GameB, procedural, perspectival, and participatory knowing, the embodiment of virtue, music & community-building, and much more.

Jim talks with Peter Wang about his idea that meaning comes from making consequential choices. They discuss the immediacy of consequences, the modeling of causal loops, the subjective aspect of causality, two hundred varieties of shampoo, the intersubjective realm, middle-class consumer culture, the desire to be a live player, examples from Succession and Mad Men, the manufacture & commodification of desire, alternative systems of meaning, levels of patterns, false consequence, atomized individualism & the roots of the meaning crisis, the Ruttian meaning of life, negative vs positive freedom, Krishnamurti's choiceless awareness, the new ability to create networked tribes, the liminal, clockwork oranges, facing the Hofstadter terror, taking our place in the mandala of the universe, and much more. 

Jim talks with Bruce Damer about genius and the use of psychedelics for creative thinking. They discuss the roots of genius, the discovery of fire, Einstein's four great discoveries, building blocks of genius, endotripping vs exotripping, set, setting, & setup, the danger of over-relying on LLMs for knowledge, geniuses in the scanner, crosstalk in the brain, the prepared mind, Bruce's lifelong experience of endotripping, rapid retripping, lucid dreaming, getting psilocybin from Terence McKenna, ayahuasca, Steve Jobs's LSD experience, external constraints, Bruce's epiphany about the origins of life, hypothesizing as a non-rational process, the stoned ape theory, psychedelics in Eleusis, human brain sizes & assisted birth, hypnagogic trip states, casualties of the early psychedelic era, a call for serious practitioners, a proposal for string theorists, Charles Manson & the importance of screening for wisdom, the increasing need for genius, and much more.