Jim talks with Adam Lake about Reboot America, a project aimed at reforming American democracy. They discuss existential threats facing humanity, the two-party corporate duopoly, a Princeton study on policy preferences, first-past-the-post voting problems, campaign finance issues, social media's role in polarization, wealth & income inequality, Bernie Sanders's Fight Oligarchy tour, the Democratic Party's cultural baggage, Trump country perspectives, courage in leadership, how the quality of leadership has changed over time, the "politician's pledge" & its six points, ranked-choice voting, proportional representation systems, liquid democracy, the People's Agenda concept, lessons from the Emancipation Party & GameB, and much more.

Episode Transcript

The Politics Industry, by Katherine Gehl

JRS EP219 with Katherine Gehl on Breaking Partisan Gridlock

RebootAmerica.us

No Labels - Our Ideas

The Perception Gap

Voice of the People (vop.org)

Adam Lake is the founder of Reboot America, an emerging framework for a movement aimed at revitalizing the American political system by realigning it with the founding principles of our democratic republic. With a background in economics and experience in business development for a digital identity company whose technology empowers individuals to protect their civil liberties in the digital world, he brings a pragmatic approach to tackling systemic political challenges.

Currently, he is engaging with voices in the democracy renewal and independent media spaces, exploring how to build momentum for a transpartisan effort that challenges the entrenched two-party duopoly. He's not a politician or a pundit—just someone determined to find a way forward.

Jim talks with Sara Walker about the ideas in her new book Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence. They discuss Sara's path from theoretical physics to astrobiology, the biggest scientific questions, philosophy of science & theory development, historical approaches to origin of life research, Schrödinger's negative entropy concept, Prigogine's dissipative systems, information as a causal force at life's origin, emergence as a scientific concept, constructor theory of information, Assembly Theory as a framework for detecting life, assembly index & copy number as measurable properties, complexity vs randomness, the physical nature of time in complex systems, how Assembly Theory redefines life beyond Earth-centric definitions, planetary-scale perspectives on life's origins, measurements of exoplanet atmospheres, addressing the error catastrophe problem, Sara's collaboration with Lee Cronin, the application of Assembly Theory to minerals & planetary atmospheres, the Fermi Paradox & observational horizons, constraints on Drake equation parameters, and much more.

Episode Transcript

Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence, by Sara Walker

JRS Currents 100 - Sarah Walker and Lee Cronin on Time as an Object

The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex, by Harold Morowitz

The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution, by Stuart Kauffman

Sara Walker is a theoretical physicist interested in the origins of life and discovering alien life on other worlds. She is Deputy Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, a Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University and an External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Her recognition as a leading scientist includes a Stanley Miller Early Career award, and a Schmidt Sciences Polymath award. Her research team at ASU is internationally regarded for their work at the forefront of building fundamental, and testable theory for understanding what life is. She is also widely regarded for her public intellectual work advancing our understanding of life, which includes her popular science book Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence and appearances on podcasts such as Star Talk with Neil de Grasse Tyson, the Joe Rogan Experience, and the Lex Fridman podcast.

Jim talks with Ashley Hodgson about her YouTube series "The New Enlightenment" and its heterodox perspectives on economics and social systems. They discuss Iain McGilchrist's influence & his book "The Matter with Things," economic mythology & its role in upholding the current system, the Bernays era of programmed consumerism, GDP growth myths, destructive growth value, problems with GDP, resource extraction vs other forms of growth, Galbraith's economics, corporate accountability structures, distortions in the information environment, changes in management compensation, the consumer sovereignty myth, the role of the technostructure, manufactured desires vs actual needs, behavioral economics & rationality, problems with "debunking" mindset, the meta-crisis, sense-making challenges, voice & exit rights, coherent pluralism, the "creepy utopia" problem, and much more.

Episode Transcript

The New Enlightenment (YouTube channel)

The Matter with Things, by Iain McGilchrist

JRS EP 154 - Iain McGilchrist on The Matter with Things

The Economics of Innocent Fraud, by John Kenneth Galbraith

The New Industrial State, by John Kenneth Galbraith

Debt: The First 5,000 Years, by David Graeber

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, by Shoshana Zuboff

Ashley Hodgson is an economics professor and a YouTuber. Her teaching history includes behavioral economics, health care economics, digital industries, blockchain economics, public health, ageing, and game theory, among other courses. She enjoys co-teaching as a way of fostering interdisciplinary dialogues and has co-taught courses with faculty in anthropology, psychology, statistics, and biology. Hodgson’s YouTube channel, The New Enlightenment, looks at paradigm shifts in economics, governance and knowledge systems, and parallels her own research and book writing.

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 amplifier, the Blue Network's counter-response, the George Floyd protests & moral framework, censorship & 'the long night', digital rights & moderation, the Ukraine conflict & swarm response, the Red Network reconfiguration, digital ledgers & truth-seeking accounts, the professionalization of Red digital warriors, network decision-making at a societal level, the government contracting corruption, defense procurement issues, the D.C. area wealth concentration, the future of network organizations, and much more.

Episode Transcript

Global Guerrillas (Substack)

JRS EP 254 - John Robb on What Went Wrong with America

"Blitzing DC," by John Robb

"The Open-Source War," by John Robb (New York Times)

"Musk and Moderation," by Jim Rutt (Quillette)

John Robb is an author, inventor, entrepreneur, technology analyst, astro engineer, and military pilot. He’s started numerous successful technology companies, including one in the financial sector that sold for $295 million and one that pioneered the software we currently see in use at Facebook and Twitter. John’s insight on technology and governance has appeared on the BBC, Fox News, National Public Radio, CNBC, The Economist, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek. John served as a pilot in a tier-one counter-terrorism unit that worked alongside Delta and Seal Team 6. He wrote the book Brave New War on the future of national security, and has advised the Joint Chiefs of Staff, NSA, DoD, CIA, and the House Armed Services Committee.

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, multipolar trap & arms race dynamics, power & chip requirements, training vs implementation costs, context scaling in reasoning AI, innovation in AI efficiency, models & simulations in military planning, validation challenges, statistical distributions vs single predictions, Taiwan conflict scenarios & deterrence strategies, operational causality, the strategic importance of the Straits of Malacca, and much more.

Episode Transcript

"Applying AI to Strategic Warning," by Anna Knack, Nandita Balakrishnan, and Timothy Clancy

JRS EP57 - Timothy Clancy on Russia's Mid-Game

JRS EP248 - Timothy Clancy on the Israel-Hamas War

"MegaMullet: The DeepSeek Moment – The Start of an AI Cold War," by Timothy Clancy

Timothy Clancy is an Assistant Research Scientist at START specializing in studying wicked mess problems, including violence and instability, as complex systems. For over 30 years Timothy has helped stakeholders in all manner of organizations understand their wicked mess problems and work towards resolving them. This included prior work at IBM where he was the Chief Methodologist of Lean, Six Sigma, and Agile supporting Fortune 50, government, and military clients to navigate their own wicked messes in strategy, business models, and enterprise transformation.

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, Teilhard de Chardin's "Omega Point," Whitehead's relational teleology, Ilya Prigogine's dissipative structures, energy efficiency comparisons between organisms & stars, the cosmic imperative of entropy production, energy rate density as a complexity measure, whether entropy is the goal or a byproduct of complexification, origin of life as contingent or necessity, Alexander Bard's emergence vectors, questioning of the heat death hypothesis, cosmic expansion possibly preventing maximum entropy, Webb telescope findings, Lee Smolin's evolutionary universe theory, philosophical implications of cosmological narratives, the deepening of interiority in cosmic evolution, Nick Chater's "The Mind Is Flat" argument, the importance of intersubjectivity, language's role in human experience, AI development & emotions, critique of transhumanism, the need to defend your emergence vector, and much more.

Episode Transcript

Jim's initial Facebook post

JRS EP268 - Brendan Graham Dempsey on the Evolution of Meaning

The Evolution of Meaning: A Universal Learning Process, by Brendan Graham Dempsey

JRS EP157 - Terrence Deacon on Mind's Emergence from Matter

Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature, by Eric Chaisson

The Mind Is Flat, by Nick Chater

"The Last Question," by Isaac Asimov

Brendan Graham Dempsey is a writer, researcher, organic farmer, and the director of Sky Meadow Institute, an organization dedicated to "promoting systems-based thinking about the things that matter most." He graduated summa cum laude with a BA in religious studies and classical civilizations from the University of Vermont and earned his master's from Yale University, where he studied religion and culture. He is the author of Metamodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Cultural Logics and host of the Metamodern Spirituality Podcast. His primary interests include theorizing developments in culture after postmodernism, productively bridging the divide between science and spirituality, and developing sustainable systems for life to flourish. All of these lead through the paradigms of emergence and complexity, which inform all of his work.

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 financialized capitalism's effects on communities, European vs American approaches to industry/manufacturing, military alliances & European defense independence, the urban-rural divide in American politics, "internet trans" vs medical gender dysphoria, social media's role in amplifying cultural divisions, the intersubjective verification of the inter-objective, comparing the internet with the printing press, multi-party vs two-party political systems, the potential for American democratic renewal, and much more.

Episode Transcript

The Listening Society, by Hanzi Freinacht

Nordic Ideology, by Hanzi Freinacht

JRS EP36 – Hanzi Freinacht on Metamodernism

JRS EP53 – Hanzi Freinacht on the Nordic Ideology

JRS EP82 – Hanzi Freinacht on Building a Metamodern Future

JRS EP173 – Hanzi Freinacht on Metamodern Self-Help

Metamoderna (website/organization

Emil Ejner Friis is a theory artist and a teacher of metamodernism. He is a co-founder of Metamoderna and one of the writers behind Hanzi Freinacht. He has spent the last ten years trying to figure out how to create a listening society, a kinder and more developed society that deeply cares for the happiness and emotional needs of every citizen.

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 consciousness, a factory waste disposal dilemma, animal rescue triage scenarios, probability calculations in moral consideration, the "one in a thousand" threshold, computational constraints in moral calculations, human exceptionalism & its limitations, fully automated luxury communism & rewilding Earth, responsibilities to wild animals, humans as a custodial species, and much more.

Episode Transcript

The Moral Circle: Who Matters, What Matters, and Why, by Jeff Sebo

"What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" by Thomas Nagel

Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves: Why Animals Matter for Pandemics, Climate Change, and other Catastrophes, by Jeff Sebo

Ethics and the Environment, by Dale Jamieson

Jeff Sebo is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Affiliated Professor of Bioethics, Medical Ethics, Philosophy, and Law, Director of the Center for Environmental and Animal Protection, Director of the Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy, and Co-Director of the Wild Animal Welfare Program at New York University. His research focuses on animal minds, ethics, and policy; AI minds, ethics, and policy; and global health and climate ethics and policy. He is the author of The Moral Circle and Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves and co-author of Chimpanzee Rights and Food, Animals, and the Environment. He is also a board member at Minding Animals International, an advisory board member at the Insect Welfare Research Society, and a senior affiliate at the Institute for Law & AI. In 2024 Vox included him on its Future Perfect 50 list of "thinkers, innovators, and changemakers who are working to make the future a better place."

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 principles, neo-feudalism vs. the scribal paradigm, Humanity 2.0, Aristotelian concepts of soul & hylomorphism, Cyber Sabbath practices, transitions between oral/scribal/digital paradigms, technological change as evolutionary pruning, Jonathan Rauch's Constitution of Knowledge, memory & imagination as key faculties, versions of the Enlightenment project, Daoism & Eastern philosophy, coherent pluralism, and much more.

Episode Transcript

JRS EP 174 - Fred Beuttler and Mark Stahlman on Trivium University

Center for the Study of Digital Life

Exogenous (Mark's Substack)

The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin

Analogia: The Emergence of Technology Beyond Programmable Control, by George Dyson

JRS EP 287 - Jonathan Rauch on the Epistemic Crisis

Science and Civilization in China, by Joe Needham

Mark Stahlman is a biologist, computer architect and ex-Wall Street technology strategist. He is the President of the not-for-profit Center for the Study of Digital Life (CSDL, 501(c)3,  digitallife.center) and its educational project Trivium University (Triv U, trivium.university). He is also CEO of Exogenous, Inc. (EXO, exogenousinc.com), a strategic risk analysis group and on the editorial staff of its publication, the Three Spheres Newsletter (TSN). He studied for but did not complete advanced degrees in Theology (UofChicago) and Molecular Biology (UW-Mad). He has been widely interviewed and published, including teaching online courses (available on YouTube via 52 Living Ideas).

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 idea space" vs technical execution, the role of liberal arts people in tech teams, Bitcoin as digital gold, Schelling points in cryptocurrency, the US dollar as hegemonic currency, "pools of fools" theory, sovereign wealth funds moving into Bitcoin, El Salvador's Bitcoin investment, Texas and Wyoming considering sovereign Bitcoin funds, game theory of nation-state Bitcoin adoption, regulatory transitions, predictions about Bitcoin's future based on sovereign adoption, and much more.

Episode Transcript

The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, by Neal Stephenson

Speaking of Bitcoin Podcast (formerly Let's Talk Bitcoin!)

Adam B. Levine has spent over a decade pioneering disruptive technologies before they become mainstream. He launched one of the earliest Bitcoin podcasts, Let's Talk Bitcoin! (2013), founded Tokenly (2014)—one of the earliest companies exploring what could be done with blockchain tokens—and served as CoinDesk's first podcast editor (2019), hosting shows like Speaking of Bitcoin and Markets Daily. In 2021, he founded 330.ai, a startup building cutting-edge tools to boost creativity with AI.