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 relationship between semantic richness & structural complexity, justification systems theory & cultural evolution, and much more.

Episode Transcript

A Universal Learning Process, by Brendan Graham Dempsey (Volume 1)

Emergentism, by Brendan Graham Dempsey

In Over Our Heads, by Robert Kegan

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

EP 172 Brendan Graham Dempsey on Emergentism

EP 293 Brendan Graham Dempsey on Cosmic Teleology and Emergence Vectors

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 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-inflammatory effects, health applications, enhancement applications, contraindications & side effects, research methodologies & limitations, commercial potential, global adoption patterns, and much more.

Episode Transcript

Microdosing for Health, Healing, and Enhanced Performance, by James Fadiman and Jordan Gruber

The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide, by James Fadiman

Our Symphony of Selves, by James Fadiman and Jordan Gruber

JRS EP126 - Jordan Gruber & James Fadiman on Our Symphony of Selves

Autism on Acid, by Aaron Paul Orsini

Institute of Noetic Sciences

James Fadiman, Ph.D., is a prominent figure in the field of psychedelic research, particularly known for his work on microdosing psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin. Often called the “father of microdosing,” Fadiman has a long history in the study of psychedelics dating back to the 1960s, when he worked on studies involving LSD and creativity while at Stanford University. After psychedelics were banned in the U.S., Fadiman shifted his focus but returned to psychedelic research decades later. His book, The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys, has become a key resource for safe psychedelic exploration. In recent years, he has pioneered research on microdosing, examining its potential benefits for mental health, cognitive enhancement, and overall well-being.

Jordan Gruber, JD, MA, founded the early online Enlightenment.Com community. After practicing law at Cooley Godward and focusing on IP law at NASA’s Moffett Field, as well as working at GNOSIS Magazine, Jordan became “the Practical Wordsmith,” a writer, ghostwriter, editor, and writing coach speciliazing in transformational modalities and practices. Jordan has helped create cutting-edge works on everything from forensic audio and financial services to health, wellness, psychology, and spirituality. Recent editing credits include Cindy Lou Golin’s The Shadow Playbook (2023), Scott Rogers’s The Mindful Law Student (2022), and Lawrence Ford’s The Secrets of the Seasons (2020).

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 adoption of AI tools across industries, understanding limitations, challenges for AI startups, and much more.

Episode Transcript

JRS EP 317 - David Shapiro on Post-Labor Economics

David Shapiro is an American AI thought leader, author, YouTuber, and former IT infrastructure and automation engineer based in Raleigh, North Carolina. With over 16 years of experience in technology, including four years focused on artificial intelligence, Shapiro has emerged as a prominent voice in AI philosophy, cognitive architectures, and post-labor economics. His work centers on the societal and economic implications of AI, advocating for a future of post-scarcity and hyper-abundance where automation meets basic human needs at low cost.

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 biology, the distinction between teleonomy & teleology, the five orders of nature (physical, material, biological, psychological & cultural), characteristic time scales in emergence theory, why particular disciplines coevolved in intellectual traditions, Erik Hoel's theory about emergence having the highest causal power, natural religion & the fine-tuned constants of the universe, the choice between multiverse explanations & a single ground of nature, Darwin's views on divine purpose, comparisons to deists like Spinoza & Einstein, and much more.

Episode Transcript

The Orders of Nature, by Lawrence Cahoone

The Emergence of Value: Human Norms in a Natural World, by Lawrence Cahoone

The Feynman Lectures on Physics, by Richard Feynman

Lawrence Cahoone graduated with a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Stony Brook University in 1985. Cahoone's areas of specialization are American Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, Social and Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Culture, Metaphysics and Natural Science and Modernism and Postmodernism. Since 2000, Cahoone has taught at Holy Cross and is now currently an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Holy Cross. He has also written and published seven books in his career, including The Emergence of Value, The Orders of Nature, and Cultural Revolutions.

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 Relationship Management versus CRM, automated negotiation systems, the trillion-dollar opportunity in improving the infosphere, enshittification risks, local AI processing on personal devices, the future of AI agents as personal representatives, and much more.

Episode Transcript

Speaking of Bitcoin! Podcast

JRS EP 313 - Chris Colin on Why Customer Service Sucks

JRS EP 316 - Ken Stanley on the AI Representation Problem

The Intention Economy, by Doc Searls

Midnight Protocol

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.

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 assets, & residual wages), the pyramid of power (immutable civic bedrock, freedom to transact, radical transparency, direct programmable democracy, & forkable constitutional meta-governance), blockchain & cryptocurrency, radical financial transparency, liquid democracy, governance innovation, and much more.

Episode Transcript

"Post-Labor Economics pt. 1: The Rise of Automation," by David Shapiro on Substack

"You should let the human race die out," by David Shapiro on Substack

Why Nations Fail, by Daron Acemoğlu and James Robinson

The Bitcoin Standard, by Saifedean Ammous

"An Introduction to Liquid Democracy," by Jim Rutt

David Shapiro is an American AI thought leader, author, YouTuber, and former IT infrastructure and automation engineer based in Raleigh, North Carolina. With over 16 years of experience in technology, including four years focused on artificial intelligence, Shapiro has emerged as a prominent voice in AI philosophy, cognitive architectures, and post-labor economics. His work centers on the societal and economic implications of AI, advocating for a future of post-scarcity and hyper-abundance where automation meets basic human needs at low cost.

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 decomposition, implications for creativity & continual learning & generalization abilities, Unified Factored Representation as an alternative to FER, the relationship to grokking in neural networks, scaling considerations & evidence in larger models, potential methods to achieve UFR, connections to biological evolution and DNA representation, and much more.

Episode Transcript

Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective, by Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman

"Questioning Representational Optimism in Deep Learning: The Fractured Entanglement Representation Hypothesis" by Akarsh Kumar, Jeff Clune, Joel Lehman, and Kenneth Stanley

JRS EP137 - Ken Stanley on Neuroevolution

JRS EP130 - Ken Stanley on Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned

Kenneth O. Stanley is the Senior Vice President of Open-Endedness at Lila Sciences.  He previously led a research team at OpenAI also on the challenge of open-endedness. Before that, he was Charles Millican Professor of Computer Science at the University of Central Florida and was also a co-founder of Geometric Intelligence Inc., which was acquired by Uber to create Uber AI Labs, where he was head of Core AI research. He is an inventor of popular algorithms including NEAT, novelty search, and CPPNs. He has won more than 10 best paper awards and his original 2002 paper on NEAT also received the 2017 ISAL Award for Outstanding Paper of the Decade 2002 - 2012 from the International Society for Artificial Life.  He is also a coauthor of the popular science book, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective (published originally in the US by Springer), and has spoken widely on its subject.

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, academic struggles, attending University of Rochester, spending his father's life insurance money, his boxing career, the All American Heavyweights program, alcohol abuse, sobriety, Olympic trials, military service, a degree in physics, his current life as an author & speaker, and much more.

Episode Transcript

Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business: Boxing and the Art of Life, by Ed Latimore

"5 reasons why I quit boxing with only one loss," by Ed Latimore

"The book made me do it—why I'm boxing again," by Ed Latimore

Ed Latimore is a former professional heavyweight boxer, an amateur national champion, a competitive chess player, and a bestselling author with a B.A. in Physics from Duquesne University. He draws on his experiences in the boxing ring, in the classroom, and in recovery to teach people how to build grit and resilience.

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 principles & first values, the intimacy equation concept, desire as disclosing value, consciousness in animals vs simpler systems, machine consciousness, group selection theory, the evolution of complexity, the role of contingency & necessity, religious & materialist perspectives on value, and much more.

Episode Transcript

First Principles and First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come, by David J. Temple

The Abolition of Man, by C.S. Lewis

Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society, by Peter M. Senge and Joseph Jaworski

JRS EP301 - Zak Stein on K-12 Education in the AI Era

JRS EP240 - Stuart Kauffman on a New Approach to Cosmology

Dr. Zachary Stein is a Co-Founder of the Civilization Research Institute and the Center for World Philosophy and Religion. He was trained at the interface of philosophy, psychology, and education and now works in fields related to the mitigation of global catastrophic risk. He is a widely sought-after and award-winning speaker and a leading authority on the future of education and contemporary issues in human development.

Dr. Marc Gafni has been described as a world philosopher—a kind of galaxy heart brain—integrating wisdom from across multiple disciplines into what he has called a New Story of Value in response to the meta-crisis. He is the author of fifty books, including the award-winning A Return to Eros and Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment, with the academic Journal of Integral Theory and Practice dedicating an entire issue to his Unique Self Theory. Marc is founder with Ken Wilber of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, and President of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution, succeeding Barbara Marx Hubbard.

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 to address bureaucratic time tax, political implications of poor government services, administrative burden, coping mechanisms, consumer action possibilities, the psychological toll of dealing with poor service, Cory Doctorow's concept of "enshittification," responses to Chris's article, and much more.

Episode Transcript

Chris Colin's website

"That Dropped Call with Customer Service? It Was on Purpose," by Chris Colin in The Atlantic (June 29, 2025)

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein

Chris Colin has written about problematic billionaires, contentious river law, Barack Obama’s Irish roots, COVID memorialization efforts, Japanese rent-a-friends, endangered pasta and more for the New York Times, the Atlantic, NewYorker.com, Pop-Up Magazine, 99% Invisible, Outside and Wired. His work has been featured in Best American Science & Nature Writing, and he created José Andrés's podcast. In 2020 he launched Six Feet of Separation, a free pandemic newspaper by and for kids — “a virtual newspaper for our troubled times,” Dan Rather called it.