The Jim Rutt Show

Jim has a wide-ranging talk with Jeremy Lent about his latest book, The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe. They discuss the dominant worldview in today's advanced economies, its lack of scientific basis, how worldviews shape the direction of history, myths of selfishness & separation, how viewing nature as resource leads to self-reinforcing feedback loops, money-on-money return, origins of capitalism & colonialism, the extractive mindset as a European development, a complex-systems approach to spirituality, "natural attractors" as spirits, discovering Taoism, wu wei & yu wei, animate vs conceptual consciousness, integrated consciousness, yu wei as multipolar trap, problems with using GDP as a metric, improving the relationship between I & self, a democracy of consciousness, contemplative & embodied practices as a way of moving the brain toward new attractors, false ideas about evolution e.g. the selfish gene, how cells began cooperating, how humans might do the same, changing our social operating system, stepping off the hedonic treadmill, fixing transnational corporations, and much more.

Jim has a wide-ranging talk with Samuel Scarpino on Covid-19 epidemiology and disease surveillance. They discuss some of the biggest surprises in Covid research since its beginning, the importance of understanding the evolutionary trajectory of the virus, the oscillation pattern of case rates, wastewater-based epidemiology, current bottlenecks in gene sequencing, the latest evidence about Omicron's contagiousness & severity, obstacles created by HIPAA protections, how to build a data system that will be ready for the next pandemic, the role of interdisciplinary complex-systems research centers, a disaster scenario that keeps Scarpino up at night, herd immunity, social contact data from phones & what it would cost to process it all, how much more the US spends on weather data & defense than on pandemic data, and much more.

Jim has a wide-ranging talk with Joshua Vial, co-founder of the multifaceted social-impact support network Enspiral. They discuss Enspiral's origin story, its organizational structure, tradeoffs between exploration & exploitation, coherent pluralism, how to do a company without bosses, keeping product & consulting companies separate, the origins of Loomio in Occupy Wall St. consensus processes, how to invite external investors without shitshow VC culture, building to sell vs building to keep, Enspiral as intentional-contributor collider, face-to-face vs virtual collaborations, effects of international growth, the Golden Pandas livelihood pod, unsettling permission-seeking habits in communities, management theories as picking grounds for practices, Dev Academy & cutting out "ball-chasing" in education, Web3 as a chance for citizens to win, DAOs as possible next unit of human culture, worthy social-impact projects in the blockchain space, and much more.

Jim talks with Henry Elkus and Sam Feinburg, founders of the global problem solving organization Helena. They discuss how Helena identifies society's big problems, the group's origin story, how they attracted a large membership of people who are first-class in their domains, facilitating The Covid Network to quantitatively prioritize supply distribution, creating the Shield Project to address dire vulnerabilities in the electrical grid, Energy Vault's method of gravity energy storage, over-siloing of issue areas & problem-solving modalities, why it's important to proliferate both social & hard technologies, and much more.

Jim has a wide-ranging talk with neuroscientist Antonio Damasio about his latest book, Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious. They discuss the importance of separating intelligence from the nervous system, feeling as the inaugural event of consciousness, distinguishing consciousness from mind, the permeability of intellectual & affective processes, debunking William James's "stream of consciousness" metaphor, interoception, proprioception, & exteroception, how anesthesia works, attention as the cursor of consciousness, introducing vulnerability into AI, and much more.

John Vervaeke joins Jim for the final episode of a five-part series examining the ideas put forward in Vervaeke’s popular YouTube series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. They discuss relevance's lack of essence, sacredness as inexhaustibility, separating cognitive indispensability from metaphysical necessity, religio & the perennial problems, whether Enlightenment++ principles can offer a place to stand, the need for new symbols of self-transcendence, reverse-engineering Enlightenment, mindfulness practices as serious play, the "religion of no religion," signal detection theory, a "collective dynamic Socrates," rationality's malleability, active open-mindedness, and much more.

Jim has a timely discussion with geophysicist Dorian Abbot, whose public lecture was recently canceled by MIT—Jim's alma mater—due to Dorian's views on affirmative action. They discuss the (unrelated) scientific content of the canceled lecture, Abbot's & Ivan Marinovic's proposed Merit, Fairness, and Equality (MFE) framework, the Chicago Principles, the Kalven Report, mainstream support for merit-based hiring decisions, the relationship between liberal humanism & academic freedom, results of a secret-ballot poll of MIT faculty, how Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) functions in current hiring systems, the goal of a university, what listeners can do to fight for academic freedom, a proposal for a Center for a Free Society at the University of Chicago, and much more.

John Vervaeke joins Jim for the fourth of a five-part series examining the ideas put forward in Vervaeke’s popular YouTube series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. They discuss Nietzsche as a prophet of the meaning crisis, the politicization of the quest for meaning, recreating religion, the deep functionality of Christianity, meaning cultivation, Newell & Simon's error, the essentialism heuristic, combinatorial explosions, the no-free-lunch theorem, relevance realization as the engine of general intelligence & its role in religio, secular wonder, "I" & "me," transjectivity & flow, the sense of sacredness, the importance of meta-meaning systems, the function & dangers of symbols, and much more.

John Vervaeke joins Jim for the third of a five-part series examining the ideas put forward in Vervaeke’s popular YouTube series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. They discuss altered states of consciousness, phenomenology as clue to functionality, fluency, weakening egocentrism, ecologies of practice, the Solomon effect, complexification, Buddhism's intervention in parasitic processing, a corrective reading of dukkha, Alexander the Great & post-Alexandrian domicide, Stoicism as therapy, eros & agape, St. Augustine's grand synthesis, Thomas Aquinas's solidification of two-worlds mythology, Galileo's murder of the universe, the Enlightenment & Romanticism, genocidal implications of the True Self, and much more.

John Vervaeke joins Jim for the second of a five-part series examining the ideas put forward in Vervaeke’s popular YouTube series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. They discuss virtue & virtuosity, Plato's man-monster-lion model, hyperbolic discounting, agent & arena, Plato's parable of the cave, the continuity between Plato & Aristotle, personality vs character, Erich Fromm's idea of having vs being, modal confusion, reversal theory, mindfulness as meta-modal optimization, opponent processing, hierarchical complexity, mystical experiences & putting transformation above metaphysics, the danger of reifying consciousness, global workspace theory, the g factor, integrated information theory, an emerging consensus about the function of consciousness, and much more.