The Jim Rutt Show

John Vervaeke joins Jim for the first of a five-part series examining the ideas put forward in Vervaeke's popular YouTube series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. In this episode they focus on defining core concepts, including meaning, non-reductive science, symptoms of the meaning crisis, attention, shamanism, psychotechnology, ritual, serious play, participatory vs perspectival knowing, the flow state, mindfulness, the Bronze Age collapse & transition into the Axial Age, two-worlds mythologies, faith as loving commitment, the perniciousness of romantic comedies, kairos & its relation to Game B, the Socratic revolution, Socrates's imprecation to "know thyself," lying & bullshit, availability bias, salience vs transformation, and much more.

Zak Stein & Jim have a wide-ranging talk inspired by two recent Consilience Project essays on the information war & propaganda. They discuss the culture wars as a case of mutually assured destruction, distinguishing education from propaganda, developing widespread resistance to propaganda, epistemic nihilism, key indicators of propaganda, the function of thought-terminating clichés, a typology of propaganda, leaders' failure to educate rather than propagandize regarding Covid vaccines, modulating noise & chaos in the information ecosystem, redirecting technological innovation toward new goals of educational development, and much more.

Lene Rachel Andersen & Jim have a wide-ranging talk about the meaning of Bildung & the growing Bildung movement, inspired by last week's Global Bildung Festival. They discuss easily transferable "horizontal" knowledge vs. emotional, social, & bodily development, the need to confront exponentially increasing rates of change, appropriate learning for appropriate ages, the wasted effort of teaching math to young children, participatory knowing in childhood play, how to expand our sense of responsibility, ten concentric circles of belonging, humans as a custodial species, applying Kant's categorical imperative to food choices, highlights of the Bildung Festival, and more.

Jim has a wide-ranging talk with returning guest Robert Tercek about competing visions of the metaverse, centralized vs. decentralized models, the importance of interoperability standards, differences between VR & AR, digital twins, digitization of the supply chain, AI-enabled creation of artificial worlds, Unity’s democratizing approach to 3D creation tools, the metaverse's potential for social harm, Marc Andreessen’s statements about “Reality Privilege,” whether the metaverse will be an extension of digital feudalism, mental-health externalities of social media, keeping “useless humans” occupied versus a world where everyone can be useful, meaning & craftsmanship in digital worlds, the challenge of 3D search, the illusion of “free” services, and more.

Jim has a wide-ranging talk with evolutionary biologist Heather Heying about her & Bret Weinstein’s new book, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life. They discuss hyper-novelty & its challenges, niche-switching as the human niche, the naturalistic fallacy, the Ancient Beringians’ entry into the Americas, the hubris of reductionism & neo-cornucopianism, humans as the blankest slates, metaphoric & literal campfires, scaling laws in social groups, theory of mind, social media’s flattening effects including flattened affects, social media sabbaticals, the Sucker’s Folly, human population explosion, the Personal Responsibility Vortex, Proto-B communities, the lineage view of evolution, understanding exponentials & fat-tail events, culture as evolutionary adaptation (the Omega Principle), humanity’s Fourth Frontier, and more.

Jim talks with evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, discoverer of Dunbar's number, about his latest book, Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships. They cover the importance of friendship, the loneliness epidemic, loneliness as a signal rather than a disease, oxytocin & endorphins, physical touch, synchrony & other ways of triggering the endorphin system, new data sources in the study of social networks, the social brain hypothesis, theory of mind/mind-reading, limitations of our mind-simulating capacities, the discovery of the Dunbar number(s), examples of the pattern from Navy Seals to Christmas cards, the mystery behind the scaling law of three, the seven pillars of friendship, costs & benefits of diversity, why friendships end, and more.

John Robb & Jim meet for a timely discussion about the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, the current mess at the Kabul airport, how the Taliban are controlling the flow of evacuations, likely backroom negotiations, dynamics of the intelligence and command failures that led us here, the U.S.’s failure to switch from guerilla warfare to maneuver warfare, the overreliance on diplomacy, OODA loops & shears, tempo change, how the Taliban could force the U.S. into an overland retreat & whether they will, the brutality of nation-building, Afghanistan & Iraq as foreign-policy distractions, further examples & consequences of “assumption rot”, and more.

Robert Tercek & Jim continue their conversation in this wide-ranging chat about learning & education. They discuss the dematerialized economy, technological unemployment risk, underestimating software automation, AI as a career superpower, changing cost & quality of college, what education is for, Bryan Caplan’s challenge to the value of college, COVID & online education, online educational resource curation, VR learning potential, the metaverse discovery problem, why higher ed hasn’t vaporized, microcredentials & the push for alternative credentialing, 2 vaporized-education business proposals, and more.

Jonathan Rowson & Jim continue their conversation by exploring Jonathan's recent essay, Tasting the Pickle: Ten flavours of meta-crisis and the appetite for a new civilization. They cover contextualizing our entangled meta-crisis, finding better language, limits of intellect & usefulness of felt experience in sensemaking (tasting the pickle), dividing vs distinguishing, mapping the pickle, saving humanity & spreading life, the "is it too late" question & our collective action problem, hidden aspects of the pickle, unifying vs pluralistic views, spiritual bypassing, metaphysical speculation, defining "meta", 10 flavors of the pickle, and more.

Jim Rutt Show producer, Jared Janes & Jim announce some changes to the podcast, preview upcoming guests, talk about the Jim Rutt Show (JRS) origin story, Jim's guest prep process, the evolution of JRS, its impact on Jim's reading habits, reading fiction, civilization collapse, contemporary influencers & counter cultures, curation as a service, what Jim likes the most about the podcast, core JRS themes, the art of yarning, stand out episodes & collaborations that came from the podcast, meditation, and more.