The Jim Rutt Show

Robert Tercek talks to Jim about his book, Vaporized: Solid Strategies for Success in a Dematerialized World. They cover the usefulness of the vapor metaphor, centralization vs decentralization, the impact of closed application ecosystems, value in intangible assets, hardware vs software profitability, the telling story of Tower Records, rapid consumer market changes, big tech bundling strategies, the birth of mobile games, Epic Games vs Apple, digital goods, race to the VR metaverse, digitized smart cities, future TV evolutions, interactive TV & Twitch, switchboards vs platforms vs markets vs ecosystems, and much more.

Britt Adkins has a wide-ranging talk with Jim about the space industry. They explore prioritizing space funding & common misconceptions, power of the overview effect, global vs celestial community, cultural & political impacts, public participation strategies, physical / psychological adaptation to space & other planets, scaling humanity, urban planning in space, orbital debris & waste, environmental design dynamics, cultural commons in space, policy challenges & the Outer Space Treaty, diversity in the space industry, Elon Musk worship, off-earth self sufficiency, and much more.

Samo Burja joins Jim to talk about the Consilience Project: a project that aims to create positive cultural change in unique ways. They cover its founding goals & approaches, big tech's ability to amplify negative externalities, the rise of Trump, memetic noise & virality, how digital cultures change, types of articles, sense-making, meaning-making, choice-making & social norms, de-energizing & carbon accounting, unique ways the Consilience team collaborates & operates, new/upcoming articles, and much more.

Jason Mauck talks to Jim about what lead him to farm, how & why he started Constant Canopy, agriculture innovation dynamics & economics, finding crop combinations, turning manure into methane, utilizing Biochar, acquiring a meat-packing business, building direct-to-consumer meat distribution & strategy, farm integration models (livestock, agro, food, entertainment...), robotic berry picking, and much more.

Ken Stanley and Jim talk about his wide-ranging book Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective. They cover the no free lunch theorem, exploitations vs exploration, the myth & issues of objectives, the room of all images & adjacent possible, the problems & dynamics of deception, the power of serendipity, gradients of interestingness, intuition & novelty search, social change & innovation, emergent education & AI insights, incrementalism, risk & reward, Ken's unique journal idea, and much more.

Connor Leahy has a wide-ranging chat with Jim about the state & future of Deep Learning. They cover the history of EleutherAI, how GPT-3 works, the dynamics & power of scaling laws, ideal sampling rates & sizes for models, data sets, EleutherAI's opensource GTP-Neo & GTP-NeoX, PyTorch vs TensorFlow, TPU's vs GPU's, the challenge of benchmarking & evaluations, quadradic bottlenecks, broad GTP-3 applications, Connors thoughts on Jim's proposed GPT-3 research project, untapped GPT-3 potential, OpenAI's move away from opensource, alignment, AI safety, the unknown future, and much more.

Stephanie Lepp & Jim have a wide-ranging talk on her two-time Webby Award winning video series, Deep Reckonings. They start by covering the history & intentions of Deep Reckonings, deep fake technology, our post-truth crisis, and the pros & cons of irony. They then go on to talk about the Deep Reckonings videos: how she chose people to include, reflections on the Mark Zuckerberg video, the challenge of remaining in good faith, free speech & censorship, GameB, Joe Rogan & Alex Jones, reflections the Brett Kavanaugh video, analyzing Jim's own Robin DiAngelo deep reckoning script, capitalism, how the video scripts changed Stefanie, materialism, the role of conviviality in moving away from GameA, Potlatch, and more.

Forrest Landry & Jim continue their exploration of metaphysics by diving deep into a theorem that arises from Forrest's Immanent Metaphysics called Incommensuration Theorem (ICT). They start by defining the key concepts of ICT: symmetry & continuity, domains & their three elements, what it means to know something, measurement & comparison, sameness & difference, content & context, access control limits, time & causality, the principle of identity, and the nature of epistemic processes. Then, using these concepts, they go into what ICT says about possible relationships of continuity & symmetry, everyday & scientific implications of those revealed relationships, quantum interpretations from the view of ICT, and much more.

Jonathan Rowson & Jim have a wide-ranging talk about his book, The Moves That Matter: A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life. They cover chess as a meta metaphor, partial vs full info, randomness, freedom, concentration vs flow states, chess player ratings, mastery, embodied intuition, AI, fundamental dimensions of chess, utilizing time, climate change, wisdom, the strong vs the weak, religion & fundamental reality, metaphysical & ontological modesty, purpose, meaning, and much more.

Jordan Gruber & James Fadiman talk to Jim about their book, Your Symphony of Selves: Discover and Understand More of Who We Are. They cover our multiple selves, self vs mood, arguing with ourselves, David Bowie, history of the single-self assumption, connecting with our younger selves, self-switching benefits & methods, authenticity, contextuality, connections to mental illness, psychedelics & meditation, integrating selves, cultural differences, and much more.