The Jim Rutt Show

Joe Henrich talks to Jim about some of the key insights from his book, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar & Particularly Prosperous. They cover who the WEIRD people are & what impact their WERDness has on academic research, the impact of literacy on cognition, nature & nurture, the unique characteristics of WEIRD people, individualist vs relational dispositions, guilt vs shame cultures, how events in Middle Ages driven by the Catholic Church lead to WEIRDness, kin-based institutions & cultures, non-kin organizations in societies & their impacts, differing views on justice, individualism's role in innovation & wealth, wholistic vs analytical thinking, moral universalism, free will, possible WEIRD genetic drivers, and more.

In this Currents episode, Former U.S. Capitol Police Chief, Terry Gainer talks to Jim about his views on the January 6th riot at the U.S. Capitol. He discusses shortcomings in preparations, intelligence, and operations, highlights failure to adjust as new information came in, describes issues with the chain of command that impacted both preparation and response,  the role of "optics" in protest preparations, how macro failure arose from several smaller ones, examines claims of police & military collusion with the rioters, positive aspects of the law enforcement response, and much more.

In this Currents episode, Jim talks to Curtis Yarvin about some key points in his recent article, "2020, the year of everything fake". They start by talking about the ability &/or inability to take the world seriously, presentism, history, political formulas & their connection to governmental failure, the fall of the soviet union, and the stupidity quotient. They then explore aspects of the US institutional failures related to the COVID-19 response: virus origin, vaccines, conflicting incentives, lockdowns, and US governmental ops capacities today & in the past. They go on to talk about the Manhattan Project, oligarchy vs monarchy, and Curtis wraps the episode up by reciting a speech from 1933 to demonstrate how much has changed.

In this Currents episode, Jim talks to John Robb about the Jan 6th events at the US Capitol. They cover the intelligence & operations failures, the event as an example of domestic opensource insurgency, heterogeneous motivations & intentions among the protesters, self-organizing network tribal dynamics of the right & left, the conspiracy attractor for the insurgents, the criticality of this cultural moment, current & past US election distrust, consensus vs dissent on social media, Trump's role, the shifting political field & strategies, the Parler shutdown, big tech power & alternatives, and much more.

James Ehrlich talks to Jim about what makes a regen village, potential community organization types, how regen villages could learn from each other, utilizing machine learning, working with existing government regulations, the importance & urgent need for regen villages, the COVID-19 impact on demand, city living & de-urbanization, misconceptions of rural living, climate change, healthy living with less, materialism, funding villages, the future of pre-fab construction, plans for regen village agriculture, and more.

Debora Spar and Jim have a wide-ranging conversation on some of the insights in her book, Work Mate Marry Love: How Machines Shape Our Human Destiny. They start by focusing on our transition from forager to agricultural life: the creation of property & new family structures, roles & lifestyles of women, polygyny, hoe vs plow cultures, and bastard children. They then go on to cover highlights of the industrial revolution: fossil fuels & steam power impacts, the idea of progress, factory life, women's changing cultural expectation, class dynamics, washing machines & other impactful household appliances, freeing dynamics of automobiles & female birth control. They finish this chat by talking about more recent technological inventions & their potential impacts: in-vitro fertilization & genetic technologies, surrogacy, online dating, and more.

Clayton Banks talks to Jim about bridging the digital divide & the importance of internet access, essential tools & digital literacy, prioritizing digital infrastructure, possible COVID-19 impacts on the digital divide, capitalism with empathy, why & how he started Silicon Harlem, key relationships for community development, online meetups & business, internet costs & limitations, 5G tech potential & conspiracies, internet service competition & regulation, the power of the FCC, the racial disparity of computer access, keeping the digital divide non-partisan, and much more.

Sam Bowles talks to Jim about his book, A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution, co-authored with Herbert Gintis. They start by exploring cooperation in hunter-gatherer living: how human cooperation is different from other species', collaboration needed for big game hunting, egalitarianism & competition, hierarchy myths, impacts of weapons, how far cooperation goes back in history, the size & make-up of cooperative groups, altruism, and prerequisites for group selection. They then talk about collaboration in cultures more broadly: the wonder of nationalism, the pros of external threat, cultural progress, leadership, paradoxes of the prisoner's dilemma, differences in cultural cooperation, the "civilizing force of markets", game theory, punishing free-riders, the limitations of unconditional generosity, and more.

In this Currents episode, Jim and Barbara Oakley start by talking about her eclectic background & career, then go on to talk about her article, How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math: how a liberal arts person learned advanced math and became an engineering professor, fluency across domains, understanding-centered learning & the limits of procedural understanding, cultural-based education differences, slow educational evolution, online education, primary vs secondary biological learning, the direct instruction education method, the role of confidence in learning, comparing learning sports to learning math, and more.

Practicing business entity attorney Jason Wiener talks to Jim about prioritizing the mission in a business, downfalls of profit-maximizing models & intentions, employee ownership structures, understanding & planning for trade-offs, adaptive vs rigid structures, types of fundraising & their long-term business implications, cooperatives including the new multi-stakeholder form, adapting existing ownership structures, for-benefit corporations, land trusts, the types of businesses Jason has worked with, and more.