The Jim Rutt Show

In this short extra episode, Jim talks to Nora Bateson about how the pandemic is changing our relationship to time & mortality, recontextualizing the essential, non-linear future speculation, opportunities & dangers, the fragility of efficiency, changing how we work & travel, our political priorities, prioritizing community, family, locality, health and more.

In this short extra episode, Jim talks to Michelle Girvan about the network dynamics of COVID-19 spread, fat-tailed risks, unintuitive network insights, social distancing dynamics, efficiency vs robustness, challenges of modeling the backside of the curve, the need for testing, economic analysis, potential corporate roles, the Network Epidemiology Online Workshop Series, and more.

Author Laurence Gonzales talks to Jim about his book “Deep Survival” a fascinating look at survival in extreme conditions from both a cognitive science and “you are there” narrative perspective. Includes: multiple survival stories, the value of being cool in survival situations, preparing for an emergency, his perceive & believe heuristic, dangerous group dynamics, fighting stress with humor, learned helplessness, using emotion & reason properly in stressful situations, negative emotional capture, the value of failure, deep fatigue & rest, the value of being helpful, normal accidents, the nature of being lost, positive mental attitude, formal survival training, surviving survival, and more.

In this short extra episode, Jim talks to Jessica Flack about stressing & testing cultural organization styles, optimizing for wholistic robustness, acting-oriented sensemaking, a department of wicked risks, top-down vs bottom-up response dynamics, liminal spaces, speculative market safeguard techniques, long-term thinking, safety nets, inequality, and more.

In this short extra episode, Jim talks to Robin Hanson about possible dosage related effects on exposure and the related trade-offs of viral dose & deliberate infection strategies, the need for more investment in robustness, capacity vs flexibility, optimizing for adaptability, our lack of leadership, and more.

In this short extra episode, Jim talks to Simon DeDeo about what moving out of social isolation could be like, social norms for risk management, the wide diversity of COVID reactions, making sense personally & collectively, homeostasis & hysteresis, post-COVID impacts on data privacy, travel, free time, education, and more.

Professor Jessica Flack talks to Jim about micro vs macro causality in complex systems, coarse-graining, primate power hierarchies, downward causation, robustness, free will as a feeling, consciousness theories, theoretical biology, laws in adaptive systems, the non-spookiness of emergence, her work's philosophical connections, question asking vs answering, social engineering dynamics, Lord of The Rings & The Foundation Trilogy, agent-based modeling, social policing & punishment, how mature complexity science really is, Jessica's reflection on her experiences with primates, and more.

In this short extra episode, Jim talks to Bonnitta Roy about what it means to ‘stay with the trouble’, habitual behavior, the value of reflection, consumerism, scarcity & abundance, resourcefulness, the allure of going back to the rat race, system dependence vs interconnection, lack of community in the capitalist system, Game B, the downsides & narrow capabilities of monetary efficiency, and more.

In this short extra episode, Jim talks to Dr. Ben Goertzel about the economic & cultural impacts we could expect after the peak of COVID-19, the end of the tech backlash, income inequality, homeostasis & hysteresis, business travel bets from Jim & Ben, in-person vs virtual events, potential opportunities, cryptocurrency & blockchain, answering the cultural wakeup call, dynamics of centralized responses in decentralized systems, and more.

In this bonus episode, Jim hosts a talk & Q&A on The Stoa. Peter Limberg sets the context for this talk and they then go on to reflect on the impacts & opportunities created by COVID-19, homeostasis vs hysteresis, flaws of Game A thinking, Game B in the developing world & evolution vs revolution, parasitizing Game A, complex systems design, meta-narratives, the evolution of media, and more.