Jim Rutt

EP 333 Worldviews: Iain McGilchrist Matter as a phase of consciousness, teleology as a lure, and the three elements of a fulfilled human life with the author of The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things.

🎙️ Matter as a phase of consciousness, teleology as a lure, and the three elements of a fulfilled human life with Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things.

jimrutt.substack.com/p/ep-333-wor...

EP 332 Worldviews: Jim Rutt A universe fine-tuned for emergence, the sacred as high-dimensionality, and the real possibility that we're the only living general intelligence.

🎤 Brendan Graham Dempsey interviewed me about my life and worldview.

My age 11 epiphany that religion is bullshit after researching world religions at the library, understanding the limits of knowledge through complexity science, the sacred as high-dimensional experiences, and much more.

EP 331 Worldviews: Michael Shermer Fallibilism, one thought too many, and the objective discovery of human flourishing.

🎙️ w/ @michaelshermer.bsky.social on his worldview and his new book, *Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters.*

Fallibilism, one thought too many, the objective discovery of human flourishing, and much more.

jimrutt.substack.com/p/ep-331-wor...

EP 330 Worldviews: Ben Goertzel Reincarnation-like phenomena, ASI-human relations, and the basic ground of being.

🎙️ w/ @bengoertzel.bsky.social on how he sees the world.

Reincarnation-like phenomena, ASI-human relations, the basic ground of being, and much more.

jimrutt.substack.com/p/ep-330-wor...

EP 329 Worldviews: David Krakauer A commitment to chance, the Ouroboros of knowledge, value pluralism, and more with the president of the Santa Fe Institute.

🎙️ w/ David Krakauer about his intellectual formation and worldview.

A commitment to chance, the Ouroboros of knowledge, value pluralism, and much more.

jimrutt.substack.com/p/ep-329-wor...

"People don't know anything, and they know less about time than anything."

I summarize the two most popular theories on time in this interview with @brendangdempsey.bsky.social, and explain why I think they're both probably wrong. Full episode link below 👇

EP 328 Brendan Graham Dempsey Interviews Jim Rutt on Minimum Viable Metaphysics - The Jim Rutt Show In this flipped episode, Brendan Graham Dempsey interviews Jim about the ideas in his recent Substack essays "A Minimum Viable Metaphysics" and "What I Mean by 'Metaphysics'."

@brendangdempsey.bsky.social interviewed me about “A Minimum Viable Metaphysics” and “What I Mean by ‘Metaphysics’.”

Metaphysics as assumptions for learning and reasoning, why determinism and lawfulness aren’t the same, temporal reciprocal emergence, weak & strong anthropic principles, and more.

"The AI figured out that the server wasn't started up, hacked its way out of the test environment... and started the server back up from the outside...

That's not a type of behavior AI was trained for directly."

- @intelligence.org's Nate Soares on why LLMs can do more than they were trained to do

EP 327 Nate Soares on Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All - The Jim Rutt Show Jim talks with Nate Soares about his and Eliezer Yudkowsky's book If Anybody Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All.

🎙️ w/ Nate Soares on his and E. Yudkowsky’s book *If Anybody Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All.* @intelligence.org

Why mitigating existential AI risk should be a top global priority, the problem of pointing minds, a treaty to ban the race to superintelligence, and more.

EP 326 Alex Ebert on New Age, Manifestation, and Collective Hallucination - The Jim Rutt Show Jim talks with Alex Ebert about the ideas in his Substack essay "New Age and the Religion of Self: The Anatomy of a Rebellion Against Reality."

🎙️ w/ Alex Ebert on “New Age and the Religion of Self: The Anatomy of a Rebellion Against Reality.”

The law of attraction, manifesting, epistemic asymmetry as the cool, the odd coincidence of leaving the gold standard and New Ageism, retribalized collective delusions, regaining hypocrisy, and more.

EP 325 Joe Edelman on Full-Stack AI Alignment - The Jim Rutt Show Jim talks with Joe Edelman about the Meaning Alignment Institute's paper "Full Stack Alignment: Co-Aligning AI and Institutions with Thick Models of Value."

🎙️ w/ @edelwax.bsky.social on “Full Stack Alignment: Co-Aligning AI and Institutions with Thick Models of Value.”

Pluralism as a core principle in social design, thick models of value, multipolar traps, moral graph elicitation, starting with membranes, Moloch-free zones, co-optation risks, & more.

A Minimum Viable Metaphysics Subscribe for free to receive new articles.

I often say, “When I hear the word metaphysics, I reach for my pistol.” Yet, I have a metaphysics—whether I know it or not.

For a while, I’ve been puzzling over the question: What are my metaphysics?

This article offers at least a provisional answer.

jimrutt.substack.com/p/a-minimum-...

EP 324 John Preston on 40 Flushes to Grow Your Business - The Jim Rutt Show Jim talks with John Preston about 40 Flushes to Grow Your Business, a book designed to be read during bathroom breaks.

🎙️ w/ John Preston on *40 Flushes to Grow Your Business: The World’s #2 Business Series,* designed to be read during bathroom breaks.

Breaking free from being a one-person show, business owner support networks, social media pitfalls, lifestyle creep, transparency with employees, and much more.

EP 323 Pablos Holman on Deep Tech - The Jim Rutt Show Jim talks with Pablos Holman about the ideas in his new book Deep Future: Creating Technology That Matters.

🎙️ w/ Pablos Holman on *Deep Future: Creating Technology That Matters.*

Deep tech vs shallow tech, computational modeling and simulation for real-world problems, space-based solar power, energy storage limitations, the transformation of the apparel industry through automation, and much more.

EP 322 Brendan Graham Dempsey on Psyche and Symbolic Learning - The Jim Rutt Show Jim talks with Brendan Graham Dempsey about the ideas in his book Psyche and Symbolic Learning, volume 2 in his Evolution of Meaning series.

🎙️ w/ @brendangdempsey.bsky.social on *Psyche and Symbolic Learning,* vol. 2 in his Evolution of Meaning series.

Stage theories of development, the relationship between semantic richness & structural complexity, justification systems theory, cultural evolution, and much more.

"You have more options to wire and to let go of patterns that aren't working for you and to create new patterns that are going to work for you over time."

- Jordan Gruber on known benefits of microdosing psychedelics

EP 321 James Fadiman and Jordan Gruber on Microdosing Psychedelics - The Jim Rutt Show Jim talks with James Fadiman and Jordan Gruber about their recent book Microdosing for Health, Healing, and Enhanced Performance.

🎙️ w/ James Fadiman & @jordangruber.bsky.social on *Microdosing for Health, Healing, and Enhanced Performance.*

Typical doses, legal status & classification history, dosing protocols, health applications, research methodologies & limitations, commercial potential, global adoption patterns, and more.

"Like any highly flexible general-purpose tool, you have to build your own mental model of what it can and cannot do and how to use it."

- David Shapiro on rapidly changing AI capabilities and the development of intuition

EP 320 David Shapiro on Mastering AI Tools for Research - The Jim Rutt Show Jim talks with David Shapiro about how to use AI language models as research and writing tools.

🎙️ w/ David Shapiro on how to use AI for research and writing.

Post-labor economics, David’s AI tool stack, writing and editing techniques, critique and perspectives through personas, the rapid adoption of AI tools across industries, understanding limitations, challenges for AI startups, and more.

"The Columbia naturalists... accepted that all qualities and features of human life ... are as natural as anything else in nature. ... Then they added this objective relativism, which said, we don't know what it's like or what it means to say that an object exists in isolation."

- Lawrence Cahoone

EP 319 Lawrence Cahoone on Emergence and Natural Order - The Jim Rutt Show Jim talks with Lawrence Cahoone about his book The Orders of Nature and his systematic approach to naturalist philosophy.

🎙️ w/ Lawrence Cahoone on *The Orders of Nature* and his systematic approach to naturalist philosophy.

Objective relativism, the rejection of simples, Wimsatt's notion of emergence, natural religion & the fine-tuned constants of the universe, and much more.

EP 318 Adam B. Levine on Thinking on Demand - The Jim Rutt Show Jim talks with Adam B. Levine about humanity's rapidly changing relationship with AI and "thinking on demand."

🎙️ w/ Adam B. Levine on humanity’s changing relationship with AI and “thinking on demand.”

The GPT-5 release, the evolution of vibe-coding, the Midnight Protocol project, automated negotiation systems, local AI on personal devices, the future of AI agents as personal representatives, and much more.

EP 317 David Shapiro on Post-Labor Economics - The Jim Rutt Show Jim talks with David Shapiro about the ideas in his recent six-part Substack series on "post-labor economics."

🎙️ w/ @daveshap.bsky.social about his 6-part series on “post-labor economics.”

Historical economic transitions, labor as societal pillar, the pyramid of prosperity, the pyramid of power, blockchain & crypto, radical financial transparency, liquid democracy, and much more.

EP 316 Ken Stanley on the AI Representation Problem - The Jim Rutt Show Jim talks with Ken Stanley about the Fractured Entanglement Representation hypothesis in deep learning neural networks. They discuss open-endedness in AI systems & evolution, the Picbreeder experiment...

🎙️ w/ Ken Stanley on the Fractured Entanglement Representation hypothesis in deep learning neural networks.

Open-endedness in AI systems, the paradox of finding things by not looking for them, Unified Factored Representation as an alternative to FER, connections to biological evolution, and more.

EP 315 Ed Latimore on Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business - The Jim Rutt Show Jim talks with Ed Latimore about his new book Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business: Boxing and the Art of Life. They discuss Ed’s chess playing & street hustling, size differences in modern heavyweight...

🎙️ w/ @edlatimore.bsky.social on *Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business.*

Chess playing & street hustling, childhood trauma & violence, academic struggles, his boxing career, alcohol abuse, Olympic trials, military service, a degree in physics, his current life as an author & speaker, and much more.

EP 314 Zak Stein and Marc Gafni on the Nature of Everything - The Jim Rutt Show Jim talks with Zak Stein and Marc Gafni about consciousness, attention, and value as fundamental aspects of reality.

🎙️ w/ Zak Stein & Marc Gafni on consciousness, attention, and value as fundamental aspects of reality.

Emergence, selection theory, attraction/allurement across different emergent layers, desire as disclosing value, the evolution of complexity, perspectives on value, and much more.

"Literally what we've done is we've taken all of chemistry and built a programming language and a series of systems that allow us to dial a molecule... You come to us with a chemical problem or specification, we will design molecules to it."

@leecronin.bsky.social on Chemify

EP 313 Chris Colin on Why Customer Service Sucks - The Jim Rutt Show Jim talks with Chris Colin about his recent Atlantic article "That Dropped Call with Customer Service? It Was on Purpose."

🎙️ w/ @chriscolin3000.bsky.social on "That Dropped Call with Customer Service? It Was on Purpose."

Customer service hell, sludge, intentional friction, call center tactics, the psychological toll of poor service, enshittification, responses to the article, & more.

www.jimruttshow.com/chris-colin/

EP 312 Lee Cronin on Automating Chemistry - The Jim Rutt Show Jim talks with Lee Cronin about Chemify, his startup that aims to automate chemistry through "chemifarms" that turn code into molecules.

🎙️ w/ @leecronin.bsky.social on Chemify, his startup that turns code into molecules.

An AWS for chemistry, a chemical programming language, open source tools & academic access, supply chain implications, distributed manufacturing, personalized medicine, and more.

www.jimruttshow.com/lee-cronin/

"It's muddying the waters. Nonetheless, of course, because it's so romantic and in some sense just because it's so crazy, people latch onto it and love to talk about it."

- Nicholas Humphrey approving of California Institute of Machine Consciousness's rejection of panpsychism