The Jim Rutt Show is an interview podcast series examining cutting-edge thinking in science and technology and the future of our economic, political and social systems and institutions.
Available on all popular podcast apps.
Follow Jim Rutt on Twitter and/or Medium.
We welcome your comments and recommendations. Thanks for listening!
Subscribe: Spotify | RSS | More
Joe Edelman has spent much of his life trying to understand how ML systems and markets could change, retaining their many benefits but avoiding their characteristic problems: of atomization, and of servicing shallow desires over deeper needs. Along the way this led him to formulate theories of human meaning and values (https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.
Subscribe: Spotify | RSS | More
Jim talks with John Preston about his book 40 Flushes to Grow Your Business: The World’s #2 Business Series, which is designed to be read during bathroom breaks. They discuss breaking free from being a one-person show, hiring self-guided employees, the importance of business owner support networks, clarity on business goals & personal objectives, the five-gear growth machine business metrics model, marketing fundamentals & investment levels, understanding the customer journey, social media pitfalls, customer inquiry response strategies, complaint management, CEO time management & delegation, working capital needs, lifestyle creep, measuring business metrics, gross profit vs net profit, building high-trust company cultures, transparency with employees, marketing strategies & customer acquisition, hiring & retention strategies, and much more.
John Preston is a Hall of Fame sales and business coach who transforms complex concepts into actionable insights for entrepreneurs and sales teams, drawing from his 22+ years as a television news reporter and producer. As the creator of JP Business Academy, he specializes in making business education accessible through live, engaging training sessions and online teaching. He can be reached by email at john@thejpbusinessacademy.
Subscribe: Spotify | RSS | More
Jim talks with Pablos Holman about the ideas in his new book Deep Future: Creating Technology That Matters. They discuss deep tech versus shallow tech, computational modeling and simulation for real-world problems, the hacker mindset, the role of inventors, nuclear power and renewable energy solutions, population growth, development challenges, space-based solar power, the likelihood of fusion power, mistakes in German energy policy, energy storage limitations, the transformation of the apparel industry through automation, and much more.
Pablos is a hacker, inventor, and bestselling author of Deep Future: Creating Technology that Matters, the indispensable guide to deep tech. Now Managing Partner at Deep Future, investing in technologies to solve the world’s biggest problems. Previously, Pablos worked on spaceships at Blue Origin and helped build The Intellectual Ventures Lab to invent a wide variety of breakthroughs including a brain surgery tool, a machine to suppress hurricanes, 3D food printers, and a laser that can shoot down mosquitos—part of an impact invention effort to eradicate malaria with Bill Gates. Pablos hosts the Deep Future Podcast and is a top public speaker—his talks have over 30 million views.
Subscribe: Spotify | RSS | More
Jim talks with Brendan Graham Dempsey about the ideas in his book Psyche and Symbolic Learning, volume 2 in his Evolution of Meaning series. We discussed hierarchical complexity, stage theories of development, constructivism & realism, dynamic skill theory, the Lectical Scale, ego development & consciousness, meaning systems & worldviews, cross-cultural developmental patterns, statistical distributions of developmental stages, the relationship between semantic richness & structural complexity, justification systems theory & cultural evolution, and much more.
Brendan Graham Dempsey is a writer, researcher, organic farmer, and the director of Sky Meadow Institute, an organization dedicated to “promoting systems-based thinking about the things that matter most.” He graduated summa cum laude with a BA in religious studies and classical civilizations from the University of Vermont and earned his master’s from Yale University, where he studied religion and culture. He is the author of Metamodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Cultural Logics and host of the Metamodern Spirituality Podcast. His primary interests include theorizing developments in culture after postmodernism, productively bridging the divide between science and spirituality, and developing sustainable systems for life to flourish. All of these lead through the paradigms of emergence and complexity, which inform all of his work.
Subscribe: Spotify | RSS | More
Jim talks with James Fadiman and Jordan Gruber about the findings in their recent book Microdosing for Health, Healing, and Enhanced Performance. They discuss the definition of microdosing, “subthreshold” vs “subperceptual,” typical doses, current usage statistics & demographics, its legal status & classification history, LSD, psilocybin, why cannabis isn’t suitable for microdosing, mechanisms of action, dosing protocols, anti-inflammatory effects, health applications, enhancement applications, contraindications & side effects, research methodologies & limitations, commercial potential, global adoption patterns, and much more.
James Fadiman, Ph.D., is a prominent figure in the field of psychedelic research, particularly known for his work on microdosing psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin. Often called the “father of microdosing,” Fadiman has a long history in the study of psychedelics dating back to the 1960s, when he worked on studies involving LSD and creativity while at Stanford University. After psychedelics were banned in the U.S., Fadiman shifted his focus but returned to psychedelic research decades later. His book, The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys, has become a key resource for safe psychedelic exploration. In recent years, he has pioneered research on microdosing, examining its potential benefits for mental health, cognitive enhancement, and overall well-being.
Jordan Gruber, JD, MA, founded the early online Enlightenment.Com community. After practicing law at Cooley Godward and focusing on IP law at NASA’s Moffett Field, as well as working at GNOSIS Magazine, Jordan became “the Practical Wordsmith,” a writer, ghostwriter, editor, and writing coach speciliazing in transformational modalities and practices. Jordan has helped create cutting-edge works on everything from forensic audio and financial services to health, wellness, psychology, and spirituality. Recent editing credits include Cindy Lou Golin’s The Shadow Playbook (2023), Scott Rogers’s The Mindful Law Student (2022), and Lawrence Ford’s The Secrets of the Seasons (2020).
Subscribe: Spotify | RSS | More
Jim talks with David Shapiro about how to use AI language models as research and writing tools. They discuss post-labor economics, the evolution of AI tools from GPT-2 through GPT-4, using AI as a learning companion vs. relying on it completely, David’s AI tool stack, exploring new domains, using NotebookLM for document management & searching, AI writing and editing techniques, critique and perspectives through personas, the rapid adoption of AI tools across industries, understanding limitations, challenges for AI startups, and much more.
David Shapiro is an American AI thought leader, author, YouTuber, and former IT infrastructure and automation engineer based in Raleigh, North Carolina. With over 16 years of experience in technology, including four years focused on artificial intelligence, Shapiro has emerged as a prominent voice in AI philosophy, cognitive architectures, and post-labor economics. His work centers on the societal and economic implications of AI, advocating for a future of post-scarcity and hyper-abundance where automation meets basic human needs at low cost.
Subscribe: Spotify | RSS | More
Jim talks with Lawrence Cahoone about his book The Orders of Nature and his systematic approach to naturalist philosophy. They discuss fallibilist & local metaphysics, objective relativism, the rejection of simples, Jim’s materialism which grants emergence first-class existence, Wimsatt’s notion of emergence & nonaggregativity, downward causation & pruning rules, natural complexes, Aristotle’s four causes & the use of purpose in biology, the distinction between teleonomy & teleology, the five orders of nature (physical, material, biological, psychological & cultural), characteristic time scales in emergence theory, why particular disciplines coevolved in intellectual traditions, Erik Hoel’s theory about emergence having the highest causal power, natural religion & the fine-tuned constants of the universe, the choice between multiverse explanations & a single ground of nature, Darwin’s views on divine purpose, comparisons to deists like Spinoza & Einstein, and much more.
Lawrence Cahoone graduated with a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Stony Brook University in 1985. Cahoone’s areas of specialization are American Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, Social and Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Culture, Metaphysics and Natural Science and Modernism and Postmodernism. Since 2000, Cahoone has taught at Holy Cross and is now currently an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Holy Cross. He has also written and published seven books in his career, including The Emergence of Value, The Orders of Nature, and Cultural Revolutions.
Subscribe: Spotify | RSS | More
Jim talks with Adam B. Levine about humanity’s rapidly changing relationship with AI and “thinking on demand.” They discuss the GPT-5 release & pricing, open-source AI models, the three-dimensional framework of AI advancement (models & hardware & agent frameworks), the evolution of vibe coding, development tools, agent-based development, AI implementation strategies with humans in the loop, the Midnight Protocol project, Vendor Relationship Management versus CRM, automated negotiation systems, the trillion-dollar opportunity in improving the infosphere, enshittification risks, local AI processing on personal devices, the future of AI agents as personal representatives, and much more.
Adam B. Levine has spent over a decade pioneering disruptive technologies before they become mainstream. He launched one of the earliest Bitcoin podcasts, Let’s Talk Bitcoin! (2013), founded Tokenly (2014)—one of the earliest companies exploring what could be done with blockchain tokens—and served as CoinDesk’s first podcast editor (2019), hosting shows like Speaking of Bitcoin and Markets Daily. In 2021, he founded 330.ai, a startup building cutting-edge tools to boost creativity with AI.
Subscribe: Spotify | RSS | More
Jim talks with David Shapiro about his six-part series on “post-labor economics.” They discuss historical economic transitions, the logic of labor substitution, automation & AI’s impacts on employment, the four basic human economic offerings (strength, dexterity, cognition & empathy), labor as a societal pillar, the pyramid of prosperity (universal basic services, collectively owned public & private assets, conventional private assets, & residual wages), the pyramid of power (immutable civic bedrock, freedom to transact, radical transparency, direct programmable democracy, & forkable constitutional meta-governance), blockchain & cryptocurrency, radical financial transparency, liquid democracy, governance innovation, and much more.
David Shapiro is an American AI thought leader, author, YouTuber, and former IT infrastructure and automation engineer based in Raleigh, North Carolina. With over 16 years of experience in technology, including four years focused on artificial intelligence, Shapiro has emerged as a prominent voice in AI philosophy, cognitive architectures, and post-labor economics. His work centers on the societal and economic implications of AI, advocating for a future of post-scarcity and hyper-abundance where automation meets basic human needs at low cost.
Subscribe: Spotify | RSS | More
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 & its significance, the objective paradox of finding things by not looking for them, comparisons between Picbreeder & SGD networks, visual differences in internal representations, weight sweep experiments, modular vs tangled decomposition, implications for creativity & continual learning & generalization abilities, Unified Factored Representation as an alternative to FER, the relationship to grokking in neural networks, scaling considerations & evidence in larger models, potential methods to achieve UFR, connections to biological evolution and DNA representation, and much more.
Kenneth O. Stanley is the Senior Vice President of Open-Endedness at Lila Sciences. He previously led a research team at OpenAI also on the challenge of open-endedness. Before that, he was Charles Millican Professor of Computer Science at the University of Central Florida and was also a co-founder of Geometric Intelligence Inc., which was acquired by Uber to create Uber AI Labs, where he was head of Core AI research. He is an inventor of popular algorithms including NEAT, novelty search, and CPPNs. He has won more than 10 best paper awards and his original 2002 paper on NEAT also received the 2017 ISAL Award for Outstanding Paper of the Decade 2002 – 2012 from the International Society for Artificial Life. He is also a coauthor of the popular science book, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective (published originally in the US by Springer), and has spoken widely on its subject.