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.
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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 boxing, growing up in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, childhood trauma & violence, his relationships with his single mother & absent father, middle school & gifted programs, the cocaine prank incident, his high school football career, academic struggles, attending University of Rochester, spending his father’s life insurance money, his boxing career, the All American Heavyweights program, alcohol abuse, sobriety, Olympic trials, military service, a degree in physics, his current life as an author & speaker, and much more.
Ed Latimore is a former professional heavyweight boxer, an amateur national champion, a competitive chess player, and a bestselling author with a B.A. in Physics from Duquesne University. He draws on his experiences in the boxing ring, in the classroom, and in recovery to teach people how to build grit and resilience.
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Jim talks with Zak Stein and Marc Gafni about consciousness, attention, and value as fundamental aspects of reality. They explore continuity & discontinuity in evolution, phenomenology & naturalism, emergence, value theory, selection theory, mathematics as both discovered & created, pre-life organic chemistry, sexual selection & evolutionary dynamics, attraction/allurement across different emergent layers, evolving value, first principles & first values, the intimacy equation concept, desire as disclosing value, consciousness in animals vs simpler systems, machine consciousness, group selection theory, the evolution of complexity, the role of contingency & necessity, religious & materialist perspectives on value, and much more.
Dr. Zachary Stein is a Co-Founder of the Civilization Research Institute and the Center for World Philosophy and Religion. He was trained at the interface of philosophy, psychology, and education and now works in fields related to the mitigation of global catastrophic risk. He is a widely sought-after and award-winning speaker and a leading authority on the future of education and contemporary issues in human development.
Dr. Marc Gafni has been described as a world philosopher—a kind of galaxy heart brain—integrating wisdom from across multiple disciplines into what he has called a New Story of Value in response to the meta-crisis. He is the author of fifty books, including the award-winning A Return to Eros and Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment, with the academic Journal of Integral Theory and Practice dedicating an entire issue to his Unique Self Theory. Marc is founder with Ken Wilber of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, and President of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution, succeeding Barbara Marx Hubbard.
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Jim talks with Chris Colin about his recent Atlantic article “That Dropped Call with Customer Service? It Was on Purpose.” They discuss customer service hell & Chris’s personal story with Ford, the concept of sludge, intentional friction in customer service systems, call center operations & tactics, high-quality customer service approaches, the impact of short-term CEO tenures on service quality, the Biden administration’s attempts to address bureaucratic time tax, political implications of poor government services, administrative burden, coping mechanisms, consumer action possibilities, the psychological toll of dealing with poor service, Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification,” responses to Chris’s article, and much more.
Chris Colin has written about problematic billionaires, contentious river law, Barack Obama’s Irish roots, COVID memorialization efforts, Japanese rent-a-friends, endangered pasta and more for the New York Times, the Atlantic, NewYorker.com, Pop-Up Magazine, 99% Invisible, Outside and Wired. His work has been featured in Best American Science & Nature Writing, and he created José Andrés’s podcast. In 2020 he launched Six Feet of Separation, a free pandemic newspaper by and for kids — “a virtual newspaper for our troubled times,” Dan Rather called it.
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Jim talks with Lee Cronin about Chemify, his startup that aims to automate chemistry through “chemifarms” that turn code into molecules. They discuss Chemify as an AWS for chemistry, the development of a chemical programming language & its evolution to Turing completeness, quantum vs classical chemistry computation, open source tools & academic access, robotics & automation in chemistry, catalyst discovery & optimization, integration with tools like AlphaFold, business models, venture capital funding, supply chain implications, distributed manufacturing, personalized medicine possibilities, and much more.
Lee Cronin is a chemist. He is the Regius Professor of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow and the Founder & CEO of Chemify. He is known for his approach to the digitization of chemistry and developing digital-to-chemical transformation known as Chemputing which can turn code into reactions and molecules. He has also developed a new theory for evolution and selection called assembly theory which aims to quantify and explain how selection can occur in chemistry before biology. Lee is also exploring how chemical systems can compute, and what is needed for the evolution of intelligence, as well as designing a new type of computational system that uses information encoded in chemical reactions and molecules.
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Jim talks with Nicholas Humphrey about the ideas in his 2023 book Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness. They discuss the distinction between sentience & consciousness, access consciousness vs phenomenal consciousness, terminology in consciousness studies, ring-fencing theories, Nicholas’s early experiments with phosphenes, the discovery of blindsight in monkeys, his relationship with Helen the monkey, color preferences in monkeys, sensation vs perception, realism vs illusionism, consciousness as art, the concept of “ipsundrum,” the evolution of consciousness as “all or nothing,” the Fermi paradox & the uniqueness of consciousness, qualophilia, consciousness in birds & mammals, theory of mind in different species, and much more.
Nicholas Humphrey is an English psychologist who studies the evolution of intelligence and consciousness. He was the first to demonstrate the existence of “blindsight” in monkeys, studied mountain gorillas with Dian Fossey in Rwanda, proposed the celebrated theory of the “social function of intellect,” and has investigated the evolutionary background of religion, art, healing, death-awareness, and suicide. His honours include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, the Pufendorf Medal, and the International Mind and Brain Prize. His most recent books are Seeing Red, Soul Dust, and Sentience.
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Jim talks with Samo Burja about his report on the defense startup Anduril’s plan to modernize the U.S. military. They discuss “live players vs. dead players,” AI adoption & cognitive tools, Anduril’s background & naming origin, military technology modernization, software-defined conflicts, autonomous & software-enabled weapons, sensor deployment & data collection, the Lattice software platform, hardware offerings including drone & underwater vehicle acquisitions, surface naval warfare obsolescence, military industrial capacity, US vs. China manufacturing capabilities, personnel-to-weapon system ratios, drone production scale, cost considerations, defense industry ecosystem, traditional contractors, friend-shoring possibilities, NATO+ industrial capacity, component manufacturing, future warfare implications, training advantages of digital systems, scale of drone warfare, AI capabilities gaps between nations, industrial advantages in military competition, and much more.
Samo Burja is the president and founder of Bismarck Analysis, a consulting firm specializing in institutional analysis for clients in North America and Europe. He is also a Senior Research Fellow in Political Science at the Foresight Institute and chair of the editorial board of Palladium Magazine. You can follow him at @SamoBurja.
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Jim talks with Richard David Hames, picking up from the ideas in his recent Facebook essay about the decline of Western civilization. They discuss the retreat from truth in politics & institutions, postmodernism’s impact on rationality, China’s governance model, the failure of democratic institutions, wealth inequality & social stratification, the liberation of women as our era’s defining achievement, climate change denial, the futility of modern warfare, AI’s disruptive potential, the loss of character & virtue in leadership, living in a liminal period between worlds, and much more.
Richard David Hames is a philosopher, activist, strategist, and advisor to boards and governments, mentoring leaders out of their manufactured normalcy. He is the author of several books, the most recent of which is Manmade: 50 Failings of Our Own Making, coauthored with Adam A. Jacoby.
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Jim talks with David Chapman about rethinking nobility for the modern age through his recent “nobility tetralogy” of essays. They discuss character & virtue as “risible” concepts, noblesse oblige & elite education, nobility as intention vs status, “The Battle of Maldon” poem & its lessons, postmodernism & postmodernity, the failure of elite universities, effective altruism & Sam Bankman-Fried, Elon Musk & hubris, meritocracy & institutional change, Nietzsche’s master-slave morality, Tolkien’s models of nobility, Vajrayana Buddhism’s life-affirming approach, software engineers eating the world, meta-rationality & the tech industry, new institutions, visions for a more playful & connected future, and much more.
David Chapman writes and speaks about understanding meaning, purpose, and culture through resolving fundamental, unthought emotional stances that can make us miserable; leveling up technical work by going beyond formal rationality; Vajrayana, the life-affirming branch of Buddhism offering a vaster, brighter, freer way of seeing, feeling, and acting; and artificial intelligence (he has a PhD in it).
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Jim talks with Thomas Schindler about heliogenic civilization as a vision for a regenerative future. They discuss the current multipolar trap shitshow of global civilization, M3 money supply & GDP growth requirements, the doubling of energy demand, exit to planet as an alternative to traditional business exits, biomimicry & biological approaches to manufacturing, solar energy as a fusion reactor, nature’s material production vs human industrial production, construction systems using earth blocks & natural materials, bioregional self-sufficiency, feminine scaling vs traditional growth models, the Oslo Project as an inverse Manhattan Project, deep ecology & Arne Næss’s philosophy, governance structures, education systems as symptoms of industry, coordination among farmers in Kenya, project governance & preventing OpenAI syndrome, Bernard Lietaer’s alternative currency experiment, biological computing possibilities, solar energy & hydrogen electrolysis, ocean floor mining & environmental impacts, copper vs aluminum for electrical transmission, material constraints on renewable energy transition, and much more.
Thomas is co-founder of delodi.net, a mission-driven software studio and the engine behind the not-for-profit initiatives MOTHERLAND, GITA, IRM, and Project MIRACLE. The throughline of his work lies in reimagining how societies generate value—shifting from extractive models to regenerative, life-centered systems that empower local communities. He’s particularly focused on helogenic civilization frameworks, bio-regional material commons, infrastructures of generosity, systemic change methodologies, and the intersections of technology, culture, and ecology. Motivated by the conviction that aligning collective creativity, open protocols, and local agency is essential to address today’s ecological and existential challenges, he writes, speaks, convenes and assemblies to catalyze these conversations and collaborations.
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Jim talks with Anders Indset about his book The Singularity Paradox: Bridging the Gap Between Humanity and AI, co-authored with Florian Neutkart. They discuss the “final narcissistic injury of humankind,” Freud’s three historical narcissistic injuries, machine consciousness vs human consciousness, the “undead” state, human cognitive limitations, game theory dynamics & multipolar traps, Artificial Human Intelligence vs AGI/ASI approaches, consciousness preservation, chess AI & human cognition, coevolutionary dynamics between AHI & AGI/ASI, “playing to win” vs “playing to become,” organizational design for anticipatory leadership, trust & friction as progress drivers, the three pillars of forging & investment & efficiency, reactive vs reflective societies, technical hygiene, “zombie apocalypse” scenarios, the role of agency, questions of identity & authenticity in an AI world, and much more.