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 John Robb about the ideas in his recent essay “Blitzing DC,” about how a networked organization took over Washington. They discuss the early roots of network warfare in Iraq, McLuhan-esque societal rewiring, open source dynamics & plausible promise, the Arab Spring & Occupy movements, empathy triggers, Trump’s 2016 campaign as a hybrid swarm, The_Donald as a meme amplifier, the Blue Network’s counter-response, the George Floyd protests & moral framework, censorship & ‘the long night’, digital rights & moderation, the Ukraine conflict & swarm response, the Red Network reconfiguration, digital ledgers & truth-seeking accounts, the professionalization of Red digital warriors, network decision-making at a societal level, the government contracting corruption, defense procurement issues, the D.C. area wealth concentration, the future of network organizations, and much more.
John Robb is an author, inventor, entrepreneur, technology analyst, astro engineer, and military pilot. He’s started numerous successful technology companies, including one in the financial sector that sold for $295 million and one that pioneered the software we currently see in use at Facebook and Twitter. John’s insight on technology and governance has appeared on the BBC, Fox News, National Public Radio, CNBC, The Economist, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek. John served as a pilot in a tier-one counter-terrorism unit that worked alongside Delta and Seal Team 6. He wrote the book Brave New War on the future of national security, and has advised the Joint Chiefs of Staff, NSA, DoD, CIA, and the House Armed Services Committee.
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Jim talks with Timothy Clancy about wicked mess problems & the potential for a new Cold War centered on AI. They discuss the evolution from chat-based to reasoning AI, military applications, social & systemic complexity in national security, the scaling hypothesis, China vs US competition, DeepSeek R1 model implications, export controls on GPU chips, Taiwan’s strategic importance, multipolar trap & arms race dynamics, power & chip requirements, training vs implementation costs, context scaling in reasoning AI, innovation in AI efficiency, models & simulations in military planning, validation challenges, statistical distributions vs single predictions, Taiwan conflict scenarios & deterrence strategies, operational causality, the strategic importance of the Straits of Malacca, and much more.
Timothy Clancy is an Assistant Research Scientist at START specializing in studying wicked mess problems, including violence and instability, as complex systems. For over 30 years Timothy has helped stakeholders in all manner of organizations understand their wicked mess problems and work towards resolving them. This included prior work at IBM where he was the Chief Methodologist of Lean, Six Sigma, and Agile supporting Fortune 50, government, and military clients to navigate their own wicked messes in strategy, business models, and enterprise transformation.
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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.
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Emil Ejner Friis is a theory artist and a teacher of metamodernism. He is a co-founder of Metamoderna and one of the writers behind Hanzi Freinacht. He has spent the last ten years trying to figure out how to create a listening society, a kinder and more developed society that deeply cares for the happiness and emotional needs of every citizen.
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Jim talks with Jeff Sebo about the ideas in his book The Moral Circle: Who Matters, What Matters, and Why. They discuss the concept of the moral circle, harming cats vs harming cars, the case study of Happy the elephant, Descartes’ view of animals, phenomenal consciousness, Thomas Nagel’s bat argument, the Google engineer who claimed LaMDA was conscious, the substrate dependence of consciousness, a factory waste disposal dilemma, animal rescue triage scenarios, probability calculations in moral consideration, the “one in a thousand” threshold, computational constraints in moral calculations, human exceptionalism & its limitations, fully automated luxury communism & rewilding Earth, responsibilities to wild animals, humans as a custodial species, and much more.
Jeff Sebo is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Affiliated Professor of Bioethics, Medical Ethics, Philosophy, and Law, Director of the Center for Environmental and Animal Protection, Director of the Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy, and Co-Director of the Wild Animal Welfare Program at New York University. His research focuses on animal minds, ethics, and policy; AI minds, ethics, and policy; and global health and climate ethics and policy. He is the author of The Moral Circle and Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves and co-author of Chimpanzee Rights and Food, Animals, and the Environment. He is also a board member at Minding Animals International, an advisory board member at the Insect Welfare Research Society, and a senior affiliate at the Institute for Law & AI. In 2024 Vox included him on its Future Perfect 50 list of “thinkers, innovators, and changemakers who are working to make the future a better place.”
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Jim talks with Mark Stahlman about Trump as an avatar of the current digital transformation. They discuss the GameB movement & complexity theory, predictions made to the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, security through development as alternative to war, the three spheres (East, West, Digital), China’s approach to digital vs. the Western approach, Catholic social teaching principles, neo-feudalism vs. the scribal paradigm, Humanity 2.0, Aristotelian concepts of soul & hylomorphism, Cyber Sabbath practices, transitions between oral/scribal/digital paradigms, technological change as evolutionary pruning, Jonathan Rauch’s Constitution of Knowledge, memory & imagination as key faculties, versions of the Enlightenment project, Daoism & Eastern philosophy, coherent pluralism, and much more.
Mark Stahlman is a biologist, computer architect and ex-Wall Street technology strategist. He is the President of the not-for-profit Center for the Study of Digital Life (CSDL, 501(c)3, digitallife.center) and its educational project Trivium University (Triv U, trivium.university). He is also CEO of Exogenous, Inc. (EXO, exogenousinc.com), a strategic risk analysis group and on the editorial staff of its publication, the Three Spheres Newsletter (TSN). He studied for but did not complete advanced degrees in Theology (UofChicago) and Molecular Biology (UW-Mad). He has been widely interviewed and published, including teaching online courses (available on YouTube via 52 Living Ideas).
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Jim talks with Adam B. Levine about AI programming aids for non-techies and the future of Bitcoin. They discuss Adam’s background as a “technical non-technical” person, the evolution from manual LLM prompting to using IDEs, Windsurf as an AI-first IDE, Claude 3.7’s thinking mode, productivity improvements with AI coding tools, different platforms like Cursor and Cline, the “pure idea space” vs technical execution, the role of liberal arts people in tech teams, Bitcoin as digital gold, Schelling points in cryptocurrency, the US dollar as hegemonic currency, “pools of fools” theory, sovereign wealth funds moving into Bitcoin, El Salvador’s Bitcoin investment, Texas and Wyoming considering sovereign Bitcoin funds, game theory of nation-state Bitcoin adoption, regulatory transitions, predictions about Bitcoin’s future based on sovereign adoption, 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.
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Jim talks with BJ Campbell about the ideas in his Substack essay “On Cops, Belief, and Chainsaw Faced Robot Dogs.” They discuss forms of social control, absolute police states vs. belief states, the role of belief vs. actual enforcement in maintaining order, the noble lie concept & Plato’s original formulation, the 2020 crime spike & “defund the police” movement, the history of police forces & alternative methods of maintaining order, the “God-shaped hole” concept, membranes & group coherence, anthropological research on fairness, non-supernatural belief systems, marketing challenges for new social systems, money as a noble lie & coordination signal, Saudi Arabian social control methods, and much more.
BJ Campbell is a licensed professional civil engineer and practicing hydrologist who consults in the land development and environmental industries. In addition to his Substack Handwaving Freakoutery, he writes for Open Source Defense, Quillette, and Recoil Magazine.
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Jim talks with Jonathan Rauch about the ideas in his book The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. They discuss the epistemic crisis, Plato’s Theaetetus, Trump & propaganda techniques, the Constitution of Knowledge as a framework for epistemics, the “marketplace of ideas” metaphor, the reality-based community, the personal-institutional spiral, the social funnel of knowledge, social media’s impact on epistemics, advertising vs subscription models, meme space pollution, the anti-vax movement, the importance of free speech to the gay rights movement, recommendations for defending truth, supporting institutions, speaking out against misinformation, maintaining viewpoint diversity, and much more.
Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, is the author of eight books and many articles on public policy, culture, and government. He is a contributing writer for The Atlantic and recipient of the 2005 National Magazine Award, the magazine industry’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. His latest book, published in 2021 by the Brookings Press, is The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, a spirited and deep-diving account of how to push back against disinformation, canceling, and other new threats to our fact-based epistemic order.
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Bob Levy was, for 14 years, chairman of the board of directors at the Cato Institute. He is now chairman emeritus. Bob joined Cato as senior fellow in constitutional studies in 1997 after 25 years in business. The Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies is named in his honor. He has also served on boards of the Federalist Society, the Foundation for Government Accountability, and the Institute for Justice. Bob received his PhD in business from the American University in 1966, then founded CDA Investment Technologies, a major provider of investment information and software. At age 50, after leaving CDA in 1991, Bob went to George Mason law school, where he was chief articles editor of the law review and class valedictorian. He received his JD degree in 1994. The next two years he clerked for Judge Royce Lamberth on the US District Court and Judge Douglas Ginsburg on the US Court of Appeals, both in Washington, DC.