Category Archives: Jim Rutt Show Podcasts

EP 282 Tyson Yunkaporta on Indigenous Law, Lore, and Learning

Jim Rutt Show Podcasts

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Jim talks with Tyson Yunkaporta about the ideas in his new book Right Story, Wrong Story: Adventures in Indigenous Thinking. They discuss a symbolic emu visitor on Jim’s farm, Aboriginal collective pronouns, Sand Talk‘s impact, wrong canoes, lore vs law, how Aboriginal law adapted to invasion, ritualized violence & rule-governed fighting, Aboriginal knowledge systems & peer review, signals & spirit in natural systems, the sacred as a way to deal with complex systems, Plato’s noble lie, restricted knowledge, Aboriginal law & the Jewish Torah, plague impacts, art as store of capital vs communal knowledge, the metaphor & mythology of water dowsing, Tyson’s upcoming book, how to be a deeply spiritual skeptical atheist, and much more.

Tyson Yunkaporta is an academic, an arts critic, and a researcher who is a member of the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland. He carves traditional tools and weapons and also works as a senior lecturer in Indigenous Knowledges at Deakin University in Melbourne. He lives in Melbourne and is the author of Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World.

EP 281 Jeff Hawkins and Viviane Clay on the Thousand Brains Theory

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Jim talks with Jeff Hawkins and Viviane Clay about the Thousand Brains Project and Jeff’s book A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence. They discuss Mountcastle’s theory of the neocortex’s universal algorithm, cortical columns & their structure, learning modules in AI sensory systems, reprogramming of the neocortex, the 6 layers of cortex, mini-columns & macro-columns, the visual cascade, reference frames as essential for knowledge representation, “voting” for perceptual consensus, how the project differs from deep learning & LLM approaches, James Gibson’s concept of affordances, the “Jennifer Aniston neuron” idea, current state of the Monty project, solving fundamental problems vs making impressive demos, avoiding “old brain” traits in AI systems, and much more.

Jeff Hawkins is a scientist whose life-long interest in neuroscience led to the creation of Numenta and its focus on neocortical theory. His research focuses on how the cortex learns predictive models of the world through sensation and movement. In 2002, he founded the Redwood Neuroscience Institute, where he served as Director for three years. The institute is currently located at U.C. Berkeley. Previously, he co-founded two companies, Palm and Handspring, where he designed products such as the PalmPilot and Treo smartphone. Jeff has written two books, On Intelligence (2004 with Sandra Blakeslee) and A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence (2021).

Viviane Clay is the director of the Thousand Brains Project. She received her doctorate degree in Cognitive Computing and master’s degree in Cognitive Science at University of Osnabrück in Germany, where she focused on sensorimotor learning as a key aspect in intelligence. She brings to Numenta fifteen years of coding experience, along with her background in neuroscience, psychology, and machine learning.

EP 280 Rob Henderson on Luxury Beliefs

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Jim talks with Rob Henderson about his book Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class and the concept of luxury beliefs. They discuss Rob’s journey from foster care to Yale and Cambridge, Jim’s background, the decline in two-parent families from 1960 to 2005, changing forms of elite hypocrisy, intra-elite competition, corporate adoption of woke beliefs, enforcement of ideological conformity, the spread of academic ideas into mainstream culture, attributions of success, drugs and gambling as luxury beliefs, the self-control aristocracy, Western environmentalism’s impact on Sub-Saharan Africa, elite opinion vs public opinion, and much more.

Rob Henderson grew up in foster homes in Los Angeles and in the rural town of Red Bluff, California. After enlisting in the U.S. Air Force at the age of seventeen, he subsequently attended Yale on the GI Bill and was then awarded the Gates Cambridge Scholarship to study at the University of Cambridge, where he obtained a PhD in psychology in 2022. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a Contributing Editor for City Journal, and his Substack newsletter is sent each week to more than 70 thousand subscribers.

EP 279 Samuel Scarpino on H5N1 (Bird Flu) and Pandemic Risk

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Jim talks with epidemiology expert Samuel Scarpino about the recent spread of H5N1 (bird flu) in dairy cows and its implications for public health. They discuss the historical context of H5N1, fatality rates, modeling the spread, network effects in disease transmission, current surveillance efforts, H5N1 transmission mechanisms, challenges of human respiratory transmission, lessons learned & mislearned from Covid-19, the current state of the H5N1 vaccine preparation, extreme pandemic response scenarios, Sam’s current risk assessment, economic impacts including egg & dairy prices, recommendations for immediate action, and much more.
Samuel Scarpino is the Director of AI + Life Sciences at the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University and a Professor of the Practice in Health and Computer Sciences. He holds appointments in the Institute for Experiential AI and the Network Science, Global Resilience, and Roux Institutes. Prior to joining Northeastern in November 2022, Scarpino was the Vice President of Pathogen Surveillance at The Rockefeller Foundation and Chief Strategy Officer at Dharma Platform (a social impact, technology startup). Outside of these roles, he has over 10 years of experience translating research into decision support and data science/AI tools across diverse sectors from public health and clinical medicine to real estate and energy.

EP 278 Peter Wang on AI, Copyright, and the Future of Intelligence

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Jim has a wide-ranging conversation with recurring guest Peter Wang on AI copyright frameworks and the rapidly changing tech landscape. They discuss “the Chattening” (ChatGPT’s release in November 2022) & its impact, parallels between current AI & the invention of science, humans as narrow-band sensors, cybernetics & control systems, the unbearable slowness of being, the Platonic Representation Hypothesis, language & intelligence, why eyeballs are white, copyright challenges with AI, the Anaconda ML Public License framework for AI rights & usage permissions, AI’s impact on various industries, impacts on software engineering careers, giant frontier models vs specialty models, AI models’ convergence on underlying reality, representation complexity, evaluation frameworks, and much more.

Peter Wang is the Chief AI and Innovation Officer and Co-founder of Anaconda. Peter leads Anaconda’s AI Incubator, which focuses on advancing core Python technologies and developing new frontiers in open-source AI and machine learning, especially in the areas of edge computing, data privacy, and decentralized computing.

EP 277 Kristian Rönn on Darwinian Traps and How to Escape Them

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Jim talks with Kristian Rönn, co-founder of the carbon accounting tech company Normative, about his book The Darwinian Trap: The Hidden Evolutionary Forces That Explain Our World (and Threaten Our Future). They discuss Darwinian traps & demons, the parable of Picher, Oklahoma, the “cost of doing business” mentality, beauty filter arms races, perverse incentives in science, Goodhart’s law, how nature deals with defection vs cooperation, kamikaze mutants, pandas as evolutionary dead ends, close calls with nuclear weapons, engineered pathogens, AI risk, radical transparency at the nation-state level, reputation systems, types of reciprocity, distributed reputation marketplaces, developing Darwinian demon literacy, local change, and much more.

Kristian Rönn is a founder, author, and global governance advocate. He pioneered cloud-based carbon accounting by founding Normative, a platform that helps thousands of companies achieve net-zero emissions. A proponent of effective altruism, Kristian advocates for prioritizing the wellbeing of Earth’s inhabitants as the key metric for progress. Before Normative, he worked at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, focusing on global catastrophic risks and AI. He has contributed to numerous global standards, legislation, and resolutions on climate and AI governance.

EP 276 Carolyn Dicey Jennings on Attention and Mental Control

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Jim talks with philosopher and cognitive scientist Carolyn Dicey Jennings about her book Attention and Mental Control. They discuss mental control vs self-control, the ping pong metaphor, prioritization vs single-threaded focus, voluntary vs automatic attention, perceptual processing & conscious attention, 3 forms of interest, meditation & mind wandering, hyperfocus as a superpower, ADHD & neurodiversity, the emergence of control, wave activity in the brain, local vs global brain activity, and much more.

Carolyn Dicey Jennings explores whether it is possible for us to direct our own minds through attention and, if so, what impact this has on other functions of the mind. She has training in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience and combines these fields to approach fundamental questions about the nature of the mind, including the existence of the self, the foundation of consciousness, and the possibility of a free will. She has published three books, two monographs with Cambridge University Press (The Attending Mind, 2020 and Attention and Mental Control, 2022) and an edited volume (Mind, Cognition, and Neuroscience: A Philosophical Introduction, 2022 with Ben Young). She is currently working on a new project, on “collective attention,” which intersects with recent digital technologies.

EP 275 Rachel Winkler on Mass Deportation

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Jim talks with lawyer and former DHS policy person Rachel Winkler about Trump’s promise to carry out a large-scale deportation operation. They discuss estimates of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., mixed-status households & the aging undocumented population, the legal standing of an undocumented immigrant, types of undocumented immigrants, the process for pending deportation orders, potential policy changes, prosecutorial discretion, practical constraints on mass deportations, private detention companies, cooperation with Mexico, the Alien Enemies Act & the Insurrection Act, balancing secure borders with the need for immigrants, and much more.

Rachel Winkler is a member of the Cross-Border Risks team. Utilizing experience working with federal law enforcement partners and professionals at DHS, Rachel’s practice focuses on U.S. immigration benefits, compliance, and status defense; visa sponsorship and eligibility; removal defense; forced labor supply chain compliance with Section 307; and international criminal investigations. She also handles customs and I-9 verification issues. Her clients include individuals (including those with white-collar convictions), entities, and startups across various industries including tech and entertainment.

EP 274 Richard Overy on Why War?

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Jim talks with historian Richard Overy about his new book Why War? They discuss historians’ shyness in thinking about the nature of war, a correspondence between Einstein & Freud, the meaning of the term, the “pacified past,” the interplay between warfare & cooperation, recent ethological studies of chimpanzees, conformity, 4 major types of anthropological evidence, the status of warriors over time, ecological drivers of war, Marxian analyses of war, hubristic warfare, Rome’s centuries of warfare, the illusion of security, the future of war, and much more.

Richard Overy is Honorary Research Professor in the University of Exeter. He spent his teaching career at Cambridge, King’s College London, and Exeter. He is the author of more than 30 books on World War II, air power, and the European dictators, including Why the Allies Won, Russia’s War, The Air War 1939-1945, and most recently Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War 1931-1945, which won the Duke of Wellington Medal for Military History and the Society for Military History’s Distinguished Book Award for 2023. His next book, Rain of Ruin, on the bombing of Japan is due out in March 2025. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He lives between Italy and England.

EP 273 Gregg Henriques on the Unified Theory of Knowledge

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Jim talks with Gregg Henriques about his new book UTOK: The Unified Theory of Knowledge. They discuss the problem the book addresses, 3 vectors of knowing, the metacrisis, avoiding despair & techno-optimism, the enlightenment gap, the iQuad coin, the UTOK garden frame, a descriptive metaphysics for science, behavior & mind, endo-naturalism, 3 kinds of mindedness, webs of justification, the periodic table of behaviors, behavioral investment theory, the influence matrix, the tree of life, why wisdom is the ultimate virtue, the concept of God, the dragon’s lair, the fifth joint point, the third attractor, personal information agents, the garden fractal, a transcendent naturalism, and much more.
Dr. Gregg Henriques is a Professor of Graduate Psychology at James Madison University, where he has worked since 2003. He is a clinical and theoretical psychologist, and founder of UTOK, the Unified Theory of Knowledge, which is a new system of thought that bridges the sciences and humanities into a coherent whole. Dr. Henriques has authored three books, UTOK: The Unified Theory of Knowledge (2024), A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap (2022), and A New Unified Theory of Psychology (2011). He has published many professional papers in the field’s top journals, and has a popular blog on Psychology Today, called Theory of Knowledge, which has almost 500 essays and received over 10 million views. Dr. Henriques is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the 2022 President of the Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration, and head of the UTOK Circle. He teaches classes in psychotherapy, personality, personality assessment, cognitive psychology, and social psychology. He received his PhD in Clinical Psychology at the University of Vermont, did his postdoctoral training under Aaron T. Beck at the University of Pennsylvania, and is a licensed clinical psychologist in Virginia.