Upcoming Guests - The Jim Rutt Show

Tristan Harris

Tristan Harris is the Co-Founder & Executive Director of the Center for Humane Technology, and the Co-Host of the podcast, “Your Undivided Attention.” He was called the “closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience” by The Atlantic magazine, Tristan was the former Design Ethicist at Google. He is a world expert on how technology steers us all, leaving Google to engage the issue publicly. Tristan spent over a decade understanding subtle psychological forces, from his childhood as a magician, to working with the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, to his role as CEO of Apture, which was acquired by Google. His work on the attention economy started in 2013, when he created a slide deck within Google that went viral, warning about the technology industry’s arms race to capture human attention and the moral responsibility companies have for the ways they restructure society. Tristan’s work has been featured on TED, The Atlantic, 60 Minutes, The New York Times, The Associated Press, Wall Street Journal. and many more. Tristan has briefed Heads of State, technology company CEOs, and members of U.S. Congress about the attention economy.

Jessika Trancik

Jessika Trancik is an Associate Professor in the Institute for Data, Systems and Society (IDSS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She received her B.S. in materials science and engineering from Cornell University and her Ph.D. in materials science from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Her research group studies the dynamic costs and environmental impacts of energy technologies to inform technology design and policy.

Steve LeVine

Steve LeVine is the Future Editor at Axios. Prior to Axios, LeVine was Washington Correspondent for Quartz, the mobile-first startup launched in 2012 by Atlantic Media. Steve is also a Future Tense Fellow at the New America Foundation and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, where he teaches energy security in the graduate-level Security Studies Program. Previously, Steve was a foreign correspondent for 18 years in the former Soviet Union, Pakistan and the Philippines, running a bureau for The Wall Street Journal, and before that writing for The New York Times, the Financial Times, and Newsweek. He is also an author of two books.

Daniel Schrag

Daniel Schrag is the Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology, Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering at Harvard University, and Director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment. He also co-directs the Program on Science, Technology and Public Policy at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. Dan’s interests include climate change, energy technology, energy policy, and digital technology policy. He is currently working on understanding how tropical ocean dynamics relates to decadal climate variability and climate prediction.

Jessica Flack

Jessica Flack is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Flack directs SFI’s Collective Computation Group (C4). Flack was formerly founding director of the Center for Complexity and Collective Computation in the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Flack received her Ph.D. from Emory in 2003, studying cognitive science, animal behavior and evolutionary theory, and B.A. with honors from Cornell in 1996. Flack’s work has been covered by scientists and science journalists in many publications and media outlets, including Quanta Magazine, the BBC, NPR, Nature, Science, The Economist, New Scientist, and Current Biology.

Mark Burgess (part 2: money)

This second conversation will largely focus on Mark’s views on money that are largely summarized in his book Money, Ownership. and Agency.

Mark Burgess is a theoretician and practitioner in the area of information systems, whose work has focused largely on distributed information infrastructure. He is known particularly for his work on Configuration Management and Promise Theory. He was the principal Founder of CFEngine, ChiTek-i, and now co-founder and chief innovation officer at Aljabr Inc.

Mark is emeritus professor of Network and System Administration from Oslo University College. He is the author of numerous books, articles, and papers on topics from physics, Network and System Administration, to fiction. He also writes a blog on issues of science and IT industry concerns. Today, he works as an advisor on science and technology matters all over the world.

Beth Pyles

Beth Pyles practiced law as a trial lawyer in West Virginia for twenty-two years before responding to the call to ministry, attending Princeton Theological Seminary, from where she graduated with an M. Div. in 2005. She is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA), serving McDowell Presbyterian Church in Highland County, Virginia since 2005 in a part-time pastorate, which allowed her time to spend two months a year in Iraq with Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) from 2005 – 2010. CPT is a faith-based violence reduction organization with teams in Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Colombia, and part-time presences in northern Canada and on the border between the U.S. and Mexico.

Hanzi Freinacht (part 2)

Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian & sociologist, author of The Listening Society, Nordic Ideology, and the upcoming book The 6 Hidden Patterns of World History. As a writer, Hanzi combines in-depth knowledge of several sciences and disciplines and offers maps of our time and the human condition with his characteristically accessible, poetic and humorous writing style – challenging the reader’s perspective of herself and the world. He epitomizes much of the metamodern philosophy and can be considered a personification of this strand of thought.

John R. Koza

John R. Koza is Chair of National Popular Vote and a member of the Board of Directors. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Michigan in 1972. He published a board game involving Electoral College strategy in 1966. From 1973 through 1987, he was co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Scientific Games Inc. where he co-invented the rub-off instant lottery ticket used by state lotteries. In the 1980s, he and attorney Barry Fadem were active in promoting adoption of lotteries by various states through the citizen-initiative process and state legislative action. Between 1988 and 2003, he taught a course on genetic algorithms and genetic programming at Stanford University, where he was a consulting professor. He is lead author of the book Every Vote Equal: A State-Based Plan for Electing the President by National Popular Vote and originator of the National Popular Vote legislation. Koza has visited 29 states on behalf of National Popular Vote.

Eric Smith

Eric Smith received the Bachelor of Science in Physics and Mathematics from the California Institute of Technology in 1987, and a Ph.D. in Physics from The University of Texas at Austin in 1993, with a dissertation on problems in string theory and high-temperature superconductivity. From 1993 to 2000 he worked in physical, nonlinear, and statistical acoustics at the Applied Research Labs: U. T. Austin, and at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. From 2000 he has worked at the Santa Fe Institute on problems of self-organization in thermal, chemical, and biological systems. A focus of his current work is the statistical mechanics of the transition from the geochemistry of the early earth to the first levels of biological organization, with some emphasis on the emergence of the metabolic network.

Daniel Christian Wahl

Daniel is an international consultant and educator specializing in biologically-inspired whole systems design and transformative innovation. He is a biologist (University of Edinburgh and University of California), holds an MSc in Holistic Science (Schumacher College) and a PhD in Design (CSND, University of Dundee, 2006).

Daniel has worked with local and national governments on foresight and futures, facilitated seminars on sustainable development for the UNITAR affiliated training centre CIFAL Scotland, consulted companies like Camper, Ecover and Lush on sustainable innovation, and has co-authored and taught sustainability training courses for Gaia Education, LEAD International and various universities and design schools. He is also a member of the International Futures Forum, a fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts (FRSA), co-founder of Biomimicry Iberia, and brought Bioneers to Europe in 2010.

Daniel currently works for Gaia Education and the SMART UIB project of the Universidad de las Islas Balears. Triarchy Press published his first book, Designing Regenerative Cultures, in 2016.

Joshua Epstein

Joshua Epstein is Professor of Epidemiology in the NYU College of Global Public Health, and founding Director of the NYU Agent-Based Modeling Laboratory, with affiliated appointments at The Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, and the College of Arts & Sciences.

Prior to joining NYU, he was Professor of Emergency Medicine at Johns Hopkins, and Director of the Center for Advanced Modeling in the Social, Behavior, and Health Sciences, with Joint appointments in Economics, Applied Mathematics, International Health, and Biostatistics. Before that, he was Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution and Director of the Center on Social and Economic Dynamics. His research interest has been modeling complex social dynamics using mathematical and computational methods, notably the method of Agent-Based Modeling in which he is a recognized pioneer. For this transformative innovation, he was awarded the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award in 2008, an Honorary Doctorate of Science from Amherst College in 2010, and was elected to the Society of Sigma XI in 2018.

Joshua & Jim will be discussing his last book, Agent_Zero: Toward Neurocognitive Foundations for Generative Social Science and more.