The Jim Rutt Show

Jim talked with Cory Doctorow—prolific sci-fi and nonfiction author, journalist, activist, EFF special adviser, and author of Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It—about how structural forces degraded the internet, and what citizens (not consumers) can actually do about it. They discussed: The origin of "enshittification"—Cory's January 2023 blog post, its viral spread, and its naming as Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society Two-sided markets & th

Jim talks with Tyson Yunkaporta—indigenous Australian scholar and author of Sand Talk, one of Jim's top ten favorite books—about his metaphysics and worldview, the ecology of sex and creation, and how to wear rationalist and traditional knowledge frameworks simultaneously. They discuss: Jim's editorial endorsement of Sand Talk—"one of the top 10 best books I have ever read" Tyson's trilogy of books Humans as a custodial species—sacred carers embedded in nature Who Tyson is when he wakes from dee

Jim talks with Lisa Buckingham—a veteran HR leader at Vialto Partners, US Soccer, Lincoln Financial, and Thomson—about how the LLM era is reshaping hiring and job architecture, and how companies and workers can roll with the changes. They discuss: Jim and Lisa's shared history in natural language processing labs thirty years ago—and the contrast with today, where "everybody can be an AI expert" The kind of people to hire in the age of LLMs: intellectual curiosity, learning agility, and willingne

Jim talks with Peter Wang—chief AI officer, cofounder and CEO of Anaconda, board member of the Center for Humane Technology, and founder of the Austin STEM Center—about Robert Pirsig's metaphysics of quality, how modernity encourages defection, and a secular conception of the sacred. They discuss: Peter's self-description as "the music in a violin that can kind of hear itself" The "Peter Wang-shaped hole in the universe" thought experiment Subject-object Cartesian dualism as a false alienation M

Jim talks with recurring guest and deep systems thinker Jordan Hall about the scaffolding of his worldview. They discuss the waking-up scenario as a window into consciousness and personal identity, Jordan's phenomenology of waking and the "latent potential of all possible memory," the soul as the binding of finite and infinite, Jim's counter-framing of consciousness as a fusion of perception, interoception, and unconscious memory, the infinite as genuinely real, the Platonic triangle as a concre

Jim talks with Bonnitta Roy, interdisciplinary thinker and founder of the Pop-Up School and the Divinity School, about her worldview, the deep foundations of her work, and an upcoming conference in Cambridge. They discuss the phenomenology of waking up and recomposing, life as a stream of participation, being nested in place through horses, pigeons, bees, and gardens, covariant motions as her process-philosophy term for embeddedness, the limits of computational rationalism, the bench scientist v