Episodes

Author, founder & scientist Mark Burgess talks with Jim about his career, physics skill set, CFEngine, Promise Theory, AI, free will, spacetime, and much more... Author, founder & scientist Mark Burgess talks with Jim about why he made the switch from theoretical physics to computer science, the widely applicable skill set of physicists, what led him to create CFEngine, computer immunology, how he came up with Promise Theory & its connection to physics & network science, the relativity of system...

Jamie Wheal talks to Jim about flow, intrinsic & extrinsic motivation, group flow, GameB, the future of ecstatic state tech, cult leaders, and much more... Author Jamie Wheal talks with Jim about working with the Navy SEALs, what characterizes flow, intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation, the Eleusinian Mysteries, Plato, Aristotle & Pythagoras, soft-leadership & dynamic hierarchies, group flow, if courage & integrity can be taught & what that means for Game B, coherent pluralism, spiritual bypassing,...

Jordan Hall & Jim outline Game B's advantage over Game A, explore embodied wisdom, meaningfulness, Game B transitions & life, parasitizing Game A, and much more... Jordan Hall and Jim have another wide-ranging conversation about Game B. They start with a quick overview of Game A and then move on to talk about the emerging collaboration of Game B & how it happened, its competitive advantage over Game A, liminal spaces, embodied wisdom, sovereignty & sense-making, the pre-B phase, changing our liv...

Author & CEO Gary Marcus talks with Jim about his book, Rebooting AI, driverless cars, AI learning & intelligence, hybrid AI models & AI bias, and much more... Scientist, author & entrepreneur Gary Marcus talks with Jim about his latest book, Rebooting AI. In this wide-ranging conversation they cover the gullibility gap, the illusory progress gap, the robustness gap, driverless car progress & safety, how narrow AI is today, model building, the free-lunch theorem, nativism in animals & humans, ho...

Bret Weinstein & Jim talk about unsustainable culture, dangerous algorithms, GameB, complexity, trade-offs, social media, today's left, Darwinian religion, and much more... Bret Weinstein and Jim talk about the evolutionary & game-theoretic dynamics that have led humanity to an unsustainable place, the impact of today’s algorithms & how they’re connected to human evolution, the recent shift of corporate values, how Game B should view complex systems, design vs. navigation, trade-offs from a theo...

Jim talks with CEO Jeff Gomez about working on movies, games & media, transmedia storytelling, fandom, working with the US gov, propaganda, Game B, and much more... CEO Jeff Gomez and Jim have a wide-ranging talk about Jeff’s work with massive movies like Pirates of the Caribbean, his work with transmedia storytelling & worldbuilding, how nerdy Jim really is, how narrative & story differ & the role the audience plays, fandom, the perennial Star Wars vs Star Trek question, the far reaches of fan ...

Consultant Sara Kindsfater-Yerkes & Jim talk about leadership today, HR teams, embracing change, team engagement, honesty, gender dynamics, being offended, and much more... Business Consultant Sara Kindsfater-Yerkes and Jim start this episode by reflecting on working together in their earlier careers. They then go on to talk about today’s multi-generational workforce, commonalities of Gen Z & Boomers, workplace mindsets, recruitment strategies & HR teams, shifts in today’s leadership approaches,...

AI expert Roman Yampolskiy & Jim have a wide-ranging talk about simulation theory, types of intelligence, AI research & safety, the singularity, and much more... This conversation with Jim and Dr. Roman V. Yampolskiy–author, tenured associate professor, founding director of Cyber Security Lab–starts by covering the vast variance of possible minds. They then go on to talk about Boltzmann brains, the implications of an infinite universe, simulation theory’s limits & if we could find its glitches, ...

Author Pamela McCorduck talks to Jim about her new book, the humanities & sciences divide, her friendships with AI pioneers, risks of AI, feminism, and more... Author Pamela McCorduck talks with Jim about themes of her latest book, This Could Be Important: My Life and Times with the Artificial Intelligentsia. They talk about C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures thesis that explores the divide between the humanities & sciences, Pamela’s professional & personal friendships with AI pioneers (Julian Feldman, Al...

Author, inventor, tech analyst, engineer, and military pilot John Robb talks to Jim about drone attacks, internet-age networks, geopolitics, AGI, and much more... This conversation with Jim and John Robb–author, inventor, entrepreneur, technology analyst, astro engineer, and military pilot–starts by covering the impact of the recent drone attack on a Saudi fuel processing center, and the current US political situation. They then go on to talk about how John compares resistance and the insurgency...

Professor, MacArthur Fellow & author Stuart Kauffman talks with Jim about complexity, biology & the origins of life, social/technical evolution, and much more... Professor, MacArthur Fellow and author Stuart Kauffman talks with Jim about the major themes of his career: complexity, auto-catalytic chemical sets, protocells and the origins of life, the problem of the error catastrophe, human evolution, social and technical evolution, the Fermi Paradox and much more. Stuart also introduces his new T...

Bonnitta Roy teaches insight practices for individuals who are developing meta-cognitive skills, and hosts collective insight retreats for groups interested in breaking away from limiting patterns of thought. She teaches a masters course in consciousness studies and transpersonal psychology at the Graduate Institute. Her teaching highlights the embodied, affective and perceptual aspects of the core self, and the non-egoic potentials from which subtle sensing, intuition and insight emerge. Throug...

Peter Wang is Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of Anaconda, the leading Python tools and data analytics company. Peter holds a B.A. in Physics from Cornell University and has been developing applications professionally using Python since 2001. Before co-founding Anaconda (formerly Continuum Analytics) in 2011, Peter spent seven years designing and developing applications for a variety of companies, including investment bankers, high-frequency trading firms, oil companies, and others. Pete...

David Brin is best-known for shining light — plausibly and entertainingly — on technology, society, and countless challenges confronting our rambunctious civilization. His bestselling novels include The Postman (filmed in 1997) plus explorations of our near-future in Earth and Existence. Other novels are translated into over 25 languages. His short stories explore vividly speculative ideas. Brin's nonfiction book The Transparent Society won the American Library Association's Freedom of Speech Aw...

Jill Tarter received her Bachelor of Engineering Physics Degree with Distinction from Cornell University and her Master’s Degree and a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley. She served as Project Scientist for NASA’s SETI program, the High Resolution Microwave Survey, and has conducted numerous observational programs at radio observatories worldwide. Since the termination of funding for NASA’s SETI program in 1993, she has served in a leadership role to secure private fu...

Trent McConaghy is the Founder of Ocean Protocol. He has 20 years of deep technology experience with a focus on machine learning, data visualization and user experience. He was a researcher at the Canadian Department of Defense and in 1999, he co-founded Analog Design Automation Inc. and was its CTO until its acquisition by Synopsys Inc. In 2004, he co-founded Solido Design Automation Inc., once again in the role of CTO. Trent has written two critically acclaimed books on machine learning, creat...

Brian Nosek is Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Open Science (COS) that operates the Open Science Framework. COS is enabling open and reproducible research practices worldwide. Brian is also a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2002. Brian co-founded Project Implicit, an multi-university collaboration for research and education investigating implicit cognition — thoughts and feelings that occur...

Dave Snowden is Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Cognitive Edge. His work is international in nature and covers government and industry looking at complex issues relating to strategy and organizational decision-making. He has pioneered a science-based approach to organizations drawing on anthropology, neuroscience, and complex adaptive systems theory. He is a popular and passionate keynote speaker on a range of subjects, and is well-known for his pragmatic cynicism and iconoclastic style....

David Krakauer is President and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute. David’s research focuses on the evolutionary history of information processing mechanisms in biology and culture. This includes genetic, neural, linguistic and cultural mechanisms. The research spans multiple levels of organization, seeking analogous patterns and principles in genetics, cell biology, microbiology and in organismal behavior and society. Introduction to David Krakauer and the ...

Joe Norman is an applied complexity scientist with a focus on transforming insights gleaned from complex systems science into practical and implementable strategies and tactics for grappling with an increasingly uncertain and dynamic world. Joe is an Affilate at the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, MA, an instructor at the Real World Risk Institute, and founder of Applied Complexity Science, LLC. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife where they are focusing their energy on h...

Zachary Vorhies recently resigned as a senior software engineer at YouTube. Employed by Google since 2008, Vorhies collected a large cache of documents that he claims demonstrates that Google intentionally skews search results to drive a political agenda. Vorhies shared these documents with James O'Keefe of Project Veritas, which released a video about the documents on August 14, 2019. Vorhies' candid interview with Jim Rutt was conducted five days later on August 19, 2019. Meet Zack Vorhies, "T...

Jordan is the Co-founder and Executive Chairman of the Neurohacker Collective. He is now in his 17th year of building disruptive technology companies. Jordan's interests in comics, science fiction, computers, and way too much TV led to a deep dive into contemporary philosophy (particularly the works of Gilles Deleuze and Manuel DeLanda), artificial intelligence and complex systems science, and then, as the Internet was exploding into the world, a few years at Harvard Law School where he spent ti...

Daniel Schmachtenberger is a founding member of The Consilience Project, aimed at improving public sensemaking and dialogue. The throughline of his interests has to do with ways of improving the health and development of individuals and society, with a virtuous relationship between the two as a goal. Towards these ends, he’s had particular interest in the topics of catastrophic and existential risk, civilization and institutional decay and collapse as well as progress, collective action problems...

Douglas Rushkoff is the host of the Team Human podcast and author of Team Human as well as a dozen other bestselling books on media, technology, and culture, including, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, Present Shock, Program or Be Programmed, Media Virus, and the novel Ecstasy Club. He is Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY/Queens. Introduction to Douglas Rushkoff 8 minutes "Team Human," Timothy Leary and the Long Boom 11 minutes Th...