Episodes

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 warfar...

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 wisd...

Jim talks with Loribeth Ford Jarrell, the director of Sumplicity Math, a mathematics enrichment program for children. They discuss working with the neural characteristics & firing patterns of individual children, education going modular, the microschool movement vs supplementary education, tutorial services, individual assessment, 10 vector dials, Jim's education in proving the teacher wrong, identifying Jim's learning profile, why education should belong to the child, the 10-frame dot model, du...

Jim talks with Lorraine Besser about the ideas in her book The Art of the Interesting: What We Miss in the Pursuit of the Good Life and How to Cultivate It. They discuss the turning point in Lorraine's life that inspired the book, the meaning of the good life, pleasure vs eudaimonia, Stoicism & Epicureanism, unstructured cognitive engagement, the interesting, Seinfeld's relationship to happiness, problems with the pursuit of pleasure & meaning, the arrival fallacy, saints vs human beings, psycho...

Jim talks with Nancy Jacobson, the founder and CEO of the No Labels political organization, in the last of four conversations featuring non-partisan thinkers on the upcoming US presidential election. They discuss No Labels's mission, the Problem Solvers Caucus, the common sense platform, the quality of No Labels volunteers, the power of party leaders, issues with the current parties, Nancy's vote for the 2024 election, what's next for No Labels, and more. Episode Transcript "The Republican Elect...

Jim talks with Alex Ebert about his recent essay "Suboptimal Revolution: In Defense of Inefficiencies." They discuss what optimization does, genius vs democracy, negating the spatiotemporal experience of becoming a master, the decision-by-committee problem, intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation, dimensional collapse, the app Shazam, what happened to movies, preferred energetic states & the feat of problematizing, status burning, audience capture, the signature of a medium, the human ability to spot ...

Jim talks with Brendan Graham Dempsey about the ideas in his new book, The Evolution of Meaning: A Universal Learning Process. They discuss Jim's love for the book, the thinking behind the title, future books in the series, why Brendan avoided the word "religion," the nature of meaning, dissipative systems, Shannon information vs semantic information, relations vs static objects, meaning as adaptive information, the meaning of value, Gregg Henriques's Unified Theory of Knowledge, the meaning of ...

Jim talks with Richard Hanania in the third of four interviews with heterodox political thinkers on the upcoming US presidential election. They discuss the danger of "heterodox orthodoxy," Trump's election denial, disagreeing with the Democrats on policy, Jim's critiques of both parties, religion's impact on policy, Republicans as the party of low human capital, the idea of Trump derangement syndrome, the number of people who served under Trump who are not supporting him, guardrails against over...

Jim talks with Marcia Gralha about her and Gregg Henriques's work identifying the common core of psychotherapeutic traditions. They discuss her collaboration with & recent engagement to Gregg, framing psychotherapy, the enlightenment gap, the development of eclecticism, common factors between approaches, the integration movement, approaches to integration, the 3(+1) elements of the Common Core, the quality of the therapeutic bond, cultural legitimization, choosing interventions, rituals, the Uni...

Jim talks with Aravind Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of the AI-powered search engine Perplexity. They discuss Jim's use of Perplexity, its wide range of use cases, why Google search is limited by fear of mistakes, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), citations, coming up with the idea, leveraging existing tools vs inventing everything, the core product experience, how the orchestration engine works, semantic vector databases, testing Perplexity as a hedge fund strategist, the Perplexity API, Per...

Jim talks with Bret Weinstein in the second of four episodes featuring heterodox political thinkers on the 2024 presidential election. They discuss Bret's historical voting principles & why they don't apply this time, election interference, what actually happened with Biden's failed debate, current polling & apparent desperation of the Democrats, the long trajectory of feminism & its relationship to the current Democratic party, defections by men, a massive political realignment, hating both tea...

Jim talks with Evan McMullen about the state of self-driving car technology, with a special focus on simulators. They discuss the purpose of simulators, levels of simulation, how the world is modeled, gradually ramping up the complexity of the testing world, Tesla's approach, hardware-in-the-loop testing, Waymo's first-mover advantage, simulating the availability of a human intervener, driverless solutions vs driver aid, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), the question of which theorie...

Jim talks with Cliff Maloney about the November election and his get-out-the-vote campaign, The Pennsylvania Chase. They discuss Cliff's libertarian background, why Pennsylvania is a crucial state, a Republican return to grassroots, the structure of the operation, the effectiveness of door-knocking, choosing the highest-impact doors to knock on, why Cliff is helping the Republicans, Jim's political trajectory, oikophobia, why Jim finds Trump intolerable, Cliff's political background, working for...

Jim talks with Nikos Salingaros about architectural theory, urbanism, and urban planning. They discuss inherited knowledge, the capability to distinguish between ugly & beautiful buildings, John Vervaeke's 4 kinds of knowing, vertical vs horizontal design, how architecture went so wrong, backward evolution, a Messianic futurism cult, the destruction of living geometry, how the real estate racket works, biophilic design, the correlation between modern architecture & modern art, the human scale, J...

Jim talks with Trent McConaghy and Ben Goertzel about the merger of Ben's SingularityNET AGIX token, Trent's Ocean Protocol, and Fetch. They discuss the relative size of the merger, motivations for pulling together the three networks, distinguishing this from a standard corporate merger, how the communities of the projects reacted, leveraging the benefits of scale, changing the ticker symbol, defining AGI vs ASI, forecasts on AGI, considering the arc of self-driving cars, data bottlenecks, the l...

Jim talks with Toufi Saliba about the Toda/IP protocol and HyperCycle, a decentralized network for AI-to-AI communication. They discuss the high-level view of Toda/IP & HyperCycle, enabling communication of value, what Toda adds on top of UDP, time & cost constraints, cryptographic proof in the first handshake, how Toda transfers value in very small quantities, how settlement occurs, who has custody of a dollar, transaction machines, where money is kept & what prevents stealing, an actual non-fu...

Jim talks with Stephen Webb about his book If the Universe Is Teeming With Aliens... Where Is Everybody?: Seventy-Five Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life. They discuss Jim's obsession with the Fermi paradox, the meaning of the Fermi paradox, the Drake equation, discounting claims about UFOs, a question that everyone can contribute to, Perplexity AI's estimates, optimistic scenarios, anthropic principles, Kardashev civilizations, the principle of mediocrity, g...

Jim talks with Malcolm and Simone Collins about declining worldwide fertility rates and pronatalism. They discuss when fertility started declining, the pre-World-War-I fertility catastrophe, the countries entering fertility freefall, a population-based pyramid scheme, different cultural frameworks' resistances to fertility collapse, the urban monoculture, the rise of an anti-natalist mindset, preparing for a consistent economic decline, the UN's misleading statistic, the debt overhang, whether t...

Jim talks with Glenn Loury about his recent memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative. They discuss the problem of self-regard, Glenn's mentorship under Thomas Schelling, his upbringing in the South Side of Chicago, his matriarch aunt Eloise, his best friend Woody, the one-drop rule, the social construction of race, the influence of his uncles, stealing a car for prom, the Illinois Institute of Technology, working at a printing plant, community college classes, discovering the...

Jordan Hall tries to convince Jim that the reality of the Christian God is logically necessary. They discuss points of agreement & resonance between their views, relational ontology vs substance ontology, belief as mental operation vs existential commitment, a hierarchical stack of concepts, the complexity lens, the conceptual level on which relationship belongs, relata as contained within relationship, relationship as the most real, the impossibility of imagining being without relationship, one...

Jim talks with John Robb about the ideas in his recent Substack essay, "What Went Wrong With America?" They discuss why there's a need to address what went wrong, tribal conspiracy theories following the Trump assassination, a breakdown in collective sense-making, cohesion, coherence, legitimacy, OODA loops, the importance of orientation, reorienting after career retirement, America's choice to orient on globalism, open borders, the end of America's tribal narrative, Pat Buchanan, the Ross Perot...

Jim talks with Alexander Bard in the last of three conversations about his and Jan Söderqvist’s recent book Process and Event. They discuss the barred absolute as that which is hidden to us in the world, the barred subject, the mamilla in Lacan, barred absolutes vs the Barred Absolute, dissolving nihilism, accepting death as absolute, trans-determinism, Grand Project A, exodology, paradigmatics, the tyrant's lynch mob, oikophobia, Trumpism as a reaction to oikophobia, attentionalism, the aboliti...

Jim talks with Alexander Bard in the second of three conversations about his and Jan Söderqvist's recent book Process and Event. They discuss eventological monotheism vs nomadological iconology, dualism vs monism, substance dualism, Spinoza's monism, graded relationality, emergence vector theory, Syntheism & its concepts, God as the ultimate dream, creating God, 4 dimensions of time, a more complete metaphysics, the problem with oneness, the two-headed phallus, priests & chiefs, the 3 fundamenta...

Jim talks with Pamela Denise Long about the nomination of Kamala Harris and what it might mean for American Freedmen. They discuss the meaning & value of the term "Freedmen," what it means to be Black & why it matters, misallocated affirmative action, Barack Obama's ethnicity, the history of Bantu & Nilotic Africans, Kamala Harris as a metaphor, parallels between Harris & Obama, the question of Harris's Blackness, Harris's decision to identify as Black, the influence on public policy, her statem...