The Jim Rutt Show

Jim talks with Sara Walker about the ideas in her new book Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence. They discuss Sara's path from theoretical physics to astrobiology, the biggest scientific questions, philosophy of science & theory development, historical approaches to origin of life research, Schrödin

Jim talks with Ashley Hodgson about her YouTube series "The New Enlightenment" and its heterodox perspectives on economics and social systems. They discuss Iain McGilchrist's influence & his book "The Matter with Things," economic mythology & its role in upholding the current system, the Bernays era of programmed consu

Jim talks with John Robb about the ideas in his recent essay "Blitzing DC," about how a networked organization took over Washington. They discuss the early roots of network warfare in Iraq, McLuhan-esque societal rewiring, open source dynamics & plausible promise, the Arab Spring & Occupy movements, empathy triggers, T

Jim talks with Timothy Clancy about wicked mess problems & the potential for a new Cold War centered on AI. They discuss the evolution from chat-based to reasoning AI, military applications, social & systemic complexity in national security, the scaling hypothesis, China vs US competition, DeepSeek R1 model implication

Jim talks with Brendan Graham Dempsey, picking up on a disagreement they had on Facebook about the teleology of the universe. They discuss Aristotle's influence on the topic, Terrence Deacon's work on naturalizing teleology, the distinction between purpose & goal-directed behavior, cosmic teleology, Teilhard de Chardin

Jim talks with Emil Ejner Friis about political metamodernism and what comes after postmodernism. They discuss the "woke vacuum" & its failure to include common folks, psychosocial problems vs material challenges in Western countries, Jim's pushback on postmodernism, Trump as the first postmodern president, personal vs