Jim talks with David Chapman about rethinking nobility for the modern age through his recent "nobility tetralogy" of essays. They discuss character & virtue as "risible" concepts, noblesse oblige & elite education, nobility as intention vs status, "The Battle of Maldon" poem & its lessons, postmodernism & postmodernity, the failure of elite universities, effective altruism & Sam Bankman-Fried, Elon Musk & hubris, meritocracy & institutional change, Nietzsche's master-...
Jul 03, 2025•Season 1Ep. 308
Jim talks with Thomas Schindler about heliogenic civilization as a vision for a regenerative future. They discuss the current multipolar trap shitshow of global civilization, M3 money supply & GDP growth requirements, the doubling of energy demand, exit to planet as an alternative to traditional business exits, biomimicry & biological approaches to manufacturing, solar energy as a fusion reactor, nature's material production vs human industrial production, construction systems using eart...
Jul 01, 2025•1 hr 30 min•Season 1Ep. 307
Jim talks with Anders Indset about his book The Singularity Paradox: Bridging the Gap Between Humanity and AI, co-authored with Florian Neutkart. They discuss the "final narcissistic injury of humankind," Freud's three historical narcissistic injuries, machine consciousness vs human consciousness, the "undead" state, human cognitive limitations, game theory dynamics & multipolar traps, Artificial Human Intelligence vs AGI/ASI approaches, consciousness preservation, chess AI & human cogni...
Jun 25, 2025•1 hr 26 min•Season 1Ep. 306
Jim talks with J. Doyne Farmer about his book Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World. They discuss deterministic chaos & strange attractors, how chaos makes time possible, bounded rationality, economic equilibrium & Nash equilibrium, traditional economics' failures, standard economic theory basics, "as if" vs "as is" approaches, heterogeneity in economic systems, agent-based modeling & its critiques, the "metabolism of civilization" analogy, financial markets as...
Jun 19, 2025•1 hr 22 min•Season 1Ep. 305
Jim talks with Samuel Arbesman about the ideas in his book The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World—and Shapes Our Future. They discuss Sam's motivation for writing the book, the wondering vs. utilitarian stances toward computing, early personal computing experiences, scale in programming, AI as a "hinge of history" moment, the democratization of code through AI tools, the dual nature of code as text & action, analogies between code & magic/mysticism, HyperC...
Jun 17, 2025•1 hr 22 min•Season 1Ep. 304
Jim talks with Mark Stahlman about the new Pope Leo XIV and the Catholic Church's evolving role in a digital age. They discuss Trump as an avatar of the digital paradigm shift, the significance of Leo XIV's name choice, Francis as a thug, Francis's background as chemical engineer and bouncer, Synodality & Church decentralization, the exterior vs interior personas of Pope Francis, Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, the three pillars of Catholic social teaching, financial system reforms...
Jun 04, 2025•58 min•Season 1Ep. 303
Jim talks with Daniel Mezick on the theme of games and their relationship to governance. They discuss Jane McGonigal's four properties of games, the nature of authority, position-based vs role-based authority, formal vs. informal authority structures, finite & infinite games, mutable games, the paradox of self-amendment, the U.S. Constitution as a game, progress tracking in governance systems, roles, artifacts, rules, events, Constitutional reforms, problems with a two-party system, unintend...
May 30, 2025•54 min•Season 1Ep. 302
Jim talks with Zak Stein about the psychological and developmental risks of AI in K-12 education. They discuss education vs schooling, technology's role in human-to-human interaction, GPS & skill atrophy, prosthetic vs enhancement technologies, multipolar traps in AI, cognitive diminishment & skill development, teacherly authority, attention as a constrained resource, attention as a service, parasocial attachment, risks of anthropomorphizing AI, object relations theory, bad parenting &am...
May 27, 2025•Season 1Ep. 301
Jim talks with Daniel Rodriguez about the state of AI software development and its implementation in industry. They discuss Daniel's background at Microsoft & Anaconda, transformer-based technologies, software engineering as hard vs soft science, vibe coding, barriers to entry in software engineering, cognitive styles needed for programming, Daniel's history with LLMs, unit testing & test-driven development with AI, social aspects of AI adoption, quality concerns & technical debt, st...
May 22, 2025•1 hr 12 min•Season 1Ep. 300
Jim talks with Ryan Blosser about the ideas in his book Mulberries in the Rain: Growing Permaculture Plants for Food and Friendship, co-authored with Trevor Piersol. They discuss the motivation behind writing a permaculture book, the human sector in permaculture design, financial challenges of permaculture farming, 8 forms of capital, food forest design principles, plant guild functions & relationships, persimmons, hunting stories, willows, redbuds, bourbon, black locust properties, rhubarb ...
May 21, 2025•1 hr 36 min•Season 1Ep. 299
Jim talks with Adam Lake about Reboot America, a project aimed at reforming American democracy. They discuss existential threats facing humanity, the two-party corporate duopoly, a Princeton study on policy preferences, first-past-the-post voting problems, campaign finance issues, social media's role in polarization, wealth & income inequality, Bernie Sanders's Fight Oligarchy tour, the Democratic Party's cultural baggage, Trump country perspectives, courage in leadership, how the quality of...
May 15, 2025•44 min•Season 1Ep. 298
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, Schrödinger's negative entropy concept, Prigogine's dissipative systems, information as a causal force at life's origin, emergence as a scientific concept, constructor theory of inform...
May 13, 2025•Season 1Ep. 297
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 consumerism, GDP growth myths, destructive growth value, problems with GDP, resource extraction vs other forms of growth, Galbraith's economics, corporate accountability structu...
Apr 15, 2025•Season 1Ep. 296
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, Trump's 2016 campaign as a hybrid swarm, The_Donald as a meme amplifier, the Blue Network's counter-response, the George Floyd protests & moral framework, censorship &am...
Mar 31, 2025•58 min•Season 1Ep. 295
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 implications, export controls on GPU chips, Taiwan's strategic importance, multipolar trap & arms race dynamics, power & chip requirements, training vs implementation costs, c...
Mar 28, 2025•1 hr 16 min•Season 1Ep. 294
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's "Omega Point," Whitehead's relational teleology, Ilya Prigogine's dissipative structures, energy efficiency comparisons between organisms & stars, the cosmic imperative ...
Mar 25, 2025•1 hr 16 min•Season 1Ep. 293
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 institutional change, emotional states & leadership, late-stage financialized capitalism's effects on communities, European vs American approaches to industry/manufacturin...
Mar 18, 2025•Season 1Ep. 292
Jim talks with Jeff Sebo about the ideas in his book The Moral Circle: Who Matters, What Matters, and Why. They discuss the concept of the moral circle, harming cats vs harming cars, the case study of Happy the elephant, Descartes' view of animals, phenomenal consciousness, Thomas Nagel's bat argument, the Google engineer who claimed LaMDA was conscious, the substrate dependence of consciousness, a factory waste disposal dilemma, animal rescue triage scenarios, probability calculations in moral ...
Mar 13, 2025•1 hr 24 min•Season 1Ep. 291
Jim talks with Mark Stahlman about Trump as an avatar of the current digital transformation. They discuss the GameB movement & complexity theory, predictions made to the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, security through development as alternative to war, the three spheres (East, West, Digital), China's approach to digital vs. the Western approach, Catholic social teaching principles, neo-feudalism vs. the scribal paradigm, Humanity 2.0, Aristotelian concepts of soul & hylomorphism, C...
Mar 11, 2025•1 hr 25 min•Season 1Ep. 290
Jim talks with Adam B. Levine about AI programming aids for non-techies and the future of Bitcoin. They discuss Adam's background as a "technical non-technical" person, the evolution from manual LLM prompting to using IDEs, Windsurf as an AI-first IDE, Claude 3.7's thinking mode, productivity improvements with AI coding tools, different platforms like Cursor and Cline, the "pure idea space" vs technical execution, the role of liberal arts people in tech teams, Bitcoin as digital gold, Schelling ...
Mar 06, 2025•1 hr 26 min•Season 1Ep. 289
Jim talks with BJ Campbell about the ideas in his Substack essay "On Cops, Belief, and Chainsaw Faced Robot Dogs." They discuss forms of social control, absolute police states vs. belief states, the role of belief vs. actual enforcement in maintaining order, the noble lie concept & Plato's original formulation, the 2020 crime spike & "defund the police" movement, the history of police forces & alternative methods of maintaining order, the "God-shaped hole" concept, membranes & gr...
Mar 04, 2025•1 hr 19 min•Season 1Ep. 288
Jim talks with Jonathan Rauch about the ideas in his book The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. They discuss the epistemic crisis, Plato's Theaetetus, Trump & propaganda techniques, the Constitution of Knowledge as a framework for epistemics, the "marketplace of ideas" metaphor, the reality-based community, the personal-institutional spiral, the social funnel of knowledge, social media's impact on epistemics, advertising vs subscription models, meme space pollution, the anti-vax...
Feb 27, 2025•1 hr 37 min•Season 1Ep. 287
Jim talks with Bob Levy about presidential powers, their history, and their potential for abuse. They discuss the nature of the presidential pardon, recent controversial pardons by Trump & Biden, proposed reforms, 3 main purposes of the pardon, court blocks on executive actions, the firing of federal employees, the Impoundment Control Act, immigration & deportation under Trump, presidential power over tariffs, courts as guardrails, the timeline for legal challenges, potential constitutio...
Feb 24, 2025•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 286
Jim talks with Josh Bernoff, author of Writing Without Bullshit, about the impact of AI on writing education and professional writing. They discuss Josh's background and career, Stephen Lane's recent op-ed arguing that AI should take over writing mechanics, problems with AI-generated writing, the role of writing in thinking, ChatGPT's "deep research," Jim's ScriptHelper project, the decline in math & navigation skills, the importance of memos for corporate decision-making, literacy as a fund...
Feb 18, 2025•53 min•Season 1Ep. 285
Jim talks with Jordan Hall about the relationship between humanity and advanced AI. They discuss the false dichotomy of state vs market control of AI, the commons & the church as organizing principles, community vs society, why alignment with humanity is by definition impossible, the role of symbols & organizing principles in communities, how Moloch & Mammon shape AI development, hyper-concentration of power, neo-feudalism, the possibility of an AI singleton, entropy in communities, ...
Feb 13, 2025•Season 1Ep. 284
Jim talks with Brian Chau about what the new administration could mean for AI development. They discuss recent actions by the Tump administration including repealing Biden's executive order & the Stargate infrastructure project, Biden's impact on AI, the formation of the Alliance for the Future, regulatory bureaucracy, state patchwork laws, censorship, the Gemini controversy & DEI in AI, safety restrictions in chat models, the meaning of DeepSeek, economic implications of model distillat...
Feb 11, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 283
Jim talks with Tyson Yunkaporta about the ideas in his new book Right Story, Wrong Story: Adventures in Indigenous Thinking. They discuss a symbolic emu visitor on Jim's farm, Aboriginal collective pronouns, Sand Talk's impact, wrong canoes, lore vs law, how Aboriginal law adapted to invasion, ritualized violence & rule-governed fighting, Aboriginal knowledge systems & peer review, signals & spirit in natural systems, the sacred as a way to deal with complex systems, Plato's noble li...
Feb 06, 2025•1 hr 34 min•Season 1Ep. 282
Jim talks with Jeff Hawkins and Viviane Clay about the Thousand Brains Project and Jeff's book A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence. They discuss Mountcastle's theory of the neocortex's universal algorithm, cortical columns & their structure, learning modules in AI sensory systems, reprogramming of the neocortex, the 6 layers of cortex, mini-columns & macro-columns, the visual cascade, reference frames as essential for knowledge representation, "voting" for perceptual consensu...
Feb 04, 2025•1 hr 32 min•Season 1Ep. 281
Jim talks with Rob Henderson about his book Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class and the concept of luxury beliefs. They discuss Rob's journey from foster care to Yale and Cambridge, Jim's background, the decline in two-parent families from 1960 to 2005, changing forms of elite hypocrisy, intra-elite competition, corporate adoption of woke beliefs, enforcement of ideological conformity, the spread of academic ideas into mainstream culture, attributions of success, drugs an...
Jan 30, 2025•1 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 280
Jim talks with epidemiology expert Samuel Scarpino about the recent spread of H5N1 (bird flu) in dairy cows and its implications for public health. They discuss the historical context of H5N1, fatality rates, modeling the spread, network effects in disease transmission, current surveillance efforts, H5N1 transmission mechanisms, challenges of human respiratory transmission, lessons learned & mislearned from Covid-19, the current state of the H5N1 vaccine preparation, extreme pandemic respons...
Jan 09, 2025•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 279
