"People don't know anything, and they know less about time than anything." I summarize the two most popular theories on time in this interview with @brendangdempsey.bsky.social, and explain why I think they're both probably wrong. Full episode link below 👇

@brendangdempsey.bsky.social interviewed me about “A Minimum Viable Metaphysics” and “What I Mean by ‘Metaphysics’.” Metaphysics as assumptions for learning and reasoning, why determinism and lawfulness aren’t the same, temporal reciprocal emergence, weak & strong anthropic principles, and more.

"The AI figured out that the server wasn't started up, hacked its way out of the test environment... and started the server back up from the outside... That's not a type of behavior AI was trained for directly." - @intelligence.org's Nate Soares on why LLMs can do more than they were trained to do

🎙️ w/ Nate Soares on his and E. Yudkowsky’s book *If Anybody Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All.* @intelligence.org Why mitigating existential AI risk should be a top global priority, the problem of pointing minds, a treaty to ban the race to superintelligence, and more.

🎙️ w/ Alex Ebert on “New Age and the Religion of Self: The Anatomy of a Rebellion Against Reality.” The law of attraction, manifesting, epistemic asymmetry as the cool, the odd coincidence of leaving the gold standard and New Ageism, retribalized collective delusions, regaining hypocrisy, and more.

🎙️ w/ @edelwax.bsky.social on “Full Stack Alignment: Co-Aligning AI and Institutions with Thick Models of Value.” Pluralism as a core principle in social design, thick models of value, multipolar traps, moral graph elicitation, starting with membranes, Moloch-free zones, co-optation risks, & more.

I often say, “When I hear the word metaphysics, I reach for my pistol.” Yet, I have a metaphysics—whether I know it or not. For a while, I’ve been puzzling over the question: What are my metaphysics? This article offers at least a provisional answer. jimrutt.substack.com/p/a-minimum-...

🎙️ w/ John Preston on *40 Flushes to Grow Your Business: The World’s #2 Business Series,* designed to be read during bathroom breaks. Breaking free from being a one-person show, business owner support networks, social media pitfalls, lifestyle creep, transparency with employees, and much more.

🎙️ w/ Pablos Holman on *Deep Future: Creating Technology That Matters.* Deep tech vs shallow tech, computational modeling and simulation for real-world problems, space-based solar power, energy storage limitations, the transformation of the apparel industry through automation, and much more.

🎙️ w/ @brendangdempsey.bsky.social on *Psyche and Symbolic Learning,* vol. 2 in his Evolution of Meaning series. Stage theories of development, the relationship between semantic richness & structural complexity, justification systems theory, cultural evolution, and much more.

"You have more options to wire and to let go of patterns that aren't working for you and to create new patterns that are going to work for you over time." - Jordan Gruber on known benefits of microdosing psychedelics

🎙️ w/ James Fadiman & @jordangruber.bsky.social on *Microdosing for Health, Healing, and Enhanced Performance.* Typical doses, legal status & classification history, dosing protocols, health applications, research methodologies & limitations, commercial potential, global adoption patterns, and more.

"Like any highly flexible general-purpose tool, you have to build your own mental model of what it can and cannot do and how to use it." - David Shapiro on rapidly changing AI capabilities and the development of intuition

🎙️ w/ David Shapiro on how to use AI for research and writing. Post-labor economics, David’s AI tool stack, writing and editing techniques, critique and perspectives through personas, the rapid adoption of AI tools across industries, understanding limitations, challenges for AI startups, and more.

"The Columbia naturalists... accepted that all qualities and features of human life ... are as natural as anything else in nature. ... Then they added this objective relativism, which said, we don't know what it's like or what it means to say that an object exists in isolation." - Lawrence Cahoone

🎙️ w/ Lawrence Cahoone on *The Orders of Nature* and his systematic approach to naturalist philosophy. Objective relativism, the rejection of simples, Wimsatt's notion of emergence, natural religion & the fine-tuned constants of the universe, and much more.

🎙️ w/ Adam B. Levine on humanity’s changing relationship with AI and “thinking on demand.” The GPT-5 release, the evolution of vibe-coding, the Midnight Protocol project, automated negotiation systems, local AI on personal devices, the future of AI agents as personal representatives, and much more.

🎙️ w/ @daveshap.bsky.social about his 6-part series on “post-labor economics.” Historical economic transitions, labor as societal pillar, the pyramid of prosperity, the pyramid of power, blockchain & crypto, radical financial transparency, liquid democracy, and much more.

🎙️ w/ Ken Stanley on the Fractured Entanglement Representation hypothesis in deep learning neural networks. Open-endedness in AI systems, the paradox of finding things by not looking for them, Unified Factored Representation as an alternative to FER, connections to biological evolution, and more.

🎙️ w/ @edlatimore.bsky.social on *Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business.* Chess playing & street hustling, childhood trauma & violence, academic struggles, his boxing career, alcohol abuse, Olympic trials, military service, a degree in physics, his current life as an author & speaker, and much more.

🎙️ w/ Zak Stein & Marc Gafni on consciousness, attention, and value as fundamental aspects of reality. Emergence, selection theory, attraction/allurement across different emergent layers, desire as disclosing value, the evolution of complexity, perspectives on value, and much more.

"Literally what we've done is we've taken all of chemistry and built a programming language and a series of systems that allow us to dial a molecule... You come to us with a chemical problem or specification, we will design molecules to it." @leecronin.bsky.social on Chemify

🎙️ w/ @chriscolin3000.bsky.social on "That Dropped Call with Customer Service? It Was on Purpose." Customer service hell, sludge, intentional friction, call center tactics, the psychological toll of poor service, enshittification, responses to the article, & more. www.jimruttshow.com/chris-colin/

🎙️ w/ @leecronin.bsky.social on Chemify, his startup that turns code into molecules. An AWS for chemistry, a chemical programming language, open source tools & academic access, supply chain implications, distributed manufacturing, personalized medicine, and more. www.jimruttshow.com/lee-cronin/

"It's muddying the waters. Nonetheless, of course, because it's so romantic and in some sense just because it's so crazy, people latch onto it and love to talk about it." - Nicholas Humphrey approving of California Institute of Machine Consciousness's rejection of panpsychism

🎙️ w/ Nicholas Humphrey on *Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness.* Sentience & consciousness, the discovery of blindsight in monkeys, consciousness as art, qualophilia, consciousness in birds & mammals, theory of mind in different species, and much more. www.jimruttshow.com/nicholas-hum...

"One of the most basic observations we can make about the world is that the vast majority of people act on scripts—essentially roles that have been defined in advance." - Samo Burja on his distinction between live and dead players

🎙️ w/ Samo Burja on defense startup Anduril's plan to modernize the U.S. military. Live vs. dead players, software-defined conflicts, US vs. China manufacturing capabilities, the scale of drone warfare, AI capabilities gaps between nations, and much more. www.jimruttshow.com/samo-burja-5/

"Politics and democracy actually don't mix. I really don't think the way politics is practiced, the two can coexist. They're opposed." - @richardhames.bsky.social on what inspired his recent polemical post on the decline of Western civilization

🎙️ w/ Richard David Hames on the decline of Western civilization. The retreat from truth in politics & institutions, China’s governance model, social stratification, AI’s disruptive potential, the loss of character & virtue in leadership, living in a liminal period between worlds, and much more.

"Simultaneously, there's been a lack of positive innovation on the whole over the past half-century, and at the same time, there's a sense that our institutions are failing... And my argument is that the lack of a coherent, current understanding of nobility is a big part of that." - David Chapman

🎙️ w/ David Chapman on rethinking nobility. Character & virtue as “risible” concepts, nobility as intention vs status, the failure of elite universities, Tolkien’s models of nobility, Vajrayana Buddhism’s life-affirming approach, meta-rationality & tech, & more. www.jimruttshow.com/david-chapman/

"One is growing linearly & making something planetary-sized & stuffing the planet inside... The other is more like replication. Having a solution that works here in place... then gifting it... saying, 'This works for me here, see how it works for you.'" - @thomasschindler.bsky.social on scaling

🎙️ w/ @thomasschindler.bsky.social on heliogenic civilization. The current multipolar trap shitshow, bioregional self-sufficiency, biological computing, solar energy & hydrogen electrolysis, material constraints on renewable energy transition, and much more. www.jimruttshow.com/thomas-schin...

"All of a sudden Magnus Carlsen plays this move. And this move shows Stockfish going into madness and saying, oh my God. What a big mistake! And all the commentators are pondering... How can he make such a blunder?" @andersindset.bsky.social on the World Chess Championship and multipolar traps

🎙️ w/ Anders Indset on *The Singularity Paradox: Bridging the Gap Between Humanity and AI,* co-authored with Florian Neutkart. The “final narcissistic injury of humankind,” consciousness preservation, trust & friction as progress drivers, reactive vs reflective societies, the role of agency, & more.

"If you make analogy to a living system, the economy is the part of society that... combines natural resources with human labor to make goods & services that we need... or at least want. Whereas if you look at, what is a metabolism?" - @doynefarmer.bsky.social on economies as metabolisms

🎙️ w/ J. Doyne Farmer on *Making Sense of Chaos: A Better Economics for a Better World.* Traditional economics’ failures, “as if” vs “as is” approaches, agent-based modeling, financial markets as an ecology of strategies, energy investment modeling, envisioning a “conscious civilization,” & more.

"When I think about my own experience with computers growing up, it wasn't just worry and concern. It was full of wonder and delight... I didn't feel that computation was just this branch of engineering. It was this weird, humanistic liberal art." - Samuel Arbesman on *The Magic of Code*

🎙️ w/ Samuel Arbesman on *The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World—and Shapes Our Future.* Wondering vs. utilitarian stances toward computing, AI as a “hinge of history," evolution of protocols, agent-based modeling & artificial life, the simulation hypothesis, & more.

"The Catholic Church has gone missionary, and they got themselves a missionary in this new Pope." - Mark Stahlman on the role of the new Pope and his connection with former Pope Francis

🎙️w/ Mark Stahlman on the new Pope & the Catholic Church’s evolving role. Trump as an avatar of the digital paradigm shift, the 3 pillars of Catholic social teaching, multipolar traps & solidarity, the Catholic Church’s diplomatic efforts & interfaith outreach, the future of global systems, & more.

"Meetings that don't have progress tracking mechanisms are straight up boring. And it's the same thing here in our civilization." - Daniel Mezick on government as a game and the importance of a sense of progress

🎙️ w/ Daniel Mezick on games & governance. Finite & infinite games, the U.S. Constitution as a game, progress tracking in governance systems, roles, artifacts, rules, events, problems with a two-party system, unintended consequences in rule design, game theory & system design, gaming virtue, & more.

"Conversation isn't semantic transfer. Conversation is pragmatic clarification of social relationship of responsibility. Pragmatic clarification of social relationship of responsibility is not something you can do with a machine." - Zak Stein on the ecological importance of attention scarcity

🎙️ w/ Zak Stein on risks of AI in K-12 education. Education vs schooling, cognitive diminishment, attention as a service, Daniel Dennett’s proposal about criminalizing misrepresentation, design principles for responsible AI in education, the transhumanist ideology behind AI development, and more.

🎙️ w/ Daniel Rodriguez AI software development. Vibe coding, barriers to entry, cognitive styles needed for programming, approaches to steering LLMs through roles & personas, the future of agent frameworks, distributed systems, IDEs & linting tools, and much more.

"'98% of the permaculture projects that fail, fail due to poor design in the human sector.' We knew this, but we haven't experienced up until a few years ago a robust integration of what that human sector concept & how to design it might look like." - Ryan Blosser on difficulty of the human sector

🎙️ w/ Ryan Blosser on *Mulberries in the Rain: Growing Permaculture Plants for Food and Friendship.* Food forest design principles, hunting stories, willows, redbuds, bourbon, burdock, community, climate considerations, water management, soil fertility, aesthetics in design, and much more.

"We need a big tent movement that isn't centered around any particular ideology, but centered around the democratic process and delivering for the American people what we actually want." - @alake.bsky.social on the broader potential of @sanders.senate.gov's Fight Oligarchy tour