The Jim Rutt Show

Jim talks with Kristian Rönn, co-founder of the carbon accounting tech company Normative, about his book The Darwinian Trap: The Hidden Evolutionary Forces That Explain Our World (and Threaten Our Future). They discuss Darwinian traps & demons, the parable of Picher, Oklahoma, the "cost of doing business" mentality, beauty filter arms races, perverse incentives in science, Goodhart's law, how nature deals with defection vs cooperation, kamikaze mutants, pandas as evolutionary dead ends, close calls with nuclear weapons, engineered pathogens, AI risk, radical transparency at the nation-state level, reputation systems, types of reciprocity, distributed reputation marketplaces, developing Darwinian demon literacy, local change, and much more. Episode Transcript The Darwinian Trap: The Hidden Evolutionary Forces That Explain Our World (and Threaten Our Future), by Kristian Rönn "Five Rules for Cooperation," by Martin Nowak "The Vulnerable World Hypothesis," by Nick Bostrom Kristian Rönn is a founder, author, and global governance advocate. He pioneered cloud-based carbon accounting by founding Normative, a platform that helps thousands of companies achieve net-zero emissions. A proponent of effective altruism, Kristian advocates for prioritizing the wellbeing of Earth's inhabitants as the key metric for progress. Before Normative, he worked at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, focusing on global catastrophic risks and AI. He has contributed to numerous global standards, legislation, and resolutions on climate and AI governance.

Jim talks with philosopher and cognitive scientist Carolyn Dicey Jennings about her book Attention and Mental Control. They discuss mental control vs self-control, the ping pong metaphor, prioritization vs single-threaded focus, voluntary vs automatic attention, perceptual processing & conscious attention, 3 forms of interest, meditation & mind wandering, hyperfocus as a superpower, ADHD & neurodiversity, the emergence of control, wave activity in the brain, local vs global brain activity, and much more. Episode Transcript Attention and Mental Control, by Carolyn Dicey Jennings "I Attend, Therefore I Am," by Carolyn Dicey Jennings (Aeon Magazine) More Videos and Papers The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex, by Harold J. Morowitz Carolyn Dicey Jennings explores whether it is possible for us to direct our own minds through attention and, if so, what impact this has on other functions of the mind. She has training in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience and combines these fields to approach fundamental questions about the nature of the mind, including the existence of the self, the foundation of consciousness, and the possibility of a free will. She has published three books, two monographs with Cambridge University Press (The Attending Mind, 2020 and Attention and Mental Control, 2022) and an edited volume (Mind, Cognition, and Neuroscience: A Philosophical Introduction, 2022 with Ben Young). She is currently working on a new project, on “collective attention,” which intersects with recent digital technologies.

Jim talks with lawyer and former DHS policy person Rachel Winkler about Trump's promise to carry out a large-scale deportation operation. They discuss estimates of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., mixed-status households & the aging undocumented population, the legal standing of an undocumented immigrant, types of undocumented immigrants, the process for pending deportation orders, potential policy changes, prosecutorial discretion, practical constraints on mass deportations, private detention companies, cooperation with Mexico, the Alien Enemies Act & the Insurrection Act, balancing secure borders with the need for immigrants, and much more. Episode Transcript Rachel Winkler is a member of the Cross-Border Risks team. Utilizing experience working with federal law enforcement partners and professionals at DHS, Rachel’s practice focuses on U.S. immigration benefits, compliance, and status defense; visa sponsorship and eligibility; removal defense; forced labor supply chain compliance with Section 307; and international criminal investigations. She also handles customs and I-9 verification issues. Her clients include individuals (including those with white-collar convictions), entities, and startups across various industries including tech and entertainment.

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 warfare, the illusion of security, the future of war, and much more. Episode Transcript Why War?, by Richard Overy Richard Overy is Honorary Research Professor in the University of Exeter. He spent his teaching career at Cambridge, King's College London, and Exeter. He is the author of more than 30 books on World War II, air power, and the European dictators, including Why the Allies Won, Russia's War, The Air War 1939-1945, and most recently Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War 1931-1945, which won the Duke of Wellington Medal for Military History and the Society for Military History's Distinguished Book Award for 2023. His next book, Rain of Ruin, on the bombing of Japan is due out in March 2025. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He lives between Italy and England.

Jim talks with Gregg Henriques about his new book UTOK: The Universal 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 wisdom is the ultimate virtue, the concept of God, the dragon's lair, the fifth joint point, the third attractor, personal information agents, the garden fractal, a transcendent naturalism, and much more. Episode Transcript Gregg's blog at Psychology Today UTOKing with Gregg (Podcast) JRS EP 176 - Gregg Henriques Part 1: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap JRS EP 59 - Gregg Henriques on Unifying Psychology The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex, by Harold J. Morowitz JRS EP 266 - Marcia Gralha on the Common Core of Psychotherapy and Wokeism in Academia "In Search of the 5th Attractor," by Jim Rutt JRS EP 57 - Zak Stein on Education in a Time Between Worlds First Principles and First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come, by David J. Temple Dr. Gregg Henriques is a Professor of Graduate Psychology at James Madison University, where he has worked since 2003. He is a clinical and theoretical psychologist, and founder of UTOK, the Unified Theory of Knowledge, which is a new system of thought that bridges the sciences and humanities into a coherent whole. Dr. Henriques has authored three books, UTOK: The Unified Theory of Knowledge (2024), A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap (2022), and A New Unified Theory of Psychology (2011). He has published many professional papers in the field’s top journals, and has a popular blog on Psychology Today, called Theory of Knowledge, which has almost 500 essays and received over 10 million views. Dr. Henriques is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the 2022 President of the Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration, and head of the UTOK Circle. He teaches classes in psychotherapy, personality, personality assessment, cognitive psychology, and social psychology. He received his PhD in Clinical Psychology at the University of Vermont, did his postdoctoral training under Aaron T. Beck at the University of Pennsylvania, and is a licensed clinical psychologist in Virginia.

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, dumb approaches in basic math education, long consolidators, phases of learning, the one-room schoolhouse model, types of readers, the neurological paths of reading, cognitive advantages of Arabic numerals, the nastiness of long division, how to deliver a bespoke learning trajectory, de-professionalizing math education, demonstrating that math is beautiful, counter-movements in education, supporting parents, and much more. Episode Transcript Sumplicity Math Loribeth Ford Jarrell, director of Sumplicity Math, President of Jarrell Academics, is an innovative educator who has built a lab school/lab program comprising a new model of Education Service Delivery based on the neural characteristics and firing patterns of individual children. Her work covers all aspects of bespoke education service delivery from understanding the behavioral and cognitive development needs of children on the Spectrum, to typically developing peers, to the advanced needs of the highest achieving children.

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, psychological richness, pursuit mode, Neal Cassady of the Beats, high dimensionality, the show Somebody Somewhere, tips for developing an interesting mindset, how much to go into the danger zone, the value of friendship, interesting vs moral, and much more. Episode Transcript The Art of the Interesting: What We Miss in the Pursuit of the Good Life and How to Cultivate It, by Lorraine Besser JRS EP 130 - Ken Stanley on Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned Visions of Cody, by Jack Kerouac The First Third, by Neal Cassady JRS EP 269 - Alex Ebert on the War on Genius The Eudaimonic Ethics: The Philosophy and Psychology of Living Well, by Lorraine Besser Lorraine Besser, PhD, is a professor of philosophy at Middlebury College, who specializes in the philosophy and psychology of the good life and teaches popular courses for undergraduates on happiness, well-being, and ethics. An internationally recognized scholar, she was a founding investigator on the research team studying psychological richness. She is the author of two academic books (The Philosophy of Happiness: An Interdisciplinary Introduction and Eudaimonic Ethics: The Philosophy and Psychology of Living Well) and dozens of professional journal articles on moral psychology.

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 Electoral College Advantage," by Jim Rutt No Labels - Books and Reform Proposals JRS EP 219 - Katherine Gehl on Breaking Partisan Gridlock The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy, by Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter JRS EP 262 - Cliff Maloney on a Libertarian's Case for Trump Nancy Jacobson is the Founder and CEO of No Labels, a non-profit political organization in Washington D.C. that uses bi-partisan approaches to bring people together to solve today’s toughest political problems. She previously held senior roles on political campaigns for President Bill Clinton, Senator Al Gore, and Senator Evan Bayh.

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 good bad things, cognitive sovereignty, the allure of inertia, fighting back against entropy, a million years to do cool stuff in the universe, suboptimal tech, constraints, natural implicit hierarchies, tying effort to sovereignty, and much more. Episode Transcript Bad Guru (Substack) "Suboptimal Revolution," by Alex Ebert Alex Ebert is a platinum-selling musician (Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros), Golden Globe-winning film composer, cultural critic and philosopher living in New Orleans. His philosophical project, FreQ Theory, as well as his cultural analyses, can be followed on his Substack.

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 learning, why the world is full of bogus learning, whether complexity increases over time, information overload, John Vervaeke's relevance realization, wisdom, evolution as learning, the meaning & evolution of sacredness, and much more. Episode Transcript The Evolution of Meaning: A Universal Learning Process, by Brendan Graham Dempsey JRS EP 172 - Brendan Graham Dempsey on Emergentism JRS EP 176 - Gregg Henriques Part 1: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap UTOK: The Unified Theory of Knowledge, by Gregg Henriques JRS EP 159 - Bobby Azarian on the Romance of Reality JRS EP 143 - John Vervaeke Part 1: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Brendan Graham Dempsey is a writer, researcher, organic farmer, and the director of Sky Meadow Institute, an organization dedicated to "promoting systems-based thinking about the things that matter most." He graduated summa cum laude with a BA in religious studies and classical civilizations from the University of Vermont and earned his master's from Yale University, where he studied religion and culture. He is the author of Metamodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Cultural Logics and host of the Metamodern Spirituality Podcast. His primary interests include theorizing developments in culture after postmodernism, productively bridging the divide between science and spirituality, and developing sustainable systems for life to flourish. All of these lead through the paradigms of emergence and complexity, which inform all of his work.

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 overthrowing the election, the likelihood that Trump wins, the apparent swing toward Trump among young men, and much more. Episode Transcript Richard Hanania's Newsletter Richard Hanania is a Fellow at the Salem Center for Public Policy at the University of Texas, and a former Research Fellow at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. He holds a JD from the University of Chicago Law School and a PhD in Political Science from UCLA. His research interests include the relationship between wokeness and civil rights law, psychological differences between liberals and conservatives, and how to improve public discourse and policymaking by holding experts accountable through prediction markets. He has written in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.

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 Unified Theory of Knowledge (UTOK), disentangling confusions in terms, the persona filter, person-centered therapy, the neurotic loop, character adaptation systems, cognitive therapy & cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), wokeism in academia, a sexual harassment complaint, woke 1.0 vs 2.0, the ability to deal with strong stuff, and much more. Episode Transcript Inside UTOK (Substack) JRS EP59 - Gregg Henriques on Unifying Psychology JRS EP176 - Gregg Henriques Part 1: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap "The Common Core of Psychotherapy," by Gregg Henriques and Marcia Gralha "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" by Thomas Nagel Marcia Gralha is an independent scholar of the Unified Theory of Knowledge (UTOK) and serves as a content and community curator for the theory. She holds an M.A. in Clinical Psychology from Western Carolina University, North Carolina, and a B.A. in Psychology from the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, FL. Marcia has contributed to the development of various UTOK initiatives, including the Annual Conference "Consilience," publications, lectures, workshops, and coaching services. She is also the co-founder of the Nexus project, an initiative dedicated to fostering unification and integrative approaches to psychology in Brazil.

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, Perplexity's moat, maintaining cognitive sovereignty, paid tiers, what the company needs to succeed, having individuals as major investors, debunking rumors of acquisition by NVIDIA, affordances for coders, and much more. Episode Transcript Perplexity Aravind Srinivas is the CEO of Perplexity, the conversational "answer engine" that provides precise, user-focused answers to queries — with in-line citations. Aravind co-founded the company in 2022 after working as a research scientist at OpenAI, Google, and DeepMind. To date, Perplexity has raised over $165 million from investors including Jeff Bezos, Nat Friedman, Elad Gil, NVIDIA, and the late Susan Wojciki. He has a PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley and a Bachelors and Masters in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.

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 teams, voting against the status quo regime, the demographic shift in party alignment, a bias in courage towards religious worldviews, removal from the World Health Organization, understanding the failure of government institutions in Covid, Ukraine aid as a looting mechanism, global warming & solar forcing, the Carrington effect & the migration of Earth's magnetic poles, Trump's narcissism & its effects on decision-making, defeating the duopoly, deliberating until the last minute, and much more. Episode Transcript Bret Weinstein has spent two decades advancing the field of evolutionary biology, earning his PhD at the University of Michigan, before teaching at The Evergreen State College for 14 years. He is currently working to uncover the evolutionary meaning of large-scale patterns in human history, and seeking a game-theoretically stable path forward for humanity, in service of which he has just co-organized the Rescue the Republic rally in Washington, DC. Bret has spoken at venues including the U.S. Congress, the International Covid Summit, Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, and the Hannah Arendt Center. With his wife, Heather Heying, he hosts the DarkHorse podcast and co-authored the NYT bestseller A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life.

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 theories of ethics to use, international standards for functional safety, a liability shield equilibrium, tool-sharing between companies, open source simulators, NVIDIA's DRIVE Sim & other players, standards for interoperability, incentives for cooperation between companies, hardware accuracy, edge case generation, evaluating current offerings for consumers, vibrational tactile feedback vs heads-up displays, when we'll be able to read a book in self-driving car, and much more. Episode Transcript JRS EP 94 - Shahin Farshchi on Self-Driving Tech JRS EP 124 - Jim Hackett on Ford, Electric Cars & More JRS EP 221 - George Hotz on Open-Source Driving Assistance Evan McMullen is a mechatronics engineer at dSPACE, a leading provider of hardware and software for simulation tools into the auto industry.

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 Ron Paul, the loss of the anti-war left, Trump's gut instinct, Trump's deficit record, comparing the foreign policy of Nikki Haley & John McCain, hurricane relief & Ukraine relief, whether support for Ukraine is a good investment, the drug war, returning abortion rights to the states, transgender surgeries for kids, luxury beliefs, Christian nationalism in the Republican Party, woke ideology vs the nuclear family, the unsustainability of American public education, teacher's unions, politics as the adjudication of power, the importance of open disagreements, Thomas Massie, and much more. Episode Transcript Get Out the Vote, by Donald Green and Alan Gerber "Dividend Money: An Alternative to Central Banker Managed Fractional Reserve Banking Money," by Jim Rutt (YouTube) Cliff Maloney is a United States political strategist and commentator. He is nationally known for launching the grassroots program “Operation Win at the Door,” which has now knocked on over 3 million doors and elected 300+ state legislators. His life’s mission is to create a liberty state by targeting the 5,413 state legislative seats in America to elect principled citizen legislators.

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, James Gibson, the Fibonacci sequence, deconstructivism, architectural assassins, fractals in architecture, richness, interpretability, medical health, functional ornamentation, information overload, cultural continuity & erasure, the ruse of postmodernism, algorithmic design, the AI revolution in architecture, an opportunity for new entrants, wonderful modern buildings, failed typologies, urban planning, making several systems work together simultaneously, autopoietic systems, urban DNA, Jane Jacobs, the city as a living system, post-war zoning, peer-to-peer urbanism, why it hasn't worked, the "yes in my backyard" movement, the future of architecture, and much more. Episode Transcript A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander JRS EP 227 - Stuart Kauffman on the Emergence of Life The Death and Life of American Cities, by Jane Jacobs How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built, by Stewart Brand "P2P Urbanism," by Nikos Salingaros “Form, Language, Complexity: Unified Architectural Theory” - Syllabus and Course Videos Dr. Nikos A. Salingaros is Professor of Mathematics and Architecture at the University of Texas at San Antonio. An internationally recognized Architectural Theorist and Urbanist, his publications include seven books on architecture and design, two of them co-authored with Michael Mehaffy. Salingaros collaborated with the visionary architect and software pioneer Christopher Alexander over more than twenty years in editing Alexander’s monumental four-volume book The Nature of Order. Salingaros won the 2019 Stockholm Cultural Award for Architecture, and shared the 2018 Clem Labine Traditional Building Award with Michael Mehaffy. Salingaros holds a doctorate in Mathematical Physics from Stony Brook University, New York. He has directed and advised twenty-five Masters and PhD theses in architecture and urbanism.

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 likely shape of superintelligence, what the 3 organizations do, autonomous economic agents, AI creativity, the amount of work happening on crypto networks, the antifragility of crypto, why AGI/ASI emerging from these networks might be plausible, making something work without understanding it, and much more. Episode Transcript JRS EP217 Ben Goertzel on a New Framework for AGI JRS EP211 Ben Goertzel on Generative AI vs. AGI Currents 072: Ben Goertzel on Viable Paths to True AGI JRS EP3 Dr. Ben Goertzel – OpenCog, AGI and SingularityNET JRS EP 22 Trent McConaghy on AI & Brain-Computer Interface Accelerationism (bci/acc) "Is It Worth Being Wise?" by Paul Graham "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data," Google Research Dr. Ben Goertzel is a cross-disciplinary scientist, entrepreneur and author. Born in Brazil to American parents, in 2020 after a long stretch living in Hong Kong he relocated his primary base of operations to a rural island near Seattle. He leads the SingularityNET Foundation, the OpenCog Foundation, and the AGI Society which runs the annual Artificial General Intelligence conference. Dr. Goertzel’s research work encompasses multiple areas including artificial general intelligence, natural language processing, cognitive science, machine learning, computational finance, bioinformatics, virtual worlds, gaming, parapsychology, theoretical physics and more. Trent McConaghy is founder of Ocean Protocol. He has 25 years of deep tech experience with a focus on AI and blockchain. He co-founded Analog Design automation Inc. in 1999, which built AI-powered tools for creative circuit design. It was acquired by Synopsys in 2004. He co-founded Solido Design Automation in 2004, using AI to mitigate process variation and help drive Moore’s Law. Solido was later acquired by Siemens. He then went on to launch ascribe in 2013 for NFTs on Bitcoin, then Ocean Protocol in 2017 for decentralized data markets for AI. He currently focuses on Ocean Predictoor for crowd-sourced AI prediction feeds.

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-fungible token, fully decentralized smart contracts, whether or not Toda is analogous to paper money in a gold standard world, Toufi's motivation for building this tech, hyperinflation in Germany in the 1920s, the currency for AI, OpenCog's AGI ASI project, why inter-operation with AI is important, wealth creation at the node level, a market in results not compute, how this helps facilitate AGI, the entire world reaching AGI vs a single entity reaching it, why Toufi thinks AGI is close, reasons for thinking decentralized AGI will happen first, how to get involved, the cost of a node, using Moloch's incentives to overthrow Moloch, learning how to run nodes, HyperCycle vs SinguarityNET, and much more. Episode Transcript JRS Currents 027: Charles Hoskinson on Cardano Blockchain Project JRS EP217 - Ben Goertzel on a New Framework for AGI Toufi Saliba is the co-author of the Toda/IP protocol and currently serves as the global chair for international protocols for AI security for the IEEE, which is the world's largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of all humanity. Toufi has a history of building various AI projects centered around cryptography and cybersecurity. In October 2022, he took on the leadership of Hypercycle.ai, which is focused on developing a general-purpose technology supporting a decentralized network for AI-to-AI communication.

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, getting to the bottom of the UAP phenomenon, problems with the zoo scenario & the interdict hypothesis, the simulation hypothesis, Oumuamua, solar chauvinists, Stapledonian thinking, the signaling problem, 3 types of communications, the dark forest scenario, Dyson swarms, types of planets that would make space exploration hard, what might be special about Earth, the idea that Earth was deliberately seeded by aliens, the Great Filter idea & potential causes of extinction, the Carrington Event, previous filters, the co-evolution of tools & intelligence, where Stephen would place his bets, humanity's huge moral responsibility, and much more. Episode Transcript If the Universe Is Teeming With Aliens... Where Is Everybody?: Seventy-Five Solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the Problem of Extraterrestrial Life, by Stephen Webb JRS EP14 - Astrophysicist Jill Tarter on SETI and Technosignatures Stephen Webb has a passion for learning why the world is the way it is and asking whether it could be any different. He worked at several UK universities, being elected a Member of the Institute of Physics, Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and was project lead for the UK Advance HE Collaborative Award in Teaching Excellence in 2022. He is also active in science outreach, and his TED Talk “Where are all the aliens?” has been viewed more than 6.5 million times. In 2023, he retired to devote more time to his writing. He has published numerous books, including an undergraduate textbook on distance determination in astronomy as well as several general and popular science books. His best-known book is Where is Everybody?, an exploration of the Fermi paradox.