Jim talks with Richard David Hames, picking up from the ideas in his recent Facebook essay about the decline of Western civilization. They discuss the retreat from truth in politics & institutions, postmodernism’s impact on rationality, China’s governance model, the failure of democratic institutions, wealth inequality & social stratification, the liberation of women as our […]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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