The Jim Rutt Show

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.