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EP 313 Chris Colin on Why Customer Service Sucks
Jim talks with Chris Colin about his recent Atlantic article "That Dropped Call with Customer Service? It Was on Purpose." They discuss customer service hell & Chris's personal story with Ford, the concept of sludge, intentional friction in customer service systems, call center operations & tactics, high-quality customer service approaches, the impact of short-term CEO tenures on service quality, the Biden administration's attempts to address bureaucratic time tax, political implications of poor government services, administrative burden, coping mechanisms, consumer action possibilities, the psychological toll of dealing with poor service, Cory Doctorow's concept of "enshittification," responses to Chris's article, and much more. Episode Transcript Chris Colin's website "That Dropped Call with Customer Service? It Was on Purpose," by Chris Colin in The Atlantic (June 29, 2025) Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein Chris Colin has written about problematic billionaires, contentious river law, Barack Obama’s Irish roots, COVID memorialization efforts, Japanese rent-a-friends, endangered pasta and more for the New York Times, the Atlantic, NewYorker.com, Pop-Up Magazine, 99% Invisible, Outside and Wired. His work has been featured in Best American Science & Nature Writing, and he created José Andrés's podcast. In 2020 he launched Six Feet of Separation, a free pandemic newspaper by and for kids — “a virtual newspaper for our troubled times,” Dan Rather called it.
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EP 312 Lee Cronin on Automating Chemistry
Jim talks with Lee Cronin about Chemify, his startup that aims to automate chemistry through "chemifarms" that turn code into molecules. They discuss Chemify as an AWS for chemistry, the development of a chemical programming language & its evolution to Turing completeness, quantum vs classical chemistry computation, open source tools & academic access, robotics & automation in chemistry, catalyst discovery & optimization, integration with tools like AlphaFold, business models, venture capital funding, supply chain implications, distributed manufacturing, personalized medicine possibilities, and much more. Episode Transcript Currents 100: Sara Walker and Lee Cronin on Time as an Object Chemify Lee Cronin is a chemist. He is the Regius Professor of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow and the Founder & CEO of Chemify. He is known for his approach to the digitization of chemistry and developing digital-to-chemical transformation known as Chemputing which can turn code into reactions and molecules. He has also developed a new theory for evolution and selection called assembly theory which aims to quantify and explain how selection can occur in chemistry before biology. Lee is also exploring how chemical systems can compute, and what is needed for the evolution of intelligence, as well as designing a new type of computational system that uses information encoded in chemical reactions and molecules.
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1:04:49
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EP 311 Nicholas Humphrey on the Invention of Consciousness
Jim talks with Nicholas Humphrey about the ideas in his 2023 book Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness. They discuss the distinction between sentience & consciousness, access consciousness vs phenomenal consciousness, terminology in consciousness studies, ring-fencing theories, Nicholas's early experiments with phosphenes, the discovery of blindsight in monkeys, his relationship with Helen the monkey, color preferences in monkeys, sensation vs perception, realism vs illusionism, consciousness as art, the concept of "ipsundrum," the evolution of consciousness as "all or nothing," the Fermi paradox & the uniqueness of consciousness, qualophilia, consciousness in birds & mammals, theory of mind in different species, and much more. Episode Transcript Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness, by Nicholas Humphrey Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness, by Nicholas Humphrey "How did consciousness evolve?" - lecture by Nicholas Humphrey The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, by Charles Darwin The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature, by Geoffrey Miller Yoshua Bengio: Deep Learning | Lex Fridman Podcast JRS EP148 - Antonio Damasio on Feeling and Knowing Nicholas Humphrey is an English psychologist who studies the evolution of intelligence and consciousness. He was the first to demonstrate the existence of "blindsight" in monkeys, studied mountain gorillas with Dian Fossey in Rwanda, proposed the celebrated theory of the "social function of intellect," and has investigated the evolutionary background of religion, art, healing, death-awareness, and suicide. His honours include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, the Pufendorf Medal, and the International Mind and Brain Prize. His most recent books are Seeing Red, Soul Dust, and Sentience.
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EP 310 Samo Burja on Anduril’s Plan to Modernize the US Military
Jim talks with Samo Burja about his report on the defense startup Anduril's plan to modernize the U.S. military. They discuss "live players vs. dead players," AI adoption & cognitive tools, Anduril's background & naming origin, military technology modernization, software-defined conflicts, autonomous & software-enabled weapons, sensor deployment & data collection, the Lattice software platform, hardware offerings including drone & underwater vehicle acquisitions, surface naval warfare obsolescence, military industrial capacity, US vs. China manufacturing capabilities, personnel-to-weapon system ratios, drone production scale, cost considerations, defense industry ecosystem, traditional contractors, friend-shoring possibilities, NATO+ industrial capacity, component manufacturing, future warfare implications, training advantages of digital systems, scale of drone warfare, AI capabilities gaps between nations, industrial advantages in military competition, and much more. Episode Transcript EP 244 Samo Burja on Lessons from the Russo-Ukrainian War Bismarck Brief "Anduril's Plan to Modernize the U.S. Military," by Samo Burja Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy EP 247 Sergey Kuprienko on Drone Warfare in Ukraine Bismarck Analysis Foresight Institute Anduril Industries "Anduril Industries Acquires UAS Developer Blue Force Technologies" - Press Release Samo Burja is the president and founder of Bismarck Analysis, a consulting firm specializing in institutional analysis for clients in North America and Europe. He is also a Senior Research Fellow in Political Science at the Foresight Institute and chair of the editorial board of Palladium Magazine. You can follow him at @SamoBurja.
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EP 309 Richard David Hames on the Final Performance of Western Civilization?
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 era's defining achievement, climate change denial, the futility of modern warfare, AI's disruptive potential, the loss of character & virtue in leadership, living in a liminal period between worlds, and much more. Episode Transcript Richard's Facebook post Manmade: 50 Failings of Our Own Making, by Adam Jacoby and Richard Hames Education in a Time Between Worlds, by Zachary Stein Zak Stein's appearances on The Jim Rutt Show Richard David Hames is a philosopher, activist, strategist, and advisor to boards and governments, mentoring leaders out of their manufactured normalcy. He is the author of several books, the most recent of which is Manmade: 50 Failings of Our Own Making, coauthored with Adam A. Jacoby.
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