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 governance systems, roles, artifacts, rules, events, Constitutional reforms, problems with a two-party system, unintended consequences in rule design, game theory & system design, gaming virtue, and much more.

Jim talks with Zak Stein about the psychological & 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 attachment, risks of anthropomorphizing AI, object relations theory, bad parenting & AI parenting, Daniel Dennett's proposal about criminalizing misrepresentation, design principles for responsible AI in education, non-anthropomorphic design, age limits, neurological safety, fiduciary security, the transhumanist ideology behind AI development, the need for better cultural & legal frameworks, and much more.

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 development with AI, social aspects of AI adoption, quality concerns & technical debt, style consistency & aesthetics, approaches to steering LLMs through roles & personas, philosophical perspectives on LLM consciousness & intelligence, personification & interaction styles, memory & conversation history in models, agent-based systems & their historical origins, the future of agent frameworks, customer/user interaction within agent ecosystems, distributed systems, future predictions about inference costs & protocols, IDEs & linting tools, and much more.

Jim talks with Ryan Blosser about the ideas in his book Mulberries in the Rain: Growing Permaculture Plants for Food and Friendship, co-authored with Trevor Pearsall. They discuss the motivation behind writing a permaculture book, the human sector in permaculture design, financial challenges of permaculture farming, 8 forms of capital, food forest design principles, plant guild functions & relationships, persimmons, hunting stories, willows, redbuds, bourbon, black locust properties, rhubarb as a barrier plant, spring bulbs, garlic, Hawaiian adventures, the benefits of tulsi, growing cannabis, uses of comfrey, beets for deer plots, burdock as medicine, community, climate considerations, water management, soil fertility, aesthetics in design, and much more.

Jim talks with Adam Lake about Reboot America, a project aimed at reforming American democracy. They discuss existential threats facing humanity, the two-party corporate duopoly, a Princeton study on policy preferences, first-past-the-post voting problems, campaign finance issues, social media's role in polarization, wealth & income inequality, Bernie Sanders's Fight Oligarchy tour, the Democratic Party's cultural baggage, Trump country perspectives, courage in leadership, how the quality of leadership has changed over time, the "politician's pledge" & its six points, ranked-choice voting, proportional representation systems, liquid democracy, the People's Agenda concept, lessons from the Emancipation Party & GameB, and much more.

Jim talks with Sara Walker about the ideas in her new book Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life's Emergence. They discuss Sara's path from theoretical physics to astrobiology, the biggest scientific questions, philosophy of science & theory development, historical approaches to origin of life research, Schrödinger's negative entropy concept, Prigogine's dissipative systems, information as a causal force at life's origin, emergence as a scientific concept, constructor theory of information, Assembly Theory as a framework for detecting life, assembly index & copy number as measurable properties, complexity vs randomness, the physical nature of time in complex systems, how Assembly Theory redefines life beyond Earth-centric definitions, planetary-scale perspectives on life's origins, measurements of exoplanet atmospheres, addressing the error catastrophe problem, Sara's collaboration with Lee Cronin, the application of Assembly Theory to minerals & planetary atmospheres, the Fermi Paradox & observational horizons, constraints on Drake equation parameters, and much more.

Jim talks with Ashley Hodgson about her YouTube series "The New Enlightenment" and its heterodox perspectives on economics and social systems. They discuss Iain McGilchrist's influence & his book "The Matter with Things," economic mythology & its role in upholding the current system, the Bernays era of programmed consumerism, GDP growth myths, destructive growth value, problems with GDP, resource extraction vs other forms of growth, Galbraith's economics, corporate accountability structures, distortions in the information environment, changes in management compensation, the consumer sovereignty myth, the role of the technostructure, manufactured desires vs actual needs, behavioral economics & rationality, problems with "debunking" mindset, the meta-crisis, sense-making challenges, voice & exit rights, coherent pluralism, the "creepy utopia" problem, and much more.

Jim talks with John Robb about the ideas in his recent essay "Blitzing DC," about how a networked organization took over Washington. They discuss the early roots of network warfare in Iraq, McLuhan-esque societal rewiring, open source dynamics & plausible promise, the Arab Spring & Occupy movements, empathy triggers, Trump's 2016 campaign as a hybrid swarm, The_Donald as a meme amplifier, the Blue Network's counter-response, the George Floyd protests & moral framework, censorship & 'the long night', digital rights & moderation, the Ukraine conflict & swarm response, the Red Network reconfiguration, digital ledgers & truth-seeking accounts, the professionalization of Red digital warriors, network decision-making at a societal level, the government contracting corruption, defense procurement issues, the D.C. area wealth concentration, the future of network organizations, and much more.

Jim talks with Timothy Clancy about wicked mess problems & the potential for a new Cold War centered on AI. They discuss the evolution from chat-based to reasoning AI, military applications, social & systemic complexity in national security, the scaling hypothesis, China vs US competition, DeepSeek R1 model implications, export controls on GPU chips, Taiwan's strategic importance, multipolar trap & arms race dynamics, power & chip requirements, training vs implementation costs, context scaling in reasoning AI, innovation in AI efficiency, models & simulations in military planning, validation challenges, statistical distributions vs single predictions, Taiwan conflict scenarios & deterrence strategies, operational causality, the strategic importance of the Straits of Malacca, and much more.

Jim talks with Brendan Graham Dempsey, picking up on a disagreement they had on Facebook about the teleology of the universe. They discuss Aristotle's influence on the topic, Terrence Deacon's work on naturalizing teleology, the distinction between purpose & goal-directed behavior, cosmic teleology, Telhard de Chardin's "Omega Point," Whitehead's relational teleology, Ilya Prigogine's dissipative structures, energy efficiency comparisons between organisms & stars, the cosmic imperative of entropy production, energy rate density as a complexity measure, whether entropy is the goal or a byproduct of complexification, origin of life as contingent or necessity, Alexander Bard's emergence vectors, questioning of the heat death hypothesis, cosmic expansion possibly preventing maximum entropy, Webb telescope findings, Lee Smolin's evolutionary universe theory, philosophical implications of cosmological narratives, the deepening of interiority in cosmic evolution, Nick Chater's "The Mind Is Flat" argument, the importance of intersubjectivity, language's role in human experience, AI development & emotions, critique of transhumanism, the need to defend your emergence vector, and much more.

Jim talks with Emil Ejner Friis about political metamodernism and what comes after postmodernism. They discuss the "woke vacuum" & its failure to include common folks, psychosocial problems vs material challenges in Western countries, Jim's pushback on postmodernism, Trump as the first postmodern president, personal vs institutional change, emotional states & leadership, late-stage financialized capitalism's effects on communities, European vs American approaches to industry/manufacturing, military alliances & European defense independence, the urban-rural divide in American politics, "internet trans" vs medical gender dysphoria, social media's role in amplifying cultural divisions, the intersubjective verification of the inter-objective, comparing the internet with the printing press, multi-party vs two-party political systems, the potential for American democratic renewal, and much more.

Jim talks with Jeff Sebo about the ideas in his book The Moral Circle: Who Matters, What Matters, and Why. They discuss the concept of the moral circle, harming cats vs harming cars, the case study of Happy the elephant, Descartes' view of animals, phenomenal consciousness, Thomas Nagel's bat argument, the Google engineer who claimed LaMDA was conscious, the substrate dependence of consciousness, a factory waste disposal dilemma, animal rescue triage scenarios, probability calculations in moral consideration, the "one in a thousand" threshold, computational constraints in moral calculations, human exceptionalism & its limitations, fully automated luxury communism & rewilding Earth, responsibilities to wild animals, humans as a custodial species, and much more.

Jim talks with Mark Stahlman about Trump as an avatar of the current digital transformation. They discuss the GameB movement & complexity theory, predictions made to the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, security through development as alternative to war, the three spheres (East, West, Digital), China's approach to digital vs. the Western approach, Catholic social teaching principles, neo-feudalism vs. the scribal paradigm, Humanity 2.0, Aristotelian concepts of soul & hylomorphism, Cyber Sabbath practices, transitions between oral/scribal/digital paradigms, technological change as evolutionary pruning, Jonathan Rauch's Constitution of Knowledge, memory & imagination as key faculties, versions of the Enlightenment project, Daoism & Eastern philosophy, coherent pluralism, and much more.

Jim talks with Adam B. Levine about AI programming aids for non-techies and the future of Bitcoin. They discuss Adam's background as a "technical non-technical" person, the evolution from manual LLM prompting to using IDEs, Windsurf as an AI-first IDE, Claude 3.7's thinking mode, productivity improvements with AI coding tools, different platforms like Cursor and Cline, the "pure idea space" vs technical execution, the role of liberal arts people in tech teams, Bitcoin as digital gold, Schelling points in cryptocurrency, the US dollar as hegemonic currency, "pools of fools" theory, sovereign wealth funds moving into Bitcoin, El Salvador's Bitcoin investment, Texas and Wyoming considering sovereign Bitcoin funds, game theory of nation-state Bitcoin adoption, regulatory transitions, predictions about Bitcoin's future based on sovereign adoption, and much more.

Jim talks with BJ Campbell about the ideas in his Substack essay "On Cops, Belief, and Chainsaw Faced Robot Dogs." They discuss forms of social control, absolute police states vs. belief states, the role of belief vs. actual enforcement in maintaining order, the noble lie concept & Plato's original formulation, the 2020 crime spike & "defund the police" movement, the history of police forces & alternative methods of maintaining order, the "God-shaped hole" concept, membranes & group coherence, anthropological research on fairness, non-supernatural belief systems, marketing challenges for new social systems, money as a noble lie & coordination signal, Saudi Arabian social control methods, and much more.

Jim talks with Jonathan Rauch about the ideas in his book The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. They discuss the epistemic crisis, Plato's Theaetetus, Trump & propaganda techniques, the Constitution of Knowledge as a framework for epistemics, the "marketplace of ideas" metaphor, the reality-based community, the personal-institutional spiral, the social funnel of knowledge, social media's impact on epistemics, advertising vs subscription models, meme space pollution, the anti-vax movement, the importance of free speech to the gay rights movement, recommendations for defending truth, supporting institutions, speaking out against misinformation, maintaining viewpoint diversity, and much more.

Jim talks with Bob Levy about presidential powers, their history, and their potential for abuse. They discuss the nature of the presidential pardon, recent controversial pardons by Trump & Biden, proposed reforms, 3 main purposes of the pardon, court blocks on executive actions, the firing of federal employees, the Impoundment Control Act, immigration & deportation under Trump, presidential power over tariffs, courts as guardrails, the timeline for legal challenges, potential constitutional crisis scenarios, Congress's abdication of power, the growth of the administrative state, options if Trump defies court orders, contempt powers, impeachment as the ultimate check, and much more.

Jim talks with Josh Bernoff, author of Writing Without Bullshit, about the impact of AI on writing education and professional writing. They discuss Josh's background and career, Stephen Lane's recent op-ed arguing that AI should take over writing mechanics, problems with AI-generated writing, the role of writing in thinking, ChatGPT's "deep research," Jim's ScriptHelper project, the decline in math & navigation skills, the importance of memos for corporate decision-making, literacy as a fundamental life skill, Ethan Mollick's approach to AI in education, writing as art, the PowerPoint problem, the Idiocracy scenario, and much more.

Jim talks with Jordan Hall about the relationship between humanity and advanced AI. They discuss the false dichotomy of state vs market control of AI, the commons & the church as organizing principles, community vs society, why alignment with humanity is by definition impossible, the role of symbols & organizing principles in communities, how Moloch & Mammon shape AI development, hyper-concentration of power, neo-feudalism, the possibility of an AI singleton, entropy in communities, an alternative path centered on intimate AI, individual values, integrity, restoration of the commons, the potential for rapid dissemination, the choice between good & expediency, mutual self-correction, collective action guided by higher values, the need for a properly functioning priestly class, and much more. 

Jim talks with Brian Chau about what the new administration could mean for AI development. They discuss recent actions by the Tump administration including repealing Biden's executive order & the Stargate infrastructure project, Biden's impact on AI, the formation of the Alliance for the Future, regulatory bureaucracy, state patchwork laws, censorship, the Gemini controversy & DEI in AI, safety restrictions in chat models, the meaning of DeepSeek, economic implications of model distillation, historical analogies for AI development, national security & sovereignty implications, 3 main lanes for AI development, democratized access vs gatekeeping, trust issues, "AI" vs "LLMs," and much more.