RIP Jim Rutt (with John Krakauer on Why Neuroscience Needs Behavior and Tyson Yunkaporta on Ceremony, Skepticism, and Seeing in 3D)

Very sad to hear the news this morning that Jim Rutt died on May 27, 2026. Official announcement:

https://www.obaughfuneralhome.com/obituaries/james-jim-rutt

He was a big character and someone deeply involved with complexity, a Boomer Uncle or Grand-uncle par excellence, I think, and someone I listened to regularly with amusement and frustration – but a true, actual, explorer and thinker, open to challenge and deeply learning focused. Just yesterday I’d listened to and sent myself the link for this excellenct interview with John Krakauer, which aligns with so much of my thinking on neuroscience:

https://jimrutt.substack.com/p/ep-339-john-krakauer-on-why-neuroscience

And then I was pleased to see that his final published podcast was with Tyson Yunkaporta, his opposite in many ways – yet also someone with many similarities, finding commonality, who pays umprompted and heartfelt tribute to what he has learned from Jim, and which is openly reciprocated, and explored:

https://jimrutt.substack.com/p/ep-345-worldviews-tyson-yunkaporta

ChatGPT says I should summarise his life as:

“Jim Rutt occupied a rare position at the intersection of technology, complexity science and public discourse. As chairman of the Santa Fe Institute, an internet entrepreneur, co-founder of Game B, and host of The Jim Rutt Show, he spent decades creating conversations across disciplines and communities that otherwise might never have met. His enduring contribution wasn’t a single theory or institution but a relentless curiosity about how complex systems evolve and how humans might learn to navigate them more wisely.”

That’s pretty good actually, he was big and bold but also humble, a capitalist but also a convenor, a complexity thinker but always critical. Other links:

Longer biography

https://archania.org/p/individuals/internet-personalities/jim-rutt

Full backlog of his podcast

https://www.jimruttshow.com

And his substack

https://jimrutt.substack.com/notes

And a recent interview with him:

https://blog.thomas.cr/p/the-next-10000-years-a-roadmap-for?hide_intro_popup=true

A typical bombacious perspective, and responses

"When I hear the word 'metaphysics' I reach for my pistol" — Jim Rutt pic.twitter.com/pwU7sU9TiA
— Jim Rutt (@jim_rutt) January 9, 2024

A tribute from Jonathan Rowson

https://jonathanrowson.substack.com/p/howdy-on-the-other-side

And I’ll leave the last word to Jim

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 11:47 pm on June 1, 2026

Just listening live to the podcast with Yunkaporta, and what a lot of synchronicity:

Tyson: So which — I guess that led to this kind of mistranslation of dreaming, you know, as being this kind of altered state of consciousness. But you’re just kind of in it all the time. You’re just in this understanding of the universe as, you know, moving in these ways and always correlates and matches up and allows you to predict what’s happening in the systems and flows around you. You know, even often in finance and bloody global politics and stuff like that — you’ve got your eyes across enough good data, accurate data, then you can track that. Yeah. So it’s spiritual, but it’s also intensely secular because you don’t separate spirit and life into these different areas. It just is. And it’s as simple as just being informatics, which are invisible but they happen — these massive webs of cause and effect that self-organize and have intelligence.

These are entities and minds of place. And when you have old names for them and understandings of them and deeper and deeper layers of story that you can access as knowledge improves, then you can really know these entities for how they move through and then how they change over time. You know, with that serpent, there’s always part of the story where he dies. But that’s not the end of the story because that story’s eternal. So that story goes through all of time. And so it’s just a cloud of potential moments that you visit in different moments, different times. So it’s not sad that he died because he just died in that moment. But there’s all the other moments and they still exist. And you revisit them in those seasonal cycles as you move through that story every year and as you might travel along those routes, either with your mind or with your feet, you know, along those lines, you know, where those places are. Yeah.

Because it was all those potentialities taking form out of the deep dark that made and shaped everything.

Tyson: I have to apologize for like, opening you up to the possibilities of spirit. And it’s so weird, it’s like we missed each other. You influenced me so much that I’m this fricking skeptic and bloody rationalist now. But only with everybody else’s supernatural beliefs, not my own, because mine are right. It is, like, wrong.

Jim: Yeah. That’s always been my critique of religion. Wait a minute. There are 10,000 religions out there. At most, one of them is correct. Why the hell do you think yours is correct? Right? Yeah.

Tyson: Well, that’s it. I’ve been really happy with my audit of my cosmology and to the end, it stands up. It stands up to all of my scrutiny.

Jim: Check out my Substack article, “Minimum Viable Metaphysics.” This is an actual metaphysics that even Jim Rutt can stand behind.

Tyson: It’s enough to know the title. I love it. Minimum — oh, send me that.

Jim: I’ll do it.

Tyson: No. I’ve got to get your Substack.

Jim: Since I first met you, the thing I found most extraordinary has been this two-lens thing that I’ve talked about, and you have talked about it too. Probably not as much as I’ve talked about it, which is that you really do see the traditional Aboriginal entities like song lines, etcetera. And at the same time, you’re a rationalist materialist scientist. What in the world does it feel like to be using those two lenses simultaneously or serially?

Tyson: Alright. Alright. Here’s the metaphor. Three-D glasses. You know the cinema — remember they’re two different colors, cellophane? Yep. Yep. You know, it’s like asking somebody what’s it like to just see the red lens all the time? Like, what’s it like to see the blue lens all the time? It’s like, what’s it like to see them both at once? And it’s like, well you don’t see them. But you know, Alvin and the Chipmunks will pop right out of that screen at you. You’ve got — oh, you’ve got like — I remember seeing a Star Wars three-D thing in the cinema once, and it was just all these spaceships flying out at me. Yeah. It’s kind of like that. I’m not like shifting between two lenses — I’m putting on my three-D glasses, bruh.

Jim: Wow. That’s — I love that. That’s an amazing metaphor, actually. Alright. That works. That works. That works. Alright, people. Go get your three-D glasses. You know, we’ll talk to Tyson again when his book comes out here in the US, assuming we’re all still around at the time. So I want to thank Tyson Yunkaporta for an amazingly interesting worldview podcast here on The Jim Rutt Show. And don’t forget, if you don’t read Sand Talk, I’m going to kick your ass.

Tyson: Yo, love you, Jim. I love how you say that.