Recording a Podcast in Virtual Reality: Neural Networks, Consciousness, and Game B with Jim Rutt

Vance Crowe [00:00:00] It's now just about to start going into practice at the local,

Jim Rutt [00:00:05] On

Vance Crowe [00:00:05] The ground stage through what we call proto bees, which are actual communities of people living in part game B ways of life, and actually developing local operating systems for governing how they live. So I won for the very first one, has actually closed on its

Jim Rutt [00:00:25] Land. I'm Brian Mos, a farmer living in Florence, South Dakota, and you're listening to the Vance Grow Podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:35] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here today. You can see we are doing something totally different. I had Jim Rutt come join me in the Articulate Ventures underground bar for the first ever podcast in virtual reality. I don't know if anybody else has ever done a podcast in vr, but Jim is one of those people that if you're gonna get the attention of a guy that has his brain space, his network, his ideas, his enthusiasm, then you've gotta use it for things that are gonna push the envelope. And that is exactly what we did today. We jumped into vr, we had the experience of talking about what is it like in vr, and then we just did a regular podcast where we talked about everything from artificial intelligence to consciousness to the changes of language, and really how he interacts and engages with people. Finishing up with a really interesting conversation about his program, game B, I am so glad you're here. I'm glad you're interested in these kind of exciting ideas. And if you've been one of those people, which I have them reach out to me all the time on Twitter and send me emails that have thought about joining the Articulate Ventures network, let VR be one of those things that brings you into it. It is really difficult to figure out where to go, what to do, how to make it worthwhile, but if you're a person that wants to explore this new world, it's something we are doing all the time in the network. And it's not just me. I'm actually one of the people that took the first steps in there, but now we've got people building their own VR worlds, people starting up different field trips that we can take and all kinds of experiences.

Vance Crowe [00:02:14] And you can be one of those people, even if you don't know where you're gonna fit, when you join the network, everybody comes in, they realize that there's this explosion of enthusiasm, that there's somebody new there with something to share, and then everybody finds a spot for them to contribute and things that they get out of it that we couldn't even anticipate. So if you're interested in joining the network, I hope you'll go to Network Articulate Ventures to sign up and know that we would love to see you in vr. So now without further ado, we're gonna go to my man, Jim Rutt. Whoa, Jim Rutt, welcome back to the podcast. Only this time in Virtual Reality.

Jim Rutt [00:03:00] Yeah, Vance Crowe, great to be here. This is a new thing for me. I've only been in VR once before and that was hanging out with you. And this is certainly the first time I've tried to do a VR podcast. So we're out there on the ragged edge.

Vance Crowe [00:03:17] Yeah. And so for listeners, people that are just listening and not watching this, we are in the Articulate Ventures underground bar. So this is the place that we come to do our book club and the we, we've had the book club for about a year, and then we decided, well, let's try and do this in vr. And it was such a big hit. People enjoyed it so much more because of the thing that you talked about. It's kind of the, the split between the loose connections that you only get from reading what other people say or seeing their posts on, on social media and the strong bonds that come from being in person. This is somewhere in between there.

Jim Rutt [00:03:56] Yeah, this is quite interesting. You know, this is something I've, I've been talking about for quite a while, is the weak link, strong links, and the combination of the two produces is very useful for building movements, et cetera. And then of course our year of Zoom has taught us that zooms are somewhere in between also. But VR feels to me like it's maybe closer to face to face, not the same, you know, we are primates after all. We deal a lot with smell and you know, details of facial expressions and and such, which at least so far aren't turning up in vr. On the other hand, as you've pointed out, the audio spatial aspects are important. So it's gonna be quite fun to see how VR fits in my taxonomy of links. I suspect somewhere between Zoom and face-to-face, but probably closer to Zoom than face-to-face.

Vance Crowe [00:04:53] Yeah, I do think, ed, there's something weird about it, and I am always a big proponent of being able to see people's faces because I think, you know, the ability to see if they're smiling, if they look like they're trying to manipulate you, these are things that we've learned or evolved to learn over time, really in depth. But then I get into VR and I say, well, I don't know. There's something about the feeling like I'm in the same three dimensional space as you, that makes me feel more connected than a lot of the Zoom calls I've been on.

Jim Rutt [00:05:23] Yep, I agree. I think a bit more, it's definitely better than Zoom, but it would be great if they could somehow capture our facial expressions and particularly our eyes. I always found eyes to be key. You know, the, what, what was it? Somebody said, the windows to the soul. And obviously in these very simple avatars, we don't have anything like that.

Vance Crowe [00:05:45] But the thing that we do have, that we've discovered is the, when you talk, it makes your head kind of shake or grow. Sometimes it'll make the avatars, the lips will shake or grow, so that way you can can tell who's talking. And then we also figured out that avatars with hands are a lot more able to communicate than people without hands. And so, because you figure out, somebody maybe says like, oh, it's my turn, or you, you add a lot more gestures. So the hands actually end up being an important part of communicating inside of here.

Jim Rutt [00:06:19] That makes sense. I'll pretend to be Italian today. Hey, hey, happy.

Vance Crowe [00:06:27] So when you remember back with vr, you were kind of always up on the leading edge. What was kind of the promise of VR as you were getting started?

Jim Rutt [00:06:36] Yeah, the first time I kind of stuck my nose in VR was, I don't know, 1994 or something like that, when Jaron Lanier was kind of the leading explorer in that realm. And truthfully, the thought was that virtual worlds would be, would be available, and that would be the, that was the goal. Now, it was always a second order kind of businessy thing, like, ah, maybe it'd be useful for industrial training or training the military, or something like that. And as we know, that's where actually some of the biggest business successes here in our, in our third generation VR have actually occurred in industrial training and in military simulations. But, so yeah, I think, I think the vision hasn't really changed. It's just as Moore's law has caught up, we've been able to deliver something closer to the vision from 1994 in a, you know, not too annoying format. You know, for, for our listeners out there, we're both Vance and I are both wearing Oculus Quest twos, I believe, and they're pretty cheap with $300, something like that. They don't require to be tethered to a computer. Their resolution isn't the ultimate, but it ain't bad. It's good enough. Unlike VR in 1994.

Vance Crowe [00:07:52] Yeah, I mean

Jim Rutt [00:07:53] The, they're definitely

Vance Crowe [00:07:54] Still just trying to use as many triangles as they can. Really simple shapes. It's, if you're watching it, it's probably a little bit better than Minecraft if you're using a browser.

Jim Rutt [00:08:04] But I

Vance Crowe [00:08:04] Have seen some stuff that is really on the edge as far as like being able to make things come to life. But you've got, everybody's got different internet speeds. The headsets are all different. I think one of the big differences that I'm already observing is the best stuff are not made in apps right now. The best stuff is done through browsers. And when I was talking with my friend Anthony de Pascal, he's talking about how that the ability to build worlds on just regular websites makes it so you don't have so much of that walled garden experience where if you have the Oculus, you can only do Oculus things with Oculus people, and instead you can use any headset you want because everybody navigates through the same space.

Jim Rutt [00:08:50] So does that mean that someone could come into this bar through the Mozilla hub and use a different headset?

Vance Crowe [00:08:57] Yeah, they could use a different headset or for the book club right now, probably about half of the people just come in on their computers or even their phones. The, the downside of somebody using their phone is you've got a really scale back the graphics. And as you can see in this room, you know, we have a lot of good book covers, things that are kind of high resolution. So for those people it becomes kind of obnoxious. But you could be on your computer in here just as easily.

Jim Rutt [00:09:23] No, you wouldn't get the immersive VR effect.

Vance Crowe [00:09:26] Yeah. In fact, when people are on their computers, they, I think they wonder why everybody in VR thinks it's so amazing and we love it so much. But it's because you don't get the sense of looking around. I mean, it really, it genuinely feels like you and I are sitting here. I I want to turn my head and, and look at you, and I, I feel weird if I'm looking this way and not at you, even though we're, we're not in the same room. So the, the actual physically moving your head and, and moving around, I think is one of the reasons it feels so much more real.

Jim Rutt [00:09:59] Yeah. And also the, you know, the embedding, I'm looking around looking at these very cool book covers you have on the wall and the fine grain wood floor and the wood ceiling and the stone wall. And, and, you know, it's, it's like real life. It attracts, you know, you, you're having a high, relatively high bandwidth experience, which is interesting. You know, again, I don't know what it all means, what it's good for, but it's certainly different, you know, even on Zoom, you know, you tend not to really notice the background much. And of course a lot of people use fake backgrounds. I, I generally don't, but once in a while I do. Here we have a fake background, but one with a lot of nuance to it. It's kind of cool.

Vance Crowe [00:10:43] Well, and in this space, I actually had spent quite a bit of time, you know, I'm kind of an amateur lover of architecture. I, I could never actually build a real building that anyone would ever want to walk into. But in this space, I was able to take some principles. And I remember having heard not that long ago, that the reason New York is so famous for doing comedy is because all of the comedy clubs were built before they were building codes. And so they could have these low ceilings and that low ceiling makes people have the impression of feeling really close in. And one of the things I noticed about VR was people would build these giant spaces because the materials don't cost anything. But really, if you're trying to create an experience with human beings, creating a space that pushes them together and and, and makes them feel like they're a part of something really kinda makes the whole experience better.

Jim Rutt [00:11:39] Yeah, that's, I think exactly right. I've noticed that in business, you know, when, when you have a startup company and you move to your new space, you know, still recall my very first startup, we, we had a hundred people crammed into 4,100 square feet. That's pretty crammed, let me tell you. And then we moved to 10,000 square feet and it felt like something was wrong with our culture for a while, because, you know, suddenly the density had fallen by a factor of two and a half. Then we decided to pack the various units together into, you know, subsets of the space to recover something close to our previous density. And then the culture started feeling right again. So I think there's really something about density as something that we react to in, in a pretty solidly human way.

Vance Crowe [00:12:30] Yeah, I, when I, when, as you're saying that, I'm thinking about the giant movement towards open offices, and it was kind of sold to everyone as, oh, we'll be more communal. We'll be able to, people will see each other more. And the funny thing, I don't, I don't know about everybody, but I know for me, the only work that I do that's valuable requires me to focus. It requires me to not have distraction, not hear other people's phones. But I, I agree, I don't mind being around a lot of other people, but I need to, at some level be able to close the door and not have interruptions If I'm gonna do work that's more valuable than the, the work I would do by, you know, watching TV or something.

Jim Rutt [00:13:12] Yeah. It's interesting, you know, I used to feel that way, and perhaps for me it's still true, but I have seen a whole bunch of quite successful tech startups that do have, you know, seven people sitting right next to each other on a long bench, and they seem to have developed the ability to go into the tube and do their work despite people two feet to the left and to the right of 'em. And it does, of course, facilitate real time conversations, right? Of course, you need some meta signaling when, when am I available to be talked to? But it certainly allows that serendipitous conversation to happen at a higher rate. So maybe that you're just an old fart, even though you're a relatively young old fart. Right. That you haven't figured out how to operate in that space. 'cause I've, I've been to these companies and I kind of shudder a little bit, trying to envision myself in that space, but, you know, some of these companies have produced some remarkable products. Some of the companies I've been involved with as an advisor, an investor, a board member, et cetera. And I think it's just different, a different set of, of skills and affordances, you know, and affordance means things you can do. You know, the idea that you can be two feet from somebody and hit 'em on with your elbow and say, come over on the screen here, look at my code, let's walk through the code together, is something that's much more likely to happen than if we're each in our 10 by tens and, you know, you gotta get up, walk down the hall, blah, blah, blah. So it's different. And I'm not sure I'd be able to deal with it, but I can say that it does work.

Vance Crowe [00:14:44] Well, I have several friends that have all engineered their own brown noise machine headphones, right? Where they, where it's some amount of static that allows them to have, to be able to block things out. And one of my friends was talking about really wanting to have a light signal on there, like, you know, green means go ahead and bump me. Yellow means, you know, send me a message and I'll, I'll, I'll pop out. And red means don't interrupt because I for one, have the, I am capable of reading at a very, very high velocity. But if somebody interrupts me, it's no different from that, from a person like waking me up out of a dead sleep. My instantaneous reaction is anger. And I have to, I'm, I'm not an angry person. I'm like an amiable happy person, but if I'm reading and get interrupted it, it will, it will take me minutes to be able to come back down, even if it was a totally reasonable request for somebody to interrupt me.

Jim Rutt [00:15:41] Yeah. It's funny, I, reading doesn't bother me too much. I think I can sync back up in 30 seconds or a minute, but programming, oh my God, right? If I'm deep, deep, deep into a hard part of a program, it can take me 20 minutes to get to Resync. And there's some, you know, cognitive science research that indicates something like a 20 per minute reset time when you're doing your, your best and hardest thinking. 'cause you gotta get completely back into that state where, where it's all in your head. At least my style of programming is I build a quite elaborate mental model of what I'm doing, which allows me to operate at pretty high velocity. But if I get interrupted at all by anything, the model collapses and it takes a while to rebuild it.

Vance Crowe [00:16:30] Yeah. That's the same thing for me, what you're describing. If for me, when I read, if I am really into it, I don't even see the words anymore. They, they're just, it's just me flipping pages. I'm not, not, it's not only like second after second, but I mean, I don't really sit there and have to think about the words and to get popped out of it, require it, it takes a long time to get up to that speed again. But I'm not a programmer, so I don't, I don't have the same experience in programming. What do you program these days? I mean, how do you stay current and, and being able to program things that matter instead of just going back and remaking pong or something?

Jim Rutt [00:17:05] Oh yeah. And I just as a discipline, I teach myself a new computer language every year. I now know about 30 computer languages at the level of being able to do a hello world, or actually I do a little bit more than that to 2020. I did F Sharp, which was my first foray into so-called functional programming, which is a whole new style of programming. It's been around for quite a while. But I had had, I've had conversations with people, one of my good friends is a, a very passionate advocate for Haskell, which is perhaps the purest functional programming language. And so I decided this year I was gonna do F Sharp and it was fun. I liked it a lot as to the kind of projects I do for more and more serious work. My current number one project is I have had a vision for years of a different kind of neural net for AI and for a learning algorithm different than anything else that exists. And I got it mentally specified about three years ago. And then my life took off into too many two adventures and I was never able to instantiate it as code. But this year over Christmas, I took two weeks off and spent a lot of time with my family, but I also spent three or four hours a day creating this new kind of neural net. And I got it up and I got it running. I've got it running on, well, I got it Rudimentarily processing one of the most famous AI test problems called the MN Handwritten Digits problem.

Jim Rutt [00:18:43] Basically it's a set of 60,000 handwritten digits, zero through nine with all kinds of idiosyncratic writing styles. And the AI problem is to look at the digits as a raster field, you know, a bunch of dots and decide what digit it is. Right. And it's, it's a very interesting problem 'cause it's not real hard, but not real easy. Lots of learning algorithms will show no traction on it at all. Any decent learning algorithm will show some traction, but nobody has ever solved it at a hundred percent level. I think we're currently up to like 99.85 of the 64,000 digits can be, you know, labeled correctly. So I've gotten it up to that point though I have not hooked in the learning algorithm, which is the interesting part. I'm taking a week off the week of April 5th, and at least part of that week I intend to, you know, maybe get another 15 or 20 hours in on this entirely new radical architecture for a learning neural net with its own new learning algorithm. So that's the kind of stuff I do. Most of the thing I did before that is I wrote an AI that exhibited rudimentary consciousness, at least I would so argue. And I hooked it into woo yeah, rudimentary consciousness. And I instantiated it as a deer running around in a field full of obstacles.

Jim Rutt [00:20:15] And I wrote the AI in one environment and I wrote the Deere in Unity 3D, which is a game programming environment, so I could get some high resolution graphics. And the, then the interesting and fun part is I had to write my own custom communications layer to let Unity talk to this AI engine. And I managed to create a really high speed communications pipe that was like how many times faster, at least a hundred times faster than the, the ones that the AI framework people had created, which really sucked. And being able to, you know, send the 200,000 messages a second allowed me to do amazingly fine grained behaviors in the, in the deer with the AI engine. So those are the kinds of things I work on. You know, my, and of course one of the problems with programming is if you're not doing it every day, your fingers forget. Right? And so it always takes me two or three days to kinda ramp back up when I start a project, which is the reason I tend to do it in big chunks of time, rather than saying, well, you know, don't you always have an hour here or there? Yeah, I have an hour here or there, but an hour of programming when you haven't done it in two weeks is damn close to useless.

Vance Crowe [00:21:27] Sorry, that that's

Jim Rutt [00:21:28] One of the

Vance Crowe [00:21:28] Problems

Jim Rutt [00:21:28] Of vr. I just

Vance Crowe [00:21:30] Accidentally hit a button and then was morphed across the room. So that actually gives me a whole new level of, I don't wanna say respect, but when you were talking with Yosha Bach, which by the way, I think that is one of the most amazing interviews I personally have ever heard was your second interview with him. But every time I listen to a new, new interview with you, and we should talk more about your podcast, 'cause I, I'd like to get into that, but you are really harsh on GPT-3, and I've had some pretty advanced programmers on the podcast that have spoken pretty highly of GT three and where it's going. So when you were pushing on that saying like, ah, you know, it's, it's not learning, it's just using a data set that's finite. And I was kinda like, well, who's this guy to be talking about the, the misgivings of G GT three? But if you're out there doing your own learning algorithms, there's a whole new level of respect I have for you.

Jim Rutt [00:22:25] Yeah, I've been doing that stuff since, you know, at least 20 years. I wrote one of the first genetic neural algorithms where we used Darwinian evolution to evolve neural nets and used it to create game playing agent. This

Vance Crowe [00:22:40] Is the second time you've referenced neural nets. And I couldn't give a description of a neural net if somebody asked me.

Jim Rutt [00:22:46] Okay, well most of the ais that we're hearing about the so-called deep

Vance Crowe [00:22:50] Learning type

Jim Rutt [00:22:51] Ais, they are, they are neural networks, which means that they are a very rough cartoonish, similar to the way our brains are wired, that think of those whole series of nodes that have links between them. The links have weights, and let's say that, and there's layers of these nodes. So imagine 500 nodes in a line and 500 nodes above that, and 500 nodes above that. And then each layer has connections to the next layer down in, in, in the general case, kind of the lazy case. All, all 500 in this layer are connected to all 500 in the next layer. But the weights differ and not only do they differ, some are positive and some are negative. And so let's say the top level is where the input comes. So let's imagine in like this problem I discussed, it is a very simple, I think it's 16 by 16 dots to exemplify the handwritten digit. So let's make 256 dots, the top layer of the neural net, the digits that are turned on are zero, and the ones that are off, or one or vice versa, though actually it's zero to 2 55. But you know, it's keep it simple. And then that signal propagates down to the next level through these weighted lengths into the next level, to the next level, to the next level. Let's say the bottom level is just 10 nodes, which represent the digits zero to nine. And the number of times that that, or the, the, the strength of the signal being reached at that bottom node is the signal on which digit it is.

Jim Rutt [00:24:23] So there's a, a really crude example of what a neural net is. And essentially everything you've hear heard about in AI with some notable, and I think important exceptions is neural nets of one sort or another. Alpha go the, you know, the great go playing program, alpha zero, the learning thing GPT-3, they're all neural nets, all deep learning neural nets, which means they have many layers. When we first started playing with neural nets, say back in the eighties, typically they'd be two or three levels, maybe four. Now they could be a hundred levels, and they could be, instead of having 50 or a hundred or 500 nodes in a level, they might have thousands. And in fact, some of the, you know, really big neural nets like GPT-3 could have billions of, of links in the model. So they're really quite remarkable, but they're not actually intelligent. They are, and this is what I was making the point with yosha, that they are a statistical learning model. They have made a whole series of little bit at a time adjustments to these weights until they give the right answer, you know, at a high level of probability. But that's all they are. G PT three does not understand the English language, though it can do some remarkable things that can fool people into thinking that it does. And it's really, and it, but it is a quite useful tool as long as you know what it's good for and what it's not good for. For instance, you would not want to use it at this stage for medical diagnosis because it is this neural net.

Jim Rutt [00:25:59] It isn't always right. Some percentage at the time, it'll give you absolute nonsense. It's small percentage currently, but it's, but it, it's there. So it doesn't actually know anything. It doesn't actually understand English. What it is is a, a co a collation of the learning from looking at probably billions of words of English that Google has not Google the other guys. OpenAI has scooped off the internet and processed and created this static representation. That's the other thing about GPT three, it does not change once you start using GT three, it learns nothing from your use of it. It's essentially this distillation of the billion things it has read. So the reading happens, it creates this artifact, which then does, its GPT-3 three, but it doesn't learn anything from interacting with you. Hope that's helpful.

Vance Crowe [00:26:57] Oh, that's, I mean, that's fantastic. The, the, the first question that comes to mind when I think about these things, and I spoke with Ken Stanley who's at OpenAI, is as you're building these computers and you're making them smarter and smarter and you're adding in a learning algorithm so that they can actually teach themselves, do you fear or is this just the fear of US plugin or normies of a runaway ai, a system that's so smart that we can't control it or don't, don't even really understand what it's doing?

Jim Rutt [00:27:28] Yeah, this is the so-called AI risk discussion. By the way, Ken Stanley is one of my heroes because he's one of the people who has also done, in fact, he's done more interesting work in evolutionary neural nets than anybody else. I would say, oh,

Vance Crowe [00:27:44] Ken Stanley changed my life. I read his book on the Why Greatness Can't be planned, the, you know, novelty search. And that idea led me into a whole different way of thinking between him and Yosha Bach there heroes of mine, for sure.

Jim Rutt [00:27:59] Yeah. Yes, most of my work originates from the University of Texas evolution neural evolution work. And Ken Stanley is one of the students of that work. And so he's in that tradition and

Vance Crowe [00:28:13] Probably the person that's pushed

Jim Rutt [00:28:14] At the furthest, at least in t terms of actually useful tools. But anyway, getting back to AI risk,

Vance Crowe [00:28:21] It's funny,

Jim Rutt [00:28:22] I talk about this fairly regularly. I was talking with one of my good buddies, Ben Gerel yesterday is one of, in fact, he's the guy

Vance Crowe [00:28:28] Who

Jim Rutt [00:28:28] Coined the expression a GI, and he's created an a GI framework. He's written 15 books on the topic. And we talk about this regularly, and we both believe that yes, in the long run, there is risk that an AI could take off the so-called technological singularity. And this is a very important concept. And the simplest form, let's say the following, let's say you finally get an AI that's a teeny bit smarter than a human, say 1.1, and let's suppose you give it the job of designing its successor, and the successor it creates is 1.2 as smart as a human. And then you say, oh, give, give that one

Vance Crowe [00:29:13] The job

Jim Rutt [00:29:14] Of creating its successor. And the next one comes out at 1.5, and then the one after that 1.9, the one after that 3.3 and then 10, and then 50, and then a thousand, and then 10,000 and then a million. So it's conceivable and this, and there is a theory that could all happen in six or eight weeks once you reach the, the takeoff threshold. Now, there are some of us, there are people who argue on, you know, where is the takeoff threshold? You have to get to a million first before it's dangerous. I'm not sure, I don't think anybody knows the answer, but in terms of whether the work they're doing today, like GPT-3 is dangerous, I'd say absolutely not, because it's not, and it's a static artifact that's been created. It can't continue to learn. It can't, it doesn't have any consciousness, it doesn't have any sense of self, you know, frankly, it's, you know, no more different than an oscilloscope. Basically, you put data in, you get something out. But it's something that those of us who are working in this field need to be aware of. And at some point, you know, we'll have to become more proactive in building AI safety into what we're doing. Of course, Nick Bostrom's book, what the hell is the name of it? I don't remember, but is the place to start to read about AI safety. And, and Miri, MIR i.org has got some of the most cutting edge people thinking about AI safety, but realize they're in the AI safety business.

Jim Rutt [00:30:46] So they're kind of overhyping it a little bit, in my opinion. So, but anyway, those are two good, good,

Vance Crowe [00:30:51] Good places

Jim Rutt [00:30:52] To look for

Vance Crowe [00:30:52] Those who wanna learn more about AI risk and AI safety. So twice you've referenced consciousness in regards to machines, and I think for a lot of people, this seems like something akin to magic or something, something that doesn't seem real, but that, that you could talk about using words, but to really say, what would it mean for a machine to be conscious?

Jim Rutt [00:31:16] But what

Vance Crowe [00:31:16] Do you mean when you say that? Ah, now this is,

Jim Rutt [00:31:20] This is actually the very center of my research. So I may go a little deeper here than usual.

Vance Crowe [00:31:27] My

Jim Rutt [00:31:28] Own view is, well, there's various views on this, needless to say, from those who, you know, the classic Cartesian dualism, which is the root in some ways of modern thinking about consciousness, which I believe and most current researchers in consciousness believe is wrong. But anyway, Renee Decart believe that consciousness and the body were two separate materials, and that they talked to each other through the pineal gland of all weird things. And that you could think of consciousness as being analogous to the Christian soul, and that when you died, the consciousness separated from the body went and did its own thing, et cetera. I would say modern

Vance Crowe [00:32:11] Thinkers,

Jim Rutt [00:32:12] No, mostly, at least the scientific thinkers reject that view. And they believe in consciousness as being emergent from the material. So they, the consciousness emerges from our brains and our bodies. And when the body dies, the consciousness dies. And it does not go on in some separate existence, not a separate material. So it's a uniformitarian view. Then there's a second fork, which those, those who believe that consciousness, i, I believe it's called functionalism, that if you had a, a computer that was similar enough to the way humans process or even process it in a different way, you could nonetheless create an identical consciousness experience to that which a human has. I would say that I'm skeptical of that. And the school that I approach this question from is, the question is the School of John Sear, the Berkeley philosopher who writes some amazingly accessible books. By the way, if you wanna read a philosopher's, take on the Science of Consciousness, look up John Searle, that's S-E-A-R-L-E. His view is that our consciousness, the only one that we know of, yeah, call it the animal consciousness, emerges from our bodies in a very complex way. It includes the brain, but it includes the gut, and it includes our skin, includes our senses, everything else. And so attempting to duplicate our exact consciousness in a machine is gonna be very, very difficult and probably won't happen anytime soon.

Jim Rutt [00:33:52] However, you know, he describes consciousness as a biological function like digestion or respiration, which has many components to it. Like you can't put your finger on something in your brain, say, this is consciousness, rather, it's a dance of lots of different things in the body and the in the mind. And, and just like in food science and in pharmaceuticals, we have things called digesters. They use bacteria, they use fungi, they use yeast to process raw chemicals and turn 'em into higher value products. And we call it digester, even though that digester doesn't look anything like your colon and your stomach and your pancreas and your liver, but it does something analogous. It's kind of like digestion. So where there's a long way around. So where I come out is that things like my conscious deer, very rudimentary, but, and, and other machine consciousnesses that we're likely to see in the next five to 20 years are gonna be analogous to what human consciousness is. But in no means, you know, closely identical to it. I, I know that's a whole series of pretty fine distinctions, but they're important when you think about this question,

Vance Crowe [00:35:06] Well, I remember when we were about to do your podcast, you know, we had kind of talked a little bit about consciousness and I had mentioned the Damon, right? The inner voice that's behind people. And you were kinda like, well, you know, there's some philosophers out there that say the decisions that you make are not actually driven by you. In fact, we can watch in an MRI that, that you make the decision and then you're conscious, well then you become conscious of the fact that you made that decision. So something is going on behind the, the works, and just because you perceive that you had the choice

Jim Rutt [00:35:38] Doesn't

Vance Crowe [00:35:39] Mean that you actually did. Is that a fair representation of that?

Jim Rutt [00:35:42] Yes. That's called the li bit result. One of the most famous studies in cognitive science, that it appears that the decision, for instance, to move your finger happens somewhere on the order of half a second before you actually move your finger. And one variant on that is, okay, what is free will, right? And the conclusion, and one and one variant is that the decision to move your finger is part of the unconscious machinery of the mind. And what the conscious layer has is a very short window to veto that suggestion. So it, you know, it happens and you have a very short period where you can say, no, don't do it. And that, and that's essentially what it means, the fact that it ha that, that the, the neurons are starting to fire to move your finger before you're conscious of it, but typically you're conscious of it before the finger actually moves. So you have a veto window and that maybe that's all free will is. And the other important thing about consciousness, particularly, and this is where I work very closely and where my simulations are, are, are digging in, is that consciousness orchestrates and is a, a workspace for the integration of unconscious processes. You know, the vast preponderance of our processing is unconscious and, but signals from the unconscious are constantly rolling into the brain at a relatively slow rate, which is quite interesting. And then the processing occurs very slowly, relatively speaking to the unconscious in the conscious brain.

Jim Rutt [00:37:16] And, and the inter it's the dance between the two, which makes animals who we are. And I should point that out, that the school thought that I'm involved with believes that animals from at least reptiles up are conscious. So consciousness is not just a human artifact, it's been something that's been evolving probably since amphibians. And certainly, you know, our dogs are conscious, birds are conscious, reptiles are conscious. And so when we talk about consciousness in this biological ilian sense, it's actually much more productive to consider. All these creatures are conscious. It gives us a lot more to work with rather than just our own introspection. What makes our consciousness seem different and indeed be much more powerful, at least the ilian view, is that we have a new class of conscious contents, meaning symbols, language that we can manipulate and that we can store in our memories and we can do cool things with. And so that makes our consciousness be able to do lots of things that let's say our dog can't do. On the other hand, our dog can do a lot of things that we can't do. Like a dog in theory can diagnose somebody who has cancer based on their smell. We don't have a brain that processes smell in the same way a dog does. And so in, in, in that domain, the dog's consciousness is more powerful than ours. But on the other hand, a dog can't write Beethoven's ninth Symphony and at least the occasional human can, and that's comes from the ability to manipulate symbols.

Vance Crowe [00:38:49] Well, and in your conversation with Yosha Bach, I I remember laughing out loud and then actually stopping and taking what you were saying very seriously, which is if you look at the contents or the size of a brain, right? They have an elephant or of a whale, they're massively larger than a human beings. And Yosha said, well, maybe they all became autistic because they realize that consciousness in and of itself, or the ability to, to work yourself into this symbolic world where you end up in offices and, and you know, need to do drugs to do all these things, may maybe they became, maybe they decided to shut down some of this consciousness in a, in a different way, which I thought I, at first I kinda laughed at and then thought, well actually that's maybe a rather serious observation. Yosha is an

Jim Rutt [00:39:36] Amazing outta the box thinker. And I, that's, and I never had that thought, right? And very few people have the kind of thoughts that Yosha has. On the other hand, there's not a, there's not an iota of evidence for that. You know, I'm pretty firm on the idea that within our evolutionary tree, I mean IE those things that are using, we all use a uniform DNA encoding, it's very clear that all life that we know of on earth is all descendant from a single root. And so within that evolutionary tree, I believe humans are the only ones that have clearly passed over the line to have high powered use of symbols and can't prove it. But it would seem there's no sign at all that any other animal has come even close to the human level of, of symbol usage that we have. And if someone were just barely over the line, let's say the equivalent of a human, a proto human, say 300,000 years ago, it's not at all clear they would have the capability, the technology or the inclination to be able to back away from that. That that's taking on, it's taken, you know, 300,000

Vance Crowe [00:40:47] Years to

Jim Rutt [00:40:48] Evolve a being like the OSHA in the human line that could have that radical thought. So I very much doubt that's true of the elephant and the whale, but I can't prove it.

Vance Crowe [00:40:58] Well, the symbolism is an interesting concept. In fact, you know, you prompted me to write something down that I had always kept in symbols, the well actually graph that I put right up here, right? But the, this is very powerful. I think the ability to draw something and be able to break down a complex set of thoughts and put it into lines and, and arrows and or mathematics or any of those things and be able to, for me to hand it to you and then for you to be able to hand it on, I mean, once you have that ability to capture a symbol and then push it forward is, well, we've seen exactly how far that takes us. And it doesn't take very long from when you get written language to being able to do some pretty, pretty, pretty astounding things.

Jim Rutt [00:41:42] Yep. And in fact, for instance, the alphabet that we use alphabetic language is fundamentally different than the idiagram languages of like China, et cetera. It's a very late invention somewhere around 800 bc So a mere 2,800 years ago, the alphabetic language came into being and just think what's happened in the last 2,800 years. Basically most of what we know, oh, you know, there was history before that, but it was pretty primitive in a lot of ways. But, and so the, and as you say, the ability to use artifacts outside to amplify the power of our consciousness, you know, the smartest mathematician in the world could not do a big long 20 page proof in his head, right? He needs paper to write it down or a whiteboard or, you know, like that one over there, right? You know, again, in fact, I remember one of my favorite physics professors at MIT, he did his work on six blackboards that, you know, slid up and down and all this sort of stuff, and he would just completely cover them equation with equations when he was in the middle of a, a run trying to crack something in theoretical physics. And he was a way smarter dude than I am, but he couldn't have done it in his head. He needed the, the green board and the chalk to do that. So the development of the alphabetic language, the Hindu Arabic numbers turns out manipulating Roman numerals, for instance. We would never have made the progress that we made, we would never have that thing over there. I'm pointing to on the wall the Apollo rocket, at least we would not have had it by now if we were still using Roman numerals to do the engineering calculations.

Jim Rutt [00:43:14] A Hindu Arabic numbers, you

Vance Crowe [00:43:16] Know, the

Jim Rutt [00:43:16] Zero through nine digits and the I idea of power of 10 places just turns out to be a shitload better for externalizing our cognition about things mathematical and things quantitative. And so,

Vance Crowe [00:43:28] You know, development of those psycho technologies

Jim Rutt [00:43:31] Is what literally got us to the moon.

Vance Crowe [00:43:34] One of my, one of the astounding observations, a good friend of mine named Bernard Sue, put forward was an observation about the Chinese language and how it has not changed over time. So whereas if we try and go back, like right now I'm reading Mark Twain, a Connecticut Yankee in, in King Arthur's court. And even that language is somewhat stilted, somewhat difficult to get to because the English language can change so quickly, can evolve and adapt, but the ability to be able to go backwards and read and really understand and have a, an equal understanding of what the people meant. Whereas in the Chinese language, you can go back hundreds of years and school children can still read those ancient texts. And there's gotta be a trade off between those two things.

Jim Rutt [00:44:23] One

Vance Crowe [00:44:23] That evolves really quickly and allows you to adapt to new ideas, but another one that has stability and, you know, kind of long staying power. Yeah,

Jim Rutt [00:44:32] That's an interesting, a very interesting statement though. You'll notice that most Chinese science is written in English these days, right? There's a, and I've yet to see a computer language based on Chinese. So that's an interesting idea for someone to, to chat, try to create. So, but right, but I will take the point that there indeed is that design space trade off between fidelity through time and adaptation to the current needs of the world. And it would make sense that alphabetic languages are more adaptable than others. And of course, even alphabetic languages for cultural reasons evolve at different rates. For, for instance, the French have an academy that defines legally what French is and English never has. English has been the, is the most opportunistic of alphabetic languages. And it's as bizarre hybrid that's about 60% Anglo-Saxon and 40% French in its roots. And well at least it was let's say 500 years ago. And we willy-nilly adopt Yiddish, we adopt Italian, you know, we adopt Spanish, we adopt, you know, terms from anywhere and any from anybody, and we pervert them and use 'em for our own purposes. And, and, and actually that one of the, and that reinforces your statement that, you know, makes English less preservationist. You know, even something as relatively recent as Chaucer about 12th century, it's really hard work to read even Shakespeare.

Jim Rutt [00:46:06] You know, you, most people if they read slowly can read Shakespeare, but he uses all kinds of weird words that we're not really familiar with. They have different meanings, et cetera. And of course he doesn't have a lot of words that we have. So even Shakespeare who's a mirror, you know, less than 500 years ago, is getting harder and cha are damn hard. And you go back to Beowulf old English impossible, you know, you cannot read Beowulf in the original old English without a dictionary basically. And that's maybe 1600 years ago, while you, you're right, you can go read a Chinese classic from, you know, 2,500 years ago and at least make some sense of it. And the same is also true of ancient Greek. Greek. It's interesting that ancient Greek, while it conquered the world, Alexander the Greek and the Hellenic period afterwards, there are no in no languages that derived from ancient Greek. It's very curious. Well, Latin of course has hundreds of languages that have, I know hundreds, many languages, many of them now extinct, that derived from Latin. There's not a single language that derived from ancient Greek. It was quite a bit more conservative than Latin.

Vance Crowe [00:47:22] You had a guy on, I'm not gonna be able to remember his name off the top of my head, but he was basically making a challenge to the kind of western understanding of religion and God and I, the, the conversation was about the Silk Road and he brought up Zoroastrianism and, and the, the, the Western understanding of that being all incorrect is this, is this ringing a bell for you? I you've done so many

Jim Rutt [00:47:44] Alexander Bard,

Vance Crowe [00:47:46] That was a phenomenal interview and I have no idea if he's right or not, but just the ideas that he was slamming into, into my mind, I, I found to be really striking. And I, I haven't gotten all the way through it yet because it was so slow, but I wondered if you guys got to language because it seemed really important. The silk road with its, I mean, language ends up being a mind virus, right? It is the software that you use to be able to convert ideas, just like we're saying, some of them evolve quickly, some of them don't. Some of 'em are so impenetrable that then that makes it so ideas of Western culture maybe don't get into them. You know, the Russian language is not notably difficult to to learn. So it makes it diff if unless people want now I think it's easier for ideas to hop, but they were much more preserved from that. Anyway, it was just a thought that I had regarding that. I thought that was a phenomenal interview you did. Yeah. It was,

Jim Rutt [00:48:40] Alexander is a heady dude. I mean, he is also intentionally controversial, so he said stuff to stir up the shit, right. But he is truly a brilliant dude. And so yeah, I would, if people want to get a, a very interesting tap dance through thinking about religion in this particular case, his proposed new internet religion, right? You know, check out Alexander Bard on the Jim Rut show@jimrutshow.com. There's a little plug there if you don't mind.

Vance Crowe [00:49:08] Not at all, man. I think your podcast is truly an excellent place where you, it, it's not just that you're finding such interesting people. I think you have a deep gravity well that people just kind of fall into and you've built it over a long period of time. But your base knowledge to be able to communicate with them, I mean, people can't just slide ideas past you. There are a lot of things that, that Bard was talking about that I'd had to be like, okay, I guess that's true. But, but you, you kept up with them. Which makes me wonder, what is your reading regimen like, how, how do you po I know you get off the internet for six months at a time or, or, or at least social media. How, what do you do to keep this pace up?

Jim Rutt [00:49:52] It's funny, I've been reading, I've been starting a hundred books a year since I was about 10 and I finished about 75 and I've done it all throughout my life. You know, whether I was a, a loafing bum hitchhiking around the country, which we talked about on your last podcast or whether I was a hyper busy public company, CEO whose day during the workday was scheduled in 15 minute blocks including to go take a shit. Right? I

Vance Crowe [00:50:24] Still found time to read my a hundred books a year and

Jim Rutt [00:50:28] I just did it late at night and early in the morning. And so I have always been a relentless reader and of course the internet's made it easier to dig. So you read a reference in a book, you know, I'll often move, go over to Google Scholar and pull up the reference and read that and maybe read a scientific paper or two. So I'm essentially a self-directed learning machine who has read something like 5,500 books in my life and probably 50,000 scientific papers or something like that. And so I happen to have a pretty large body of knowledge and I would say I have a, a decent though, not top of the curve ability to integrate them into a coherent body. So, you know, even if someone says something that isn't specifically about the topic we're talking about, I have a large body of other data that's analogous and by comparison that

Vance Crowe [00:51:27] I can,

Jim Rutt [00:51:27] That I can bring to bear. And then just a little trick, I mean it's not really a trick, it's just a thing I do about my podcast is I actually read the goddamn books, right. A lot of podcasters don't. I actually read the books, annotate 'em carefully, sometimes do some side research if I wanna really be able to challenge the speaker. And I, on average spend about 10 hours preparing for each podcast. So combine that with this, you know, large kind of self-directed education program I've been on since I was 10 years old. And then the fact that I really do read the books in detail allows me to engage the, the authors I think in a way that is somewhat uncommon.

Vance Crowe [00:52:08] So one of the things I love about your podcast is your willingness to challenge people. Right? For me, normally my sense is I like finding rapport, I like finding ways that we can shake our heads Yes. And, and get interested. And I don't mind pushing back 'cause I'm actually a relatively disagreeable person, but I find that you are willing to push much harder on people than I think most of the time they get. And what I find

Jim Rutt [00:52:30] Is that your

Vance Crowe [00:52:31] Guests enjoy it. I think there aren't very many

Jim Rutt [00:52:33] People that you

Vance Crowe [00:52:34] Have on that aren't prepared to handle it,

Jim Rutt [00:52:36] But it's just, it's

Vance Crowe [00:52:37] Very, very different. I think that's, I, that's why I would tell people go, go listen to his podcast because

Jim Rutt [00:52:43] Jim

Vance Crowe [00:52:43] Rutt does an excellent job of showing exactly how to disagree with people. But I I I, this makes me think that on your Game B idea, which I've now looked into and I've had quite a few members of the ag community get very interested in this. I do have some pushback on this I'd like to discuss now that I've thought about it and, and gotten to look at it and I, I wanted to push back on it, but for anybody that didn't get to check out our first one, do you want to give an explanation of game B and kind of where you're at and where you're headed to?

Jim Rutt [00:53:16] Yeah, sure. First, let me just address this idea of pushing back, which is indeed something I do on many of my podcasts. But one of the things I don't do is play gotcha journalism. You know, I'm not looking for the thing to embarrass the guy or anything like that. It's always about something substantive, right? That okay, they say X but I say, well, you know, you know, you haven't actually proven X, you've pushed X forward as a hypothesis, the evidence, here's some other evidence to points the other direction, et cetera.

Vance Crowe [00:53:44] So, well, I push back fairly

Jim Rutt [00:53:46] Often actually, as

Vance Crowe [00:53:47] You know,

Jim Rutt [00:53:48] I never do it in the gotcha sense, only on substance and only with evidence. And I think

Vance Crowe [00:53:54] That's amen. That's actually exactly what I mean. I think there's very few pieces. I think one of the reasons people have gotten so bad at conflict is they don't actually see conflict done very often. And so I think that conflict is good, it makes everybody's ideas better. I think there's no person that I've ever heard you pushing back on that didn't actually like it because it forced them to speak their thoughts that probably they, they hadn't even put some of those things that they knew into words. And I, I I find it to be expansive rather than diminishing.

Jim Rutt [00:54:26] Yeah. And I've never gotten into an ugly conversation with anybody at all on the podcast. As you say, Mo, all of them go with the flow and then some of 'em have told me afterwards, holy shit, you know, that that did take me into a whole new thinking. I'm gonna write a paper about that. Right? So anyway, back to game B, it's an idea that evolved from a group of our work back in 2012, which actually started to create a political party, which was kind of a fiasco, but it ended up collecting a group of that eventually grew to about 60 people, really smart, interesting people from many disciplines. And the idea of a new social operating system for society that was congruent to the challenges that we currently face is what arose. And that's what game B is, right? It's literally an attempt to say, all right, there's something deeply wrong with our world and part, and a lot of that has to be the fact that our institutional structures, our ways about thinking about things truthfully haven't changed all that month much since the 18th and 19th century. You know, when I hear people argue about capitalism versus socialism, I go, why are you so in love with ancient thinkers? Right? It's 21st century people. You know? I don't think the answer to what comes next with respect to how we organize our society is likely to be well described by either 18th century IE capitalist thinking, or 19th century IE socialist thinking. And so we're trying to do thinking at that level, but fresh with a blank sheet of paper with some of the smartest people around on what will it take to get humanity through the 21st century without destroying ourselves and to build a vibrant and wonderful future for the human

Vance Crowe [00:56:13] Race. So I, I like this so much. I've been sharing it everywhere. I've talked about your stuff on podcasts that I've been invited on. I know you've been talking with Jason Mao, who I think is an interesting character in the, in the field of alternative kind of styles of agriculture. The thing that strikes me is how will this movement possibly grow at scale?

Jim Rutt [00:56:36] It

Vance Crowe [00:56:36] Seems to me that it requires people to take on a level of labor that we haven't had people doing for generations. So where, where do you think people will

Jim Rutt [00:56:48] Be,

Vance Crowe [00:56:48] Where do you think the, the, how will this become water that runs downhill and makes it easier over time for people to join this?

Jim Rutt [00:56:57] Yeah. Excellent, excellent question. In fact, we talk about that's a lot, right? And if you've got, you've gotten yourself into the discourse, you, you've seen it's pretty high brow, right? A lot of it, you know, this is not designed for the guy who, you know, dropped outta high school and lives in a trailer at this time. But in the future, it has to get to that person if it's gonna be a social operating system for society. So there were several of our founding team that had business careers. In fact, I think the original 25 game beers, five or six of us had been CEOs of reasonably significant companies. And we all knew about the famous Jeffrey Moore crossing the

Vance Crowe [00:57:39] Chasm Curve,

Jim Rutt [00:57:41] Which essentially says that for a successful consumer product, you typically go through a series of markets. The first is the innovator market. Less than 2% of people are innovators and are open to hear entirely new things. The next is called the early adopter, and it's probably 10 or 12%. Then there's the early majority, the

Vance Crowe [00:58:03] People who

Jim Rutt [00:58:03] Hop on a trend once the early adopters have, have tried it out. You know, a canonical example is the flat screen tv. When those things first existed in the nineties, they were like $30,000, right? And only a, a few cranks bought 'em. In fact, the first flats actually, yeah, the first flat screen TV I bought was $10,000 in the year 2000, I think. And then, and of course that was a very oddball, and I mostly bought it just to see what the fuck it was all about, right? I'm not even that much of a TV watcher. And, but being as part of my dance along the edge, I went, Hey, what the hell is this flat screen TV shit? And now, of course, you know, the most recent TV, flat screen TV I bought was $199 and, you know, had built in Roku and all this stuff, and it's quite

Vance Crowe [00:58:55] Remarkable. And now we're hanging out on vr,

Jim Rutt [00:58:56] Right? And now we're hang hanging out on, on vr. And so we think that the evolution of Game B will follow the similar curve and that we're still on the innovator phase. We're talking to the one or 2%. And in fact, a small subset of that because as we described, who has the ears to hear the

Vance Crowe [00:59:15] Message

Jim Rutt [00:59:16] Yet and are, and we actually have a writing program that's writing an introduction to game B. And that was our topic last night is where do we want to position the language and vocabulary and concepts for the next written description of game B? And we decided still in the 2% phase, a little closer to the line between the 2% and the 12%, but we're still talking to the 2%. And so that's one part of the story. But the second is, and this is I think the most exciting thing about game B right now is it's been a talk shop since 2013, and it's now just about to start going into practice at the local, on the ground stage through what we call protos, which are actual communities of people living in part game B ways of life and actually developing local operating systems for governing how they live. So on one, for the very first one has actually closed on its land and will be opening its doors sometime before the end of the year. And I am pretty confident at least one more and maybe two will open its doors before the end of this year on the o. Another track to go from the theory to the practice is the concept of game B ventures. And that's the idea of businesses that are formed with game B operating systems quite different than the command and control systems we typically see in, in western business structures.

Jim Rutt [01:00:49] They will have probably, in most cases, employee ownership, stakeholder ownership of different sorts. Many of them will aim not to maximize economic return in the short term, but for longevity and providing stable employment for the people. And yet we'll provide sufficient return to the investors to make it an attractive proposition for investors. So I think that a big turn is about to happen in the game B world where we go from some extraordinarily interesting thinking and writing to practice. And I have warned everybody that a fair amount of our theories likely to be turned out to be wrong or very incomplete. That, and, and that practice always takes precedence over theory and that we're about to enter an epoch where we will have, actually, I should put these things in my hands so you can see my hands move like a good Italian. We, we will have theory, which we have in abundance, but we will just about now have practice. Practice will disprove some theory. We'll show the incompleteness of some theory, and we'll open up opportunities for new theory. And so theory will get rewritten as practice happens. People will take the new theory, apply it to new practice, and the same thing will happen again and again. What does this sound like? It sounds like science, right? It sounds like the idea of hypothesis, which is theory and then experiment or data, which is practice. And we, in science, we've had this amazing ratchet that's been going on for 300 years that's taken us from really not understanding the world at all to having pretty good, not complete understanding of the world in a mere 300 years.

Jim Rutt [01:02:29] And it's, we're in the epoch now where game B is about to enter that ratchet. And I'm extremely excited about how that will go.

Vance Crowe [01:02:39] I'm very excited about it. That's why I'm, I'm, I push many, many people, I had so many listeners wanting to talk about it. One observation that somebody made that I, I think you kind of confirmed in a way is that a lot of the people that seem to be very interested in game B one game A and, and I think that that, like for example, you, you know, there's not very many people out there that have sold the company for $15 billion, but those that have can come to the conclusion that even if you get to the top of the world, you aren't magically like lifted off into Olympus where everything is good and everything's okay and you still have meaning or you're still searching for something else. And so for you, the conclusion could be, Hey, game A didn't give me the satisfaction, therefore I'm going to move towards game B. But most people, particularly I would say, young men with testosterone and aggression and the things that allow you to push through during difficult times, that pursuit of game a's hierarchy is one that drives them or has driven much of society. And I know we talked a little bit about the, the hunter-gatherer cultures of, of the past, you know, saying, well, there were people that have done this, but that's a, that's, that's like a, that's a pretty distant thing to be hearkening back to, I think, kind of a tall order. What do you think about trying to get the very people that you're gonna need to be doing the heavy lifting and the, and the work being, being passionate about game, about, about winning at game a first?

Jim Rutt [01:04:15] That's interesting. Very good question. And Al I will say that while the original founder team had us a definite heavy loading of game, a successful people, frankly, 'cause we had the time and the resources to do it,

Vance Crowe [01:04:28] Right,

Jim Rutt [01:04:30] Most of the participants in the game B movement today are millennial men, actually about 25% women. And interestingly, the times as we've marched on, has produced lots of very talented people who are already nauseated by game a, you know, the idea of operating

Vance Crowe [01:04:49] In a command and

Jim Rutt [01:04:50] Control structure doing something that's probably bad for the world and bad for the humans. An amazing number of people are starting to get that. I mean, that was extremely radical thinking in 2012, but by 2021, those with ears to hear are out there and in abundance. And of course that is indeed the biggest challenge. Can we capture the human drive for creation and innovation into a world that's not denominated principally by rewards in terms of stuff, or positional goods. Now, it's true, people are still gonna be looking for status at some level, though perhaps not as ferociously as in the game a world. But there will be ways for people to have that who, you know, who has contributed a new idea for local farming, for instance, that really worked, or who wrote a great sonnet, or who's a really good childcare person who came up with a new biscuit recipe to use buckwheat instead of wheat flour. You know, those things could have very, very high status and people could compete in some sense for that. And that may be where it falls a cropper. But I, I do, I can see it. And, and there are, you know, now thousands of people who seem to be smelling this opportunity to change the game that we're playing. And I will say, even though I did make it pretty high up in the stack in game A, it was sort of by accident, I wasn't particularly ambitious at all.

Jim Rutt [01:06:25] In fact, I turned down three different, huge opportunities to make giant steps in game a world at various times in my life because I just didn't feel like it. And, you know, I would say I was never driven by ambition to climb the game a hierarchies, but I nonetheless did, which was kind of interesting and curious.

Vance Crowe [01:06:46] Yeah, I, I'm, I'm very curious to see where this goes. The, the thing that really,

Jim Rutt [01:06:52] It

Vance Crowe [01:06:52] Didn't surprise me, I actually kind of thought that it would happen, but it definitely did happen, was that the ag world in my, in my circle, when we started talking about game B, people got really interested. They, they're saying, Hey, we're already living out in the countryside. We would welcome more people out here. We want

Jim Rutt [01:07:09] These

Vance Crowe [01:07:10] Communities to be revitalized. We've

Jim Rutt [01:07:12] Got

Vance Crowe [01:07:12] Buildings for sale, we've got property that's out here, and we don't really want it to go to some giant consortium where they just send in, You know, people to manage the land as employees that, you know, come and go As, as migrants, we want people living and, and being a part of this. So I, I am, I'm, I really hope that as you get more and more offers to go speak with people in the ag community on their podcasts and getting out there, I hope you and, and other people in game B get there because I think that is going to be a, a key piece in making this work. You know, we had a chance to sit down with Mike Compston, for example, the,

Jim Rutt [01:07:50] The

Vance Crowe [01:07:50] Rancher from Nevada that also grew crops. And these people, they want community as bad as anything that you could imagine. And, and I think you, the game

Jim Rutt [01:08:01] B is

Vance Crowe [01:08:02] The only, the only train that's coming down the tracks, even remotely close to where they live. So I think they're all saying, come on, come in here. We wanna, we wanna help build and, and get them engaged. So if people wanted to get engaged with game B, tell us again how, how they can do it.

Jim Rutt [01:08:18] The best way to do it currently is to go to game b.org website called Game B Home. We used to be on Facebook, and we still do have a group on Facebook, but essentially all the interesting work is now happening over on the Game B home, and we'll probably be closing the Game B Facebook group down fairly soon. And there are lots of people, as we always say, the first step to playing game B is find the others. Game B is an inherently social game, and you can't play it fully by yourself. So find the others@gameb.org. Look forward to seeing you. And we're currently not really open to the public. We have, we're mostly just bringing in our own game, b people from Facebook and Twitter. But you'll be asked three questions. And one of the questions you'll be, where'd you hear about it? Say, I heard about it from Jim Rutt, that asshole on Vance Crow's podcast.

Vance Crowe [01:09:15] And

Jim Rutt [01:09:15] If you do that, we'll let you in.

Vance Crowe [01:09:18] So Jim, as we're wrapping up, what was your experience of doing this in VR now, now that we've spent an hour here, how did it feel? How, how, what was the experience like?

Jim Rutt [01:09:30] It was good. It was, you know, it was just, just like the first, my first one hour experience takes a little getting used to, and you, you're the one that warned me. It'll take 40 hours before you get the Zen of vr. And I suspect you're probably right, but I thought we had a good conversation. I thought, I don't like doing podcasts on, oh, put it this way, I don't do my own podcasts on Zoom. I do them on an audio only tool called Zencastr. Now, I've been on lots of other people's podcasts doing Zoom, and I kind of enjoy that, get to ham it up a little bit, but this is kind of, kind of nice. It's less hammy maybe than Zoom, right? Where, because we have all the, you know, wave our hands, you know, open our eyes wide open, et cetera. We sometimes tend to overdo that a little bit, but here we have this interesting sense of being, I mean, it feels like you're three feet from me, right? And I think I've kind of felt that, and you saw me use my hands a little bit. You see me looking

Vance Crowe [01:10:28] Around,

Jim Rutt [01:10:28] You know, gesture to the board, all that is cool. All that is neat, and I like it. So provisional thumbs up.

Vance Crowe [01:10:37] Yeah, I, I, same thing. So this is the first time I've recorded a podcast or done anything like this other than the book club. And a couple of observations. One, when

Jim Rutt [01:10:46] You leaned

Vance Crowe [01:10:47] In like this, it gave me a feeling of closeness, right? Like we're, we are actually here. And I think when I take my headset off, I am going to have had a much more visceral experience of I've spent time with Jim than I would have if we were on Zoom. I, it gets a little uncomfortable. I'm, I don't know, maybe I could have had a better chair or something where, where my arms were better supported. But o overall, I, I feel like I, I guess I am confirmed again that I feel like this creates a deeper connection between the two people talking than I think even Zoom did.

Jim Rutt [01:11:24] Yep. Now, I would say that, you know, as I'm thinking about this, if we had more expressive avatars, that would help a lot. And I don't, you know, again, there's could be some difficulties in doing the, the man machine interface. Like, you know, how do you raise your eyebrows, for instance, right? And how do you smile? And, you know, and,

Vance Crowe [01:11:44] Well, I don't think that my avatar does, but your avatar, the eyes move. And so I find myself trying to, to catch your eyes. Like even if your head is still, they, they have the, the eyeballs themselves move around a little bit. Oh, that's cool. And so I found myself thinking like, oh, is Jim like making eye contact with me?

Jim Rutt [01:12:06] Why don't you get an avatar that has eyes next time?

Vance Crowe [01:12:09] I will. I, I'm, I, I guess I just, I learned quite a bit about the avatar. I actually like your avatar better than mine. I think mine is too. You can't see my fingers move. I can see your fingers move. So if you even touch the buttons, I can actually see your, your fingers even kind of jostling a little bit. And then, yeah, I, I, I like your avatar better. And I think focusing on these tiny details just stacks more and more bandwidth on top to be able to make it a better and better experience.

Jim Rutt [01:12:39] And every innovation is that way, right? You start off with a base invention, in this case, the actual technology of vr, and then you build the things around it that make it better and better and better and more useful for real people and more expressive avatars, I think is a, you know, a very important place to go to, you know, make this thing come closer to face to face and be less like, kind of, sort of like zoom. But I would say this second hour of VR has, shall we say, not kept me from taking the next step to learn more.

Vance Crowe [01:13:12] All right. Well, Jim, thanks for, thanks for joining me. We'll have you on again anytime you're free.

Jim Rutt [01:13:18] All right. Thanks for having me. This has been a damn interesting experience and I don't know if anybody else has ever done a VR podcast. Do you know,

Vance Crowe [01:13:26] I looked 'em up. I couldn't find any. So I think we may be, if we're not the first, we're definitely up there in close proximity to the beginning. Ah.