Jim Rutt and Vance Crowe Record Podcast in Virtual Reality: Consciousness, Neural Networks & Game B

About this episode

Vance Crowe and Jim Rutt record what may be the first-ever podcast conducted inside virtual reality (via Oculus Quest 2, in the Articulate Ventures Network's VR "underground bar"), opening with a meta-discussion of VR itself as a communication medium — weak-link/strong-link theory, spatial density's effect on culture (drawing on Rutt's own startup office layouts), and the surprising importance of hand gestures and eye movement in low-fidelity avatars. The conversation moves into Rutt's personal deep-tech projects: building a novel neural-network architecture and learning algorithm from scratch, and a prior project simulating "rudimentary consciousness" in a virtual deer. This leads into an extended, technically rich explainer of how neural networks work, why GPT-3 is a static statistical artifact rather than "understanding" anything, AI risk and the intelligence-takeoff scenario, and John Searle-style biological views of consciousness (rejecting Cartesian dualism and computational functionalism) alongside the Libet experiment on free will. A digression covers symbolic language and alphabetic writing as civilization-enabling "psycho-technologies," comparing the durability of Chinese/Greek/Latin-derived languages to English's rapid evolution. The back half pivots to Rutt's Game B project — an attempt to design a 21st-century "social operating system" beyond capitalism/socialism, its innovator-to-early-adopter diffusion strategy (Crossing the Chasm framework), its first physical "proto" communities securing land, and Crowe's pointed pushback about whether people driven by "Game A" status/ambition will ever buy in, plus his observation that rural agricultural communities are unexpectedly receptive to Game B's community-revitalization pitch.

“It appears that the decision to move your finger happens somewhere on the order of half a second before you actually move your finger... you have a very short period where you can say, no, don't do it. And that maybe that's all free will is.”

“I actually read the goddamn books... annotate them carefully, sometimes do some side research... I on average spend about 10 hours preparing for each podcast.”

“There's something deeply wrong with our world... I don't think the answer to what comes next... is likely to be well described by either 18th century capitalist thinking, or 19th century socialist thinking.”

Key moments

• ~5-14%: VR as a communication medium — weak/strong link theory, spatial density and office culture, hand-gesture importance in avatars.
• ~24-32%: Rutt's neural-net-from-scratch project and conscious-deer AI simulation via custom Unity communications layer.
• ~34-46%: Neural network explainer and why GPT-3 doesn't "understand" language; AI risk and technological takeoff scenario.
• ~48-56%: Consciousness debate — Cartesian dualism vs. biological emergence (Searle), the Libet free-will experiment.
• ~58-66%: Symbolic language and alphabetic writing as "psycho-technologies"; language durability comparisons (Chinese vs. English vs. Greek/Latin).
• ~72-90%: Game B's diffusion strategy (Crossing the Chasm), physical "proto" communities, and pushback on recruiting status-driven "Game A" winners.

Notable quotes

“The decision to move your finger happens... before you're conscious of it... you have a very short period where you can say, no, don't do it. And that maybe that's all free will is.”

“I actually read the goddamn books... I on average spend about 10 hours preparing for each podcast.”

“GPT-3 does not understand the English language... it's a statistical learning model... it doesn't actually know anything.”

“Less than 2% of people are innovators and are open to hear entirely new things... we're still talking to the 2%.”