Jim Rutt: MIT to living behind a dumpster to CEO and now Game B; the wild life of a smart man.

About this episode

Jim Rutt — an MIT grad who lived behind dumpsters, sold textbooks, helped build "The Source" (the first consumer online service), co-owns The WELL, ran Thomson Reuters' technology arm, was the last CEO of Network Solutions, and later chaired the Santa Fe Institute — opens by recounting how Facebook's moderation algorithm, apparently mistuned on QAnon detection, banned all three admins of his 30,000-person "Game B" community with an unappealable "death penalty" ban, reversed ten hours later with zero explanation. That triggers a wide-ranging conversation about "building barns on rented land" (platform risk), Vance's own "social media archipelago" thesis, and Rutt's decades-long pattern of taking deliberate six-month breaks from social media to avoid being "programmed." Rutt narrates his own arc from working-class DC kid to Apple II hobbyist to CEO, then pivots into complexity science (his ten years at Santa Fe Institute, superlinear scaling of both patents and crime with city density, and evolutionary computation) as the intellectual scaffolding behind Game B — a movement proposing "proto-bees," networked communities of 30-3,000 people that combine intact, face-to-face community life with plugged-in digital economic participation. Rutt argues hunter-gatherer societies were actively anti-hierarchical for 190,000 of the last 200,000 years, using role-based rather than position-based leadership, and that Game B ventures will "parasitize" Game A by out-competing conventional companies for talent since low-cost, low-status-signaling community life lets people work for less while doing more meaningful work. He predicts a slow-then-fast exponential growth curve toward 500 million Game B adherents worldwide, at which point Game A collapses "just as happened to the Soviet Union." Vance connects this to men's mental health, meaningless corporate busywork, and outsourced childcare, while pushing back on whether status hierarchies can ever really be eliminated.

“It turned out it was probably an algorithm that had been tuned on Q Anon and somehow found our form of thinking... they blasted all three of us simultaneously... typical Facebook kafkaesque governance didn't tell us why... this may not be, cannot be appealed and may not be reversed.”

“Anyone who's actually thinking about new things, you get the hell off Facebook. If all you're doing is using rubber stamps to repeat conventional wisdom, yep, probably Facebook, Twitter's okay for you. But if you're actually doing fundamental thought, heterodox ideas about how to make the world better, don't do it on those rented plots of land.”

“The big phase transition... are the first proto bees which are on the ground communities where people can at least in considerable part live in a game in a more game B way... it'll happen exponentially... maybe four years later, a few million... we might reach 500 million people at that point, the tipping point will occur.”

Key moments

• ~5-10%: The Facebook ban story — Kafkaesque unappealable "death penalty" ban and reversal with no explanation.
• ~19%: "Facebook's War on Thought" essay thesis — heterodox thinkers should leave centralized platforms before they're purged.
• ~30-34%: Origin story — Apple II, The Source, The WELL, Network Solutions turnaround and 2020 sale.
• ~44-48%: Superlinear scaling in cities (patents, crime, HIV all rise with the same exponent) as intellectual grounding for Game B.
• ~49-52%: Anti-hierarchy in forager societies and role-based vs. position-based leadership as Game B's organizing principle.
• ~52%: Explicit "we believe... looks like we're gonna win" prediction — Game B out-competing and eventually collapsing Game A.
• ~56-60%: Corporate busywork, "a third of your time managing your boss," and men's mental health tied to meaningless work.

Notable quotes

“This algorithm... booted all three of the admins... we got the highest, the death penalty. When you go to the appeal process, it says this may not be, cannot be appealed and cannot be reversed.”

“Anyone who's actually thinking about new things, you get the hell off Facebook... if you're actually doing fundamental thought, heterodox ideas about how to make the world better, don't do it on those rented plots of land.”

“They did not organize themselves hierarchically... anyone who tried to pull that game would be first laughed at and then ignored and then exiled. And if they kept coming back trying to say I'm the boss, they'd be killed.”

“You have a wonderful life in a beautiful, intact community, and yet you're in touch with the real world economy... you can be smarter and outcompete what we call the game a world.”