Ex-CEO Jim Rutt: Why Facebook Banned My 30,000-Person Community and the Game B Alternative

Jim Rutt [00:00:00] Create proto bees, as we call them, which are communities on the ground, anywhere from 30 people to maybe 3000, and that these can then use network technologies to interact with each other wherever they may be. And so you have the best of both worlds. You have a wonderful life in a beautiful, intact community, and yet you're in touch with the real world economy and other proto bees. Hi, this is Jack Lebeck baseball player in second grader from St. Louis, Missouri, and you are listening to the Vance Crow podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:31] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here.

Jim Rutt [00:00:34] Today

Vance Crowe [00:00:34] We are meeting we a character, a guy that has lived a wildlife, a man named Jim Rutt, who started out as a working class kid that got to MIT. And then he'll tell you that he went and lived behind dumpsters and worked at Circle K and became a college textbook salesman, and then eventually rose to the ranks of some of the most important internet companies in the world. He has since retired several times and now has so many thoughts on trying to create a system that's different than the one that we're in, that allows people to leverage the benefits of the internet, the networks, and the way you can meet people from all over the world and share information with this strong desire that we have to live in communities. Jim is a beam of energy, and I find myself being so excited to talk with him that I really had to restrain myself to not interrupt and keep guiding him around into different areas because this is one of the profound minds of our lifetime. So I am really excited for you to listen to this. Before we get to that, I wanna talk with you about a couple of things that I'm working on. Just the other night in the Articulate Ventures network, we had two of our members, the Ring Brothers, give a talk on how does one slaughter a steer. I, for all of my years of being in agriculture, from traveling around the world, from being in farming, I had never actually seen what is it like to slaughter a steer all the way from when you kill it, to skinning it, to breaking it apart?

Vance Crowe [00:02:06] And this is the type of stuff that we do inside of the Articulate Ventures Network. It's access to people that have an amateur love of something that they wanna share with you. And so if you're interested in meeting a brilliant group of people that are all talking and teaching and sharing with one another, I recommend you check out the Articulate Ventures Network by going to Network dot Articulate Ventures. Another thing we've been doing a bunch of is virtual reality. If you're interested in this, we've been doing, we did our book club in virtual reality, we've started hosting some meetings. We're even doing some talks coming up in the next few weeks. If your corporation is starting to think about how would we dip our toe into it, I have put on some workshops and definitely done some field trips that I would love to share with you. So if you're interested and your company wants to just kind of dip your toe in for a very low cost just to see what it's all about, let me know by visiting Articulate Ventures slash vr. And finally, I wanna mention the private interviews. This was something that I decided to do around Christmas time. I had extra time because so many talks were kind of winding up at the end of the year. And it is a way for you to have me interview somebody that you love and respect. Somebody that you wanna capture their stories, their history, their values, those little quirky things that you can never just put down in writing. And for some reason, when you pull out your camera to record them, they clam up and you can't get 'em to talk about it. If you'd like me to do an interview with your grandparent or parent or friend that you wanna capture their stories, you can find out more about doing this by going to store Articulate Ventures.

Vance Crowe [00:03:46] And for a small fee, I will spend an hour talking with your loved one, capturing these stories and giving you a gift that is priceless to be able to capture their essence, their stories, and their values on video. So I hope you check that out. I'm really excited about all the things going on, and definitely as you leave this interview, you are going to feel the excitement and enthusiasm that comes from talking with a man like Jim. So without further ado, let's head to the interview. Jim Rutt, welcome to the podcast.

Jim Rutt [00:04:19] Hey, Vance, glad to be here. So you're an

Vance Crowe [00:04:23] Interesting character because you came across my radar, not because you were involved with one of my favorite organizations in the world, the Santa Fe Institute, but instead because you wrote an article that was so edgy that you got booted off of Facebook. And so that actually, I'm like a moth to flame for this and I wanna know all about this. So tell the listeners what it is that you

Jim Rutt [00:04:45] Wrote

Vance Crowe [00:04:46] And why did Facebook kick you off of their platform for it?

Jim Rutt [00:04:50] Well, as it turned out, I don't think it was anything I wrote, it was probably this is our best thinking, a miscalculation by the ais that they've let let loose looking for bad guys, you know, in their mind Q Anon or what have you. It turned out that this algorithm, which we believe the parameters were changed sometime on Friday, about 10 days ago, booted all three of the admins for a very interesting Facebook group that I am one of the admins for, called the Game B Group. And that is a community of about 3000 people who are exploring the operating system of the future for humanity in a very calm, theoretical way. We don't allow any discussion of contemporary, you know, team blue team red politics. We don't talk about current events. And we have a seven person moderator team that keeps things from getting ugly. So it's like, what? Anyway, they blasted all three of us simultaneously. At first, I thought it might've been something I posted, but it turned out it was probably an algorithm that had been tuned on Q anon and somehow found our form of thinking and exploration and the fact that we have our own vocabulary and that we're always trying to take our theory and, and compare it with data and practice in some superficial way, probably had some statistical similarities, oddly enough, to the Q ball, the, you know, the screwball Q Anon stuff.

Jim Rutt [00:06:29] And so they whacked us. And of course, typical Facebook kafkaesque governance didn't tell us why. And even better, we got, there's a three different levels of ban. We got the highest, the death penalty. When you go to the appeal process, it says, this may not be, cannot be appealed and may not be re and cannot be reversed, right? So this is the ultimate wacko, right? And so we went over to Twitter and started posting and you know, fortunately our community on Facebook's about 3000. Our community on Twitter is probably about 10,000 plus. We got lots of friends, some of them fairly influential and fairly large shitstorm emerged. Literally millions of people heard about this. And of course, it also turned out we have a pretty well connected network of folks who are friends and at least four intervene on our behalf with employees at Facebook of, you know, medium level. And lo and behold, less than 10 hours later, the ban was reversed. But that these son of a guns bothered to tell us. Of course not, not in their kafkaesque fashion. We were actually on a conference call, the, the whole moderation team, seven people. And one of them happened to get on a, get an email from a friend, Hey, it looks like you're back on Facebook. So we all quickly hit our computer. Sure enough, we were, and so that is the screwy story of the banning of the game B three and their reinstatement with no apology, no notification, nothing.

Vance Crowe [00:08:09] Well Sue, you bring up at like such many, many interesting points, not least of which are this world that you live in, that you're building barns on rented land. When you're building a, a group on Facebook, and you could build it all up, you could be doing everything right and somebody else somewhere far away, maybe not even a person can flip a switch and have it all shut down. So now that you've gone through this Kafkaesque experience, what do, what do you do going forward to make sure that you're, you know, don't, don't continue to build barns on rented land?

Jim Rutt [00:08:41] God damn right. Actually, fortunately, I had smelled that this could happen. So I'd been looking for a year for a potential private home, basically a white label platform that had the functionality we wanted and was easy enough for normal people to use, right? Because we have a lot of people who are not technos, that are people that are interested in a new way of living. A lot of people interested in living in a regenerative fashion, they're interested in, you know, real community, et cetera. So tech isn't necessarily their thing. So we didn't want a difficult, you know, pinhead kind of platform. And, and I've been doing this for 40 years. I was literally worked for the world's first online commercial service called The Source back in 1980. So I have a pretty good idea of what you actually need to build a mass audience. And so I finally found one, and in early December I set up a potential bolt home for Game B, just set it up, basically tested it out and put some branding on it, colors, logos, you know, a couple test subgroups, and convinced myself that looked pretty good. So we got banned on Friday, let back on Friday night. By Sunday I actually had cleaned up the, the new home and we had brought in 40 testers from the community who were started working, you know, on it, make sure it works. Is this simple enough? Can we understand it, et cetera, what do we need to, what decisions do we need to make, et cetera, if on the tunings, the options.

Jim Rutt [00:10:17] And we've been going through that process now for about a little over a week and nine days to tonight we are opening the new game B home for a soft launch to our Facebook community. And I expect we will very quickly have hundreds and soon thousands. And then if it all holds together, which I think it will in a week, we're gonna announce it to the world. So we immediately decided this was one step too far from these people. We knew it all along. I mean, as I said, I've been doing this for 40 years and you know, I love your analogy as a farmer myself. You know, you don't wanna build a barn on rented land, right? You might, you know, plant some hay or a little sud deck, something like that, maybe some soybeans, but damn, I'm gonna build a barn on rented land. So here we were building a barn on rented land. Love that analogy. Now we got our own land and now we'll build a much bigger and better barn. And literally, we'll should be, I would say, substantially migrated off in another three or four weeks. So that's the,

Vance Crowe [00:11:21] I think that this is the direction of the entire world. And I can remember, so I used to travel around the world before COVID hit and give talks to groups. And one of the things that I was always predicting was this thing we called the social media archipelago, which is that eventually when you have too much pressure on, on any one social network group, that it have only a certain political bent or only certain ideas can be there. Well, people will leave and they'll go get on their own island. And that island will be so distinct and so separate from the other social media platforms, even though they're living on an island that's maybe just across the river from somebody they won't even know or hear or see anything from them. And I think that we will watch culture splinter out in a, in a whole bunch of different ways differently than the way that social media has played out so far. I mean, so far social media has been a centralizing force and I think we're gonna watch an explosion of a decentralizing force going on going forward.

Jim Rutt [00:12:18] And of course, this is returned to the way the online world was, right? And that the internet was for a long time. 'cause it used to be that one of the most powerful use cases for the online world, and this goes back before the internet, was what we called affinity groups. One of the examples I like to use, you know, CompuServe was the, the big power in the middle and late eighties, right? And there were hundreds, maybe thousands of what they called special interest groups. And one of them I happen to know was a group for aficionados of antique restored Packard automobiles. Right?

Vance Crowe [00:12:54] And that's highly specific.

Jim Rutt [00:12:56] Yeah, there was, I don't know, a couple hundred people on there amazingly. 'cause I guess the same kind of nerdy people that liked to restore an old Packard were just the same kind of be running a TRS 80 or a Commodore 64 or something on, you know, character mode CompuServe in 1986. And you know, they were very distinct from the antique Cadillac people and they hated each other, right? Because Cadillac and Packard were the two competing luxury brands back in the thirties and forties and early fifties. And so these were very distinct, totally culturally different. And once in a while, one from one would try to invade the other and it'd be a big shit storm. It was pretty funny. So, and then I think about it prior to about around 2004, 2005, a lot of the internet was also that way. You know, specialty websites for all kinds of things. And then the blog phenomena, right? People had their own voice. And then there was multi-author blogging where, you know, a half dozen of bloggers of a similar point of view would put up the equivalent of an online magazine. And so that was actually, you know, the heart of the internet from say 1991 when it first became more or less legal for consumers up till maybe 2003, 2004, when the earliest social media kind of commingled strange new platforms emerged with things like Friendster. And then, what the hell was the famous one? MySpace. MySpace,

Vance Crowe [00:14:23] Yeah.

Jim Rutt [00:14:23] That, you know, a total blown opportunity. They should have been the winner, but they just made too many mistakes. And then Facebook came in and snuck in and won most of the marbles. But there was a bunch of other ones. Orchid was out there, of course Reddit was out there in that timeframe. And so this attempt to interweave everybody into this indistinct ball of yarn is relatively new, only about 15 years old. And so I think it's not at all a bad prediction that many people will, will find, particularly in this new crazy environment where the platforms have decided they're gonna, they're gonna become censored. That why do we need to be censored? And even though we're not bad guys at all, you read the Game B group, you'll see that we were definitely erroneously targeted. We're not political any short term sense, very political in the very long term sense. But, you know, why should we put up with that? You know, why should we put up with the Aries of some algorithm, let loose without proper testing? And who knows when we start getting more radical, which we may well in the future, then we would certainly be at risk of being snuffed. And in fact, I'm working on an essay called Facebook's War on Thought. And the warning is 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.

Jim Rutt [00:15:59] 'cause they're gonna get you. It's sooner later. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:16:01] I'm struck by the idea, you know, Jim Rome, that that motivational speaker, if you go back and listen to some of his talks, he always says, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And I don't think people realize how much time they spend with people on social media and that the average of the people that they're spending time with may be just people, you know, copy pasting some idea that had some kernel of something that they could agree with, and they felt like gives them social status if they repeat it. And so they're a part of it. And even though you don't mean to, even though you maybe have different ideas than that, seeing it over and over and over again is no different than subjecting yourself to propaganda. You will eventually have that factored into your average way of thinking.

Jim Rutt [00:16:44] Yeah, and it's one of the reasons I take long breaks from social media. I took a, as I do every year, a sixth month break from 1st of July to the 1st of January from Facebook, Twitter, and the, well, which is the one of the world's oldest, probably the oldest online community. I've been a member of it since it's 1989, it goes back to 1985. And so I took a break from all three as I, I've been doing it for Facebook for about four years and from the well for 15 years. And so I've come to understand that this stuff is programming us. And so I take a six month break to become deprogrammed every year and, and, and go out and do all kinds of interesting things and then come back and see what's happening for six months before I then go. So

Vance Crowe [00:17:28] You're, bye-bye. This is, this is awesome. So you're a member of the, well that's like having an air dish number that's like, that's hardcore. So why don't we actually

Jim Rutt [00:17:37] Go and not only go out, not only am I a member of the, well, I'm a part owner of the well.

Vance Crowe [00:17:41] Oh my gosh. So, okay, let's, for people that don't know, let's go back in your history. Who the hell are you, Jim? You're, you said you were a part of a group called The Source. You are a member of the, well you're, you know, doing this kind of avant guard. Back to the Land Plan B idea, where did you come from and who are you?

Jim Rutt [00:18:00] I was a working ca class kid, grew up in the suburbs of Washington DC My dad was a DC cop and neighborhood. I grew up in about half the parents were high school dropouts about the other half, had a high school education, hardly anybody had been to college. Somehow I lucked out and got into a very good college. MIT went off and, you know, became a bit of a scholar I suppose. Decided I didn't wanna go into academia. Went back into the, into the business world after a couple years of hitchhiking around the country and what have you, you know, living behind dumpsters and working at restaurants, washing dishes and what have you.

Vance Crowe [00:18:38] Oh, is that right? Were you on the electric Kool-Aid acid test path of, of merry pranksters and, and

Jim Rutt [00:18:45] That sort of thing? Yeah. That, that was kind of a strange combination. Obviously we might call a redneck hippie. Right? And yeah, I had fairly long hair and I wasn't adverse to smoking a Doy or two, but, you know, some of the more extreme stuff, nah, it wasn't for me. I, you know, I wouldn't have my, didn't wanna have my brain cells melted, right? And so yeah, I had my couple years of just, you know, enjoying the very good life. I mean, the life on the road was fun in, you know, 19 75, 19 76. And, and I enjoyed it to the fullest. And then I came back to the real world, got involved in, got a real job working for a college textbook publisher as a salesperson in Kentucky, in Kentucky, east Tennessee, and a corner of West by Godd, Virginia. And that was very,

Vance Crowe [00:19:35] Wait, an MIT graduate that becomes a textbook salesman. That doesn't seem like, was that a step down for you in your mind? Or a step up from the, from the life of living behind a dumpster?

Jim Rutt [00:19:47] It's definitely a step up from living behind a dumpster. And even in my later days on the road, I actually had a little efficiency apartment in Ketchum, Idaho. And it was step up from that too, when I was working as the night shift manager for the local Circle K. But no, I didn't really give a shit about success or the ladder or any of that crap. Didn't give a shit at all. One the reasons I took the job of the college textbook publishing is about the easiest job I could imagine. And I had figured out during the interring process that once you learn how to do it, you probably only have to work about eight weeks a year and at least work hard eight weeks a year. You had to take care of the paperwork the rest of the time. And that was about right as it worked out, after about two years, I could basically work eight, maybe 12 weeks a year hard and then dick around, do a lot of the rest of it by phone calls and, you know, and ordering books for professors and stuff and leave me time to work on my own project. So it was perfect. I was not interested at all in ye old career game. And you know, I, I thought even, you know, a half-ass job like that was giving the world more of its due than I really wanted. Right? If I could, you know, found some other way to ma make a decent living that was even more of a fuck all job I would've found, I would've taken that, but I couldn't find any. And I was right, it was perfect, but, but always the, but as it turned out, as I'm wandering around seeing all these college professors, 15 of 'em a day on average, during that 12 weeks a year, I was working hard. At least after a year or two I start seeing these early personal computers, you know, weird ones like North Star Horizons and Mitts and Sci, this is before even the TRS eighties and the Apples.

Jim Rutt [00:21:24] And I started talk, talk to these people about this and I'd been a programmer when I was in college, a way to make money basically. And I'd taken a couple of programming courses, but I was not really a big computer science person. And part of it was I didn't like that culture of the big machine room, the giant IBM mainframes and all that stuff, which was sort of the computer culture of 1972 when I was in college. But this idea of having your own computer, I go, this is kind of interesting. So in 1980, I went and spent 90% of my net worth, which was a big $4,500 and bought a top of the line Apple two, I mean top of the line, 48 K of RAM on two floppy drives. Wow. And a dot matrix printer. And got back into writing programs, wrote the World's Champion Othello program, beaten IBM three 70 with it and started just seeing what's what up, right? Basically in the world of computing. And quickly realized, ah, this is neat. And applied for some couple of jobs in that area, got some offers. And then stumbled across, as I said earlier, the source, the world's first consumer online service. Literally it was for like Apples with modems in them, 300 BOD modems, usually 30 characters, a second text, 30 character mode only. And yet we had most of what, by 1981, we had most of what the web has today. We had email, we had chat, we had bulletin boards, we had online shopping, stock prices, news wires. We even had the world's first Catholic confession done via chat under the supervision of the Archbishop of Washington.

Jim Rutt [00:23:03] And so I was there at the creation of this crazy online world. And then I went off, started some my own companies where we applied these low cost, high volume platform technologies to high-end products like Wall Street and Corporate America. And built a few companies, sold them, then retired, got helped some people do. Another company retired again, first time I retired I was 32, which was kind of nice, lasted two and a half days. And then built another couple companies for myself that did pretty well then got sucked back into corporate America with an offer I couldn't refuse for eventually ended up as the CTO of what's now Thomson Reuters, the, in fact, I was the first CTO executive committee member, figured i'd yeah. Worked till I was 55 and retired. They had a nice fat pension plan and you know, fairly decent stock options, whatever. And, but then I got headhunted outta there to my surprise and became the last CEO of network solutions back in the days when they ran the whole domain name system. And right in the time when the domain name system was being privatized from, we basically had a monopoly, a government granted monopoly, very abusive, and the company sucked. They were the biggest clowns of misery ever met in your life. You know, couldn't do shit at least in the operator. Interestingly, they had good finance and good legal, but technology, you know, but

Vance Crowe [00:24:36] That's the way of any corporation, right? You, you eventually hit that sigmoidal growth where you're at the top of that, that growth curve. And the only thing you can add on are more attorneys to protect your, your staff.

Jim Rutt [00:24:46] Oh, but even worse, this is what makes it so pissed me off. It didn't really piss me off. I knew it was a great opportunity. Sleep is growing like this. You know, we're in the, we're in the, the czars that the domain business 1999, right? And it's straight up generating cash like you can't believe. And these clowns still couldn't execute, couldn't pour, piss out of a rubber boot if the instructions were emblazoned on the heel as my father used, my father used to say. And so I came in, was Mr. Turnaround, it was actually the second turnaround I had done. And we got sucker turned around pretty good and we settled all of our outstanding issues with the government, retained parts of our monopoly, the most lucrative parts entered in the competition, in the competitive parts of the world and we're doing real well. And then value of this PR company kept going up and up and up and up and up and up. Eventually got started getting offers to sell the company. And I said, shit, these offers are higher than I'd pay for a damn thing. And my old training at Thomson Reuters where we bought and sold 80 companies a year, said,

Vance Crowe [00:25:42] Hmm,

Jim Rutt [00:25:43] Somebody offers you a lot more than you think it's worth sell. So we did, we sold Network Solutions in 2020. I stayed on a year as I agreed I would and then I retired.

Vance Crowe [00:25:56] Well that is a wild ride. And it opens up an infinite number of threads. One that I want to circle back to that we talked about before, where the message board specifically the well that you spoke about before, what is that group and why, why does it hold such esteem out in the world of people that know what it is?

Jim Rutt [00:26:15] Ah, yeah. It's, it was a spinoff from the whole Earth Review, which was kind of that hippie magazine back in the day. Stewart Brand and his band of, of of crazies. There it is right there. The last one that's, is that Kevin Kelly? Is he the editor on that one?

Vance Crowe [00:26:31] No, I think this was still, Stewart Bran was the editor on

Jim Rutt [00:26:33] The, that was still Stewart Brand. Yeah. Anyway, they somehow came up with this crazy idea in 1985 to start their own online community. And it was, it's basically a whole series of what are called forums, what they call 'em forums. No, they call 'em conferences. And then conferences have topics and topics live for a long time. They're not like the transient posts on Facebook. A topic might l last for years, might have thousands of posts in it. And you know, at, at its peak, which would've been about 1991 or 92, it had like 12,000 members and a large number of the original movers and shakers of the internet. In fact, wired magazine was cooked up on the, well, Craigslist was cooked up on the, well, the Electronic Frontier Foundation was co the FF was cooked up on the, well, truthfully, I used the piss out of it. 'cause by that time I was working at Thompson Thomson, now Thomson Reuters as sort of Mr. Internet when nobody knew much about being internet and being on the, well, I knew what was happening six months before anybody else did. And as they say, you don't have to be faster than the bear. You just gotta be faster than the other hiker. And being on the well provided me that, you know, that heads up on what was coming and what was important and which we, I basically took to the Thompson, we actually out competed our big competitors by quite a bit, by just being a little bit faster than they were back in the transition to the internet. So, you know, in its heyday, the well was the kind of the thought leader of the early internet.

Jim Rutt [00:28:08] And still to this day, some of them people still hang out there. You know, we kind of joke it's a little bit like the colonial Williamsburg of the internet because the platform hasn't changed since 1996. About 30% of the users still use the old command line version of the product. There's actually a web version, which is not terrible. well.com check it out now. But it's also very contrarian. You must use your real name, you must pay, there are no ads. Your, all your information's totally private. There are no algorithms that are targeting your behavior against you. You know, it's very interesting. It's the total opposite of Facebook in every possible dimension. And the result is the quality of the conversation is so good. You cannot believe it. If you're hanging out, you know, on the cesspools of Twitter and Facebook and you go to the well and say, you join the politics conference, you know, first you better not say anything stupid. 'cause people will tear you apart, but in a nice way. But, but they'll do it in a very erudite and detailed and factual based way. None of this living in non-reality. These are very reality based people. Very smart, very well read, very good writers. Most of 'em better, good, better writers than me. And so I, I really enjoy going back to the, well after taking a break. On the other hand, it can be tiring 'cause there's a whole lot, these people seem to have nothing better to do except all day long. So that's the story of the, well, you know, it reached its peak influence in the early nineties.

Jim Rutt [00:29:42] Gradually, gradually kind of just peak, you know, went down just now got a hardcore of, you know, the community still there and they're still having a good time. They still have the highest quality discourse anywhere on the internet as far as I can tell.

Vance Crowe [00:29:54] Yeah, Stewart Brand had a rather profound impact on, on my life, on several different, in several different domains, not least of which, when I took the, I used to work for Monsanto and I actually was the director of millennial engagement. So my job was to talk with people that had come to the conclusion that Monsanto was, you know, pure evil, the, the, a force for, for bad in the world. And so when I took this job, I was like, well, if you're gonna try and change the way that people think, you're talking about changing culture. And so I actually flew out to San Francisco and met with Stewart Brand at the, the Long Now, and the biggest thing that I learned from that conversation was he said like, ideas don't change by one person. They change by networks. And if you really wanna change the world, you have to find ways to, to ping together and, and stitch together people that wouldn't meet otherwise. Because that's the way that you create new ideas. That's the way complexity can emerge beyond what any one individual can put forward. So to, so to be sitting here talking to somebody like you that is out there, like actually creating the stitching on the internet that, that brings people together is phenomenal. I I actually didn't fully realize your backstory.

Jim Rutt [00:31:12] Yeah, I, I did a lot of that stuff. And then the complexity part, of course after I retired, I decided, well, I don't wanna go back to work like I did the last two times I retired, goddammit. So let me find something that'll keep my interest for, you know, at least two years I said. And so I surveyed all my interests and I decided I, an area that I was interested in and knew a little bit about, which was called evolutionary computation, the idea of growing computers via Darwinian evolution. And so I set up a big old lab in my house with a bunch of computers and a T one internet connection. Holy shit. 1.4 megabits. Wow. Oh,

Vance Crowe [00:31:48] I was using those to download music off Napster. I remember T ones.

Jim Rutt [00:31:52] Yeah, yeah. This was in, in 2001, it cost $1,500 a month, but what the hell, I'd sold my company for a pile of money, I could afford it. And so I started writing evolutionary neural nets that would evolve themselves to play games and came to the attention of the Santa Fe Institute. In fact, someone wrote a New York Times story about my doings. And, and so the Santa Fe Institute invited me to go out there and Santa Fe Institute, as you probably know, is the home of the, of complexity science. And we hit it, really hit it off. And I, I came out there as a researcher in residence and ended up spending 10 years there and, and eventually ended up as a chairman of the damn place. And, and so I got quite a deep education in complexity science in many of its manifestations. You know, the new modern network science of people like Mark Newman and Michelle Gervin, agent-based modeling with people like Rob Axtel and Josh Epstein, Econo physics guys like doing far do farmer, some of the very interesting anthropological thinking in terms of complexity. Guys like George Goberman, man, it was like amazing. The funny,

Vance Crowe [00:33:02] The funny thing about complexity is you have to be so careful when you're writing about it or you're even reading about it, that you don't get into the a magic land, right? Like complexity science is so complicated. So if you were gonna describe for people what, what is the study of complexity? What does that actually mean?

Jim Rutt [00:33:23] It it, it's the emergence of complexity from simplicity. So the, the best example is, is life. Let's say us at the bottom, we're a bunch of atoms jiggling around atoms are actually quite simple. You know, every hydrogen atom is identical to every other hydrogen atom, you know, take away the isotopes of deuterium and tritium. But plain old hydrogen, everyone's identical, every electron is identical to every other electron. So this is actually a very simple domain. But then, you know, these atoms get together and produce molecules gets more complicated and the molecules get together, produce bigger molecules, organic chemistry, which is hugely complicated. And then that turns into eventually cells which have metabolisms, which, you know, the graph of the metabolism of the simplest bacteria. I've actually seen this on the wall. A friend of mine's office, you know, cover eight feet of whiteboard in, you know, the average circle about this big. And so metabolism is an emergent, it emerges from biochemistry, then the, then you have a single cell entity. And then magically, we don't know how, but about 500 million years ago, the single cell started operating together as multicellular entities and the so-called Cambrian explosion, and then they started evolving. And from that one event, we believe it was that one single event, essentially all the animal life in the world evolved relatively rapidly.

Jim Rutt [00:34:57] And, and so basically you have animals which start to be created from cells which become tissues which become organs which become systems like, think of the circulatory system that Jeffrey West probably talked to you about. And then, then it adds up to an organism like us. And an organism lives in an ecosystem which emerges from the interaction of all the participants, both humans and other animals as well. So that's one of the very best examples of complexity from simplicity. The other one I like to use, it cuts right to the quick is I like to talk about the relationship between the dancer and the dance. One can think of the dancers as sort of, sort of interchangeable elements, but the dance is the emergent interaction of all the dancers under the influence of the music. So you can think of a dance as a complex emergent phenomena that is the, the dancers in motion under the influence of the field of a piece of music. So, long answer to a short question, hope that helps.

Vance Crowe [00:36:07] No, this is, this is excellent. I, I find the Santa Fe Institute's research and the discoveries that they make to be profound and, and actually to have many, many applications to my own life, if not only just the, the prism through which I see things, the one that I think is probably the most common example that people here talked about is that you can track how fast people are walking and, and then backwards calculate based on how fast they're walking, how dense the city is within 10,000 people. And that to me is shocking because it doesn't matter what continent they're on, it doesn't matter what latitude they're at, really the speed that people are walking at are, is based on how closely are you packed in there. And you think about that and you say, okay, let's assume this is true. Let's, let's say the research is correct. What other things are going on in the minds of individuals that are impacted just by the virtue of how many other people they're surrounded by, not even other people that they're talking to, just how many people they're surrounded by.

Jim Rutt [00:37:07] Yeah, if you remember talking to Jeffrey West, turns out there's a whole bunch, right? Turns out things like the number of patents per capita, the nu the amount of crime per capita. So good things and bad things. The amount of HIV per capita all rise at about the same exponent, 1.15, which is very interesting. While at the same time the infrastructure, it is subline. So there's less gas stations per capita, less miles of natural gas lines, less grocery stores per capita. The more densely people are tied together. So at the infrastructure side, just like in the human body, you get subline scaling, you don't need quite, you don't need as much, you know, a mouse doesn't, is much more dense in terms of its infrastructure than an elephant is, or a human, A really big city is actually has less infrastructure per capita than a small town, oddly enough. It just has a lot more of it. But the outputs are super linear, both the good ones and the bad. How fast you walk, number of patents, the amount of, amount of your earnings per capita amount of education, almost any metric you can talk about. But then the bad stuff too, crime and disease are also super linear. You get more crime and disease per capita in the bigger cities.

Vance Crowe [00:38:25] I think that when I started to first realize what was going on with complexity in the Santa Fe Institute, I think that was one of my first steps back from the, the edge of nihilism, right? Where you think, well, nothing really means anything. Everything's so big. Where do you fit in the billion year, you know, system of, of the universe. But then you start seeing something like complexity and you see, at least I have a sense of awe. And I think about you describing that you are building games or neural networks that can learn, which almost puts you in the position, I don't wanna overstate it, but of as a God, right? You are able to create something that can create something else and spin off. Do you have this same sense of awe? Do you have this feeling of of power because you can create something that can evolve on its own.

Jim Rutt [00:39:14] Yeah, as it said in that New York Times article back in 2001, when I first saw it actually work, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. It was like,

Vance Crowe [00:39:24] Shit,

Jim Rutt [00:39:25] You know, I just wrote some simple rules and told them to go do their thing and they got smarter on their own. Wow. And of course now people take that to a crazy degree, you know, famously deepminds at Google has created this whole family of learning algorithms called Alpha Zero, which you can, it, it has no knowledge at all of a game. You just tell it the rules and it starts playing it with itself. And it becomes a world champion in like two days. Alpha Zero is now the world's champ in chess, in go and several other games. And that's what no, you know, knowledge of the game other than playing itself. It's amazing. And yeah, it's really amazing. And the, and the bigger lens of complexity, of course it leads us to believe that's how everything got here. That same way playing with itself in evolutionary competition. And it, it takes the, you know, the statement that nothing in biology makes sense except through the lens of evolution. One of the famer, I don't remember who one of the famous biologists said that you can now say the history of the universe makes no sense other than through the lens of evolution. And that is a really powerful lens.

Vance Crowe [00:40:38] So the reason that I think you're such an interesting character is that you are talking about these edge, you know, right on the, the the chaotic edge where you're creating new things, you're in the internet. And yet the article that we started this whole interview talking about the plan B is almost like a back to the land movement. It's, it's definitely a, a reverse of course. And saying get back to your community. Where did you come to this? Why, why is this the conclusion you're reaching as, as you, you know, age into retirement?

Jim Rutt [00:41:14] Yeah, this is actually a, the group work of a bunch of people. This is not my sole invention by any means. You know, the Game B community started in 2013. It was about 30 people initially, now it's probably 30,000 and there's ongoing dialogues. And by, by the way, it's game B, not plan B people, oh

Vance Crowe [00:41:33] Sorry, game B

Jim Rutt [00:41:33] Make that, make that mistake a lot. In fact, I believe the article you're talking to is called A Journey to Game

Vance Crowe [00:41:39] B, it's on medium

Jim Rutt [00:41:41] And it lays out at least my version of Game B. And other people have different versions. But it is, it is interesting that we are all converging to similar takes, which is despite the super linearity of things like income and patents, we've concluded that life in the big city is got more negatives than positives. 'cause while we may create a few more patents, we're also consuming a lot more of the earth's resources. We're living in a way that's not in touch with our basic human nature. You know, we're separated from the land and the, and and the water and the plants. We're not getting our food from our own productions or productions of our friends and neighbors who we might be trading with. It's coming through this great industrial agricultural model, which has, is a miracle. It's figured out to save 8 billion, feed 8 billion people. But an awful lot of people are just eating the worst kind of, you know, industrial food. And we've concluded that we can have the best of both worlds actually in some sense is that we can create proto bees as we call them, which are communities on the ground, anywhere from 30 people to maybe 3000. And that these can then use network technologies to interact with each other wherever they may be. And so you have the best of both worlds. You have a wonderful life in a beautiful intact community and yet you're in touch with the real world economy and other proto bs. And so you can get at least a goodly piece of that super linear scaling and you can be smarter and, and outcompete what we call the game a world.

Jim Rutt [00:43:18] And yet not have to live in New York City or San Francisco or someplace like that. And so I would say we came to this a step at a time, you know, different people added different pieces of one of my key collaborators, a guy named Jordan Hall, another one, Daniel Sch Achtenberg, Brett Weinstein has been an important contributor. Nora Bateson and many others. Bonita Roy has had a lot of very interesting ideas that have played into the evolution of this. And we, you know, we didn't know this is where we were headed, but a step at a time as we've learned more, it just seems like this is the right step for humanity, contrary to what the experts tell us. You know, they tell us the world's gonna get more and more and more urbanized. Everybody's gonna live in a super city of 25 million people by the year 2100. We don't think so. We think the right answers step back from that, build our lives at a human scale, but then use the networks for what they're good for, which is to organize capacity to do meaningful work without us all having to be in the same place at the same time.

Vance Crowe [00:44:25] I am so enthralled with this idea and in fact, so I run my own network or I'm with a group of people that are running a network and we've started doing exactly this thing. So just last night the, we had two guys that run their own cattle operation and they did an entire presentation on how to slaughter a cow after all the years and the amount of beef I've eaten in my entire life, I actually had never seen a cow be skinned before. I'd never seen quarters cut. I didn't know, I mean, I knew kind of where steaks were, but you start to go through that experience and you realize I'll never eat a steak again in the same way because of the experience having seen this done. And I think that it does put you in touch with something far deeper about yourself as a human to be around those things. But I myself can't just go get that information from zero. I have to have other people in my network that have that knowledge in order to be able to, to get it and share it. So as you're describing game B, how do you think that people will walk away from game A and walk towards game B? Will it be a lights off, lights on kind of thing? Or will it be a gradual step?

Jim Rutt [00:45:38] It'd be gradual. In fact, there are, you know, many people that are trying to make their lives more game B right now. The big phase transition complexity term, which we, we think is coming this year early next 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. But we're not utopian hippies, you know, we've seen that, been there, done that, right? Doesn't really work. In fact, our farm was a failed hippie commune, at least the the core piece of it. We bought it from the last commun art as usual, the one with the trust fund, right?

Vance Crowe [00:46:15] And, and

Jim Rutt [00:46:18] You know, they had a, they had not clue one. And we know how hard farming is, and if you're gonna grow your own food, you gotta make a real serious commitment to it. And it's frankly not for everybody. And so a proto be may only have five or 10% of the people involved in agriculture, but that's enough. It can, you can produce all the food you need with five or 10% of the workforce as long as you use smart farming techniques and you know, people who know what they're doing. But we would expect people on pro to B to continue to, many of them, to work in the game a world. And we believe we can actually outcompete them. We call that parasitizing game a right? 'cause we think that people who are living in a good place, who are not stressed out by status through stuff who, whose kids are being well taken care of by built-in daycare and really good high quality education, you know, just a generally high quality life, we're actually gonna do, be able to do better work. And because they're living inexpensively, because they're not into status through possessions, they don't need to make as much money as the poor fool living in San Francisco. And so these game b technology companies are gonna be able to outcompete the, the game a technology companies and gradually people could say, wait a minute, why should I work for some horrendous sweatshop when I can go join a game B venture and then maybe eventually move to a, a proto B and still participate if I want to in the work of the world. And so we think it'll happen like any good, any good organism, it'll happen exponentially.

Jim Rutt [00:47:54] But people won't even notice it at first. You know, first it'll be a few hundred, then a few thousand, a few tens of thousands, then a few hundreds of thousands, then maybe four years later, a few million. So you go through, you know, that's, you know, go through several cycles of this over a period of 30, 40 years, we might reach 500 million people at that point, the tipping point will occur. We believe that if we can get 500 million people seriously living the game B lifestyle and out competing game a while they're doing it, it'll be like the old Soviet Union game, a will just collapse of its own contradictions. 'cause people will say, wait a minute, why are we doing this? This is a hell of a lot better way to do it. Just as that's basically what happened to the Soviet Union.

Vance Crowe [00:48:36] You know, the, the maybe the criticism that I'd like to hear you redress is status, right? Status is deeply important to human beings. I have a close friend named Eric Ward who says, if you have an org chart, and no, it doesn't matter how thin you draw the line between two people, as soon as you draw a line, somebody's gonna try and figure out who's in charge of the other one. And it's just a natural human reaction.

Jim Rutt [00:49:01] It's not, what do you

Vance Crowe [00:49:02] Think about that?

Jim Rutt [00:49:02] You don't. Okay, it's not, it is not. If we look back at the forger, the hunter gatherers, which constitutes 190,000 of our 200,000 years on earth, they did not organize themselves hierarchically or in status relationships. In fact, they went to great lengths to defeat anyone who tried to play that game on them. In fact, one of the greatest books of anthropology that I know is called Hierarchy in the Forest by Chris Bowen. It actually should have be called Anti Hierarchy in the Forest, but he called it for whatever reason, hierarchy for us. And he explains how forger people, despite the fact that our near relatives that Chopan Zs are very hierarchical, we managed to get outta that box and we would not tolerate hierarchy. And in fact, 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. And the enabling technology was unlike chimps with the biggest, baddest chimp was really pretty hard to deal with. Humans had weapons. And so even a random dude could kill the biggest, baddest dude in the, in the band. And humans built this anti hierarchical way of life that lasted for 95% of our time on earth. And we believe this is a core idea of game B, that we can get back to that as an example. You do need leadership.

Jim Rutt [00:50:33] But how did the foragers do it? They and indigenous, some indigenous peoples today, not all, they used what was called role-based leadership rather than position based leadership. So the guy who was best at, you know, hunting buffalo would go out and lead the band that was hunting buffalo. But that was his only authority was to lead people on buffalo hunts. And when they were back in the camp, he wasn't the chief. Nobody gave him any extra respect. You know, Mary, who was the greatest Barry Picker, she led people on Barry Pick expeditions. And oh by the way, if you know, if they, if some new up and comer turned out to be better at it, they took over as the role-based leader in these thing, you know, or even, you know, the guy who was in charge of the buffalo hunt got tired of leading the buffalo and decide he wants to go start napping stones. He could just say, I'm not doing that anymore. So much, much, much more fluid and emergent. And the biggest challenge of game B is to be able to do that as well and better than, than game A does it. And we believe that we will have a huge competitive advantage because what would you rather work in a world where we're all collaborating together as peers in role-based, rotating role-based leadership or one of these godawful command and control structures. We believe that over time we will pull the talent out of game a 'cause it will prefer the game B way of organizing work. And so our ability to parasitize game a just gets stronger and stronger over time. We pull out the talent, leave the stiffs there. They're less effective structures or more effective structures.

Jim Rutt [00:52:05] Looks like we're gonna win. That's our, that's our theory.

Vance Crowe [00:52:08] Well there's no doubt, like the, the modern corporation today, if you go look at their hierarchical structure, it is exactly the same as it was in the 1930s, maybe even the 1890s, whatever structure they had where there's a guy on top and then they have three people to report to them and, and on up. I, I personally would love the system that you're talking about, but I have strong doubts about how that happens. So I, I, yeah, I mean it's very interesting to hear you talk

Jim Rutt [00:52:37] About, it's time for us to put, you know, our words to action. 'cause you know, proto Bees, which is on the ground, communities will happen this year. The other ones that will happen this year are game B ventures. We will be starting up some businesses on these principles and maybe we're wrong, but maybe we're right and we'll soon find out.

Vance Crowe [00:52:58] Yeah, I think some of the coolest companies that are out there right now, the guy I mentioned before, his name's Eric Ward, he's with a company called AgBiome and they don't do raises or, or they do raises, but they don't do what promotions in the same way. So in their company, if you want to get a, get a career milestone they call it, you actually have to advocate for yourself. You have to say, Hey, I think that in two years ago I was doing this work, now I'm doing this work. I wanna find an advocate and four people that I'm gonna go ask for their feedback. Do you think I've been moving forward? What is your direct feedback? And then after you get those four people's feedback, you take it to a committee that's made up of the larger organization and they make the case for you. How are you doing? Are you moving up? And they give you really concrete feedback as to whether or not you've achieved it or not. And so they don't have this, well, I moved up, I'm now, I went from scientist one to now I'm scientist three. And I'm really excited about continuing to get to Scientist four and instead, they're able to collaborate. And what that allows is exactly like you were saying within their company. They are, they're allowed to choose which projects they work on, which means they actually have way more fun and way more interest and get up every day a lot more excited about it. I had, I would never have crossed my mind unless we were talking that you could do that on a larger scale than just that one company. It, it genuinely wouldn't have crossed my mind.

Jim Rutt [00:54:23] They're not the only company that does that. And a company called Valve does that. They're the ones who run the Steam online game system. Zappos does a variant on that called Holacracy. It's is another example. And there are, and there are others. And it's growing. And as you say, it ought to work better. And it's certain, and most importantly in the, in, in the transition period, it ought to attract the most talented people. 'cause what would you rather be in that kind of company or, you know, grinding your way up the hierarchy. And I can tell, even though I rose to the top of the hierarchy, most of the people raised rose to the top of the hierarchy. Didn't do through suit, through talent. They did through backstabbing in politics. And, you know, being in a big corporation most of the time is not a very pleasant way to spend eight to 10 hours a day. And, and that again, just like the Soviet Union collapsed when the people could see on TV what it was like in the West. When people can see what it's like to organize work and production and life without command and control, without hierarchy and without status through possessions, at least heavy emphasis on status through possessions, I think people are gonna vote with their feet.

Vance Crowe [00:55:41] You know, the more you're talking about this, I mean, and part of it's just my excitement to see you being so excited about it. But I often will talk with people in the ag world and say, look, you don't understand the people that are going to a corporate job, they're there from let's say eight 30 till five at night. And they're making the appearance that they are working for those eight and a half hours. But in fact, the internet made it so the amount of work that they have to do in a given week is not 40 hours. It's about four or maybe six, maybe 10. Yeah, probably more like 10 16.

Jim Rutt [00:56:10] That's a good number.

Vance Crowe [00:56:11] Yeah. And so then they, they like, when they're done with that work, the rest of their time is filled with trying to justify the, the, the time that they're spending there, the salary. So they're participating in meetings where no decisions are being made. They're going to Oh

Jim Rutt [00:56:26] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:56:26] The, the hierarchical and, and people hate it. And I think that it is a huge reason why you see men losing their minds and the suicide rate of, of adult men that are even successful is so high. And it's because if you're going every day and doing work that you know is meaningless, it reflects on your own soul. Like it, you, you can't carry that.

Jim Rutt [00:56:48] Absolutely agree. In fact, there's an old saying in ge, which was considered the best managed company in America for very many years, that a, a serious ge I spent a third of their time doing their work, a third of their time managing their boss and a third of their time managing their career. And that was the best managed company in America. And I'd say that in a lot of those big companies in, it's like less than a third, I'd say, you know, you know more like maybe you do 25% of your day in actual work, something like that. So yeah, no, and it's demoralizing. And, but, but on the other hand, it's easy to be anesthetized by the cycle of status debt and more work, right? Oh, I got a new Lexus, I got a Rolex who I join the country club, go play golf. Right? And that's how they pay these people off. And, but when the spell breaks, when the glitz in the matrix appears, and you see there's another way to be in this beautiful proto b where you live in a fairly small but nice house in a on the ground community of like-minded people of honesty and good faith where your kids are taken care of by the community just like they always were in the old days when I was a kid, you know, we weren't afraid to go out and go for miles, right? It wasn't this fear. 'cause all the parents were more or less watching out for the kids and that kind of community, people are craving them, but a lot of 'em don't even know it's possible. But when the word gets out that it's possible and that it actually exists, I expect the defectors from, from the game, a world will will happen on a massive scale.

Vance Crowe [00:58:27] Yeah. The child raising thing is one of the things that I, I really was not aware of until we had a child about six months ago. And all of a sudden you realize part of the challenge of the status game of the, of the making money and trying to live at a certain level is that you now have to outsource your childcare. So you're finding somebody that's low status, you're paying them money and you're saying, I'll be back in six to seven hours. And there's nothing to do with the community. You're not asking them to instill values. You're just like, keep your eyes on them to make sure they don't choke or fall or, you know, stab themselves or do whatever and, and

Jim Rutt [00:59:03] Wait until they're, wait till they're 12. You know, one of 'em, you know, screwing around or whatever. Right? But I say in yet, you know, I was a kid, we didn't have any of that shit, right? We just went and lived in the community, lived in the co we had the wood, the woods, we had the, you know, the baseball fields. You know, we did, you know, we just did our thing. You know, we come home at dinner. That's all you did, right? From a remarkably young age, three or four. Right? And that world does not exist for an awful lot of people today. And they crave it. And that's, we believe that that kind of community will be built into the ro bees. You know, some percentage of the people will actually have as their job being community, people making, you know, making community happen. And they'll be paid by the proto b to be community people to make, you know, all that traditional stuff happen. And it'll be high status work, be paid the same as a Python programmer probably, or damn near. And we just think that's a better world.

Vance Crowe [00:59:59] Well I think that my audience, which is largely made up of farmers, are either gonna say, I live in proto B, right? Or in game B right now. Or they'll, it, they'll be very interested in finding a way to participate. So if people wanted to learn more about game B and and getting involved, how would they do that, Jim?

Jim Rutt [01:00:18] The best way, as we call it, is find the others. And for now, the best way to find the others is on the game B Facebook group. Just go to Facebook in the search box, type in game B, all one word, and you will find about 22 different groups that are doing different things like game B, parenting Game B, communities game B, education game B governance. But go to the main one that just says Game B and say, I'm here and that we'll take it from there.

Vance Crowe [01:00:49] Well, I hope that when you really launch your next, your, your barns that you're building on the land that you own, that you let me know and I'll be sure to share it with everybody else. 'cause I, I wanna see you grow, grow, grow, and get away from the algorithms.

Jim Rutt [01:01:03] Very good. And oh, of course, by the way, as, as I mentioned earlier, we'll soon be going off to our new home. So for now go to Facebook. But if you're on Facebook, the word will be spread immediately where we're going next.

Vance Crowe [01:01:15] And Jim, if people wanted to listen to your podcast or find you in other places, where would they do that?

Jim Rutt [01:01:21] Jim Rutt show.com. That's the home for our podcast. We're also up on 155 different podcast apps. So any app you use to listen to your podcasts, just type in Jim Rutt show, you'll find me. You can also, you know, find my bio at the Santa Fe Institute. Just type Jim Rutt, SFI and it will find my bio. And that's probably about, oh, and, and also my various essays on various topics on medium. You know, go to Medium, just type in Jim Rutt, you'll pull up eight or 10 essays including a journey to Game B and I, I'm not a real heavy Twitterer twit or whatever the hell they call themselves, but I also, Jim underscore rutt on Twitter. I'd say an occasional interesting thing, but, so you can check me out there too.

Vance Crowe [01:02:10] Well, thanks so much for coming on, Jim. I, I cannot wait to see where this all goes.

Jim Rutt [01:02:14] Yeah, it has been a wonderful conversation. You obviously have a head, your head into similar ways of thinking. I agree.