Capitalism has historically been our biggest blessing. But what if it’s now turning into our biggest curse?
My guest this week
believes so. Jim is an early internet pioneer, a complexity scientist, the former chairman of the Santa Fe Institute, and co-founder of the Game B movement... and he has a lot to say about how our economic and technological systems have trapped us in addictive, self-reinforcing feedback loops.From smartphones engineered like slot machines to markets that manufacture desire rather than meet real needs, he argues that our current “Game A” world runs on a single signal — money-on-money return — and that this growth-at-all-costs monoculture is rapidly eroding our agency, our sanity, and our planetary stability.
This is where “Game B” comes in: a post-capitalist operating system built on multidimensional value, regenerative economies, and what he calls “membranes” — local, self-governing communities that cooperate through trust, technology, and shared sensemaking rather than rivalry and coercion.
So if, like me, you increasingly feel that modern life is engineered to keep us divided and distracted, and want to understand how to fix it, I highly recommend this episode.
♾️ Liv ♾️
Chapters:
01:42 - Intro
03:38 - Tech hygiene practices
06:57 - Why tech sabbaticals?
10:12 - The allure of slot machines
15:02 - Building tech responsibly
21:38 - Status games
23:34 - The market as an information ecosystem
31:38 - Digital status games
38:42 - Definition of Game A and Game B
52:14 - Preventing system collapse
01:05:52 - Practical Game B experiments
01:18:00 - Why Game A is self-terminating
01:27:45 - Planetary boundaries and population size
01:39:41 - How to fix the game from within it?
01:41:45 - Defeating tyrants and “big men”
01:49:18 - Jim’s trillion dollar idea
02:00:31 - AI consciousness
02:14:36 - Consciousness vs Intelligence
02:22:48 - The high stakes game of AI consciousness
02:26:32 - Rapid fire predictions
02:28:53 - Jim’s Win-Win
Links:
♾️ The Jim Rutt Show: https://www.jimruttshow.com
♾️ Jim’s Substack: jimrutt.substack.com
♾️ Jim’s X: https://x.com/jim_rutt?lang=en
♾️ Game B wiki: https://www.gameb.wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
♾️ Game B Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/gamebcore
♾️ Jim’s essay on smartphone dopamine: https://medium.com/@memetic007/reclaiming-our-cognitive-sovereignty-f49f30eb26bb
Credits:
♾️ Hosted by Liv Boeree
♾️ Produced by Luca de Vico
The Win-Win Podcast: Poker champion Liv Boeree takes to the interview chair to tease apart the complexities of one of the most fundamental parts of human nature: competition. Liv is joined by top philosophers, gamers, artists, technologists, CEOs, scientists, politicians and more to understand how competition manifests in their world, and how to change seemingly win-lose systems into Win-Wins.
Podcast links:
♾️ Youtube:
♾️ Spotify:
♾️ Pocketcast: https://play.pocketcasts.com/podcasts/7f708340-d17c-013b-f46e-0acc26574db2
