The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show, Owen Cox, or Daniel Fraga. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guests are Daniel Fraga and Owen Cox. Daniel’s the author of the book Ontological Design: Subject is Project, which looking up on my Kindle, I found I had Kindled back in August but I hate to admit it, I haven’t read it yet but I’ll get around to it. From his website, Daniel says he is a designer and theorist, advising some of the world’s best-known companies on designing for artificial intelligence, immersive and voice technologies. At the crux of his philosophies is the idea that in the 21st century, human subjectivity itself is the next frontier for the creative project. A simultaneously dangerous and exciting prospect. Yeah, that’d be very interesting. Owen Cox describes himself as a thinker, reader and writer. He’s the co-host of the Parallax Sangha podcast. And Daniel and Owen together are co-hosts of the Technosocial podcast. So check them out. So welcome, Daniel and Owen.
Owen: Hello.
Daniel: Hello, hello, Jim.
Jim: Hey, good to be here, or at least it might be good. We’ll see how she goes, right? See how it rolls, right? As regular listeners know, I frequently reference Game B a radical social change movement I’ve been involved with since 2013. To learn more about Game B, you can go to gamebfilm.org, gameb.wiki. And to join the online community of several thousand people working on Game B, go to www.game-b.org. Unfortunately, the www for arcane technical reasons is necessary.
Anyway, Owen and Daniel have been principled critics of Game B, including producing some hilarious and scurrilous memes. They’re quite funny actually, and quite scurrilous. They packaged up some of the criticism and memetics under the label Game C. I thought it’d be fun to have them on here and have a spirited but principle discussion. So, where do you want to start? Who wants to go first? Just start talking.
Daniel: So Game C is probably not something that I would identify with, but certainly I can come up with some criticisms of Game B broadly speaking. I guess, that just off the bat, the main one that comes to mind is… And correct me if I’m wrong, because it might come from just a misunderstanding from my part. From this attempt to logically deal with things that are definitionally illogical. So, it seems to me, like oftentimes with Game B centric discussions, issues like libido, the way that people have their own enjoyment. It’s just like the death drive, they’re brushed over. And the assumption is that you can logically systematize them away with a good enough system. Whereas, Owen and mine’s position is that these things are definitionally illogical, and therefore cannot be, I guess cast and solved away into a system. That would be just off the bat what I think. Owen, do you have anything to add to that?
Owen: Yeah. I mean, plenty, right? I think the thing, Game B… Or game C rather, obviously started as a joke. The little bit of history behind it, there was an event. I won’t say what event and I won’t say which person, but basically it was within the broader subculture within which we exist. It wasn’t explicitly a Game B thing by any chance, but it was a meetup of people who have been networking through the internet to try and explore and understand and strategize and move forward. It had been very carefully thought through and structured and planned. And a friend of ours just spent the entire weekend drinking cognac and caused a complete havoc, and it was hilarious. At some point someone started saying, “Well, this is Game C.”
And it stopped, because there was basically something true in what had happened there, that the asshole who decided to just get completely wasted and fuck everything up was giving voice to something that wasn’t given voice or an expression in that situation. It was too well thought through. It was too structured. There was no expression of the ecstasy, the chaos, the dionesium, you might say. And that was where we started playing around with this idea of Game C, I think, as the signifier or the placeholder for all of the stuff, the dirty, seedy and fun stuff that doesn’t seem to be held or formally theorized in the ideas of Game A or of Game B, precisely because it can’t be formally theorized.
It takes the quality of being a dirty joke. And of course, there’s a deep truth in dirty jokes that precisely connected up with the tragic comedy of life, I think, with the absurdity of the human condition, the things that the great writers like Shakespeare explore and play with that I don’t think we can carefully deal with with our utopian or idealistic attempts to reframe what we should do about human culture. And so, Game C, sorry, becomes this provocative way to say, “Ah okay, but what about the sleaze? What about the fun? What about the booze?”
Jim: Cool. Yeah, I think it’s a useful critique because I do think it is true that especially the outwardly-facing communications from the Game B world have tended to be… I mean, we both know this isn’t exactly right, but the cultural flag, left brain, analytical systematizers, et cetera. I will say, however, that’s far from the complete story because as you guys, as you say, life is messy, is sleazy, is driven by the fact that we’re basically apes with clothes, right? But also, I would also take your point that it’s really hard to systematize that. So we’ve just taken it as a given that humans are going to be humans.
And while we can maybe make some marginal changes in how we operate through things like meditation, psychotechnologies of various sorts. At the end of the day, human beings as human beings, you got to deal with them as they are. With respect to the non-normativity… I think this is a way to handle this, what you may see is not addressing the issue. I think perhaps another way to think about it is that we have chosen a deep concept that we call “Coherent Pluralism”, that Game B itself will have a very small number of axioms which are critical such as living within the planetary limits of humanity for at least hundreds of years, for example, that everybody should have a voice in the governance of any activity that wants to call itself Game B.
Another one is that anyone who wants to exit a Game B entity needs to be able to do so easily without coercion. And if they have the equivalent of a capital account in the community or the business, they need to be able to take that with them. Needs to be portable so you don’t lock people in because people will make mistakes.
And this goes to the next part of the pluralism side, which was we envision Game B society built up from small cells upwardly as membranes within membranes within membranes, a free forming hierarchy but not a formal hierarchy. And it’s very important that we expect these different bubbles to have different norms and values, as long as they don’t violate the coherent core. Sometimes in talks I’ve given said, “For example, I could easily imagine a Proto-B,” that’s our name for our on-the-ground communities, about 150 people, but maybe 300, something at that range, “that could be run like a 19th century Victorian middle class suburb with both the rigidity and the hypocrisy in place,” right?
I can also imagine another Proto-B run like… What was that crazy ass dude out in Oregon USA had his ranch was basically a sex cult. I can imagine either of those being Proto-Bs, and so we haven’t systematized that aspects of life because we don’t believe we can or should, and that people should decide on norms and values at the local level. But they should decide, which is interesting, right? Because we’re not believers. You just take a bunch of people with a bunch of different beliefs and practices, put them together into 150-person community and magic will occur and they’ll start to cohere.
In fact, I’d like to say that there’s a slider between coherence and diversity. And diversity here not in the banal nose-counting method popular on college campuses today, but diversity in the real sense of fundamental differences about values and life missions and things of that hill. And that at the level of on-the-ground community, you probably dial in for more coherence. But within the ecosystem of multiple communities, you dial in and look for substantial pluralism so that people can come together and agree, “I want to live in a sex cult. I want to live in a Victorian 19th century middle class suburb.”
Another example I use because it’s one that’s often talked about in our gaming space, especially by people who are young parents or about to become parents, is standards for whether mobile devices are appropriate for children. I’m of the view they are not, and that giving a nine-year-old a full-on smartphone is worse for them than giving them cigarettes. On the other hand, they are folks that believe that these are incredible educational devices, acculturation devices, and that there should be special Game B phones or [inaudible 00:09:59]. I don’t know, let’s try them both, see which one works better.
So, I suspect that what you see as ignoring the ugly… oh, not the ugly, because I don’t think it’s ugly, it’s beautiful, the human, the apes with clothes aspects. The Game B approach is more to encapsulate it at different levels and leave that part to be defined by each community. That make sense?
Daniel: That does make sense. Here’s where I think the paradox lies. It feels like Game B is a rather positivistic endeavor, one that, as you said, searches for coherence and may inadvertently end up producing neo-Benthamism. Jeremy Bentham, this 19th, 20th century guy.
Jim: Utilitarian. Yep.
Daniel: Precisely, right? Let’s sort everything out so that society is optimal. And there’s a paradox between the search for a coherent pluralism that encompasses the real in a Lacanian sense, in one of the bubbles among many, and this other view, which is more negatilogical, not positivistic, that is about handling incoherence about thoroughly exploring the necessary violation of norms. I’m sure that Owen will be able to jump in here with great examples, but I’m thinking of Nietzsche, Dionysus, Bataille, [inaudible 00:11:19].
I’m thinking about, where does the concept of the psychoanalytic phallus come from? Where does the true form of charisma come from? Where does sexual attraction, any sexual attraction come from? Well, it comes precisely from the incoherence. Even [inaudible 00:11:41] often touts about the fact that, “If everything was coherent, nobody would be horny.” And I feel like the more we search for that coherence side of things, the less able we are to handle that incoherence and the more out of touch we are with incoherence.
And here I just want to flip the order. Whereas, perhaps Game B wants to create neat little bubbles for everything and then have one bubble where people can go crazy in, and that’s the one where the real and the seedy and the sleazy and the fun happens. I would invert that, and I would say that everywhere there is incoherence, there is violation of norms, and we must perhaps open a space within ourselves, not within society, not within norm, not within groups, this is spiritual practice, open space to understand that conflict is spiritual practice, that sex is spiritual practice. And only by understanding it as necessarily incoherence can we think these things through in a way that doesn’t end up in what I’d say, as neo-Benthamist.
Jim: Interesting, that’s one thing I would not have ever thought of describing Game B as is neo-Benthamist. In fact, at least in a very peculiar sense, we might have our own functions that we’re trying to optimize, but they’re not classic utilitarianism for sure. In fact, we talk about if we have something like a goal, it’s maximizing human wellbeing rather different than the mechanical and material assessments that your typical utilitarian.
Daniel: So in that sense, more Bentham than Bentham then.
Jim: Yeah, more Bentham than Bentham, maybe. I like that. That’s cool. Now, back to incoherence and let’s say, sex. One, the coherence is that we imagine emerging in the Game B bubbles are not totalitarian at all, right? They may be agreement about seven things, let’s say, let’s call them the virtues or the norms. Beyond that, again, I would expect many Proto-Bs or bubbles to be open, right? For instance one might imagine… But I’d also imagine the opposite. Some of the Proto-Bs may be very, very prescriptive. And that might work, and it might not. Your prediction would be that it would not. I think history is also a pretty good predictor that it won’t. But there does seem to be an attractor in humanity to try again and again to be overly prescriptive. But I expect the most healthy Proto-Bs, the ones that will be copied and replicated, mimetically propagated, the mim with an I, will be those that achieve some reasonable balance of prescription versus openness.
And specifically with respect to sex, there is definitely a tendency in fringes of the Game B movement to what I’d called, “The trad orientation.” Get married early, have a bunch of kids, rigid, monogamy, et cetera. But there are also groups and people in the Game B movement who are advocates of polyamory. There are people who express more fluid and open views. The experiments tried at everywhere in the continuum. But personally, I suspect that a nontotalitarian set of virtues and norms is going to be the winner, particularly for western people who are already used to that. And there’ll be plenty of room for sex. I don’t see any sign of living in a community with a reasonable social coherence being on the downside of sex at all. In fact, if you believe the statistics, today’s atomized and nihilistic culture has some of the lowest sexual rates ever recorded by humans, right? Typical, quite prescriptive traditional society. People typically have sex at least seven times a week. How many useless goddamn civilized people are still having sex seven times a week? The statistics say, not that many.
Daniel: It almost sounds like you’re describing Game B as kink design. Why do I say this? This is a good spirited provocation, but it seems like when I say that negatology or antagonism are essential for sexual attraction is precisely because of the role that incoherence has in this. So if you create a space and you say that the norm is agreement with these seven values, then I will immediately think, “What about disagreement about these seven norms as enjoyment?” What I feel needs to be more sophisticatedly understood, and this is just my view, is that precisely everything that you say establishes a limit. “Let’s do this and let’s not do that.” And we say that whenever you say, “Let’s not do that.”, where you’re actually communicating what you’re telegraphing to people is, “Let’s do that.” That’s how human desire works. That’s Gerard’s whole thesis is that whenever there’s a limit, whenever there’s an obstacle, people inherently feel attracted to that.
And this again, comes back to my view of a more sophisticated way to create, to make these design gestures, to make regulations, which has to understand that regulations have a sexual component to them, have a sexual enjoyment component to them. Not only in the explicit sense, “Oh, I’m polyamorous. I’m gay, I’m this or that.” No, that’s a very early 21st century way of seeing it. What I’m saying is that, I’m speaking to a more distributed dissolved way of seeing sexuality, a way that sees that even all little elements of everyday life do also carry this charge. They do serve to mediate the realities of sex and violence in a very distributed sense, in a very light sense. It’s like sex is diluted everywhere, and wherever we put limits into it, we are in fact organizing enjoyment clusters. And that is what I think we could begin to understand in the 21st century, especially when we are coming up and engaging in this worthwhile task of thinking about, “What is the future of society we want to design for ourselves?”
Jim: I guess, I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at that’s diffuse sex, right? If we’re organizing a crew of people to go out and pick the apples-
Daniel: I’ll tell you. Yeah.
Jim: Well, that’s interesting. Because people who go out and pick apples together probably are more likely to develop interpersonal relationship than people sitting in cubicles programming are. Yeah, give me a thought about how this diffusion of sex into everyday life works.
Daniel: Very simple, very easy to see. The way that in the Twittersphere, a left winger enjoys being outraged by a right winger, and a right winger enjoys being outraged by a left winger is a perverse… In the best sense possible of the word perverse by the way, is a way of sexually enjoying. They just don’t admit to it. They just don’t know it. But there’s a sexual relationship at play when one is outraged against the other. This is one example. I mean, we also know other examples.
Jim: I’m not sure I buy that. Team red, team blue beating each other over the head with balloons on Twitter. I don’t see any sex there. In fact, about the most unsexy thing I can imagine as a matter of fact, watching yet another dumpster fire between pinheaded idiots that have no idea what the world’s really about.
Daniel: Maybe for the pinheaded idiot it is a unacknowledged kink is what I would suggest, that without them knowing they’re living some sexual relationship unconsciously. A friend of mine once said that all relationships, couples, they are… All relationships are BDSM relationships. They are either consciously so inside of the bedroom or unconsciously so outside of the bedroom. So people do play out these unconscious psychological dynamics. It’s just-
Jim: Well, clearly there’s power dynamics in every human relationship. But to go from power dynamics to BDSM, I think strikes me as more than a bridge too far, but I could be wrong.
Daniel: Let’s add an extra step in the middle perhaps then. Instead of saying immediately BDSM, might we not just say that power and sex are intimately connected, and while it may not be for everybody’s taste to just up the volume to 11 and just mention BDSM straight off the bat, maybe the interesting thing to note here is that between power and sex, between the bedroom and the public sphere, there’s a continuous line, and that line doesn’t have any specific limits. This idea that there’s a public sphere and a private sphere is a 19th century invention that’s Bentham, and unfortunately up until this point, Game B still believe in.
And I’m suggesting that we should be more sophisticated in understanding these flows, this continuity, this more delusion way of understanding things that, “My God, when I see these debates on Twitter, it’s almost like being of [inaudible 00:20:36]. And it’s almost like seeing people enjoy these debates, this compulsive, nearly obsessive exploration of the same topics, the same themes, looking for the same obstacle, looking for the same person to tell them, no.” I’m reading this… Oftentimes, when I see that I’m thinking, “My God, this political movements, they start in the bedroom. They start in the bedroom.”
Jim: Let me come back to that. I got a specific thought I want to lay on you. Let’s let Owen have a chance here.
Owen: Well, I mean to just riff on that, I think maybe there’s interesting stuff to notice, for example, in the way that sexual fantasy is often in some way augment or compensate for social positions. So, a very common one is the CEO or board member or politician who loves dominatrixes or loves humiliation type stuff. That’s a really interesting example in the libidinal field. Very common, and then with lots of power, lots of money who like to go into intensely submissive relationships there. We could speculate that some of the dynamics that we see very popular in mainstream pornography at the moment reflect things that are going on in the social field too. So for example, what’s very popular at the moment, transgender porn and interracial porn, incest porn, big taboos, especially where certainly the first two, these are really areas that are incredibly prohibited and restricted that you might say, the normative cultural morals.
So you have to accept transgenderism, you have to try and accept the multiculturalism. And yet, the erotic fantasy is really going into the monstrosity and the alienness and the otherness precisely of these things that at the surface level we work very hard to accept. And we probably didn’t have the same intense focus on, for example, transgender porn or on interracial porn a hundred years ago or 500 years ago. There’s something about the unique dynamics of the present that then begin to get reflected in the sexual unconscious and in the sexual sleazy field. So what I guess, Daniel might be speculating his way towards is what new forms of perversity and enjoyment might emerge in something like a Game B operating system? And also, what types of character, what types of people might themselves even be attracted towards these types of communities? And the first, this is an open question we don’t know, but it’s an interesting one to continue to be thinking about. As I’ve just been listening, I think the experimental ethos of Game B seems very intelligent.
It seems like the right way to be going forwards with this. It reminds me of what I’ve read about the great research programs of the 20th century, say the OPA program where you basically allow things to find… Let the best work come forwards, right? You can have a lot of failure, as long as some things are succeeding. But lots of the intentional communities and utopian projects of getting people to live together in the 20th century and in humongous falling out, whether it’s after two years or 10 years. And usually due to some excess sexual builder, often because some person becomes a charismatic leader, and then it explodes outwards. So it’d be interesting to know, for example, what within the Game B thinking is trying to say, “Be different to a lot of the other hippy intentional communities that exist in Ecovillages or around Barley that at least from what I’m hearing, often crumble after a certain amount of time.
Jim: Oh yeah, there’s great statistics on that that most of them crumble in two or three years. If you make it four to seven, even fewer make it 15. And only the rarest ones make it long term. And those are generally religious, right? [Inaudible 00:24:44] for instance, right? Although there is one counter example, which is when I mind a lot for some of the Game B the ideas and other people have too, and that’s the Israeli Kibbutz. The Israeli Kibbutz’s are now around for over a hundred years, and 80% of them are radically secular. They were actually founded by Eastern European socialists, mostly from Russia and Poland who were radically atheistic and still are. And yet they have built an operating system. And this is the thing, they built a real operating system that includes the social and the economic. Israeli Kibbutz’s provide 20% of the industrial production of Israel and 50% of the agricultural production of Israel, despite only being 2% of the population.
So they have gone in the direction that Game B thinks, which is a bunch of hippies living on 40 acres and making hammocks or something to sell the tourists is not a real thing. It’s a luxury good for people with trust funds, or it’s a refuge for people who can’t cut it in the real world. We don’t see Game B as that at all. We see Game B as something that can outcompete Game A in many cases, as we say, actively parasitize Game A by being able to do real things really well. The way is really Kibbutz’s do. So I use them as the hopeful pattern rather than the anti-pattern of 40 hippie showed up on buses and on 40 acres and… Well, fuck all that, right? Anyway, I would put that as the other pattern that has been shown to work, and that’s where we’re going.
Because that has to be a complete social operating system. If you don’t actually have the means of production and the way to make a living in the world, you’re just playing basically. You think about life, the first thing that evolution is looking for is, how does this thing make a living? If it doesn’t, it dies and doesn’t pass on it genes. Those that can make a living pass on their genes and become part of the lineage. And humans, of course, don’t have to wait for genes. We can build things socially, but Game B from the very beginning, the very first day always assumed it was a complete stack OS that could make its own way in the world and not just a parasite for peculiar people on the side.
Owen: Is there much Jewish cultural ritual in the Kibbutz? I haven’t looked into them at all so I genuinely curious. Like, is it totally atheistic with no trace Jewish culture or do they do that thing that Jews often do, which is that they don’t subscribe to the metaphysics, but they still make a point of going through some of the family traditions and the song and dance, and the music and so on?
Jim: As I understand it, the original first generation were radically atheists and tried to purge all the traditional holidays and ceremonies, but over time they have come back in, and that many Kibbutz’s now do celebrate the traditional Jewish holidays, but in a secular fashion. And then about 20% of Kibbutz’s were actually founded a little bit later by religious oriented Jews and take the whole thing, they do it all. Not just performatively, but meta physically as well. But yes, as far as I know that many of them do now do purim, and they do the… But they tell the kids, it is like Santa Claus, right? We’re not talking about the metaphysics here, but it’s our people. It’s our tribal tradition and we’re going to keep with it. But initially, they were radically against it and tried to purge it. But as we know, it’s mighty hard to purge those things.
Let me go back to one thing you said, about pornography. Now this is something that has been… There’s different opinions on in Game B. I was at a dinner recently with four Game B people from all around the world as it turned out. And it turned out all four of us believed that a perfectly reasonable Proto-B norm, optional dorm, but set in one of the Proto-Bs and enforced there, no pornography might be a good idea. That pornography has degraded sex in the world. One could argue that this hyper perversity and decadence that we’re seeing and enjoying sometimes may not be good for us. That having let this beast loose, particularly to people at the impressionable ages may be doing way more harm than good. Well, can I say that on the Bible? That’s definitely true. No, but do I think it might be true? Yes.
And sometimes tell on the podcast a funny story from when I was 11. My best buddy that summer between sixth and seventh grade, his uncle was in the Merchant Marines and he had a little shack of a house, 500 square feet, that’d be 50 square meters for those who used such things. And he wasn’t home too much, but this little shack he lived in, he’d built up a collection of dirty magazines, right? In those days, turns out the one he collected was called Juggs. Basically pictures of big breasted gals with their tops off, right? [Inaudible 00:29:38] they were like 1950s style with puffy hair and all this stuff. So anyway, my buddy Billy says, if we’re willing to walk over to my uncle’s shack… He sold his shack with two acres on it to a developer for a pile of money and was going to move into someplace else.
He’ll give us his dirty magazine. So, it was the middle of August, DC area, hot as hell. We walked three miles to his uncle’s place, took a burlap sack with us and… Actually, two burlap sacks and filled the sacks up as much as we could carry of these dirty magazines. And then hiked back three more miles of hot, sweltering, humid Washington DC suburbs summer. And these Juggs magazines became the thing. We buried them in the woods and we traded them for things. And this was the most innocuous stuff.
And I say, compare that to the kids today who type up triple penetration with cuckoldry, right? 11 years old and they get all they want, right? Or as you say, transgender porn or BDSM with blood, right? 11 year old has that on tap. Is that healthy? I’m not at all sure that it is. And that a society that dedicates itself to decadence and perversity is… Some people might call it a pervasively, is may not be as good as society as one that is more disciplined about how it attracts sex. As I mentioned, very traditional society sex seven times a day, sometimes a week. They actually did a better job of having sex and having sex in their lives-
Daniel: Yeah. I hear you.
Jim: … Than the decadent perverts of today do. So, maybe pornography should be excluded from the social realm.
Daniel: I agree with the intention and truly the examples that you put forth, they make a point. But I don’t see… I disagree with the opposition you cast. I don’t see that this is an opposition between all the sex in the world without limits and then no sex. I think there’s something beyond that. There’s something beyond that negation of sex that comes in. Let’s create a Proto-B place where people don’t have access to these things. Let’s enforce a very strict rule. I think what we need to do is sublate this into the negation of a negation and be sophisticated. Be sophisticated about how we understand and sublate these things because my God, it’s not just one or zero, there’s something else. So, what I think might make sense also in connection to some previous points that we were talking about to speak of when we speak of sex and projects and all these things, I think we need to sublate these underlying sexual dynamics that exist as we argue a little bit everywhere, and we need to sublate them into design principles.
Now these design principles should not be norms to be enforced at the barrel of a gun. They rather should be understood as practice, practices, spiritual practices. However, there’s a caveat here. With a norm you can create and instantiate a cult or a community or a government. You can create a set of laws. But with practices, practices requires sophisticated subjects. It requires continuous iteration. And sophisticated subjects are developed to a position where they can understand both the rule, it’s negation, and they understand both of these things as a polarity they can play with and go wherever they want. So the answer is not, let’s completely open up sex and make it absolutely unlimited. But the answer is also not, let’s completely shut it down. My suggestion is to understand it a little bit better as this practice that sophisticated subjects engage in for the sake of project.
Now this connects to the Kibbutz argument. What is a Kibbutz? The underlying element in the Kibbutz is thousands of years of artificial selection of the community, which created a tribe in a community that works even though in the 20th century they call themselves atheists. But there’s something else behind that. What is that something else? A specific attitude towards sex that has driven the reproduction and the artificial selection of people throughout many years. That’s why it works, simple as that. Isn’t this sexual practice as spiritual practice? This is my connection between the religious and the sexual and the cultural. These things are all connected in many, many, many layers. And only my argument is we should begin to understand these things as sophisticated practices, a spiritual practice so that we can do project and come up with design principles with a little bit more depth than simply creating a norm and a rule and speaking in terms of thou shalt or thou shalt not. I think we should move beyond that.
Jim: Yeah, of course. That’s an interesting point, but one of the things you said is sophisticated, et cetera. Keep in mind that most people are not very sophisticated, right? You know how dull a person is with an IQ 100? Half the people are dumber than that, right? Take a look at the Hanzi Freinacht statistics on his table of hierarchical complexity. The number of people at the top few levels are less than 1%. One of the key design principles of Game B is that this is for everybody. This has to be for all eight… Eventually, all 8 billion humans, or at least in the short term, 500 million Westerners. And we have to make sure that we have lives that provide safety, fulfillment and dignity to everybody irrespective of their biological or social or familial endowments. And I think there’s an awful lot of this fringe thinking that says, “Yeah, wouldn’t this be great if everybody had an IQ above 130 and went to a fancy university, and could read Hegel and actually understand it.”
Well, guess what? That ain’t the real world folks. So that’s one pushback I regularly give to some critics. We have to build a society for everybody. And that’s what traditional societies did, right? Before 1870 when we still got our security and our provisioning from our face-to-face communities, if you were somebody’s mentally retarded brother, they took care of you. You were an eccentric uncle who liked to drink too much, you lived in your grandmother’s attic. There were no homeless, right? But in our atomized society where the endowed get richer, the St. Matthew effect, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. We get the shit show society we have today. We have to design our society to not assume top one percentile of intellect and education if we’re going to make it work.
Secondly, before you go on and answer, you use two terms which are not going to be familiar to most of our audience, it’d be useful to define them, and that’s sublate and praxis.
Daniel: Would you like me to define that?
Jim: Yeah, if you wanted to define them, then if you could respond to the others though.
Daniel: Sublate is as far as I understand it, when you take an opposition and you transcend that opposition by taking of the… It’s simultaneous coincidence of opposites is the place where A and B meet that C. When you take, for example, in the example of sex, the position A being the current society of extreme sexual libertinism. And you take the point where that coincides with complete sexual denial. And you have the third position, which would be sexual denial as pleasure people who enjoy sexual denial. And I find that that’s a tremendous way to get over oppositions which are sometimes too static. And that’s what I mean by sublation. Let’s try to move… This is Hegel, this is how we move beyond apparently intractable oppositions. And the other thing is praxis, right? Practice is something you do often time and again, simple as that.
Jim: That’s easy enough. Why don’t just call it practice? What the fuck, right? Have to be fancy, put that philosophical booze yet on there, right? You should just point out nobody in Game B is claiming there should be no sex. Right? Quite the contrary. We expect the good life if we’re, that’s what we’re trying to get includes lots of sex, right? Sex is a very important part of human life. And so don’t anybody get the idea that Game B is for no sex. Quite the contrary. And also very important to note that while I mentioned, there is no doubt a tendency in Game B for no pornography, for example. No doubt. There’s also groups that would like to have lots of pornography. So this idea of norms in a small bubble, but pluralism across is also important to keep in mind.
Owen: If I could jump in here, there’s something that I was in my mind when you were talking to him about this, yes or no question. And I do think it’s not the right question because humans have always been making pornography in some format or another. There’s dicks all over the walls in the ruins of Pompeii. There’s sexual drawings in caves, there’s dirty novels from the 18th and 19th centuries. What we are at is at a weird historical point where ubiquitous internet and the fact that everybody has got a camera means we’re in a very different phases of what pornography looks like. I don’t think we’re just going to get rid of it. And I think a community that actually makes one of its valued principles that we don’t do this stuff here. As long as the kids have access to video cameras or what’s the most transgressive thing that you can do in a place that says, we don’t film each other fucking, or you’re going to go and film each other fucking.
So that’s the thing, right? You can’t get rid of this stuff. And this is why the interesting question to me is actually, what are the more interesting forms of pornography for the 21st century? What are the voyeuristic, exhibitionistic, nightclub tiles style dynamics that we can build as artists, as theater people, and so on that scratch that itch in a more satisfying way than just jerking off to porn, harbor on your own. And I think to me, this is where the interesting creativity goes is bringing back a interesting experimental community burlesque as opposed to it being solo online stuff.
I mean, I think if anything, that’s where culture is really being suffocated at the moment in general, is that so much of it is accessed on alone through a laptop or on a computer. You don’t go to a movie theater anymore and watch a movie from the great era of Hollywood in a room with 300 strangers. You watch it in front of a computer and potentially check your phone halfway through. And I think there’s a massive loss here because we actually lose the ritual intensity of the space. And then that leaves us craving for more of an intensity in some other way. And so it’s that perpetual dissatisfaction. So, that would be my interest certainly as an artist myself on the fringe of the Game B conversations is where are the conversations about building these nightclub style dynamics within the Game B world?
Jim: Yep. I think a perfectly legitimate thing to do from a nomenclature perspective though. Of course, as we know nomenclature is just an arbitrary boundary. We have the concept of Game B ventures that people get together and do Game B things as businesses, right? And they may or may not be associated with Proto-Bs. So one could have a Game B venture that was a burlesque club, right? Might be cool. And again, within the coherent pluralism of Game B, nobody would say anything about it, right? Now, it may be that some people in some Proto-Bs would never go there, but there would be others that would. So, that’s the beauty of coherent pluralism. There’s room to explore basically very, very wide spaces. And this is the other side of it though, that’s important without compelling people who don’t like that to have to see it or engage with it, they still want to do that.
I want to do that. I got my… I’m focused on my family, my farmstead, my crafts, et cetera. And frankly, I’m not too interested in all those urban perverts goddamn them, right? Well, on the other hand, there are people like that stuff. And then of course, as you say, the sad reduction that we’ve reached is the person sitting in their mother’s basement jerking off to Pornhub. That is a classic example of Game A hijacking our neurotransmitters and neuromodulators to reduce us to the lowest kind of humanity. And it’s exactly the thing that Game B is opposed to. And I think, all right, thinking people should be opposed to.
Owen: And I think maybe just continuing to riff from that, part of my critiques of Game B that have come out in the videos and the conversations is that when I was paying a lot of attention to those conversations, I wasn’t attracted as the person who would like to go to these CD urban perverse [inaudible 00:42:55]. There was nothing in the conversation or in the movement or in its public face that made me think that stuff is even going on here or there’s space to do that or develop that here.
My historical path over the last couple years was that I got into Rebel Wisdom. I saw some of your guys talking about Game B on Rebel Wisdom. I was like, “Ah, that’s cool.” And then I saw Andrew Sweeney and Alexander Bard doing their Sweeney versus Bard and talking about rock and roll and cigars and partying. And I was like, “Ah, I need to go more in that direction because there’s something there that the American Santa Fe guys aren’t getting at.” And I do think it’s important to bring them back together and to see those things as being part of an emerging culture together.
Jim: Yeah, that’s good point. And we do talk about it, but probably not enough. It’s a good point. One of the core values of AD is that human wellbeing substantially is driven by conviviality, right? Social conviviality in person. And I imagine Proto- B I’m involved with, if there is ever such a thing, we’ll have a beer hall and we’ll have Friday night singing and dancing and such and cigar. I used to like cigars. I got a heart condition, doesn’t let me smoke them anymore, at last. But I think smoking cigars and drinking good beer, it’s a good thing, right? And use the beer to wash down or make all pork roast and some sauerkraut and all that’s good. I don’t think there’s anything about Game B that mitigates against that. Quite the contrary, the high value that we place on true interpersonal on the ground face-to-face conviviality actually speaks to those things as areas of [inaudible 00:44:35].
It’s funny, I was just counseling a Game B person about an event that she wants to have just right before this. And I talked about the fact that, don’t fall into the trap of habit in too many galaxy-brains, right? And spend at least 30% of your budget on the conviviality aspects on the food and the drink and the parties and things of that sort. Because that’s what people are going to remember, frankly, rather than yet another didactic blah blah by the galaxy-brains. So I’m with you there, but it’s probably good point that we don’t emphasize that conviviality component enough. I’ll try to remember to do that. I wanted to go back to Daniel and the sexual pinheads bashing each other on Twitter. I still don’t goddamn I don’t see that. I mean, I’ve been that pinhead, right?
And frankly more before Twitter, before earlier platforms, when I was more of your flame warrior. I used to enjoy good flame war, right? But I don’t think there was anything sexual about that at all. But I do think what it was close to something else that was been part of your critique is that Game B doesn’t deal with violence enough. I think a good flame war and a good bashing online is really a sublimation of violence more than it is a sublimation of sex. When I have a winning hand in a flame war, I feel that exalted, “Yeah. Motherfucker,” right? And not the discharge and ease that you feel after a good sexual encounter. So I’m going to push back and say that online flame wars and bashing are more analogous to sublimation of violence than they are sex.
Daniel: Fair enough. Fair enough. Could be…
Owen: Yeah, I think in the Freudian view that Daniel is arguing from that, it is ultimately all expressions of this libido. And in its more unconstrained forms that plays out in sex first. And then as we get develop more power, it turns into violence. The first thing we learn to do is to desire the mother and suck on the tit. So there’s like an erotic transference between two human beings there. But then through development, then learning to actually hate the mother or hate the things that prohibit us from getting to the mother. That’s then where we start developing a capacity for violence and frustration. But there’s always some connection between desire or unsatisfied desire and conquering or overpowering an opponent like Freud would speculate that there is a lot of sadomasochism that’s tied up with it.
You don’t have to necessarily run with that. You can still go with a point, maybe it is the violent impulses rather than the sexual impulses. But there’s still, I think, a clear amount of enjoyment in the domination. I mean, you said it yourself, right? Winning a flame war is a hell of a lot of fun. And precisely because we have the internet, you can do it without really having stakes in the game. It replaces in a sense. Sport, sports gets increasingly boring when you can have Twitter flame wars.
Jim: And sports and flame wars are both sublimation of war, right? Which are violence. And as to Dr. Freud being a cognitive science person, I think Dr. Freud with more than the grain of salt, I think with a whole shaker, I think of him as more of a brilliant literary figure than a scientist or a philosopher. And so no, I don’t see sex everywhere. And sometimes I like to say Dr. Freud, sometimes a cigar is just cigar.
Daniel: Freud would say that in itself might as well be a sexual position.
Owen: Well, it’s the pleasure of the fight, I guess. But I like that you bring in right that point about the sublimation of war. I think this is one of the things that in all of our cultural movements, we need to be thinking about. Like the 20th century used sports culture. It used mass music culture, it used cinema as its rituals to outlay the sexual and the violent impulses. And increasingly in the mainstream, these things become sanitized and more bourgeois. Like here, everyone’s trying to make football polite now and take all of the gruff working class elements out of it. Similarly, in the arts world, more and more there’s this discourse and we have to give a voice to the people who have been marginalized. Yes, maybe there’s some reason, but it actually just creates a perverse incentive where everybody who’s from a marginalized community needs to then make artwork that expresses what it’s like to be from a marginalized community, and what it’s like to be traumatized and being that thing.
And so everything just becomes more and more about the trauma of the marginalized. And nothing increasingly exciting or new gets said. It’s just about making, I think the normal bourgeois people feel a little bit better about themselves. And so, the transgressive element of sports, of music, of cinema is increasing, being lost in their mainstream. It’s alive in the underground, I think for sure. I think underground culture is fascinating. What I’m increasingly curious about, and this taps into what I’ve been saying is making sure that the worlds that are developing through the internet stuff like Game B taps into that electric transgressive energy of the underground culture that is the sublimation of war and sexuality. So we actually have ritual spaces to get that Aristotelian catharsis, you might say, and not just end up walking around stiff and neurotic. Like I think more and more people are without even really realizing it, because there is no good outlet.
Jim: Game B is the opposite of that. For instance, two of our experts on Game B education, they ran a school which what they called Real Learning, which was quite unstructured. And when I first met them, I asked them about fighting. One of my big objections to American culture today is they don’t let kids fight anymore, right? When I was a lad, everybody fought, right? Boys, girls, you didn’t fight all the time but you fought, right? And truthfully, losing a fight had no great disgrace. The only thing that had disgrace was refusing to fight. And particularly for adolescent boys say, 11 to 15 or 16, if they don’t fight, they don’t learn how to be human beings, right? I’ve often postulated that the school shooting epidemic has come around because you won’t let boys fight instead, right? Because if you fight, you know that the limits are, right?
In my hometown, it was informal. We call it the code, right? If you’re fighting with somebody from your town, you can’t stomp them when they’re on the ground, right? And if they stay down, fight is over. You can’t gouge eyes, you can’t tear off ears, right? There were definite limits. And never, never, never could you produce a weapon. Anybody produce a weapon in a fist fight was excommunicated from the community, essentially. No one could have not imagined a worse, worse… So anyway, I asked these two education experts about fighting, and they said, “Oh yeah. In our school, if two kids have a real gripe, what we did is we give them big boxing gloves, big coffee, 16 ounce boxing gloves and said, “Go outside and settle it,” and we’ll watch but you can have at it, right? And I thought that was very interesting. We’ll say, in our street level fighting, people did get teeth knocked out and jaw busted and stuff like that, is probably not optimal.
So turning this into a more ritualized form of violence that was a bit safer, I thought was a very interesting move. Another Game B adjacent thinker, who I think very highly, I’ve got Tyson Yunkaporta also is a strong believer that ritualized violence probably should be part of many communities. Some may opt-out, rigid pacifism and that kind of stuff. That’s another way to organize this [inaudible 00:52:06]. Can imagine Proto-Bs that say, “Hey, no violence at all, just don’t like it.” But my own bet is going to be… Put it this way, an interesting ingredient to emergence is to allow ritualized violence in a way that’s physically safe, but allows that natural primate mammal desire for conflict to occur.
Daniel: Absolutely. I agree, I agree. Perhaps before prescribing how the form of this ritualized violence can be, perhaps we need to understand a little bit deeper where that violence or the sexuality comes from and how it plays out at a deeper level. That would be perhaps my only point because… For example, Jim, you mentioned school shooters. We know that school shooters typically nowadays, they’re set to belong to this group of people called the incels, the involuntary celibates. And that part of why they’re so… They have such a disaffected profile with society comes from their sexual position. For some reason in 2022, they cannot find any partners to have sex with or to have romantic relationships with.
And this ends up manifesting itself in these horrible, horrible things like school shootings. So my point here is that in order to design and to create a project for Game B spaces, it is… And in order to design social containers that can ritualize these deeper impulses of people, I think it’s really, really important to understand the unconscious sexual and violent dynamics that are at play so that these containers can tenably give way and sublimate them in a good way, in a way that it wouldn’t work the same way today as it did in the 1950s, these containers is what I’m saying.
And so that’s why I would even argue that to understand these unconscious sexual dynamics, it is important to go back to a guy like Freud or Lacan or Žižek to properly bring into this practice of designing social containers to bring this psychoanalytic angle to it so that when we design them, they take into account these oftentimes hidden motivations behind people’s actions. What is I want to say, ultimately.
Jim: Yeah, any thoughts on how one might go about operationalizing that, the Hanzi Freinacht?
Daniel: Yeah.
Jim: We know who he talks about, they talk about, he talks about that education ought to include strong teachings about how to have a relationship. There ought to be dating mentors for 14 and 15 year olds. I think that’s probably a good idea in terms of not having sex. Back in my day, very few people had sex before they were 16 or so. So we were all incels, right? We didn’t go shoot up to school. But on the other hand, we dated and had relationships and things of that sort. And so, the idea of developing your romantic and interpersonal life as a psycho technology makes a lot of sense to me.
Daniel: Well, my answer to that would be that to have the design of social containers happen as a practice. In other words, to properly workshop these questions in a design setting. And to do that not once and for all as a norm, that must work for everybody universally. And that is coming back to something you said previously, Jim, that Game B is coming up with norms that should work universally. I disagree with that. So, I’m a designer and I think design is inherently discriminatory because it says, yes to some things and no to other things. And I think that if we are to make something work, it must work in a specific container for some people and not for others. We are speaking in one language, not in another language. The way we speak is inherently discriminatory to non-English speakers, for example.
And so my point is that first, as designers, we must be humble in forfeit the tendency or the vice of universalism, which is a very fashionable thing to say nowadays. But yeah, we’re not designing the universal norm, we’re designing for particularities. And we know this, right? There’s a lot of different Proto-Bs. But in each of these Proto-Bs, the way that these norms are approached, that approach in my view is not a legislative act. I’m going to be biased here. It is a design act. It’s something that needs to be workshop, workshop with a lot of different people, with the typical profiles of the users in mind, of the typical inhabitants of these communities in mind, right? What works for you might not work for me, et cetera. And then just workshop those hard, hard questions, time and again. The reason why Hanzi says that people should have dating coaches is… And I say this in a positive senses, because Hanzis are Scandinavian.
There’s nothing closer to a Proto-B society in Scandinavia. Everybody looks the same, everybody thinks the same. It’s very rich. It’s a perfect playground for that. But it works precisely because it’s so close and contained. Whereas in order to experiment some of these prescriptions in other places, you cannot just copy paste the prescription and apply it somewhere else. No, you have to workshop it. You have to understand the people. And so this is why you advocate for ontological design, the whole premises that you need to have a design practice behind this in the same way that you would also workshop other products, digital experiences, et cetera.
Jim: Or how you run your farm, right? You have to design that.
Daniel: Yeah, yeah.
Jim: And I do think that we are not prescriptive in how a Proto-B develops its emergent governance, right? Hopefully, there’ll be some templates eventually say, “Hey, here’s some things that have worked elsewhere, take those.” But we do assume that the actual people on the ground that are forming a Proto-B will cooperatively and emergently create their own governance structure. And that might include bring in an outside experts who have designed skills with respect to community governance and community dynamics. So I don’t see any conflict here. I think that’s perfectly compatible with how we envision Game B is coming into being. People are going to live there, or at least the founders of the community make some collective decisions on how they’re going to operate. Now, back to the universals, I will push back on that a little bit.
As I gave you a list of very three universals, a very small list, one of which is that we live in balance with mother nature, with the nine planetary boundaries are useful examples of that. I’m going to put a flag down say, “Godammit, that’s a universe of value.” Can’t violate that one. And the reason is the concept of subsidiary, which is important Game B, which is rules and decisions and actions should be pushed down to the lowest possible level that are relevant to the problem being dealt with. Well, it turns out that survival of humanity on earth is a planetary level issue. And so therefore, it is appropriate to have a planetary standard that thou shall not violate the nine planetary limits, right? And I’m fine with that. I’ll stand on that one.
Owen: Yeah, I’m with you. I think I’m with you, but we have to include within the fact that that is not a friend, Alexander Barb would probably say, an imperialistic stance, right? America right now sets the global rules and we have a relative deep degree of peace and stability with it. I’m cool with that. It seems to be crumbling on the fringes at the moment with China, with whatever the fuck is going on in Ukraine. But I think in order to be taking that global governance perspective, there needs to be also the readiness to fight over it.
Jim: Yep. But transgressors will have to be punished.
Owen: Yep. Exactly. Yep.
Jim: On the other hand, American hegemony is not going to last, at least under our model. Our model says that today a typical American burns about 12,000 watts continuous power in implicit in the products they use, their transportation, their house, et cetera. A person in Angola, about 500 watts, right? Person in Sudan, maybe 1100 Watts, person in Bolivia if I remember the numbers, 1500 watts. And if you run the numbers and do some attempts at simulation of what we could get to in 50 or 60 years in terms of renewable energy, non-carbon, carbon renewal, et cetera, it looks like 3,500 to 4,000 watts per person for the world.
And another part of the Game B ethos is that over two generations or so, the West and the rest should asymptotically approach the same number of energetic intensity in our society. And it’s going to be a big move for US, Australia and Canada or the biggest offenders, only slightly less so for Europe, and a bit less so for Japan. But it’s going to be a big boon for everybody else in the world. And this is going to require a gigantic change in mindset. Americans, Europeans, they’re not ready to give up their Mercedes and their 300 square meter houses, this, that and the other thing.
Daniel: But see Jim, here is where I come back to perhaps the critique I was making previously. You mentioned and very well this quantifiable energy difference between the consumption of Europe and America and the rest of the world, and how this is unsustainable in order to stay true to this ethos of, to live and balance with mother nature. And you say that in order to affect this change, we need a cultural moral shift. I do think however, that the problem and the question of the moral shift and cultural shift that in your words must happen. That is a question that Game B does not understand. And because it does not understand, it falls back to these activisms which are almost like Protestant moral guilt games. You consume a lot of energy, you should feel guilty and you who are more pure, more pious, more green, you should feel more… You are a better person than everybody else, and you get to enjoy that a little bit.
My point is the following, why don’t we investigate the moral question a little bit deeper and understand with the same degree of acumen that we understand the quantifiable problems, the conscious problems. What if we apply that same degree of precision and analysis to these more hard to quantify problems, like the problems of the unconscious moral energy of culture, of why guilt exists or does not exist? Because if we do not understand these problems, then they are perhaps at the mercy of more sophisticated bad actors. When a Hitler or a Trump roused the masses with their incendiary speeches, what are they doing if not tapping into the vast reservoirs of quantifiable unconscious energy? If you don’t read Freud, someone else will.
Jim: I have read his son-in-law, right? The famous-
Daniel: Aha, Bernays. There you go.
Jim: Bernays right. Bernays is very useful.
Daniel: This is part of this attempt to understand and learn power both in its quantifiable as well as in its more unquantifiable aspects. And I think a lot of-
Jim: Well, that’s damn a good point. I will say that the brainy big systems types that you hear about in Game B, none of us are any good at culture, right? We’re not artists, we’re not culture hackers. In fact, we’re abnormal sorts. In fact, when I ran companies, I always told our advertising people and our branding people, “Please don’t ever bring me anything to approve. I have the world’s most contrarian tastes, and if I like something, probably nobody else will.” And actually, one of the things that we have laid out for the evolution of Game B is we need to have [inaudible 01:05:41] small and growing. Like for instance, the Game B film came out of our artistic corner. We need to have more artists, and they have to be trying more in different things. We need social designers. Goddamn thing about the Lacan or Freud and how that might be working in.
But we should get people in that how to do those things and think about what some of the moves might be to achieve the results that we know we have to have. I mean, I think it’s a given that we have to find the way to get to this cultural switch that results in the convergence of people on a worldwide basis into an intensity of civilization that’s sustainable. Now, how you do that cultural shift, that’s another question. I don’t know the answer to that one today, but any help you guys could give us, that’d be great.
Owen: I mean, that’s the interesting point, right? I mean, we think about this a bunch with one of our friends [inaudible 01:06:35] lost as well. We stand and where… It’s just interesting to examine the position we’re in as weird online podcast thinker, writers, artists who are existing outside of the old institutions, but there aren’t yet new institutions to provide the structure or the funding or the shield from the brutal techno capitalist marketplace. And so, it’s just a game of luck. Now, I’ve been lucky, [inaudible 01:07:08] has been lucky to have people who… What would you say? Patrons who have helped us out basically. But not everybody has that, and there’s lots of fringe weirdo kids who are 20, 21 who are fucking brilliant philosophers, fucking brilliant artists who have no resources coming to them at all. And they don’t even appear to be the structures that can hold them and give them stuff.
And this is where I mentioned earlier that I’d been researching that OPA project. I found that fascinating, and I think one of the things that’s desperately needed for this cultural shift is just more institutions that can hold weirdos doing weird creative projects that we don’t know exactly how they’re going to be useful yet. It might be a weird burlesque play, it might be just a bizarre combination of like you said, of Lacan and Freud and God knows what else. And if we don’t have that, then it’s just going to be a selection for the tiny minority of people who already have the resources to do it, who are able to balance their time between a job and a tech company and doing this stuff, or who are lucky enough to find the patrons. And this is something that doesn’t exist yet, but I think it rapidly needs to exist as well as say, Proto-B type structures that are actually trying to do on the ground community building. I think we need things that are probably more distributed research organizations that can fund stuff like this.
Jim: And absolutely, a 100% agree. And in the Game B game plan are pools of money for creators. Because Jordan Hall, one of the key Game B thinkers has laid out the very interesting and important distinction between rival risk economics and non-rival risk economics. In shorthand a rival risk economics is about things like a ham sandwich. Either you eat it or I eat it. Well, a non-rival was good as one say an MP3 file that it costs almost nothing to duplicate. And in it seems obvious that to maximize the value of these things, anyone who wants an MP3 file should have one, whether they can pay or not, right? And on the other hand, producers need to get paid. And so, we’ve done some work on what does an ecosystem look like whereby people are paid not on how many copies of their MP3 file went out into the world, but by essentially the decision of individual people to cast their vote for the allocation of the resources from this pool, say they might be funded by a bunch of [inaudible 01:09:39], to go out and fund various artistic and other creative and scientific endeavors.
Owen: Absolutely.
Jim: And we had some conversations about a year ago, six months ago about that, and I suspect you’ll see that restarting again to literally set up a funding pool for artists and creators in and around the community. I think it’s important to include the around part. We don’t want this to be too self referential. Anyway, guys, I’m coming up here on my time limit. Any final thoughts last few minutes?
Daniel: Well, maybe I’ll just reiterate a little bit of the thing that I’ve been speculating and aiming at in this conversation. Reaching the conclusion that there is something in culture, in the intangible assets of culture and morality that moves in strange ways, but also holds the promise of incredible leverage. The stone… What do you call it? The art comedian point on which you can lift the whole world?
Jim: The lever and the pivot, right?
Daniel: Exactly. The pivot of the lever that will lift the world is in my view, something intangible. Cultural, moral, psychological exists in the hearts and minds of people. And in order to move the projects that Game B has and which just the impetus of doing a project is in itself fantastic. The leverage for that in my view exists in the hearts and minds. And that is my point, that is my final point.
Jim: Okay, great. Owen?
Owen: Yeah. And for me, I mean, it’s a pleasure to meet you at last, Jim, rather than just casting trash at each other on the IDW. And yeah, I think this last point that I was just touching on is important for me. We’ve got projects, we’ve got guys more projects like the Parallax Sangha, like Philosophy Portal that Cadell runs. So we’ve got multiple young guys within them that just need some structure and money to hold them for a year so they can do some weird shit. And so, if these conversations around arts and culture, funding institutions are getting up and running, give a call.
Jim: All right. Sounds cool.
Owen: Yeah.
Jim: I think we had a good conversation. I’m sure the audience will realize we did so respectfully, and we disagreed forthrightly. And I think we actually modeled how to do this fairly well today, fellas. Thanks.
Daniel: Thank you, Jim.
Jim: Yeah. So it was Owen Cox and Daniel Fraga, this was great. Look forward to chatting with you all in the future.
Owen: Likewise, man. Take care.
Daniel: Thank you so much and bye-bye.