Once a proto-B becomes large enough to be noticed, it enters the danger zone. It becomes a threat to be crushed or, more likely, a resource to be co-opted. In my latest conversation with Jim, we explored the kinetic and memetic power imbalances at this threshold. We asked the question: how do we navigate the transition without being hijacked by the very structures we are trying to replace?

The Shield of Strict Legality

The first move is counter-intuitive: Strict Legality. Jim argues that under the rule of law, we must not give the authorities a stick to beat us with. The hippies of the 1960s failed because they provided Game A with a legal pretext for their own destruction. To exit the multipolar trap, we must practice jurisdiction shopping: finding the “nooks and crannies” in the legal operating system where rams-earth houses and compost toilets are not just dreams, but legal realities.

By committing to the law, we buy time. We use the existing mechanisms of democracy to leverage local power, turning a small community of two hundred into a decisive political force.

Membrionics and Cultural Power

We cannot do this as isolated islands. We need Meta-membranes.

We require coordination structures that concentrate our political and economic power without falling into the divisive partisan traps of Team Red or Team Blue. This is the infrastructure of the new civilization: a stack of interpenetrating membranes that protect our communication and our capital.

But the strongest shield is not kinetic; it is cultural. When we reach the point where the general public sees Game B as a transparent, unself-serving sanctuary for human flourishing, we achieve a cultural win that no dominator hierarchy can easily suppress.

The Great Filter: Internal Schismogenesis

The greatest threat, however, is not external. It is the Great Filter of Schismogenesis.

Jim and I looked back at the early fissions of Game B: the moments where smart, good-hearted people were torn apart by minor differences in perspective. This is the internal hijack. To counter it, we must adopt the role of the Fair Witness: a neutral, independent observer who surfaces the undercurrents before they turn into personal grudges.

Whether we use high-dimensional human intuition or the analytical power of LLMs as neutral analyzers, we must build an immune system that keeps “Dark Triad” personalities away from the levers of power.

We are not just building houses. We are building the social technology required to survive the shift.

For centuries, that shared vertical anchor provided our moral compass. We have also, in our hubris, attempted to “kill” nature by assuming a dominance that is as impossible as it is destructive. We have severed the umbilical cord of interbeing.

In my latest conversation with Jim, we asked the hard question: what gives rise to a shared sense of morality now? What is the foundational prerequisite for a large-scale shift toward a life-serving civilization?

The Interestingness Heuristic

Jim proposes a fascinating North Star: Interestingness.

Physics grounds out at stars and planets. Biochemistry is more complex, but life—especially life with general intelligence—is where the universe becomes truly open-ended. If we use “generating interestingness” as a pruning rule, we find a vector for ethics that doesn’t require a top-down ideology.

Free people generate more interesting culture. Nature, unmolested, produces more intricate food webs. This is the transition from the “exploitative mode” to one of co-evolution. It is the recognition that human flourishing is not a zero-sum game played against the planet, but a result of being a part of its complexification.

The Custodial Species

We discussed Tyson Yunkaporta’s concept of humans as a Custodial Species. Our role is not to be the “apex predator” or the “supremacy” in the web. Our role is to be the caretakers of the interesting. We are the first general intelligence in the universe that we know of, and that carries a moral obligation to preserve that intelligence and move it forward.

But this requires a radical humility. We are rushing forward with AI and market-driven extraction like three-year-olds building atomic bombs. We are so afraid of insecurity—biological, financial, and existential—that we cling to the “Game A” machinery because it promises a safety it cannot deliver.

Bootstrapping Security

How do we move the compass? We must address the Insecurity Loop. The status quo keeps us on our toes by cultivating precarity. Even in the richest countries in history, we feel two weeks away from the street. This fear is the anchor of the multipolar trap.

To exit, we must build the Membrane. The membrane is where we bootstrap basic survival—food, shelter, relationship—independent of the extractive system. It is where we remember what we already know: that we are social animals, and that the fundamentally collective nature of human experience is our only true security.

We don’t need a machine to tell us how to live. We need to start being a part of life again.

You can measure the frequency of the light. You can map the atmospheric refraction. You can even write a poem about the bleeding of purple into gold. But the touching: the visceral, internal shift that occurs when you stand before that fading light, cannot be transferred through words.

In my latest conversation with Jim, we decided to tackle the impossible: the participatory side of system change. We explored the things that can be named but never fully explained.

The Left-Brain Hijack

Our civilization has been hijacked by the left brain.

As Iain McGilchrist argues, we have traded the intuitive, scanning, and integrative capacity of the right brain for the linear, grasping, and categorizing mode of the left. We have turned life into a series of “mentioned” sentences rather than lived experiences.

This is the core of the multipolar trap. We have commodified time to the point where “being mode” feels like a betrayal of productivity. If you spend four hours watching a sunset or picking coffee with friends, the system marks you as a defector. But this “defection” is actually the first step toward sanity.

The Status Game of Moloch

Why do we choose the car chase over the rose garden?

It is a question of granularity and status. We are wired for the high-intensity signal: the explosion, the $M_3$ growth, the aircraft-carrier-sized truck. These are the artifacts of a culture that has lost its connection to “Qualia,” the raw, felt sense of being alive.

Jim and I discussed the ultimate lever for shifting this: the status game. If we want to change the world, we must change what we reward with our attention.

We need new stories. We need a “Netflix for Game B” that doesn’t just entertain but lifts the viewer into a higher granularity of mind. We need to reach the point where the person participating in a community sunset drumming circle holds more social capital than the one trading Bitcoin in a basement.

Building the Asshole-Free Zone

How do we start? We build the Membrane.

Individual agency is fragile, but a membrane of conviviality is resilient. One of my own heuristics for this is the creation of the “Asshole-Free Zone.”

In business and in life, we must learn to trust our high-dimensional intuition. We must filter for the “rate of learning” and the quality of being rather than the resume. When you find “the others”—the ones who are willing to embarrass themselves, to fail, and to grow—you create a mycelial network that Moloch cannot penetrate.

We must move from the “having mode” to the “being mode.” We must follow the water until the ecosystem accepts us.

In todays conversation with Jim, we decided to perform a forensic audit of his own worldview. We used the John Vervaeke framework: propositional, procedural, perspectival, and participatory knowing. We anchored the analysis in late 1992: a time when Jim was re-entering the corporate world as a high-stakes executive.

The result is a “Delta Analysis” of a human soul.

The 1992 Baseline: The Market as God

In 1992, Jim was a “hill-climber.” He saw a summit and he took it. His worldview was built on a few rock-solid, if slightly embarrassing, propositions:

1. Naive Newtonianism: The belief that the world is a lawful, predictable, and fundamentally knowable machine.

2. Market Fundamentalism: The conviction that markets are the smartest entities humans have ever created. If there is a problem, a carbon tax or a slight adjustment of the knobs will fix it.

3. The Rationality Myth: The belief that people are perfectly capable of ascertaining their own desires, free from systemic programming.

Back then, Jim would have looked at his current self and seen a “naive hippie.” He was focused on talent-vs-money arbitrage, hiring “A-plus” players, and mastering the spreadsheet as a superpower. It was a world of extraction, even if it was done ethically.

The 1994 Phase Shift: The Sustainability Wall

The pivot began on The Well. Jim encountered top-tier ecologists like Stewart Brand and Paul Hawken who pointed to the edges of the petri dish.

He realized that the “Green Revolution” had merely delayed the inevitable. We were depleting topsoil, poisoning aquifers, and hitting the biophysical limits of the planet. But Jim’s unique contribution to this realization was the identification of the “Coherence Mechanism”:

Advertising.

Advertising is the programming language of the status quo. It creates a reflexive cycle where products create profit, which is reinvested in high-impact psychological programming to create “new” needs: aircraft-carrier-sized trucks and heart-stopping fast food.

The 2026 Perspective: Complexity and Service

Today, Jim has “hung up the sword.” He has moved from being a principal who intervenes with intensity to an advisor who guides with wisdom.

The shift is profound:

• From Propositional to Emergent: He no longer sees a Newtonian machine; he sees a world of 27 layers of emergence, where politics and economics are far too complex for “knobs and dials.”

• From Self-Authoring to Self-Transforming: Following Robert Kegan’s developmental scale, Jim has moved from a self-authoring “game player” to a self-transforming “servant of the whole.”

• From Individualist to Relational: His participatory knowing is now grounded in the “vibrant heartbeat of life”: teaching his granddaughter chess, following the water in his local ecosystem, and refusing to be paid for his work.

The First Step into Game B

If you want to prepare for the transition, Jim’s advice is ruthlessly practical: Cut the feed.

Disconnect from high-impact advertising. Pay the three dollars to remove the ads. Your subconscious was evolved to fit in socially, and if the only social signals you receive are designed to keep you in the “multipolar trap,” you will never develop the agency required to exit.

We must become objects in the game, not subjects of the programming.

Jordan Hall once recounted an anecdote about a man attempting to grasp the scale of our civilizational transformation. After forty-five minutes of deep inquiry, just as the logic began to click, the man’s internal “immune system” triggered a hard reset. He returned to zero. He began asking the same questions he had asked an hour prior.

This isn’t just a failure of intellect. It is a biophysical defense mechanism.

Our current worldview is a “frozen accident” of history, a cage built from M3 growth obligation driven extraction and the multipolar trap. To see outside of it is, quite literally, a threat to the self.

In my latest conversation with Jim, we decided to map the Epiphany Axis. This is the process of deprogramming the “Subject,” the one who is acted upon, and evolving the “Agent,” the one who acts.

The Three Walls of Moloch

We are hitting the edges of the petri dish. Jim and I identified three distinct forcing functions that make our current “Soulset” untenable:

1. The Planetary Limit: We have reached a point where 80% of the weight of all birds on Earth is human poultry. We are no longer living in nature; we are living in a factory that has run out of floor space.

2. The Attentional Limit: We are suffering from an “information hijacking.” The thousands of digital interrupts we face daily: the ads, the blather, the pop-ups, have depleted our capacity for collective sense-making. We are too distracted to be free.

3. The Debt Limit: Our system is designed to grow debt exponentially in a finite biophysical world. It is a mathematical death spiral.

The Membrane Strategy

How do we evolve agency in a world that thrives on our obedience?

The answer is the Membrane.

Individual agency is metabolically intense. Radical individualism is a Game A trap that leads to burnout and isolation. Instead, we must find “The Others,” groups of two or three, where we can practice a different way of being.

This starts with Participatory Knowing. It starts by fixing a toaster the system wants you to throw away. It starts by making gnocchi with your children instead of buying it in single-use plastic.

These aren’t “hobbies.” They are acts of rebellion. When you try to fix that toaster, you suddenly see the entire systemic embedding of proprietary interfaces and extractive supply chains. The “Machine” becomes visible only when you choose to act against its grain.

Following the Water

Jim speaks of “artful” governance. I want to move toward joyful governance.

There is a lesson from the indigenous elders of the Imagination Group in Australia: If you want to understand an ecosystem, follow the water. By following the water, you see the water: how it feeds the trees, which feed the birds, which sustain the soil. You begin to see the interconnectedness not as a theory, but as a felt sense. You reach full understanding when the water “accepts” you, when the life around you stops fleeing because you finally smell like the ecosystem.

We are looking for that transition point. The moment where it becomes entirely obvious that the “infinite game” is more powerful, more stable, and infinitely more beautiful than the exploitation model.

In this 10th session with Jim, we take a hammer to the “Molochian shit show” of finance and start sketching the blueprint for Game B economics.

Sourcing and the Bluefish Coin

Game A only “sees” what is denominated in money. It sees a hospital bill as “economic activity,” but it doesn’t see health. It sees overfishing as “profit,” but it doesn’t see the death of the bioregion.

Jim proposes a different modality: Sourcing Tokens. Imagine a bioregion that issues tokens for the sustainable harvest of bluefish. If you want to fish, you need a token. If you want to eat bluefish, you need a consumption token. These aren’t just currencies; they are “brakes” tied directly to the carrying capacity of the land. They are market forces made smart enough to respect the planet.

The Central Bank of Dreams

I pushed Jim on the “care economy”, the things like shamanism, art, and localized care that money can never properly value. I invoked my mentor Bernard Lietaer’s “Central Bank of Dreams.”

What if money wasn’t a claim on lost life, but a tool to fulfill the passion of our neighbors? Imagine a world where your “basic security” is provided by the community, not your bank account. In this world, a Porsche isn’t a status symbol; it’s a cry for help. The community wouldn’t laugh at you for owning it; they’d ask how they could help you so you didn’t need the Porsche to feel significant.

The Problem of the “Villager”

We hit a wall during this talk, a wall I’ve seen in my own software company: Everyone wants a village, but nobody wants to be a villager. Being a villager requires responsibility. It requires closing the loop on negative externalities. In Game A, we are programmed to “take” and disconnect. We want the cheeseburger, but we don’t want to see the cow. Game B economics is the process of closing those loops: making the producer “eat the dog food” they are creating. If you’re designing a sports-betting app that exploits your own neighbors, you might think twice.

The Great Repeal

The transition to a thriving Game B economy isn’t just about tokens; it’s about the Great Repeal. We have to dismantle the “push-button” alienation of late-stage Game A. We need to legalize composting toilets, rewrite zoning laws that forbid self-sufficiency, and move toward a “punctuated equilibrium” where our communities are prepared to absorb millions of people when the Game A debt bubble finally bursts.

This conversation was hazy, difficult, and exploratory. It shows how far we are from a perfect theory but it also shows that we are finally asking the right questions.

Let’s start building the bridge between the theory and the substrate.

If Game A is a sinking ship, how much does it cost to build the lifeboats?

Jim, being the veteran strategist he is, doesn’t deal in vague utopianisms. He deals in numbers. And the number to reach “Phase One”, the proof of existence that actually scales, is roughly one billion dollars.

The 3% Tipping Point

We often feel like we need to convince everyone to change. We don’t. Social complexity science suggests that once a committed cadre reaches 3% of the population, the status quo starts to wobble. At 15%, the game flips.

In the U.S., 3% is about 10 million people. To house them in functioning, trading “proto-bees” (communities of 150 to 3,000 people), we need a massive infusion of capital. But here’s the kicker: the total cost to transition the U.S. over the next 60 years is about $200 billion.

That sounds like a lot until you realize it’s only one-half of one percent of annual U.S. philanthropic spending. We aren’t asking for the impossible; we’re asking for the rounding error on the guilt-money of the billionaire class.

The Strategic Hedge

So why hasn’t it happened? Because nobody has presented a plausible battle plan. Until now.

The pitch to the rich isn’t just “save the trees.” It’s a sophisticated financial hedge. We tell them: Keep 98% of your assets in the game you know, but put 2% into building the standby operating system. If the shit hits the fan [and between the debt burst and climate change, it will] you want a world that actually knows how to function.

It’s insurance for their descendants. It’s buying a stake in the only system that won’t burn down when the grid fails.

Conquest from the Bottom Up

While the media is obsessed with the “Kings” and the national drama in D.C., Jim points to a more effective flank: Local power.

In a rural county, 1,000 to 10,000 votes don’t just influence an election, they own it. If Game B communities start taking over county commissions and school boards, they can begin the “Great Repeal.” They can legalize composting toilets, rewrite zoning laws that forbid self-sufficiency, and dismantle the health department rules that treat nature as a biohazard.

We don’t need the Presidency yet. We need the local permit office.

Punctuated Equilibrium

The growth won’t be a smooth line. It will be “punctuated equilibrium.” We build the infrastructure in the quiet years, and then, when Game A hits a crisis like a financial collapse or a climate disaster, we surge. We provide the “osmotic pressure” that sucks people out of the burning building and into a membrane that actually works.

It takes three generations to fully enculturate a new way of being. We are the first generation. We are the ones who have to build the first five experiments, learn from the failures, and “fork” the governance until it’s unbreakable.

It’s time to move from talk-talk-talk to walk-walk-walk.

In this 8th session with Jim, we dive into the “soul shift”, into the radical realization that 90% of our decision-making isn’t happening in our conscious, calculating minds, but in the dark, wet basement of our heuristics. If the soul is for feeling what the mind is for thought, as my mother once told me, then our souls have been hijacked by a Game A operating system.

We are on autopilot, playing extractive games because our “feelings” have been socialized to crave status, fear failure, and worship the ladder. Moving to Game B isn’t about a new policy or a better spreadsheet. It’s about a fundamental rewriting of the internal code.

The Immunization of “Fucking Off”

Jim is a rare specimen: an anti-neurotic strategist who spent decades in the belly of the beast without becoming a monster. I wanted to know why. How did he build an immunity to the “immortal psychopaths” we discussed in our last talk?

The answer is surprisingly human. He spent five years “fucking off.”

Before he became a CEO, he was hitchhiking across the country, selling cars, peddling textbooks, and reading 75 books a year while sitting by a pool. He wasn’t “climbing.” He was developing a “leitmotif of life” that prioritized the life of the mind over the status of possessions. He immunized himself against the crushing need to play the game by proving to himself, early on, that he didn’t need the game to be happy.

Most of us never get those five years. We are pushed into the “sausage factory” of testing-based education, where curiosity is a nuisance and boredom is a sin.

The Bridge Between the Abstract and the Physical

We talk about “thinking,” but what is it, really? Jim describes it as the bridge.

He recalls fixing tractors on a “hillbilly farm” in Appalachia and laying concrete driveways with his father. This is the groundedness that keeps the strategist from floating away into pure abstraction. When you know how to replace a water line or swap a Volkswagen motor at age eleven, the world stops being a “push-button surface.” You realize you can influence the substrate.

In a world of DoorDash and Uber Eats, we are being alienated from the very mechanics of our survival. This alienation is the primary tool of the extraction machine.

The Cursor of Attention and the New Goebbels

“You are your attention.”

Jim calls attention the “cursor of consciousness.” Every quarter-second, your brain decides what to focus on. And right now, there is a multi-billion dollar vacuum called TikTok sucking up every spare second of human thought.

Boredom used to be the prelude to a breakthrough. Now, it’s a dopamine deficiency that we “fix” with a scroll.

We end on a chilling warning. The propagandists of the past used radio and TV. The Joseph Goebbels of 2026 won’t use a megaphone; he’ll use an AI-based therapy app. He’ll get you at your most vulnerable, in a trust-based interaction, and subtly program your values before you even know you’re being indoctrinated.

The “soul shift” is a war for our attention. It’s about reclaiming the cursor.

We’re moving from the institutional to the personal, searching for the “density of experience” that might finally allow us to wake up.

Think about the “progress” we celebrate. From the first steam engine pumping water out of coal mines to the algorithmic AI “therapy” apps of today, every step forward has been a step away from our own humanity. We’ve traded the real-time, rhythmic power of the sun for a frantic, one-time burn of “saved solar” energy aka fossil fuels. It gave us 10X the power, but it unanchored us from the cycles of life and put us on a collision course with the cold laws of thermodynamics.

The Rise of the Immortal Psychopath

Jim and I trace a history that is essentially a timeline of alienation.

We created interchangeable parts to fix rifles on a battlefield, but in doing so, we broke the craftsman. We traded the pride of a human soul for the “economic efficiency” of a screw-turner. Then, we birthed the Corporation, an immortal, legal person with all the rights of a human but the morality of a parasite. A psychopathic entity that never dies, never feels guilt, and lives only to optimize one single, narrow metric: money-on-money return.

This isn’t just an abstract legal tweak. It’s a foundational violence. We’ve empowered a species of artificial life that lives forever and views the biosphere and human potential as mere fuel to be extracted, converted, and sold.

The System Hacking the Player

The game truly ran off the tracks during what we call the Bernays Epoch.

Before Edward Bernays (Freud’s nephew), products existed to satisfy human needs. After him, the system learned how to manufacture those needs from scratch. We were programmed to want things we didn’t need to satisfy status-games we didn’t choose. We moved from satisfying hunger to chasing 300 types of shampoo and $300,000 cars.

Then came the credit cards, the “hedonic treadmill” powered by easy money and finally, the 1971 exit from the gold standard, which unanchored finance from reality entirely. The result? A global financial system that has effectively hacked our biology, making us heroin-addicted to a growth that is killing us.

The Broken Safeties

We are currently witnessing the total failure of our error-correction mechanisms.

• Science has done its job when it told us about climate change 150 years ago but its voice has been muzzled by a propaganda machinery that treats truth as a cost to be minimized.

• Democracy was supposed to be the regulator, the “wise enough” guardrail. Instead, it’s been bought and sold. As Jim notes, our tech titans are currently sucking up to power just to keep their licenses for further extraction.

• Finance is the only pillar left standing, and it isn’t “broken” it’s doing exactly what it was designed to do: maximize returns even if the planet becomes a graveyard in the process.

The Loop Over Which We Wake Up

So, how do we stop the extraction? How do we find the “glitch in the matrix”?

We end this conversation on a provocative hook: the possibility of a “shortcut” to waking up. If Game A is a dead end leading to planetary suicide, we need to move toward a coherent pluralism. We need a worldview that doesn’t just “calculate” limits but feels them as sacred.

Is there a way to accelerate the journey through the developmental hierarchy? Can we reach a state where the integration of limits becomes natural, even obvious, without needing seven years of meditation to get there?

Jim brings the institutional rigor; I’m looking for the spiritual shift. We’re trying to find the place where the system meets the soul.

It’s raw, it’s honest, and it’s a necessary look at the claims we’ve made on lost life and how we might finally start reclaiming it.

PS: if you made it all the way here, i want to warmly invite you to join the INFINITIVE community - once you’ve passed the gate (38 days of 30 minute commitment), you’re in. https://infinitive.world

For 190,000 years, humans lived under a “Forager Operating System.” It was egalitarian not because people were “nice,” but because they were vigilant. If someone tried to act like a “Big Man,” the tribe didn’t bow; they gossiped, they ridiculed, and if necessary, they executed. Leadership was role-based: the best hunter led the hunt; the best gatherer led the search.

Then came agriculture and with it the glitch.

Surplus grain allowed the genetically-inclined dominators (the 2% “Big Men”) to hire henchmen. We traded the freedom of the forager for the safety of the hut, entering a 10,000-year “Dominator Period.” It was a hierarchy of “Big Men” dominating “Little Men,” who in turn dominated women and children. It was a world of “Position-based” authority: I am the Chief because I have the most thugs.

The Grandmother’s House: Balancing the Action Ring

We discussed Alexander Bard’s nomadic model: a society organized as concentric rings, not a pyramid. At the center sits the Feminine Core (45%), weaving the cultural fabric. Around them, the Masculine Ring (45%) handles the “chilling and killing”, action and defense.

Modernity has broken this balance. We have legal equality (a mandatory upgrade), but we lack structural wisdom. Jim proposed a radical institutional fix: The Grandmother’s House. Imagine a third branch of government where only grandmothers vote or serve. Their sole power? The absolute authority to declare war or peace. Why? Because grandmothers possess the most mature feminine energy the only perspective incentivized by the long-term survival of the lineage rather than the chest-pounding short-termism of the masculine action ring.

The Red Button: Killing the “Idiot Lottery”

Human history is an “idiot lottery.” We’ve spent millennia ruled by the random eldest sons of kings, regardless of whether they were fools or sociopaths.

To bridge to Game B, we need Forrest Landry’s governance model:

1. Consensus: To delegate power.

2. Meritocracy: To execute tasks (giving a “Master of Waste” absolute authority to run the sewers).

3. The Red Button: A 51% democratic vote that can instantly revoke that authority.

This is the antidote to the “Shit Dictator.” You give someone total authority to get the job done, but you keep your finger on the kill-switch.

The Three Pillars: The 1700 Error-Correction Machine

Jim defines “Game A” as the specific synthesis that emerged around 1700. To escape 10,000 years of stagnant “Big Man” rule, we inserted three “error-correction machines” into our social OS. These were designed to destroy the “take it on authority” model of the Church and King.

1. Science (The Reality Machine)

• The Modality: Falsification and peer review.

• The Correction: Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it. If the experiment doesn’t support the theory, the theory is discarded. It replaced the “Metaphysical Authority” of the priest with a self-correcting loop of data.

• The Failure: Capture. When Science is funded by Finance, the “falsification” machine is jammed. We now see “Science” used as an appeal to authority, the very thing it was designed to destroy.

2. Democracy (The Governance Machine)

• The Modality: Collective sense-making and the franchise.

• The Correction: Constitutional limits and the ballot box. It replaced the “Idiot Lottery” of primogeniture with the ability to fire the King (or Parliament) without a civil war. It was meant to ensure policies were tested against the needs of the many.

• The Failure: Scalability and complexity. In a world of 8 billion people and hyper-specialization, the “metabolic energy” required for an average citizen to make sense of the world is depleted. Democracy has devolved into a battle of competing “identitarian caucuses” and regulatory capture.

3. Finance (The Resource Machine)

• The Modality: The Market and price signals.

• The Correction: Profit and loss. If a project is a bad use of social surplus, it fails. It was a way to optimize the economic cycle outside the control of the state.

• The Failure: The Accumulation Glitch. When Finance is no longer about transaction but about accumulation, it skews the price signals. Money stops being a tool for resource allocation and becomes a tool for capturing the other two pillars.

The Triptych in Collapse

In 1700, there were 625 million people. Our footprint was invisible. These machines were a massive upgrade, but they are now cannibalizing each other.

Finance has eaten Science, turning inquiry into a marketing arm. Finance has captured Democracy, turning policy into a service for the highest bidder. The error-correction mechanisms are jammed because they have all been denominated in a single, corruptible currency.

We are at the limit of the Game A growth curve. The software that pulled us out of the mud is now the machine eating the ecosystem.

At the heart of this transition lies the problem of the Blight. As Jim describes it, the Blight is the inherent tendency for individuals to defect against the commons. It is the “warrior at the back of the line” who wants his village to win but doesn’t want to be the one on the front line . In modern institutions, this manifests as embezzlement, nepotism, or the simple misallocation of shared resources.

To fight this, Jim has long advocated for radical transparency. In a Game B “membrane”, a container like a Proto-B village or an intentional community. This might mean world-readable bank accounts where every penny is tracked.

However, transparency only takes us so far.

The Limits of Seeing Everything

During our talk, I argued that transparency doesn’t eliminate the need for trust; it simply shifts where that trust is placed. If you cascade transparency all the way down, you eventually hit a floor. As I put it to Jim: “The question remains if it is turtles all the way down, the last turtle still has trust”.

Even in a radically transparent system, you still have to trust the people seeing the data to do the right thing with it. You have to trust that the “behind closed doors” moments (which are necessary for personal privacy or sensitive personnel investigations) are handled with integrity.

So, how do we bootstrap that trust?

Animal-Level Integrity and the Dunbar Scale

Jim emphasizes that we are evolved for face-to-face, animal-level interaction. While we can have impressive intellectual conversations online, we can’t truly “smell out” a person’s integrity until we spend three days with them, carousing and sharing “true confessions” at 2:00 AM.

For me, the shorthand for this is simpler: people must say what they do and do what they say. Trust is built over duration, observing consistency across time, especially when the incentive to be honest is low.

Vulnerability as a Human Advantage

One of the more profound realizations I’ve had in exploring the future of AI is that machines can “patch” themselves. If a machine has a data error or a software glitch, it can roll back or fix the code. Humans cannot.

Our inherent vulnerability/our woundedness and our inability to simply “fix” our emotional states is what makes us human. By revealing these wounds and shortcomings to others, we give them a way to exploit us. When they choose not to exploit that vulnerability, trust is built more deeply and quickly than any transparency ledger could ever achieve.

Cultivated Interdependence

We also discussed the “design principles” of a membrane. Trust thrives in safe environments where the cost of being wrong is lower.

I shared an anecdote with Jim about a mechanic whose grandmothers would send him to neighbors to borrow a cup of sugar, even if they already had it at home . When he asked why, they told him: “If we don’t ask for help, they will also not ask for help”.

This is cultivated interdependence. By practicing the habit of relying on each other for small things, we build the “reciprocal altruism” needed for the big things. In a Proto-B, this means knowing you will never be homeless or hungry as long as the membrane exists.

Scaling Beyond the Dunbar Number

The real challenge, of course, is scaling this trust beyond the 150-person Dunbar limit. Jim suggested that we need to architect our connectivity so it doesn’t “fan out” too fast. Instead of one representative for 700,000 people, we might need multiple levels of “proxies” and liquid democracy, where you give your “defense proxy” to someone you actually know and trust, who then carries that trust upward.

Owning the Solution

Ultimately, the difference between the “Game A” world and the “Game B” world is the feeling of agency. In Game A, the system is given to you; you are either “fucked with or without Vaseline”. In Game B, you own the solution.

Whether it’s a dinner club, a babysitting group, or a startup, we can begin by explicitly declaring our “accords” and practicing these new social operating systems at a small scale. We don’t have to bet our entire lives on it yet; we just have to start playing with the design of our own membranes.

By Monday afternoon, you’re back to processing insurance forms, navigating suburban sprawl, and responding to the same old perverse incentives. The retreat didn’t stick because there was nothing to hold it in place.

This is Part 4 of an open-ended series of conversations where I sit down with Jim Rutt—architect of the Game B movement—to explore the edges of his thinking. In this session, we untangle the knot that has strangled almost every social movement of the last century: the false choice between changing yourself and changing the system.

The Personal-Institutional Spiral

In 2013, the first iteration of Game B collapsed. The reason? A civil war over sequence. One camp insisted on “Personal Change First.” The other demanded “Institutional Change First.”

Jim’s hard-won realization is that sequence is a trap. It’s not a line; it’s a spiral.

You need a tiny fragment of personal change (the 1–3% of us ready to try something else) to build a slightly better institution. That institution then provides the scaffolding to support further personal growth. That growth, in turn, allows for even more sophisticated institutional design.

When they move together, you ratchet upward. When you separate them, you collapse back to the baseline of Game A.

Following the Water: The Dinner Club

I often think of Tyson Yunkaporta’s lesson: to understand a bioregion, you must follow the water. If the water accepts you—if the fish don’t swim away because you smell like the land—you have become part of the system.

Jim brings this “following the water” down to the kitchen table with his example of the Dinner Club:

1. The Game A State: A group meets once a month. They buy Kentucky Fried Chicken and Budweiser. It’s conviviality, but it’s powered by engineered, hyper-stimulating poison.

2. The First Accord: The group realizes this food is a “humane misuse of human beings.” They set a rule: Home-cooked food only.

3. The Ratchet: This small bit of scaffolding changes the “Currents.” People take pride in their craft. They talk differently. They start asking bigger questions: Why not a collective meal service for our kids? Why not a community garden?

A Friday night social has suddenly evolved into a proto-sovereign food system.

Membranes and the “Blight”

Jim borrows from the logic of early life. A cell needs a Membrane—a semi-permeable boundary that keeps the metabolism high and filters out toxins.

For our social membranes to work, we need:

• Accords: Explicit, evolving agreements (our “Social OS”).

• Currents: The ethical gravity. In a healthy membrane, doing the right thing feels like the right thing.

• Role vs. Position: We must kill “Position-based leadership” (The Chief) and replace it with “Role-based leadership” (The person who knows the most about tracking antelope leads the hunt).

Then, there is the Blight. Jim is a realist: 1% of the population are sociopaths. They will always try to defect from the commons for personal gain. To protect the spiral, the membrane must be radically transparent. As Jim put it: “If you steal from the commons, we march you to the border. No toleration for the blight.”

Lowering the Activation Energy

The biggest hurdle for these “Proto-B” experiments is that the people doing the work are usually too busy to document how they did it.

I proposed a “Git for Social Accords.” Imagine an AI-powered Integrators Guild that documents the successes of a dinner club in Berlin so that a group in Costa Rica can “fork” the code and adapt it to their own bioregion. We can use the current AI stack to summarize, curate, and signal inconsistencies between what we say we value and what we are actually doing.

We don’t need to fix global democracy by Tuesday. We need to start the spiral in the small institutions of our lives.

Follow the crack in the sidewalk. Follow the wind. Follow the water.

• Epoch 1: The Egalitarian Game (~290,000 years): For most of our history, humans lived in forager bands where no single “Big Man” could tell others what to do. Two dudes with spears acted as a check on any bully trying to dominate the tribe.

• Epoch 2: The Big Man Game (~10,000 years): Agriculture allowed for surplus, which allowed for henchmen. For millennia, kings, priests, and warlords ran the world through hereditary power and monopolies.

• Epoch 3: Game A (~300 years): Starting around 1700, humanity combined proto-democracy, science, and modern finance. It unleashed massive creativity but failed to kill the Big Man game. Instead, it financialized it.

The Crisis: We are now on an exponential curve on a finite planet. Our “pruning rule” for what exists in the world is no longer human well-being; it is simply money-on-money return. This is how we end up with TikTok, opioid addictions, and fast food: innovations that make us sick but make the Big Men rich.

Minimum Necessary Radicalism

Jim argues that the “Game B” revolution must be calibrated with surgical precision:

1. Minimum: Most revolutions go too far, ending in camps and killing fields (the French and Russian models). We must do no more than is required.

2. Necessary: Standard politics does “nowhere near enough”. It’s rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic while the iceberg is already inside the hull.

3. Radicalism: We have to think from first principles. The time for micro-adjustments is over; we need a “bigger swing” to move the world to a new attractor.

Engineering the Exit

We discussed the institutional “forks” required to build a world that isn’t a suicide pact:

Membranes & Subsidiarity

Game B isn’t a top-down empire; it’s a collection of membranes, small communities with their own local “accords” or rules. Decisions are pushed down as far as they can go (subsidiarity), meaning a bureaucrat 300km away shouldn’t be deciding what happens in your local bar.

Growth via Forking

In Game B, if a community turns into a cult or stops working, you fork it. You copy the operating system, change the parts that suck (the “delta”), and start a new lineage. This creates a horizontal search for what actually works for humans.

Liquid Democracy

The “bullshit” of current politics is a failure of sense-making. Jim proposes liquid democracy, where you give your “proxy” to people you actually trust for specific topics—like giving a building expert your vote on construction—but you can revoke that power instantly.

The Ultimate Stakes

Why go through this radical trouble? Because of the Fermi Paradox. It is entirely possible that we are the only technological society in the universe.

“We better be damn careful not to fuck up this chance for the universe to come to life.”

Living in Game B should feel like swimming with the current rather than against it. It means security, the end of alienation, and a status game based on what you give to the community rather than what you can extract from it.

In our next conversation we will explore the Personal Institutional Spiral - keep an eye out for this in a week.

we find ourselves herenow at the edge of a civilizational “shitshow.”

two days ago, i started running a thought experiment in my mind: a “Black Swan” scenario that breaks the current rules of how we think about the world. i’ve been contemplating the unthinkable: the European Union applying for membership in BRICS. let’s call it the Brussels-Kazan Axis.

this isn’t a prediction. it is a sensor reading of a system that is running out of steam.

For decades, the EU has been the world’s “moral compass,” a project built on the old settings of the Western alliance. but as the US turns inward—consuming its own energy rather than radiating it: the protective skin of Europe, our “membrane,” is beginning to shake. the way we handle money and energy is no longer serving Life.

The Trap of Choosing Sides

right now, we are stuck in a “multipolar trap.” we feel forced to choose between a fading Atlantic partnership and a rising group of nations in the Global South.

this is a “Mindset” problem, seeing the world as a game of winners and losers. a “Heliogenic” civilization, one that acts like the sun, doesn’t just pick a side; it creates a boundary that allows for growth. it’s about being “exothermic,” meaning we generate more value and life for the world than we take from it.

The Physics of the Shift

if we look toward Kazan as a theoretical partner, the data tells an interesting story about our survival:

• Industrial Oxygen: our industries are “hypoxic” starved of the energy oxygen they need to breathe. turning toward new partners is an attempt to restore that breath.

• The Green Resource Gap: our “Green Deal” depends on materials like lithium and cobalt. most of these are currently found inside the BRICS network. we can’t build a new world if we are cut off from its building blocks.

• A New Financial Pulse: we could integrate the Euro into new digital payment systems. this would be an “exit to planet” a way for our societies to trade and create value without being dependent on a single, aging financial system.

if we treat money as a flow of energy rather than just numbers in a bank, this move is about realigning our sensors with the reality of what the planet actually needs.

Walls vs. Membranes

my contemplation of this scenario suggests that such a shift would be a massive shock. it might even cause a split within Europe between those who look West and those who look East.

this tension happens because we still think in “masculine” ways: using hierarchy, force, and walls. a more “feminine” way of scaling would see this not as a breakup, but as a maturation. nature doesn’t use rigid walls; it uses membranes. a membrane is a skin that is strong enough to protect what’s inside, but smart enough to let the “good stuff” in.

we are at the edge between the “herenow” of energy crises and the “thenthere” of an economy that actually works with the planet.

this Brussels-Kazan thought experiment isn’t about “joining a club.” it’s about sensing a transition. we must ask ourselves: does our current path serve Life? does it help us thrive, or is it just helping us manage our decay?

to live up to a higher standard, we have to start building membranes instead of walls. we have to recognize that “the other Others”, whether they are in Kazan, New Delhi, or right here in our own neighborhoods, are part of the same living system.

we understand this. we are sensing the shift.

Basically, how do we design a social operating system where greed isn’t the feature, but the bug?

In this new episode, Jim and I stop hovering at the theoretical level and start drawing the blueprints. We dig into the “architectural” changes required to move from our current game of status competition where billionaires stack chips just to say they have more than the other guy to a model of genuine, resilient flourishing.

Here are a few of the deep currents we explore in this session.

The Shared Purse vs. The Blight

We start with a radical but historically grounded idea: shifting the nexus of wealth from the individual to the “membrane”, a community of roughly 150 people (a Dunbar number group).

Imagine a “Shared Purse” economy, similar to the early Israeli Kibbutzim. When assets are pooled, the incentive to exploit your neighbor dissolves because their loss is your loss. But we aren’t naive. We know that wherever power gathers, “The Blight” (corruption) follows. We discuss why absolute, world-readable transparency in financial ledgers isn’t just a nice-to-have it’s the only immune system capable of keeping the Blight in check.

The Pruning Rules of Innovation

Why does our current society produce incredibly sophisticated sports betting apps designed to addict young men, but fail to build a resilient electrical grid?

It comes down to what Jim calls “Pruning Rules.”

Every time humanity jumps to the “adjacent possible” (the next stage of innovation), we filter our choices through a pruning rule. Right now, that rule is almost exclusively Money-on-Money Return. If it’s profitable, it survives. If it’s merely “good for civilization,” it often dies. We discuss how to change these rules so that we stop optimizing for addiction and extraction.

Viscosity, Voice, and Exit

We also tackle the hard problem of governance. A free society cannot be a prison. We discuss the non-negotiable principles of Voice (having a say) and Exit (the ability to leave on fair terms).

But perhaps the most provocative part of the conversation was about Death.

Nature understands that for new life to emerge, old things must die. Our institutions, however, try to live forever. We talk about the concept of “Sunsetting”: the idea that every law, institution, and corporation should have a built-in expiration date.

The Thought Experiment: A Terminal Value for Tech Giants

This led us to a wild thought experiment.

Imagine if companies like Google or Facebook couldn’t be sold to private equity or inherited by a dynasty. Imagine if, after 25 or 50 years, they had to be sold to the public commons.

Here’s the kicker: The price the public pays wouldn’t be based on projected profits, but on the company’s Net Contribution to the Planet.

If your company extracted value, destroyed attention spans, and polluted the ecosystem, the price is zero (or you owe us). If you added genuine value to the biosphere and humanity, you get a handsome reward. It’s a mechanism that would change the incentives of a founder from Day 1.

We even toyed with the idea of writing this up and sending it to Larry Page and Sergey Brin to ask: Does your 25-year-old self agree with this? Does your current self? (so, @Sergey if you happen to read this, let’s chat :))

This conversation was a journey from the mechanics of local farming to the governance of Mars colonies. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Why Life is More Interesting Than Non-Life

The universe is vast and largely silent. As we discuss in the video, we are part of a rare process where the universe has begun to wake up. We explore why we have a profound moral obligation not to “screw this up” and how we can move from being a species in crisis to one that is actively bringing the universe to life.

Key Themes We Cover

• The Power of Emergence: Why change happens fastest when systems are in “disequilibrium.”

• Social Scaffolding: Why personal change isn’t enough—we need communities and “membranes” to stabilize our growth.

• Mutual Dependence: Moving away from hyper-individualism toward systems where we actually need one another to survive and thrive.

• The 10,000-Year View: Why shifting our timeframe changes every decision we make today.

“Life is more interesting than non-life... we need to change what we want at some level if we are going to survive the transition to a galactic civilization.”

Takeaways to Keep in Mind

• Small is Beautiful: We need to build small, coherent things initially to prove new ways of living.

• Worldview as Design: Your worldview isn’t just a philosophy; it’s a design element for how you build your life and community.

• The Role of Technology: How to use our tools to encourage mutual dependence rather than isolation.

Chapter Guide

• 00:00 The Emergence of Life and the Universe

• 05:05 The Next 10,000 Years: A Vision for Humanity

• 09:55 Understanding Emergence: From the Big Bang to Life

• 19:53 The Role of Technology and Society in Our Future

• 29:57 Navigating the Future: Choices and Consequences

• 43:20 The Role of Membranes in Emergence Management

• 49:24 Personal Pathways to Emergence

• 54:57 Worldview as a Central Design Element

• 01:01:51 Building Coherent Communities

• 01:10:40 Designing Membranes for Global Cooperation

• 01:20:41 Establishing Mutual Dependence in Systems

What do you think? Are we ready to take on the responsibility of being the “consciousness” of the universe, or are we still too caught up in the “small things”? Let’s discuss in the comments.

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We decided that this required deeper exploration and since we already knew 90 minutes wouldn’t be enough we aimed for 10 sessions of 1 hour in which we choose a different lens each time in order to weave a holistic picture - a picture that honors the complexity of the situation.

This is the first of these conversations. Once Rory and i have reached saturation, i already know who is coming next. And the one after … both absolutely outstanding humans.

I was quiet for the last 45 days or so. Part of this was family vacation - but part of it also was me taking time for deep reflection, the result of which i want to share today. - before i begin, and because of the long silence - i want to express my deep gratitude to you, who are taking the time to read this, to often respond in private conversation and especially those - you know you who are - who have chosen to support this publication financially. This means a lot because it shows me that there is real value for you in what i am offering. Thank you!

The reflection of the past few weeks primarliy revolved around the question of who we - individually and collectively - must be in order to be worthy of anything being aligned with us. Not that i haven't thought, spoken and written to this extensively already - the reflection of my hiatus was more about the how we get to be what we must become.

For consistency i will re-iterate the three main pillars briefly:

1: Remembering

what it means to be a human being rather than a consumer is surprisingly easy. Time and time again i see that people effortlessly tap into the deep and often unknown knowledge of the three-hundred-thousand years of human experience we all carry within - and - in the same movement reveal how thin the slither of 300 years of colonialisation and industrialisation really is.

Either this sounds obvious and easy to you, or you see it as childish hippy talk. In the former case, you can continue to step 2 - in the latter, you have some work to do.

2: Coordinating

what you find when you connect with the deepest sense of what it means to be a human being alive on this planet with everyone else. If you haven't fully remembered, this step is impossible to you. It is impossible because it requires deep trust in the fact that every human on the planet ultimately feels the same level of vulnerability and woundedness as you do. Only this trust can open you up to sharing your deepest humanity with others.

Once you do, it opens up effortless collaboration because everyone simultaneously steps out of the ego-profit-maximisation game which defuses the massive first mover disadvantage of the multipolar trap of the current shitshow. If that sounds like nonsense to you, you need to go back to step 1.

3: Building

the physical, social and emotional reality that deeply integrates the previous two steps is paramount. Most of us manage to connect to our deepest humanity and we often manage to get into coordinating coherence with others - in pockets. In pockets of space and time. Usually we get sucked back into the molochian hamster wheel. Even the most immersive experiences of this kind tend to have a half life of a few weeks at max.

In this step it is of crucial importance to focus on the physical reality that makes living aligned with the previous steps possible. This is not an intentional community that uses its beautiful expression of remembering and coordination as a marketing mechanism for yoga and ayahuasca retreats. Instead, this is living with and off the land - living with and in community.

I can sense a deep longing for making the above a reality. It is shining through the cracks of the meta and the poly but there is nothing to shine on, just yet. At least that's how it feels. But what if we actually trusted that we are the many, that we are unique and beautiful - just like every human being you will ever meet? What if we just started living as if the world were already the beautiful place we know it can be?

While we are constructing the foundation to make the construction of the possibility a tangible possibility for everyone on the planet for free with the Oslo Project, the thought of "just" starting to live outside of the shitshow became louder over the past few weeks. And i wasn't alone - whenever i clumsily expressed these feelings i found shared ground.

As a result, i have created an online video training version of the INFINITIVE retreat and book to serve the Remembering which acts as a gate for a community of other others to serve the Coordinating. This is a very early prototype and since you actually read all the way here and would like to know more - send me a note t@thomas.cr or +491785830082 (signal/whatsapp)

Don’t lie. Don’t cheat. Don’t hurt people. Be fair. Be helpful. Be honest. Be accountable.

Those are the values we’re trying to code into artificial intelligence. As we were building this shiny new mirror, we are catching a glimpse of ourselves—and it isn’t pretty … because if we take the AI alignment rulebook and point it at human history, we fail. Hard.

We’re out here demanding that machines do no harm, while we’ve spent millennia perfecting harm at industrial scale. We want our AIs to be helpful and beneficial, while entire generations of philanthropic and aid systems have stumbled over colonial power dynamics, self-interest, and top-down “solutions” that solve little and disempower much. We preach fairness in machine learning models, while living in societies built on systemic inequality, racism, slavery, apartheid, and extraction.

We don’t want AIs that manipulate or deceive us, while our own governments and corporations run misinformation campaigns, sell cigarettes with cancer disclaimers in fine print, and bury climate truths under a billion-dollar fossil PR strategy.

We say we want honest machines. But can we honestly say we’ve even built an honest civilization?

This isn’t a philosophical exercise. This is the raw audit of our species through the very standards we’re asking our machines to live by. Harmlessness. Beneficence. Fairness. Honesty. Accountability. These aren’t new concepts—they’re just newly sharpened. And we’re suddenly realizing we’ve never quite measured up.

What we’ve built in AI alignment is not just a safeguard for future tech. It’s a mirror. And that mirror is showing us something hard but obvious: the real alignment problem isn’t the machines. It’s us.

Because let’s face it—teaching an AI to avoid genocide is important. But maybe it’s time we fully grasp the fact that we industrialized it first. That between 1956 and 2016, 50 million people died in genocides. That we built weapons that could end human life on Earth several times over, and we call it “security.”

That we’re still pumping poison into oceans, cutting down forests at record speed, and packaging everything in microplastic tombs while nodding along to “sustainability” slogans. We’re not living aligned. We’re just pretending to.

And yet. And yet—we can do better. Because even in the wreckage, there’s a blueprint for something else.

We’ve seen the sparks of coherence. Civil rights movements. Anti-apartheid struggles. Truth commissions. Investigative journalism. Scientific rigor. These are not perfect tools, but they are proof that alignment isn’t a fantasy. It’s just hard. It requires work. Integrity. Humility. A willingness to be wrong—and to change.

And this is where it gets even more interesting: we’re not just building smarter machines. We’re building a new ethical standard, one that forces us to grow up. One that doesn’t just ask, “What do we want the machines to do?” but “Who do we need to become?”

There’s a term from AI safety that captures this: Coherent Extrapolated Volition. The idea is to build systems that do what humanity would want if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were.

That’s a beautiful goal. But it pulls down the masks.

Because maybe the most advanced AI will never be more dangerous than a misaligned human with too much power. Maybe the machines are giving us a gift: a final chance to look in the mirror and ask—are we ready to live up to the values we keep trying to teach?

We don’t need to be perfect. But we do need to be honest. About who we’ve been. About what we’ve done. And about the enormous gap between our aspirations and our behavior.

The machines will only ever reflect us. If we want better outputs, we need a better input. That starts with realignment—not just of the systems we’re building, but of the species doing the building.

The future won’t be written in code - it will be written in courage. In coherence. In whether or not we finally live up.