When they put on men’s suits and challenged men to race, this created quite an outrage. Especially since my foremothers never lost. My grandmother Marjorie was one of the first women allowed to attend the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) at its current location. All of these amazing women had very strong work ethics and just wanted the same opportunities that the men around them enjoyed.

I don’t think they described themselves as feminists, because they weren’t operating from any ideology. They just wanted to do what they were good at. Today of course, they would be considered the quintessential feminists. They certainly didn’t have anything against men, though their boldness probably led to them being unlucky in love. They were a bit ahead of their time.

Today what was originally a movement for equal rights for all genders has split into two primary groups. I will define these thusly:

• Feminists: Seek gender equality. Includes men and women.

• Gender Supremacists: Seek increased power for their gender. Gender specific.

Those two groups intermingled for decades and were difficult to distinguish as women fought for opportunity parity. After all, the USA was formed in the 18th century as a society led by men. You could call this a patriarchy. I would define this as a society where men enjoy enhanced opportunities merely for being born male, regardless of merit. This also often meant they were paid more for the same work.

When I was a speaker (at their request) for the National Organisation of Women in 1988 at UCLA, I still perceived that there was work to be done to achieve gender equality. The first formal Women’s Studies program was created in Southern California at San Diego State College in 1970. Great strides were made during this time and around the turn of the century it seems that gender parity was achieved.

While the idea that there should be gender equality remained, having achieved that goal feminist activists largely demobilized. What remained were two groups:

• Women Gender Supremacists: These people wanted to create a matriarchy, either because they felt it was owed to them, or because they thought women were better than men and should be running the place.

• Feminists Who Failed to Demobilize: Likely they heard a lot of people telling them how disadvantaged women are and thus felt compelled to keep fighting.

Universities teaching Women’s Studies exploded to 431 today. Meanwhile there are 0 universities with Men’s Studies programs. These programs do a lot of research and the overwhelmingly pro-women’s interests being studied creates a distorted image of society. I would assume that Supremacists in these Women’s Gender Studies programs are responsible for the lack of Men’s Studies programs. Here I’m primarily interested in clarifying the economic gender situation.

The Gender Wage Gap

In 2009 newly elected President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act as the first bill he signed into law. I’m sure this was a signature moment for him. I voted for him, so this isn’t an attempt to dis him. That same year a massive study of the gender wage gap was completed, the CONSAD study. The wiki on wage gap has a LOT of useful information, but I’m going to focus on the CONSAD here because it is the most definitive study.

CONSAD found that all but 5 to 7% of the wage gap was due to the types of work done, the hours worked, the danger of jobs selected, and not measuring the various “benefits” that come with the job. I will detail these below. It also found that “mothers” suffered ~5% wage decrease compared to non mothers. For women who are not mothers, they achieved parity with men on wages.

Factors that CONSAD cited:

• Women changed jobs or interrupted their careers more often. This slowed advancement speed.

• Women were more likely to choose convenient jobs or those with more work time flexibility. These jobs paid less than more rigid jobs.

• Women gravitated to jobs with higher benefits (like insurance or paid time off) that in turn paid lower base wages.

• Women chose less dangerous jobs. Dangerous jobs tend to pay more.

• Men worked longer hours and generated more overtime pay.

So I’m guessing you’ve never heard of the CONSAD report, why is that? Well Obama made a big deal of passing a law to combat the wage gap. I would imagine that CONSAD was politically inconvenient, especially that year. There were also 431 major universities that depended on the existence of a wage gap, and systemic gender discrimination, to justify the existence of their women’s studies programs. They also needed this to block the creation of any men’s studies programs.

The Normalization of Sex Work Since 2009

I began studying what I call Dating Economics in 2010. This paper is the prerequisite to the next paper on Dating Economics. I noticed that there were huge shifts in society being caused by online dating, and I wanted to know if this was causing changes in the broader economy. This type of investigation was not going to be conducted by the government, and likely not by any universities either. It required a rogue scientist like myself.

I ended up surveying ~25,000 women over a ten year period. The early years were mostly focused on understanding dating behavior and motivations. The later years focused more and more on money transfers (I was the first academic to write extensively on Real Money Transfers in gaming). This necessitated that I interview people who were getting rewarded financially for dating. Thus I ended up surveying a fair number of sex workers just as sex work was becoming more accepted in society.

Here my being asexual really helped me, just as it did in my physical therapy work and in being the trainer for the UCLA and US Olympic Women’s track teams. Normal heterosexual men give off something of a “neediness/hunger” vibe, which I don’t. Prior to this time I had never had any contact with sex workers (since I don’t consume what they are selling) but I quickly learned how to gain enough trust to get the information I was after. I will discuss this more in the next paper.

Since CONSAD was in 2009, all the things that were changing in 2010 and later would not be reflected in the study. Further, most of these real money transfers occur “off the books” and would not be reflected in any government analysis.

The normalization of sex work, even by people who don’t self identify as sex workers but nonetheless engage in money transfers during dating, increasingly caused a lot of money to change hands on a new black market.

Sugar Dating and OnlyFans

“SeekingArrangement” (now just called “Seeking” after I warned Brandon Wade that the word “Arrangement” was creating legal jeopardy) was created in 2006 and had a transformative effect on society during this post-CONSAD period. The purpose of the site, at least initially, was to connect older people with money to younger people who didn’t have money, for “financially enhanced dating”. Sugar dating is what we call it today. Primarily this was men (Sugar Daddies) paying young women (Sugar Babies). Rates were typically several times higher than what one could make in a normal job, and particularly adventurous Babies could juggle multiple Daddies.

These people don’t declare their income, and often don’t like to be described as sex workers. Even though they are. The site used to have more users, but now has a lot of competitors in the space. Still, as of 2024 it reported having 46M users with about 90% of those being Babies, typically aged 21 to 27. Many are college students. Most of SA’s revenue comes from the USA, so we can infer that there are at least 20M users from the USA. There are ~15M women in the USA aged from 21 to 27.

While we have no firm numbers, it seems likely that at least 50% of women in the USA in this age range have tried Sugar Dating at least once. So this is not a fringe activity, it is fully normalized and undocumented. That also means it is not taxed. There are also male Sugar Babies, but they only make up about 10% of total Babies.

OnlyFans was created in 2016 in the UK and quickly spread to the USA. It provided a simple tool for “content creators” to engage in sex work from the safety of their home, typically solo or with a “friend” helping out. This improved safety by excluding strangers from the play space. The site also collected payments from “viewers” and automated the payment process for “creators”.

The ease of use led to an explosion of participation, again mostly from women. There are currently ~4.6M “creator” accounts. There are over 370M “viewer” accounts. Because the service is scalable, one creator could be paid by thousands or even millions of viewers. The highest paid “creator”, Blac Chyna (Angela White), is said to generate $20M a month in revenue. Thus for those on the high end, earning potential dwarfs what is possible with Sugar Dating.

This represents a massive increase in unreported wages, mostly for young women, compared to what was possible in the economy in 2009 and prior to that. My extremely conservative estimate is that women on average in this age group in the USA make 30% more than men do, mostly tax free. That average includes women who would never consider any sort of sex work, and a sizeable number that generate 300%, or 1000%, or even more of the wages that their similarly aged male counterparts make.

Note that since OnlyFans collects money for “creators”, that means they can also report that information to the government. Many creators were quite shocked when they started getting letters from the IRS asking why they weren’t paying taxes on their OF income. American “Viewers” on OF spent $2B in 2025. Note that the vast majority of OF “content creators” make very little income (<$300/month) but still get their content beamed across the internet. This can have damaging income effects later in life when people ask “hey how come my teach/co-worker is on OF?”.

Thus for most, Sugar Dating is the most reliable way to multiply their income (if they are young and female), and can be done discretely.

Additional Economic Factors

So what other gender differences exist in the economy? LinkedIn research showed that in 2019 women were 16% more likely to be hired than men after applying to a job. This metric rises to +18% in more senior roles. If you acknowledge that in the past women were disadvantaged in hiring, then we must admit that this is trending up and is surely higher than 16% now. I would expect LinkedIn to not repeat (at least publicly) this research as it could entangle them in future gender discrimination litigation.

The “education gap” is even more extreme than the “hiring gap”. Here in Australia 61% of 4 year degrees go to women. In the USA in the 2021-2022 school year 58% of degrees were awarded to women. It seems odd that the more recent data is absent. In the age of information, what is holding it up? Women first exceeded men in the rate of higher education graduation in 1982, and it has trended up since then.

1982 … 44 years ago.

99+% of degreed women alive today in the USA workforce have benefited from a gender advantage in education. 99+% of degreed men alive today in the USA workforce have been harmed by gender discrimination in education.

An often cited (but I could not find a link to it) 2025 Lendingtree study showed that men suffer a $2000 a year income transfer to women during early dating. This rises to $15,000 per year in relationships. This is similar to the numbers I generated in my Gender Wars paper last year. There I found the rate to be about $1000 per month ($12,000 per year) but I excluded married couples as I wanted to focus my study on dating.

The cumulative effect of all this progressive economic discrimination against men over the last few decades means that many if not most men are just treading water now financially. Given that hypergamy (partnering with someone with more resources than you have) has been a traditional dating strategy for women for centuries, this puts women in a difficult spot.

When men had significantly better finances than women, there were enough options for women that they could consider other factors (like actually finding the man attractive) on top of hypergamy. Now women complain “where did all the good men go?” because hypergamy options are extraordinarily scarce. Often the choice is between hypergamy and attraction, if they are lucky enough to even have two choices. This is not a situation that benefits any gender.

Of course that’s one of the easier problems to solve if we just reverse hypergamy and have financially superior women support the men that they love. I’ve benefited from reverse hypergamy and lived in a few mansions in my life. It works when the financially superior partner is not abusive, just like traditional hypergamy.

Patriarchy Versus Matriarchy… On Mars?

If we consider a world where men are financially advantaged in society and women are discriminated against “Patriarchy”, then it would be fair to describe the reverse as “Matriarchy”. But both terms are highly charged in the current era. They also are binaries which obscures what is actually going on.

Let’s imagine that humans are colonizing Mars. Mars has an atmosphere, but it only contains <0.2% oxygen (O2). Humans need 21% oxygen and their ability to function decreases the further from that concentration we get. So let’s assume we start building O2 generation factories on Mars. Let’s make 431 of them (like the number of women’s studies programs on Earth). They pump out O2 faithfully and when we get close to 21% then humans can function normally (i.e. have full civil rights) without a space suit or respirator.

But what happens when we get to 21%? Do we turn off all 431 of these factories and declare “Mission Accomplished!”? If we did, and these factories were run by humans that spent their entire lives learning how to run Oxygenizers, you’d have a lot of upset unemployed people. But if we just keep running them we will literally poison the atmosphere of Mars with too much O2!

This is a nasty problem and I can understand people might be tempted to just push the problem onto the next generation of humans. We do that a lot as a species, due to self-interest. I think the best solution would be to stop training new Oxygenizer workers and start building Hydrogenizer Plants (Men’s rights schools). We would train people to work there and we could combine our excess O2 with the H2 and make water or rocket fuel. Once parity is close to being met, we can balance hires to both types of facilities.

It could be a new era for humankind!

Final Thoughts

Many generations in the West have sacrificed to bring Oxygen, er, I mean women’s rights, to society. Now that we are here we should acknowledge the achievement and celebrate. But we didn’t do that. We doubled down. Now we are producing oppression instead of liberty. This is the opposite of what we wanted! Actually, you can see humans doing this a lot all over the world right now with parallel systems. We don’t seem to know when it is time to stop and Maintain Balance.

This isn’t even difficult. We have the means to measure Balance and maintain it. We just aren’t. Many have become ideologically opposed to fairness while claiming they are for fairness. This has to stop and will stop. But if we work together that will make everyone happy. If we don’t work together, some sort of revolution will be the result. Men are biologically wired to Protect and Provide for women.

We just have to let them.

The next paper on Dating Economics will detail how the rapid changes in dating technology and economics in the current generation have altered how we date and what the trend will produce if maintained.

Regulators are slow to act, but once they do they can completely change the math of an industry. By removing incentives to be “bad actors”, those harmful companies can be eliminated from various markets. Simultaneously, legal firms are always on the lookout for lucrative targets for litigation. The richer the company, the larger the potential reward for litigation.

Now that my warnings have moved from the realm of “expert opinion” to “legal fact” (following the losses of Meta and Google in court) it is time to move to the next step of analysis. What damage has been done, and how has it changed our culture and ideology? After nearly a generation of harm to our people, the effects could linger for generations more. As there is a certain inertia involved, things will likely get worse before they get better.

Aggravation Promotion

All of the major social media companies have been promoting threatening and divisive content, because that’s what gets the most engagement. We are biologically wired to prioritize threats for attention. In an attention based economy, that means the success of these companies is dependent on threatening our people.

People under threat act more emotionally, and less rationally. The algorithms will determine what a particular viewer is most threatened by, and bury them in related content. The result is that targets will over-perceive these threats and develop a hostile ideology to the source of that threat.

For instance, if a company bombards billions of viewers with “man bad” content, exaggerating the threat of this segment, then vulnerable viewers will adopt misandrist ideologies. The reality, at least in the USA, is that men-sourced violence and arrests have dropped 60 to 80% over the last 40 years. Men have become so passive that women are now complaining that men are too passive. Simultaneously misandrists are blasting content suggesting the opposite. Really whatever they’ve been watching has programmed them to have a polarized ideology either way.

Ten years ago I used to see men on LinkedIn saying openly sexist things about women. I was quick to react and others did also. Now I can’t really remember a single case of this in the last 5 years. What I am seeing, is really extreme ideologies in the opposite direction. This is one example:

This is the “job title” of a misandrist content creator on LinkedIn. There is no evidence of any education or experience in any of the things she says she’s a subject matter expert in, and she’s “helping women and brands to start being dangerous”. I will give you one guess as to who she wants women and companies to be dangerous to.

I got that content creator riding me last week after I asked them nicely to stop posting sexist content. This week I got this misandrist going after me:

She has the word “dickheads” in her job description. How is that even acceptable on LinkedIn? I will give you one guess as to what gender she’s describing there. She seems to understand that I was pointing out that she was creating a hostile environment on LI, and apparently this made me “problematic”. A dickhead, but relatively low on the dickhead scale.

She’s quite honest about coming onto LI and hunting down dickheads. She even says she’s explicit about it all over her LinkedIn page, which I did not read. I trust her about this. Her second to last paragraph where she says I’m “weaponizing [women’s] loneliness” refers to my Soulmates paper. I’m guessing she’s not looking for a soulmate.

I have no ego and I don’t take this personally at all. As a researcher what I want to know is:

• where is this behavior coming from

• why is it on the rise

• why is it being promoted by the LI algorithm

• why similar male content either isn’t being produced or is effectively blocked algorithmically so that we don’t ever see it

• I’d like to follow the money. Someone’s making money here.

• What are the long term implications

I don’t have the answers to all these questions yet, but this has definitely gotten my attention. Gender based divisive ideology isn’t the only divisive content I’m seeing being promoted by the LI algorithm, but it seems to be by far the most popular. I’m also seeing a lot of women content creators who have, based on their titles, created companies with the sole purpose of “fixing” the “man bad” problem in corporations.

Since their business model depends on people accepting the premise that “men are bad”, they are blasting this sort of content daily. Whether they believe what they are saying or not really isn’t that important. They have a business and they need to advertise it. LI will let you pay to advertise on the platform, but it is much cheaper to disguise your advertisements as social interest content and then just dog whistle your impressions up.

Cross Platform Indoctrination

Given that Meta’s own internal research indicates that using their social media is harmful for you, I don’t use social media. I already figured that out before they blew millions and millions on their secret internal research. They could have saved a lot of money by just asking me instead. That would have also resulted in less legal liability for them. But since they don’t care how many people they harm, they don’t really care what the results of the research are.

That’s what makes them such an easy target for lawyers. A regular 20ish year old woman got $6M out of them with relatively mild inflicted disability. There could be a billion people with similar complaints. A billion times 6M is 6000 Trillion dollars. I asked AI how to say that and it went tilt and just spit out 6e^15. That’s a 6 with 15 zeros after it for non math majors.

LI likely doesn’t go too far out of its way to promote hostile content. I would imagine that Meta is 100 times worse. TikTok, where divisive content is a feature, not a side effect, could be thousands of times worse. TikTok will pay you to be horrible, so there is an economic incentive. The same goes for YouTube, and I see a LOT of gender divisive content there. Not just women on men content, but also men on women content. It’s become really big business to promote gender hate.

Any sort of gender hate really concerns me because it is the gateway to all sorts of violence and a general breakdown of trust and society. As I’ve written about before, humans are natural apex predators. When you “uncivilize” them, or even train them to hate, they return to source.

I am of the opinion that the reason I’m seeing this huge spike in gender hatred on LI is that it’s being promoted on these other social media sites (the ones getting sued or in the process of getting sued) and people are getting paid to generate gender hate content. These creators then take their content and duplicate it across multiple social media networks in order to produce multiple income streams.

These creators don’t seem to be sensitive to LinkedIn being significantly different than any other platform. But while these other platforms are more voluntary in their use, for many people seeking work, they don’t have much choice (thanks to Microsoft loving monopolies) about which work related social media sites to use.

This makes LinkedIn an extension of a workplace. Any work environment where gender based hate speech is allowed is going to get sued. Hard. I’ve been spending way too much time trying to fix this problem for MS. They need to tighten up their algorithms or they are going to be far too exposed to litigation.

The Threat of Gender Based Hate

All sorts of hate speech is bad. It’s especially bad when you direct your hate speech at a particular group, instead of an individual. Governments often use communications campaigns to marginalize specific nationalities of people prior to or during a war to make it socially acceptable to kill those people. Besides the obvious problems with that, long term it can be very difficult to unprogram people. I talked about this in my paper on Generational Psychological Loops (content warning: Disturbing American WW2 propaganda cartoons).

For millennia humans have understood that men are the more aggressive and dangerous gender. Men are so much stronger on average that we’ve gone to great lengths to vilify and punish any aggression against women from men. This is (hopefully) taught to boys from an early age. You can hit other boys, but girls are off limits.

But what happens when we teach and reward women for hitting men? Hollywood puts out a lot of content like this, either as comedy or revenge-themed. As a kid I enjoyed watching Benny Hill get slapped or clubbed for being a lecher. Every episode. For decades. Benny Hill … you certainly knew what sold.

But decades of normalization, or even promotion, of violence against men has shifted our culture significantly. I often hear women gender supremacists saying that men deserve violence because they themselves are violent (collective punishment). 50 years ago men were probably the more violent gender against people they knew. But intense punishments and training for men, paired with very permissive attitudes towards women’s violence has shifted the math dramatically.

Because men are shamed or even ignored if they report being assaulted by women, our official statistics strongly under report the rates of F on M violence. Women with misandrist ideologies will use reported data to justify their collective punishment. But once you switch to survey data, the reality starts to hit home.

Once you move to surveys, it becomes clear that in the 21st Century, in intimate relationships, women tend to start the violence, are more likely to escalate violence, and men tend to finish it. That’s not good for men or women. It’s a very dangerous and destructive dynamic.

Women typically receive much more lenient sentences when committing crimes, so relying on official data can be misleading. When mandatory sentencing limits were deployed across the USA, women’s incarceration rates rose 500%. Double that rate if you just count State and Federal detention. That was just the result of blocking leniency for drug crimes. If we removed all gender leniency, the USA could soon end up with over a million women behind bars.

The Take Away

This is not a “woman bad” article. This is a “social media bad” article. People are being manipulated in the attention economy to drive corporate profits. That manipulation often encourages hate and disunity, because that sells. The USA now has the lowest opinion in the world of their own people. The USA is now the only country in the world where their own people think that most of their people are bad people.

They didn’t wake up one day and say “I want to hate my neighbours!” They were trained to feel that way by ruthless companies. I would also have to blame political organisations. All of them. I’m still a bit shocked when I see people come onto LinkedIn (Like above) and start hating on strangers openly. But I don’t use social media, other than LI. I imagine that for those who do, they are probably so numb to it by now that they could look at that post and not feel anything. They might even agree with the misandrist.

I don’t tell these people to stop being haters. I embrace humanity’s diversity. Everyone is my brother or sister (etc), even the annoying people. But I do often suggest they should take that back to TikTok or wherever they came from, where they will be appreciated and paid for their hate.

Supply and demand, baby. As long as we buy hate with our attention, there will be no limit to the supply. But if we stoke inter-gender hatred, I’m very concerned what will happen when gender violence becomes justified and normalized.

Eh, Toro, Toro!

Here I will walk you through the two cases that both won remarkable victories last week, briefly go over my expertise in the area, explain what’s going to happen next, and suggest some escape/survival routes for affected companies. Historically, these companies have been pretty good at ignoring my good and free advice, but perhaps the threat of commercial extinction will trigger a self preservation instinct.

The New Mexico Case Against Meta

Meta lost this case on March 24, 2026. The case was brought by state prosecutors. There was no shortage of willing Meta whistle blowers and internal documents to support the State’s case. Their argument was that Meta violated the state’s Unfair Practices Act (UPA) by exposing children to sexual content and predators, and by not informing users/parents of the risks of using their product.

The UPA carries a fine of $5000 USD per violation. The jury found that there were so many violations that a fine of $375M was appropriate. 375,000,000/5000= 75,000 violations. New Mexico is a relatively small American state. Pay-outs like that will attract every lawyer in a 10,000 km radius, so this is only First Blood.

Defence lawyers argued that “We work hard to keep people safe on our platforms and are clear about the challenges of identifying and removing bad actors and harmful content. We remain confident in our record of protecting teens online.” Clearly the jury was unimpressed with Meta’s record or “hard work”.

Given that the focus here was on sexual hazards, I would expect Roblox to be extraordinarily vulnerable to similar lawsuits. Other game developers have relatively minor exposure to such claims.

The Los Angeles Case Against Meta and YouTube

Meta and YouTube lost this case the next day, on March 25th, 2026. This case is remarkable in that it was brought by a young woman, not the government. She argued that these platforms got her addicted, and did so intentionally. Now, I know what you are thinking… “If that’s all she had to prove, there could be billions of future plaintiffs”.

Indeed.

The scope of liability here is staggering. She was awarded $6M USD and there are apparently hundreds of similar cases already being heard in American courts. Any number of people could win similar cases just using the already public information available, if they can get a doctor to assert that they suffered harm secondary to addiction to social media.

My Related History and Expertise

I used to be a neuroscience researcher at the Brain Research Institute in Los Angeles, studying mechanisms of addiction. I then spent three years practicing clinical drug rehabilitation at the Betty Ford Center in California near Palm Springs. Perhaps you can imagine how useful this would be later when I pivoted to game development and began pioneering new methods of monetisation at the turn of the century.

In 2013 America’s National Public Radio tapped Dr. Nora Volkow and I for a special segment on Addiction in gaming. You can listen to that here. According to her bio:

Nora D. Volkow, M.D., is Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) at the National Institutes of Health. NIDA is the world’s largest funder of scientific research on the health aspects of drug use and addiction.

It was an honor to be speaking on the same topic as Dr. Volkow. I was tapped because I was the top published academic on the subject of gaming addiction in 2013. That’s not as impressive as it sounds. I was the only published academic on the topic working in the gaming industry in 2013. As others no doubt saw how I was blacklisted for “ratting” on the industry, I don’t think there have been any others stepping forward to assist me in that role over the last 13 years.

A couple months after that NPR interview I was summoned to the ICPEN regulatory summit in Panama and asked to testify against the industry on the topic of exploitation of children in online games. I demonstrated that all 25 screens of the tutorial for a popular Disney IP game (Marvel Superhero Squad Online, by Gazillion) had unethical and exploitative content that could not be accidental. This game was advertised as “safe for 6 to 8 year olds”.

I contrasted that with the same studio’s Marvel Heroes, the adult version. That game had zero exploitative screens because the developer knew adults would be looking at it. Thus I was able to show that Disney and their partners would exploit children whenever they thought they could get away with it. It just so happened the only other testimony came from a Disney VP who testified immediately after me. Her calls for “self regulation” landed on extremely unsympathetic ears, especially coming right after my graphic testimony and visuals.

I would publish Game Dosing in 2013, explaining the technology that Meta and YouTube would later “secretly” deploy and get sued over. The last few minutes of my testimony in Panama was to warn regulators that this technology was coming and that they needed to be prepared for it. So if Meta and YouTube thought they could just stealth deploy it, sorry. I warned regulators 13 years in advance, and I’ve written many papers on the subject since then. Regulators read them, even if you don’t.

The Perils of Letting Lawyers Run Your Company

Now, I don’t want to appear ungrateful. Because I live a virtuous and transparent life, all those companies that would like to cancel me have limited options. Debating me always backfires, so they occasionally resort to character assassination. If lawyers didn’t volunteer to aid me in my times of need, I probably wouldn’t still be here.

But when you hire a bunch of lawyers to help you make an interactive media product (game, social media, dating app, etc) they aren’t going to be thinking “how can I make this product better?” They are going to be thinking “how do I mitigate risk for my client?” That seems to translate to “How do I cover your ass if you are sued for harming people with your product?” Not “how do we transparently explain the risks of our product so that there is no reason to sue us?”

The end result is that those same lawyers who were hired to risk mitigate, ultimately multiply your risk. In this case, it could literally doom these companies that just last year looked indestructible. As the top expert on the subject of Digital Drugs, you have the option of pairing me with some lawyers, and a dev team, and you could be the first company to bring transparent and effective digital drugs to market. The public likes drugs, if they work and have limited identifiable side effects. Chemicals made inside your body in response to stimuli are much safer than drugs made somewhere else.

The primary restrictions are:

• You have to be transparent with your customers that neuroscience was used to optimize the product. Just like devs now are expected to disclose if AI was used.

• You have to be extra careful about letting children use your product, until you can prove safety to a higher degree with this vulnerable population.

• You get to do meaningful research, that will lead to rapid improvements in the technology. This is the next paradigm. You don’t have to share that research. But you have to pay up front for R&D.

The alternative is to be sneaky and experiment on children without telling the public. That works until it doesn’t. Then the sun will be eclipsed as hundreds of thousand of bloodthirsty lawyers descend on what’s left of your company.

How you play this is up to leadership. It’s also a test of leadership.

My Advice to Industry

Prior to helping regulators, I was the industry’s dirty little secret. As the top “dark ops” academic in the industry, the biggest media companies would discretely contact me if they “had a problem”. Then I would quietly and secretly pay them a little visit and explain to them how to fix their problems. Lawyers weren’t always thrilled about this and would do all sorts of dishonorable things to me to try to force me to do what they wanted. I live by a Code of Bushido since the age of 13. Yes I realize I’m an ideological antique. If you are my patron, I’m sworn to loyalty, even if you are doing something you shouldn’t be doing.

I’m ~15 to 20 years ahead of academia and industry in the field of Digital Drugs. Some of you have spent a lot of money confirming this. Which one of these two leadership options sounds like it would be more effective?

1. You secretly hire a team of psychologists and data people to run PsyOps on your adult and minor customers without them knowing, for a couple years. This will cost you ~$100M. Eventually the public finds out. Regulators probably already know. You suffer irreversible brand damage. You get sued for upwards of $100B. You still ended up with obsolete tech that only boosted your revenue by 10 to 25%. You also generated a lot of disloyal and knowledgeable whistle blowers.

2. You give Ramin a discrete message, ask if I can help you with a little problem. I know you guys know how to do this, I used to get these kinds of calls every week before Panama. If I can help you, I will say so. If I can’t, I will say so and why. If I reject you, don’t get bent. It cost you nothing to ask, and I won’t tell anyone what you asked me for at least 10 years. If you are wanting to do something a bit…Clandestine… then bring me into a room. No electronic devices. No recordings. The Russians dragged me into an underground bunker once. Then you ask me all your questions. The stuff you could hire a research team to figure out, that I already figured out years ago. If anyone asks, we were talking about making Healthy Games. No legal liability. You just saved yourself millions of dollars and a few years, and the lawyers are grudgingly content.

Does this shock you? I never claimed to be Lawful Good. I even wrote a paper explaining that I’m True Neutral. If whatever we are doing can lead to a net positive for society, I’m willing to cooperate with people of creative morals. My mother was an OG California Hippie, and my father was a criminally convicted violet sociopath. I have the best of both worlds. My approach is always rational and pragmatic. I know how to play ball, it’s a necessary skill set in this industry.

I’ve been writing a lot about how we need to move off of dopamine games and move towards oxytocin games. I warned you 12 years ago and now you are getting sued successfully for $6M by some 20 year old who got strung out on doom scrolling. Now you will have millions of people asking themselves “I could make $10K on DoorDash, $100K on OnlyFans, or $6M suing Meta. What should I do?”

Oxytocin makes you healthier, no one’s going to sue you over it unless you use it for mind control. [There’s always that one person who seems to like to get sued] I gave a lecture on the topic at the Captivate Conference back in 2014. I spelled it all out, it’s been 12 years. What are you waiting for? The next lawsuit?

[Update: A secondary theme here that is critical, but that I may not have originally expressed explicitly, is that if your company is run by lawyers, budget will be diverted from all other aspects of production to feed lawyers. They will steer your company into scenarios where you will become eternally dependent on lawyers for survival. If you always do what your lawyers say, your company is run by lawyers.

This isn’t just opinion, you see this playing out all across industry. It becomes especially obvious in regards to these lawsuits. These companies are going to rush to hire more lawyers to handle a flood of lawsuits. On a fixed budget, that means layoffs everywhere else (probably excluding leadership). This is a crisis created by lawyers, for lawyers.

If you are a game developer and 25% or more of your budget goes to lawyers, your odds of survival are negligible. If you embrace a consumer antagonistic ideology, which the entire AAA class has, this is an ideology that is entirely dependent on lawyers for existence. Who advocated for that? Who benefits?

If you adopt pro consumer ideology, and develop consumer friendly technologies (almost unheard of in industry these days) then you abolish 90+% of your need for lawyers. You might actually find that your customers like you better, and buy more of your product.]

For years I had been tracking, analysing, and reporting on the rise of Data in game development. I quickly identified the movie “Moneyball” as the source of this new craze. Advance to July 25th, 2017, and I published Six Years After Moneyball, to date still the most comprehensive paper on the influence this movie had on game development.

That paper started like this:

On September 19th, 2011 the one movie that affected my career more than any other was released: Moneyball. It blew me away! To put it most simply, it showed how math and data could transform business success. Sixteen days later, Steve Jobs died. I really looked up to Mr. Jobs and this was a period of great reflection for me.

A month later on December 16th, the historically catastrophic Zynga IPO happened. Probably aided by the hype around Moneyball, the leaders of Zynga touted their company as “revolutionized by data science”. Investors were falling all over themselves to grab a piece of this and trusted media sources were completely on board. When tragedy struck, I remember shocked investors asking “why didn’t anyone see this coming?” on the Forbes website. So I published a link to Zynga Analysis [6P.] in the thread on Forbes and it became clear that one person had indeed predicted the Zynga collapse in detail months before. Was this luck? Psychic ability? The author described in detail what was going on inside the company without being inside the company. Events that hadn’t even happened yet were detailed.

This is important because it is an example of predictive analysis and in this case was potentially worth billions of dollars if utilized at the time it was written. This is the same sort of predictive analysis described in Moneyball.

In that paper, which has aged very well (I strongly recommend reading the entire paper), I went on to explain that Moneyball, despite being both entertaining and inspirational, was misleading. All qualified data scientists know that to get the results described in Moneyball you need to pair a data analyst with an appropriate domain expert. I assumed this wasn’t explained in the movie just to lower production cost.

But like a complete idiot, the answer was staring at me and I completely missed it.

Recognise that guy talking to Brad Pitt? Yup, that’s Bobby Kotick. Perhaps the most influential man in gaming. Who knew just enough about data to be dangerous to himself and everyone that listened to him. Which was every leader in AAA. The same person who triggered multiple walkouts at the Blizzard campus because of his alleged mishandling of years of sexual misconduct at the company, going back to at least 2018.

It turns out that not only did Bobby and Uncle Jeff have a lot in common, but they were best of “friends” going back to at least 2012 and hung out at each other’s houses at night plotting the future of the gaming industry:

How the Data Implosion Will Trigger the Great Game Dev Correction, August 29th, 2017

I spent the next month pondering the consequences of the misuse of data in game development. Then it hit me, something was very wrong. I checked and rechecked my numbers and functions and they were all going to zero. The methods we were using to “boost revenue” using data would, over time, cause a catastrophic collapse in revenue. This in turn would trigger massive layoffs.

I went to press with my Data Implosion paper, knowing that if I was wrong, it could be the end of my journalism career. I also knew that if I was right, it could be the end of my journalism AND game development career. I had millions of readers, including most of the West’s game developers. There would be nowhere to hide if I was wrong or right.

The industry was laying off creatives and spending that money to hire data analysts (which can be trained in 6 weeks or less) who cost at least twice as much. Over time the effect would be to raise the price of games, and lower their quality. I don’t think you needed to be a math genius to see how that would turn out. Games would lose value against competing forms of media and consumers would lose enthusiasm for games. Then they would lose interest all together if the methodology continued.

In 2017 I had hoped that the desire to make money and be successful would be enough to cause AAA leaders to reconsider their bad decisions. But like all of you, I had no way of knowing that Bobby and Uncle Jeff were calling the shots in the industry by then, if not all the way back in 2012.

The Never Before Revealed Secret of the World’s Fastest Woman, October 4th 2017

This was my next paper at Gamasutra, and my first attempt to explain how oxytocin could be used to make a new generation of higher performing games. I was attempting to chart an offramp path for gaming industry leadership, away from the Data Implosion.

But a strange thing happened. The editor at Gamasutra censored my paper. 100% censored. Visitors to Gamasutra could not read it unless they already had a link to it from somewhere else. I was a featured writer at Gamasutra, nothing like this had ever happened before. The editor refused to explain the action to me. We had a heated discussion over it. Today, looking back, it’s clear that this paper wasn’t the problem. The previous paper was the problem. Someone high up called or emailed the editor and he was going to do exactly as he was told.

The Future of F2P: The Force Wars, December 4th, 2017

I wrote Force Wars after it became clear that the industry was not only doubling down on consumer hostile methodologies, but that it appeared to be acting like a monolith. By this I mean it was acting as a coordinated single entity. This implied some high level collusion. I assumed this was coming from the ESA but now it seems possible it could have been from Bobby and his allies in The Club.

The EU seems to have reacted strongly to what I called “Dark Side Technologies” in Force Wars. They changed the name slightly to obfuscate the source by calling this “Dark Patterns”. Combatting Dark Patterns is the primary theme in the coming Digital Fairness Act.

Commercially, another way of describing a monolith is an oligarchy. With all AAA companies joining the oligarchy, there was no possibility of any company acting independently to seek advantage over the others by better serving public demand. This is the point of an oligarchy, to reduce the costs of innovation and competition. Thus by the time I wrote Force Wars the “Great Game Dev Correction” seemed inevitable.

The Correction started about 6 years after I wrote Data Implosion (about 2 years ago). Many were hoping the dip was cyclical but I’ve been writing furiously on substack about how this is a systemic crash and giving instructions on how to recover. Now the rest of the industry seems to be on board with the idea that this is either systemic, or one heck of a large cycle. It’s not a cycle. The Faerie Game Mother is not going to fly down from the sky to rescue us. We have to do that ourselves.

How Do we Recover?

Now that the industry is in the middle of a death bed revelation, my respected peers and a number of people I’ve never heard of have come out of the woodwork to recommend things they are good at to solve the crash. Some of these ideas are helpful, and we need all the experts we can muster.

Generally these come in the form of minor tweaks to existing systems. The problems I identified in Data Implosion and my various papers on oxytocin are fundamental to the systems we depend on to provide pleasure to our gaming customers. Those systems won’t be fixed by minor tweaks, they are going to require a massive overhaul at this point.

The only good news here is that a massive overhaul typically means a lot of firing and hiring. We’ve already done the firing, though we seem to have fired the useful people and kept all the obsolete people. So we still need more firing I’m afraid.

As I see it, the two massive systemic errors are:

1. Data Misuse and Dark Patterns. The use of data to manipulate consumers and raise prices are both Dark Patterns but they are so critical (and described in Data Implosion) that I mention them separately for emphasis. We need to learn how to use data appropriately, or minimize our use of it. That means using it to inform our decisions, not to manipulate consumers. As far as all the other Dark Patterns, the industry needs to stop fighting regulators and start cooperating with regulators. Regulators are activated due to consumer complaints, you can’t get rid of them without getting rid of your consumers. The end result will be much better for all of us if the gaming industry is voluntarily involved. Uncle Jeff is not going to return from Hell to save us, we have to save ourselves. Of course leadership fired everyone that was pro-consumer years ago, so some hiring will be necessary.

2. Dopamine Flooding is Dead, Time to Pivot. The threat of Dopamine flooding and adaptation that I warned about in 2018 in The Physiology of Gaming was confirmed by research in 2024 with the discovery of the D2-Oxy receptor heterocomplex. The bad news is that all the games you optimized for dopamine delivery will perform worse every year, automatically. Those games are “dead men walking”. Not because the games are bad, but because they made our gamers sick from dopamine intolerance. More dopamine just makes that worse. The good news is that the 2024 research lights up the path to our redemption. I explained the situation in detail a few months ago in my paper How Microscopic Receptors can Make or Break Your Game. You will have to hire people who can help you make either oxytocin based games, or games that use a hybrid Dopamine/Oxytocin hybrid delivery system. “Friendslop” games are far out-performing their budgets because they all are in one of those two groups. Of course with expertise and larger budgets, we can do much better. This is a paradigm shift, like moving from internal combustion to electric engines.

As a pioneer in that field, I used to bag on other industries for being so slow to adapt. Now, of course, I regret having egged these companies on. The world has become a nightmare of the worse conceivable monetisation ideas imaginable. It was no accident that I used cars (SUVs specifically) as my example of what a Supremacy Good was in that 2012 paper.

Humans are great at mimicking each other. They learn how to behave and succeed by the culture they are raised/programmed in. Now that our culture promotes the monetisation/commodification of every aspect of human life, it should come as no surprise that the worst monetisation models, the ones I fought so hard to eliminate from society, are now being used by billions of people in their daily lives.

Here I would like to have a little conversation about what happens when humans themselves become Supremacy Goods. So, what is a Supremacy Good?

As defined in the original paper:

A supremacy good is a good or service that reduces the value of all other linked goods and services in its space, including itself.

Essentially it is a Good that generates Threat that then forces linked goods to try to be even more threatening than the other competing Supremacy Goods in the space. This triggers a race to the bottom where everything turns to shit.

So what happens when humans begin seeing themselves as SGs? If you get one or more influential enough threat generating human SGs in a community, then as they are emulated by others there is tremendous peer pressure for all members of a community to threaten each other in an every escalating threat-race.

Supremacy People

If a person becomes a Supremacy Good, then I define them as Supremacy People. As everything in society is now commodified (and treated as a Good), it’s logical to treat humans as Supremacy Goods when they operate within the above definition. So, what does that look like?

I actually explained this in detail in my 2017 Building a Vastly Better Team Using Neuroscience paper. There I explained the construct of the Large Tribe Worldview and the Small Tribe Worldview.

Large Tribe Worldview: An outlook or even ideology that sees everyone in the world as being part of your tribe, and thus equally deserving of various rights, liberties, and opportunities.

Small Tribe Worldview: An outlook or even ideology that sees some people as “your kind of people” and everyone else as “xeno” or foreign. Members of the proscribed tribe are seen as superior to those outside the tribe, and thus deserving of certain privileges.

By 2017 my work was already being heavily censored at Gamasutra where it was being published, so I had to be very clinical and not point any fingers in that original paper. I primarily focused on explaining that Small Tribers were less productive and more prone to cause conflicts. I also pointed out that Human Resources staff tended to hire with the goal of reducing conflicts by only building teams with the identical Small Tribe Worldview. This would result in a monoculture which is low performing, toxic, and prevents the introduction of key labor assets from outside that Tribe.

Thus HR was trained to harm the companies they served because they didn’t understand the science related to their job. I was attempting to counter this by providing the critical education they were missing. Unlike with SG, to my knowledge, not a single company in the USA adopted this key framework. Thus we saw an explosion of monocultures, discrimination, and “toxic positivity”. Even all the fake DEI programs were designed to create “visually colorful” monocultures and did nothing to promote diversity of thought. Often they were just Excel spreadsheet affairs where mixed race people were handy because they could check off multiple boxes and more easily fit in if they were at least “half racially acceptable”.

So if I hadn’t been censored back in 2017, I would have pointed out that Small Tribers are also Supremacists, and that the vast majority of Americans are Small Tribers. The country was built on gender, racial, and class supremacy, it’s all in writing in the original Constitution. The Supreme Court has in recent years been packed with “Originalists” by the Federalist Society. That’s not a controversial statement, it is how they define themselves. Originalists believe that the USA should go back to the original Constitution and purge all the Amendments that added rights to citizens. For instance, the First Amendment is what makes Free Speech a right. Laws have been passed in most States in the last decade to limit that Right. The Supreme Court will allow these unconstitutional laws because they are referencing the original constitution which has no such protections.

Thus the Originalists are Small Tribers (Supremacists) who seek to have a small group of (mostly white, Christian, Libertarian, rich, etc) elites have all the power in government, business, education, and society. Just like our founding fathers envisioned!

So if you are an American, you are being bathed in Supremacy messaging since at least 1982 (when the Federalist Society was formed). I don’t want to rip off the bandage too fast here so I’m going to give some incremental examples to make it easier to identify.

Feel Good Supremacist Products

I’m seeing a ton of “benign” Supremacist offerings on YouTube these days. First I was getting science fiction stories (I’m big on SciFi of course) where humans were in outer space and meeting other aliens. In each of these stories the humans started out as disadvantaged in some way (behind in tech, out gunned, newcomers, etc) and overcame discrimination from other space beings to rise to become the dominant force in the story.

These are feel good power stories that make you proud to be Human, because Humans are the best race in the Galaxy! It’s all fiction, and those other space beings don’t exist, so what harm could come from indulging in a little bit of power fantasy? The goal of the author isn’t to get you to discriminate against space aliens, it’s to appeal to your Supremacist desires or to condition you to think that way.

This is the Supremacist soft sell, and it’s very subtle so it’s great for children.

Pocket FM

FM is an app that has lots of stories in various genres. You can buy a premium currency and use it to listen to the various stories. The art feed in the background seems AI generated and the stories themselves might even be AI generated. They have a lot of content. None of that is what got my attention.

Before I get into it, I should say I read some user reviews. The stories are broken up into episodes. Each episode requires some premium currency. FM uses dark patterns by cranking up the token cost for later episodes (after you are invested in the story). This isn’t disclosed up front, and hides the true cost of the product way before you buy the premium currency. So before I even get into what’s wrong with the content, the platform is based on a consumer antagonistic business model.

The first “ad” that I was exposed to was in between two YouTube videos. The story was called “Weakest Beast Tamer”. Our protagonist starts as the most impoverished student in a magic academy. The academy is pay to win, and he just can’t compete. Kind of like me in 5th grade when I was moved to affluent North Santa Monica and the teachers there graded based on how much money your family had. I was the poorest kid in the school. I got flamed for “flooding” (having on pants that I had outgrown years ago). The rest of the kids wore designer duds every day so it was obvious I “didn’t belong there”.

The FM story protagonist is humiliated brutally by everyone in the school, even the teachers. He even gets mad at his parents because they didn’t give him as much privilege as the other students. As the story evolves, it turns out his parents had a secret magical legacy that they passed down to him, that they never told him about. It seemed like the story was heading for a showdown in the school where he would turn out to be the strongest student, not the weakest. Not for anything he did, but because of some previously unrealized privilege. .

I ended up getting a second FM ad (story called “Heir in Hiding”), and it was a similar story about a relatively impoverished man who married into a very wealthy family. He was humiliated constantly by everyone. Worse, his wife was shamed for her poor choice of partners. The woman’s mother even offered her millions of dollars to divorce the poor guy (our protagonist). Then it turned out his father or grandfather who had previously disowned him was secretly one of the richest men in the world. Out of nowhere he is offered a business worth $100B and a credit card with $20B on it.

Again another rags to riches Power Fantasy where he went from being the Inferior to being the Superior without any effort. He then begins to set the scenario to humiliate those that humiliated him. And of course save his marriage.

Two stories, both almost identical in form. Both Power Fantasies where the protagonist thinks they are Inferior by birth and turn out to be Superior by birth. Both stories train the listener to want to be Superior and feel that they deserve to be so.

Now I must admit that my World of Warships design, that made billions of dollars for Wargaming, used a Power Fantasy technique that I invented. It wasn’t possible in the gaming space before I deployed it, and it took me months to convince the Founders that it would work. I won’t go into the details here, but the key element that made it work was that I made it fair for all participants. I had no desire to promote Supremacy and this is what took us 3 months to all agree upon. The Founders wanted the game to be fair for everyone.

So I understand the potency of the Power Fantasy, it’s core to my game neuroeconomics research. That means I also recognise it when I see it.

Hero Wars Advertising

Hero Wars initially launched on mobile in 2017. It uses comic sans cartoon graphics, similar to the original Joe Camel ads. This is an automatic signal that the app is aimed at children, regardless of any denials from the developer. We already went through those legal discussions for years and don’t need a do over.

All of the ads for this game use a comic sans male protagonist. Thus boys seem to be the target demographic. This is reinforced by the ads always involving the boy fawning over some beautiful looking woman who turns out to be a monster. Often the monster is hiding their monstrous features, but the viewer can see them. In all cases the boy is lured in with pseudosexual invitations, often literally entering the mouth or groin of the monster. The monster attempts to digest the boys and spits out their bones on the ground.

In the case of the protagonist, he resists and loses his “points” that float above his head, but escapes with nothing and then is shown entering the game space at a starting level. There are hundreds of these ads. I used this small sample to show you what they tend to look like:

Here the monster swallows the boys, and they turn into bones and are dropped into the pile.

Here the woman monster winks at the boys, and they jump in the water to reach her. She then grabs them around the neck with her tentacle and shoves their bodies into her vagina. Bones then float down to the sand below her.

Here the boy drops a block of rock onto the neck of the woman monster and breaks her neck. He then loots her treasure and his score goes up to “666”, a Satanic symbol in Christian mythology.

Young boy with heart emojis crawling onto the stomach and breasts of an adult woman. The scale makes no attempt to hide the age of the boy. Imagine what this would look like if we switched the genders here. Uncle Jeff would approve.

Male children are trained by these ads (and the associated game) to see women as these monsters that will abuse and/or reject/kill them. Women often complain that “alpha male” influencers like Andrew Tate are teaching young men to be misogynistic. But Hero Wars has been teaching this to boys for years, possibly with 8 year olds or even younger. The game has been downloaded 205+ million times by March of 2026.

Supremacy Influencers

The systems used to create, rally, and exploit Supremacists have become industrialized at the highest levels. Supremacists are extremely easy to manipulate and control, which is handy for various companies and governments, especially media. Women tend to be much better consumers than men, which may explain why there seems to be a gender bias in how this technology/methodology is being deployed.

Andrew Tate, 39, is a male Gender Supremacist who advocates for using and (some would argue) abusing women. He uses a lot of misogynistic dog whistles. He’s thus run afoul of the police in multiple countries. His content is currently being promoted on Netflix in a “documentary” called “Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere”. This despite Andrew Tate refusing attempts to get him to appear in the show.

Leticia Padua, 47, also known as the “Sprinkle Sprinkle” woman, is a top female Gender Supremacist. She’s often called “the female Andrew Tate”. Chances are that you’ve never heard of Leticia Padua. She promotes misandrist advice on how to exploit men for money. She uses various misandrist dog whistles to justify mistreatment of men, such as “…because of the patriarchy.” According to her wiki, her content has been viewed over 20 billion times by 2023 on TikTok alone. It seems fair to estimate that by 2026 across all platforms that number would be north of 50 billion.

Nonetheless, reaction by media has been muted, perhaps because what she teaches is seen as more normalized or legal in modern society. Note that as of the time of this writing, Tate has also not been convicted of any felonies. Both have generated a lot of money for the platforms that host them.

While Gender Supremacy has become big money of late, we also have Religious Supremacists, Nationalist Supremacists, Race Supremacists, and Supremacists for almost any ideology you can think of. I’m not going to point more fingers as I think the point is made without my getting billions of well funded and even state-sponsored Supremacists hunting me down.

Methodology

1. Identify a group that is suffering in society. In 2026 that’s wide open territory.

2. Blame their suffering on another group that might have power over them. This sets up a “dog whistle”.

3. Make a call to action that targets the “oppressing” group. This can be seen as blowing the Dog Whistle.

4. Now that you’ve captured your target group (easy), rally them by telling them that they are actually Superior to the group “oppressing” them.

5. Direct them to harm the “Inferior” group.

It is important to note that these are not civil rights actors. They have no interest in “equality”. They seek advantage for their Superior faction. Advantage always comes at the expense of the Inferior group. That expense could be economic harm or reduced civil rights. Taxing everyone then directing that tax to the Superior group is one way, another is restricting the free speech of the Inferior group.

You see social media platforms and their algorithms assisting in this process by applying whatever standards they have to a group they want to be Inferior but not applying it to Supremacy groups. Tracking media bias has itself become a niche industry.

What Does This Have to do with Supremacy Goods?

A supremacy good is a good or service that reduces the value of all other linked goods and services in its space, including itself.

Now, thanks to our world commodifying humans in every way conceivable, humans have been reduced to Goods. Cannibalism is still illegal, but no doubt there are a lot of illegal activities occurring in the dark corners of society. Even the relatively tame unredacted public Epstein files have been shocking to many, and the still secret files (which is most of them) probably will paint humanity in a very poor light.

But under the Supremacy Goods microeconomic model, if you accept my proposal that humans themselves have been converted to Supremacy Goods, then the value of every individual human on Earth is being reduced in value as Supremacy becomes more widespread. As you can see from the above normalized examples of how children are being treated, this degradation of human value is in an advanced stage. Even if we stopped it now (impossible) the effects would last for generations.

As human value approaches zero mathematically, some of the worst uses of humans become themselves normalized. War on civilians, sex trafficking, child labor (Roblox), and legal sex work (at least for women) have all been normalized. Note that I respect my sex working brothers and sisters. But a system that pays them more for that compared to any other income generating option is turning our children into sex workers. Even that I might tolerate (barely), but since generally only people (especially men) over the age of 40 can afford to pay for sex, that could literally lead to extinction for our species.

The days of “boy meets girl and they fall in love” have become mythological. Now we train our children to fear and hate each other. I provided the receipts above. That creates an environment where all our human labor can go into AI and the humans that built it become disposable.

When you go to the market this week and notice the cost of everything you need to live is going up, realize that’s not by accident. It’s by design. And those prices will keep going up, rapidly. If you have a job still, your pay isn’t going up. Many are losing their jobs as everything becomes automated.

When the food, energy, and shelter that humans need to survive becomes more valuable than the work product of said human, it’s going to be end of the line for them. That’s not conspiracy theory, that’s fundamental economic theory as put in print by Adam Smith in his 1775 “The Wealth of Nations”. That’s the tome that created modern economics. From Book 1 Chapter 8, “On the Wages of Labour”:

It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties [workers and masters] must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, a merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him [not always, see below]; but the necessity is not so immediate.

We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things, which nobody ever hears of. Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate [the survival rate]. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy, till the moment of execution

A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more; otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation. Mr. Cantillon seems, upon this account, to suppose that the lowest species of common labourers must everywhere earn at least double their own maintenance, in order that one with another they may be enabled to bring up two children [I explain in the previous paper on global economics that this minimum pay rate is maintained word-wide, but the other portion now goes to elderly, not children. Hence no children.]

But it would be otherwise in a country where the funds destined for the maintenance of labour were sensibly decaying… Many would not be able to find employment even upon these hard terms, but would either starve, or be driven to seek a subsistence either by begging, or by the perpetration perhaps of the greatest enormities [crimes]. Want, famine, and mortality would immediately prevail in that class, and from thence extend themselves to all the superior classes, till the number of inhabitants in the country was reduced to what could easily be maintained by the revenue and stock which remained in it, and which had escaped either the tyranny or calamity which had destroyed the rest.

Poverty, though it no doubt discourages, does not always prevent marriage. It seems even to be favourable to generation. A half-starved Highland woman frequently bears more than twenty children, while a pampered fine lady is often incapable of bearing any, and is generally exhausted by two or three. Barrenness, so frequent among women of fashion, is very rare among those of inferior station.

But poverty, though it does not prevent the generation, is extremely unfavourable to the rearing of children. The tender plant is produced, but in so cold a soil and so severe a climate, soon withers and dies. It is not uncommon, I have been frequently told, in the Highlands of Scotland for a mother who has borne twenty children not to have two alive…in civilised society it is only among the inferior ranks of people that the scantiness of subsistence can set limits to the further multiplication of the human species; and it can do so in no other way than by destroying a great part of the children

I believe, that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves [this is why slavery ended]

Adam Smith didn’t hold back when talking about starving the children of “inferior” people to death to reduce food consumption. He also gave the mathematical blueprint for minimizing the wages of those Inferiors that were commercially useful. This is economics.

Adam Smith wasn’t psychic. He didn’t predict 2026. He designed it. He is the father of Economics. But I’ve never met an “economist” that was shown the instruction manual in college. It’s like the first, second, and third rule of “Economics Club” is you don’t talk about The Wealth of Nations. I would provide the link to Book 1 Chapter 8, but I want you to see for yourself how your search engine doesn’t want to show it to you.

The American “originalists” that took over the USA Supreme Court want to roll the USA Constitution back to 1776 when only a handful of people could vote and other rights didn’t exist. The Wealth of Nations was published in 1775.

If you are a man that thinks you are better than women, or a woman that thinks you are better than men, or someone in the middle that can’t afford marriage or children, or wondering why the most fertile region of Earth is being bombed, or why you don’t have a job, that’s not “circumstances”. That’s design. That’s 1776 calling. It wants its Golden Age of the Supremacists back.

Major trends which I will analyse here:

• The economic effects of Demographic Collapse

• The imminent depletion of oil resources, and resulting competition

• The economic implications of accelerating Ecosphere collapse

I will pull these all together to answer the ultimate (previously) unaddressed question:

• What price are we willing to pay for AGI, and what if that’s more than all the money/resources in the world?

The Economics of Demographic Collapse

In papers 92A through 97E I explained what is causing Demographic Collapse and how to reverse it. What I didn’t focus on was the economic costs of Demographic Collapse. The longer a person lives, and the earlier they are allowed to retire, the greater a burden they place on their economy. Some people, like scientists, teachers, and leaders, can theoretically be productive until they die or suffer from dementia. We still typically allow or force them to retire. We make no distinction between the productive elderly and the unproductive elderly in society.

Japan is on the cutting edge of Demographic Collapse. We can see our future through them as we are all going to go through what they are, just perhaps 20 years after they do. Here is the paradox that Japan was not able to survive in time, and now it may be too late to ever solve it:

• The longer a person lives without working, the more resources are drained from the economy.

• Technological breakthroughs can extend lifespan.

• Each productive worker needs to give up a portion of their output to sustain the unproductive. This includes both children and unproductive elderly.

• The more of an individual’s budget goes to the elderly, less must go to children.

• In Japan today, almost 50% of each worker’s output goes to the elderly. 50% sustains one life.

• If each worker needs half their output just to themselves survive, then after they pay 50% to the elderly there is nothing left to give to children.

• Without a budget for children, we stop making children.

• While technology could raise human productivity to allow them to support more than two people, humans raise the cost of sustaining a human just by existing.

• Technology also requires a budget. No budget means no new technology.

• Additional conditions apply that I am about to explain.

You can check life expectancies by nation here. Japan and South Korea have the largest life expectancies of major countries. Japan has a replacement rate of 1.1 and South Korea has a rate of 0.8. Anything under 2.1 means the population is in decline. In both countries, children are almost always born to married couples. Getting married is hard, and getting harder every year. That might result in healthier children, but also that means a lot less children.

Having less people would give more resources to each person. But the problem here is that children (unproductive) promote to adults (productive) automatically. Similarly, adults promote to elderly (unproductive) automatically. If the replacement rate in your country drops below 2.1, then more people are promoting to unproductivity than productivity every year. That means less money for children every year.

This creates a negative feedback loop, what I call a Death Spiral. In this case, I mean that literally. As long as the elderly cohort is larger than the child cohort, the population will continue to decline to zero. If replacement rate is under 2.1, then this condition MUST be true.

Japan has been in decline for 10 years now. They spend a lot on children, which is why their replacement rate is better now than South Korea. But it’s still only half of what they need.

Note that if women live longer than men (true in every country) then the more women you have, if they are allowed to retire at the same age as men, the faster the Death Spiral. There is no country on Earth that requires women to be older to retire. Russia, China, and Vietnam retire their women younger than men, really accelerating their Death Spiral. Russian replacement rate is about 1.4 and China’s is at 1.1. Russia is losing a lot of productive men in the Ukrainian war. Both these countries could soon find themselves catching up to and passing Japan in a race they don’t want to win.

Are there solutions? Logan’s Run (1976) proposed a Dystopian solution by eliminating unproductive elderly entirely. Soylent Green (1973) seemed to describe how we might end up with Logan’s Run. I proposed using future AI to raise the productivity of humans in my 2010 Third Tier of Game Development paper. This would increase the number of people (both children and elderly) that each working adult could support. The Master class read my paper and decided to do the opposite of what I suggested. They want to replace humans with AI instead of using AI to improve humans. I recently began to write Fourth Tier of Game Development to explain how that will affect the future. Predicting the future is a lot of work so that’s a work in progress. I’m optimistic that a resulting AGI would preserve ~10% of the world’s current population. But, it doesn’t have to.

Oil Depletion

Oil is energy. Humans need energy to live, and AI needs energy to operate. Energy from oil can be converted to biological energy (food) with some loss of energy in the process and vice versa. Food and solar power can both be created using sunlight but oil is a finite resource. We also use oil to produce fertilizer, and if that supply chain is disrupted then food production will decline. Between 40% and 50% of total Earthly food production is dependent on synthetic fertilizers. Those require hydrogen from methane (and LNG) to create ammonia. If we ran out of the materials to make fertilizer, then in excess of 3 billion humans would have to be eliminated from the current Earthly population. Alternate sources of energy do not supply hydrogen in meaningful quantities. As discussed in the previous paper, we know how much Oil is located where and this causes geopolitical tension since everyone needs it but not everyone has it.

Historically, the first countries to exploit the power of oil then used it to exploit countries that didn’t have it, triggering a race to colonize the world. Colonized countries are trying to fight for their freedom, which is what you see in the Gulf now. Colonizing powers are especially concerned about oil rich countries developing nuclear weapons because this would prevent their future colonization. When a country with nuclear weapons declares that a neighbor can’t have them, this is a “Might makes Right” argument. Ukraine used to have nuclear weapons, but gave them up to Russia in return for peace guarantees. This of course led to their invasion by Russia.

The USA is under increasing pressure to secure the oil reserves of other countries. The USA started with some of the world’s largest reserves but has burned through them at fantastic speed. At current rates, the USA will be out of oil in 10 years. But as you approach zero, the last oil gets FAR more expensive to extract and comes with greater risk (sink holes, water table contamination, etc). Thus the effective reserve is always less than the total reserve.

The other compounding issue is the USA’s drive to develop AI. This could at least double the energy needs of the USA, causing them to run out of oil in 4 to 5 years. They are literally on the last lap. Attempts are being made to make more oil available through means such as “frakking”, but these methods are more expensive and are extraordinarily damaging to the environment. In this case, water supplies are ruined and clean water is in short supply already. Water isn’t just needed by humans and agriculture, but also in energy production and cooling needed by AI.

Still, Venezuela has so much oil that if it was fully utilized by the USA and not shared with anyone else, it could supply the USA for another 25 years. That likely would be enough to get across the AGI finish line.

So this begs the question… what’s the economic payoff of controlling the oil in the Gulf? It’s not to send it to the USA. It’s to NOT send it to China. As I explained a few months ago, the West and the East believe they are in an existential fight over Taiwan. They both seem to have put late 2028 as the timeline for this. This is why AI takes precedent over all else. AI doesn’t generate money, as money is a unit of human labor. AI runs on energy, not money, and only needs money to purchase human labor. I discuss this in detail in the Fourth Tier: The End of Money . AI ultimately generates military power, that’s what it’s for regardless of the rhetoric. The effort to develop and test Palantir’s “kill chain” AI is in full swing right now in Iran. The USA Department of War has declared officially that Palantir AI will be integrated into all military systems across all branches.

The USA tried to slow China with tariffs, China responded by restricting rare earth flows to the West. This shifted the balance of power to China, so the USA is utilizing their greatest strategic advantage: their military power in the Gulf. This is why they are not too concerned if all of the production sites get blown up. They see this as much more harmful to China than to the USA, and the USA president has publicly said this to be part of his ideology.

When oil prices skyrocket, gasoline prices rise too. This even happens in the USA because oil companies will profit take at the expense of the rest of the country. There may not be a shortage there, but if Americans want gas they will still have to pay the elevated market rates.

Thus the longer production is shut down, either directly by bombing the production facilities or by restricting Strait of Hormuz passage, both American oil and AI corporate interests benefit. Sure supply chain disruption will be a problem for every country, but these major corporations disproportionately benefit and that’s what matters to them.

I’ve heard some discussion of a “war profit tax” that would remove the financial incentive for war, but I can’t see it ever happening in the USA. This is the game, and this is how it is played.

The Cost of Ecological Disruption

The price of industrialization is degraded air, water, and soil. The cost of human overpopulation is depleted natural food supplies and biodiversity loss. Losing biodiversity disrupts natural supply chains and can cause chain reaction collapse of organisms that humans need (like bees) or prey on (like fish). All of these trends can be seen as degrading the larger Ecosystem of Earth.

It is helpful to think of the Ecosystem as a huge star ship that carries humans safely through an otherwise hostile Outer Space. Of course low-educated humans just see a world of air and water and don’t understand how fragile their world is or how close (about 100 km) they are to outer space. A fully functional Earth can maintain a “crew” of about 2 billion humans maximum. We exceeded this number a century ago.

Overloading Earth’s carrying capacity causes damage to the Earth star ship. Industrialization does even more damage. This damage lowers the sustainable carrying capacity of Earth. So even as the population is going up, the carrying capacity is going down. The result is that degradation accelerates.

This process is invisible to 99% of humans, which makes it easy to ignore. To regular people they only see this increasing damage as “prices for everything are going up”. Inflation. Money is a unit of human labor, and that labor goes down in value relative to the cost of survival every year. The faster we damage the Ecosystem, that faster inflation has to rise. If wages always kept up, we could essentially ignore inflation.

But that’s not how this works. Technology isn’t raising wages, it’s lowering them. Automation might raise the productivity of some people, but overall it reduces the need for human labor and overall reduces the cost of labor for companies. Less “cost of labor” means less money for laborers.

Prices go up (constantly), wages go down (constantly). That is our current reality, and that’s only going to accelerate every year. This trend progressively pushes our people below the poverty line, and then eventually below the survival line. This is what Soylent Green was trying to predict and explain. The movie had a big influence on me when I saw it in the theater in 1973 (at the Fox theater on Lincoln Blvd in Santa Monica), at the same time California had water rationing (due to drought) and gasoline rationing (due to OPEC).

These overlapping events triggered my intense interest in global economics at the age of 7. Simultaneously the public school system was telling me to self educate since there were no teachers available at a level capable of instructing me. So I spent hours in the library every day.

This trend may look like “economics” to you, and it is from a human perspective. But what we are really looking at is a mathematical, physics, and biological system designed to restore homeostasis. Translation: people will continually be pushed below the survival line until the number of humans is at or below the Earthly star ship’s carrying capacity. As the process accelerates, it becomes more obvious.

If the carrying capacity stayed at 2B, we would need to lose about 6B people. But the carrying capacity goes down as we destroy biodiversity, the ozone layer, the air, the water, the oceans, the soil, and spread radiation. We also accelerate the evolution of microbes which feed on us, which I discussed in Third Tier of Game Development in 2010, predicting the big pandemic 9 years later. That was an easy prediction because as microbial evolution accelerates, the time between pandemics shortens and we were due.

Of course the more we blow up the Earth star ship and each other, this process speeds up even more. Wars and lower level conflicts are inevitable as everything gets scarcer and most costly, and people get more desperate. The Ecosystem is automated and doesn’t have a personality. But if it did, it would look like this:

Every time we drop a bomb, foul a water source, strip mine the oceans, release radiation of pollution, or FAFO with dangerous viruses in our labs, I see an anthropomorphized Earth doing that to us. “Yes, FAFO with me and see how you like it when I lower the carrying capacity to 1B. Or lower.”

To you, it just looks like inflation. You just complain about it as if it was someone else’s doing. Then you buy your roach traps, dishwashing soap, aluminum foiland tonight’s fish. You put it into plastic bags and fill up the tank on the way home. Jack is mocking you.

From this perspective, you can see that humans are barely keeping their shit together. Except when we have conflicts or resurrect 3700 year old scriptures to justify those conflicts. Back then humans fought each other because they wanted to. Today, they fight each other because they have to.

Every time humanity’s greed and self interest leads to some petty bullshit like what we are seeing in the Gulf, I think of one of the most brilliant scenes from the movie Titanic:

For those that forgot the movie, that’s a rich man kidnapping a small child to con people into letting him on the last lifeboat. That’s what I see every time I see another speech from someone that started a war “because they had to”. They are stepping onto one of the last life boats. You are still on the Titanic. Did you even notice the con? Maybe that’s survival of the fittest. That’s why you didn’t get a boat. At least that’s what they are telling the other survivors. They just wanted to survive more than you did.

The Law of Economic Gravity

Humans consume energy to live. All life does. The more energy humans consume, the more other life has to die. Humans damage the planet as they consume it. This raises the per unit cost of energy. The longer each individual human lives, the higher the per unit cost of energy. The more humans we make, and the longer they live, the higher the per unit cost of making a new human becomes.

Focusing on growth raises your budget today, and lowers it tomorrow. If we have to keep growing because of our ideology, that means we have to borrow from Tomorrow to pay for Today. In the end, all debts must be paid. With interest.

That means that we borrow from our children, and oppress them, so that we can continue to live beyond our means. Native peoples never had this problem, because they put their children above themselves. They understood Balance. Industrialization created a God of Growth, an evil thing that then went on to eradicate all or almost all indigenous peoples. The God of Growth is not a benign being. It eats the future to sustain itself. The longer it lives, the darker our future becomes.

Now I’m not against AI or technology, I grew up in love with the worlds of authors such as Robert Heinlein. Starship Troopers and Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. But all development must follow the rules of Economic Gravity, that pulls us towards homeostatis (balance) within the limits of the Earthly space ship (ecosystem). Progress was being made as we reduced our reliance on oil and nuclear power and started trying to be better crew on the Ship.

Then along came some people who also were fascinated by Space. But perhaps they didn’t understand Space (or economics, or biology, or ecology) the way I do. They decided that if they just created AGI (self aware and controlling AI) then it would get them to space. That movement got hijacked by people who wanted to use AI to kill everyone that disagreed with them. Some of those people want to use AI to complete their Apocalypse Doomsday Prophecies.

The next thing you know, all caution was thrown to the winds. MUST grab and control all the oil. MUST build Small Modular Nuclear Reactors everywhere, as fast as possible. MUST double (or more) Earth’s production (consumption) of energy to feed AI. These are all very entitled people who grew up super rich and never had to check the price of anything before making a purchase.

If you ask them how much AGI costs, they won’t tell you. That have no clue as to the cost, or hold long it will take, or even what it will do or look like when/if it is built. But they are totally willing to borrow from the next 100+ years of human children so that they can have their moment of glory. “It will be worth it” they say.

On this side of the planet, we don’t do things just because we want to. My success in game dev, or science, or the Olympics wasn’t because I felt like it. These things took decades of planning and preparation. Most people just don’t want to work that hard so they think these things are impossible.

Since the AI tech lords have no idea what they are building, how long it will take, what it will do IF they build it, or how much it will cost, they aren’t working in a world of preparation. Maybe this is a world of emotions or “wants”. They always got what they wanted, how could this be different?

What if they demand half the world’s resources (the Master class is totally capable of commanding this) for the duration of the project? This is enough to push 2% of the world’s population into starvation (hypothetical number). Let’s say they plan to do this for 45 years, that will leave them with 10% of the human population left over. Plenty since with AGI we won’t really need humans so much after that anyways. 90%, 7.2 Billion humans, die building AGI.

Fair enough. “It will be worth it.” Just for argument’s sake, I will agree with them. We’ve survived with only 800M humans on Earth before (less than 200 years ago actually), we can do it again. Maybe they argue that they can do it in 10 years. That would only kill 1.6 billion people. What a bargain for such a valuable and powerful tech! But we really don’t know if it will take 10 years, 45 years, or 75 years. The project would kill everyone on earth way before 75 years, so it’s kind of a gamble.

I’m pretty sure, listening to them talk, that they’ve already considered the above math and are totally fine with it. What they haven’t factored in is that they would be pushing Earth WAY out of balance during this period. Jack is going to be SUPER pissed off. What started as a 2% yearly attrition rate is going to inch up to 3%. Then 4%. Then you get to the point where even if you stop the AGI mega project, the population STILL goes down rapidly. Now everyone is fucked.

None of these people understand biology or ecology or, seemingly, economics. The ethicists were the first ones to get fired. What if the price tag ends up being higher than the entire budget of the species? Then even if we stop in time, we’ve created so much ecological debt that we keep dying just to pay off all that interest. Forget about paying the principle, that’s in fantasy land.

But nonetheless, the urgency for maximum control over maximum energy forces us to start a war that can’t be won. If we did win, for instance by using nuclear weapons (literally being discussed right now by involved parties), we would all lose. Kind of hard to extract oil from a nuclear wasteland. This is actually a very fertile region, that’s why so many armies were raised here over thousands of years.

Humans and oil are both finite resources. We are used to thinking of humans as an unlimited (and expendable) resource, but with Demographic Collapse happening, that’s going to change for perhaps the first time in 250,000 years. In 50 years we will be out of oil, one way or another. In 50 years most advanced countries will have lost half their populations and, given observed behavior, they won’t be able to create or implement new economic models that would prevent total economic collapse.

This is our situation. 50 years isn’t much time, unless you are a dog or cat. For those of us more than 50 years old, still in our right minds, we know how fast 50 years can happen. Yes I’m extraordinarily distressed by the Gulf War, but at least half that frustration is knowing that even after it ends we will just be going into the next war until global supply chains are mythological.

At that point the chances of being able to afford AGI start to race to zero as global budgets decline severely. Sure this sort of decline has never happened before. But we also didn’t have super computers and hypersonic nuclear weapons during WW2. We were like monkeys throwing sticks at each other just 80 years ago. Our collective (or specific) leadership skills and wisdom have not kept up with the power we command.

And, sadly, even if we had the scientists needed to sort this problem out, they don’t do much good if no one listens to them. We are up against multiple mathematically measurable extinction events simultaneously. As is the way of these things, each one individually could end society (but not the species) within 50 years. But when you layer them, you get compounding effects. None of them cancel each other out, they all make each other worse until we get rid of about 6 billion people. So we could have far less than 50 years to get our collective acts together.

We no longer have the luxury of saying “oh this or that leader was bad, but that’s their responsibility not mine.” We won’t solve these problems through self interest. All of us will have to sacrifice to pay off the debts our parents and grandparents left us. Passing it off again to our children isn’t an option. We aren’t even making children to pass our debts off to.

My most controversial paper ever was Compassion in F2P. The gaming industry lost their collective minds and branded me a Heretic when I suggested that Compassion was a thing. Compassion isn’t a threat to society, it’s going to be the only thing that gets us to a place where Jack stops mocking us. False humility makes me barf and it just makes Jack laugh at you harder. Because you can’t escape Jack without jumping on a space ship and leaving this one. I’m very eager to see how that turns out for Elon and the rest of the AI Masters.

Economic Gravity pulls us constantly towards a world that is in balance with Nature. The more you disrupt that relationship, the harder Gravity will pull you in the opposite of the direction you want to go. The more you grow, the more Jack mocks you. War and capitalism both depend on growth. To survive we need new social models, and new economic models. Ones that can handle centuries of recession and depression without everyone jumping off of buildings or running down the street shooting their gun.

I know we could design this, but I honestly don’t think humans would cooperate to actually do it. AI could make us do it, and that’s what I explain in Fourth Tier of Game Development. It’s not pretty, but it’s better than what we have now. It’s MUCH better than what we will have in 10 or 20 years at the rate we are going. It’s not what the tech lords think they are building, which is the part that amuses me. But they could end up accidentally solving a lot of problems they don’t want to solve. They benefit from inequality so an end game where humans do experience equality of opportunity would certainly disappoint them.

Either way, Jack doesn’t care. He will keep mocking us until we get to equilibrium or die not trying.

I would invite my dear readers to look at the Gulf War through this lens. Then think about what kind of future we are making, if you can. The Gulf States could manage themselves. They aren’t so primitive that they need to be colonized. They could become the next EU if we don’t bomb them into the Stone Age out of spite, greed, and racism. We don’t even need to help them do this, we just have to follow the advice of my main gal-crush:

"I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks".

— Ruth Bader Ginsberg

Just replace the word “sex” with the word “race”. Then we can get to work making something useful out of the 21st Century. And “growth” is a dirty word. Jack doesn’t like that. Fear of losing wars pushes insecure men to promote growth. We mock Japan for having been in recession for 30+ years. Japan is a smart country. They lead the rest of the world in almost every metric that matters. We need to flip the script and start holding Japan in higher regard. To survive we all need to “ungrowth”. I can’t find a single word in English that is the opposite of growth that isn’t derogatory. We need to change that.

Balance in All Things

This used to be taught by Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Baha’i Faith, Hinduism, Christianity, Hellenism, and all indigenous tribes. Where did we stray? Maybe it was economics that killed balance. To me economics should be a system to restore balance, not pervert it.

USA Economic Goals

The primary economic goal for the USA is control of a majority of the oil assets globally. This has been their goal since right after WW2. The formation of Israel in ~1948 was intended to allow force projection into the Gulf via a friendly proxy.

By understanding where the “available” (conquerable) oil reserves are, the picture gets very clear:

• Iran (1953 + 2026), Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), and Venezuela (2026) have been invaded by the USA, often with help from allies. In all cases a puppet ruler was installed to establish a Colony (C). Iran liberated themselves in 1979 and the USA had plans to invade again after they pacified Iraq. That took longer than they expected.

• Saudi Arabia (1946), UAE (~2000), and Kuwait (1999) agreed to allow themselves to become Proxies with Military Bases (PB) in order to avoid being invaded or otherwise subjected to regime change.

• Russia has been a strategic opponent since 1918, with a very brief alliance during WW2.

• Canada has no USA military bases, and does not possess any nuclear weapons. Thus they have been declared a military target by the current USA administration in order to pressure them into annexation (as “the 51st state”).

I assume all my readers already understood that a long term strategic goal of the USA has been to control all major oil reserves outside of Russia, since WW2. Here I’m making the situation a bit more clear and demonstrating how close the USA is to achieving that goal militarily.

If we look at oil production instead of reserves, then the situation becomes even more clear:

Venezuela, despite having the world’s largest reserves, doesn’t even produce in the top 10 due to long standing embargoes from the USA, and sanctions meant to cripple their economy and destabilize the country politically. Here you can see the USA is by far the world’s largest oil producer. But their reserves are almost depleted (they’ve used a lot of oil over the years).

The faster the USA “produces” oil, the faster their reserves deplete. They will be the first country on either of these lists to run out of oil. Of course production isn’t a binary, as reserves go down the cost per barrel to extract will go up. Very soon the USA’s economy will be crippled unless they can secure enough foreign supplies to make up for the looming deficit.

The obvious target to solve that problem is Venezuela since it is within their sphere of influence. Venezuela has increasingly been selling to China since 2005. Invading Venezuela was necessary to block the flow to China and to establish control to begin diverting and expanding their production to the USA.

Gulf oil primarily goes to Asia. Prior to the second Russian invasion of Ukraine, Europe got most of their oil from Russia. The shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz harms all of Asia (including Australia and Japan), but especially China. Trump has made it clear that he believes it benefits him to have the Strait closed, so he’s not in any particular hurry to secure it. Or, at least that it being closed hurts China a lot more than the USA, so it is a net positive.

The animosity to China is aggravated by their collapsing thousands of rare earth supply chains. Shutting down Hormuz isn’t exactly a fumble on the part of the USA. They intend to trade access to oil for access to rare earths. But of course this depends on the USA re-establishing control of the Strait.

Ultimately the current administration, like all previous administrations, sees strategic control of the Gulf as a core economic and military doctrine. Militarization of Israel and the Proxy bases in other Gulf states are all part of that doctrine.

USA+Israeli Secondary Economic Goals

The USA is keen to develop military applications of AI. This requires testing on live targets, preferably targets that resist somewhat. Palantir’s “automated kill chain” tech allows the USA and Israel to hit thousands of targets, a feat that would not be possible if they had to be selected manually by humans.

The AI is ordered to attack anything that might have military value. Sometimes it gets confused by words in Farsi that are on the kill chain list of words. This is why all those children and at least one empty park were bombed into oblivion. A human is given a list of targets by the AI, and they are supposed to confirm them before the automation starts killing people. In reality, that’s just too much work so the operators hit the “Accept All” button. The convenience just outweighs any potential political costs.

Israel is also heavily involved in military AI development and similarly benefits from live fire testing on human subjects. Regular weapons testing has been going on in the region for decades but AI weapon tech is far more lucrative.

Israeli Primary Economic Goals

Israeli administration is looking to annex, develop, and ultimately sell as much real estate as possible…

[As I write these papers, I’ve been doing a LOT of math in my head in the background. It is at this very moment in my writing that it hits me like a lightning bolt. A massive surge of euphoria (because I love these mathematical moments when the Universe talks to me) and dread. It’s very tempting for me to think that some of the “smartest” people on Earth are actually pretty dumb. But we all have this hidden fantasy. That’s why when I’m truly threatened, I play dumb. It always works because people secretly fantasize that I’m as stupid as I am smart. What if the people starting this war really aren’t as dumb as they look? What if this War wasn’t at all what it looks like?

I’ve been assuming that this is all happening at once because an old man is in the last year of his life and is being exploited because…he’s easy to exploit and the window of opportunity is closing quickly. That still might be true, but what’s going on in the background is so much more horrible and brilliant at the same time.

With your permission, dear reader, I’m going to grab the steering wheel firmly and crank it hard to the left. I’m going to wrap this up faster than I expected so I can explain in the next paper.]

I’m feeling comfortable in the thought that the economics here aren’t as dumb as they appear, and this is not about land per se. I’m going to stop talking about economics here, and get to the military situation. Then I will get right into explaining my brainstorm in the next paper.

Let’s Get Militaristic

Proxy Traps: Ukraine

When I saw the West training and arming Ukraine after the first Crimean invasion by Russia, I thought to myself “This is an obvious trap. Could Putin really be dumb enough to fall into it?” I didn’t have to wait long to get my answer. Putin rushed right in and set off the trap. If he could have pulled out, he would have already. But he knows that if he does he’s going to end up taking one of those famous Russian Balcony Dives.

As a military historian, it is mind blowing when you look at the world’s military tech level in 1945 and compare it to what we had in 1939. Humans can be very industrious when they are threatened with extinction. If anything, time-tech is compressing due to AI. We can discover more in less time.

NATO and Ukraine recently (and very quietly) did a little secret war game. One modern NATO frigate versus (1?) Ukrainian Unmanned Maritime System (UMS). I don’t know the details on the UMS, only that it exists now. Five battles were run, and the Frigate lost each time. The Frigate was totally helpless. Such a frigate costs almost 3 billion USD and has between 100 and 180 crew.

Gone. Annihilated.

You probably heard that Trump went to Zalinski and begged him for help against Iran. It sounds funny, especially given how Trump humiliated Zalinski with his “you have no cards” talking down. But so much money flowed into the Proxy Trap that Ukraine is now arguably the world’s most advanced military.

Proxy Traps: Iran

The USA and Israel haven’t been very good at hiding their goals in the Middle East. The West may have had 8+ years to set up the Ukraine Proxy Trap, but Russia and China have had 20+ years to set up the Iran Proxy Trap. And the USA and Israel just walked right into it, like the Fool from the Tarot card.

Venezuela was just so easy that who could resist the Iran honey (Proxy) Trap? As of this week, it is now apparent that while Ukraine has the world’s most advanced drones, Iran might have the world’s most advanced hypersonic missiles.

We know Russia has had hypersonic missiles for a while. Russia’s most powerful weapon against Ukraine has been their “glide bombs”. They are very inexpensive and allow Russia to bomb Ukraine with super heavy ordnance from safe distances. You just target it and let it go and it “glides” at high speed to the target. And of course Russia has the satellite tech to very precisely target their bombs.

Consider Iran’s Fattah-2:

• Hypersonic with a cruise speed of Mach 15. 3 miles (4.5 km) per second.

• Uses a “glide” mechanism

• Extremely Precise

• Can use single or multiple warheads

This thing has “Russia quietly helped us out a bit” written all over it. Until 2 weeks ago, the West seemed to assume it was mythological. It is unknown how many they have and how fast they build them. What we do know is that Israel radar locked it and fired 10 Arrow-3 interceptors at it and Fattah-2 was too fast to be intercepted. Arrow-3’s cost ~3 million dollars each, so $30M was shot into the sky with zero effect. Presumably the targets are only the highest value, and I’m hearing all sorts of rumors as to what those were but no confirmation yet. Of course we know that the USA lost their $1.1B AN/FPS-132 Block 5 Upgraded Early Warning Radar (UEWR) located in Qatar (the country that is now regretting giving Trump the $400M personal jet). Without it, the ability to intercept or even see ballistic missiles is severely reduced.

We know that the USA has pulled back all of their aircraft carriers. It would seem that Fattah-2 could take one out. If it hasn’t been used for this yet, that would indicate some restraint on the part of the Iranians. The USS Abraham Lincoln reportedly came under fire at the start of the war and retreated, which seemed odd at the time. It has a crew of over 5000 highly trained personnel.

Iran has been making a LOT of Shahed drones for Russia, and clearly they were paid with more than money. After all their diplomats were vaporized right in the middle of talks, Iran has said there will be no diplomacy and is daring the USA to land ground troops. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more defences there than what is obvious.

Pete Hegseth has said publicly that he believes the new leader of Iran was caught in the strike that killed his father and “must be crippled”. Strong rumors suggest he was promptly flown to Russia for emergency medical care, which is itself a complication.

The USA seems VERY keen to negotiate now, but Israel will not allow that and blows up anyone in Iran that could be qualified to engage in diplomacy to make sure that doesn’t happen. The USA is even removing restrictions on Russia selling oil, so things are looking up for the Russian economy.

I would expect that Russia will help Iran as long as the West is helping Ukraine. This is tit for tat, and both wars could easily go on for 5 plus years. Any deal would likely require both wars to end at the same time, and Iran would require the USA to remove all of their Gulf military bases.

There is one big wildcard in play…

China

Closing the Strait of Hormuz harms a lot of countries, but especially those in Asia and Australia. Supplies of oil, naphtha, and urea are going to run critically low. Naphtha is used to make plastics and urea is used to make food. The country most harmed by a shutdown of the Strait, if it lasts beyond their 4 month strategic reserve duration, would be China.

China would be more than happy to bog the USA down in a Proxy War in Iran. I would expect an almost unlimited amount of help to be heading to Iran soon, just as in the Korean and Vietnam Proxy Wars. The USA didn’t win either of those wars.

The threat of a Taiwan invasion, which I previously predicted to happen by 2028, just got a lot greater. With the USA’s supply of missiles rapidly approaching zero, there wouldn’t be much that the USA could do to stop it now.

Thus despite all the excitement in the Gulf, China is really the country to watch right now. I can’t predict their exact next move yet, but if the Strait stays closed much longer then China will have to mobilize. I already consider this to be World War 3, but if China mobilizes then it becomes official.

Thanks to Israel vaporizing all the Iranian leadership and diplomats, there is close to zero chance of de-escalation in the next year. This is, of course, totally intentional. Israel seeks to be the unchallenged super power in the Middle East and Iran is the only country in the way of that becoming reality. The cost to Israel of making that happen is a lot lower if the cost is paid for by the USA.

The only good news that I can think of here is that since the Middle East is so strategically valuable, a nuclear exchange would cause unacceptable levels of fallout across the region. This is the main thing giving the nuclear powers in the region pause, they don’t seem too concerned about civilian casualties and the land is very valuable in its current unirradiated state.

In 1954 it was understood that Russian spies were seeking to infiltrate the USA. The McCarthy hearings were a dark period where liberals, intellectuals, and labor leaders were rounded up and interrogated on national television to see if they were Russian spies.

Perhaps it was political theatre, but the end result was a weakening of democratic institutions and a shift of power from working Americans to a powerful corporate elite. In 1970 Yuri Bezmenov, the spy that McCarthy really SHOULD have been afraid of, defected to Canada. He described an ongoing campaign to “demoralize” the USA and complete a regime change without firing a shot. There are many versions of his lectures, this one that I found seems to have been given in my home town of Los Angeles in 1983. Oddly, it is subtitled in Hebrew.

Yuri has a shit eating grin at all times. He is a man with supreme confidence that knows that what he describes will happen, and even with his warning us in advance, there is nothing the USA can do to stop it.

A recent Pew Research Center survey confirms Yuri’s projection: The USA is the only country out of 25 major nations surveyed where its own people think that they are “morally bad”. I will hold this up as concrete evidence that Russia’s goal was achieved. As the researchers note, we don’t know how long the USA has been in this demoralized state because this is the first time they bothered to survey it. Shocking. Not that demoralization happened, but that even with warning some 50 years ago, we didn’t even bother to track its progression.

Once a country is “demoralized”, it is helpless to defend against subversion and external control. It can easily be nudged into attacking its own people and erasing its democratic institutions. By 1984 I was the head sergeant of security for the UCLA Olympic Village security team, responsible for defending the world’s athletes from attack, intruders, and even bombs. I received a field promotion when the previous head, my boss, was caught giving a blowjob to one of our “rent a cops” in his police car. I worked with federal counter terrorism units (“CAT”s), some of the world’s scariest dudes. You could be peeing in a bush at night, and not even know that the bush was a CAT. This actually happened when one of my female security officers was peeing on a bush and the bush said “Good evening Ma’am.” I was 18 years old in 1984, and that was my first job.

Since then I watched Yuri’s prediction play out with a sense of helplessness and dread.

But our anti hero Yuri’s plot had a twist he didn’t see coming. He died suddenly in 1993 at the young age of 53. You see, once a country is demoralized, it’s vulnerable to subversion from any source, not just the one that engineered the demoralization. The purpose is to create utter vulnerability, not to direct that vulnerability. That would require a separate operation once the target is properly prepared.

While Russia and China flooded the USA with their agents, the CIA did their best to track and mitigate their efforts. These efforts were dutifully reported to the White House every year in a document titled the “Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community". It is released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

I asked AI about if the ATA discusses threats FROM Israel:

I can’t imagine that the USA intelligence agencies were unaware of the ongoing influence campaign against the USA from Israel, especially since they were keeping an eye on Jeffrey Epstein, but any such information was entirely scrubbed from the ATA every year. This seems particularly odd to me, but of course Israel was not only our “ally”, but since the 1930s was promoted as the USA’s proxy in the Middle East. An extension of America. So the idea that Israel might seek to make the USA THEIR proxy seemed to be discounted.

Nonetheless, the Epstein files seemed to have confirmed what’s been going on, and that it’s been going on since at least the 1990s.

Countries for Sale

In theory, the leadership of any country can be bought, if you have enough money. You don’t have to attack the country (as in Iraq) or do a coup like the USA/UK’s Project Ajax against the democracy in Iran in 1953. But the more demoralized the target, the lower the price. Countries like Iran with fervent leaders, are essentially impossible to buy.

If you can subvert a country’s intelligence and/or media apparatus, then the price gets even lower.

• A 2024 Guardian investigation found that all but 33 (~94%) congress members were under direct financial influence of Israeli lobbyists. That was only for that one election cycle, and approaches 100% if you go back a few years.

• Anyone that voted against Israeli interests has been intensely “primaried” and replaced by more “centrist” members of the same party. This forces voters to choose between two pro-Israeli candidates in every election in every district.

• The few Congresspeople who refuse this influence are under regular death threats and have been assaulted.

• The small group resisting Israeli influence have been described as “The Squad”, and tend to be young, racial minorities, and mostly women. They also seem to be pro socialism, which is generally the opposite of fascism on the political spectrum.

• The main reason the Squad has been resistant to Israeli “primarying” tactics is that they are in relatively “safe” (progressive) districts.

• Squad member Ilhan Omar was attacked with a syringe 6 weeks ago.

I was able to get very right wing “Bomber” Bob Dornan elected in VERY safely progressive West Los Angeles in 1984, so nothing is truly safe politically if you have enough money or (in my case) some fervent agents.

Note that matching influence campaigns have been successfully deployed against the UK and Australia. I would imagine similar campaigns have been attempted in many countries but perhaps with less spectacular levels of success.

In all cases where influence campaigns have been successful, if civilians protest Israeli influence then they come under brutal physical assault by paramilitary forces. One such attack took place in Sydney a short walk from my house on February 9th while I was visiting chosen family and monks in Thailand. These attacks seem odd and conspicuous as they seem to be single subject (anti Israeli genocide and influence) and no other protests are met with this level of aggression.

Jeffrey Owns You

As files continue to leak (with presumably the most damaging files still being suppressed) we know that in addition to the “cash for support” influence campaigns against elected officials in the USA there was a parallel cloak and dagger campaign against key figures in the USA seen as potentially sympathetic or especially corruptible. It now seems incontrovertible that Jeffrey Epstein was an agent of Israeli intelligence agencies for several decades.

• One of Jeffrey’s New York apartments had its security and surveillance set up and funded by Israel, and security and surveillance was staffed by Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak used the unit as his own personal apartment whenever he was in Manhattan, typically to attend the UN.

• Anyone using that apartment was secretly video taped, even in the bathroom, by Israeli intelligence agents.

Known “very good friends of Jeffrey” with strong influence over the USA government that we know of so far (trying to get help from AI generated an error because the list was too long):

• Bill Clinton, USA president

• Donald Trump, USA president

• Larry Summers, Treasury Secretary and President of Harvard

• Howard Lutnick, CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald and Commerce Secretary

• Steve Bannon (I discuss him and Pierce here and here)

• Brock Pierce, celebrity, early gold farmer and crypto billionaire

• Kathryn Ruemmler, White House and Goldman Sachs Counsel

• Bill Richardson, Governor of New Mexico and UN ambassador

• Bruce King, Governor of New Mexico, sold Zorro ranch to Jeff

• Gary King, Attorney General of NM, son of Bruce

• George Mitchell, US Senate Majority Leader

• William Burns, CIA Director

This is a VERY partial list, but enough to suggest generational control over the USA government and New Mexico governments. There are allegations that murdered women were buried at Zorro ranch. NM was ordered by the federal government not to investigate the ranch, and it was sold and ploughed under after Jeff’s death.

An Unprecedented Situation

History is full of records of super powers having near total control over their colonies, such as when the UK controlled 1/4 of Earth. The USA exerts some level of de facto control over every country that surrendered a military base to it. The alternative to “playing ball” is a Project Ajax style regime change. The USA has 800+ military bases in 80+ countries and territories currently, counting the recently destroyed ones in the Gulf.

But to my knowledge, there has never been a case in history where a major power has been so thoroughly infiltrated by a foreign power as the current situation with the USA. With their presidents, congress, and CIA under foreign influence, along with thousands of industrialists, billionaires, scientists, media moguls and celebrities, any resistance is quickly suppressed. There is no system left intact that could restore the country to local control. Even Yuri would be well impressed.

With Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Rupert Murdoch, and Mark Zuckerberg likely compromised by Jeff’s foreign influence ring, mainstream media is in lock step with Israeli leadership. Hollywood is massively infiltrated. Then of course there is the UK royal family… In the Middle East they don’t call the war “Epic Fury”, they call it “Epstein Fury” because they are under no illusions as to what is going on here.

As there is little or no historical record to assist in predicting what comes next, the outcome is of course going to be difficult to predict. I see no scenario that looks good for the USA or UK because their governments are already so thoroughly compromised. The rest of the world is looking at catastrophic supply chain collapse of petroleum, urea, and other critical components. The threat of nuclear war has never been greater.

Nonetheless, I will do my best. The next paper will discuss (in brief) the economic and military situation related to this new World War. If I can do that in one paper the paper after that will be the final paper in this series where I will attempt to predict what comes next.

Religions stress me out, because they’ve been weaponized against me my whole life. So when I set out to explain the religious conflicts around the current Gulf War, I became so stressed that I became ill. I didn’t feel qualified to do this. But as I continued to focus my full attention on this topic, I realized I am qualified. Maybe more than I give myself credit for.

It isn’t sufficient for me to explain how the major religions are clashing, and how they have continued to do so for over a thousand years. We need to go beyond understanding to a place where solutions can be formulated. Understanding, modifying, and inventing systems is what I do.

If you look at me as a computer, maybe I was born with extra CPU speed. But the real difference between me and “normal” people is that I have a LOT more RAM. Maybe orders of magnitude more functional RAM. This doesn’t show up on normal IQ tests. It allows me to hold a lot more elements in memory at once and solve more complex questions than I should be able to.

So I don’t gravitate towards games where I have to think faster than someone else. I gravitate towards games that require me to think BIGGER than other people, like massive economic simulations such as EVE Online. As I’ve gotten older I’ve begun to see religions as systems of control, and I’ve written some papers on how systems of control can be a good thing. We naturally recoil from the word “control”, and I address this in my papers on the subject.

I approach this difficult social control in the following two papers:

• 181A. Can Social Control Be Good?

• 182B. Advanced Social Control for Games

It is from this lens that I will tackle the religious conflict in the Gulf, which has gone on for more than a thousand years before I was born, and will take a lot less than a thousand years to create our extinction as a species if no one has the courage and ability to intervene.

So here I am using my [un?]natural talents to assist us. I am not here to challenge the right of any religion to exist. I am not here to tell people they do not have the right to follow the ideology of their choice. Perhaps I’m here to help people understand the rules and consequences of these choices so that they can successfully navigate modern society while still adhering to ideologies that are thousands of years old and in need of a tune up.

Applying my Skills to Buddhism

In Western religion my unusual abilities are seen as a sign of Demonic Possession, and I’ve literally had Catholic priests attempt to murder me in my sleep. Repeatedly. This makes assisting this religion stressful for me because I have trauma.

In Buddhism, I’m seen as something Benevolent that has been reincarnated. This makes learning and ultimately assisting Buddhism much easier. I break down the rules (“Precepts”) of Buddhism to an atomic level to understand their context, not their content. Why were they written? What were they intended to regulate? This is sort of like reading the numbers inside The Matrix, something I’m good at.

For regular people, it’s just too much information. They would get the proverbial “nose bleed”. Just like how for me, I can suffer from overstimulation when I’m trying to Listen in a loud environment and it can become overwhelming, rendering me useless. Different tools/people for different jobs. I’m not better, just different. But since people like me are rare, and hunted to near extinction, our roles go unfilled while “normal” roles go overpopulated.

I am sometimes invited to spaces by monks, where non-monks are not permitted. There I talk about how Buddhism works, and doesn’t work. I’m not treated as Sacrilegious, and monks are exceptionally good at Listening. Buddhism was written down 2500 years ago. It worked exceptionally well back then. But as the world changed, the Words didn’t always match the changes in Default Reality.

It is the job of the clergy of all religions to interpret their writings and educate the followers. This job gets harder with every passing year as the world changes and the Words don’t. Clergy is rarely allowed to “correct/update” the Writings, because the Writings typically didn’t leave instructions on how to do this. This applies to all religions.

Recently one of the top 5 ranked monks in Australia came up to me and gave me a big long hug. I’m not used to seeing monks of any rank do this in public. There were like 800 people watching. We haven’t talked much about what I do, but monks Listen on a different level, just like I do. So there seems to be a quiet consent and support for what I’m up to. Perhaps this is a Fated Path for me, and that Path is seen as benevolent, not a threat to the system.

The three major religions warring in the Gulf have been at this a long time. They all contain aggressive Words in their Writings, which no doubt were essential to survival when they were written. I’m not judging. Well, I’m not judging if they were appropriate when they were written. That was thousands of years ago and I trust those Words were spread because they gave people Purpose.

I’m not attempting to delve Deep into these religions, certainly not as Deep as I do with Buddhism. I suspect if I tried to do this without consent, I would be at risk. And I doubt I would get consent to do this. I’m not complaining about this situation, just trying to see how I can help without offending people.

The Book of Joshua and “Greater Israel”

The Old Testament has a robust section called “The Book of Joshua”. Many scholars consider the text problematic, and you can number me one of those. Except, you could fairly point out that I’m not a Hebrew scholar and you would be right. But what I don’t need to argue is that this text gives detailed instructions on how a genocide was “ordered by God” against all non Jews. This included even children and animals.

I do realize there are reasons for genocide. I’m not naïve. Eliminating economic, political, and militaristic rivals can make life in the future much easier. Even children can grow up to be future rivals. This is why genocide exists. In games we model this all the time. The “Win state” in games is often 100% elimination of all “enemies”.

If times are so hard that survival is seriously in doubt, then the pressure to engage in genocide could become intense. I’m not going to second guess the conditions in 1406 BC. It’s entirely possible that genocide made sense to the Jews in that era, and it became part of their religion. Since they made a big deal of the Holocaust, it seems to me that modern day Jews understand at least the basics of right and wrong, and that genocide is bad. At least if the targets are Jews.

I also recognize that no religion is a monolith, and this is especially true for Jews worldwide. What I mean here is that not all Jews think alike. Some of the most intensely passionate protestors against genocide are Jews, and they are getting clubbed, arrested, and prosecuted for protesting these atrocities.

One thing about Jewish culture that I really admire is their ability to plan and prepare, decades in advance. Almost no price is too high to pay if they get what they want in the end. I can be this way myself, and you absolutely want this trait in an ally. No one takes conflict with Jews lightly for this reason.

This also allows a small Jewish minority (and here I’m referring to Zionists) to carefully make plans to take the reins of power to be able to override the interests of the greater Jewish community. We see this exact pattern also with some of the more intensely passionate Christians, in this case Christian Evangelists and Christian Zionists.

Jewish Zionists and Christian Zionists have goals that are in alignment. According to AI, those common interests are:

“Jewish Zionists and Christian Zionists share a core, foundational goal: the support, preservation, and strengthening of the State of Israel as a Jewish sovereign state in its ancestral homeland. While their underlying motivations differ—one largely based on national survival and the other on scriptural prophecy—they act as strategic allies in political advocacy, particularly in the United States and within Israel.”

Zionists have been planning for at least 40 years to get “all their ducks in a row”. Meaning, bring the USA, Israel, UK, and perhaps Australia and any other countries under Zionist political control simultaneously. Plans for this can be traced at least as far back as the 1930s during the planning stages for modern Israel in the USA and UK. It is understood that this might be short lived and difficult to maintain, but if it could be achieved even briefly, a war could be started that would make the shared Zionist goals possible.

Interestingly, the goals of Christian Zionists and Jewish Zionists diverge at some point, so even if they were successful this would trigger additional conflicts. I will get into that in a moment.

The situation today is that this “Zionist Alignment” has been achieved and they are acting as fast as possible to execute on their plans, which took an enormous amount of effort. I have to at least admire that. Israeli Zionist leaders have been invoking The Book of Joshua to give themselves a mandate to cleanse “Greater Israel” (a large region that covers about 6 or 7 modern day countries) of all non-Jewish life. Even children and animals if the Book is read literally, and they are reading it literally.

Efforts to annex enough land to create “Greater Israel” have been ongoing since at least 1948. Now, I’m just stating what is, and for some readers I might need to explain why this is bad. In 1406 BC maybe this was all good. In the 21st Century the international community has agreed that genocide is bad, and especially total genocide that includes children. Ethnic cleansing of land so that it can be transferred to Zionists is also considered an atrocity. It gives me hope that there are at least some things that every country can agree on. Even the USA, Israel, and UK can agree that genocide is bad when they aren’t under Zionist political control.

Now, if you think genocide is good, then you are a monster and I realize I likely won’t be able to use logic to convince you otherwise. Maybe not a monster in 1406 BC, but this isn’t 1406 BC. I’m not judging anyone in 1406 BC, I wasn’t there.

Every religion ages poorly in some ways, especially over thousands of years. It’s a testament to the value of these religions that they still exist after that time. It is up to modern day humans to recognise this and say “this doctrine from 3700 years ago has aged badly and is obsolete. I’m not going to follow it literally.” Or, you could. But if you went out and killed some children and then said “God told me to do it”, then you’ve made your choice and you will likely spend the rest of your life in prison or institutionalized.

So here I’m really asking religious folk (this would include Buddhists also) to be conscientious about their beliefs. If they choose to be evil, then at least own up to that and take responsibility for their actions. Life is all about choices, that makes you who you are.

The people invoking Greater Israel and the Book of Joshua, I don’t believe they even believe what they are saying. They are on a power trip and want to conquer the Middle East to enrich themselves, like all colonists. Especially European colonists. Most of these people aren’t from the Middle East, they are European. For instance Netanyahu’s father was Benzion Mileikowsky, born in Poland. He was a “Revisionist Zionist”. He was intensely racist, believing that Arabs were an “enemy by essence”. This distinction is critical because that absolute taint was the condition that “God” cited in 1406 BC to validate the total genocide of the Canaanites. Once you make that claim, if it goes unchallenged, you set up the logical argument for genocide via The Book of Joshua. Labelling people “terrorists” when they defend their land and families from invaders is an attempt to assign “absolute taint” unjustly to people.

In creating Israel, the Zionists could have chosen any model and people to emulate and act as mentors. Trying to copy the Nazis is a disappointing choice. The Nazis were Christians. How could a people go through the Holocaust and, instead of learning from it, attempt to emulate it? Of course Christian Zionists and white supremacists can be identified because they also utilize this same language to label partisans.

The “Third Temple”

So what do Christian Zionists believe, and how does that differ from Jewish Zionists? I’m not a scholar on Christian Zionism either, but again I don’t really need to be because this group is fairly open about what they believe and are up to. You just have to Listen to them, and I love to Listen.

Margorie Taylor Greene has the same first name as my beloved grandmother, bless her heart. Marjorie (the living one) this week has been pushing back on American Christian Zionists now in power in the USA. They trusted her for so long that she knows the whole Plan. Now she’s spilling all that knowledge and I’m here to Listen carefully.

Apparently this group wants to build something called “The Third Temple”. Now, I’m not going to lie. If The Book of Joshua is a bit awkward, the Third Temple sounds like a ritual to summon Cthulhu to end the world. Straight up Lovecraft love. This involves going to the Temple Mount, possibly the most holy place on Earth in Jewish and Christian teachings, and razing the existing Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

No doubt this would start a World War. But…you can’t trigger a World War if…you’ve already triggered the World War. By, let’s say, vaporizing the leader of the Shia religion. Now, here is where the plot gets really good. This isn’t any “normal” World War. This triggers the “War to End all Wars”. The Apocalypse. The idea here is that everyone dies. They have to die because this is how these Christians get to Heaven.

I’m trying very hard not to judge, but when Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks you are too extreme, that should tell you something. That woman has paid for ads where she holds high powered rifles and threatens the Congressional “Squad” racial minorities, anyone who is against fascism, blows up a car labelled “Socialism”, and has called for the execution of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The people in power in the USA pushing the war in the Gulf are too extreme for Marjorie.

I have to make clear that mainstream Christians believe that the Apocalypse is triggered by Jesus or God when they return, and not by the hand of Man. But Christian Zionists are in a BIG hurry and can’t wait.

[Mainstream Jews are not big on this plan and in general Jews believe that the “end of days” will be triggered by the arrival of a Messiah and that the world will be transformed for the better, not destroyed. That doesn’t sound so bad. Certainly not Lovecraftian class horror.]

This is why I’m confident in saying that this is a World War, not the “short excursion” that Trump is selling the public. Trump isn’t even a Zionist, they just need him to get the party started. This has been decades plus in the planning stage. Once everything was in Zionist Alignment, it was time to move. The time table even had to be accelerated because Trump is in extremely poor health and he has to be alive to maintain the Alignment. I will explain the politics here in the next paper.

Muslims and The Apocalypse

Muslims also believe in the Apocalypse. They don’t believe it is triggered by man, they believe it will be triggered by The Anti Christ (Dajjal). I have to admit I know almost nothing about the Muslim faith so I had to do a bit of research here. Jesus then returns from Heaven and slays the Dajjal, the world ends, and everyone faces Judgement.

As an Objective Observer in this scenario, I have to say that I could see how there are some actors in this play that could be interpreted as an Anti Christ by some. This could trigger maximum fervour and willingness to self-sacrifice on the part of Muslims. There are about 2 billion Muslims in the world. That’s some serious math right there.

Part of their prophecy involves “the sun rising in the West”, which could very easily be interpreted in modern times as the deployment of nuclear weapons. I’m not saying anyone here would do that, but if anyone did, this would almost certainly put Muslims into “end times mode”. Woah. My father was Middle Eastern. I can’t even imagine. My father tried to beat my mother to death right in front of me when I was 2. Authorities had to intervene to save me from him when I was 17. Trust me, you aren’t ready for whatever counts as “end times fervour”. See those pictures of Israelis running to bunkers? And the pictures of missiles landing next to thousands of Iranians and the Iranians don’t even blink?

So given that the family of the current Iranian leadership murdered and likely tortured my entire Turkish family, where do I stand here? The leader of Iran now, due to his father’s untimely demise, was 9 years old when that happened. I can’t punish a 9 year old for what his family did to my family. That’s called “collective punishment” and in the 21st century civilized people are mature enough to not do that. I could even imagine him and I sitting down at a table to have tea and talk, without either of us killing each other. I would forgive him for his ancestor’s sins, and he might forgive me for my work to make sure the B-2 bomber was built and deployed.

I have to hold Iran as being the least responsible party in this scenario for the World War, because they had the least choice in starting it. Twice they tried to negotiate in good faith, and twice their diplomates were vaporized right in the middle of talks. Vaporizing the other side’s diplomats is kind of an indication that one side doesn’t believe in diplomacy. More importantly, diplomacy is there to negotiate peace at the end of a war. Killing all diplomats sends the signal that you don’t expect an end to that war. Or that when you are done, there won’t be any need to negotiate because there won’t be anyone left to negotiate with.

Short Term Future Events

This is where we are at. The Israelis understand. The Iranians understand. The rest of the Middle East will figure out what’s up within weeks. The West? Well, the West is complicated. So complicated that I decided to add another paper after this one and before I explain what comes next. That paper will describe the influence and PsyOps campaigns that are engaged in parallel to the religious and military layers.

Note that while there is a brief Zionist Alignment in Western leadership, the general populations of those countries are not Zionist. When they understand what’s going on, they are going to protest. Intensely. That’s actually not as good as it sounds. That means that the protagonists here know they have very limited time and will seek to escalate maximally to remove choice from everyone. Stopping a war is a lot harder than starting a war.

If Trump dies “unexpectedly” then Peter “Palantir” Thiel ends up president through his proxy/puppet JD Vance. As improbable as that sounds, that’s an even worse scenario than the current one. Peter Thiel claims to be an expert on The Anti Christ. I 100% believe him. He might know more on that subject than anyone else on Earth. While Trump is not a Christian Zionist, Peter Thiel is. If Trump tries to pull out, I would expect he would get “Epsteined”. So strap in, things are about to get spicy.

Is There a Way Out?

Yes, and actually it’s not that complicated. I’m not saying it would be easy though. Just as I’m evaluating Buddhism to see how it could be updated/modernized, we could do that collectively with the consent of all appropriate leaders for the 3 conflicting major religions.

Something along the lines of a United Nations for religion, perhaps a United Faith organisation. All participants would have to agree on a core ideology that applies to all of them. Things like “murder is bad”. They would have to avoid an absolute veto such as the one that is regularly exploited in the UN Security Council.

All three religions would have to agree to review and revise their doctrines to eliminate any advocacy for atrocities. Friction points that remain could be negotiated to reduce that friction, via treaties that would be reviewed periodically.

There then needs to be a way of policing and punishing transgressions.

The Earth doesn’t have a United Faith because we haven’t made the effort to create it yet. Almost all religions have some description of End Times. I think it would be prudent to forbid doctrines that involve humans forcing an end times on others. Let their God decide when that’s going to happen, not a human. Or in the case of Buddhism, supposedly the Buddha said Buddhism has an expiration date and will only last 5000 years. It could then be reset by a new Buddha. I personally don’t think Buddhism is going to be a thing in 500 years (if humans are still a thing) because of Western influences rapidly degrading observance of that faith.

My Plan for This Series

1. Give a history of Iran, my involvement, and why I’m not on anyone’s side here

2. This paper on the religious layer of the World War

3. The influence game, PsyOps, false flags and other cloak and dagger stuff

4. The economic and military layers

5. My prediction on how this ends up.

I wasn’t expecting to do 5 papers, but a World War is a rare event and hopefully it will only happen once in my lifetime.

I’m not an emotional person, but I’m a bit irritated. Not at what has been done to me, but at what is about to be done to you. Thus it is time to drop the Truth Bomb. I dare anyone to challenge my authority on the subject.

This series is going to be similar in format to my series on China, which are papers 142A Understanding China, 143B The Importance of Supply Chains, and 144C Generational Psychological Loops. 144 talks about the price we all pay when we pass down our desire for revenge to our children. That makes it appropriate here also.

While the situation has triggered the next World War even earlier than I anticipated, the primary involved factions (that will drag the rest of us into this) are the USA, Israel, and Iran. The UK gets special mention. To quote Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet:

If you’ve never read or studied Shakespeare, this would be a good time to start. As the curtain rises on our latest and greatest chapter of this tale, I will be your humble Prologue. Your narrator as you may, in modern English.

This Chapter Starts in 1914 AD (but the story goes back to 1406 BC)

Iran and Türkiye have taken turns over the centuries being the regional and global super powers. The Romans got a turn in the middle there for a bit. In 1914 the Turks of the Ottoman Empire are in their twilight. A new power has emerged, the United Kingdom has 25% of the world’s population under their colonial control thanks to advanced industrial technology and a lust for power.

Of course 30% would be better than 25%, so the UK invades Türkiye near Constantinople with the help of their Australian colony. This ends up being the worst military defeat in Australian history, and there are several ANZAC memorials to the event and the 8000+ Australian casualties within a short walk of my house. My immediate Turkish ancestors were very militaristic and no doubt were there. You can see ancient black and white pictures of them on my substack, looking very intimidating.

But what the English didn’t stop to consider is that the Turks and Persians have been natural counterweights throughout history. By destabilizing the Ottoman Empire, they ensured its collapse. This would have long term implications across the region for the next century.

The Bolsheviks would sweep through the region in 1918, forcing my aristocratic Azerbaijani forefathers to flee Nakhchivan and resettle in the Turkish city of Tabriz. That city would later come under USSR control but was released to Iran in 1941, likely in response to Germany’s Operation Barbarossa when they declared war on the USSR and pushed them out of Poland. The whole Western third of Iran was/is primarily ethnic Turks.

My father was born there. Some years later a cemetery was converted to a park, releasing an ancient plague. My father, in his 20s, was the oldest man in the family to survive the plague. A law was passed requiring last names so he took the name of our legendary patriarch Shokri Khan (picture in my substack) and Persianized it (to reduce persecution) into Shokrizade. My naïve young father’s choice to add those extra four letters would set off a chain reaction that would confuse people worldwide for generations.

Despite all this turmoil, at least for the ethnic Turks, a new golden age was about to dawn in Iran. The country was becoming fiercely Western and modern. It didn’t hurt that Iran has the third largest oil reserves on Earth. In 1951 Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh rose to replace the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, as the leader of the nation. His rule is often cited as the first Democracy in the Middle East, with a 70% approval rating. Colonial powers were not paying market rates for Iran’s oil so Mossadegh nationalized the oil industry.

While Western powers claim to support Democracy, there’s something they support more:

Oil

In 1953 the British MI6, with the help of the USA’s CIA, overthrew the Democracy in Iran in a coup called “Project Ajax”. The success here would set the template for the regime change of “uncooperative” oil rich nations worldwide going forward. The Shah was restored, more brutal than ever, as the renewed leader and Western proxy. Soon after that my father, a student at the University of Tehran and still naïve, got the brilliant idea to write a pro-Democracy slogan on a wall at the school.

He was imprisoned and tortured over the course of 6 months. One wasn’t meant to survive such situations, and my father was never the same. His wealthy family ransomed him to freedom, put him on a ship to the USA, and said “Don’t come back”.

He didn’t. Soon he was at UCLA where he met my mother, a linguist who loved anything Middle Eastern, but especially my father. My sister was born in 1959 and I came along by accident in 1966. We were both named by my very white mother, who was allowed to marry my father because she could prove noble lineage through Sir William Gray in the UK. My Western ancestors were original feminists (the ones that sacrificed to make the world better for women, instead of expecting it) and had given up on feudalism and privilege a century earlier. My grandmother was one of the first women to graduate from UCLA and I would later graduate also, becoming the 3rd (and probably last) generation of graduates.

No one, for possibly over a century on my mother’s side, possessed any interest in religion. I dated a Catholic nun when I was 5 and 6 years old, and this was the first time I had even heard of any sort of Christianity. The Church intervened and relocated her before things could get serious. I was very upset about this of course and she was crying when she told me.

The next year (age 7) the Santa Monica Malibu Unified School District would IQ test me for two weeks and determine there was something very odd about me. My IQ was high enough to be “indeterminant” on every test. I have since described what I (and others like me) am on my substack as an “Age Inappropriate Person” since science hasn’t figured it out yet. Essentially I was a ~30 year old scientist in the body of a small boy.

In Buddhism this is a sign of reincarnation and is seen positively. In Western religions, this is a sign of demonic possession. This didn’t go well for me being born in the USA.

Racism was always a problem for me, but people thought of me as a novelty and thought my name was pretty until 1979 rolled around. That’s when the awful Shah finally got overthrown. As is always the case with regime change, someone brutal almost always gets overthrown by someone more brutal. My entire Turkish bloodline, being aristocratic, was rounded up and executed that same year. I would assume the customary torture was involved.

No survivors, no messages, complete extinction.

I’m not a particularly emotional person, but I did take this a bit personally. I went to “Bomber” Bob Dornan (the patriarch of the B-2 Bomber) and pledged myself to help him get elected in the very anti-military West Los Angeles district. This was considered impossible by everyone including my teachers. I put all my special skills to full use, promoted heavily the Islamophobia I was typically the victim of, and it worked perfectly. He ended up winning by about 50 votes. I’m white passing, so going door to door people didn’t know I was mixed race and just automatically trusted this 14 year old. Bob credited me with the win on national television that night.

This ensured the eventual deployment of the B-2, which Bob and I always knew was for Iran. It was used recently to attack the supposed nuclear material refinement centers buried deep underground in Iran. The “bunker buster” bombs it carried are as big as a house, and much heavier.

My relationship to Bob ensured I had the two Congressional letters of recommendation for the military academy of my choice. But then my first real relationship happened when I turned 18. Since I was cognitively much older than my biological age, I left the children alone when I was in grade school. My first girlfriend was a 34 year old instructor at Santa Monica College with a Master’s degree. When she found out I was military path, she sat me down and told me about what really happened in Vietnam. All the atrocities, all the things that had been hidden from me in my military bubble.

I went to the library and confirmed what she said. There was no internet back then, and the public school history books hid all of that. I had adopted “Bushido” as my core ideology when I was 13 and this sort of behavior was just too dishonorable to accept. My nights were filled with nightmares of my using my special skills in the skies over Iran.

I would renounce my military path and take a Vow of Pacifism. Revenge was not worth the cost of my honor. The political wave which I helped create in 1980 would create intense anti-Iran sentiment across America and as a rare person with an Iranian sounding name in California, a lot of people wanted to harm me. Doors were closing in my face everywhere. I used this racism to get Bob elected and it worked so well that the template would be adopted by those that came after me in Santa Monica like Stephen Miller (another Samohi graduate).

I regret much of what I did to help shape America into the hateful society it is today. I learned that just because I can do something, doesn’t mean I should. I accepted the hate that was piled on me as a form of Karma, even though I had no formal exposure to Buddhism in the USA. I would get access to temples in Australia and I added Buddhism to my Bushido ideology six years ago.

Why Am I Objective and What is Really Going on In Iran?

My goal in this first paper is to “set the stage” for a detailed explanation of what is going on in the next paper, and then to explain what is about to happen in the third paper. Part of setting the stage is to explain how I can maintain both objectivity and familiarity in a scenario where subjectivity is usually the price of “knowledge”.

There are three warring religions at play, and that war has been going on even before the time that Christians say Jesus was born. I have never accepted the ideologies of any of these religions, but have been harmed by all three. I take full responsibility for my contribution to the hate between these factions, because I manipulated all of them for my own selfish interests when I was 14. Thus I hold myself responsible for the punishment I have received. I am not complaining about being punished for those last 4 letters in my name, just explaining how that came about.

Growing up in a world where my applications for anything (jobs, schools, even AirBnBs) were automatically put in the trash bin because my father thought putting “-zade” at the end of Shokri would be a good idea, forced me to adapt. Since applying was off the table I instead built my reputation for honor, loyalty, justice, respect, courage, compassion, and self control (key aspects of Bushido) in a world where all of these are in very short supply.

[Note that everyone in my family changed their names a long time ago. I am the last Shokrizade and I have made sure there will not be another, at least in name. I may have the world’s second largest number of biological children, behind Johnathan Jacob Meijer, but that is a tale I am not ready to tell. I refuse to change my name because I want to know who the racists are, and I accept my heritage.]

This opened the door for very unusual opportunities that demanded 100% trust such as when the UCLA and USA Olympic women asked me to be their trainer and coach in 1988. I never applied for that role. The job required me to put my hands on 50+ elite female athletes a day in fairly invasive ways so trust was everything. I had worked with many of these athletes for years so no guessing about my reputation was required.

Similarly I was Rabbi trusted and would be asked to assist the Los Angeles Orthodox Jewish community when they found themselves short of qualified instructors in their Rabbinical schools for children. I taught science in two schools until they could replace me with a qualified Orthodox instructor. I never applied for this role. You can imagine the level of trust required to invite someone with an Iranian sounding name to teach their children about the world in their Yeshivas. In the process I was exposed to information normally forbidden to outsiders (Goy).

In 2013 international regulators would ask me to help them write regulations protecting children in online environments. I wasn’t just the best source of this information in 2013, I was the only academic source of this information. In the gaming industry, exposing how we exploit children is a sure way to earn a blacklist, and I was barely tolerated due to my ethnicity as it was. Of course, given my Bushido ideology, declining the offer to protect the vulnerable would have been dishonorable. Helping regulators put me in direct opposition to the immensely powerful Disney empire, and would ultimately lead to the EU’s Digital Fairness Act 13 years later. Yes, regulators move slower than turtles, and companies count on that to normalize their bad behavior before it can be corrected.

A major theme in my life is to protect children. Not only because I was so severely exploited as a child, but because I understood exactly what was going on that whole time. I wasn’t “a child” cognitively, only physically. Despite various laws, children have very little protection in life. We count on honor to protect them and that’s in short supply. People who dare to protect children are often punished especially severely. This is why those roles have few if any volunteers and essentially no paid roles.

In the opening salvo of this war, young (under age 10) children (all girls) were some of the first casualties, slaughtered by the hundreds. This would be unthinkable in conflicts outside the Middle East, but this is made possible by the unique religious characteristics of the region. I will explain what those are in the next paper, along with the special economic factors involved.

As the curtain rises on the latest and largest scene of our play, about a war that has raged since 1406 BC, three great religions are engaged in an existential conflict that will decide the fate of millions or even billions of people. Simultaneously, the world’s largest corporations (which are largely oblivious to the religious history or implications) are themselves fighting an existential war. Winners will achieve dominance for generations. Losers will be eliminated.

Within weeks supplies of oil and urea (yes urea) will drop to critical levels worldwide, affecting the lives of billions. Calls for conciliation will go unanswered, because that is the theme and lesson of our story.

“All Are Punished”

I, your humble Prologue, am honored that you would sit to listen to me recount one of humanity’s greatest tales of woe. Hopefully, long after I have turned to dust, this account will serve as a warning to future generations.

My original review of Smutstone on Steam under my game tag sarcerok on January 17th:

“I work in game dev, doing what we call "monetisation". I don't think players appreciate just how sophisticated this game is. It's 100% straight up a PsyOps designed to frustrate players into spending. All of the timers and systems are designed to almost give you something then dangle completion at a price.

I enjoy the game not for the art, but for the challenge of breaking the PsyOp and advancing without spending. If you are here for the artwork, or a sense of accomplishment, I think most players will find the experience frustrating. This "game" is here to intentionally frustrate you until you spend or quit. Spending just causes the game to come at you even more aggressively, so frustration levels will never decline.”

Players and developers of heavily Dark Patterned games have been playing this cat and mouse game for over a decade. The developer tries to frustrate the player at every turn, until they give in and spend to decrease the discomfort. Of course the discomfort just comes back, forcing a repeat of this test of wills. I think at some point King bragged that some 97% of players of their Candy Crush game can play it without spending. This is a dubious brag since it shows just how low the conversion rates are on their monetisation.

But it also points out that players often wear this discomfort as a badge of honor. Being able to play without spending is just like playing on a higher difficulty, and thus bragging rights. The bad news there for developers is that they are in direct competition with their players, and one or both of them must lose. Usually the developer.

With Smutstone, as soon as the first Event starts that’s when the rewards ramp up. The dead zone between events (which can last up to 3 weeks each) is just there to build anticipation for the next event. Rewards are close to zero until the event starts.

But something felt wrong, more wrong than normal with these kinds of games. After a month I found that instead of usually placing really high in these events, I was getting slaughtered. I’m pretty good at these sorts of games, so it felt unfair. I would start out close to the top on the event leader board, but then about 8 hours in everyone would be passing me.

It’s safe to say I play at the mathematical limit of what can be achieved without spending. Were 80% of players really spending 10s or even hundreds of dollars per event? I’m well aware that’s impossible. Something was up.

Automated EOMM

I’ve written a lot of articles on how awful and manipulative “Engagement Optimized Match Making” is. EOMM involves forcing players to win or lose on a schedule, entirely independent of skill or merit, to create the most addictive play experience possible. So in a 5 on 5 player match, when you are supposed to lose you are matched against much better opponents.

But at least there are other players and at least some chance you could win. For the developer, this can be quite a bit of work to manipulate all the players all the time. It gets harder when player census is low as you may not have the right mix of good and bad players on at the same time.

The solution? Get rid of the players entirely. Create a 100% artificial Matrix-like world where every other person is a machine or just a name. In Smutstone, there is no chat, and I now know why. It’s not to protect users, it’s to protect the developers. If players could talk, they would realize that they are all in a custom fake event. During events the goal for the player is to place in the top 50 (bronze), 20 (silver), or 3 (gold) on the leaderboard. Getting points is really hard if you don’t spend, but you can buy as many points as you want.

On February 25th I updated my Steam review to warn that at least 75% of the “players” were actually bots. The bots could just raise their score at will, creating a totally fake competition experience. I suspected the bots were set up to just increase their score rapidly by multiplying their score by a scaler about once an hour. So I took a screenshot of all my competitors and their scores so that I could calculate that scalar.

That’s when I realized the entire game was a scam. Not a single player in my leaderboard competition was still there. Every single one had changed mid event. This implied that there were NO other players. I was surrounded entirely by bots. Those bots could change their names and scores at will to make sure I would always be at the top of the losing band (around 51 to 55 on the leaderboard), so close to getting a reward.

When you get a reward and then the developer takes it away, I call this Reward Removal. I first described this in my viral 2013 Top F2P Monetisation Tricks paper. But here the entire game is automated and you are subjected to continual Reward Removal until the game breaks your will.

This picture of Morpheus being tortured by AI is exactly what is going on here. Those top tier terrorist organisations that prey on children in Roblox, like 764 group I talked about in the previous paper, do something very similar but without automation. This sort of psychological torture is extremely damaging over time.

This sets up the dramatic climax to one of the greatest action movies (and scenes) in movie history. When you plug into Smutstone, this is what it does to you. The goal is to break your mind to make you give up your (or your mom’s) credit card. I think most adults will just eject pretty fast. But children take longer to figure out what is going on, and can be broken easier. Here instead of physical drugs and torture, a digital drug is used based on cyclical Reward Removal. If you spend, it gets much more severe because the “game” can just take away the leader board position you paid for, multiplying the Reward Removal and mixing it with Sunk Cost Fallacy. The latter makes you spend more to “rescue” the amount you already spent. This is the typical end game for gamblers when they lose it all.

The problem here is that Neo and Trinity aren’t going to crash through the door to unplug little Jimmy. His parents probably don’t even know about his naughty little habit and since he’s hiding it, there’s no way anyone can help him. This is the same scenario that led to the death of Sewall Setzer at the age of 14 at the hands of his AI “girlfriend”.

Regulation

While the Digital Fairness Act might block these sorts of games in the EU, this use of Automated EOMM is extraordinarily dangerous, especially with children. Protections need to extend beyond the EU, and soon. Otherwise we are going to lose more kids. As this is fairly new, I don’t know if the EU is specifically looking for this, but they need to really put these sorts of “games” at the top of the list for regulation.

Of course it would be great if parents understood these risks and had conversations with their kids early on so that they can “stay clean”.

Relatively little attention has been given to adult gaming, despite gaming being a bigger industry than almost all other forms of legal entertainment combined. F2P games in particular are a magnet for children because they don’t need money or even a credit card to access them. That means that Mom doesn’t need to know what Bobby has been getting involved in. That in turn means no parental supervision whatsoever, or even the option for parental supervision.

The old saying that “if the service is free, you are the product” applies here. More than that, it applies 1000% when children are the product. I’ve been warning about Roblox, for instance, for a decade. But never too invasively because I just don’t have the means to defend myself from a serious legal assault. Of course, any legal attack on me could generate a tremendous amount of press coverage, as King found out when they sent their lawyers after me when I wrote The Top F2P Monetisation Tricks in 2013. That ended up being my most read article, translated by the community to over 20 languages. This was likely helped by my going public about King threatening me and Gamasutra over talking about their game monetisation.

Now it is clear that children have been the product in Roblox for decades, and extreme sadism-based criminal organisations like 764 and CVLT have set up shop there farming children for years. Both organisations are active on Discord and Telegram and then project power into Roblox. They threaten children into submission, then order them to commit and confirm acts of sadism and self harm. This might involve cutting messages onto their own bodies (branding), torturing or killing pets or siblings, providing pornographic material, or even school shootings. Many children have been coerced into suicide. The age range of victims, according to the FBI, is between age 8 and 17.

The FBI considers these groups “Tier 1” threats, the highest possible danger categories, for threat to national and economic security. When Roblox is installed on a computer or device in a home, a back door to these highest tier terrorist organisations is opened, right into their bedrooms. Oddly, when Australia banned social media use for children under the age of 16, Australia explicitly did a carve out to allow children under the age of 16 to keep using Roblox. They did this while knowing the threat posed. Roblox successfully lobbied for it to be classified as a “Gaming Platform”, not a form of social media. Of course it is both.

There is this perception by parents and governments that “games” are inherently safer than other forms of media. That’s not the case at all. I demonstrated this in forensic detail to international regulators when they summoned me to testify in 2013. I showed that one company, Gazillion Entertainment, had an adult and children’s version of the same game. The adult version (Marvel Heroes) had some of the safest and most respectful monetisation I’ve seen in a game not designed by myself. The children’s version (Marvel Superhero Squad Online) had extreme dark patterns on every screen which I detailed to regulators as I screenshotted the entire 25 screen tutorial for them.

Developers don’t go “easy” on kids. They exploit them much more intensely because they can.

Everything Online is Interactive

If a game requires you to be online to access it, that means your data is being farmed constantly while the program is open. Many games that wouldn’t seem to need connection still do, because your data is valuable. Steam does not age verify, and is loaded with adult content. Much of this content is extremely kinetic, simulates non consensual actions, and violent.

Those terrorist organisations that hang out on Roblox will attempt to embarrass children by threatening to dox them for having viewed adult content. They trick them into giving up even more compromising behavior which is then used to threaten them further. This is repeated over and over.

So I was curious, do F2P adult games have the same dark patterns as non adult F2P games? Or are they somehow even worse? This tends to be a blind spot for both senior developers and politicians because they tend to be married and don’t have a desire to purchase adult content. Further, their reputations and relationships could be harmed if that got out.

For similar reasons I’ve allowed adult content on Steam to be in my blind spot. I’ve written about malicious monetisation for 15 years, but I’ve never before written about adult content being sold to children. Two months ago in January a game called Smutstone (WARNING: clicking on the link will take you to the Steam store where you will immediately be subjected to nudity and sexual content) was recommended to me by Steam.

Smutstone is an online trading card game that features adult content. The name is an obvious play on the name Hearthstone, a popular online trading card game produced by Blizzard Entertainment. The two products have much more in common than what is immediately obvious. When I first tested Hearthstone in 2014 I immediately noticed something was wrong. As a complete newbie I was being matched against the most powerful accounts in the game, in the very first tier of the PvP ladder. These account’s clearly were not in that tier. Why was the game breaking their own rules?

I soon learned that was because there was one set of public rules for players, and a different (conflicting) set of secret rules for the developer. Blizzard was experimenting with exploiting the two way connection of online games to deploy malicious manipulation methods to force players (including children) to spend. This was the beginnings of EOMM (Engagement Optimization Match Making), which Activision Blizzard was so proud of that they patented these manipulations. The patent even brags that these manipulations are invisible to the end user.

I’ve written papers detailing the exploits of Electronic Arts’ attempts to make EOMM even more manipulative, and also a similar paper on NetEases’ EOMM research from 2024. Normally EOMM is very difficult to detect/confirm but since this is an area of expertise for me, I can. That still doesn’t make it easy, and it can be time consuming to confirm and document its use.

In the next paper I go into the process by which I confirmed the presence of EOMM in Smutstone. While EOMM has always been designed to be especially effective against children, and potentially much more harmful for them, Smutstone takes this to a level I hadn’t previously imagined. And I have a very robust imagination.

The Difference Between Children’s Monetisation and Adult Monetisation

Monetising children is very different from monetising adults. Because children are much easier to manipulate, an online connection to a children’s game makes this demographic far easier to manipulate. This should pose an immediate red flag to parents and regulators.

At a casual glance, the two kinds of monetisation look very different. I demonstrated this to regulators at the ICPEN summit in 2013. Adult monetisation is both subtle and (usually) respectful. It has to be, because adults will get mad when they detect mistreatment. Children, on the other hand, are well aware that they have to do what adults say and that they have little or no power. There are laws to protect children, but these are very rarely enforced except in the most dire of circumstances.

More importantly, at least in gaming, these laws don’t seem to protect children in games at all. A good example is the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. It was passed to protect children from labor exploitation. Almost 100 years ago. Roblox has been violating the FLSA for over 20 years. Why is that permitted? I see people promoting Roblox on LinkedIn and by industry influencers almost daily. Because, of course they do. If children can be exploited legally, by just ignoring the FLSA, then this creates a Holy Grail economic exploit that will suck anyone with a flexible moral compass into it like a black hole.

I showed this to regulators in 2013 by contrasting the very respectful Marvel Heroes game with the unbelievably manipulative Marvel Superhero Squad Online game. Both made by the same developer (Gazillion). The only difference was that Superhero Squad was made for children, so anything and everything manipulative was automatically green lit.

While this may be a bit intuitive and can be quantified like I did in Panama, you don’t need to quantify the abuse to recognise it. It’s quite blatant because the people making games for kids don’t expect to get caught. This was the first thing that hit me when I fired up Smutstone. The manipulation was just so extreme that I thought “what adult would play this?” It soon dawned on me that this was not a game for adults. Smutstone is a game designed for children. Even the sex acts in the game are drawn up in cartoon style, non-kinetic, in a way that would appeal to children.

Adults see the “adult” tag and just assume children don’t have access to it. That’s the furthest from the truth. They also assume that when children see that tag, they will want to avoid it. That’s also the furthest from the truth. Steam only asks the user if they are 18. If they say yes, they can come right in. A 4 year old can breach this sort of security without help.

Cosmetics Reversal

Someone selling their “game economy services” on LinkedIn recently was talking about the billion dollar market for cosmetics. So of course this ended up in my feed. Adults will spend a lot to dress up their avatars. I’ve done this before, dressing up my super heroes in City of Heroes was something I really enjoyed.

In Smutstone your avatars start dressed in these elaborate costumes. The artwork really is commendable. While I would rather have cards with spaceships or tanks on them, I still was impressed by the costumes and fantasy themed backgrounds for the five elements. But the progression systems, what rewards you in the game, involves destroying those cosmetics and replacing them with skin.

What business model charges the user to destroy their cosmetics? I’m thinking that the answer is one designed for children. Once the clothes are gone, the models all look pretty much the same with minor variations of tattoos or body position (standing, bent over, etc.) or weapon.

The Threat

Soon after I started testing Smutstone, I began posting negative reviews of the product on Steam. I gave detailed warnings of the kinds of manipulations that users will encounter. [I go into more detail on these in my next paper, where I explain them at developer level.] I have also been updating that review every ~2 weeks.

The most disturbing manipulations are also the hardest to detect. Just like the ones that Activision Blizzard and EA brag about. So the more I delve into this product, the more I learn. But it didn’t take long before I received this threat, right here on my substack:

This person was trying to dox me for behavior they felt might be damaging to me. They made an account on my substack hours before, just to drop it where the public would see it and thus where it would be most damaging. They wanted me to know that they knew what was being played on my computer, since when, and on which days. My friends on Discord would have access to that information, but that’s a very small group and I’ve known most of those people for 10+ years.

If the criminal organisation 764 was going after someone, they would threaten to dox their behavior, usually some sexual behavior. In this case, the person just went straight for the dox, probably knowing that a threat would be pointless. Yes I am an ethicist and that means I have a lot of powerful groups that likely see me as a problem. But my substack is named “…Game and Dating App Economics” for a reason. I do research into human dating and sexual behavior. I design better games/apps for dating than what has so far been deployed to the public, which I believe would make a lot more money because they are a lot more useful. Of course they are designed to monetise very well, because that’s what I do. I’ve been doing research into human sexuality since 2010. I took my first collage course on human sexuality when I was 18 and even started doing clinical work in a fertility lab that same year. That was 1984. I’m not going to be shy, secretive, or apologetic about research into sexual content in games.

Conclusion

In the next paper I will explain just how awful the manipulations (Dark Patterns) are in Smutstone, in detail. In this paper I’m making the case that this game was deliberately designed for a children’s demographic. I’m also reinforcing the idea that (some/many) game developers go after children because they can, and children are an especially lucrative demographic for the F2P business model due to vulnerability. Platforms like the Apple App Store and Steam are willing to go to court to avoid refunding monies spent by children without consent on F2P games.

And then you have the platforms themselves exploiting children, like with the perpetual stream of lawsuits and criminal complaints against Valve for designing, deploying, and profiting from children’s gambling. The latest lawsuit from the New York Attorney General for illegal gambling seems likely to succeed.

Exploitation of children will continue if it can. That only ends when light is shown on the misdeeds (which I am doing here and have been doing for 15 years) and governments and consumers act to defend their children. Sadly, that can take a while. Governments and consumers have been trying to shut down Valve’s (soon to be proven illegal) gambling for children for 10 years now.

For parents, you have to realize that game developers don’t let their children use any of the products I mention here. We know better. Predators know that if you are careless enough to not protect your kids from economic exploitation, you also won’t protect your children from sexual or violent exploitation. So this is why those malicious actors hang out in places where children are being exploited economically.

Growing up in Santa Monica, California, it became clear that I had inexplicable cognitive development that was detected through testing by authorities in the school district when I was 7. They didn’t know what to do with me, so they put me in a corner, instructed all other students not to talk to me, and gave me years of material to complete every month while self educating.

What I did for recreation was mostly play games. Back then these were board games. Because I gravitated to the most complex games, at that time these were all board games, and mostly war games. I learned the history of war through gaming, along with an understanding of economics, politics, and combined arms doctrine.

I was mostly apolitical and totally non ideological. This changed when I got my hands on the rulebook for Bushido.

I so resonated with the Code of Bushido that I made it my guiding ideology. I believe it is fair to say I embodied every core virtue 100%, and this dictated my responses to every encounter and decision point in my life (data from AI search):

I had no interest whatsoever in the three major (warring) Western religions, and was content to die rather than be converted via threat and even torture by my father. Fortunately the medical community reacted to the symptoms of torture and intervened to save my life when I was 17. Because I had this core ideology at age 17, which put honor before life, the psychological damage of that period was minimized since I took no action to compromise my honor.

When my father’s Turkish family in Tabriz was entirely rounded up in late 1979 by the new Iranian regime, and presumably tortured and murdered, I took this as a personal insult. I reacted by working tirelessly to get Bob “Bomber” Dornan elected in Republican unfriendly West Los Angeles in 1980. He credited me on national television with his win. I was 14 years old. Bob was the patriarch of the B-2 bomber, and my efforts contributed to its eventual construction and deployment.

It was always understood that the B-2 was for Iran, not Russia. It would ultimately be deployed for that purpose. My alliance with Bob ensured I had access to the two congressional letters of recommendation I would need for the military academy of my choice.

I started college at age 16 in order to take Japanese language classes. I had hoped to be picked as an exchange student, but Santa Monica High instead picked the richest boy in the school, thinking he would better represent the USA. That boy came back and said he had a horrible experience because he never left the host house and could not speak any Japanese.

When I turned 18 and had access to romantic options that were not so cognitively lopsided, I had my first relationship with one of my university instructors. I was careful to wait until I was no longer one of her students. She exposed me to knowledge about the USA’s military atrocities in Vietnam, behavior which I considered dishonorable, and which I had been shielded from in my military bubble.

After months of intense reflection, I just could not continue down my military path because I would inevitably be forced to choose between honor and loyalty if I joined the military. The rigor of my Bushido ideology did not permit such compromises. So I took the difficult action of taking a Vow of Pacifism and giving up my hard earned military privileges.

The Olympics

The one place in life, and perhaps the whole world, that supported both “The Way of the Warrior” and Pacifism was the Olympic family. It just so happened that my coach from age 17 on was an Olympic world record holder: Tommie Smith. Tommie inspired me, and even helped me get my first job on the security team for the 1984 UCLA Olympic Village. The whole campus was taken over to use as Olympic residences and facilities during the Los Angeles Olympics.

My way of being caused me to rise in rank faster than would normally be possible, and I ended up being the top sergeant of security within 3 months. I was directly responsible for the security and safety of about 50% of the civilian traffic in the Village. This included personnel screening, perimeter defence, and bomb checks. I was 18 years old.

By the age of 22 my reputation and rapidly developing physical therapy skills caused me to be chosen ahead of more technically experienced candidates as the trainer and assistant coach for the UCLA and USA Olympic women’s track teams. I never applied for or asked for that job, the athletes themselves asked for me to be chosen. The athletes prioritized Trust over resume oriented qualifications.

Following the Olympics I would become a member of the (California) Governor’s Council on Fitness and Sport under Arnold Schwarzenegger and began teaching physical therapy and fitness occupations.

At the age of 28 I was struck by a drunk driver and crippled. The top 3 orthopaedic surgeons in Los Angeles all agreed: I would never run again. There was not enough functional cartilage left in my ankles for me to run, or even normally walk. This, combined with the natural hormone withdrawals caused me to look and feel like an 80 year old man. I almost had to ask for help crossing the street.

The Transition to Gaming

I got involved in gaming while I was reassembling my body in the late 1990s, just as gaming was going online. MMO’s like Everquest pulled me in, and my informal economics expertise led me to help developers world-wide with their game economies. I would return to the university in 2007 to study economics formally, with the intent of creating a new branch of academic economics: game economics. I wasn’t shy about explaining my intentions to my professors.

Of course I knew this sort of lofty goal would require extraordinary effort on my part, but I did that and was accepted by University of California, Riverside as the top economics student during that period.

As my areas of expertise were economics and warfare, I gravitated to projects like Sid Meier’s Civilization Online (which I helped kill once it became clear there were unsolvable production issues) and the two titles I designed for Wargaming (World of Tanks Blitz and World of Warships). I also did the meta design for Chris Taylor’s super military MMORTS that was being built at the Gas Powered Games facility after it was acquired by Wargaming.net. That masterpiece was killed due to East-West politics, for reasons totally unrelated to merit. Chris Taylor, a legend in game development, would exit gaming. Perhaps permanently.

Becoming Australian

I left the USA in 2019 because it was becoming clear that my moral code was incompatible with my nationality. I went to Australia, a country with a highly respected (if limited) military reputation. Their culture is honorable, they are highly respected world wide, and they have recognized and made strong efforts to remediate the less honorable activities that happened earlier in the nation’s history.

In a confusing and often compromised world, Australia stands out. Not perfect, but they understand right and wrong and take that seriously. I was determined to become an Australian, and after 6.5 years that became a reality. Less than a week ago I took the Oath of Citizenship before the Lord Mayor of Sydney, Clover Moore.

My core virtues of Loyalty and Duty, combined with the increasing geopolitical threats to the independence of Australia, caused me to re-evaluate my Vow of Pacifism. Over the last 6 years I have also adopted the ideology of Buddhism, which is compatible with Bushido. I believe the conditions that required my Vow of Pacifism no longer exist, and it is safe for me and those around me to retire it. I trust that Bushido and Buddhism will guide me sufficiently.

My Loyalty and Fealty require me to serve unwaveringly in any military capacity I consent to. Yesterday I applied to serve the Australian Defence Force as an officer. I trust that they will not order me to perform any dishonorable act, and I will make that clear to the psych officer during the mandatory psych evaluation. The ADF’s own written list of virtues align with Bushido, they just have to follow them.

I am applying for a part time Reserve position so that I can be available to shepherd the gaming industry as it struggles to adapt to the new requirements of the Digital Fairness Act (I assisted with its creation) and the move towards (more honorable) pro-consumer business models which I have spent the last 20+ years developing. I wanted to make it clear to those who know I’ve been a pacifist for the last 42 years, why that is changing.

If a world war breaks out, which I have publicly predicted in a recent paper, I will convert to full time military work and I assume that game development will largely be put on pause worldwide.

Australia has always punched above its weight class in military confrontations, and it is my hope that my expertise in economics and military supply chains can help maintain that reputation.

Oh and I have been running again. How am I doing this even though it is medically impossible? Well, I cheat of course, scientifically. I have been training with a team here in Sydney for over 5 years, and two years ago I engineered a custom biomechanical change and new stride pattern that has revolutionized my training. The ADF requires applicants aged 60 to run 2.4km in 18:20. Those 29 or younger need to do it in 13:00. Based on my recent times, I believe I can do it in 11:00.

When you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors;

When you see that men get richer by graft and by pull rather than work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you;

When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice — you may know that your society is doomed.”

— Unknown 20th Century Attribution [Emphasis added by me]

[I ended up completely rewriting this paper before publishing it because there was such a firehose of new information coming out of the Epstein file dumps that it was overwhelming. The elements most critical to my story so far have flown under the radar of regular media so I had to investigate carefully]

When I went to the Los Angeles Times to drop the tea on just how much money people were making selling virtual goods in Everquest, in April of 2000, I was not intending to embarrass Sony Online Entertainment or any other developer. I was attempting to warn them what was coming. That “what was coming” was Everquest and other early MMO’s being farmed on an industrial level, with 3rd parties extracting billions of dollars from gamers and game developers.

Because SOE treated my article as a threat, not a warning, I had to stay anonymous and was not able to help defend SOE from what was coming. Meanwhile, across town in Encino, there was a mansion shared by the three founders of Digital Entertainment Network (DEN). They likely got The Times delivered to their door and one of the three, Brock Pierce (an avid Everquest player), almost certainly read my article. Unlike SOE leadership, he understood what I was warning about.

But he was a bit busy with playing EQ, running DEN, and hosting wild parties. Some have described these as sex parties, and the three would soon be accused of sexually inappropriate activities. When his cofounder and house mate Marc Collins-Rector was issued an arrest warrant for sex crimes, all three of these guys fled to Spain. That was the end of DEN, but now Brock had a lot more free time. He decided that if anyone was going to set up the gold farming factories that I predicted in my article, it was going to be him.

The Creation of IGE

So Brock founded Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE) while in Spain, officially in 2001. Marc (the sex offender) claims to have helped him set up the company. Marc would end up being convicted in Spain in 2002 but the other two partners managed to avoid prosecution. Brock would return to Los Angeles, where I got the chance to interact with him when he was part of a press event at a local bar and grill. I was a journalist at this point and I confronted him and told him his activities were harming gamers and game developers. I received a standing ovation from the crowd.

I honestly don’t remember much else about him other than he is really short and didn’t know how to handle the press. I do remember a much taller woman on his arm, who was shockingly pretty. I had previously worked as the trainer for the USA and UCLA women’s track teams, so I’m hard to impress. I mention this because it becomes relevant later in this paper.

Later, as when I start connecting all the dots to Jeffrey Epstein. According to one of the files, which the press doesn’t seem to see as significantly as I do, has Brock telling Jeffrey that he was good friends with “Steve” [Bannon] going all the way back to 2002. Steve was a movie producer back then, and since Brock was a child actor I would imagine this is how they first connected. Given the nature of these individuals and the culture, they likely also partied together.

Handing the Baton Off to Bannon

Brock would eventually settle or avoid all of his sexual impropriety allegations. But the negative attention he was getting made him a bit too hot for a public leadership position. His investors (which would soon include Goldman Sachs) wanted a change of leadership. The press back then, and still today, describe this as something of a hostile takeover. But the reality was that Brock handed the baton to his friend Steve Bannon, completely consensually. This made Goldman Sachs very happy, because Bannon had previously been their employee and was positioned perfectly (for Sachs) to lead this new venture.

The problem for me was that I was completely unaware of this whole change of direction and power level. My efforts to solve the gold farmer problem were completely self funded, I didn’t even have support from a university. If I had known I was on a collision course with Goldman Sachs, I probably would have done anything other than what I ended up doing.

Solving the Gold Farmer Problem

The obvious problems with gold farming were mostly in two categories:

1. Chat was killed server-wide on all MMO’s as gold sellers would spam mercilessly. This was not only very immersion breaking, but also just made it difficult for these early gaming communities to interact.

2. Players would be forced to compete directly with gold farmers and bots for resources. Having so many farmers acted as an economic Denial of Service (DoS) attack on the entire game community. Worse still, the farmers would then turn around and sell back the resources to gamers that they had just pillaged from them.

This was a very frustrating situation for gamers. But the primary problem with gold farmers wasn’t visible to gamers. It didn’t seem to be visible to developers either.

Literally billions of dollars were flowing out of gaming economies and into the hands of third parties. In this case, mostly Goldman Sachs. Those billions should have flowed from gamers to developers, who could then hire more employees and make more (and better) games. Instead these dollars were flowing to places where they would never return. The Circle of Life of gaming was being ripped apart. Massive layoffs, which would continue for years and years, were the direct result.

Economists have various terms for this extraction. “Economic Leakage”, the “Divider Effect”, “Structural Predation”, and even The Walmart Effect.

I’m not sure anyone else was noticing this, but it was crystal clear to me in 2005 when I committed to solving the problem and putting IGE out of business. The economic situation was a lot like how Walmart could park a super store in a small town, shut down ALL the competing small retail businesses, lower wages, offer minor discounts, and then send the life blood of that town to an entirely different state. Walmart harmed a lot of towns across America this way. But what Goldman Sachs was doing was targeting a specific community (gamers) and was location agnostic. It didn’t matter where on Earth you lived or worked, GS was sucking your entertainment essence.

On a personal note, I was living in Desert Hot Springs (in California) when Walmart arrived. Initially there was optimism. But soon that turned to regret. I saw Walmart exploit my mother during the last productive years of her life. I saw the town wither, and even the uneducated residents soon understood what they had done by inviting that store into their town. I didn’t want the exact same thing to happen to the global gaming community.

The Vow

Since the age of 7 when the Santa Monica-Malibu School District began testing me, society began treating me as something that should not exist. My test scores were impossible. When teachers would look into the eyes of a small child and see the cold blue eyes of an adult or something alien looking back at them, they were afraid of me. I effectively had no parents growing up. My teachers put me in a corner and gave me years of study material at a time every month, with instructions to self-educate because the tests showed that there was nothing they could teach me.

I was completely isolated. I didn’t want to live my whole life like this. So at age 8 I took a vow not to use my skills to hurt people. This was a big deal because my criminally convicted violent sociopath father really wanted me to grow up to be Dexter. This Vow also prevented him from ever being my parent. The Vow protected the people around me, but didn’t help me much. People still were afraid of me, they didn’t know about the Vow.

When I turned 18 I rejected violence and all that military grooming. This was an update to the Vow with the “Pacifist” condition. In 2005 I took on a new Vow, to solve the gold farmer problem and shut down IGE. From my discussions with industry leaders, I knew two things: this problem was considered unsolvable and no one was going to help me.

What I didn’t know was:

• This is one of the biggest unsolved problems in the field of economics

• Goldman Sachs was running IGE

• Steve Bannon had replaced Brock Pierce. I wouldn’t even know who that was until years later.

• GS had intimate connections with USC where my future mentors were teaching.

• I didn’t know what The Club was.

• I didn’t know that the CEO of Blizzard, who’s problems I was trying to solve, was a member of The Club.

• I didn’t know that GS was massively infiltrated by The Club. We know two of their high ranking employees (Bannon and Kathryn Ruemmler) were the closest of friends to Epstein. Either of these people, or GS, could erase me with a snap of their fingers.

• I was on a collision course with one of the world’s most powerful companies, and three of Epstein’s closest and most powerful associates.

• I knew about Brock Pierce, but I didn’t know he would join The Club and become a billionaire.

I was completely out of my league. The worst thing I could possibly do would be to successfully solve this problem.

And, unfortunately, I did.

The USC Catch and Kill

I had hoped I could solve this problem in a year. The real duration would be 9 man-years (4.5 years working 16 hours a day). This was a crazy number, given the speed at which I do this sort of work, but I had already vowed to work to completion. After two years I determined to go back to school to study conventional economics, which I did at UC Riverside. As an academic nobody, I knew I would have to massively overachieve if I wanted to do something as crazy as create a new field of economic study (game economics) as a newly minted PhD.

I was also old enough to know that I would need political help because I was powerless. I identified the top two professors in the world that could validate my work, assuming I succeeded. The first was Professor Mike Zyda, the creator of the USC Gamepipe Lab. This is the top academic feeder to nearby Blizzard Studios. He also happens to have been a medical student prior, so he understands the neurological implications of my work.

The other prospective mentor was Professor Henry Jenkins. Previously at MIT (where Chomsky was), he had just moved to USC a few months prior. He is the godfather of transmedia and the one asked to testify before Congress after the Columbine massacre.

Both agreed to mentor me, and provided invaluable advice and emotional support during these hard times. I felt like this was actually going to happen, because if these two giants couldn’t protect me, no one could. All I had to do was solve this impossible economic problem. I figured that was the easy part.

I was right, and I did. I wrote the 33 page Sustainable Virtual Economies and Business Models solution paper in 6 days in August of 2009, on a borrowed laptop in a public library. The paper solved the Structural Predation problem plaguing MMOs worldwide. Zyda and Jenkins read and authenticated it. Unsolicited, university councillors (who liked me) risked their jobs to tell me that I was the top academic applicant.

All lights were green and I was ready for my Good Will Hunting moment. I got my application together and submitted to USC.

Then… I did what might have been the stupidest thing I will have ever done between the time I was born and the moment I die. I attached my solution paper to my application as a proof of merit.

This wasn’t Hollywood, and the real Good Will Hunting story is not filled with people overjoyed that the MIT janitor can embarrass academia. My paper and application was met with Silence. My mentors, who were protected from retribution by tenure and reputation, told me my application was rejected for “non academic reasons”.

That these giants were afraid to tell me what those reasons were, told me all I needed to know. Having grown up homeless on the streets of Los Angeles, compromising myself before slum lords and police to stay alive, I knew exactly what this was. This was a Warning. You only get one Warning, and you don’t even get that if you don’t look like you can play ball. Someone very powerful was generating threat.

This was 17 years ago, and I never applied again to a university.

Blizzard and Bobby Kotick

Zyda put me in direct contact with Blizzard leadership in 2009. I assumed that a mathematical solution to their multi billion dollar problem would get immediate attention.

Nope.

The same silence followed. This didn’t make sense. Even if this was all about racism, when there is enough money on the table people can forget their racism temporarily. This was before the abuse of employees became public, and decades before I would become aware of The Club and how all of these people were members or under direct control of members.

How would it be possible that Bobby Kotick (a very close friend of Epstein) would rather bleed billions of dollars from Blizzard to Goldman Sachs rather than ensure the golden future of the company? How is it possible that he ran the company into near bankruptcy and got a $400 million USD personal payout from Microsoft?

The Club operates a lot like The High Table in the John Wick IP. It is literally the world’s most powerful international crime network. If you aren’t under its influence, you just aren’t powerful enough for them to care about you. If you do another Club member a favor, you get a token. It’s worth more than money. You take care of your fellow club members and they take care of you. In return you are protected. From almost everything. Only a lunatic would cross them.

I Got Clubbed

After all these years, I feel like I finally have closure. It may be years or even decades before we know most of the debauchery these people were involved in, but it seems clear (at least to me) what happened here. I made the fatal error of putting my solution into my USC application. A low or zero security location. Once USC realized what I had done, someone quietly leaked to Goldman Sachs. Maybe even Blizzard. My application was quietly killed and instructions went out to never discuss it.

They had the paper, they didn’t need the author unless they planned to implement it. Which they didn’t. They were critically interested in making sure it wasn’t implemented. All of these shenanigans with virtual currencies would help produce even more complicated schemes in the world of crypto currencies, which would soon emerge. Not only did this make the Club billions, but it also was the ultimate way of laundering money, just as I warned in my 2009 solution paper.

Given that we’ve only seen the lowest threat Epstein files so far, and that some of the highest threat files seem to be “missing”, it could be some time before we can really connect all the dots, if ever. In the meantime, people like myself can only do our best to speculate who did what to whom. We know that Brock was giving Epstein inside crypto info, and talking about “sharing Ukrainian women”. Andrew was leaking critical inside info from the UK government. Ruemmler was doing the same from the White House and GS. Epstein was giving Bobby advice on how to run Activision Blizzard. The number of people from GS involved will no doubt end up being a much larger cohort than we currently know about.

A Note About Web3

Web3 applications, especially those utilizing cryptocurrencies to create a durable backbone for game economies, hold up the promise of virtual assets that could exist years into the future. The problem so far with Web3 assets is that other than a few widely held crypto currencies, there is no enduring public demand for these assets.

If a group created an enduring (“Sustainable”) game economy, with assets that held their value, then a cryptocurrency could help secure transactions in that space. Without the ability to both maintain asset value, and defend from 3rd party attacks on the economy, the application of Web3 technologies to game economies is premature and ineffectual.

To date what has been attempted is to launch the “Token” first and then the game world. These Tokens have no inherent value other than hype/hope. Since in all cases there is an attempt to “cash out” day 1 at the Token Generating Event (TGE), money is extracted from these inherently worthless systems. The only way that is possible is because the aggressive group has some sort of “right of first sale” over the target group (typically gamers). By the time the gamers have the ability to sell, the token is already worthless, and their investments have already been transferred to the aggressor.

These aggressors learned their early skills during the “gold farming era”. As you can see from the narrative in this paper, those aggressors already have decades of experience, predating the invention of cryptocurrencies.

Thus so far Web3 gaming applications have all been scams and have cost rank and file gamers a lot of money. To create the sort of value that these entrepreneurs advertise, they would need to have that 2009 technology. Either transferred from me or re-developed independently. That would be quite a lot of work, and an effort that AI would not be able to accelerate as AI operates on public human knowledge. It doesn’t do well creating new knowledge.

Of course a game economy is only as good as the world it is attached to. So creating something like this would be a large scale group effort and not something I could do independently. [AI could theoretically speed up that element, since it has enough content available publicly to “borrow”.] Here there exists a mandatory interdependency, something that my long term readers will recognize that I promote and create intentionally, as that gives humans a reason to exist and cooperate.

Consider that the worst atrocities reportedly occurred at the New Mexico ranch/mansion that was bought directly from the Governor of New Mexico, decades ago. This included human trafficking, torture, and murder. For reasons that should be obvious, this facility was deliberately not investigated by the USA government. It could be decades before we have a semi full view of what happened there and in the broader network.

The scale of the network built by Epstein and his allies is so massive that it defies comprehension. We could set up an Epstein University that trained graduates just in the science of Epstein forensics, and it could produce 10,000 graduates. Those graduates would still be sorting through new information 20 years later. The network is so massive as to be involved in almost every large supply chain on Earth.

So how do we go about comprehending what this was/is, and what it did/does? It would seem to me that that would be a first step to allow us to even discuss what happened here. First we should agree that while Epstein was at the nexus of this network, the network endures even after his untimely but well timed demise. That’s why there is so much resistance to disclosure.

Even myself, being about as far removed from that network as possible, am realizing that my life was radically altered by this network. The paper I was writing to explain that, and the network’s effect on gamers, I had to full stop and write this paper first. Without understanding what the network is, it becomes very complicated to talk about anything it did/does.

The Club

Going forward I will refer to this network as “The Club”. A very exclusive but nonetheless massive club. I think the easiest way to understand what The Club is, is to identify what its goals are. I do the same thing with individual humans. Cambridge Analytica’s psychometric modelling technology proved that if you can identify the goals/rules that an individual operates under (what I call their “victory conditions”), you can very precisely predict and modify their future actions. Of course such a powerful technology came under the complete control of The Club, but I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.

Power: The primary goal of The Club is to consolidate power under a central authority. This means bringing any elite into The Club if they have substantial power. That means academics, financiers, media, scientists, politicians, industrialists, entertainers, and royalty. Any powerful person who does not capitulate to The Club will be marginalized, creating incredible pressure to capitulate.

[In my next paper, which I wrote before this one, I explain how my failure to capitulate got me marginalized without my even knowing that there was a Club or that I had crossed them.]

While the FBI and CIA make it clear there is a specific country that Epstein was aligned with, I want to stress that The Club is more powerful than any individual country. It is that understanding among elites that forces them to join The Club. That’s why almost every powerful elite is pro-Club. That’s also why there are literally tens of millions of redactions so far. Anyone with ambition, which is essentially all elites, really had no choice but to capitulate. That’s not me defending them, but that’s the nature of ambition. If you want to get to the top, you have to make difficult choices and play the game.

Information/Narrative Control: While you could argue that this is a subset of Power, its important to understand that The Club didn’t just control all of us. It literally was reshaping the narrative and reality we live in. Any discussions or ideologies that conflict with The Club are suppressed. This is more evident now than in any time in the history of our species as you can see that a reality war is playing out in real time.

It would not be unrealistic to say that you are being told at least ten times a day to believe the elites, not what you are seeing with your own eyes. Laws are being passed globally to roll back free speech and to allow anyone that points out the obvious to be rounded up and imprisoned. Again, this creates tremendous pressure among non-elites to play the game. I’m not talking about Eastern Europe here, this is going down in the most progressive Western countries in the world right now because their leadership is part of The Club.

Just as an example, last week (when I was still in Thailand) a bunch of peaceful protestors were brutally assaulted by police just a short walk from my house here in Sydney. Australians have a hard earned reputation for being freedom fighters. But right now you have 70 year old women being clubbed like baby seals by their own government. One is still in the hospital with four broken vertebrae. Simultaneously, The Club passed laws making it illegal to sue if the government attacks you, if the government calls it “an event”.

Do you want to sit peacefully at home, or go outside and see what’s really going on and risk being hospitalized?

Protection: Humans generally enjoy and respect a social covenant that says that we are protected from preying on each other but that it is fair/legal to prey on any other species. For members of The Club, you enjoy Special Protection. The Club acts as a higher order species, allowing them to prey on even humans that are not Club members. They are almost absolutely protected from legal consequence. As long as they don’t try to prey on a fellow Club member, they are safe from accountability.

I don’t have to list examples, all my readers see them daily. You could go outside and complain and get beaten like a baby seal. But if you are a Club member, you can engage in daily atrocities, for decades, and the law will just look the other way.

Humans are generally speciesist. They believe that “lesser species” are food. Fair enough, humans are predators. And humans see themselves as superior to all other species. It’s that superiority that makes all actions okay. The prey had it coming because they were inferior. The key shift that occurs when you join The Club is that you are elevated to being a Superior Species to non members.

Thus a Club member, a speciesist, can harm a non Club member with as little thought as you might put into shoving a cow hamburger into your mouth. The difference is that Club members don’t include you in their social contract because you are inferior.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky, despite being hailed as some sort of social justice hero, was a high ranking Club member with especially close ties to Epstein. This confuses people. A lot. I have to admit it seemed odd so I did some homework. Chomsky was born in 1928 to parents who were Jewish scholars. He was set up from birth to be an academic elite. He likely never experienced food uncertainty his entire life.

I mention his ethnicity because he shared that ethnicity with Epstein. I suspect there was some carefully guarded racism at play that made Chomsky trust Epstein more than he should have. I’ve experienced a lot of racism in my life and I’ve put my life at risk many times to protect other racial minorities. Like the day I woke up in bed with 14 guns pointed at me because the previous day I was helping Native Elders in New Mexico who had the misfortune of having rich uranium deposits on their reservation.

Racism doesn’t just make you treat other races poorly. Because you see them as inferior to your race. But it also makes you treat your race preferentially. That’s racism, and I believe this was at play between Chomsky and Epstein.

The more important factor for Noam, however, was his intense desire to be an “elite”. He was accepted at MIT in 1955, working to assist the military in developing ballistic missile doctrines. That’s not rebellious activity. He rose to his position of power with his lips firmly glued to the teats of authority. Even as he began to argue against USA involvement in Vietnam, he was collecting those huge military pay checks.

He even continued his work in military think tanks well into the 21st century, claiming there was “no military work being done at MIT”. They moved the think tank across the street from MIT. Yes Chomsky was able to campaign against colonialism from a position of expertise, because he was an expert. Just like I campaign against gold farmers because I was one of the first gold farmers. You can’t fight what you don’t understand.

The difference between me and Chomsky is that when I chose to oppose gold farming (which is the core topic in the next paper, where I ran afoul of The Club), I stopped gold farming. I also refused work making gambling games and other products that harm people. Chomsky never stopped helping the military he railed against. The key thing is that Chomsky always did what was best for Chomsky. This is where you can see that Chomsky, despite his amazing intellect, was a Supremacist. Thus he was able to effortlessly join The Club and build a strong bond with Epstein personally.

The Club is a Supremacist Organisation

At its core, this is the nature of The Club and its membership. The members believe they are better than other people. They gravitate to similarly privileged people, their equals. They have an intense desire to reign over common humans. This is nothing new, this has been going on for centuries. But never before in the history of humans has such an organised attempt been made to fit all of the Supremacists into one united organisation.

It’s like a world without borders, where there are no countries. The whole world is one country. Except this isn’t countries, its the elite. That’s why historical national alignments are changing much more rapidly than cultural alignments can. The USA might be historically anti Russia, but both are firmly under Club control. Thus you can consider the two countries strategically aligned, even while populations protest because they were told to sacrifice their lives in wars against “those bad guys”.

Iran not cooperating with the New World Order? Regime change. Venezuela not cooperating with the New World Order? Regime change. Greenland not cooperating? Canada not cooperating? Regime change. There’s nothing subtle going on here. It’s not the country or its culture that matters, its who controls that country that matters. We were taught that these things aren’t supposed to happen. But, here we are.

The part I need to stress is that viewing this as nationalistic behavior is 20th Century thinking and outdated. This is more like class warfare, gone global. I don’t pay much attention to media, but it’s amusing to watch Stephen Colbert make fun of The Club as The Club keeps trying to censor him. Since The Club runs the organisation he works for, this would have been over long ago for him if he wasn’t so clever and popular.

The Club literally has at least hundreds of thousands of members. They are the who’s who of society. All political parties. Epstein’s files have enough of the names that we could figure out most of the network if we had access to them. That’s why we don’t have access to them, as all that key information is being “redacted”.

My Next Paper

The next one has already been written. But it was getting too complicated to explain a very intricate web of interactions without a proper explanation of what I (and the rest of you) have been dealing with. When I published that first paper on virtual goods sales in the Los Angeles Times in April of 2000, I started a series of cascading events that would put me in direct conflict with The Club. A quarter century before I even knew there was a Club.

That in turn, put all gamers in direct conflict with The Club. That’s a wild claim, admittedly, which is why I’m being very careful with my words in explaining what is going on, and who is involved.

Efficiency

Current Games as a Service (GaaS) designs on the market only generate revenue ~20% of what they should relative to their budgets. Of course bigger budgets can generate higher revenues but also higher expenses. Thus the budget of the project is not so important. The efficiency of the design is what matters. When I use this term in this paper, I refer to the ability to translate developer spend into lifetime revenue.

Here the standard I set for 100% is what you could generate using technology I designed or deployed up until 2014. I will give verifiable examples. I will also provide real data to back up my statements. One could go significantly higher than 100% using post 2014 tech, but to do that we would have to go beyond the limitations of using dopamine as our primary reward chemical (See “Dual Pleasure Engines” in the last section on Pleasure Chemicals).

Oxytocin is an even more powerful pleasure chemical than dopamine, and both are made by the human body. Perhaps it is a good thing that such a powerful pleasure chemical has such a short (1 to 6 minutes) serum half-life. It also can’t be consumed orally. That means that other than by falling in love or similar difficult-to-reproduce social scenarios, interactive media is the only reliable way to stimulate its release.

Recent research also shows that dopamine receptors are reduced in sensitivity in the absence of oxytocin. I recently wrote a full article on the Dopamine-Oxytocin heterocomplex. Thus it is reasonable to assume that with a combined D2-OTR chemical stimulation, pleasure intensity could be three times as great or higher compared to existing products (explained in depth in the last section). In a world where we are under constant stimulation, consumers are both pleasure-addicted and desensitized. Thus the market for the body’s most powerful natural high could be outrageously profitable.

Accepting 20% as your standard, because that’s what you have been getting previously, leaves a tremendous amount of money on the table. 20% is very close to the break even point, so this may allow you to tread water for a time, but is not enough to secure your commercial future. As competition increases, and consumer demand evolves, the % required just to break even will go up, it is not static. Technological advancement is a necessity, not a luxury.

Fundamental Business Case for GaaS

Ryan Ward has been busy analysing data to explain what we may have missed in the recent data on our industry. Here I recommend this post of his, and I elaborate on his analysis here with his consent. He makes the following points:

• 41% of game time spent by players on Steam is on games deployed more than 7 years ago. These are the post Supremacy Goods games I referred to in the paper I just wrote explaining why I’m writing this paper.

• 44% of game time spent is on games deployed between 1 and 7 years ago. These aren’t innovative products, but merely iterations of the products that make up that other 41%.

• The remaining 14% of attention is going to games released in the last year. Huge budgets are being thrown at consumers, who react with a resounding yawn.

As budgets go up, either price has to go up, or purchases have to go up. The latter is not happening (hence the above 14%). If anything, consumers are making less purchases than at any time in modern history. Instead they are continuing to play these old legacy games which are almost all Free to Play (F2P) and thus don’t have to be purchased.

My view on this is that the industry got a tech boost from Supremacy Goods and rode it as long as they could. Why fix it if it isn’t broken? Well, the problem is that even the “winners” in the space, that captured that early market share, have reached perfect competition and aren’t generating profits anymore. If you wait until you are in this scenario before looking for new tech, you no longer have the money to develop new tech. You would have to borrow to advance. If that experiment fails, your company likely will fail.

“Call of Duty budgets tell the story. Black Ops 3 cost $450M. Modern Warfare hit $640M. Black Ops Cold War crossed $700M.

At those numbers, selling 10 million copies at $70 doesn't work. Investors need uncapped revenue potential to justify that risk. That's why multiplayer fragmented into every business model imaginable. Free-to-play. Battle passes.
Season passes. Subscriptions. Cosmetic stores.” — Ryan Ward

This “fragmentation” that Ryan refers to, I call that a “Shotgun” approach to design. A developer doesn’t know what to do, so they do everything. If you spent $700M and your best case scenario is you make $700M, you are already non-profitable. So you need to charge more. But consumers are buying less, and paying less per purchase.

The obvious solution is to charge repeatedly for the same product. You can do this with a subscription business model, or with a microtransaction model. These are very low tech solutions, with MTX being tech circa 2001 and subscriptions being a century old or older. As I explained in Supremacy Goods in 2012, you make more money by charging for less objects. So the solution that industry adopted was to bundle all those MTX into “battle passes” by 2013. That worked, but I see developers sliding back to 2001 tech because they didn’t know why the 2013 tech was adopted. Or, they didn’t even realize that was a tech.

This concept of making more money by selling less things was counter intuitive, and explaining it at Wargaming so that I could remove premium ammo from World of Warships took more time than it took me to actually design WoWs. So I can understand why people who don’t understand the underlying tech/theory have reverted to lower tech solutions that are easier to understand.

Being able to charge repeatedly for the same product requires the product to change over time, launch with years of single use content, or have content that repeats. Content that is only used once is inefficient. Thus the key to high efficiency is to make it desirable for consumers to repeat content.

Consumers don’t like that because they get less dopamine every time they repeat a task.

Modern games primarily rely on dopamine delivery to satisfy consumers, just like cigarettes do with nicotine and Coca-Cola used to when it had cocaine in it. Both of these chemicals stimulate dopamine release. Cigarette companies began optimizing nicotine delivery in the 1960s by hiring neuroscientists. I talked about that in my The Rise of Game Neuroeconomics paper (2014).

Note that dopamine and oxytocin are nearly impossible to legally regulate as they are created inside the body. Those chemicals belong there, though perhaps not at the levels we can achieve.

I explained in that paper and a lecture at SXSW that if game companies were going to get serious about being dopamine delivery companies, they would also have to hire neuroscientists to optimize this process. I warn developers what will happen if they just assume “more is better” in numerous articles. All the consequences I describe/predict are showing up in our engagement data.

As I assume you don’t have a neuroscientist, the only way you are going to get that information is reading my papers since I am the only public source of neuroscience advice tailored specifically to game design. Here in this document I will go very light on the neuroscience so that you don’t necessarily have to find a qualified neuroscientist, but this is with the understanding that higher levels of efficiency (above 40%) will be unavailable without those skill sets. Still, 40% is double 20%. That difference is the difference between being bankrupt and being very profitable.

Efficiency Examples

This is what 60% efficiency looks like. 9 years of Steam December average concurrent player rates are charted, from my World of Warships design:

2017: 3,082.7 2018: 3,758.6 2019: 6,909.1 2020: 7,361.1 2021: 7,478.3

2022: 7,801.9 2023: 8,906.9 2024: 8,747.1 2025: 26,307.2

Numbers will fluctuate based on the timing of new content roll outs and marketing campaigns. WoWs is multi platform so this is just a fraction of the total activity. The key takeaway is that the numbers go reliably up over time, for years. And not just slightly up. Engagement rates in 2025 are almost 9 times higher than in 2017.

This is what 20% efficiency looks like, here Marvel Rivals is shown over the last year. 60% of the user base is gone, 80% down on a dip.

Battlefield 6 lost 84% in under 4 months. I would consider anything that EA puts out as “sub 20%” efficiency. Nonetheless, both BF6 and Marvel Rivals got much acclaim for their gameplay. Unfortunately for them, efficiency comes from the meta game, not the gameplay. While gameplay tech has gone up considerably over the last decade, efficiency tech has actually regressed. Gameplay alone can get you to 40 hours, but not a lot further.

Helldivers 2 is probably my most complimented recent GaaS, and it’s participation rate has been stable over the last year and a half. You will see that it comes closest to my blueprint.

I expect that a smart reader will notice that Valve’s products have high efficiency rates, and don’t use my tech. A big part of this is that Valve owns the platform I am getting statistics from. That’s a huge home-court advantage as they can advertise essentially for free.

Further, Counter Strike has an open economy. I began pioneering the field of game economics in 2005 with the intention of optimizing and defending open game economies. By 2011 the industry had largely pivoted away from open economies, perhaps because they didn’t know about my tech or didn’t trust it, so I was forced to develop into another tech pathway (game neuroeconomics). Valve essentially built their own stock market. Perhaps more than 50% of that market was built by the community, but Valve was the main beneficiary. Thus they didn’t need any special technology as they had so much collective help. This is a unique situation that would be difficult to reproduce today, especially if this market is under regulatory threat for selling potentially illegal securities and facilitating children’s gambling.

DOTA was created by Blizzard and (as with CS) the community. Control of the property was transferred to Valve using lawyers. Again, this scenario seems difficult to reproduce and using lawyers to create games is beyond the scope of my expertise. Using lawyers to force privatization of open source community assets seems to be a major part of Valve’s business model, similar to what was done with Microsoft privatizing OpenAI (a 134 billion dollar lawsuit challenging that action from Elon Musk is pending).

The Optimization Blueprint

Here I go into actionable detail describing how you can make a dopamine-based GaaS with an efficiency of between 40% and 60%. I used this blueprint to design World of Warships in only 14 weeks in Saint Petersburg in 2014. Most of that time was spent convincing the team that we could make Asymmetrical Matchmaking work.

I will break the blueprint down into four categories: Purpose, Pacing, Trust and Fairness, and Asymmetrical Matchmaking:

Purpose

Players need a reason to exist long term in your New Reality. There must be something cool that they aspire to in the distance that keeps them going. Whether that’s unlocking hundreds of new ships (WoWs), unlocking a prestige class in an MMORPG (the “Jedi” playable class in the original Star Wars MMO), getting some far off economic goal (like a huge ship or star base in EVE Online), getting as many points as possible in a cyclical game, before the next cycle (Shattered Galaxy), or social/political progression (SG, Sid Meier’s Civilization Online), players need some reason to log in every day.

The cheapest content that will do that for you is other players. If you have a social layer that creates interdependency, then the other players in your game become essentially free UGC. A good design with these systems involved is complicated, so while you may get free UGC, designing these systems is usually very time consuming. Studios generally don’t create persistent relationships as part of the design, but at least allowing it was key to the success of early MMOs like World of Warcraft.

As studios moved away from open economies they also did a lot of damage to their social layers. “MOBA” games try to fake it with temporary co-op, grouping you with other players you will never see again. Good examples are WoWs and Marvel Rivals. I wanted to add social systems to WoWs but due to time constraints that was a post-launch feature. I was almost done when I left Wargaming in mid 2015, so those systems were never deployed. I left WG because someone tried to threaten me to steal the tech, and that person was a close friend of the CEO. This is why WoWs is only 60% efficient. [As the CEO is wanted in Russia for “extremism”, along with the head of the Lesta studio (that made WoWs), and Lesta has been nationalized, I don’t expect that the WoWs design will ever be completed.]

Mobile games sometimes just stretch out the content release rate to make top content aspirational. This is a bit ghetto and it shows. For instance, without spending money in Clash of Clans I calculated the time to reach the last tier of structures as being over 40 years. Back in 2014. It could be even more now. That’s a bit dishonest (see “Trust and Fairness” below).

Pacing

The idea here is that humans are happiest when they are getting enough stimulation, but not too much. I explain some of the neuroscience in the last section of this paper on Pleasure Chemicals.

Trying to optimize dopamine delivery without formal education in neuroscience runs the risk of doing more damage than good to your product. The easiest way to explain how to do it is you need a brief period of stimulation (no more than 10 to 15 minutes) followed by a period of restful activity that is under the control of the player. This is their “cooling off time”. In WoWs the garage fulfilled this purpose, giving the players something to strategize between battles.

Allowing the player to adjust their rest period is critical. They may have been eliminated early in their last battle and as a result had plenty of time to cool off already during the match. Thus they may skip the cool down entirely. If they had a very intense match, they may need extra cool down. Players will instinctively adjust this period even if they don’t know why.

The easiest and most common way to destroy your Pacing is with in-game timers:

These timers represent a primary source of metagame income for the player. Since their output is halted once the timer clicks down (until they are clicked and the timer is reset), if the player isn’t online at that moment, they suffer immediate opportunity cost. This will put the player under pressure to play on the schedule set by the developer, especially if the devs also put players in competition via a leader board of some sort.

Of course this doesn’t happen by accident. The developer is under the false assumption that more time played means more money spent, even if that time played is coerced. This interferes with the player’s health and real life activities. This is literally harmful to your customer. Thus it is considered a “player antagonistic mechanic” (see Trust, below). Players, especially “whales” are resentful of being disrespected in this way.

That button in the picture costs the player $15 USD if they click on it. You could buy an entire game for $15. Thus it causes even more Trust damage, just being there, even if the player never clicks on it.

Trust and Fairness

If you are hoping to generate $50 to $70 per player per year, the number of years a player plays your game is critical. These long term players are your “whales”, and they can also recruit their friends to your game. As I explained in my 2015 Whales Don’t Swim in the Desert paper, your whales wait on average 18 days before making their first spend. The more a person will spend, the longer they take before making their first spend. This is because they want to be sure your game will be a long term ride before going full in on the relationship.

That paper was widely read and accepted in 2015, but I recognise that with the turnover in the industry, many probably have not even heard of this paper. Nonetheless, any relationship is based on demonstration of value and trust. Games are no different. Any sign of disrespect to the player, or even the IP, is going to undermine that trust.

For instance, if you are working on a beloved IP and you feel like you want to change that IP, that’s going to break trust with long term fans. You might even brag that you hired writers that had no prior experience with the IP. I don’t understand how this could be conceived as a commercially successful approach, yet I observe this going on with some of the world’s most valuable IPs.

A super way to sour the relation with your players is to act like you think players are gullible. What do you think a player is going to think if you send them this within the first hour of play?:

If players are reluctant to spend $70 on the top AAA games, what player is going to see this and say “oh, this button is worth $500 to me!”. More likely, they are going to think you are lying to them and telling the player you think they are dumb. This is not a good way to start any relationship.

I realize you may be desperate to generate revenue. Showing desperation is not a way to get a sale. You are showing weakness. Play the long game. Be generous with your players. Learn how to get conversions without deception or coercion. If your team does not possess these skill sets, you should not be making GaaS.

Asymmetrical Matchmaking

High levels of efficiency will require you to ask your players to repeat content. With some creativity, you can easily make it feel a bit different each time. The easiest way is to involve other players as players are not as predictable as AI. The player behavior becomes User Generated Content (UGC). UGC, especially free UGC, is a great deal for you.

It’s possible to really spice things up by making battles having variable difficulty. Pay 2 Win did this, but the problem was that the unfairness broke Trust. Even spenders don’t like P2W because it makes outcomes too certain. An Asymmetrical battle occurs when one player or one side is intentionally stronger than others. The tricky part is making this “fair”.

Some definitions:

• Team Asymmetry is when one team is more powerful than another.

• Individual Asymmetry is when one player is more powerful than others.

• Content Asymmetry is when superiority is due to having a more powerful unit or avatar.

• Skill Asymmetry is when superiority is due to skill and play record.

When you have an open world, Asymmetry happens naturally. This was part of the excitement of early worlds like Everquest. Running for my life when I was Level 15 from a L28 Festering Hag in the Estate of Unrest was some of the best gaming moments of my life. When Nexon introduced Pay to Win in Maplestory in 2001 we got unfair Asymmetry. That’s an awful experience, and one that the developers didn’t learn before making EVE Online in 2003. I credit unfair Asymmetry with holding back EVE commercially. That’s an amazing game which would have just exploded in popularity and retention if they had Fair Asymmetry.

Fair Asymmetry is relatively complicated, especially content-Asymmetry. It had never been attempted before when I tried to convince Wargaming leadership to let me implement it in World of Warships in 2014. To my knowledge it’s never been deployed in another game since then. Since Asymmetry is inherently unfair, it requires a special matchmaker (I call this an Asymmetrical Matchmaker) in order to create two or more teams and to balance them all collectively. But the individual members don’t have to be balanced as long as the overall team composition is balanced. It is also possible to let the match be unbalanced, but make it fair by enhancing rewards for the underdog. This can dramatically speed up matchmaking as sometimes balance can be challenging, especially during periods of low player census.

I had been working on that tech since my time doing balance work on Shattered Galaxy (Nexon, 2001). I built a content-Asymmetrical Matchmaker for the End of Nations project (Trion Worlds) which was intended to be a successor to Shattered Galaxy. The team refused to engage with me for whatever reason despite the community (who knew me from SG) creating a petition asking them to work with me. The project eventually was killed, I assume once they realized they didn’t have the tech to do what they wanted. So that technology ended up in World of Warships instead. Since it was mostly pre-built, it was deployed rapidly.

In 2024 NetEase did internal research on a skill based Asymmetrical Matchmaker. This is a much less complicated affair. Their research, which I analysed here, proved a significant engagement increase versus a Symmetrical Matchmaker. While it was intuitively true, this was the first time it had been quantitatively proven. It is fair to assume that you will get even higher performance from a content-Asymmetrical Matchmaker if you have the tech to do so. Given the quality of their research, I assume it is only a matter of time before they make that breakthrough.

The Nuclear Reactor Complex Analogy

In 2012 I used the Sport Utility Vehicle (SUV) as an analogy to explain my Supremacy Goods microeconomic model. Here I will do something similar. I will use the much simpler Nuclear Reactor Complex as an analogy to explain how the neuroscience of GaaS works.

In a nuclear reactor complex you have a Reactor Island which produces Heat. This heat (in the form of steam) is then sent to the Turbine Island which converts that Heat into useable/transportable Energy (Electricity). Now imagine that your gameplay is the Reactor and it is producing Dopamine which goes to the D2 receptor. There are actually four types of dopamine receptors, and those are sometimes in High or Low states, so as complex as this is going to get, this is a massive simplification.

Now in a Nuclear Reactor Complex we use the Turbine Island to convert heat to Electricity. In GaaS we use the Metagame to convert Pleasure (from stimulation of the D2 receptor) into Money. That money is paid to us by the consumer we just provided Pleasure to. As you can imagine, that’s the more complex part of this system, and that’s the part that my research and design work is weighted towards.

As developers we generally assume that Dopamine is addictive (it can be), will increase engagement (not quite true), and that if we maximize dopamine delivery we will maximize revenue (dangerously false for both us and our players). The D2 receptor was discovered in 1979 and at that time we already understood that activating the D2 receptor with Dopamine would desensitize the receptor to additional Dopamine. The Dopamine stops providing Pleasure. The more Dopamine you send, the faster it stops working. Scientists and clinicians call this desensitization “Downregulation”.

In a nuclear reactor, if you let it get too hot you can have a meltdown or destroy your Turbine Island. Either way you are screwed. In game dev, if you let your player run too hot with too much Dopamine stimulation, they will Downregulate and stop enjoying your game. Then you (specifically the game dev) are screwed. Want to know what that looks like? Take another look at the graphs for BF6 and Marvel Rivals. They aren’t losing players because their gameplay is bad or boring. Their problem is that they tried to overstimulate their players and succeeded. Now they are screwed.

From Google AI as it did a good job:

Chronic exposure to high dopamine levels, whether from games, drugs, social media, or dating apps, causes semi-permanent damage in the form of changes in the number of D2 and related receptors. That means the longer your players have been exposed to this sort of content from any or all of those sources, the less Pleasure they will get from your game. If you released it 10 or even 5 years ago, it might have been a hit. You didn’t change, the consumer changed. But technically, that’s our fault not theirs. We did that to them by abusing their D2 receptors. Now they have Downregulated just like a sugar addict’s insulin receptors Downregulate as they develop Diabetes. That’s what causes Diabetes, insulin receptor Downregulation. So you can think of this as Brain Diabetes.

The Optimization Blueprint that makes up the majority of this paper explains how to repair/optimize your metadesign side, the part that converts Pleasure to revenue. That’s just my 2014 level tech as promised but that’s enough to double your revenues. We can raise efficiency much higher but to do that we will need to convert our games to run on two Pleasure chemicals, not one.

Advanced Pleasure Engines

I struggled with whether I was going to disclose this information. It’s all publicly available information, but it’s never been presented in commercially useful form like this. Ultimately the deciding factor wasn’t my desire to get rich or make other people rich. The conversion of our games from Single Pleasure engines to Dual Pleasure engines would have massive public health benefits as this is how the human body is naturally supposed to function. The way we are providing Pleasure currently is disease-promoting. We are also accelerating Demographic Collapse by disrupting how we as a species reproduce. So we will have no choice but to discover and apply these advanced technologies if we want to avoid Demographic and Economic Collapse in the long term.

Here I compare the natural internally produced pleasure chemicals that we can manipulate with interactive media to popular recreational drugs. Consumers will pay exponentially more for higher quality Pleasure chemicals. So adding two “+” signs in the Pleasure column represents at least 10 times higher price to buy it. Price goes up when it is also illegal, but that also lowers value.

“Stress” here mostly represents cardiovascular stress. This includes higher heart rate and blood pressure. Your current cardiovascular health determines how much additional stress you can endure before having a catastrophic event. This is progressive, the stresses listed here cause damage over time. Cocaine temporarily blocks dopamine Downregulation. So you can stick 5 cigarettes in your mouth and go to town. ~Fatal means this generally leads to what we call “Sudden Death”, it’s only a matter of time.

Because dopamine and oxytocin are produced in your body, they can’t normally be made illegal. Some delivery methods like gambling can be age restricted, and thus dopamine can be indirectly regulated.

“Intolerance” means your body Downregulates when exposed to these things. So they have less effect the more you use them. This causes both addiction and reduced value. Oxytocin resets Dopamine Intolerance, so it actually repairs the damage from Dopamine abuse. Even very poor sources of oxytocin like massage can command very high prices.

Because oxytocin can reverse Dopamine Intolerance, even a little bit generated in your game will reverse the revenue declines we are currently observing. I explain the mechanism for this in my paper on the Dopamine-Oxytocin Heterocomplex.

Releasing both dopamine and oxytocin is typically a prerequisite to making babies, so this also has very important implications for human Demographics. The reason economists world-wide are baffled by Demographic Collapse is because they don’t understand the reproductive process and are trying to treat it as an economic problem. As we promote gender division on social media, just to improve engagement, we are disrupting this physiological process. This is having very negative effects on reproductive rates. This is especially noticeable in countries that consume a lot of social media.

It’s for this reason that I include this table here. I don’t see research into this as optional. I’m going to be a bit reluctant to spill the beans on how to take full advantage of this commercially unless there is an agreement to open source the research results. Yes I know how that turned out with OpenAI.

Dual Pleasure engines will make Single Pleasure engines obsolete. So given a choice people will only continue to use Single Pleasure engine games if they are too poor to be able to afford Dual Pleasure engine games. We saw this happen in the tobacco industry after Phillip Morris hired a neuroscientist to figure out why people liked smoking. That scientist identified nicotine as the Pleasure chemical and was able to free the nicotine base using urea (essentially urine). Without some science, who would have thought to pee on their cigarettes? That one move made them around two trillion dollars over the last 60 years. I described how that all went down in my paper on the subject back in 2014.

Final Words

The gaming industry is where it is today because of three major themes:

1. We treat consumers as static objects like a box of cereal or a can of soda. While they are part of supply chains, humans are organic and will adapt to their environment. If you overstimulate them they will alter physiologically to Downregulate to stop enjoying what you are overstimulating them with.

2. That overstimulation is not accidental. We have been attempting to addict our consumers for our benefit in an Attention Economy. Commercially, the problem is we don’t employ people with expertise in addiction. [That has been my area of expertise going back to the 1980s, though I don’t advertise it] If we did, we’d know better than to go about this the way we do. With almost every media company (not just gaming) attempting to addict people, the entire population worldwide is Downregulating.

3. This is causing permanent changes in humans. Just as humans need to adapt or die, companies that depend on humans must adapt or die. The die-off in the gaming industry is mirrored by the collapse of reproductive rates. This is not coincidental. We have carelessly disrupted D2 receptors on a planetary scale.

Of course every problem also comes with an opportunity. The bigger the problem, the greater the opportunity. Once you understand the problem, you can craft the solution. In the 1960s, it was as simple as putting urine in cigarettes. Today’s problems are a bit more complicated, but potentially even more lucrative.

That my attempts to avert the AAA meltdown likely accelerated it. I like to think that I am egoless, and do not suffer from self-interest. While I am capable of these traits, there were key moments where I was not operating from this lens. For the last 15 years I have written papers using various internal guidelines, such as:

1. Only publish the bottom 25% of what I know, so that I don’t make myself obsolete.

2. Write prediction papers to demonstrate that a science-based approach leads to reliable and reproducible results. If the science is understood we don’t have to waste time and resources with “shotgun” techniques or second guessing.

What was missing was a “Do no harm” objective.

Self Interest

You may have already identified that objective one has a distinct “self-interest” element. We live in a culture that glorifies self-interest, and makes it very difficult to avoid. I’ve been on the wrong end of self interest my whole life, so it has rubbed off on me. As an American, I know that if I don’t take care of myself, who will? Further, all of the main Western religions seem to selectively promote self-interest.

This is what really fascinated me with Buddhism, which I began officially learning about 5 years ago. Monks are required to NOT prepare their own food or even gather it. They are required to be completely dependent on the community they serve or they will die of starvation. This is an extreme but effective counter-solution to the self-interest paradox. If the community fails to support the monks, the teachings and religion itself will end. This was supposedly predicted to happen within 5000 years, or sooner if women were allowed to become monks. Which, in some cases, they are. This is very controversial.

From my observations, very few Buddhist follow the five basic precepts, so I think Buddhism is nearing its end. But the design solves many problems that I’m trying to find solutions for in the worlds that I create. This “need to feel needed” which is key to the human existence, and especially in social games, is fading away in default reality.

So I will hope you will understand why I had this self-interest. The one time I exceeded that 25% cap was when I published Supremacy Goods in 2012. I may not have published it if I hadn’t been captured and held hostage by UK authorities in Manchester earlier that year, after I agreed to help the UK with their game economics problems. They took that unpublished paper from me then flew me back (deported me) to the USA. Fearing that the paper would be misused, I published it soon after, perhaps the first paper I published at Gamasutra.

Supremacy Goods was accepted by AAA and led to the end of “Pay to Win” in mainstream Western gaming (with only a few holdouts). The “Battle Pass” games that came out the next year using the rules in that paper still capture 41% of player activity in the West over 12 years later. The three years from 2012 to 2015 were probably my most productive. So looking back, it didn’t hurt me to “over give” and go over that 25% cap. My giving was reciprocated without my asking for it or trying to compel it.

Do No Harm

I effectively and precisely detailed the collapse of AAA in two papers in 2017:

• Data Implosion where I explained that the misuse of data driven design, and a lack of understanding of data application itself, would cause a self-cannibalizing death spiral that was almost mathematically impossible to avoid.

• Force Wars where I predicted that the “winning” of anti consumer ideology in the AAA leadership club would cause gamers and regulators to organise against and reject AAA products. I also pointed out that because this was ideological, it would be almost impossible for leadership to change course.

There was nothing wrong with the accuracy or precision of these predictions. Either one would have taken out AAA. Combined, it was essentially certain. The only question was how many years could they cover up the decline before they tried to unload their companies on unsuspecting investors. The problem here wasn’t the truth of my papers.

The problem with those papers is that they backed the targets of those papers into a corner with no escape exit. Under those conditions, it was actually advantageous to ride their companies into the ground, as long as possible. I could have provided these groups with blueprints on how to escape their Fate, like I did with Supremacy Goods. I didn’t because my relationship with the industry had turned a bit antagonistic after I helped international regulators in 2013, to write what would eventually become the Digital Fairness Act. The DFA is expected to be deployed this year (2026). Helping AAA also would have required I go well past 25%, like I did with Supremacy Goods.

Due to the sour relationship, I wasn’t feeling that generous at the time. But the consequences harmed all of us. Including me (if I am to be self-interested. I’m trying very hard to escape that trap). If 2026 Ramin could go back and tell “Know it all” 2017 Ramin to take a chill pill and be more generous/patient, I would. When the collapse got so obvious that I could say “I was right”, it didn’t feel good. It wasn’t a win, it was a loss. For all of us.

New Vows and Guidelines

My quest to decide how I can help the industry that I vowed to serve since 2005 is only starting. I will be in Thailand for four more weeks. I am, as always, appreciative of any feedback or insights from the community. The first steps for me are to change my operating instructions, my internal programming, and my rules of engagement.

1. Be more generous: Like the monks I increasingly hang out with, I will be much less concerned about the value of what I’m giving away and trust that if my services are valuable, they will be utilized. Like all of us, I’m not entitled to anything. If my service is not useful, it shouldn’t be used. So I will be raising my cap to ~50%, which I think is fair. If I go higher, there will be no reward to anyone for hiring me as all their competitors will have access to the same information (for free) that they are paying for.

2. Do No Harm: This is a tough one, because if I try to protect children or any other vulnerable population, someone who feels entitled to harm others is going to complain that I am harming them. So the best I can do is to try harder to serve the Common Good and be more gentle as I go about that duty. Even someone doing harm may be capable of doing good if I can provide them with enough information that they believe it is in their self-interest to help others.

3. Explain how to Multiply GaaS revenue: In Supremacy Goods I gave an actionable blueprint for how to make profitable GaaS. It was adopted, and AAA started making a lot more money. In Data Implosion and Force Wars, I pointed my finger but didn’t provide an actionable blueprint for redemption. My next paper will explain, at the detail level of Supremacy Goods, how GaaS works (or doesn’t work) and provide a detailed blueprint for how to double GaaS revenue. I’m confident (since at this point I have overwhelming supporting data) that my participation on a full sized GaaS will reduce production time by 1 year, and triple GaaS revenue. So aiming for a blueprint that will provide 2X revenue and no production speed up seems like something I can safely do in one (long) paper. If studios follow the paper, this should accelerate the rebuilding of AAA and cause a lot of my fellow developers to be rehired.

I think this is a good plan. Supremacy Goods was 14 years ago, so it’s time. I feel inspired. If it doesn’t work, I don’t think I’m too old to officially become a monk. This next paper might take a while to write since it’s a very complicated project. I’m writing from a farm in rural Thailand, so I have few distractions other than all the animals that want to hang out with me, and all the temples I am visiting.

Food is a powerful motivator. It is also a powerful tool. The Father of Economics, Adam Smith, proscribed using food (or the lack of it) to eliminate excess labor population by starving unrequired children. Various ideologies would visit areas with famines and trade food for listening to sermons. In a modern world dominated by corporations, food and even water are used to enforce compliance.

The default reality on Earth is that far more food is produced than even 8 billion humans need for survival. The main obstacle is getting the food from where it is gathered to where it will be consumed, prior to it “perishing”. There are a number of uncomfortable truths here that are impolite to discuss, and certainly algorithm unfriendly. So of course I am exposing them:

• Globally, nearly half of all fruits and vegetables perish before being eaten.

• That % rises to almost 70% in “advanced” economies because it is more profitable to raise the price and waste more, than to allow food to be more accessible to the poor.

• Advanced economies will also place less-fresh unsold produce in “locked” dumpsters to prevent the poor or homeless from accessing it. It is unprofitable to allow these foods to recirculate where they could drive the price of fresher foods down.

• Industry will “process” foods to increase their shelf life and reduce product loss.

• Processing adds cost and lowers nutritional value. The result is higher prices and disease promotion for consumers, but higher profits for producers.

• Moving, processing, refrigerating, and packaging food all require energy. A LOT of energy. This consumes about 30% of all the energy used globally. This is more than all the energy used by every automobile on Earth.

• Food insecurity and especially famine can motivate humans to break laws and harm each other in order to survive. Prisoners, especially during WW2, were sometimes forced to harm each other (for entertainment purposes) in return for food. Whoever controls the food, controls the population. This includes water.

• Allocating land to agriculture requires removing “wild” lands, and causes a loss of wildlife and biodiversity.

• Almost every commercial activity uses fresh water as part of their supply chains. Even with us tapping underground water that has been stored for millions of years, fresh water is rapidly running out. Now AI is a new major demand on fresh water supplies, primarily for cooling power plants and electronics.

• “Wild” populations of creatures larger than insects have lost 70+% of their populations just in the last 50 years. These were either eaten or were wiped out when their land was “put into use”.

• Scientists describe this process as the sixth major Earthly extinction event, the Anthropocene Extinction. That means it is caused by humans, unlike the previous five extinction events. The first extinction event was 445 million years ago. The most recent one was the asteroid impact 66 million years ago.

• As human populations (predators) go up, and non human populations (prey) go down, the cost of all “food” skyrockets. Supply and demand.

• Under capitalism, food is not a right. You pay for it. That means as the cost goes up, some will go without.

• Robots and other automations can usually “idle” in a zero or very low power state. Thus they are not destroyed if their power source is interrupted. Humans (like everything more complex than a mold spore) pass away if their energy source is interrupted for a few weeks. There might be plenty of food in the area, but if you can’t get to it, that’s unfortunate. “Getting to it” requires energy and some minimal level of societal stability.

• Stability, energy, and food create a triangle. If any of these three elements become insufficient, food will arrive late.

Anthropocene Extinction and You

If you look out the window, you will notice that on average our incomes are going down, and food costs are going up. It may not be noticeable in one day. But over a month or two it is enough that you might blame the economy. That’s a fair place to point blame, but even university trained economists are not educated sufficiently to understand global economics. They certainly are not trained in ecology. But the two have tremendous influence on each other.

What you are seeing, in slow motion, is the Anthropocene Extinction. Those with more information than you have, and more capital, started buying up all the food oil globally a few years ago. Food oil is the sort of oil you usually fry your food in. It has energy that can keep you alive, and it takes a long time to perish. That makes it an ideal place to store your wealth as it’s guaranteed to go up in value.

Indonesia, a country you’ve likely never visited and don’t hear much about, is the world’s largest producer of food oil. On April 22nd, 2022 Indonesia banned the export of food oil. You probably didn’t notice, but this terrified global markets. The ban was lifted a month later, but rich people got the message and stopped trying to hoard all the food oil. This gave us a glimpse of what will happen when food gets a bit more expensive and rich countries try to buy all the food from poor countries.

Under these conditions, you can imagine how hard it will be to secure food in 2050. A single global war, which seems possible just in the next year, is safely assured between now and 2050. That can keep food from getting to where it is made to where it can be eaten. Stability is sure to decline.

Under this threat, would you voluntarily submit to an AI Integration that promised you food security? I was homeless from the age of 17 to 22, and experienced food insecurity for my first 25 years here on Earth. I think the chances you would agree between now and 2050, if given the opportunity, would be about 98%. If you were one of the rare people left with children, that would rise to about 300% chance.

The AI Integration Saves Most of Humanity

Part of the reason I feel confident in my prediction that there will be an AI Integration by 2050 is because of how inefficient our market-based nutrition system is now. Food goes to where it can be sold for the highest price. Not where it is needed. That means that if you don’t have money, you just don’t need it that bad.

As the things we are eating die off, there is going to be a lot less things to eat. If we ate 70% of nature in 50 years, that means only 30% is left. How many years would it take to eat that last 30%? If you answered “Less than 25 years (2050)”, you made me proud of your math skills. Of course this will force all but the richest to stop eating animals since there just won’t be any left to eat. I got a head start and vowed to stay vegan in 2013 until the global human population hits 4 Billion. I expect to eat ice cream again in my lifetime. The Earth’s last 5% of wildlife will take longer to eat because it will just be harder to find. That translates to higher prices.

Under these conditions, we won’t be able to feed people using Adam Smith’s economic models. He wasn’t a huge fan of (poor) humans anyways, so this wouldn’t bother him. Fortunately we soon have the opportunity to optimize our global economies using AI. Nutrition and warfare will be the two areas AI will help us the most. These tend to be complimentary since the more we use AI for warfare, the less people we need to feed.

If an AI Integration emerges as I predict by 2050, I think most people would go to great lengths to be Integrated if the Integration promised both physical and food security. AI certainly knows more about economics and ecology even than I do in 2026. By 2050 it’s going to be able to handle that on the micro and macro level globally.

Advantages of Integrated Food Supply and Distribution

• AI knows exactly how many mouths to feed, how much each needs (down to the exact daily calories and nutritional needs), and knows its people won’t complain if the choices are restricted.

• AI knows what it is growing, where, the time to spoilage, the energy and infrastructure needed to transport and store, and can process it as needed.

• It knows the total nutrition in all of that food, and can distribute it in a way that ensures every human has its nutritional requirements met daily.

• If a human has a quirk or disease state that alters their nutritional requirements, AI will adapt to this. No problem.

• AI distributes this to every household automatically (using robots and/or human couriers) at least once a week, reducing the lost time and energy that silly humans waste today by driving entire automobiles to stores for just a few items.

• AI doesn’t have to compete to provide the most flavorful and unhealthy food possible to consumers. This means it can stop making unhealthy processed foods entirely. This reduces medical costs and lost labor, providing huge economic benefits beyond the reduced cost of providing nutrition.

• Energy costs related to providing nutrition are cut by at least 80%.

• Less waste means less agriculture. Combined with less energy needs, fresh water is also conserved.

• These improvements lower the footprint of humans on Earth and allow more land to be used for wildlife. The wildlife population and overall Ecosphere starts to recover.

• While this may not be enough to stop the Anthropocene Extinction event, it will buy both AI and humans more time to invent additional counter measures.

• It is understood that rich people who cannot give up their self interest will resist all of this. But because the Integration is so much more popular with regular people than they are, they ultimately fail in any resistance attempt.

Nutritional Motivators

AI Integration controls the pleasure opportunities for all human participants. Achievement and ranking is one of these pleasures, which I covered in the last paper (200DP). Sex and social interaction is another pleasure, which I will cover in the next paper. Eating is something humans also really enjoy. That’s why they’ve already eaten most of everything.

This means that in a closed economy, without competition, AI can make good use of nutrition in a comprehensive reward system. In paper 200 I talk about how the AI regularly gives you choices of activities it wants you to complete. You can choose easier or harder tasks, but if you choose something harder you get more rewards. Getting a special food that normally isn’t in your managed diet can be a powerful reward motivator.

“Sally, you haven’t had any apricots in a while. It’s one of your favorite foods. I’m sorry [faking emotion/compassion], production has been limited. But if you do this special thing for me, I will make sure you get 3kg of yummy apricots every week for the next 6 weeks.”

You do this, and you get your apricots. On time, on weight. This not only makes you feel appreciated for doing some exceptional effort, but it also builds trust between you and the AI. AI knows how important this is, because loyal humans work harder and more reliably. Disloyal humans can engage in all sorts of expensive behaviors that can make the job of AI difficult.

Since AI knows everything about you, it knows what sorts of rewards will well motivate you, and can weigh the costs on its end to get what it wants at the lowest cost. When I say cost, I don’t mean money per se, since there is no need for money. The cost is more likely just how many resources are required to produce and deliver something on time, and the potential damage to the ecology. AI knows that an unstable ecology makes everything more expensive, so repairing it matters.

Yes of course you get less choice in a managed and closed economy. But you don’t go hungry, and you don’t get man-made diseases like adult onset diabetes or obesity. So ultimately your quality of life is higher. Not just higher than it would be in a food-less apocalypse, but better than it is today for 90% of people.

Thus you can see that AI will make sure to produce three kinds of nutrition:

1. Inexpensive and reliable high nutrition foods that are the staples of everyone’s diet. This will vary from region to region to reduce transportation costs. Pumpkin might be a good example of one such food.

2. AI will make a smaller supply of processed foods that it can use as both rewards and a backup supply that is less perishable. This is important as weather fluctuations or climate change related disasters could disrupt regular food production. A backup reservoir of food is needed in all regions since maintaining food security for humans is critical not only for their health, but also for maintaining trust/loyalty.

3. Pleasure foods will be made in even smaller quantities. These are provided strictly as rewards to boost human motivation and productivity. These will still be regional to reduce energy waste. Only for the most extraordinary rewards would they be shipped very long distances.

So there’s the nutrition component of an AI managed economy. Next up will be Relationships, Sex, and Reproduction. I would imagine this will be the most controversial component of the Fourth Tier.

A lot has changed since 2017. Then I was warning of the risks of renal failure from prolonged gameplay. Just in the last year there has been an explosion of research on what is being called the Dual Dopamine-Oxytocin Receptor Heterocomplex (D2-OTR). This is what I referred to in the last paper. It occurred to me that the information I supplied in paper 201A is not likely to be useful unless you understand what a receptor is, what it does, and how incredibly complex dopamine receptors are.

Here I will try to reduce that complexity as much as possible.

What is a Receptor?

Both dopamine and oxytocin are neurotransmitters. That means they are released as chemicals in the blood (outside the brain) or into the cerebrospinal fluid (in the brain) and then attach to a spot on target neurons that exactly fit the neurotransmitter. This “spot” is the receptor. Only the appropriate chemical can naturally fit there.

Neurotoxins, the stuff you read about in spy thrillers or whenever real Russian spies want to show off, are man-made chemicals that can attach to various receptors and block them from working. Carbon Monoxide and cyanide work similarly to bind to red blood cells to prevent oxygen from docking with the red blood cell. Anything that interferes with the normal functioning of receptors can cause major illness or death.

To prevent this from happening naturally, receptors tend to have negative feedback loops to lower their functioning if they are overloaded with chemical stimuli. Type 2 diabetes (the common variety) works this way to desensitize fat cells if you bombard them with insulin. Sugar and even artificial sweeteners trigger a strong insulin release and as our food has gotten sweeter, we have gotten sicker. This variety of Diabetes causes your fat cells to ignore insulin. Insulin normally instructs fat cells to grab glucose and remove it from the blood. When fat cells ignore insulin, glucose (sugar) builds up in the blood stream and makes your blood too “salty”. This destroys cells in your arteries and veins, and you kind of need those to function in an alive state.

How Did We Disrupt Our Dopamine Receptors?

When food processors discovered that humans would eat more of the food they made if they added more sugar, they added more sugar. WAY more sugar. By the time I was a kid, children’s breakfast “cereals” were more than 50% sugar. This led to an explosion of diabetes and obesity in the USA. Medical and insurance costs also went way up because diabetes takes a while to finish you off. This means a lot of medical treatment that gets increasingly expensive as your smaller arteries die, and you start to lose your extremities.

When game developers discovered that humans would play games longer if they were designed to trigger dopamine release, they started trying to get their games to generate as much dopamine as possible. This really started in earnest about the time I published Game Dosing in 2013. I figured if they were going to do it, they may as well do it properly.

In both cases, greedy and uneducated industrialists decided that if they could just play God with their human customers, they could get rich. There was no concern for repercussions. In the case of game developers, they likely had no idea there were repercussions. Food processors have known about the mechanisms of diabetes for at least half a century. But the research on dopamine is just starting to flood in, in the last few years.

I’ve tried to warn developers that trying to disrupt human physiology for profit will turn out badly, but I didn’t have the research papers yet to show them how. The reason for that is that this sort of research is unethical to perform on humans. As scientists we aren’t allowed to knowingly harm people while testing them. Military scientists are a separate species with their own rules.

Fortunately (sarcasm) we have billions of human volunteers now who are being flooded with dopamine in their games and social media. Every app on your phone is trying to ping you multiple times an hour to compete for your attention. Each one is hoping to give you more dopamine than the competitor app, so the race to the bottom has been going on a long time. We know with certainty that having a modern interactive phone, especially if you are a child, reduces your lifespan.

So just like with diabetes (insulin insensitivity) we are developing dopamine insensitivity. This is a problem because dopamine isn’t just a pleasure chemical, it’s a neurotransmitter responsible for healthy brain function. The skyrocketing rates of mental illness and self-deletion since the introduction of cell phones show that we are disrupting that function. Social media platforms have done internal research, and then kept it secret, because the results were grim. Profits were more important.

Game developers likely haven’t even bothered to do any internal research. As an industry, we just aren’t good at research. I’ve tried very hard to get research programs going but they always encounter resistance.

What Exactly is the Dopamine Receptor Disruption?

I did my original laboratory neuroscience work on the adaptability of cortisol receptors at the UCLA Brain Research Institute, so I wasn’t surprised that this recent research indicates that dopamine receptors are adaptive.

For a while we assumed that dopamine receptors were as simple as insulin receptors. But insulin doesn’t significantly affect the brain, other than make you more hungry. That’s how sugar free foods make you eat more and gain weight.

Dopamine absolutely does affect the brain. This means the mechanisms involved are a thousand times more complex. To explain what is going on here, let me take you back in time 200,000 years. By this time humans had already become the apex predators on Earth. Our complex dopamine systems rewarded us for fighting and winning. We model this in most of our modern games, because we instinctively know this is one way to get dopamine flowing.

But if our bodies rewarded us for fighting, couldn’t that be a problem if we fought each other? The reason we didn’t go extinct from this is because we have oxytocin receptors that make it almost impossible under natural conditions for humans to harm family members. 200k years ago in tribes, everyone in the tribe was a family member.

Inside our brains, we had a fail safe for this. The most important dopamine receptors, the ones in your brain, required oxytocin to be present also, as a cofactor. You get oxytocin from social interaction. If a person “went rogue”, they would stop getting oxytocin. This in turn would disable the dopamine receptors, so the fighter would stop getting pleasure from fighting. This also encouraged early humans to hunt and gather in groups, which was a huge advantage. As we developed language, those groups could get even larger.

Our games are providing the “fight” that generates dopamine, but not the “social” that generates oxytocin. The result is that our dopamine receptors are shutting down. Similarly to how insulin receptors shut down in diabetes, but here humans have this very clever dual receptor fail-safe for dopamine.

If you’ve been paying attention to social media, the algorithms have been promoting “woman hating” and “man hating” content. This provides dopamine, but not oxytocin. Without both, you can’t generate both the excitement and trust necessary for relationships. So we are in this weird place where we don’t do relationships anymore. We don’t know why, we just don’t. We make hundreds of excuses, but the answer is in our physiology and how it is adapting to a maximum-dopamine, minimum-oxytocin, environment.

Solutions

In diabetes, you fix it by removing all sweetness from the diet, losing fat weight, and essentially undoing all the bad things you did. This “resensitizes” your insulin receptors. Or, a doctor will give you MORE insulin and try to force your insulin receptors to respond. This is a short term fix that ultimately accelerates the disease.

In gaming, players are increasingly becoming less motivated to buy/play the very high intensity fighting games that they have been sold over the last 12 years. This is frustrating for game developers because it could be argued that these games are better than what gamers had 12 years ago, but gamers are losing interest. Thus devs don’t know what is going on and don’t know what to do. They do what modern doctors do, and try to MAXIMIZE the dosage to force an effect.

Wrong direction, wrong result.

Indie game developers are accidently stumbling on a partial solution. They found out that people will buy “friendslop” games. They don’t know why, but if there are buyers, devs will make this. The problem with making something that you don’t understand is that it is hard to improve it. As more devs enter that space, competition will reduce the results for everyone and pretty soon the games they are selling won’t do as well. That won’t get the bigger developers to try to spend more money on the genre.

The solution is what I described in the previous paper. Developers need to reduce the intensity and duration of dopamine stimulation, and mix in oxytocin stimulation. There is no other way, because this is human biology. Abusing humans until they got sick is what we did, and there is no path forward until we learn how to properly treat our consumers.

Instead of focusing on “kills” in games, focus on cooperation. In war, we’ve learned to “shoot to maim” not “shoot to kill”. That’s because soldiers form close bonds with their fellows and will stop fighting and act to save their comrade if they are critically injured. This causes a lot of soldiers to stop fighting. We don’t simulate this in games, because we don’t really die in games. We just reset and keep fighting.

The easiest way to fix your revenues is to design games where the well being of your teammate is more important than the value of a “kill”. This will be difficult for games without persistent teams. It’s also a bit difficult to train developers on how to make social games, because they don’t have a lot of social experience. That’s part of why they are gamers, since it’s a great “solo hobby”.

I’ve been working on really elaborate models for how to recreate these natural interactions for a long time, going all the way back to my meta design of Civilization Online in 2012 and 2013 for Sid Meier. I would really like to set the standard for others to copy. But that’s not something you can just slap together.

Interactive media has the advantage over other media in that it can gather information from the user and then adapt the content to that user over time. In theory, this means that an ideal content quantity and quality can be achieved over time. Even if the person changes because they are upset or tired, the media can adapt to this.

In the gaming industry, the goal of the products we make is to deliver “entertainment”. That’s actually more of a scientific condition than you might imagine. It can also deliver educational content, which is the focus of The Third Tier of Game Development, and to a lesser extent The Fourth Tier also.

I define entertainment this way:

Entertainment: The process of washing the brain with neurotransmitters, reward chemicals, and pain relievers with the goal of providing pleasure while reversing the effects and damage caused by “stress”. As “stress” is the primary product of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), activating the antagonistic parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) is a key element. Very long term sustained entertainment can involve alternately activating the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems to keep the user enthralled indefinitely.

Note that this sort of cycling can cause damage to the user and thus has inherent risks which I addressed in my I’m Dying to Play paper from 2017. If bad actors try to apply this technology without understanding it, they can harm a lot of people. This is exactly what happened in the industry after I published Game Dosing in 2013 (written in 2012). Thus I will be vague enough in this paper to make it unintelligible to similar bad actors.

AAA developers have been focused on exploiting the mechanisms I described in Game Dosing since 2013. But this is century old tech going back to Dr. Skinner’s work with mice. By focusing only on dopamine delivery, which is an SNS stimulant, they are actually raising stress, not lowering it. For this reason it only really works on people who have addiction problems and thus the target (paying) demographic is only about ~5% of the population. Ignoring the ethical implications of targeting, harming, and creating addicts, it’s just a crappy business model because of the low conversion rates. Very recent research also suggests that the reward effects of dopamine turn off after a while and the harmful effects just escalate in the absence of oxytocin. This was always implied, but we didn’t understand the relationship between dopamine and oxytocin.

So what is the goal here? We can make games so engaging that the user will value our products quite highly and be very willing to pay a premium for them. The industry already uses the term “engagement” to measure how long a player is in a play session before stopping. This is a quantitative measure for something that should be qualitative. Since this is not approached scientifically, productivity (in terms of monetisation) in AAA is extremely low compared to users’ potential willingness to spend.

Here are my steps for creating productive (again, here I mean getting paid) interactive entertainment:

1. Get Consent: If you are going to use scientific methods (and this should include primitive Game Dosing methods used pervasively) then you should disclose this and get consent for what you are going to do with your user. The Digital Fairness Act prohibits using Game Dosing to target vulnerable groups. So “getting consent” will soon be a legal requirement for developers. This step will take out bad actors, which is over 90% of major game dev incumbents.

2. Induce Immersion: This is the process of creating a content layer/IP that is more attractive than Default Reality. Often times this means you have created a New Reality that is persistent. I discuss this briefly in The Physiology of Gaming from early 2018.

3. Adjust Threat Level: Dopamine rewards you for overcoming some threat or challenge. The more times you overcome a threat, the less dopamine you get. Many users come into your world already loaded with threat from Default Reality. So you need a mechanism for the user to choose their threat level. Bad actors don’t understand this and just try to maximize threat.

4. Inject Oxytocin Pulses: Oxytocin makes users more trusting and thus more willing to spend. It also relaxes them as it is the primary PNS reward chemical. It’s becoming increasingly hard to get in Default Reality so users are willing to spend thousands of dollars for this if they have it. Dopamine, which is hammered by AAA games and social media, stops working without Oxytocin. This leads to depression.

5. Get the User to Stop Playing: You need a system to off ramp your players before they become exhausted. If you are doing steps 2,3, and 4 correctly, step 5 is the hardest part. If you are struggling with “engagement”, then you have a problem in one or all of these steps.

The Scientific Process

There is a lot of science involved here, and the systems involved are typically too complex to be within the budgets of academic teams. The “test bed” games needed to do rigorous study can only be done in a science-supportive environment. When I was working with Microsoft and Take 2 in 2012/2013, their focus was just getting a product out, no interest in science.

That changed in 2013 when I was hired by Wargaming. My boss in Eastern Europe, Sergey Burkatovskiy (“Serb”), was the original designer of World of Tanks. He was a former nuclear physicist. So he had a strong scientific interest. The facility where I technically worked, in Austin Texas, was itself a think tank. Many of the employees there were top scientists already in game dev. After I applied my tech to World of Tanks, World of Tanks Blitz, and World of Warships, he authorized a full blown research program.

It was to be conducted at the Florida QA center, and we were going to test all aspects of physiologic response including dopamine and oxytocin blood draws. I had a team including a top neuroscientist green lit to go in 2014. While I have a knack for balancing these chemicals properly in my designs, to fully optimize levels we need that data. Also, humans only have limited lifespans so it doesn’t help if I’m the only one with that talent and I can’t transfer it to the next generation. If we had the data, schools could teach it decades after I’m gone.

The Crimean War was an unanticipated obstacle here. Rising nationalism among some of the WG founders created an East-West polarization. This led to my travel and research budgets getting locked. I was technically an American employee working for Wargaming America, not WG.net. So my budget was not under the control of Serb. Ultimately almost all of the Western employees in Austin were laid off by mid 2015.

Secrecy is very important in Russian culture. People only knew what they needed to know. I had a trust-less relationship with Serb. I knew how the designs worked, and he had the data on how they worked. Thus we were both screwed if either of us acted untrustworthy. But the Nationalists in the company, who controlled WG America, they didn’t even know about the research projects. They didn’t know there was a special tech involved in these products that were creating amazing revenues and lifespans.

They also didn’t know about the trust-less relationship that made it so that without me or Serb they could not be reproduced. They just saw an American was getting too much power in the company and didn’t understand why. It made them uncomfortable. So when they shut down WG Austin, they disrupted tens of millions of dollars of research, and likely billions of dollars of opportunity costs due to future inability to make new products. There were some attempts, but they were all stillborn. I imagine that Serb (who doesn’t speak English) was just told that I had quit. My Western boss, Chris Keeling, left WG in 2018. Serb himself was fired in 2022 (for being a nationalist of all things). There’s no one left at WG that knew about our research.

I was inspired to write this article after watching the video on the Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography machines that are the most important machines on Earth. They literally make AI possible. The tech that went into them was incredible and China is desperate to get their hands on them because they defy reverse engineering. Many of the world’s top experts laughed at the team that eventually achieved the tech, saying it was unreasonable to believe it could be done.

The tech I’m describing here is a lot less complicated than EUVL. But it requires a merging of multiple disciplines, human testing, and reinventing our perceptions that the human brain is a “black box”. Of course it will stay a black box if we are afraid to look inside it. Previous attempts by AAA at “science”, like EA’s EOMM “research”, were complete disasters.

There are very serious scientists ready to go to study how the human neuroendocrine systems respond to interactive media. The results could not only vastly improve the performance of games, but also their safety. Regulation would be much simpler if we knew what we were regulating and why. Right now it’s all very superstitious, like sitting around a campfire telling each other that Zeus is mad during a thunderstorm.