Ben Mack Interview

Excerpts from here and here:

Ben Mack is the author of Poker Without Cards... which bills itself as a “consciousness thriller”. PWC is a fictionalized exploration of memetics and marketing, areas which Mack has a great deal of experience in as a career adman, having worked on high-profile ad campaigns with such corporations as Grieco Research Group, Lieberman Research Worldwide, Deutsch, J. Walter Thompson, WONGDOODY, BBDO, & WestWayne.

...The structure of poker is betting with incomplete information. I never thought of this connection between poker and The Zeigarnik Effect, they both deal with incomplete information. If somebody can’t see how the story of Jesus, of him coming back soon, isn’t structurally the same as Direct Response advertising’s application of The Zeigarnik Effect, then fuck, I hope their god preaches peace because the world is full of similar sheep that crave blood.

...I don’t view my tactics as cutting-edge. But, I do view Bey’s tactics as under utilized for good intentions. Bob Dobb asserts that the two greatest misconceptions of 20th Century Americans are that politicians mean well and that they aren’t that smart. In the 21st Century we actually have a president who isn’t that smart. Now, we are living in the Philip K. Dick book Simulacra. Wait, I’m sorry, that started in the 20th Century when we hired an actor to play the role of president.

...Healthy people have a life. When they encounter something they authentically dislike, they don’t immerse themselves in it so they can rant against the atrocity, they move on. I crack up when I see a fundamentalist Christian say that pornography is the devils work and dangerous stuff, that’s why they spent 800 hours the previous year going through pornos to classify what’s what.

...Look, I find myself surrounded by a confederacy of dunces with the occasional elitist scum who claim to KNOW stuff. I’m an Idiot. I crack up when I read comments about my book that there are no new ideas in PWC. I used to get excited because I saw this as an opportunity to learn from somebody who already covered the mental terrain I’m crossing, somebody who can show me some interesting routes and neat mental scenic views. I’ve learned that these people are generally vacuous pompous scum, on their blogs and their sites I feel their energy and all I see is a they’re contributing to society. I don’t understand how they can maintain their superior attitude, but then I see the Bush family maintaining their vacuous superiority. I guess money helps.

...Figure It out for yourself and quit believing—believing takes too much energy. Know or don’t know. It’s okay to be wrong but believing is a waste of energy.

...I have no cult. I have no movement. I want people to think for themselves and care for humanity.