Money on the Left speaks with Raúl Carrillo, assistant professor of Law at Boston College, about gaming money.
The $250 billion video game industry (the largest entertainment industry in the world) has rapidly developed an unregulated banking system. As online gaming becomes increasingly social and immersive, players build economies within games. Gamers can purchase goods and services within these environments using debit and credit cards. Companies also issue gift cards and co-branded credit cards. They store balances on digital platforms outside of the regulated banking system. Most critically, gaming companies offer players the chance to earn points inside games and convert them to other financial instruments, including bank deposits. However, these “gaming money” systems also feature exchange rate manipulation, money laundering, and financial risk for unwitting gamers and other stakeholders.
In this episode, we explore how companies like Microsoft, Sony, and Roblox are not only harming gamers but issuing “shadow money,” evading banking regulations meant to prevent structural problems. Much like 19th-century canal, railroad, and mining companies, as well as 21st – century financial technology and cryptocurrency companies, gaming giants are engaging in private monetary governance. Although agencies hesitate to regulate “virtual” worlds of entertainment, media, and the arts, banking law does not ask if money is “real” but whether its creation infringes on the privileges of banks and the U.S. government. Carrillo proposes regulators supervise large corporations that support the conversion of gaming money to bank deposits at scale. Gaming money suggests banking law is incomplete without concern for corporate monies—even those conjured across imaginary boundaries between worlds. Moreover, the long-run stakes are high. Gaming introduces most U.S. children to money. Regulation must confront a future that is already here.
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Transcript
Scott:
Raúl Carrillo, welcome to Money on the Left.
Raúl Carrillo:
Thank you very much, Scott. It’s good to be back.
Scott:
It’s so good for you to be back. I think a lot of our listeners – our longtime listeners – know who you are and and what you’re up to, but maybe you can introduce yourself afresh to remind our listeners who you are and about your background but also to introduce yourself to new listeners who may not be familiar with your appearances on our show in the past.
Raúl Carrillo:
Sure thing. Thanks, Scott. So, I’m Raúl and it’s good to be back on the show, I think, for the first time since 2019, perhaps, or a little bit after that. But I am a scholar of financial regulation and technology and an incoming law professor at Boston College in fall 2025. But I’ve done a variety of things since becoming an attorney in 2015, mostly related to financial regulation and technology, but I have been a scholar and an organizer of the money thoughts for quite some time at this point. Back in the day, I was one of the founding board members of the Modern Money Network, which is a political education organization around public money that Rohan Grey, my longtime colleague, and I created as law students nearly a decade ago. I, after law school, was a special counsel to the enforcement director at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (rest in peace). I have worked as a legal services attorney around the Hill during a variety of things related to fintech. And in 2020, I became the deputy director of the Law and Political Economy Project based at Yale Law School, which has now grown into an international movement – big tent movement – focused on, let’s say, small-d democratic, progressive visions of legal scholarship, the academy, legal thought to build a just and sustainable future.
So, now, though I mostly write law review articles, and I’ve been trying to nail down this project called Gaming Money about unregulated monetary and banking systems built by the video game industry. It’s in its current form a law review article, so it’s a bit dry, and I think we’ll be going a little bit beyond the pages in this conversation. But I guess the most appropriate way to think about it at this point is to conceive of my analysis of what is going on within and beyond the gaming industry as within the continuum of my analysis of the political power of Silicon Valley throughout the financial system. And that’s going to raise a lot of questions, I think, that are beyond my pay grade, especially regarding culture, the humanities, etc. So, again, always excited to be on Money on the Left here with the two of you.
Billy:
Yeah, I was just checking. It looks like we published the transcript of our conversation with you for episode 28, Resisting Predatory Finance, in September of 2020. But then more recently, we got some fancier software, fixed up the audio, and published the audio too. So yeah, it’s been a minute.
Raúl Carrillo:
I think that was actually a result of my attempt to run my life on Linux, Billy. And that’s not your fault. I just thought I was a smarter tinkerer than I was.
Billy:
Listen, few people can manage that.
Raúl Carrillo:
Several years later, mea culpa.
Billy:
No sweat at all. Well, several years later, what do you think the major milestones – it almost feels funny to ask – but what have we missed or what’s been happening since 2020? What’s the state of the art of resisting predatory finance? What sort of new strategies are we adapting?
Raúl Carrillo:
Oh, my. So we’re in quite a moment, Billy. And, for listeners, we’re recording this amidst Elon Musk’s takeover of the treasury payment system and a wide variety of other financial technological horrors occurring. And so, you know, it’s a real toss up is arson at the state level and the commandeering of the most critical networks, the most predatory thing going on? Or is it what’s just around the corner and, you know, just in the imagination of some of the tycoons that we’re familiar with? I guess to sort of answer the question about where are we now compared to the last time I was on the show, the last time I was on the show, I had thought about a global, virtual, expansive, social, private monetary system in predominantly theoretical terms. And now I see that it’s been happening under our eyes for decades in the form of the video game industry.
So, I believe last time I was on the show – and thank you for resituating my memory there, many things have happened – we were quite concerned about whether then Facebook, now Meta, was going to establish a private currency system called Libra, since called DM, that would have its own unit of account and run through the Facebook business empire, but also interconnect with services offered by other members of what would have been a Silicon Valley cartel and that includes not just PayPal, etc., but we’re also talking about Spotify and Uber and really a giant move to consolidate big tech’s power over the future of the political economy of finance and the financial system like itself. And we were quickly, there was a pushback by, you know, certainly academics, but many scrappy fighters around the Hill and I’d like to think that together we stopped the Libra system from coming into existence. But the truth is that it was probably Wall Street and this was just another fissure in capital and they have no interest – the banks have no interest – in Mark Zuckerberg getting his own system. Now, I certainly look at what’s happening with Musk’s plan for X and his satellites and the government and all that – and that is terrifying – but I think there are many pernicious ways in which Silicon Valley companies or major tech companies that predominantly run on the big tech business model of really getting eyeballs in data have already sort of put a stake in the future of what is going to happen.
Now, I look at the video game industry, not because I think that they are conducting unregulated activity that’s going to lead to some sort of systemic crash anywhere in the near future, but as an example of just how far you can get in creating what we might call private money and establishing an entire system completely outside of the current regulatory structure. And if you dig deep enough, this gets back to, I think, some of the familiar questions present in Money on the Left discourse about the sovereign and what it means to actually have control of a system. Can you stop private systems? Don’t we want pluralistic systems? Like, shouldn’t there be some sort of resiliency? If you want to stop kids from being able to trade coins in games on their phones, who’s the fascist now, says Elon? And so there are all these sort of very interesting questions that are cast into, I think, different registers. And I can see from different angles having begun to explore this project.
Scott:
So, maybe to get us going, you can tell us a little bit about where this video game money industry comes from. How did it emerge? What shapes has it taken? And why should we be concerned about it?
Raúl Carrillo:
Sure. That’s an excellent question because when many people hear me start to sort of go on and on this, there are some smell test questions. Like, what do you mean? Like, you know, these businesses are actually doing that or not – doing X or not doing Y. And so to sort of briefly summarize what has happened with let’s call it money in video games over the last several decades: So when I was growing up and the major sort of video game platforms were Nintendo 64, Sega Genesis, Sony PlayStation 1, video games occupied a particular area of culture, I guess I would say, or they drew particular people to them. And the industry was built around a sort of individualized hero’s journey narrative in many cases. And video games were very, you know, the image was the lonely male in the basement is the person who plays video games. And, in some sense, the structure of games and even the economies within games reflected this. You collect a lot of coins. You go to the shop. You go to the market. All of this, of course, appears from nowhere. And you get some stuff and you keep it moving. Today’s games – if you spend time with children you especially know this – are completely different and sometimes there is no sort of individual goal for many of these games, in fact. And the point is the sociality. The point is the interconnectedness with many people all over the earth in some cases.
The most sort of strident example of a game with its own internal economy and its own attempts to reach beyond what was considered the main audience of the video game industry before is Roblox, I would argue, and Roblox is really a platform of games where developers, many children, in fact, can start to develop their own economies and earn what are called Robux. And compared to games of old, so the value of a Robuck compared to like a coin in Super Mario or ring in Sonic the Hedgehog can be converted to dollar-denominated currency or fiat-denominated currency. And you can cash out, so to speak. That’s a feature that is present in other sorts of systems, but I think few people realize that you can actually do that with many video games now. There’s not always a one-to-one ratio. There is still limited scale on some of these instruments. But many games now feature financial instruments or IOUs that are quote-unquote “convertible” into other forms of currency, meaning you can gain and extract value essentially from nothing. There are many layers to these systems, and I’ve gone back and forth about whether this is a banking law article or a financial regulation article more broadly, etc., but suffice it to say that there are a number of instruments that are issued by these gaming companies, both within and outside of the games in the forms of the Microsoft Store, the PlayStation Store, the giant gift card system that keeps a lot of these games running, that have certain degrees of moneyness, as we might say on this show. They fall somewhere within the hierarchy of money.
Is it red alert? Oh, my God, there’s something that’s about to tip over and cause a financial crisis? No. I’ve written about other forms of sort of fintech innovation that I do think present risks, such as like the collapse of PayPal is quite a serious thing. But it’s, you know, that’s sort of on the radar of financial regulation scholars and practitioners in a way that something like this is not, because this seems to be so tiny and absurd. And in some sense, we’re always talking about low value monies. We’re talking about what we call low-powered versus high-powered monies. Not all of them. You can’t cash out all of them. Some of them have homes within systems within the system. There’s a whole universe of different instruments. But they begin to look like money the more we looked at them in a networked sort of way. And that is worth keeping an eye on. And it is precisely, I think, one of the lessons, and this is where it’s somewhat helpful to be a lawyer, that there are all kinds of sort of what we might consider to be ticky-tacky small denomination money that become problems given sufficient time. And the most obvious example, although sort of crude that I go back to, is all of the little scrip and token money that was present in the United States before the nationalization of the banking system and the monetary system. And just as we gave charters to certain national banks to do particular things, there was also an effort to sort of get rid of precisely this sort of tiny, absurd, silly money that when aggregated in effect actually produced components in no small part because it was difficult to measure the scope of the system as it is now with video game money.
Scott:
So, what are some of the clear abuses that you’ve observed and documented in this world of gaming money? So maybe there’s not a clear and present danger of systemic risk in the sense of a structural crisis or breakdown that would have cascading effects the way we see during the Depression and a series of bank runs or something like that, but there is still abuse going on at multiple levels. Can you walk us through some of those dimensions?
Raúl Carrillo:
Sure. So one way to have this conversation, Scott, is in terms of harm to gamers. And I think that – to the extent that the problematic financial practices of the video game industry, setting aside how they actually finance their corporations and issue stock and those sorts of things – it’s about harm to gamers and particularly children. And I think that in the limited, for instance, CFPB and FTC coverage of these issues, we’ve seen concerns about deceptive marketing tactics, about privacy, about lack of parental control, which are all, I think, really, really important. If we think about this, and not to disassociate the problems, but if we think about this from the perspective of monetary systems, the major issues that I see are forms of rate manipulation, money laundering, any systemic risk not to the system, but to companies and to gamers who don’t know that they’re participating, and developers and other stakeholders who don’t know that they’re participating in financially unsound practices.
So let’s walk through these three examples here. And I’m not going to give the full force of the legal argument, but just sort of hope to offer a taste of the issues that we see that are structural concerns, in addition to the practices that are just sort of awful. And before I continue, Scott, I will just say that I am mad about these companies. Billy, I’m mad about these companies. But this has pushed me politically because on the one hand, I really don’t like Sony and Microsoft having control over my life. And on the other hand, I think, who is this person who wants to come in here and put their government hands on my video games? And so I’m going to list a bunch of problems that I think someone should deal with but I don’t necessarily want to be the one who makes the call.
So, rate manipulation. So, let’s go back to the Roblox example. Roblox, most popular game in the world. Again, developers sort of make their own games, there are internal economies, you pay each other in Robux. There are all kinds of terrible things and wonderful things that occur on this platform, many of which – the terrible things – are honestly matters for criminal law enforcement and go beyond the scope of this discussion. I don’t ever want to suggest that the most exploitative thing happening in these games is necessarily about money. And in Roblox, when gamers are earning Robux, they can do it a number of ways. They can sort of earn them within the game, within the rules of the game, by providing goods and services, by playing in the economy, so to speak, or much more likely, they get a gift card, let’s say, from grandma, from grandpa, from whoever, and they purchase Robux. Sometimes these gift cards are denominated in, let’s say, dollars or other fiat currencies. Sometimes they are denominated in Robux. And you know what that exchange rate is? It’s whatever Roblox says it is on that given day. This, in legal terms, sort of renders the face value of the card illusory in the sense that there’s no way really to know what the rate will be. There’s a way in which the earning of Robux has become a focus of the game itself. And the company, of course, encourages developers to try to become Roblox billionaires. And then if you try to withdraw your Robux or convert them, it’ll take up to 65% or, you know, get whatever it wants. But the sort of systemic pattern that we see here, I would argue, resembles the manipulation of not even so much currencies from multiple countries, but the points and reward systems that we see between credit cards or between airline points or between hotels. And the thing is that those sort of things are meriting significantly more regulation as time goes on. And just because this occurs sort of in the sphere of children’s entertainment doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be taking it seriously either. And what banking law has to offer right now, what financial regulation law has to offer right now is disclosure about different rates between different monetary systems. And that’s certainly not enough, but it’s again, better than what we have right now. But I think we should be thinking about it in terms of this sort of lack of transparency of rates being something that’s systematically problematic. And it’s not just problematic when one particular kid or even a class action lawsuit full of kids is deceived.
Scott:
And there are other industries where precisely these kinds of these kinds of structures and these kinds of transactions are regulated, right? They are more transparent.
Raúl Carrillo:
So the banking regulators govern in some significant (if not, you know, sort of grand architectonic) ways how banks, for instance, value credit card points, loyalty points, etc., compared to the actual credit that they originate. So those rates are all subject to banking law. Before the Trump administration came in, the CFPB and the Department of Transportation were looking at establishing a regime to govern frequent flyer miles in a similar way. And so what we see here is a particular substantiation of, again, this problem that I mentioned at the beginning of corporations issuing small near monies or shadow monies that, you know, the actual or the comparative value of which is completely unstable. And, you know, disclosure is not a cure-all to systemic problems, but it is better than what we have now.
On to money laundering, which is really, I think, quite fascinating. I have written previously, or I have worked forthcoming in the Connecticut Law Review at the end of this year about crypto and money laundering and the ways in which the government surveils money laundering activity in some instances as well, but mostly poorly and with complicated politics. So property is alienable and it’s very difficult for someone to prevent a user of a video game or a player of a video game from exchanging something in the game for another form of currency outside of it. Right. And it’s hard to stop somebody from picking up the phone or speaking into their their gaming, you know, apparatus and saying, I owe you one. Right? But we have learned that it is quite quite easy – and I’m basing a lot of this thought on a recent study by forensic accountants/computer scientists at the university of York – through these platforms where you can exchange all of these currencies and again in an unregulated way (or maybe let’s not call them currencies let’s call them gaming money as I do in the piece). But the platforms sort of exist because of these illicit markets. You can change gaming monies, you can choose skins and costumes within the game, etc., but the point is to eventually cash out. And the different units of account and the ability to control them, to control entire monetary systems in something that looks like a currency as opposed to just an item or a good service makes this so much more powerful. Now there are many illicit third-party platforms that have been built on top of gaming platforms that use the API of, let’s say, the big gaming company, and the gaming company washes its hands and says, we don’t know anything about this. Again, complicated feelings about money laundering, but if you were to follow the logic of the system, there is no reason, I think, that video game companies like Steam – which runs a marketplace where people trade these things all the time, but it’s considered to be a libertarian paradise and not governed by Steam or by Valve, the company that owns Steam – then these sort of companies should be subject to the same sorts of laws. And this is yet another instance in which Silicon Valley gets to pick and choose what it wants. Valve is a giant company. It’s not Microsoft or Sony, but it’s been around for two decades as pretty much the monopolist in terms of PC game distribution. So there’s a way in which we think, who cares if you’re trading a bunch of costumes essentially from Call of Duty, but if you can do that without getting caught, then what’s the reason for using crypto? Over there, you’re just having fun and everybody’s protected by the First Amendment and entertainment and it’s just a grand old time and also it’s not real. So that’s the second problem.
The third problem is I do think that there are some forms of financial instability that are being created within the payment systems that the largest platform distributors create. So Microsoft and Sony, again, like many other tech companies and like some large non-tech companies, have internalized their payments account infrastructure in the sense that people hold balances with the private company and not with the banking system instead of consistently using their credit card, etc. The main way that people buy not even just games but all kinds of things from Microsoft now is, for instance, through the Microsoft Store. It’s not you use your bank account each time as you preload that payment system and then you use that. Now, those balances, you read the contracts and they’re not protected by FDIC insurance, for instance. And maybe there’s an argument that they shouldn’t be because these are not banks, but we are in a vacuum here where, or I should say not a vacuum, we are in a place of private governance in which the contracts and the law of contracts and intellectual property govern how that money moves around, who owns it, how it’s treated by taxes, how to measure even the value of what is in these systems and we really don’t know what the exposure is. But there are, I think, clear payments and liquidity risks to internalizing your platform. If that’s your sales infrastructure and it collapses and you face a choice, for instance, about whether to honor withdrawals or not, which most of them say they’re not going to do, well, then what happens? Well, then everybody bails into the company, so to speak, excuse me, everybody purchases goods and services from the company if they can’t take the money out, right? So then there’s a run on inventory. Is this a problem at the level of a bank failing? No, of course not. But we know that tech companies failing, and this is in the financial regulation literature, are systemically important financial events. Also, moreover, and this is going on a political economy limb and getting back to this big point about power, there are many legal scholars, I think myself included, who would argue that the bailout of Silicon Valley Bank is a sideways bailout of Silicon Valley and of crypto. And so while I don’t foresee the government bailing out Roblox, I do foresee it bailing out Microsoft. And the gaming division is the second or third largest division or most profitable division of the company, depending upon which quarter’s data you look at. And so that kind of financial distress at Microsoft and on its counterparties is not nothing. And again, we don’t know how much money is in these accounts. It’s difficult to ascertain the tax treatment. And there’s a litany of other financial regulatory problems concerning the scope of fragility here. But I will say, you know, as a legal scholar, I am concerned by what I consider to be familial structural garb, although I do think technology makes it a little bit different each time. And as perhaps we can continue to discuss, there are some different things going on here that we haven’t experienced, let’s say, in quite the same way before.
Billy:
I remember a while back reading an article about how Yanis Varoufakis had advised folks at Valve on designing the economy for Steam. As far as I can tell, that didn’t really go anywhere. But it stood out to me as significant at the time – maybe it was 2008 or 2009 – because it had a question of intent and authorship. And we could maybe point to somebody saying, this was the person and this was their idea and here’s how it was implemented. I’m thinking that it’s a lot harder to point the finger or to identify individuals or maybe even groups that are designing these systems. But I wonder if you could sort of help us think about that question of design. Of course, any good monetary system will be designed, and it seems like these are, if nothing else, very successful. Yeah, and I wonder if that also dovetails with questions about exploitation, about deliberate skirting of regulations in order to reach broader audiences, maybe even younger audiences.
Raúl Carrillo:
Yeah, this is a really important set of topics. Thank you, Billy. I think one of the most exciting, if again at times horrifying, parts of this project has been encountering different visions of monetary governance and what money is. And, as a student of how monetary systems have evolved in video games, it’s in some sense thrilling to see how the developers and the different tech folks think about money when they start versus how they think about it towards the end. And inside a lot of these discussions, you can find a lot of hints and tendrils of the debates we have about neochartalism and the debates about, you know, many of the other familiar themes of this podcast, I think. I’ll get back to the bigger question, but just to give one example, you know, Minecraft, again, a tremendously popular children’s game started as a sort of labor value theory paradise in that, you know, the first attempts at organization were distribution of in-kind resources and like literal mining and stuff. So in fact, you have some premises about the physics of money in there. But, you know, sooner or later, if you actually do want to start making dollar denominated money as the publisher, distributor, and operator of these games, you streamline the system, you bring in your vision of the Minecraft coin, and you standardize the unit of account, and you start acting functionally as the sovereign within these worlds. There’s another game, even as far back as 20 years ago, EVE Online, in the PC world, where I believe somebody essentially got the keys to the central bank vault and ran off with all the money. And these things, you know, you have to think a lot about money as statecraft as a designer, if you have a design mentality. And so all the questions about governance and our sensitivity towards centralized power are also here.
There is another plane almost in the sense that you are worried about what is happening quote-unquote inside the game. But that’s not, you know, you all are always asking the question, what’s inside, what’s outside? And, you know, the game is that that’s another sort of boundary where those questions should be asked. Because whatever happens in the game, Microsoft is still behind the game and Microsoft is pretty real, right? There’s no question about whether Microsoft, the corporation, is imaginary or whether its financial instruments and its commitments are imaginary, right? But playing the game, of course, pulls us into that experience and suggests perhaps that there’s another sort of filter between us and monetary power. And so it gives you a chance to, I think, think about money critically as both a designer and as a subject, I guess, or monetary subject, let’s say, as well. And when I think about games, having investigated some of the exploitative practices here, I still think there is very much something to be said for gaming and certainly for digital cultural innovations related to gaming for becoming sort of sites of hope, recognizing the political economy of the video game industry for what it is. Again, we’re talking about major multinational corporations, often having smaller gaming companies, certainly individual developers, including children, under their thumbs. And the monetary system that they build is very much part of that.
There are humanities scholars who I think have done great work about what a different sort of future might look like. Often this involves reinvestigating those lines of identity and who a gamer is that I mentioned at the top. So, for instance, Kishonna Gray, who I believe is at Michigan School of Information now, writes about gaming and identity and potential sites of resistance. And there are communities of people, especially, for instance, developers in the queer community who have seen gaming as a place to push back or to recover or create new identity in a place that has, you know, certainly been historically and still is quite hostile as we saw most obviously during Gamergate a few years back. And there is still, I think, a hope here for sort of authorship within design. And that makes me feel positive when most of the things in this analysis make me feel a little bit despondent. But that also touches on themes, I think, that are present in the podcast, certainly.
And I would say even in the legal scholarship, Christine Desan’s work last year, Professor Desan at Harvard, went back a little bit to themes of authorship and the corporal identity of money. And one, for instance, one of the, and I hope I don’t butcher this, one of the points that she makes is that greenbacks did offer this sort of sense of democratic authorship but it was hard to gain material sort of bite with the public in the sense that this is money because the idea of precious metal was just so engulfed in our imaginary that it wasn’t really overcomable at that point in time. And I think we face serious questions now. There’s a way in which we try to become as, I don’t even know if it’s the right word, but as abstract as possible when we discuss money. The legal scholars certainly do that. And, since the global financial crisis, we’ve pushed against metallists, against people who think that the physical form, the technological form of money is so determinate. But there is a way in which video games make me think, oh, well, the user interface is everything. And that’s actually, you know, yes, law, yes, economics, yes, society. But like if you don’t, there is no monetary system without those first few seconds of like psychological attention to what money is and what it can be.
Billy:
Well, and especially when you’re talking about younger gamers, they’re learning, right? And we’re all learning when we play games. That’s part of the fun. And there’s a definite pedagogy of money that’s happening here and without being, you know, reflective. You know, I want to know who’s running the Roblox economy and get to the bottom of their priors for, you know, monetary design. You know, I just think it’s a critical place where people, not just kids, are not just learning but having reinforced their own ideas about what money is and what it ought to be, which are going to be grounded nine times out of ten in neoclassical orthodoxy and unreflective kind of libertarian values.
Scott:
And you can imagine there being tensions between like the diegetic, that just means like in the story world, right? Like the tensions between the story world and its presumptions, you talked about early Minecraft being this kind of Lockean liberal fantasy of, you know, you mix your hands with nature and that produces value and then you just barter it away. And then a monetary system is just a lot of individuals doing that, right? You could imagine, I mean, that shows up in lots of games. And you can imagine there being tensions between that and levels of design, but also levels of user experience that are extra diegetic, that are about buying the game cards and redeeming the game cards and redeeming your gaming units for US fiat money, etc., etc. You can just imagine so many different tensions and contradictions and problems across these levels that they all need to be analyzed together, I would think.
Raúl Carrillo:
Yeah absolutely and that’s I think that’s a difficult that’s difficult for us to even conceive of how the – it’s difficult for me to always sort of conceive about how the problems compound each other. So what I will say like sort of as a meta note is that children are going to become much better at this than like I am right now and understanding the different value structures in these different monetary systems because they’re doing it when there are fewer grooves on their brains, right? Or at least they’re having more sophisticated thoughts about money than most people, certainly in the United States, or really a system where you have a single hegemonic currency. They have more sophisticated thoughts than your typical US user, adult user of money, right? In other countries where you’re doing all kinds of comparisons all the time when you have different more, let’s say, informal value systems (to adopt a term I sort of don’t like). But then you are doing a more sophisticated monetary thinking along the lines of what children are doing with video games now. And there is a sort of way, I think, in which we don’t even know yet, like we, excuse, people who may share political tendencies know what we would want out of a leftist pedagogy of money. You know, and clearly this podcast deals with this sort of question. But I guess what I want to say here is we don’t know how we would substantiate it into a game. Like, and if you know the answer to that question, please, please contact me. But whereas people with different visions of the future of money along different levels of governance, as you were describing, very much have that. I don’t know if like the Roblox operator has a really like deep vision of what money is. But if money is what money does and payment systems are what money does and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, then the Roblox people really do understand that.
And then there are other sort of more nefarious camps within this that I think are more cognizantly pushing a different vision of money. And perhaps the most obvious sub-sector of the video game industry where that’s happening is in the GameFi world, in the game finance world, where players earn crypto. And they can cash crypto out. So the worst example I have seen of a sort of financial fallout flowing from the collapse of a video game monetary system is when a game called Axie Infinity crashed in the middle of the pandemic. So back to the topic of rates and what are they and who controls them, etc. During the pandemic, many folks in jurisdictions across the world where the fiat currency or the popular government currency in use was worth less than a unit of gaming money. That’s an extreme example, but let’s say it was easier to gain gaming money and more financially valuable to earn gaming money inside of a game and cash it out than it was to get a job quote-unquote outside of the game. You saw a lot of people start to literally spend all of their time borrowing money in the quote-unquote real world and the regulated banking system to take more of a stake in the video game world and Axie Infinity is a game that is like Pokémon let’s say if you remember the late 20th-century battle monsters in card form and Game Boy form. You raise these creatures and they sort of fight each other. But now these creatures are NFTs. And that’s actually an issue for securities law. But for the broader issue of money, you earn a different token called Smooth Love Potion. And so many people were earning the payment token Smooth Love Potion. And there was a burst during the pandemic and during the crypto winter and all these coins became worthless and people were left holding the bag. Many people who had borrowed Filipino pesos, for instance, to play Axie Infinity were financially ruined. And do I think that that’s going to happen in the United States soon? If you had asked me several months ago, I would say no. Now I’m not so sure. You can still get Axie Infinity through the Apple store in many places in Latin America and Asia. And I don’t see any particular reason why a fan of deregulation of fintech or crypto wouldn’t allow it to happen here. And crypto has its own politics. And this is looping back to the bigger point, but like that is teaching kids about what you should be doing at the intersection of money and play with a very particular ideological vision of what money is and it’s the battle monster but it’s also the coins you used to pay for the battle monster to like whatever like the point is that that that is different than going to Wells Fargo with your mom if you’re like a middle class kid in the suburbs of the United States to open a savings account in the late 20th century. It’s different than that. This is what’s introducing kids to money. Those are two different galaxies of money-ness.
Billy:
Right. The kids understand it, like you say, more intuitively than the parents. You can imagine that the kid’s ability to teach the parents what’s going on in Axie Infinity is very limited relative to…
Raúl Carrillo:
My ability is limited and I’m a financial technology professor.
Billy:
And the parents are like, yeah, sure, it’s 10 bucks. Right? You know?
Raúl Carrillo:
Yeah, exactly.
Scott:
I think one of the silver linings that I think you were kind of getting at, but I wanted to flesh out a little bit more is that, in a way, it’s making the aesthetics of money and moneyness – it’s flaunting the fact that monetary design and creation and participation is always aesthetic. It’s always social. It’s always cultural. And we have this kind of neoclassical dead white guy. It’s all neutral. It’s all staid. It’s all… “There’s no aesthetic here! This is just the founding fathers.” Right? That, you know, the aesthetics of going to Wells Fargo to deposit or withdraw or ask for a loan, it’s what we in the humanities would call, it’s meant to be an unmarked aesthetic, right? It’s not hitting you over the head that there’s an aesthetic here, even though of course there is because there’s nowhere that there aren’t aesthetic decisions being made. So in that way yeah again I think that young people and old people who who play games are are are activating their monetary imaginations around different kinds of aesthetics and cultural communities which is worth pointing out.
I wanted to raise another question, something that you do bring up in the article, which is the way that these companies and their lawyers have tried to protect themselves from regulation. And you note on a number of occasions in the article that they appeal to this idea of the magic circle, which is a kind of staple of gaming studies in and outside of video games. And it actually traces back to a German scholar who I’ve taught off and on for years. His name is Huizinga. And Huizinga talks about this in this text that he wrote maybe in the 40s or something. And so he’s trying to think about what games and play do is they momentarily establish a sort of world within our world or a world that’s not playing by the rules of everyday life but establishing a new set of rules. And he calls this the magic circle. And many people have picked this up. And I was actually surprised to learn from your article that lawyers talk about this idea. Maybe they have no idea where it comes from. But they use it. I think Huizinga uses this idea in complex and subtle ways. And I think his work acknowledges that there are like real world consequences to the magic circle. Like that’s part of social life. And even if it’s creating its own world with its own rules of operation, it’s not that it’s not social. It’s not that it’s not real. It’s just different. Whereas it seems like what these corporate lawyers have done is they’ve said, “No, it’s not real. It’s meaningless essentially. It doesn’t have any effect on really anything that matters. So that’s why we shouldn’t be regulated.” Maybe you can, maybe I’m being too hand wavy about this, or maybe there’s more nuanced positions here.
Raúl Carrillo:
So I’m not, I don’t think you’re being hand wavy, Scott. I guess I will first just take every lawyer’s first instinct here and say that I’m just following precedent. So if anybody has misinterpreted Huizinga, it’s the previous scholars in the literature and certainly not myself. And so, run it up the flagpole, take it to the Supreme Court. But this has been a metaphor that I would say has certainly been in the literature around law in video games, but law and entertainment and maybe even in some senses law and technology more broadly. And I think it lends itself to legal studies just because it provides an opportunity to think about what is deserving or not reserving of regulation, which, of course, begs the question of what is the relationship between regulation and reality but like that’s I’m not that I’m not there yet. But it’s been batted around for quite quite some time and perhaps not always with the rich sort of texture that that you just provided. So it’s good that you bring up this sort of more nuanced vision of Huizinga’s work because I think when, let’s say legal scholars – corporate lawyers don’t usually use the term magic circle because of precisely how that sounds – but legal scholars adopt this term, it’s not clear whether the magic circle protects a sort of area that is unreal and that it lacks some sort of physical existence in the world and should just follow some sort of rules. This has been sort of beaten to death by law and technology scholars for a while, but nevertheless rears its head every so now and then. Oddly it did not come up during the Libra debate. No one said that just because, you know, Facebook is social media and not newspaper doesn’t mean we shouldn’t regulate it. Didn’t come up, not even once. No one said, you know, yeah.
There are other areas in which people say this is a form of artistic expression or play – sometimes they put it, they characterize it as play – and thus people should be allowed to, let’s say, do illegal things without legal consequences is one way of sort of crudely putting it. Another one is that this is fun, this is entertainment, and like you sort of, you pay the price at the door and you walk in and how you walk out is how you walk out. And so there is a sort of muddled sort of set of defenses, I guess, around the idea that we would regulate what video game monies are doing with their monetary systems. And I more specifically point to the ways in which they convert money back and forth, which I think is the most sort of concerning big dimension to it all. I don’t want to go too far ahead of your questions, but I will just say that the magic circle is not a new idea to bring into thinking about money. It’s just that those of us who are focused on the sort of problems that are not as explicitly resounding within the humanities don’t usually focus on. And there are a few legal scholars of money who are looking at gambling and at amusement parks and about online sports betting and those sorts of things, which I now have a sort of obsessive interest in precisely because they seem to beg the deeper questions in a different sort of way. So that’s where I’m at with that.
Billy:
Can we get to sort of a clean or clear definition of or sense of what the magic circle is in your work and in the context of legal studies?
Raúl Carrillo:
Sure. Thanks, Billy. So the magic circle, as used in the legal literature, is a metaphor for a boundary wherein regulation or government regulation, sometimes state regulation, does not occur. It is an area that is sort of off limits. And perhaps a, I mean, even a good corollary to draw is that, or a practical example of this being substantiated, is not just like we’re not going to regulate you, but we’re even going to create a special zone for you. In the financial regulatory world, we sometimes, agencies create sandboxes and that invokes an idea of play. And this says to the company, oh, you get to do all these kinds of things. And, you know, normally we would be really upset about this, but timeout, timeout, timeout, right? And so there is a sense of a sort of game built within the regulatory structure, especially for the neoliberals, that is sort of at play, I think, in this defense as well. Like you have to have a certain conception of rules and markets to like believe in the magic circle metaphor. On the other hand, there have been some scholars that, you know, say just because this concept, it’s hard to draw the boundaries of the magic circle does not mean it’s a useless concept. Certainly you want to defend gamers against certain kinds of, you know, oppressive action. And we need some sort of metaphor to explain this. So maybe, you know, Raúl what you’re doing is you’re not saying the magic circle doesn’t exist. You’re just drawing it differently. Because I do think that there are some things that, you know, we should be able to do with money that are not subject to state purview. And again, this project has really pressed that question of the legitimacy of regulation on me like a few other things have because it tugs in my heartstrings.
Scott:
Yeah, I mean, I guess I’m just concerned about getting lost in false binaries that are based on what I would call ill-founded metaphysical principles, right? I mean, you know, we could argue that currency is a form of, you know, meaning making. It is socially constructed. It has material instantiations, whether that’s coin or paper bills or it’s computers and packet switching and I mean we can talk about these systems as having physical dimensions and social dimensions that are irreducible to immediate physical things and I mean I don’t know. I don’t know to what extent so-called virtual money or gaming money is all that different at the end of the day. I mean it’s different in the sense that these are different systems and they, as you put it at certain points, reduce friction. There are things that these systems do that are different and new, but I’m very skeptical of imposing these very tired metaphysical oppositions between what’s real and not real. I can’t remember if you were part of this episode. Did you come on to talk about #MintTheCoin ever with Nathan and Rohan? We were talking about #MintTheCoin at some point.
Raúl Carrillo:
I don’t touch the earthy stuff.
Scott:
Yeah, you don’t touch the earthy stuff. Right, and we were talking about the – we were developing a response to the critique of the platinum coin as a gimmick, right? And our response to this was, fine, it’s a gimmick, but then it’s gimmicks all the way down, right? It’s one gimmick after the other, right? The Fed funds market is a gimmick. It’s just who is the gimmick serving and in what way, right? So there’s something – there’s a fictional or constructive social dimension to all money. And I think keeping that – and there’s a political dimension to all money. So keeping that at the forefront seems more important. And I’m not accusing you. I think you are doing this. But I’m saying in response to some of the debates that you’re wading into that, yeah, there are certain kinds of assumptions, these binary oppositions that are just really obscure the issue and try to precisely carve out more public accommodation for unaccountable private power as a consequence.
Raúl Carrillo:
Yeah, I think that’s right. I think we’re going in the same direction here in sort of finding these lines unhelpful. I do think when we think about governance, if we – holding that governance occurs by someone who holds power or people who hold power, regardless of whether or not it’s the state – it does become… There are difficult questions as to how we shape the architecture. And we do have to, like, draw lines at some point. So it’s definitely not reality. Like none of these ideas of reality that I think have been present in our conversation or back and forth here are particularly helpful. So then I guess, you know, if you were to sort of preserve a certain resilience and creativity and freedom within the space for people who want to have these gaming money systems or even just virtual systems, as some people might put it, as the government puts it, because… Let’s say you want to have a space where something like building your own monetary system in a game like Minecraft, but that is not Minecraft. What would the rules be? And that is a difficult question, I think, most of the legal literature, as I get to in the article, points towards the management of convertibility in the way in which you can convert sort of IOUs issued by these gaming companies – regardless of whether they’re from the game or not – into, say, U.S. dollar denominated bank deposits, but that is a principled answer that still leaves the question of, again, line drawing on the table. So perhaps I just come at this as a lawyer and with all the faults of a legalistic mind and just think, okay, I don’t like this binary between reality and non-reality. So here are 12 other binaries that I’ve discovered that could shape regulation. But I’d be interested to think of what you all… like, what does it actually look like to have a thriving cultural monetary sphere that is not going to lead to the sort of problems that I highlight in the article, or even just other problems that folks, that video game scholars in the humanities have discussed?
Scott:
Well, I mean, okay, I have a few things to say in response. One, good question. Two, there obviously isn’t one answer, right? There’s multiple ways of answering that. Three, yes, I am not prepared to give you my blueprint of the gaming money utopia, but I guess I will say two more things. One is a question back to you which is that you have in your developing work – your developing law review article that you’ve shared with us – you do have proposals which of course at this moment in U.S. and global history who knows who knows what agencies are going to still be around. And, you know, so we’d like to hear about some of the things that you’ve been proposing with the caveat that the basic infrastructure of governance is wildly up for grabs and being destroyed. But then the other thing I was going to say is, I would also want to open up the analysis, right, beyond the gaming world and the gaming industry, right? If there is a country like your example earlier, let’s say there is a country that has a very, very weak currency. And let’s say it’s in the global south, because that’s where those countries are. And that causes people in that country to launder money through a multinational conglomerate-owned gaming platform, the causes of that trouble are geopolitical and geoeconomic, right? They still owe to all the old classic problems like systemic unemployment and imperial domination and exploitation, right? So what’s happening in video game economies can in part be analyzed as symptoms of broader geopolitical structural inequalities and challenges. But back to you. What are some of the things – I mean you can respond to anything you want, but I’m wondering what are some of the fixes if we had regulatory institutions that we could count on? What are some of the regulatory guidelines and solutions that you’re thinking through?
Raúl Carrillo:
Thanks, Scott. So this is really helpful because I think part of the task of this project has been to define which of these problems that I’m pointing at are particular to the gaming industry and which apply to Silicon Valley or perhaps just non-bank corporation finance and payments more broadly at this point. And so in the paper, I initially had a set of rebels for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to address some of these issues, even though I presented the issue as one of fundamentally unregulated banking. But the reason that I did that is because the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau over the last 10 years or so has become the gap-filling regulator for all these forms of consumer finance that we can consider to be encroaching upon the privileges of banking, but maybe they’re schmanking. They all just sort of fell into the CFPB’s bucket. Now we sort of don’t even have that. I mentioned some new, some direct sort of responses to the legal problems that I see that could be instantiated in new legislation that revolves around rate controls and money laundering identification requirements and ring fencing. And those are all sort of very generic, honestly, responses to what are problems with unregulated forms of financial services and quasi-banking services right now.
Scott:
What’s ring fencing?
Raúl Carrillo:
So ring fencing means, you know, you’d separate – it can mean a grand variety of things. It’s one of those terms like shadow banking that has come to sort of mean, again, a wide variety of things. But you would want to, let’s say, structurally separate the operations of the gaming money system from the rest of a lot of the other corporate financial activities in an effort to protect the people who hold the accounts and provide some other benefits to the systems. But what I will say is that – given everything that’s going on in thinking about what quote-unquote fintech and really just big tech, because that’s what fintech is, is doing now – there is an industrial mindset, let’s say, in financial regulation that we have to abandon. I have spent a good deal amount of time with colleagues and allies and friends defending a New Deal financial regulatory order, which fundamentally does not meet the moment. And I don’t want to say that the fintech and crypto people are right – because I disagree with their reasoning – that they’re right about the future of finance. But, at this point, they’re certainly correct that the regulatory order does not capture what is happening.
But I would even go beyond that and say that the regulatory order has created what we are seeing and that the arbitrage occurs in the context of the law, that regulation spurs arbitrage and the technology that constitutes or is part of the arbitrage is a huge part of that story. And so what that means is a few things. And this could be a bigger conversation about the future of regulation, but what I think gaming money pushes me towards is, first of all, getting away from instrumental classification or entity classification needing to be the hook for regulation. So the need to say, this is a bank, that’s a deposit, this is a security, that’s a broker-dealer, this is a money transmitter, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, is not particularly helpful compared to supervision of entities more generally engaging in what we would consider to be financial activity subject to certain thresholds and scale. How we characterize the instrument or the intensity beyond that is a second-order question. It shouldn’t be a necessary question for establishing regulation in the first place. Saule Omarova has written a lot about this at the level of high finance. Many of us have started to write about this at the level of low finance. But why we would need that sort of specificity before engaging in regulation when everything we know about how deregulation occurs suggests that we shouldn’t do that. I don’t know why we should do that is I guess what I’m saying. I’ve lost any sort of faith in the categorical divisions and the analytical terrain that has envisioned what we might call the New Deal order with the giant asterisk that I would say that the most sort of preemptive and panoptic regulatory system that we have is in the criminal law enforcement system where they watch everything all the time and they don’t care how you classify or what is the particular identity of the instrument as some sort of hook for legitimacy.
The second thing that I would say is that we have an obsession with enforcement and going through the courts. And this is, again, going back to a bigger structural problem with regulation, but the idea that we should just litigate around these things rather than consistently supervise them in the event that they may become problems is I think really important to me. And in a forthcoming work in the Connecticut Law Review at the end of this year, I talk, the piece is called “Cops, Robbers and Regulators”. I talk about how there’s this sort of black hat, white hat mindset that Gary Gensler was going to come through and ride on his horse and stop all the crypto bad guys. And if we just had enough lawsuits, that would sure warn ’em off. I think that idea has been thoroughly discredited, I would hope, by all the news regarding the political economy of technology and finance within the last several weeks. Turns out crypto is a stronger political force than, you know, even I and many other people on this podcast had imagined.
And then the third thing is really sort of back to you all. I think the technological interface of money or the experience of money is actually a sort of first order problem. And there’s a way in which many people who think of money in the ways that we do, and I include myself in this, have sort of moved away from a sense in which that, I don’t even want to say that physicality, but let’s say probably that corporality of money, however it’s manifest, whether it’s digital or not, is actually really, really matters and we can have all these dreams about a public bank account system or a million nested plural systems in civil society, but if it doesn’t get your fingers in your eyeballs, if it doesn’t get the fingers in eyeballs of children paying attention to it, it’s not going to win. And some of those lessons are present in crypto, but much more so here. And we can have these debates about, well, is this money? Is this low-powered money? Is this high-powered money? Aren’t some of these better classified as commodities, blah, blah, blah, around these instruments? Are these really banks? Are they really doing something else? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like which laws did they, should we tell them to… How should we tell them to cut it out? And we will miss the big picture. And so we, I mean, it’s wide open. We have to have an affirmative vision of the future of money and its culture. Or, you know, there’s no vacuum. Like, private governance of the future of money will continue.
Scott:
Absolutely. And I think as we wrap up, I want to raise yet another meta issue, and this kind of comes back to the gloss you were giving us about Christine Desan’s recent work about the Greenback and recognizing that there was a cultural, aesthetic, ideological, deeply invested affection for, trust for metal that paper didn’t have. And we can scream all day long about how silly that is and how self-destructive that is. But it is a real obstacle and limit that has tremendous causal efficacy and that it has to be dealt with and not just defensively but proactively. I think nowadays one of the investments, one of those kind of deep cultural investments that we at Money on the Left and I think you as well in your work come up against over and over again is rather old, which is the kind of the fantasy of the primacy and the excitement of private ordering. And we’ve gotten to a point where, you know, whether it’s overtly thought, like consciously thought, or it’s just kind of tacitly just part of the intelligibility of contemporary culture, but we have gotten to the point where people sort of know that money is created all the time. People know that crypto doesn’t come from, it’s not a Lockean story, right? It’s designed and created all the time.
And there’s a lot more private money and investment and power brokering and advertising, you know, and political campaign financing going into buttressing that fantasy. And we folks who, you know, work at universities and then, you know, we don’t have those kinds of platforms. But it is astounding how we can live in a world where so many people who are aware of what’s going on can kind of shrug. And whether you’re pro-crypto or anti-crypto, you just kind of shrug like, yeah, those people just keep creating credit all day long. But then they turn to the public sector and they’re like, oh, God, you know, the government’s going to run out of money and the national debt. Like all – I mean for all the inroads that Stephanie Kelton has made and for all the inroads that we all have made in this movement, I think that private – the private imaginary is just – is overwhelming. And it’s so fascinating that the public collectively and ideologically has such a hard time with the U.S. Treasury creating instruments for the Green New Deal or for a public banking system. That’s, oh, no, no, that’s going to be our tax dollars or that’s going to be inefficient. But it’s all this private money creation is, it doesn’t break any rules and it’s just normative.
Raúl Carrillo:
Yeah, I think, yeah, I co-sign so much of that, Scott. And it strikes me as I’m listening to you speak that like, I’m thinking about just the psychological hold of the Trump meme coin even though everybody knows that it’s absurd. And that’s one big spectacular sort of thing. But repeatedly going against that world and the world of crypto, first-time investor, on your culture, the ad on the subway, if you’re in the outer bureau saying, the dollar has not served black and brown folks, here’s crypto, like all of these things.
Scott:
Spike Lee did commercials for crypto.
Raúl Carrillo:
To see this and to see, you know, Roblox issue, I mean, no one else is looking at that, but Roblox issue a 10K to the SEC saying our business model is dependent upon our gift card holiday sales and the ratio between Roblox and the other currencies is to look at that and to say that what we really need is for banking to be boring and some good like vanilla financial products – which is literally what folks who, you know, I have a lot of time for say on, I otherwise have a lot of time for say on the Hill – it becomes harder and harder to believe that that is a helpful sort of vision of the future to give. Even if – I’ve been guilty of this before – even if you cast digital currency or public bank accounts as being stable, steady, etc. Like there’s a certain little twist of the risk and a glint of the eye that people actually want to see when they think about money. That means that the gaming money, but certainly other forms of corporate money that we’re discussing today have just that they have that appeal that we need to have if we’re to have, you know, an enticing vision of the future of money that reflects, you know, public purpose, democratic values, the principles of the left, etc.
Scott:
Make public money sexy again. That’s my mantra.
Raúl Carrillo:
At least make it fun.
Billy:
So we are definitely at a good place to leave it. I just wanted to give you an opportunity real quick to check back in on the taxpayer money trope. It seems like it’s back with a vengeance or with an intensity that we haven’t seen in a while. What do you make of it? Is it just more indication of how toxic, how irredeemable the trope is? It seems like it could be.
Raúl Carrillo:
Yeah. So it’s been a while since I’ve sat down really mapped out where I think the taxpayer money discourse is. And other scholars have sort of jumped in on a lot of this as well. From the sort of perspective that I, on taxpayer money trope that I had adopted the last time that we spoke here, which was to say that, you know, references to taxpayer money rather than public money are a, you know, they signify that particular kinds of people who we associate with the image of a taxpayer have particular claims on the fisc. I think that is very much true. What is interesting that is happening now is that Republicans and to some extent Democrats post-Biden era and post-COVID response are not trying to cramp everything into quite the same austerian frame that we had before. Like there’s sort of a recognized complexity. And in the sense that I don’t think Musk is trying to tell, for instance, people that, you know, there’s a pile of money and that belongs to white people. And, you know, Joe Biden picked it up and he put it in the hands of black and brown people, DEI hires, who should never have gotten it and, you know, undeserving recipients of public benefits. Like, yes, he is trying to say that, but he’s a tech person and he’s not trying to, I think, wave away the facts that it’s complex. And in some sense, like it’s more naked culturally, I think, in the sense he’s like, that’s waste and I’m not even going to bother to define it or say how many F-15s we could have bought or, you know, like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, just the vibes are are not my fasci-aesthetic money vibes and it seems not streamlined it doesn’t – it feels gross to me – in my hugo boss uniform and so like we’re gonna get rid of it and people are like it sounded bad let’s let’s get rid of it. It’s old. The monetary system we have doesn’t work and like I don’t really care how the math works, I don’t care what the frame is, but if Elon says like this nasty monster that is unexplainable that we call money is actually, you know, serving ill-deserving people, then like that’s what it is. And it’s almost like it doesn’t have to have the same sort of rigidity that the trope had previously because now it’s just, it’s all up for grabs anyway.
Scott:
Yeah, I think it’s more, I think of Musk’s discourse as very much kind of ad-hoc bricolage and he just he picks up a trope that he thinks is going to work. So right so his big move him and Trump – and I don’t even, who knows what the legality of any of this is I have no idea – but right one of their moves is to say that pennies are costing us too much to produce so we’re saving money.
Raúl Carrillo:
Yeah it’s vibes it’s vibes that the government is not good at money. You should have more money. People you don’t like should have less money and no one is no one is like writing this down on the back of a napkin you know and so in some sense like the dorky liberal response is more useless than ever. Right? And it’s not to say that… I don’t think Musk and Trump are MMTers like you know if anything I’m inclined to agree with you that like you know what did they eat for breakfast today? But they just as the rules-based order is up for grabs in every other like dimension so is it here and I think to imagine that you can filter this vibes-based discussion through like a traditional fiscal budgeting framework is, I mean, it’s sort of silly – not to use a word that people threw up my paper – but it’s a little silly.
Billy:
You paper is not silly, but I do think it’s interesting that, I mean, Trump has been saying this is going to hurt a little bit. So there has been, I think that’s been surprising to me that it’s not all upside immediately. There is kind of a, I think a tinge of, we’re going to have some austerity, but it’ll pay off in the end. Kind of a millenarian fiscal Trumpism.
Raúl Carrillo:
That’s a really good point, Billy. I haven’t really factored that in. So, my two cents are, well, who knows what they’re worth? Because are we done with pennies?
Billy:
Yeah, right. Well, we’ll have to have you back in fewer than four years and I’m hoping we’ll all have a bit more optimism to go around. Although there is some, I think, in our conversation. There’s room for experimentation, room for play, and plenty called for it in these gaming spaces.
Raúl Carrillo:
I think that’s right. Thank you very much for having me on, Billy, and thanks, Scott.
Billy:
Thank you, Raúl.
* Thanks to the Money on the Left production team: William Saas (audio editor), Rob Hawkes (transcription), & Robert Rusch (graphic art)