This companion piece to this week’s episode. The podcast is the full, unedited, and raw version; this is just the rundown of what I talked about. You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only. There is a town now. It is small; it is made of pixels I drew by hand, it has a bonfire you can sit at and talk to whoever else is there, and it has been open for two weeks. I mentioned it here at the time without saying much, so most of this episode is the fuller version, what it is and where Eleven Dunbar is heading, recorded the night before I fly to Finland, so here is the rundown. We launched Elfen Town. It is a cozy 2D pixel world, open all the time, and it is where Eleven Dunbar now lives. You walk around as your Elf, there are conversation zones around a bonfire where you drop in and start a video chat with whoever is there, and there are wooden stumps and forest and water and a lot of small places to sit. You can put on lo-fi, or nature sounds, or the soundtrack my friend Moritz recorded for it. I handcrafted every pixel asset in there, and some of them are not perfect, which is precisely what makes the place feel like a person rather than a product. The D.O.N.U.T. Inside the world, you get a D.O.N.U.T., which stands for digital off-network user terminal, and it is your companion as you move around. It hands you quests, runs focus sessions if you want to sit down and work, and lets you start a co-working session with somebody else. Justin Davis and I use it constantly. There is also Pong. Four things we are building it around. Co-working, which is the simple magic of sitting next to someone and getting on with your own thing, and which matters most for people at home, for parents, for anyone without a co-working space or without the appetite for one. Co-growing, since the whole point is going inward with people rather than alone. Co-building, because the world doubles as a safe place to try the thing you have been carrying around. And co-playing, which is where we want to go next with dungeons and mini-games and cooperative experiences that are properly game-like. Become an Elf. The 12-week programme is running now, built on The Creative Act, The War of Art, and Big Magic. Each week a member gets one reflection question, one tiny thing to make that takes ten or fifteen minutes, and one quest that connects them with their Elf buddy, who they are paired with for the whole 12 weeks. What we are after is the difference between creating from the mind and creating from the heart, where the resistance sits in an ordinary day, and whose voice is actually running the show. Low effort, high positive impact- that was the design brief. Distance is not the problem. I have friends across the globe, and the internet is the reason those friendships exist at all. Feeling disconnected from yourself first and then from everyone else has nothing to do with physical location. It is psychic distance, how close you actually feel to someone, and you can build genuinely nourishing relationships online if you get two things right: a space where people can show up as themselves, and something they are growing through together. I am not claiming it replaces meeting in person. It does the job far better than most people give it credit for, and the pattern we keep seeing is that people meet online, then meet in real life, then come back online, and each round makes the next one better. If you recognised yourself in this piece, you are not the only one. A lot of us get very good at achieving, performing, and solving problems for everyone else, and slowly lose track of our own voice along the way. Eleven Dunbar is a curated membership community of dreamers, builders, and founders: a place to play, connect, and grow together. A place to find your voice, find your people, and create the impossible, without doing it all alone. Our home is Elfen Town, a cozy virtual town that is open around the clock. Members drop in at any hour to work side by side, play without an agenda, and have the kind of conversations where you can be your actual self. Beyond the town there are live gatherings, in-person meet-ups, and people who notice when you go quiet. The community is capped at 150. The community is the people, not the world. Eleven Dunbar is not Elfen Town. Elfen Town is just the space we built around the people, and the people are the entire thing. It is capped at 150 and it will stay capped, and there is something right about that, because everything in nature is finite and the limit is what makes a thing intimate rather than a crowd. Why the feeds feel so sad now. I still post on LinkedIn once a week and I still publish here, and when I scroll either feed it feels alien, names and pictures and nothing behind them. Then I open our WhatsApp community or walk into Elfen Town and I read a message from a member and I know them, properly, because we have shared actual moments. That difference is the whole product. We are building our own app now, also called D.O.N.U.T., to bring the messaging and the world together and get off WhatsApp entirely. Why we had not said any of this out loud. We launched Elfen Town two weeks ago and barely told anyone, and in our session today we asked each other why we were being so shy about it. So here it is plainly. Eleven Dunbar is a curated membership community for co-play, co-work, co-build and co-grow. This is our space. It is early, and it is small, and it is already doing the thing we hoped it would. A homecoming. Justin and I are both lifelong gamers, and I spent years designing games, including a storytelling card game as my first startup, always trying to bolt a serious purpose onto it and never quite finding the balance between meaning and fun. Separately, we both loved retreats and communities and the kind of deep conversation you get in them, which tend to be heavy. Building this feels like the bridge between the two finally showing up, which is a strange and good thing to get to do for work. The suffering artist thing is nonsense. There is a myth that making art has to come with hardship and misery, and I think it is b******t. Making things brings me joy and bliss and love, and yes there are hard moments, of course there are. Overall it comes with love, and love is the requirement rather than the reward. You have to love what you are pouring the hours into. We are masters at being our own biggest bully. For most of us the mind is the bully, producing the thoughts, running the negotiation with reality, manufacturing the anxiety and the anger. That is where nearly all the suffering comes from, and it is in our heads rather than in the world, which is also why not everything needs to be so serious. Life is already heavy enough without us adding to it. How lucky the timing is. I have not written a line of code myself in months, it is all agents now, and building this world alone would have taken me half a year or more even two years ago. What has not been solved is testing, debugging, and the actual work of making something good, so the idea that you can one-shot a quality product is a myth. What AI has genuinely given me is room, and I have spent that room on connection and on making something recreational and fun, which is where I would have wanted to spend it anyway. The invitation. Read Big Magic, The Creative Act, and The War of Art. I would put those three above almost anything else you could read this year, because they hand you back the essence of what this whole thing is about, which is playfulness, creativity, and connection. Those are the three ingredients the universe is made of, and what they produce, when you put them together, is love. Get full access to Unreasonable Art of Living at www.unreasonable.fm/subscribe
