Maximize
Health, Play Games

Health is non-optional. Everything else is a game.

The Eshkere universe

Health is the core everything else is arranged around. The four galaxies are the major domains — the games played on top of it.

Health Core

The non-optional foundation — physical, mental, social.

Physical — Sleep, movement, nourishment, a body that works.
Mental — Attention, mood, a mind you can live in.
Social — Connection, belonging, people who know you.

AI Safety

Keeping the foundation standing as powerful systems arrive.

Strategy & Prioritization — Which problems matter most, and what follows from that.
- RFPs — no destination yet
Grantmaking & Resource Allocation — Moving money and attention to the work that needs it.
- Grantmaking OS — The working system behind how grants get considered.
- AI Safety Power Map — Who can enable, constrain, condition or delay a frontier decision — and which of them sit on more than one path at once.
Fieldbuilding & Coordination — Growing the number of people who can do the work.
- Safe AI Sweden — no destination yet
- Safe AI Denmark — no destination yet
- Fieldbuilding Unconference — no destination yet
Governance & Institutions — Rules, bodies and incentives around the technology.
Technical Safety & Evaluation — Measuring and constraining what systems actually do.
- Verifiable AI-safety & AI-R&D work — no destination yet
Communication & Education — Making the problem legible to people who can act on it.

Power

The ability to cause outcomes — and to convert it into them.

Conversion — Holding power is not the same as turning it into outcomes.
Capability — What you can personally do.
Productivity — How much of it you actually get done.
Capital — Resources you can deploy.
Influence — Outcomes you can move through other people.

Knowledge & Science

Understanding reality, and getting good at it.

Mathematics — The language everything else gets written in.
Machine Learning — Learning how these systems work. Applying it to safety lives next door.
Natural & Computational Science — How the physical and computational world behaves.
Philosophy & World Models — What is worth wanting, and how we would know.
Society & Institutions — How groups of people actually decide things.

Culture & Play

The optional layer — and most of what makes a life worth it.

Games — Chosen stakes, learnable rules, the freedom to stop.
Fiction — Lives you get to run without living them.
Music — The one that needs no justification at all.
Art & Design — Making things that did not have to exist.
Exploration — Going and finding out. Often how the discoveries happen.

Transient objects

You were here — The Eshkere homepage — one close-up inside a much larger map.
Current Source comet — Currently reading: Concrete Generalist Projects in AI Safety (and how to do them)

The thesis

One foundation. Infinite games.

Health

The non-optional foundation

Everyone has a right to health — the conditions and needs underlying physical, mental and social flourishing. Sleep, movement, nourishment, connection, a mind that works. Health is serious because nobody can opt out of needing it, and everything else stands on top of it.

Games

Everything you choose on top

The optional ways people pursue enjoyment, achievement, relationships, exploration, creativity, knowledge, identity and meaning. Optional by definition — and where almost everything people cherish about being alive actually lives.

Games depend on health. That is why the foundation comes first — and why it is never the whole point.

The stakes

The floor is not secure.

For a great many people it never has been. Health is lost to poverty, illness, violence, isolation and neglect — and every game those people might have chosen is lost with it. That is a present fact, not an abstraction.

A floor that holds today can also be undermined tomorrow. Some of the plausible ways are global rather than local — how powerful AI systems are built and governed among them, alongside conflict, pandemics and ecological damage.

So health first is not only a private ordering. Where the foundation is missing or threatened, securing it is a public good — making the floor real for people beyond yourself, and keeping it standing for the people who come next.

Which of these problems Eshkere is actually positioned to help with is still an open question.

Portfolio

What we're building

Browse the portfolio →

ProjectAugust 24, 2026

Grantmaking OS

An operating system for moving from a broad funding area to concrete, defensible action — map domains, identify bottlenecks, evaluate interventions, coordinate people and resources, execute, and learn.

ai-safety
grantmaking
tools

Research & News

Thinking in public

All research & news →

AnnouncementAugust 18, 2026Eshkere

A first version of the Eshkere website

Eshkere publishes the first public prototype of its website — a working statement of the philosophy, and an honest picture of how early everything still is.

announcements
eshkere

ResearchAugust 10, 2026EshkereSample— placeholder content demonstrating the format, not a real publication

Why health is the floor, not the ceiling

A working note on the first half of the Eshkere thesis: what it means to treat physical, mental and social well-being as non-optional infrastructure rather than one goal among many.

ResearchAugust 4, 2026EshkereSample— placeholder content demonstrating the format, not a real publication

What counts as a game?

A sample exploration of the second half of the thesis: why “games” means every optional human pursuit — achievement, identity, creativity, knowledge, status, play — and not just software with a controller.

ResearchJuly 28, 2026EshkereSample— placeholder content demonstrating the format, not a real publication

Measuring the foundation

A sample note on the hardest practical question the thesis raises: how an organization could tell whether health — physical, mental and social — is actually improving.

Sample— placeholder content demonstrating the format, not a real publication entries are placeholder content demonstrating the editorial system — not real publications.

Health is the floor. Games are the point.

Eshkere is built on a single ordering: secure the non-optional foundation of physical, mental and social well-being — then choose your games and play them wholeheartedly. How that becomes projects, programs and support is still being worked out, in public.

Read the complete approach

Partner with us

Early is the interesting part.

Eshkere is an early-stage exploration, which means collaborators can still shape what it becomes — builders, researchers, funders and creative partners alike.

Partnership details forthcoming — a real contact channel will be published here once it exists.

How partnership could work

MaximizeHealth, Play Games