Liv Boeree: Poker, Game Theory, AI, Simulation, Aliens & Existential Risk | Lex Fridman Podcast #314
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Liv Boeree is a poker champion and science educator on topics of game theory, physics, complexity, and life. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Liv's Twitter: https://twitter.com/liv_boeree
Liv's Instagram: https://instagram.com/liv_boeree
Liv's Facebook: https://facebook.com/livboeree
Liv's YouTube: https://youtube.com/user/LivBoeree
Books and resources mentioned:
Novacene: https://amzn.to/3wcVqEo
POSITIVITY: https://amzn.to/3K2pfxj
Meditations on Moloch: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch

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Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
0:58 - Poker and game theory
8:01 - Dating optimally
12:53 - Learning
21:05 - Daniel Negreanu
26:13 - Phil Hellmuth
28:46 - Greatest poker player ever
33:04 - Bluffing
43:25 - Losing
52:41 - Mutually assured destruction
57:35 - Simulation hypothesis
1:14:13 - Moloch
1:43:25 - Beauty
1:55:33 - Quantifying life
2:15:43 - Existential risks
2:34:06 - AI
2:43:57 - Energy healing
2:51:07 - Astrophysics
2:54:01 - Aliens
3:19:43 - Advice for young people
3:21:48 - Music
3:29:37 - Meaning of life

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 evolutionarily, if we see a lion running at us, we didn't have time to sort of calculate the lion's kinetic energy and is it optimal to go this way or that way. You just react it and physically our bodies are well attuned to actually make right decisions. But when you're playing a game like poker, this is not something that you ever evolved to do and yet you're in that same flight or fight response. And so that's a really important skill to be able to develop to basically learn how to meditate in the moment and calm yourself so that you can think clearly. The following is a conversation with Liv Burry, formerly one of the best poker players in the world, trained as an astrophysicist and is now a philanthropist and an educator on topics of game theory, physics, complexity and life. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Liv Burry. What role do you think luck plays in poker and in life? You can pick whichever one you want, poker or life and or life. The longer you play, the less influence luck has. You know, like with all things, the bigger your sample size, the more the quality of your decisions or your strategies matter. So to answer that question, yeah, in poker, it really depends. If you and I sat and played 10 hands right now, I might only win 52% of the time, 53%, maybe. But if we played 10,000 hands, then I'll probably win like over 98, 99% of the time. So it's a question of sample sizes. And what are you figuring out over time? The betting strategy that this individual does or literally doesn't matter against any individual over time? Against any individual over time, the better player because they're making better decisions. So what does that mean to make a better decision? Well, to get into the real nitty gritty already, basically, poker is a game of math. There are these strategies familiar with like Nash equilibria. So there are these game theory optimal strategies that you can adopt. And the closer you play to them, the less exploitable you are. So because I've studied the game a bunch, although admittedly not for a few years, but back when I was playing all the time, I would study these game theory optimal solutions and try and then adopt those strategies when I go and play. So I'd play against you and I would do that. And because the objective when you're playing game theory optimal, it's actually it's a loss minimization thing that you're trying to do. Your best bet is to try and play a sort of similar style. You also need to try and adopt this loss minimization. But because I've been playing much longer than you, I'll be better at that. So first of all, you're not taking advantage of my mistakes. But then on top of that, I'll be better at recognizing when you are playing suboptimally and then deviating from this game theory optimal strategy to exploit your bad plays. Can you define game theory and Nash equilibria? Can we try to sneak up to it in a bunch of ways? Like, what's the game theory framework of analyzing poker, analyzing any kind of situation? So game theory is just basically the study of decisions within a competitive situation. I mean, it's technically a branch of economics, but it also applies to like, wider decision theory. And, you know, usually when you see it, it's these like little payoff matrices and so on. That's how it's depicted. But it's essentially just like study of strategies under different competitive situations. And as it happens, certain games, in fact, many, many games have these things called Nash equilibria. And what that means is when you're in a Nash equilibrium, basically, it is not, there is no strategy that you can take that would be more beneficial than the one you're currently taking, assuming your opponent is also doing the same thing. So it would be a bad idea, you know, if we're both playing in a game theory, optimal strategy, if either of us deviate from that, now the other, you know, the way we're putting ourselves at a disadvantage. Rock, paper, scissors is actually a really great example of this. Like if we were to start playing rock, paper, you know, you know nothing about me, and we're going to play for all our money. Let's play 10 rounds of it. What would your sort of optimal strategy be? Do you think? What would you do? Let's see. I would probably try to be as random as possible. Exactly. You want to because you don't know anything about me. You don't want to give anything about a way about yourself. So ideally you'd have like a little dice or somewhat, you know, perfect randomizer that makes you randomize 33% of the time, each of the three different things. And in response to that, well, actually, I can kind of do anything, but I would probably just randomize back to, but actually it wouldn't matter because you'll, I know that you're playing randomly. So that would be us in a Nash equilibrium where we're both playing this like unexploitable strategy. However, if after a while you then notice that I'm playing rock a little bit more often than I should. Yeah. You're the kind of person that would do that. Wouldn't you? Sure. Yes. Yes. Yes. I'm more of a scissors girl, but anyway, you are, no, I'm a, as I said, randomizer. So you notice I'm throwing rock too much or something like that. Now you'd be making a mistake by continuing playing this game theory optimal strategy because what the previous one, because you are now there's an, I'm making a mistake and you're not deviating and exploiting my mistake. So you'd want to start throwing paper a bit more often in whatever you figure is the right sort of percentage of the time that I'm throwing rock too often. So that's basically an example of where, you know, what game theory optimal strategy is in terms of loss minimization, but it's not always the maximally profitable thing if your opponent is doing stupid, stupid stuff, which, you know, in that example. So that's kind of then how it works in poker, but it's a lot more complex. And the way poker players typically, you know, nowadays they study the games change so much. And I think we should talk about how it sort of evolved. But nowadays, like the top pros basically spend all their time in between sessions running these simulators using like software where they do basically Monte Carlo simulations, sort of doing billions of fictitious self play hands. You input a fictitious hand scenario, like, oh, what do I do with Jack nine suited on a King 10 four to two spade board and, you know, against this bet size. So you'd input that press play, it'll run it's, you know, it's billions of fake hands and then it will converge upon what the game theory optimal strategies are. And then you want to try and memorize what these are. Basically, they're like ratios of how often you know what types of hands you want to bluff and what percentage of the time. So then there's this additional layer of inbuilt randomization built in. Yeah, those those kinds of simulations incorporate all the betting strategies and everything else like that. So they so as opposed to some kind of very crude mathematical model of what's the probability you win just based on the quality of the card. It's including everything else to the game theory of it. Yes. Yeah, essentially. And what's interesting is that nowadays if you want to be a top pro and you go and play in these really like the super high stakes tournaments or tough cash games, if you don't know this stuff, you're going to get eaten alive in the long run. Yeah. But of course you could get lucky over the short run. And that's where this like luck factor comes in because luck is both a blessing and a curse. If luck didn't, you know, if there wasn't this random element and there wasn't the ability for worse players to win sometimes, then poker would fall apart. You know, the same reason people don't play chess professionally for money against you. You don't see people going and hustling chess like not knowing, trying to make a living from it because you know, there's very little luck in chess, but there's quite a lot of luck in poker. Have you seen Beautiful Mind, that movie? Years ago. Well, what do you think about the game theoretic formulation of what is it the hot blonde at the bar? Do you remember like the way they illustrated it is they're trying to pick up a girl at a bar and there's multiple girls. They're like friend. It's like a friend group and you're trying to approach. I don't remember the details, but I remember. Don't you like then speak to her friends? Yeah. Yeah. Like that fame disinterest. I mean, it's classic pickup artists stuff. Right. You want to. And they were trying to correlate that somehow that being an optimal strategy game theoretically. Why? What? What? Like, I don't think I remember. I can't imagine that there is. I mean, there's probably an optimal strategy. Is it? Does that mean that there's an actual Nash equilibrium of like picking up girls? Do you know the the marriage problem is optimal stopping? Yes. So where it's an optimal dating strategy where you do you remember? Yeah, I think it's like something like you, you know, you've got like a set of a hundred people you're going to look through. And after how many do you now after that, so going on this many dates out of a hundred, at what point do you then go, OK, the next best person I see, is that the right one? And I think it's like something like 37 percent. Uh, it's one over E, whatever that is. Right. Which I think is. Yeah. We're going to fact check that. Yeah. So but it's funny under those strict constraints, then yes, after that many people, as long as you have a fixed size pool, then you just pick the the the next person that is better than anyone you've seen before. Yeah. Have you have you tried this? Have you incorporated it? One of those people I'm at. And we're going to discuss this. I and what do you mean those people? I try not to optimize stuff. I try to listen to the heart. I don't think I like my mind immediately is attracted to optimizing everything. And I think that if if you really give into that kind of addiction, that you lose the the joy of the small things, the minutiae of life, I think. I don't know. I'm concerned about the addictive nature of my personality in that regard. In some ways. Well, I think the on average people under try and quantify things or try under optimize. There are some people who, you know, it's like with all these things, it's a you know, it's a balancing act. I've been on dating apps, but I've never used them. I'm sure they have data on this because they probably have the optimal stopping control problem, because there aren't a lot of people that use social like dating apps are on there for a long time. So the the the interesting the interesting aspect is like, all right, how long before you stop looking before it actually starts affecting your mind negatively such that you see dating as a kind of game, a kind of game versus an actual process of finding somebody that's going to make you happy for the rest of your life. It's really interesting. They have the data. I wish they would be able to release that data. And I do want to. It's OkCupid, right? I think they ran a huge, huge study on all of their. Yeah, they're more data driven. I think OkCupid folks are. I think there's a lot of opportunity for dating apps and you know, even bigger than dating apps, people connecting on the internet. I just hope they're more data driven. And it doesn't seem that way. I think like I've always I've always thought that Goodreads should be a dating app like that. I've never used it. The good is a good reason just lists like books that you've read and allows you to comment on the books you read and what the books you're currently reading. But the giant social networks of people reading books and that seems to be a much better database of like interest. Of course, it constrains you to the books you're reading. But like that really reveals so much more about the person allows you to discover shared interest because books are kind of window into the way you see the world. Also, like the kind of places people you're curious about the kind of ideas you're curious about. Are you a romantic or are you cold calculating rationalist? Are you are you into Ayn Rand or are you into Bernie Sanders? Are you into whatever? Right. And I feel like that reveals so much more than like a person trying to look hot from a certain angle and attended profile. It would also be a really great filter in the first place for people. It's like people who read books and are willing to go and rate them and give feedback on them and so on. So that's already a really strong filter. Probably the type of people you'd be looking for. Well, at least be able to fake reading books. I mean, the thing about books, you don't really need to read it. You can just look at the clip. Yeah, game the dating app by feigning intellectualism. Can I admit something very horrible about myself? Go on. The things that you know, I don't have many things in my closet, but this is one of them. I've never actually read Shakespeare. I've only read Cliff Notes and I got a five in the AP English exam. Wow. And I which books have I read? Well, yeah, which was the exam on? Oh, no, they include a lot of them. But Hamlet, I don't even know if you read Romeo and Juliet, Beth. I don't remember, but I don't understand it. It's like really cryptic. It's really I don't and it's not that pleasant to read. It's like ancient speak. I don't understand it anyway. Maybe I was too dumb. I'm still too dumb. But I did go to five. Yeah, yeah. I don't know how the US grading system. Oh, no. So AP English is a there's kind of this advanced versions of courses in high school and you take a test that is like a broad test for that subject and includes a lot. It wasn't obviously just Shakespeare. I think a lot of it was also writing, written. You have like AP Physics, AP Computer Science, AP Biology, AP Chemistry, and then AP English or AP Literature. I forget what it was. But I think Shakespeare was a part of that. But I knew and you gave the point is you gamified it. Game. Well, in its entirety, I was into getting A's. I saw it as a game. I don't think any. I don't think all the learning I've done has been outside of the outside of school. The deepest learning I've done has been outside of school with a few exceptions, especially in grad school, like deep computer science courses. But that was still outside of school because it was outside of getting sorry. It was outside of getting the A for the course. The best stuff I've ever done is when you read the chapter and you do many of the problems at the end of the chapter, which is usually not what's required for the course, like the hardest stuff. In fact, textbooks are freaking incredible. If you go back now and you look at like biology textbook or any of the computer science textbooks on algorithms and data structures, those things are incredibly, they have the best summary of a subject. Plus they have practice problems of increasing difficulty that allows you to truly master the basic, like the fundamental ideas behind that. That was, I got through my entire physics degree with one textbook that was just this really comprehensive one that they told us at the beginning of the first year, buy this, but you're going to have to buy 15 other books for all your supplementary courses. And I was like, every time I was just checked to see whether this book covered it and it did. And I think I only bought like two or three extra than thank God, because they're so super expensive textbooks. It's a whole racket they've got going on. Yeah, they are. They could just, you get the right one. It's just like a manual for, but what's interesting though is this is the tyranny of having exams and metrics. The tyranny of exams and metrics. Yes. I loved them because I loved, I'm very competitive and I liked finding ways to gamify things and then like sort of dust off my shoulders afterwards when I get a good grade or be annoyed at myself when I didn't. But yeah, you're absolutely right. And that the actual, you know, how much of that physics knowledge I've retained, like I've, I learned how to cram and study and please an examiner, but did that give me the deep lasting knowledge that I needed? I mean, yes, yes and no. But really like nothing makes you learn a topic better than when you actually then have to teach it yourself. You know, like I'm trying to wrap my teeth around this like game theory, Moloch stuff right now. And there's no exam at the end of it that I can gamify. There's no way to gamify and sort of like shortcut my way through it. I have to understand it so deeply from like deep foundational levels to then build upon it and then try and explain it to other people. And like, you know, you're about to go and do some lectures, right? You can't, you can't sort of just like, you presumably can't rely on the knowledge that you got through when you were studying for an exam to reteach that. Yeah. And especially high level lectures, especially the kind of stuff you do on YouTube, you're not just regurgitating material. You have to think through what is the core idea here. And when you do the lectures live, especially you have to, there's no second takes. That is the luxury you get if you're recording a video for YouTube or something like that. But it definitely is a luxury you shouldn't lean on. I've gotten to interact with a few YouTubers that lean on that too much. And you realize, oh, you've gamified this system because you're not really thinking deeply about stuff. You're through the edit, both written and spoken. You're crafting an amazing video, but you yourself as a human being have not really deeply understood it. So live teaching or at least recording video with very few takes is a different beast. And I think it's the most honest way of doing it. Like as few takes as possible. That's why I'm nervous about this. Don't, don't, don't fuck this up, Liv. The tyranny of exams. I do think, you know, people talk about, you know, high school and college as a time to do drugs and drink and have fun and all this kind of stuff. But, you know, looking back, of course I did a lot of those things. No, uh, yes, but it's also a time when you get to like read textbooks or read books or learn with all the time in the world. Like you don't have these responsibilities of like, uh, you know, laundry and, um, uh, having to sort of pay for mortgage or all that kind of stuff, pay taxes, all this kind of stuff. Uh, in most cases there's just so much time in the day for learning and you don't realize it at the time because at the time it seems like a chore, like why the hell does there's so much homework, but you never get a chance to do this kind of learning, this kind of homework ever again in life, unless later in life you really make a big effort out of it. You get, like you basically your knowledge gets solidified. You don't get, you don't get to have fun and learn. Learning is really, is really fulfilling and really fun if you're that kind of person. Like some people like to, you know, like knowledge is not something that they think is fun, but if that's the kind of thing that you think is fun, that's the time to have fun and do the drugs and drinking all that kind of stuff. But the learning, just going back to those textbooks, the hours spent with the textbooks is, uh, is really, really rewarding. Do people even use textbooks anymore? Yeah. Do you think? Cause it's these days with their TikTok and they're not even that, but it just like so much information, really high quality information is now in digital format online. Um, yeah, but they're not, there are using that, but you know, college is still very, there's a curriculum. I mean, so much of school is about rigorous study of a subject and still on YouTube that's not there. Right. YouTube has, um, uh, Grant Sanderson talks about this. He's this math. Yeah. Three blue, one brown. He says like, I'm not a math teacher. I just take really cool concepts and I inspire people, but if you want to really learn calculus, if you want to really learn linear algebra, you just, you should do the textbook. You should do that, you know, and there are still the, uh, the textbook industrial complex that, that like charges like $200 for textbook and somehow, I don't know. It's ridiculous. There's, there's, oh, sorry. New edition, edition 14.6. Sorry. You can't use 14.5 anymore. It's like, what's different? We've got one paragraph different. So we mentioned offline, Daniel Negrano. Um, I'm going to get a chance to talk to him on this podcast and he's somebody that I was, I found fascinating in terms of the way he thinks about poker verbalizes the way he thinks about poker, the way he plays poker. So, and he's still pretty damn good. He's been good for a long time. So you mentioned that people are running these kinds of simulations and the game of poker has changed. Do you think he's adopting in this way? Do you like the top pros? Do they have to adopt this way? Or is there, is there still like over the years you basically developed this gut feeling about like you, you get to be like good the way like alpha zero is good. You look at the board and somehow from the fog comes out the right answer. Like this is likely what they have. This is likely the best way to move. And you don't really, you can't really put a finger on exactly why. Uh, but it's just comes from your gut feeling or no. Yes and no. So gut feelings are definitely very important. Um, you know, that we've got our two mode or you can distill it down to two modes of decision making, right? You've got your sort of logical linear voice in your head system to as it's often called and your system on your gut intuition. Um, and historically in poker, the very best players were playing almost entirely by their gut. Um, you know, often they do some kind of inspired play and you'd ask them why they do it and they wouldn't really be able to explain it. Um, and that's not so much because their process was unintelligible, but it was more just because no one, no one had the language with which to describe what optimal strategies were because no one really understood how poker worked. This was before, you know, we had analysis software, you know, no one was writing, you know, if I guess some people would write down their hands in a little notebook, but there was no way to assimilate all this data and analyze it. But then, you know, with when computers became cheaper and software started emerging and then obviously online poker where it would like automatically save your hand histories. Um, now all of a sudden you kind of had this, this body of data that you could run analysis on. And so that's when people started to see, you know, these mathematical solutions. And, um, and so what that meant is the, the role of intuition essentially became smaller. Um, and it, it went more into, as we talked before about, you know, this game theory optimal style, but as, also, as I said, like game theory, optimal is about, um, loss minimization and being unexploitable. But if you're playing against people who aren't, because no person, no human being can play perfectly game theory, optimal and poker, not even the best AIs. They're still like, they're 99.99% of the way there or whatever, but this it's kind of like the speed of light. You can't reach it perfectly. So there's still a role for intuition? Yes. So when, yeah, when you're playing this unexploitable style, but when your opponents start doing something, you know, suboptimal that you want to exploit. Well, now that's where not only your like logical brain will need to be thinking, oh, okay, I know I have this my, I'm in the sort of top end of my range here with this, with this hand. Uh, so that means I need to be calling X percent of the time. Um, and I put them on this range, et cetera. Uh, but then sometimes you'll have this gut feeling that will tell you, you know, you know what, this time I know, I know mathematically I'm meant to call now, you know, I've got, I'm in the sort of top end of my range and, um, these, this is the odds I'm getting. So the math says I should call, but there's something in your gut saying they've got it this time. They've got it. Like, uh, they're, they're beating you. Maybe your hand is worse. Um, so then the, the, the real art, this is where the last remaining art in poker, the, the fuzziness, uh, is like, do you listen to your gut? How do you quantify the strength of it or can you even quantify the strength of it? Um, and I think that's what Daniel has. I mean, I, I can't speak for how much he's studying with, with, with the simulators and that kind of thing. I think he has, like he must be to, to still be keeping up. Um, but he has an incredible intuition for just, he's seen so many hands of poker in the flesh. He's seen so many people, the way they behave when the chips are, you know, when the money's on the line and he's got him staring you down in the eye, you know, he's intimidating. He's got this like kind of X factor vibe that he gives out. And he talks a lot, which is an interactive element, which is he's getting stuff from other people. Yes. Yeah. And just like the subtleties. So he's like, he's probing constantly. Yeah, he's probing and he's getting this extra layer of information that others can't. Now that said though, he's good online as well. You know, I don't know how, again, would he be beating the top cash game players online? Probably not. No. Um, but when he's in, in person and he's got that additional layer of information, he can not only extract it, but he knows what to do with it. Um, still so well, uh, there's one player who I would say is the exception to all of this. Um, and he's one of my favorite people to talk about in terms of, I think he might've cracked the simulation. Uh, it's Phil Helmuth. Uh, he more ways than one. He's cracked the simulation. I think. Yeah. He somehow to this day is still, and I love you, Phil. Don't I'm not in any way knocking you. Um, he's still winning so much at the world series of poker specifically. Um, he's now on 16 bracelets. The next nearest person I think has won 10. Um, and he is consistently year in year out going deep or winning these huge field tournaments, you know, with like 2000 people, um, which statistically he should not be doing. And, and yet you watch some of the place he makes and they make no sense. Like mathematically they are so far from game theory optimal. And the thing is if you went and stuck him in one of these high, like high stakes cash games with a bunch of like GTO people, he's going to get ripped apart. But there's something that he has that when he's in the halls of the world series of poker specifically, um, amongst sort of amateurish players, he gets them to do crazy shit like that. And, and, but my little pet theory is that also he just the car he's, he's like a wizard and he gets the cards to do what he needs them to, because he, he just expects to win and he expects to receive, you know, to get flopper set with a frequency far beyond what this, you know, the, the, the, the real percentages are. And I don't even know if he knows what the real percentages are. He doesn't need to because he gets that. I think he has found a cheat code. Cause when I've seen him play, he seems to be like annoyed that the long shot thing didn't happen. He's like annoyed and it's almost like everybody else is stupid because he was obviously going to win with a If that silly thing hadn't happened. And it's like, you don't understand the silly thing happens 99% of the time. And it's a 1% not the other way around, but genuinely for his lived experience at the world's only at the world's risk of poker, it is like that. So I don't blame him for feeling that way. But he does, he has this, he has this X factor and the poker community has tried for years to rip him down saying like, you know, he doesn't, he's no good, but he's clearly good because he's still winning or there's something going on, whether that's he's figured out how to mess with the fabric of reality and how cards, you know, a randomly shuffled deck of cards come out. I don't know what it is, but he's doing, doing it right. Still. Who do you think is the greatest of all time? Would you put Helmuth? Now he's definitely, he seems like the kind of person when mentioned, he would actually watch this. So you might want to be careful. As I said, I love Phil and I, and I, I'm, I have, I would say this to his face. I'm not saying anything. I don't, he's got, he truly, I mean, he is one of the greatest. I don't know if he's the greatest. He's certainly the greatest at the world series of poker and he is the greatest at, despite the game switching into a pure game, almost an entire game of math, he has managed to keep the magic alive and this like the, just through sheer force of will making the game work for him. And that is incredible. And I think it's something that should be studied because it's an example. Yeah. There might be some actual game theoretical wisdom. There might be something to be said about optimality from studying him. Right. What do you mean by optimality? Meaning, or rather game design perhaps, meaning if what he's doing is working, maybe poker is more complicated than we're currently modeling it as. So like, Or there's an extra layer and I don't mean to get too weird and wooey, but, or there's an extra layer of ability to manipulate the things the way you want them to go that we don't understand yet. Do you think Phil Hellmuth understands them? Is he just generally? Hashtag positivity. He wrote a book on positivity. And he has? Yes. School of positivity. Not like a trolling book? No. By Sirius? He's straight up, yeah. Phil Hellmuth wrote a book about positivity. Yes. Okay. Not ironically. About, I think, and I think it's about sort of manifesting what you want and getting the outcomes that you want by believing so much in yourself and in your ability to win, like eyes on the prize. And I mean, it's working. The man's delivered. Where do you put like Phil Ivey and all those kinds of people? I mean, I'm too, I've been, to be honest, too much out of the scene for the last few years to really, I mean, Phil Ivey's clearly got, again, he's got that X factor. He's so incredibly intimidating to play against. I've only played against him a couple of times, but when he like looks you in the eye and you're trying to run a bluff on him, oof, no one's made me sweat harder than Phil Ivey. Just my bluff got through, actually. That was actually one of the most thrilling moments I've ever had in poker. It was in a Monte Carlo in a high roller. I can't remember exactly what the hand was, but I three bit and then like just barreled all the way through. And he just like put his laser eyes into me and I felt like he was just scouring my soul. And I was just like, hold it together, Liv, hold it together. And you knew your hand was weaker. Yeah, I mean, I was bluffing. I presume, which, you know, there's a chance I was bluffing with the best hand, but I'm pretty sure my hand was worse. And he folded. That was truly one of my, one of the deep highlights of my career. Did you show the cards or did you fold? You should never show in game. Because especially as I felt like I was one of the worst players at the table in that tournament. So giving that information, unless I had a really solid plan that I was now like advertising, oh, look, I'm capable of bluffing Phil Ivy. But like why? It's much more valuable to take advantage of the impression that they have of me, which is like, I'm a scared girl playing a high roller for the first time. Keep that going. Interesting. But isn't there layers to this like psychological warfare that the scared girl might be way smart and then like to flip the tables. Do you think about that kind of stuff? Oh, definitely. Is it better not to reveal information? I mean, generally speaking, you want to not reveal information. You know, the goal of poker is to be as deceptive as possible about your own strategies while elucidating as much out of your opponent about their own. So giving them free information, particularly if they're people who you consider very good players, any information I give them is going into their little database and being calculated. I assume it's going to be calculated and used well. So I have to be really confident that my like meta gaming that I'm going to then do, oh, they've seen this, so therefore that I'm going to be on the right level. So it's better just to keep that little secret to myself in the moment. So how much is bluffing part of the game? Huge amount. So yeah, I mean, maybe actually let me ask like, what did it feel like with the live here or anyone else? When it's a high stake, when it's a big, it's a big bluff. So a lot of money on the table and maybe, I mean, what defines a big bluff? Maybe a lot of money on the table, but also some uncertainty in your mind and heart about like self doubt. Well, maybe I miscalculated what's going on here, what the bet said, all that kind of stuff. Like, what does that feel like? I mean, it's, I imagine comparable to, you know, running a, I mean, any kind of big bluff where you have a lot of something that you care about on the line. You know, so if you're bluffing in a courtroom, not that anyone should ever do that, or, you know, something equatable to that. It's, it's incredible. You know, in that scenario, you know, I think it was the first time I'd ever played a 20, I'd won my way into this 25k tournament. So that was the buy-in 25,000 euros. And I had satelliteed my way in because it was much bigger than I would never ever normally play. And, you know, I hadn't, I wasn't that experienced at the time. And now I was sitting there against all the big boys, you know, the Negron is the Phil IVs and so on. And then to like, you know, each time you put the bets out, you know, you put another bet out your car. Yeah. I was on a, what's called a semi bluff. So there was some cards that could come that would make my hand very, very strong and therefore win. But most of the time those cards don't come. So that is a semi-bluff because you're representing, are you representing that you already have something? So, so I think in this scenario, I had a flush draw to, to, so I had two clubs, two, two clubs came out on the flop and then I'm hoping that on the turn and the river one will come. So I have some future equity. I could hit a club and then I'll have the best hand, in which case great. And so I can keep betting and I'll want them to call. But I'm also got the other way of winning the hand where if my card doesn't come, I can keep betting and get them to fold their hand. And I'm pretty sure that's what the scenario was. So I had some future equity, but it's still, you know, most of the time I don't hit that club. And so I would rather him just fold because I'm, you know, the pot is now getting bigger and bigger and in the end, like I've jam all, jam all in on the river. That's my entire tournament on the line. As far as I'm aware, this might be the one time I ever get to play a big 25 K, you know, this was the first time I played one. So it was, it felt like the most momentous thing. And this was also when I was trying to build myself up, you know, build my name, a name for myself in poker. I wanted to get respect. Destroy everything for you. It felt like it in the moment. Like, I mean, it literally does feel like a form of life and death. Like your body physiologically is having that flight or fight response. What are you doing with your body? What are you doing with your face? Are you just like, what are you thinking about? More like a mixture of like, okay, what are the cards? So in theory, I'm thinking about like, okay, what are cards that look, make my hand look stronger, which, you know, which cause hit my perceived range from his perspective, which cards don't, what's the right amount of bet size to, you know, maximize my fold equity in this situation. You know, that's the logical stuff that I should be thinking about. But I think in reality, because I was so scared because there's this, at least for me, there's a certain threshold of like nervousness or stress beyond which the light logical brain shuts off. And now it just gets into this like, it just like, it feels like a game of wits basically. It's like of nerve. Can you hold your, hold your resolve? And it certainly got by that, like by the river at this, I think by that point I was like, I don't even know if this is a good bluff anymore, but fuck it. Let's do it. Your mind is almost numb from the intensity of that feeling. I call it, I call it the white noise. And, and that's, and it, and it happens in all kinds of decision-making. I think anything that's really, really stressful. Like I can imagine someone in like an important job interview, if it's like a job they've always wanted and they're getting grilled, you know, like Bridgewater style, where they ask these really like really hard like mathematical questions. You know, that's, it's a really learned skill to be able to like subdue your flight or fight response. You know, what I think get from the sympathetic into the parasympathetic. So you can actually, you know, engage the, that voice in your head and do those slow logical calculations. Because evolutionarily we, you know, if we see a lion running at us, we didn't have time to sort of calculate the lion's kinetic energy and you know, is it optimal to go this way or that way? You just reacted and physically our bodies are well attuned to actually make right decisions. But when you're playing a game like poker, this is not something that you ever, you know, evolved to do. And yet you're in that same flight or fight response. And so that's a really important skill to be able to develop to basically learn how to like meditate in the moment and calm yourself so that you can think clearly. But as you were searching for a comparable thing, it's interesting because you just made me realize that bluffing is like an incredibly high stakes form of lying. You're lying. And I don't think you're telling a story. It's straight up lying in the context of game. It's not a negative kind of lying. But it is. Yeah, exactly. You are. I'm, you're representing something that you don't have. And I was thinking like, how often in life do we have such high stakes of lying? Because I was thinking certainly in high level military strategy, I was thinking when Hitler was lying to Stalin about his plans to invade the Soviet Union. And so you're talking to a person like your friends and you're fighting against the enemy, whatever the formulation of the enemy is. But meanwhile, whole time you're building up troops on the border. That's extremely Wait, wait. So Hitler and Stalin were like pretending to be friends? Yeah. My history knowledge is terrible. That's crazy. Yeah, that there were, and it worked because Stalin until the troops crossed the border and invaded in Operation Barbarossa where this storm of Nazi troops invaded large parts of the Soviet Union and hence one of the biggest wars in human history began. Stalin for sure was thought that this was never going to be, that Hitler is not crazy enough to invade the Soviet Union. And it makes geopolitically makes total sense to be collaborators. And ideologically, even though there's a tension between communism and fascism or national socialism, however you formulate it, it still feels like this is the right way to battle the West. Right. They were more ideologically aligned. They in theory had a common enemy, which is the West. Yeah. So made total sense. And in terms of negotiations and the way things were communicated, it seemed to Stalin that for sure that they would remain at least for a while peaceful collaborators. And everybody because of that in the Soviet Union believed that it was a huge shock when Kiev was invaded. And you hear echoes of that when I traveled to Ukraine, sort of the shock of the invasion. It's not just the invasion on one particular border, the invasion of the capital city and just like, holy shit. Especially at that time, when you thought World War I, you realized that that was the war that to end all wars, you would never have this kind of war. And holy shit, this person is mad enough to try to take on this monster in the Soviet Union. So it's not no longer going to be a war of hundreds of thousands dead. It'll be a war of tens of millions dead. And yeah, but that like, you know, that's a very large scale kind of lie, but I'm sure there's in politics and geopolitics, that kind of lying happening all the time. And a lot of people pay financially and with their lives for that kind of lying. But in our personal lives, I don't know how often we maybe we think people do. I mean, like think of spouses cheating on their partners, right? And then like having to lie like, where were you last night? Stuff like that. Yeah, like that's, I think, you know, I mean, unfortunately that stuff happens all the time, right? So or having like multiple families, that one is great. When each family doesn't know the other about the other one and like maintaining that life. There's probably a sense of excitement about that too. Or seems unnecessary. Yeah. But why? Well, just lying. Like, like, you know, the truth finds a way of coming out, you know, yes, but hence that's the thrill. Yeah, perhaps. Yeah, people. I mean, you know, that's what I think actually like poker was so interesting about poker is most of the best players I know, they're always exceptions, you know, they're always bad eggs. But actually poker players are very honest people. I would say they are more honest than the average, you know, if you just took random, random population sample. Because a, you know, I think, you know, humans like to have that. Most people like to have some kind of, you know, mysterious, you know, an opportunity to do something like a little edgy. So we get to sort of scratch that itch of being edgy at the poker table where it's like, it's part of the game. Everyone knows, everyone knows what they're in for and that's allowed. And you get to like really get that out of your system. And then also like poker players learned that, you know, I would play in a huge game against some of my friends, even my partner Igor, where we will be, you know, absolutely going at each other's throats trying to draw blood in terms of winning each money off each other and like getting under each other's skin, winding each other up, doing the craftiest moves we can. But then once the game's done, the, you know, the winners and the losers will go off and get a drink together and have a fun time and like talk about it in this like weird academic way afterwards. Because that, and that's why games are so great because you get to like live out, or like this competitive urge that, you know, most people have. What's it feel like to lose? Like we talked about bluffing when it worked out. What about when you, when you go broke? So like in a game, I'm, you know, fortunately I've never gone broke. You mean like full life? Full life? No. I know plenty of people who have. And I don't think Igor would mind me saying he went, you know, he went broke once in poker. Well, you know, early on when we were together. I feel like you haven't lived unless you've gone broke. Oh, yeah. In some sense. Right. Well, I mean, I'm happy. I've sort of lived through it vicariously through him when he did it at the time. But yeah, what does it like to lose? Well, it depends. So it depends on the amount. It depends what percentage of your net worth you've just lost. It depends on your brain chemistry. It really, you know, varies from person to person. You have a very cold calculating way of thinking about this. So it depends what percentage you have. Well, it really does. Right? Yeah, it's true. But that's, I mean, that's another thing poker trains you to do. You see, you see everything in percentages or you see everything in like ROI or expected hourlies or cost benefit, et cetera. You know, so that's, I, one of the things I've tried to do is calibrate the strength of my emotional response to the, to the win or loss that I've received because it's, it's no good if you like, you know, you have a huge emotional dramatic response to a tiny loss or on the flip side, you have a huge win and you're sort of so dead inside that you don't even feel it. Well, that's, you know, that's a shame. I want my emotions to calibrate with reality as much as possible. So yeah, what's it like to lose? I mean, I've had times where I've lost, you know, busted out of a tournament that I thought I was going to win in, you know, especially if I got really unlucky or, or I make a dumb play where I've gone away and like, you know, kicked, kicked the wall, punched a wall. I like nearly broke my hand one time. Like I'm a lot less competitive than I used to be. Like I was like pathologically competitive in my like late teens, early twenties. I just had to win at everything. And I think that's sort of slowly waned as I've gotten older. According to you. Yeah. According to me. I don't know if others would say the same, right? I feel like ultra competitive people. Like I've heard Joe Rogan say this to me. It's like, he's a lot less competitive than he used to be. I don't know about that. Oh, I believe it. No, I totally believe it. Like, because as you get, you can still be like, I care about winning. Like when, you know, I play a game with my buddies online or, you know, whatever it is, poly, polytopia is my current obsession. Like, Thank you for passing on your obsession to me. Are you playing now? Yeah, I'm playing now. We got to have a game. But I'm terrible and I enjoy playing terribly. I don't want to have a game because that's going to pull me into your monster of, of like a competitive play. It's important. I'm enjoying playing on the, I can't, I, you just do the, you just do the points thing, you know, against the bots. Yeah. Against the bots. And I can't even do the, uh, there's like a hard one and there's a very hard one. It's crazy. Yeah. It's crazy. I can't, I don't even enjoy the hard one, the crazy. I really don't enjoy it because it's intense. You have to constantly try to win as opposed to enjoy building a little world and yeah, no, no, there's no time for exploration and polytopia. You got to get, well, when, once you graduate from the crazies, then you can come play the graduate from the crazy. Yeah. So in order to be able to play a decent game against like, you know, our group, um, you'll need to be, you'll need to be consistently winning like 90% of games against 15 crazy bots. Yeah. And you'll be able to, like, there'll be, I could, I could teach you it within a day, honestly. Um, how, how to beat the crazies, how to beat the crazies and then, and then you'll be ready for the big leagues. Generalizes, uh, to more than just polytopia, but okay. Uh, why were we talking about polytopia? Uh, losing hurts, losing hurts. Oh yeah. Yes. Competitiveness over time. Um, I think it's more that at least for me, I still care about play about winning when I choose to play something. It's just that I don't see the world as zero sum as I used to, you know? Um, I think as you, one gets older and wiser, you start to see the world more as a positive sum thing. And, or at least you're more aware of externalities of, of scenarios of competitive interactions. Um, and so yeah, I just like, I'm more and I'm more aware of my own, you know, like if I have a really strong emotional response to losing and that makes me then feel shitty for the rest of the day. And then I beat myself up mentally for it. Like I'm now more aware that that's unnecessary negative externality. So I'm like, okay, I need to find a way to turn this down, you know, dial this down a bit. Was poker the thing that has, if you think back at your life and think about some of the lower points of your life, like the darker places you've got in your mind, did it have to do something with poker? Like what did losing spark the, um, the descent into darkness or was it something else? Um, I think my darkest points in poker were when I was wanting to quit and move on to other things, but I felt like I hadn't ticked all the boxes I wanted to tick. Like I wanted to be the most winningest female player, which is by itself a bad goal. Um, you know, that was one of my initial goals. And I was like, well, I haven't, you know, and I wanted to win a WPT event. I've won one of these, I won one of these, but I want one of those as well. And that sort of, again, like it's a drive of like overoptimization to random metrics that I decided were important, um, without much wisdom at the time, but then like carried on. Um, that made me continue chasing it longer than I still actually had the passion to chase it for. And I don't, I don't have any regrets that, you know, I played for as long as I did because who knows, you know, I wouldn't be sitting here. I wouldn't be living this incredible life that I'm living now. Um, this is, this is the height of your life right now. This is it. Peak experience. Absolute pinnacle here in your robot land with your creepy light. Um, no, it is. I mean, I, I wouldn't change a thing about my life right now and I feel very blessed to say that. Um, so, but the dark times were in the sort of like 2016 to 18, even sooner really where I was like, I had stopped loving the game and I was going through the motions and I would, and then I was like, you know, I would take the losses harder than I needed to because I'm like, ah, it's another one. And it was, I was aware that like, I felt like my life was ticking away and I was like, is this going to be what's on my tombstone? Oh yeah. She played the game of, you know, this zero sum game of poker slightly more optimally than her next opponent. Like cool, great legacy, you know? So I just want to, you know, I, there was something in me that knew I needed to be doing something more directly impactful. Um, and just meaningful. It was just like a search for meaning. And I think it's a thing. A lot of poker players, even a lot of, I imagine any games players who sort of love intellectual pursuits. Um, you know, I think you should ask Magnus Carlsen this question. I don't know what his name is. He's a boy from chess, right? Yeah. Like it must be so hard for him. You know, he's been on the top for so long and it's like, well now what he's got this incredible brain, like what to put it to. Um, and yeah, it's, it's this weird, uh, moment where I've just spoken with people that won multiple gold medals at the Olympics and the depression hits hard after you win. Don't come in crash. Because it's a kind of a goodbye saying goodbye to that person, to all the dreams you had that thought you thought would give meaning to your life. But in fact, life is full of constant pursuits of meaning. It's, it doesn't, you don't like arrive and figure it all out and there's endless bliss knowledge. It continues going on and on. You constantly have to figure out to rediscover yourself. And so for you, like that struggle to say goodbye to poker, you have to like find the next. There's always a bigger game. That's the thing. That's my motto is like, what's the next game? And more importantly, because obviously game usually implies zero sum, like what, what's the game, which is like Omni-win. Omni-win? Why is Omni-win so important? Because if everyone plays zero sum games, that's a fast track to either completely stagnate as a civilization, but more actually far more likely to extinct ourselves. Um, you know, like the playing field is finite. You know, nuclear powers are playing a game of poker with their, with, you know, but their chips are nuclear weapons, right? And the stakes have gotten so large that if anyone makes a single bet, you know, fires some weapons, the playing field breaks. I made a video on this. Like, you know, the, the, the, the playing field is finite. And if we keep playing these adverse adversarial zero sum games, uh, thinking that we, you know, in order for us to win, someone else has to lose, or if we lose that, you know, someone else wins that, that will extinct us. It's just a matter of when. What do you think about that, uh, mutually assured destruction, that very simple, almost to the point of caricaturing game theory idea that does seem to be at the core of why we haven't blown each other up yet with nuclear weapons. Do you think there's some truth to that, this kind of stabilizing force of mutually shared destruction? And do you think that's going to hold up through the 21st century? I mean, it's, it has, it has held. Yes. There's, there's definitely truth to it that it was a, a, you know, it's a Nash equilibrium. Yeah. Are you surprised it held this long? Um, it is crazy when you factor in all the like near miss accidental firings. Yes. That's makes me wonder like, you know, you know, you're familiar with the like quantum suicide thought experiment where it's basically like, uh, you have a, you know, like a Russian roulette type scenario, uh, hooked up to some kind of quantum event, you know, uh, particle splitting, um, or paraparticle splitting. And if it, you know, if it goes a, then the gun doesn't go off and it goes B, then it does go off and it kills you because you can only ever be in the universe, you know, assuming like the Everett branch, you know, multiverse theory, you will always only end up in the, in the branch where you continually make, you know, option A comes in, but you run that experiment enough times, it starts getting pretty damn, you know, out of the tree gets huge. There's a million different scenarios, but you'll always find yourself in this, in the one where it didn't go off. And, uh, and so from that perspective you, you are essentially immortal because someone, and you will only find yourself in the set of observers that make it down that path. So it's, it's, it's kind of a, that doesn't mean that this doesn't mean you're still not going to be fucked at some point in your life. No, of course not. No, I'm not advocating like that. We're all immortal because of this. It's just like a fun thought experiment. And the point is it like raises this thing of like these things called, uh, observer selection effects, which Bostrom and Nick Bostrom talks about a lot and I think people should go read. Um, it's really powerful, but I think it could be overextended that logic. I'm not sure exactly how it can be. I just feel like you can get, you can, um, overgeneralize that logic somehow. Well, no, I mean, it leaves you into like solipsism, which is a very dangerous mindset. Again, if everyone like falls into solipsism of like, well, I'll be fine. That's a great way of creating very self-terminating environment. Um, but my point is, is that with the nuclear weapons thing, um, there have been at least, I think it's 12 or 11, um, near misses of like just stupid things. Like, uh, there was moonrise over Norway and it made weird reflections off some glaciers in the mountains, which set off, I think the alarms of NORAD, uh, NORAD radar and that put them on high alert, nearly ready to shoot. And it was only because, um, the head of the Russian military happened to be at the UN in New York at the time that they go like, well, wait a second. Why would, why would they fire now when their guy is there? And it was only that lucky happens dance, which doesn't happen very often where they didn't then escalate it into firing. And there's a bunch of these different ones. Stanislav Petrov, like saved the person who should be the most famous person on earth because he's probably on expectations saved the most human lives of anyone, like billions of people by ignoring Russian orders to fire because he felt in his gut that actually this was a false alarm and it turned out to be, you know, very hard thing to do. Um, and there's so many of those scenarios that I can't help but wonder at this point that we aren't having this kind of like selection effect thing going on because you look back and you're like, geez, that's a lot of near misses. But of course we don't know the actual probabilities that they would have lent each one would have ended up in nuclear war. Maybe they were not that likely, but still the point is it's a very dark, stupid game that we're playing. Um, and it is an absolute moral imperative, if you ask me to get as many people thinking about ways to make this like very precarious because we're in a Nash equilibrium, but it's not like we're in the bottom of a pit. You know, if you would like map it topographically, um, it's not like a stable ball at the bottom of a thing. We're not an equilibrium because of that. We're on the top of a hill with the ball balanced on top and just any little nudge could send it flying down and you know, nuclear war pops off and hellfire and bad times. On the positive side, and life on earth to probably still continue and another intelligence civilization might still pop up. Maybe, it depends. Pick your X risk. Depends on the X risk. Nuclear war, sure. That's one of the perhaps less bad ones. Uh, green goo through synthetic biology, very bad. Will turn, you know, destroy all, uh, you know, organic matter, uh, through, you know, it's basically like a biological, uh, paper clip maximizer, also bad or AI type, you know, mass extinction thing as well would also be bad. Shh, they're listening. There's a robot right behind you. Okay, wait. Uh, so let me ask you about this from a game theory perspective. Do you think we're living in a simulation? Do you think we're listening, living inside a video game created by somebody else? Well, I think, well, so what was the second part of the question? Do I think we're living in a simulation and, uh, a simulation that is observed by somebody for purpose of entertainment. So like a video game, are we listening? How we, because there's a, it's like Phil Hellmuth type of situation, right? Like, um, there's a creepy level of like, this is kind of fun and interesting. Like there's a lot of interesting stuff going on. I mean, that could be somehow integrated into the evolutionary process where the way we perceive and are you asking me if I believe in God? Um, sounds like it kind of, but God seems to be not optimizing, uh, in the different formulations of God that we conceive of. He doesn't seem to be, or she optimizing for, uh, like personal entertainment. Maybe the older gods did, but the, the, you know, just like basically like a teenager in their mom's basement watching create a fun universe to observe what kind of crazy shit might happen. Okay. So to try and answer this, um, do I think there is some kind of extraneous intelligence to like our, you know, classic measurable universe that we, you know, can measure with convent, you know, through our current physics and, uh, uh, instruments? I think so. Yes. Um, partly because I've had just small little bits of evidence in my own, in my own life, which have made me question, like, so I was a diehard atheist, um, even five years ago. Uh, you know, I got into like the rationality community, big fan of less wrong, uh, continue to be an incredible resource. Um, but I've just started to have too many little snippets of experience, which don't make sense with the current sort of purely materialistic, um, explanation of how reality works. Um, isn't that just like a humbling practical realization that we don't know how reality works? Isn't that just a reminder to yourself? Yeah, no, it's a reminder of epistemic humility because I felt too hard, you know, same, same as people, like, I think, you know, many people who are just like, my religion is the way this is the correct way. This is the work. This is the law. Um, you are immoral if you don't follow this blah, blah, blah. I think they are lacking epistemic humility. They're a little too, too much hubris there, but similarly, I think the sort of the Richard Dawkins brand of atheism is too, is too rigid as well and doesn't, you know, there's a way to try and navigate these questions, which still honors the scientific method, which I still think is our best sort of realm of like reasonable inquiry, you know, a method of inquiry. Um, so an example, um, I have two kind of notable examples that like really rattled my, my, my cage. Uh, the first one was actually in 2010, early on in, um, uh, quite early on in my poker career. And I, the, the, the, uh, the, remember the Icelandic volcano that erupted that like shut down kind of all Atlantic airspace. Um, and I, it meant I got stuck down in the south of France. I was there for something else. Um, and I couldn't get home and someone said, well, there's a big poker tournament happening in Italy. Maybe do you want to go? I was like, all right, sure. Like let's, you know, got a train across, found a way to get there. Um, and the buy-in was 5,000 euros, which was much bigger than my bankroll would normally allow. And so I, uh, played a feeder tournament, won my way in kind of like I did with the Monte Carlo big one. Um, uh, so then I won my way, you know, from 500 euros into 5,000 euros to play this thing. And on day one of then the big tournament, which turned out to have, it was the biggest tournament ever held in Europe at the time. It got over like 1200 people, absolutely huge. And I remember they dimmed the lights, uh, for before, you know, the normal shuffle up and deal, uh, to tell everyone to start playing and they played, uh, chemical brothers, Hey boy, Hey girl. Um, which I don't know why it's notable, but it was just like a really, it was a song I always liked. It was like one of these like pumped me up songs and I was sitting there thinking, Oh yeah, it's exciting. I'm playing this really big tournament and out of nowhere, just suddenly this voice in my head just, and it sounded like my own sort of, you know, when you say you think in your mind, you hear a voice kind of, right. At least I do. Um, and so it sounded like my own voice and it said, you are going to win this tournament. And it was so powerful that I got this like wave of like, you know, sort of goosebumps down my body. And I even, I remember looking around being like, did anyone else hear that? And obviously people are in their phones like no, no one else heard it. And I was like, okay. Six days later, I win the tournament out of 1200 people. And I, I, I don't know how to explain it. Um, okay. Yes. Maybe I have that feeling before every time I play and it's just that I happen to, you know, because I won the tournament, I retroactively remembered it, but Or the, or the feeling gave you a kind of now from the film, Hellmuthian. Well, exactly. Like it gave you a confident, a deep confidence. And it did. It definitely did. Like I remember then feeling this, like sort of, well, although I remember then on day one, I then went and lost half my stack quite early on. And I remember thinking like, oh, well, that was bullshit. You know, what kind of premonition is this? Yes. Thinking, oh, I'm out. But you know, I managed to like keep it together and recover. And then, and then just went like pretty perfectly from then on. And either way, it definitely instilled me with this confidence. And I don't want to put, I don't, I can't put an explanation like, you know, was it some, you know, huge extra extra, you know, supernatural thing driving me or was it just my own self-confidence and someone that just made me make the right decisions? I don't know. And I don't, I'm not going to put a frame on it. And I think I know a good explanation. So we're a bunch of NPCs living in this world created by in the simulation and then people, not people, creatures from outside of the simulation sort of can tune in and play your character. And that feeling you got is somebody just like, they got to play a poker tournament through you. Honestly, it felt like that. It did actually feel a little bit like that, but it's been 12 years now. I've retold the story many times. Like I don't even know how much I can trust my memory. You're just an NPC retelling the same story. That's because they just played the tournament and left. Yeah, they're like, oh, that was fun. Cool. Yeah, cool. Next. And now you're for the rest of your life left as a boring NPC retelling this story of greatness. Well, and what was interesting was that after that, then I didn't obviously win a major tournament for quite a long time and it left. That was actually another sort of dark period because I had this incredible, like the highs of winning that, you know, just on a like material level were insane. Winning the money. I was on the front page of newspapers because I was like this girl that came out of nowhere and won this big thing. And so again, like sort of chasing that feeling was difficult. But then on top of that, there was this feeling of like almost being touched by something bigger that was like, ah. And also maybe, did you have a sense that I might be somebody special? Like this kind of, I think that's the confidence thing that maybe you could do something special in this world after all kind of feeling. I definitely, I mean, this is a thing I think everybody wrestles with to an extent, right? We are truly the protagonists in our own lives. And so it's a natural bias, human bias to feel special. And I think, and in some ways we are special. Every single person is special because you are that, the universe does, the world literally does revolve around you. That's the thing in some respect. But of course, if you then zoom out and take the amalgam of everyone's experiences, then no, it doesn't. So there is this shared sort of objective reality, but sorry, this objective reality that is shared, but then there's also this subjective reality, which is truly unique to you. And I think both of those things coexist. And it's not like one is correct and one isn't. And again, anyone who's like, oh no, your lived experience is everything versus your lived experience is nothing. No, it's a blend between these two things. They can exist concurrently. But there's a certain kind of sense that at least I've had my whole life. And I think a lot of people have this as like, well, I'm just like this little person. Surely I can't be one of those people that do the big thing. Right? There's all these big people doing big things. There's big actors and actresses, big musicians, there's big business owners and all that kind of stuff, scientists and so on. I have my own subjective experience that I enjoy and so on, but there's like a different layer. Surely I can't do those great things. I mean, one of the things just having interacted with a lot of great people, I realized, no, they're like just the same humans as me. And that realization I think is really empowering. To remind yourself- But are they? What? But are they? Are they? Depends on some, yeah. They're like a bag of insecurities and peculiar sort of like their own little weirdnesses and so on. I should say also not, they have the capacity for brilliance, but they're not generically brilliant. Like, you know, we tend to say this person or that person is brilliant, but really, no, they're just like sitting there and thinking through stuff, just like the rest of us. I think they're in the habit of thinking through stuff seriously and they've built up a habit of not allowing their mind to get trapped in a bunch of bullshit and minutiae of day to day life. They really think big ideas, but those big ideas, it's like allowing yourself the freedom to think big, to realize that you can be one that actually solved this particular big problem. First identify a big problem that you care about, then like I can actually be the one that solves this problem. And like allowing yourself to believe that. And I think sometimes you do need to have like that shock go through your body and a voice tells you, you're going to win this tournament. Exactly. And whether it was, it's this idea of useful fictions. So again, like going through the classic rationalist training of less wrong, where it's like, you want your map, you know, the image you have of the world in your head to as accurately match up with how the world actually is. You want the map and the territory to perfectly align as, you know, you want it to be as an accurate representation as possible. I don't know if I fully subscribed to that anymore, having now had these moments of like feeling of something either bigger or just actually just being overconfident. Like there is value in overconfidence sometimes. If you would, you know, take Magnus Carlsen, right? If he, I'm sure from a young age, he knew he was very talented, but I wouldn't be surprised if he was also had something in him to, well actually maybe he's a bad example because he truly is the world's greatest. But someone who it was unclear whether they were going to be the world's greatest, but ended up doing extremely well because they had this innate deep self-confidence, this like even overblown idea of how good their relative skill level is. That gave them the confidence to then pursue this thing and like with the kind of focus and dedication that it requires to excel in whatever it is you're trying to do, you know? And so there are these useful fictions and that's where I think I diverged slightly with the classic, the classic sort of rationalist community because that's a field that is worth studying of like how the stories we tell, what the stories we tell to ourselves, even if they are actually false and even if we suspect they might be false, how it's better to sort of have that like little bit of faith, like value in faith, I think actually. And that's partly another thing that's now led me to explore, you know, the concept of God, whether you want to call it a simulator, the classic theological thing. I think we're all like elucidating to the same thing. Now, I don't know, I'm not saying, you know, because obviously the Christian God is like, you know, all benevolent, endless love. The simulation, at least one of the simulation hypothesis is like, as you said, like a teenager in his bedroom who doesn't really care, doesn't give a shit about the individuals within there. It just like wants to see how this thing plays out because it's curious and it could turn it off like that. You know, where on the, you know, where on the sort of psychopathy to benevolent spectrum God is, I don't know. But having this, just having a little bit of faith that there is something else out there that might be interested in our outcome is, I think, an essential thing actually for people to find. A, because it creates commonality between, it's something we can all share and like it is uniquely humbling of all of us to an extent. It's like a common objective. But B, it gives people that little bit of like reserve, you know, when things get really dark. And I do think things are going to get pretty dark over the next few years. But it gives that like, to think that there's something out there that actually wants our game to keep going. I keep calling it the game, you know, it's a thing C and I like we call it the game. You and C is, AKA Grimes, call what the game? Everything, the whole thing? Yeah, we joke about like- So everything is a game? Well, the universe, like what if it's a game and the goal of the game is to figure out like, well, either how to beat it, how to get out of it. You know, maybe this universe is an escape room, like a giant escape room. And the goal is to figure out, put all the pieces of puzzle, figure out how it works in order to like unlock this like hyperdimensional key and get out beyond what it is. No, but then, so you're saying it's like different levels and it's like a cage within a cage within a cage and never like one cage at a time, you figure out how to escape that. Right. Like a new level up, you know, like us becoming multi-planetary would be a level up or us, you know, figuring out how to upload our consciousnesses to the thing that would probably be a leveling up or spiritually, you know, humanity becoming more combined and less adversarial and bloodthirsty and us becoming a little bit more enlightened, that would be a leveling up. You know, there's many different frames to it, whether it's physical, you know, digital or like metaphysical. I wonder what the levels, I think level one for earth is probably the biological evolutionary process. It's like going from single cell organisms to early humans. There may be level two is whatever is happening inside our minds and creating ideas and creating technologies. That's like evolutionary process of ideas. And then a multi-planetary is interesting. Is that fundamentally different from what we're doing here on earth? Probably because it allows us to like exponentially scale. It delays the Malthusian trap, right? It's a way to keep the playing field, to make the playing field get larger so that it can accommodate more of our stuff, more of us. And that's a good thing, but I don't know if it like fully solves this issue of, well, this thing called MOLLEC, which we haven't talked about yet, but which is basically, I call it the God of unhealthy competition. Yeah, let's go to MOLLEC. What's MOLLEC? You did a great video on MOLLEC, one aspect of it, the application of it to it. Instagram beauty filters. True. Very niche. I wanted to start off small. So MOLLEC was originally coined as, well, so apparently back in the like Canaanite times, it was this ancient Carthaginian, I can never say Carthaginian, somewhere around like 300 BC or 200 AD, I don't know. There was supposedly this death cult who would sacrifice their children to this awful demon god thing they called MOLLEC in order to get power to win wars. So really dark, horrible things. And it was literally like about child sacrifice, whether they actually existed or not, we don't know, but in mythology they did. And this god that they worshiped was this thing called MOLLEC. And then, I don't know, it seemed like it was kind of quiet throughout history in terms of mythology beyond that, until this movie Metropolis in 1927 talked about this, you see that there was this incredible futuristic city that everyone was living great in. But then the protagonist goes underground into the sewers and sees that the city is run by this machine. And this machine basically would just kill the workers all the time because it was just so hard to keep it running. They were always dying. So there was all this suffering that was required in order to keep the city going. And then the protagonist has this vision that this machine is actually this demon MOLLEC. So again, it's like this sort of mechanistic consumption of humans in order to get more power. And then Allen Ginsberg wrote a poem in the 60s, which incredible poem called Howl about this thing MOLLEC. And a lot of people sort of quite understandably take the interpretation of that he's talking about capitalism. But then the sort of piece to resistance that's moved MOLLEC into this idea of game theory was Scott Alexander of Slate Style Codex wrote this incredible one, literally, I think it might be my favorite piece of writing of all time. It's called Meditations on MOLLEC. Everyone must go read it. I think Codex is a blog. It's a blog. Yes. We can link to it in the show notes or something, right? No, don't. Yes. Yes. But I like how you assume I have a professional operation going on. I shall try to remember. You're giving the impression of it. Yeah. I'll look, please, if I don't please somebody in the comments remind me. If you don't know this blog, it's one of the best blogs ever, probably. You should probably be following it. Are blogs still a thing? I think they are still a thing. Yeah. He's migrated onto Substack, but yeah, it's still a blog. Anyway. Substack better not fuck things up. I hope not. Yeah. I hope they don't turn MOLLEC-y, which will mean something to people when we continue. When they stop interrupting for once. So anyway, he writes this piece, Meditations on MOLLEC, and basically he analyzes the poem and he's like, okay, so it seems to be something relating to where competition goes wrong. And MOLLEC was historically this thing of like where people would sacrifice a thing that they care about, in this case, children, their own children, in order to gain power, a competitive advantage. And if you look at almost everything that sort of goes wrong in our society, it's that same process. So with the Instagram beauty filters thing, if you're trying to become a famous Instagram model, you are incentivized to post the hottest pictures of yourself that you can. You're trying to play that game. There's a lot of hot women on Instagram. How do you compete against them? You post really hot pictures and that's how you get more likes. As technology gets better, more makeup techniques come along. And then more recently, these beauty filters where like at the touch of a button, it makes your face look absolutely incredible compared to your natural face. These technologies come along. Everyone is incentivized to that short term strategy. But on net, it's bad for everyone because now everyone is kind of feeling like they have to use these things. And these things like they make you. The reason why I talked about them in this video is because I noticed it myself. I was trying to grow my Instagram for a while. I've given up on it now. And I noticed these filters, how good they made me look. And I'm like, well, I know that everyone else is kind of doing it. Go subscribe to Liv's Instagram. Please, don't have to use the filters. Post a bunch of, yeah, make it blow up. So yeah, it's. You felt the pressure actually. Exactly. These short term incentives to do this thing that either sacrifices your integrity or something else in order to stay competitive, which on aggregate turns like creates this sort of race to the bottom spiral where everyone else ends up in a situation which is worse off than if they hadn't started, than they were before. Kind of like if like at a football stadium, the system is so badly designed, a competitive system of everyone sitting and having a view that if someone at the very front stands up to get an even better view, it forces everyone else behind to like adopt that same strategy just to get to where they were before. But now everyone's stuck standing up. Like, so you need this like top down God's eye coordination to make it go back to the better state. But from within the system, you can't actually do that. So that's kind of what this Moloch thing is. It's this thing that makes people sacrifice values in order to optimize for the winning the game in question, the short term game. But this, this Moloch, can you attribute it to any one centralized source or is it an emergent phenomena from a large collection of people? Exactly that it's, it's an emergent phenomena. It's, it's a force of game theory. It's a force of bad incentives on a multi agent system where you've got more, you know, prisoner's dilemma is technically a kind of Molochi system as well, but it's just a two player thing. But another word for Moloch is it multipolar trap, where basically you just got a lot of different people all competing for some kind of prize. And it would be better if everyone didn't do this one shitty strategy. But because that strategy gives you a short term advantage, everyone's incentivized to do it. And so everyone ends up doing it. So the responsibility for, I mean, social media is a really nice place for a large number of people to play game theory. And so they also have the ability to then design the rules of the game. And is it on them to try to anticipate what kind of like to do the thing that poker players are doing to run simulation? Ideally, that would have been great if, you know, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack and all the, you know, the Twitter founders and everyone, if they had at least just run a few simulations of how their algorithms would, you know, different types of algorithms would turn out for society, that would have been great. It's really difficult to do that kind of deep philosophical thinking about thinking about humanity actually. So not, not kind of this level of how do we optimize engagement, or what brings people joy in the short term, but how is this thing going to change the way people see the world? How's it going to get morphed and iterative game played into something that will change society forever? That requires some deep thinking. I hope there's meetings like that inside companies, but I haven't seen them. There aren't. That's the problem. And it's difficult because like when you're starting up a social media company, you know, you're aware that you've got investors to please, there's bills to pay, you know, there's only so much R&D you can afford to do. You've got all these like incredible pressures and bad incentives to get on and just build your thing as quickly as possible and start making money. And, you know, I don't think anyone intended when they built these social media platforms. And just to like preface it, so the reason why social media is relevant, because it's a very good example of like, everyone these days is optimizing for clicks, whether it's the social media platforms themselves, because you know, every click gets more impressions and impressions pay for, you know, they get advertising dollars, or whether it's individual influencers, or, you know, whether it's the New York Times or whoever, they're trying to get their story to go viral. So everyone's got this bad incentive of using, you know, as you called it, the clickbait industrial complex. That's a very mollicy system, because everyone is now using worse and worse tactics in order to like try and win this attention game. And yeah, so ideally, these companies would have had enough slack in the beginning, in order to run these experiments to see, okay, what are the ways this could possibly go wrong for people? What are the ways that Moloch, they should be aware of this concept of Moloch and realize that it's, whenever you have a highly competitive multi agent system, which social media is a classic example of millions of agents, all trying to compete for likes and so on, and you try and bring all this complexity down into like very small metrics, such as number of likes, number of retweets, whatever the algorithm optimizes for that is a guaranteed recipe for this stuff to go wrong and become a race to the bottom. I think there should be an honesty when founders, I think there's a hunger for that kind of transparency of like, we don't know what the fuck we're doing. This is a fascinating experiment. We're all running as a human civilization. Let's try this out. And like, actually, just be honest about this, that we're all like these weird rats and amaze. None of us are controlling it. There's this kind of sense like the founders, the CEO of Instagram or whatever, Mark Zuckerberg has a control and he's like, like with strings playing people. No, they're, he's at the mercy of this is like everyone else. He's just like trying to do his best. And like, I think putting on a smile and doing over polished videos about how Instagram and Facebook are good for you, I think is not the right way to, to actually ask some of the deepest questions we get to ask as a society. How do we design the game such that we build a better world? I think a big part of this as well is people, there's this, there's this philosophy, particularly in Silicon Valley of well, techno optimism, technology will solve all our issues. And there's a steel man argument to that where yes, technology has solved a lot of problems and can potentially solve a lot future ones, but it can also, it's always a double edged sword and particularly as you know, technology gets more and more powerful and we've now got like big data and we're able to do all kinds of like psychological manipulation with it and so on. It's, technology is not a values neutral thing. People think, I used to always think this myself, it's like this naive view that, oh, technology is completely neutral. It's just, it's the humans that either make it good or bad. No, to the point we're at now, the technology that we are creating, they are social technologies. They literally dictate how humans now form social groups and so on beyond that. And beyond that, it also then, that gives rise to like the memes that we then like coalesce around. And that, if you have the stack that way where it's technology driving social interaction, which then drives like memetic culture and like which ideas become popular, that's Moloch. And we need the other way around. We need it. So we need to figure out what are the good memes, what are the good values that we think we need to optimize for that like makes people happy and healthy and like keeps society as robust and safe as possible, then figure out what the social structure around those should be. And only then do we figure out technology. But we're doing the other way around. And, you know, like as much as I love in many ways, the culture of Silicon Valley and like, you know, I do think that technology has, you know, I don't want to knock it. It's done so many wonderful things for us. Same with capitalism. There are, we have to like be honest with ourselves. We're getting to a point where we are losing control of this very powerful machine that we have created. So, can you redesign the machine within the game? Can you just have, can you understand the game enough? Okay, this is the game. And this is how we start to reemphasize the memes that matter. The memes that bring out the best in us. You know, like the way I try to be in real life and the way I try to be online is to be about kindness and love. And I feel like I'm sometimes get like criticized for being naive and all those kinds of things. But I feel like I'm just trying to live within this game. I'm trying to be authentic. Yeah. But also like, hey, it's kind of fun to do this. Like you guys should try this too. You know that. And that's like trying to redesign some aspects of the game within the game. Is that possible? I don't know, but I think we should try. I don't think we have an option but to try. Well, the other option is to create new companies or to pressure companies that or anyone who has control of the rules of the game. I think we need to be doing all of the above. I think we need to be thinking hard about what are the kind of positive, healthy memes. You know, as Elon said, he who controls the memes controls the universe. I think he did. But there's truth to that. There is wisdom in that because memes have driven history. You know, we are a cultural species. That's what sets us apart from chimpanzees and everything else. We have the ability to learn and evolve through culture as opposed to biology or like, you know, classic physical constraints. And that means culture is incredibly powerful and we can create and become victim to very bad memes or very good ones. But we do have some agency over which memes, you know, we not only put out there, but we also like subscribe to. So I think we need to take that approach. We also need to, you know, because I don't want the, you know, I'm making this video right now called the Attention Wars, which is about like how Moloch, like the media machine is this Moloch machine. Well, is this kind of like blind dumb thing where everyone is optimizing for engagement in order to win their share of the attention pie. And then if you zoom out, it's really like Moloch that's pulling the strings because the only thing that benefits from this in the end, you know, like our information ecosystem is breaking down. Like we have, you look at the state of the US, it's in, we're in a civil war. It's just not a physical war. It's an information war and people are becoming more fractured in terms of what their actual shared reality is. Like truly like an extreme left person and extreme right person. Like they literally live in different worlds in their minds at this point and it's getting more and more amplified. And this force is like a razor blade pushing through everything. It doesn't matter how innocuous a topic is, it will find a way to split into this bifurcated culture war. And it's fucking terrifying. Because that maximizes attention. That's like an emergent Moloch type force that takes any, anything, any topic and cuts through it so that it can split nicely into two groups. One that's... Well, it's whatever, yeah, all everyone is trying to do within the system is just maximize whatever gets them the most attention because they're just trying to make money so they can keep their thing going. Right? And the way, the best emotion for getting attention in, well, because it's not just about attention on the internet, it's engagement. That's the key thing. Right? In order for something to go viral, you need people to actually engage with it. They need to like comment or retweet or whatever. And of all the emotions, there's like seven classic shared emotions that studies have found that all humans, even from like previously uncontacted tribes have. Some of those are negative, like sadness, disgust, anger, et cetera, summer positive happiness, excitement, and so on. The one that happens to be the most useful for the internet is anger. Because anger is, it's such an active emotion. If you want people to engage, if someone's scared, and I'm not just like talking out my ass here, there are studies here that have looked into this. Whereas like if someone's like disgusted or fearful, they actually tend to then be like, oh, I don't want to deal with this. So they're less likely to actually engage and share it and so on. They're just going to be like, ugh. Whereas if they're enraged by a thing, well, now that triggers all the old tribalism emotions. And so that's how then things get sort of spread much more easily. They out-compete all the other memes in the ecosystem. And so the attention economy, the wheels that make it go around is rage. I did a tweet, the problem with raging against the machine is that the machine has learned to feed off rage because it is feeding off our rage. That's the thing that's now keeping it going. So the more we get angry, the worse it gets. So the mullet in this attention, in the war of attention is constantly maximizing rage. What it is optimizing for is engagement and it happens to be that engagement is propaganda. It just sounds like everything is putting, more and more things are being put through this like propagandist lens of winning whatever the war is in question, whether it's the culture war or the Ukraine war. Yeah. Well, I think the silver lining of this, do you think it's possible that in the long arc of this process, you actually do arrive at greater wisdom and more progress. It just, in the moment, it feels like people are turning each other to shreds over ideas. But if you think about it, one of the magic things about democracy and so on is you have the blue versus red constantly fighting. It's almost like they're in discourse, creating devil's advocate, making devils out of each other. And through that process, discussing ideas, like almost really embodying different ideas, just to yell at each other and through the yelling over the period of decades, maybe centuries, figuring out a better system. Like in the moment it feels fucked up, but in the long arc, it actually is productive. I hope so. That said, we are now in the era of, just as we have weapons of mass destruction with nuclear weapons that can break the whole playing field, we now are developing weapons of informational mass destruction, information weapons, WMDs that basically can be used for propaganda or just manipulating people however they is needed, whether that's through dumb TikTok videos or, there are significant resources being put in. I don't mean to sound like, you know, too doom and gloom, but there are bad actors out there. That's the thing. There are plenty of good actors within the system who are just trying to stay afloat in the game. So we're effectively doing monarchy things. But then on top of that, we have actual bad actors who are intentionally trying to like manipulate the other side into doing things. And using, so because it's a digital space, they're able to use artificial actors, meaning bots. So it's like botnets, you know, and this is a whole new situation that we've never had before. It's exciting. You know what I want to do? Because there is, you know, people are talking about bots manipulating and like malicious bots that are basically spreading propaganda. I want to create like a bot army for like that, like fights that. Yeah, exactly. For love that fights. I mean, you know, there's, there's, I mean, there's truth to fight fire with fire. It's like, but how you always have to be careful whenever you create again, like Moloch is very tricky. Yeah. Hitler was trying to spread the love too. Yeah. So we thought, but you know, I, I, I agree with you that like, that is a thing that should be considered, but there is again, everyone, the road to hell is paved in good intentions and this is, there's, there's always unforeseen circumstance, you know, outcomes, externalities of you trying to adopt a thing, even if you do it in the very best of faith. But you can learn lessons of history. If you can run some Sims on it first, absolutely. But also there's certain aspects of a system as we've learned through history that do better than others. Like for example, don't have a dictator. So like if I were to create this bot army, it's not good for me to have full control over it because in the beginning I might have a good understanding of what's good and not, but over time that starts to get deviated because I'll get annoyed at some assholes and I'll think, okay, wouldn't it be nice to get rid of those assholes? But then that power starts getting to your head. You become corrupted. That's basic human nature. So distribute the power. We need, we need a, a love botnet on a Dow. A Dow love botnet. Yeah. But, and without a leader, like without... Exactly. A distributed, right. But yeah, without any kind of centralized... Yeah, without even, you know, basically the more control, the more you can decentralize the control of a thing to people, you know, but the balance... But then you still need the ability to coordinate because that's the issue when you, if something is too, you know, that's really to me, like the culture wars is the bigger war we're dealing with is actually between the, like the sort of the, I don't know what even the term is for it, but like centralization versus decentralization. That's the tension we're seeing. Power in control by a few versus completely distributed. And the trouble is if you have a fully centralized thing, then you're at risk of tyranny, you know, Stalin type things can happen or completely distributed. Now you're at risk of complete anarchy and chaos where you can't even coordinate to like on, you know, when there's like a pandemic or anything like that. So it's like, what is the right balance to strike between these two structures? Can't Moloch really take hold in a fully decentralized system? That's one of the dangers too. Yes. Very vulnerable to Moloch. So the dictator can commit huge atrocities, but they can also make sure the infrastructure works and trains run on time. They have that God's eye view at least. They have the ability to create like laws and rules that like force coordination, which stops Moloch. But then you're vulnerable to that dictator getting infected with like this, with some kind of psychopathy type thing. What's reverse Moloch? So great question. So that's where I've been working on this series. It's been driving me insane for the last year and a half. I did the first one a year ago. I can't believe it's nearly been a year. The second one, hopefully we're coming out in like a month. And my goal at the end of the series is to like present, because basically I'm painting the picture of like what Moloch is and how it's affecting almost all these issues in our society and how it's, you know, driving. It's like kind of the generator function, as people describe it, of existential risk. And then at the end of that- Wait, wait. The generator function of existential risk. So you're saying Moloch is sort of the engine that creates a bunch of X risks. Yes, not all of them. Like, you know, a- It's a cool phrase. Generator function of existential- It's not my phrase. It's Daniel Schmackenberger. I got that from him. Of course. All things. It's like all roads lead back to Daniel Schmackenberger, I think. The dude is brilliant. He's really, really brilliant. And after that it's Mark Twain. But anyway, sorry. Totally rude interruptions from me. No, it's fine. So not all X risks. So like an asteroid technically isn't because it's, you know, it's just like this one big external thing. It's not like a competition thing going on. But, you know, synthetic bioweapons, that's one because everyone's incentivized to build, even for defense, you know, bad viruses, you know, just to threaten someone else, et cetera. Or AI, technically the race to AGI is kind of potentially a molliky situation. But yeah, so if mollik is this like generator function that's driving all of these issues over the coming century that might wipe us out, what's the inverse? And so far what I've gotten to is this character that I want to put out there called Win-Win. Because mollik is the god of lose-lose, ultimately. It masquerades as the god of win-lose, but in reality it's lose-lose. One ends up worse off. So I was like, well, what's the opposite of that? It's Win-Win. And I was thinking for ages, like, what's a good name for this character? And then the morrow is like, okay, well, don't try and think through it logically. What's the vibe of Win-Win? And to me, like in my mind, mollik is like, and I address it in the video, like it's red and black. It's kind of like very, you know, hyper focused on its one goal. You must win. So Win-Win is kind of actually like these colors. It's like purple, turquoise. Loves games too. It loves a little bit of healthy competition, but constrained, like kind of like before, like knows how to ring fence zero-sum competition into like just the right amount whereby its externalities can be controlled and kept positive. And then beyond that, it also loves cooperation, coordination, love, all these other things. But it's also kind of like mischievous, like, you know, it will have a good time. It's not like kind of like boring, you know, like, oh God, it's, it's, it knows how to have fun. It can get like, it can get down. But ultimately it's like unbelievably wise and it just wants the game to keep going. And I call it Win-Win. That's a good like pet name. Yes. Win-Win. Win-Win. Win-Win, right? And I think its formal name when it has to do like official functions is Omnia. Omnia. Yeah. From like omniscience kind of words. Why Omnia? You just like Omnia? Because like OmnWin. OmniWin. But I'm open to suggestions. I would like, you know, and this is- I like Omnia. Yeah. Yeah. Like that's it. But there is an angelic kind of sense to Omnia though. So Win-Win is more fun. So it's more like it embraces the, the, the, the fun aspect. I mean, there, there is something about sort of, there's some aspect to Win-Win interactions that requires embracing the, the chaos of the game and enjoying the game itself. I don't know. I don't know what that is. That's almost like a Zen like appreciation of, of the game itself, not optimizing for the consequences of the game. Right. Well, it's, it's recognizing the value of competition in of itself about, it's not like about winning. It's about you enjoying the process of having a competition and not knowing whether you're going to win or lose this little thing. But then also being aware that, you know, what's the boundary? How big do I want competition to be? Because one of the reasons why Moloch is doing so well now in our society, in our civilization is because we haven't been able to ring fence competition. You know, and so it's just having all these negative externalities and it's, we've completely lost control of it. You know, it's, I think my guess is, and now we're getting really like, you know, metaphysical technically, but I think we'll be, we'll be in a more interesting universe if we have one that has both pure cooperation, lots of cooperation and some pockets of competition than one that's purely competition, cooperation entirely. Like it's good to have some little zero sum this bits, but I don't know that fully and I'm not qualified as a philosopher to know that. And that's what reverse Moloch. So this kind of win-win creature is in a system is an antidote to the Moloch system. Yes. And I don't know how it's going to do that. But it's good to kind of try to start to formulate different ideas, different frameworks of how we think about that. Exactly. At the small scale of a collection of individuals, a large scale of a society. Exactly. It's a meme. I think it's, I think it's an example of a good meme and I'm open. I'd love to hear feedback from people if they think it's, you know, they have a better idea or it's not, you know, but it's the direction of memes that we need to spread this idea of like, look for the win-wins in life. Well on the topic of beauty filters, so in that particular context where Moloch creates negative consequences, what, you know, the Staski said beauty will save the world. What is beauty anyway? What, it would be nice to just try to discuss what kind of thing we would like to converge towards in our understanding of what is beautiful. So to me, I think something is beautiful when it can't be reduced down to easy metrics. Like if you think of a tree, what is it about a tree, like a big ancient beautiful tree, right? What is it about it that we find so beautiful? It's not, you know, the sweetness of its fruit or the value of its lumber. It's this entirety of it that is, there's these immeasurable qualities. It's like almost like a qualia of it. That's both like it walks this fine line between, well it's got lots of patenicity, but it's not overly predictable. Again, it walks this fine line between order and chaos. It's a very highly complex system. In the, you know, you can't, it's evolving over time. You know, the definition of a complex versus, and this is another Schmackenberger thing, you know, a complex versus a complicated system. A complicated system can be sort of broken down into bits, understood and then put back together. A complex system is kind of like a black box. It does all this crazy stuff, but if you take it apart, you can't put it back together again because it's, there's all these intricacies. And also very importantly, like the sum of the parts, sorry, the sum of the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts. And that's where the beauty lies, I think. And I think that extends to things like art as well. Like there's something immeasurable about it. There's something we can't break down to a narrow metric. Does that extend to humans, you think? Yeah, absolutely. So how can Instagram reveal that kind of beauty, the complexity of a human being? Good question. This takes us back to our dating sites and Goodreads, I think. Very good question. I mean, well, I know what it shouldn't do. It shouldn't try and like, right now, you know, one of the, I was talking to like a social media expert recently because I was like, I hate- There's such a thing as a social media expert? Oh yeah. There are like agencies out there that you can like outsource because I'm thinking about working with one to like, I want to start a podcast. You should, you should have done it a long time ago. Working on it. It's going to be called Win Win. And it's going to be about this like positive stuff. And the thing that, you know, they all come back and say is like, well, you need to like figure out what your thing is. You know, you need to narrow down what your thing is and then just follow that. Have like a sort of a formula because that's what people want. They want to know that they're coming back to the same thing. And that's the advice on YouTube, Twitter, you name it. And that's why, and the trouble with that is that it's a complexity reduction. And generally speaking, complexity reduction is bad. It's making things more, it's an oversimplification. Not that simplification is always a bad thing. But when you're trying to take, you know, what is social media doing? It's trying to like encapsulate the human experience and put it into digital form and commodify it to an extent. That, so you do that, you compress people down into these like narrow things. And that's why I think it's kind of ultimately fundamentally incompatible with at least my definition of beauty. Yeah. It's interesting because there is some sense in which a simplification sort of in the Einstein kind of sense of a really complex idea, a simplification in a way that still captures some core power of an idea of a person is also beautiful. And so maybe it's possible for social media to do that. A presentation, a sort of a slither, a slice, a look into a person's life that reveals something real about them, but in a simple way, in a way that can be displayed graphically or through words, some way, I mean, in some way Twitter can do that kind of thing. A very few set of words can reveal the intricacies of a person. Of course, the viral machine that spreads those words often results in people taking the thing out of context. Not, people often don't read tweets in the context of the human being that wrote them. The full history of the tweets they've written, the education level, the humor level, the worldview they're playing around with, all that context is forgotten and people just see the different words. So that can lead to trouble. But in a certain sense, if you do take it in context, it reveals some kind of quirky little beautiful idea or a profound little idea from that particular person that shows something about that person. So in that sense, Twitter can be more successful. If we talk about mollux is driving a better kind of incentive. Yeah. I mean, how they can, like if we were to rewrite, is there a way to rewrite the Twitter algorithm so that it stops being the like the fertile breeding ground of the culture wars? Because that's really what it is. It's, I mean, maybe I'm giving it, you know, Twitter too much power, you know, power. But just the more I looked into it, and I had a conversation with Tristan Harris from the Center of Humane Technology, and he explained it as like, Twitter is where you have this amalgam of human culture, and then this terribly designed algorithm that amplifies the craziest people and the angriest, the angriest, most divisive takes and amplifies them. And then the media, the mainstream media, because all the journalists are also on Twitter, they then are informed by that. And so they draw out the stories they can from this already like very boiling lava of rage, and then spread that, you know, to their millions and millions of people who aren't even on Twitter. And so I honestly, I think if I could press a button, turn them off, I probably would at this point, because I just don't see a way of being compatible with healthiness, but that's not going to happen. And so at least one way to like stem the tide and make it less molarchy would be to change, at least if like it was on a subscription model, then it's now not optimizing for, you know, impressions, because basically what it wants is for people to keep coming back as often as possible. That's how they get paid, right? Every time an ad gets shown to someone and the way is to get people constantly refreshing their feed. So you're trying to encourage addictive behaviors. Whereas if someone, if they moved on to at least a subscription model, then they're getting the money either way, whether someone comes back to the site once a month or 500 times a month, they get the same amount of money. So now that takes away that incentive, you know, to use technology, you know, to build, to design an algorithm that is maximally addictive. That would be one way, for example. Yeah, but you still want people to, yeah, I just feel like that just slows down, creates friction in the virality of things. But that's good. We need to slow down virality. It's good. It's one way. Virality is Moloch, to be clear. So Moloch is always negative then? Yes, by definition. Yes. But then I disagree with you. Competition is not always negative. Competition is neutral. I disagree with you that all virality is negative then, as Moloch then. Because I, it's a good intuition because we have a lot of data on virality being negative. But I happen to believe that the core of human beings, so most human beings want to be good more than they want to be bad to each other. And so I think it's possible, it might be just harder to engineer systems that enable virality, but it's possible to engineer systems that are viral that enable virality and the kind of stuff that rises to the top is things that are positive. And positive not like la la positive. It's more like win win, meaning a lot of people need to be challenged. Wise things. Yeah. You grow from it. It might challenge you. You might not like it, but you ultimately grow from it. And ultimately bring people together as opposed to tear them apart. I deeply want that to be true. And I very much agree with you that people at their core are on average good, care for each other as opposed to not. I think it's actually a very small percentage of people are truly wanting to do just destructive malicious things. Most people are just trying to win their own little game and they don't mean to be, they're just stuck in this badly designed system. That said, the current structure, yes, is, the current structure means that virality is optimized towards Moloch. That doesn't mean there aren't exceptions. Sometimes positive stories do go viral and I think we should study them. I think there should be a whole field of study into understanding, identifying memes that above a certain threshold of the population agree as a positive, happy, bringing people together meme, the kind of thing that brings families together that would normally argue about culture wars stuff at the table, at the dinner table. Identify those memes and figure out what was the ingredient that made them spread that day. And also like, not just like happiness and connection between humans, but connection between humans in other ways that enables like productivity, like cooperation, solving difficult problems and all those kinds of stuff. So it's not just about let's be happy and have fulfilling lives. It's also like, let's build cool shit. Which is the spirit of collaboration, which is deeply anti-Moloch, right? It's not using competition. It's like, Moloch hates collaboration and coordination and people working together. And that's, again, like the internet started out as that and it could have been that, but because of the way it was sort of structured in terms of very lofty ideal, they wanted everything to be open source and also free. But they needed to find a way to pay the bills anyway because they were still building this on top of our old economics system. And so the way they did that was through third party advertisement. But that meant that things were very decoupled. You've got this third party interest, which means that you're then like people having to optimize for that. And that is the actual consumer is actually the product, not the person you're making the thing for. In the end, you start making the thing for the advertiser. And so that's why it then breaks down. Yeah, there's no clean solution to this. And it's a really good suggestion by you actually to figure out how we can optimize virality for positive sum topics. I shall be the general of the lovebot army. Distributed. Distributed. Distributed. No, okay. Yeah. The power, just even in saying that the power already went to my head. No. Okay. You've talked about quantifying your thinking. We've been talking about this sort of a game theoretic view on life and putting probabilities behind estimates. Like if you think about different trajectories you can take through life, just actually analyzing life in game theoretic way, like your own life, like personal life. I think you've given an example that you had an honest conversation with Igor about like how long is this relationship going to last? Similar to our sort of marriage problem kind of discussion, having an honest conversation about the probability of things that we sometimes are a little bit too shy or scared to think of in a probabilistic terms. Can you speak to that kind of way of reasoning, the good and the bad of that? Can you do this kind of thing with human relations? Yeah. So the scenario you're talking about, it was like- Yeah. Tell me about that scenario. Yeah. I think it was about a year into our relationship and we were having a fairly heavy conversation because we were trying to figure out whether or not I was going to sell my apartment. He had already moved in, but I think we were just figuring out what our life and long-term plans would be. Should we buy a place together, et cetera? When you guys are having that conversation, are you like drunk out of your mind on wine or is he sober and you're actually having a serious- I think I'm sober. How do you get to that conversation? Because most people are kind of afraid to have that kind of serious conversation. Well, so our relationship was very, well, first of all, we were good friends for a couple of years before we even got romantic. When we did get romantic, it was very clear that this was a big deal. It wasn't just like another, it wasn't a random thing. The probability of it being a big deal was high. Was already very high. Then we'd been together for a year and it had been pretty golden and wonderful. There was a lot of foundation already where we felt very comfortable having a lot of frank conversations. But Igor's MO has always been much more than mine. He was always from the outset, just in a relationship, radical transparency and honesty is the way because the truth is the truth whether you want to hide it or not. It will come out eventually. If you aren't able to accept difficult things yourself, then how could you possibly expect to be the most integral version? The relationship needs this bedrock of honesty as a foundation more than anything. Yeah, that's really interesting. I would like to push against some of those ideas, but that's down the line. Throw them up. I just rudely interrupt. That's fine. We'd been about together for a year and things were good. We were having this hard conversation. Then he was like, well, okay, what's the likelihood that we're going to be together in three years then? Because I think it was roughly a three-year time horizon. I was like, oh, interesting. Then we were like, actually, wait, before you say that, let's both write down our predictions formally. Because we were just getting into effective altruism and rationality at the time, which is all about making formal predictions as a means of measuring your own foresight essentially in a quantified way. We both wrote down our percentages and we also did a one-year prediction and a 10-year one as well. We got percentages for all three. Then we showed each other. I remember having this moment of like, oh, because for the 10-year one, I was like, oh, I mean, I love him a lot, but a lot can happen in 10 years. We've only been together for, so I was like, I think it's over 50%, but it's definitely not 90%. I remember wrestling. I was like, oh, but I don't want him to be hurt. I don't want to give a number lower than his. I remember thinking, I was like, don't game it. This is an exercise in radical honesty. Just give your real percentage. I think mine was like 75%. Then we showed each other and luckily we were fairly well aligned. But honestly, even if we weren't- He was like 20%. It definitely would have, if his had been consistently lower than mine, that would have rattled me for sure. Whereas if it had been the other way around, I think he's just kind of like a water off the docks back type of guy. It'd be like, okay, well, all right, we'll figure this out. Well, did you guys provide error bars on the estimate? Like the level of- They came built in. We didn't give formal plus or minus error bars. I didn't draw any or anything like that. Well, I guess that's the question I have is, did you feel informed enough to make such decisions? Because I feel like if I were to do this kind of thing rigorously, I would want some data. One of the assumptions you have is you're not that different from other relationships. Right. I want to have some data about the way- You want the base rates. Yeah. Also, actual trajectories of relationships. I would love to have time series data about the ways that relationships fall apart or prosper, how they collide with different life events, losses, job changes, moving. Both partners find jobs, only one has a job. I want that kind of data and how often the different trajectories change in life. How informative is your past to your future? That's the whole thing. Can you look at my life and have a good prediction in terms of my characteristics and my relationships of what that's going to look like in the future or not? I don't even know the answer to that question. I'll be very ill informed in terms of making the probability. I just would be under informed. I would be under informed. I'll be over biasing to my prior experiences, I think. Right. But as long as you're aware of that and you're honest with yourself and you're honest with the other person, say, look, I have really wide error bars on this for the following reasons, that's okay. I still think it's better than not trying to quantify it at all if you're trying to make really major irreversible life decisions. I feel also the romantic nature of that question. For me personally, I try to live my life thinking it's very close to 100%. Allowing myself, actually, this is the difficulty of this, is allowing myself to think differently, I feel has a psychological consequence. That's one of my push backs against radical honesty, is this one particular perspective on- So you're saying you would rather give a falsely high percentage to your partner? Going back to the wise sage- In order to create this additional optimism. Helmuth of fake it till you make it, the positive thinking. Positive thinking, hashtag positivity. Yeah, hashtag. Well, so that comes back to this idea of useful fictions. I agree, I don't think there's a clear answer to this and I think it's actually quite subjective. Some people this works better for than others. To be clear, Igor and I weren't doing this formal prediction in it. We did it with very much tongue in cheek. It wasn't like we were going to make, I don't think it even would have drastically changed what we decided to do even. We kind of just did it more as a fun exercise. For the consequence of that fun exercise, there was a deep honesty to it too. Exactly. It was a deep, and it was just like this moment of reflection. I'm like, oh wow, I actually have to think through this quite critically and so on. It's also what was interesting was I got to check in with what my desires were. There was one thing of what my actual prediction is, but what are my desires and could these desires be affecting my predictions and so on? That's a method of rationality. I personally don't think it loses anything in terms of it. It didn't take any of the magic away from our relationship, quite the opposite. It brought us closer together because it was like we did this weird, fun thing that I appreciate a lot of people find quite strange. I think it was somewhat unique in our relationship that both of us are very, we both love numbers, we both love statistics, we're both poker players. This was like our safe space anyway. For others, one partner really might not like that kind of stuff at all, in which case this is not a good exercise to do. I don't recommend it to everybody. I do think it's interesting sometimes to poke holes in the probe at these things that we consider so sacred that we can't try to quantify them, which is interesting because that's in tension with the idea of what we just talked about with beauty and what makes something beautiful, the fact that you can't measure everything about it. Perhaps something shouldn't be tried to measure. Maybe it's wrong to completely try and put a utilitarian frame of measuring the utility of a tree in its entirety. I don't know. Maybe we should, maybe we shouldn't. I'm ambivalent on that. Overall, people have too many biases. People are overly biased against trying to do a quantified cost-benefit analysis on really tough life decisions. They're like, oh, just go with your gut. It's like, well, sure, but our intuitions are best suited for things that we've got tons of experience in. Then we can really trust on it if it's a decision we've made many times. But if it's like, should I marry this person or should I buy this house over that house? You only make those decisions a couple of times in your life, maybe. Well, I would love to know, there's a balance, probably it's a personal balance of strike, is the amount of rationality you apply to a question versus the useful fiction, the fake it till you make it. For example, just talking to soldiers in Ukraine, you ask them, what's the probability of you winning, Ukraine winning? Almost everybody I talk to is a hundred percent. Wow. And you listen to the experts, right? They say all kinds of stuff. First of all, the morale there is higher than probably, and I've never been to a war zone before this, but I've read about many wars and I think the morale in Ukraine is higher than almost anywhere I've read about. It's every single person in the country is proud to fight for their country. Everybody, not just soldiers, not everybody. Why do you think that is specifically more than in other wars? I think because there's a perhaps a dormant desire for the citizens of this country to find the identity of this country because it's been going through this 30 year process of different factions and political bickering and they haven't had, as they talk about, they haven't had their independence war. They say all great nations have had an independence war. They had to fight for their independence, for the discovery of the identity of the core of the ideals that unify us. And they haven't had that. There's constantly been factions, there's been divisions, there's been pressures from empires, from United States and from Russia, from NATO and Europe, everybody telling them what to do. Now they want to discover who they are. And there's that kind of sense that we're going to fight for the safety of our homeland, but we're also going to fight for our identity. And that on top of the fact that there's just, if you look at the history of Ukraine and there's certain other countries like this, there are certain cultures are feisty in their pride of being part of being the citizens of that nation. Ukraine is that, Poland was that. You just look at history in certain countries, you do not want to occupy. I mean, both Stalin and Hitler talked about Poland in this way. They're like, this is a big problem if we occupy this land for prolonged periods of time, there are going to be a pain in their ass. They're not going to want to be occupied. And certain other countries are pragmatic. They're like, well, leaders come and go, I guess this is good. Ukraine just doesn't have, Ukrainians, throughout the 20th century, don't seem to be the kind of people that just sit calmly and let the quote unquote occupiers impose their- That's interesting though, because you said it's always been under conflict and leaders have come and gone. So you would expect them to actually be the opposite under that. Yeah, because it's a very fertile land, it's great for agriculture. So a lot of people want to, I mean, I think they've developed this culture because they've constantly been occupied by different people, for different peoples. And so maybe there is something to that where you've constantly had to feel like within the blood of the generations, there's the struggle for, against the man, against the imposition of rules, against oppression and all that kind of stuff. And that stays with them. So there's a will there. But a lot of other aspects are also part of it that has to do with the reverse malla kind of situation where social media has definitely played a part of it. Also different charismatic individuals have had to play a part. The fact that the president of the nation, Zelensky, stayed in Kiev during the invasion is a huge inspiration to them because most leaders, as you could imagine, when the capital of the nation is under attack, the wise thing, the smart thing that the United States advised Zelensky to do is to flee and to be the leader of the nation from a distant place. He said, fuck that, I'm staying put. Everyone around him, there was a pressure to leave and he didn't. And that in those singular acts really can unify a nation. There's a lot of people that criticize Zelensky within Ukraine. Before the war, he was very unpopular, even still. But they put that aside for the, especially that singular act of staying in the capital. Yeah, a lot of those kinds of things come together to create something within people. How zoomed out of a view do you want to take? Because you describe it as an anti-Molic thing happened within Ukraine because it brought the Ukrainian people together in order to fight a common enemy. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe that's a bad thing. In the end, we don't know how this is all going to play out. But if you zoom it out on a global level, they're coming together to fight. That could make a conflict larger. You know what I mean? I don't know what the right answer is here. It seems like a good thing that they came together. We don't know how this is all going to play out. If this all turns into nuclear war, we'll be like, okay, that was the bad, that was the... Oh yeah. So I was describing the reverse Molic for the local level. Exactly. This is where the experts come in and they say, well, if you channel most of the resources of the nation and the nation supporting Ukraine into the war effort, are you not beating the drums of war that is much bigger than Ukraine? In fact, even the Ukrainian leaders are speaking of it this way. This is not a war between two nations. This is the early days of a world war if we don't play this correctly. Yes. We need cool heads from our leaders. So from Ukraine's perspective, Ukraine needs to win the war because what does winning the war mean is coming to peace negotiations, an agreement that guarantees no more invasions. Then you make an agreement about what land belongs to who and you stop that. Basically, from their perspective is you want to demonstrate to the rest of the world who's watching carefully, including Russia and China and different players on the geopolitical stage, that this kind of conflict is not going to be productive if you engage in it. So you want to teach everybody a lesson. Let's not do World War III. It's going to be bad for everybody. It's a lose-lose. It's a deep lose-lose. Doesn't matter. I think that's actually a correct... When I zoom out, 99% of what I think about is just individual human beings and human lives and just that war is horrible. But when you zoom out and think from a geopolitics perspective, we should realize that it's entirely possible that we will see a World War III in the 21st century. This is like a dress rehearsal for that. So the way we play this as a human civilization will define whether we do or don't have a World War III. How we discuss war, how we discuss nuclear war, the kind of leaders we elect and prop up, the kind of memes we circulate. Because you have to be very careful when you're being pro-Ukraine, for example, you have to realize that you are also indirectly feeding the ever-increasing military-industrial complex. So you have to be extremely careful that when you say pro-Ukraine or pro-anybody, you're pro-human beings, not pro-the-machine that creates narratives that says it's pro-human beings. But it's actually, if you look at the raw use of funds and resources, it's actually pro-making weapons and shooting bullets and dropping bombs. Right. We have to just somehow get the meme into everyone's heads that the real enemy is war itself. That's the enemy we need to defeat. That doesn't mean to say that there isn't justification for small local scenarios, adversarial conflicts. If you have a leader who is starting wars, they're on the side of team war, basically. It's not that they're on the side of team country, whatever that country is, it's they're on the side of team war. So that needs to be stopped and put down. But you also have to find a way that your corrective measure doesn't actually then end up being co-opted by the war machine and creating greater war. Again, the playing field is finite. The scale of conflict is now getting so big that the weapons that can be used are so mass destructive that we can't afford another giant conflict. We won't make it. What existential threat in terms of us not making it are you most worried about? What existential threat to human civilization? We got like- Going down the dark path, huh? It's good. Well, no, it's a dark- No, it's like, well, while we're in the summer place, we might as well. Some of my best friends are dark paths. What worries you most? We mentioned asteroids, you mentioned AGI, nuclear weapons. The one that's on my mind the most, mostly because I think it's the one where we have actually a real chance to move the needle on in a positive direction or more specifically stop some really bad things from happening, really dumb avoidable things is bio risks. In what kind of bio risks? There's so many fun options. Yeah, so many. Of course, we have natural risks from natural pandemics, naturally occurring viruses or pathogens. Then also as time and technology goes on and technology becomes more and more democratized into the hands of more and more people, the risk of synthetic pathogens. Whether or not you fall into the camp of COVID was gain of function, accidental lab leak or whether it was purely naturally occurring. Either way, we are facing a future where synthetic pathogens or human meddled with pathogens either accidentally get out or get into the hands of bad actors who, whether they're omnicidal maniacs, either way. That means we need more robustness for that. You would think that us having this nice little dry run, which is what as awful as COVID was and all those poor people that died, it was still like child's play compared to what a future one could be in terms of fatality rate. You'd think that we would then be much more robust in our pandemic preparedness. Meanwhile, the budget in the last two years for the US, sorry, they just did this, I can't remember the name of what the actual budget was, but it was like a multi-trillion dollar budget that the US just set aside. Originally in that, considering that COVID cost multiple trillions to the economy, the original allocation in this new budget for future pandemic preparedness was 60 billion, so tiny proportion of it. That proceeded to get whittled down to like 30 billion to 15 billion, all the way down to two billion out of multiple trillions for a thing that has just cost us multiple trillions. We've just finished. We're not even really out of it. It basically got whittled down to nothing because for some reason people think that, whew, all right, we've got the pandemic out the way. That was that one. The reason for that is that people are, and I say this with all due respect to a lot of the science community, but there's an immense amount of naivety about, they think that nature is the main risk moving forward and it really isn't. I think nothing demonstrates this more than this project that I was just reading about that's being proposed right now called Deep Vision. The idea is to go out into the wilds, and we're not talking about just within cities, deep into caves that people don't go to, deep into the Arctic, wherever, scour the earth for whatever the most dangerous possible pathogens could be that they can find. Then not only do you try and find these, bring samples of them back to laboratories. Again, whether you think COVID was a lab leak or not, I'm not going to get into that, but we have historically had so many, as a civilization, we've had so many lab leaks from even the highest level security things. People should go and just read it. It's like a comedy show of just how many they are, how leaky these labs are, even when they do their best efforts. Bring these things then back to civilization. That's step one of the badness. The next step would be to then categorize them, do experiments on them and categorize them by their level of potential pandemic lethality. Then the piece de resistance on this plan is to then publish that information freely on the internet about all these pathogens, including their genome, which is literally the building instructions of how to do them on the internet. This is something that genuinely a pocket of the scientific community thinks is a good idea. I think on expectation, and their argument is that, oh, this is good because it might buy us some time to develop the vaccines, which, okay, sure, maybe would have made sense prior to mRNA technology, but mRNA, we can develop a vaccine now when we find a new pathogen within a couple of days. Now then there's all the trials and so on. Those trials would have to happen anyway in the case of a brand new thing. You're saving maybe a couple of days, so that's the upside. Meanwhile, the downside is you're not only bringing the risk of these pathogens of getting leaked, but you're literally handing it out to every bad actor on earth who would be doing cartwheels. I'm talking about Kim Jong-un, ISIS, people who think the rest of the world is their enemy. In some cases, they think that killing themselves is a noble cause. You're literally giving them the building blocks of how to do this. It's the most batshit idea I've ever heard. On expectation, it's probably minus EV of multiple billions of lives if they actually succeeded in doing this, certainly in the tens or hundreds of millions. The cost benefit is so unbelievably, it makes no sense. I was trying to wrap my head around, what's going wrong in people's minds to think that this is a good idea? It's not that it's malice or anything like that. I think it's that the proponents, they're actually overly naive about the interactions of humanity. There are bad actors who will use this for bad things. If you publish this information, even if a bad actor couldn't physically make it themselves, which given in 10 years' time, the technologies are getting cheaper and easier to use, but even if they couldn't make it, they could now bluff it. What would you do if there's some deadly new virus that we published on the internet in terms of its building blocks? Kim Jong-un could be like, hey, if you don't let me build my nuclear weapons, I'm going to release this. I've managed to build it. Well, now he's actually got a credible bluff. We don't know. It's just like handing weapons of mass destruction to people. Makes no sense. I agree with you, but the possible world in which it might make sense is if the good guys, which is a whole other problem defining who the good guys are, but the good guys are like an order of magnitude higher competence. They can stay ahead of the bad actors by just being very good at the defense. By very good, not meaning like a little bit better, but an order of magnitude better. Of course, the question is in each of those individual disciplines, is that feasible? Can the bad actors, even if they don't have the competence, leapfrog to the place where the good guys are? Yeah, I would agree in principle with pertaining to this particular plan of like that, with the thing I described, this deep vision thing, where at least then that would maybe make sense for steps one and step two of getting the information, but then why would you release it, the information to your literal enemies? That doesn't fit at all in that perspective of trying to be ahead of them. You're literally handing them the weapon. But there's different levels of release, right? So there's the kind of secrecy where you don't give it to anybody, but there's a release where you incrementally give it to like major labs. So it's not public release, but it's like you're giving it to major labs. There's different layers of reasonability. But the problem there is it's going to, if you go anywhere beyond like complete secrecy, it's going to leak. That's the thing. It's very hard to keep secrets. And so that's still- Information is- You might as well release it to the public, is that argument. So you either go complete secrecy or you release it to the public. So, which is essentially the same thing. It's going to leak anyway if you don't do complete secrecy. Right. Which is why you shouldn't get the information in the first place. Yeah. I mean, in that, I think- Well, that's A, solution. Yeah. The solution is either don't get the information in the first place or B, keep it incredibly, incredibly contained. See, I think it really matters which discipline we're talking about. So in the case of biology, I do think you're very right. It should be forbidden to even like think about that. Meaning, don't just even collect the information, but like, don't do, I mean, gain of function research is a really iffy area. Like you- I mean, it's all about cost benefits, right? There are some scenarios where I could imagine the cost benefit of a gain of function research is very, very clear, where you've evaluated all the potential risks, factored in the probability that things can go wrong and like, you know, not only known unknowns, but unknown unknowns as well. Tried to quantify that. And then even then it's like orders of magnitude better to do that. I'm behind that argument. But the point is, is that there's this like naivety that's preventing people from even doing the cost benefit properly on a lot of the things because, you know, I get it. The science community, like, again, I don't want to bucket the science community, but like some people within the science community just think that everyone's good and everyone just cares about getting knowledge and doing the best for the world. And unfortunately, that's not the case. I wish we lived in that world, but we don't. Yeah. I mean, there's a lie. Listen, I've been criticizing the science community broadly quite a bit. There's so many brilliant people that brilliance is somehow a hindrance sometimes because it has a bunch of blind spots. And then you start to look at a history of science, how easily it's been used by dictators to any conclusion they want. And it's, it's, it's dark how you can use brilliant people that like playing the little game of science because it is a fun game. You know, you're building, you go to conferences, you're building atop of each other's ideas, his breakthroughs. Hi, I think I've realized how this particular molecule works and I could do this kind of experiment and everyone else is impressed. Oh, cool. No, I think you're wrong. Let me show you why you're wrong. And that little game, everyone gets really excited and they get excited. Oh, I came up with a pill that solves this problem and it's going to help a bunch of people. And I came up with a giant study that shows the exact probability it's going to help or not. And you get lost in this game and you forget to realize this game, just like mullet can have like unintended consequences. Yeah. Unintended consequences that might destroy human civilization or, or divide human civilization or have a dire geopolitical consequences. I mean, the effects of, I mean, it's just so the most destructive effects of COVID have nothing to do with the, with the biology of the virus, it seems like it's, I mean, I could just list them forever, but like one of them is the complete distrust of public institutions. The other one is because of that public distrust, I feel like if a much worse pandemic came along, we, as a world have not cried wolf. And when, if an actual wolf now comes, people will be like, fuck masks, fuck, fuck vaccines, fuck everything. And they, they won't be, they'll distrust every single thing that any major institution is going to tell them. And because that's the thing, like there, there was certain actions made by certain, you know, health public figures where they told, they very knowingly told, it was a white lie. It was intended in the best possible way, such as, you know, early on when there were, there was clearly a shortage of masks. And so they said to the public, Oh, don't get masks. They don't, there's no evidence that they work. They're all there, you know, don't get them. They don't work. In fact, it might even make it worse. You might even spread it more. Like that, that was the real like stinker. Yeah, no, no, there's, unless you know how to do it properly, you're going to make that you're going to get sicker or you're more likely to get the, to catch the virus, which is just absolute crap. And they put that out there. And it's pretty clear the reason why they did that was because there was actually a shortage of masks and they really needed it for health workers, which makes sense. Like I agree, like, you know, but the cost of lying to the, to the, to the public when that then comes out, people aren't as stupid as they think they are, as you know, and that's, that's, I think where this distrust experts has largely come from. A, they've lied to people overtly, overtly, but B, people have been treated like idiots. Now that's not to say that there aren't a lot of stupid people who have a lot of wacky ideas around COVID and all sorts of things. But if you treat the general public like children, they're going to see that they're going to notice that and that is going to just like absolutely decimate the trust in the public institutions that we depend upon. And honestly, the best thing that could happen, I wish like, if like Fauci or, you know, and these other like leaders who, I mean, God, I would, I can't imagine how nightmare his job has been over the last few years, hell on earth. Like, so, you know, I, I, you know, I have, I have a lot of sort of sympathy for the position he's been in, but like, if he could just come out and be like, okay, look guys, hands up, we didn't handle this as well as we could have. These are all the things I would have done differently in hindsight. I apologize for this and this and this and this. That would go so far. Maybe I'm being naive. Who knows? Maybe this would backfire. But I don't think it would like, to someone like me even, because I've like, I've lost trust in a lot of these things. I'm, but I'm fortunate that I at least know people who I can go to who I think are good, like have good epistemics on this stuff. But, you know, if they, if they could sort of put their hands on and go, okay, these are the spots where we screwed up. This, this, this. This was our reasons. Yeah, we actually told a little white lie here. We did it for this and we're really sorry. Well, they just did the radical honesty thing, the radical transparency thing. That would go so far to build, rebuilding public trust. And I think that's what needs to happen. Yeah, I totally agree with you. Unfortunately, yeah, his job was very tough and all those kinds of things, but I see arrogance and arrogance prevented him from being honest in that way previously. And I think arrogance will prevent him from being honest in that way now when you leaders, I think young people are seeing that, that kind of talking down to people from a position of power. I hope is, is the way of the past. People really like authenticity and they, they like leaders that are like a man and a woman of the people. And I think that just, I mean, he still has a chance to do that. I think, I mean, I don't think, you know, if I doubt he's listening, but if he is like, Hey, I, I think, you know, I don't think he's irredeemable by any means. I think this, you know, I don't, I don't have an opinion of whether there was arrogance or there or not. Just know that I think like coming clean on the, you know, it's understandable to have fucked up during this pandemic. Like I won't expect any government to handle it well, because it was so difficult, like so many moving pieces, so much like lack of information and so on. But the step to rebuilding trust is to go, okay, look, we're doing a scrutiny of where we went wrong. And I, and for my part, I did this wrong in this part. And that would be huge. All of us can do that. I mean, I was struggling for a while, whether I want to talk to him or not. I talked to his boss, Francis Collins. Another person that's screwed up in terms of trust, lost a little bit of my respect to, there seems to have been a kind of dishonesty in the, in the back rooms in that they didn't trust people to be intelligent. Like we need to tell them what's good for them. We know what's good for them. That kind of idea. To be fair, the thing that's, what's it called? I heard the phrase today, nut picking. Social media does that. So you've got like nitpicking, nut picking is where the craziest, stupidest, you know, if you have a group of people, let's call it, you know, let's say people who are vaccine, I don't like the term anti-vaccine, people who have vaccine hesitant, vaccine speculative, you know, what social media did or the media or anyone, you know, their opponents would do is pick the craziest example. So the ones who are like, you know, I think I need to inject myself with motor oil up my ass or something, you know, select the craziest ones and then have that beamed to, you know, so from like someone like Fauci or Francis's perspective, that's what they get because they're getting the same social media stuff as us. They get the same media reports. I mean, they might get some more information, but they too are going to get these, the nuts portrayed to them. So they probably have a misrepresentation of what the actual public's intelligence is. Well, that just, yes. And that just means they're not social media savvy. So one of the skills of being on social media is to be able to filter that in your mind, like to understand, to put into proper context. And to realize that what you are seeing, social media is not anywhere near an accurate representation of humanity. Not picking a lot of that. And there's nothing wrong with putting motor oil up your ass. It's just one of the better aspects of- Hey, do what you want to do. I do this every weekend. Okay. How did that analogy come from in my mind? Like what? I don't know. I think you need to, there's some Freudian thing you would need to deeply investigate with a therapist. Okay. What about AI? Are you worried about AGI, super intelligence systems or paperclip maximizer type of situation? Yes. I'm definitely worried about it, but I feel kind of bipolar in that some days I wake up and I'm like- You're excited about the future. Well, exactly. I'm like, oh wow, we can unlock the mysteries of the universe, you know, escape the game. And this, you know, because I spend all my time thinking about these Moloky problems, what is the solution to them? In some ways you need this like omni benevolent, omniscient, omni wise coordination mechanism that can like make us all not do the Moloky thing or like provide the infrastructure or redesign the system so that it's not vulnerable to this Moloky process. And in some ways, you know, that's the strongest argument to me for like the race to build AGI is that maybe, you know, we can't survive without it. But the flip side to that is the, unfortunately now that there's multiple actors trying to build AI, AGI, you know, this was fine 10 years ago when it was just DeepMind, but then other companies started up and now it created a race dynamic. Now it's like, that's the whole thing is it the same, it's got the same problem. It's like whichever company is the one that like optimizes for speed at the cost of safety will get the competitive advantage. And so we're the more likely the ones to build the AGI, you know, and that's the same cycle that you're in. And there's no clear solution to that because you can't just go like slapping. If you go and try and like stop all the different companies, then it will, you know, the good ones will stop because they're the ones, you know, within, you know, within the West's reach, but then that leaves all the other ones to continue. And then they're even more likely. So it's like, it's a very difficult problem with no clean solution. And, you know, at the same time, you know, I know the, at least some of the folks at DeepMind and they're incredible and they're thinking about this. They're very aware of this problem and they're like, you know, I think some of the smartest people on earth. Yeah, the culture is important there because they are thinking about that and they're some of the best machine learning engineers. So it's possible to have a company or a community of people that are both great engineers and are thinking about the philosophical topics. Exactly. And importantly, they're also game theorists, you know, and because this is ultimately a game theory problem, the thing, this, this Moloch mechanism and like, you know, what this rate, how do we voice rate arms race scenarios? You need people who aren't naive to be thinking about this. And again, like, luckily there's a lot of smart, non-naive game theorists within that group. Yes, I'm concerned about it. And I think it's again a thing that we need people to be thinking about in terms of like, how do we create, how do we mitigate the arms race dynamics and how do we solve the thing of, it's got, Bostrom calls it the orthogonality problem whereby, because there's obviously there's a chance, you know, the belief, the hope is, is that you build something that's super intelligent and by definition of being super intelligent, it will also become super wise and have the wisdom to know what the right goals are. And hopefully those goals include keeping humanity alive. Right. But Bostrom says that actually those two things, you know, super intelligence and super wisdom aren't necessarily correlated. They're actually kind of orthogonal things. And how do we make it so that they are correlated? How do we guarantee it? Because we need it to be guaranteed really to know that we're doing the thing safely. But I think that like merging of intelligence and wisdom, at least my hope is that this whole process happens sufficiently slowly, that we're constantly having these kinds of debates that we have enough time to figure out how to modify each version of the system as it becomes more and more intelligent. Yes. Buying time is a good thing, definitely. Anything that slows everything down. We just, everyone needs to chill out. We've got millennia to figure this out. Or at least, well, it depends again. Some people think that, you know, we can't even make it through the next few decades without having some kind of omni-wise coordination mechanism. And there's also an argument to that. Yeah. I don't know. Well there is, I'm suspicious of that kind of thinking because it seems like the entirety of human history has people in it that are like predicting doom just around the corner. There's something about us that is strangely attracted to that thought. It's almost like fun to think about the destruction of everything. Just objectively speaking, I've talked and listened to a bunch of people and they are gravitating towards that. It's almost, I think it's the same thing that people love about conspiracy theories, is they love to be the person that kind of figured out some deep fundamental thing that's going to mark something extremely important about the history of human civilization. Because then I will be important. In reality, most of us will be forgotten and life will go on. One of the sad things about whatever anything traumatic happens to you, whenever you lose loved ones or just tragedy happens, you realize life goes on. Even after a nuclear war that will wipe out some large percentage of the population and will torture people for years to come because of the effects of a nuclear winter, people will still survive. Life will still go on. I mean, it depends on the kind of nuclear war. But in case of nuclear war, it will still go on. That's one of the amazing things about life. It finds a way. In that sense, I feel like the doom and gloom thing is a- Yeah, we don't want a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yes, that's exactly. Yes. I very much agree with that. I even have a slight feeling from the amount of time we've spent in this conversation talking about this because it's like, is this even a net positive if it's making everyone feel, in some ways, making people imagine these bad scenarios can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. But at the same time, that's weighed off with at least making people aware of the problem and gets them thinking. I think particularly, the reason why I want to talk about this to your audience is that on average, they're the type of people who gravitate towards these kind of topics because they're intellectually curious and they can sense that there's trouble brewing. I think there's a reason people are thinking about this stuff a lot is because the probability, it's increased in probability certainly over the last few years. Trajectories have not gone favorably, let's put it, since 2010. It's right, I think, for people to be thinking about it. But that's where they're like, I think, whether it's a useful fiction or whether it's actually true or whatever you want to call it, I think having this faith, this is where faith is valuable because it gives you at least this anchor of hope. And I'm not just saying it to trick myself, I do truly, I do think there's something out there that wants us to win. I think there's something that really wants us to win. And it just, you just have to be like, okay, now I sound really crazy, but open your heart to it a little bit and it will give you the sort of breathing room with which to marinate on the solutions. We are the ones who have to come up with the solutions, but we can use, there's hashtag positivity, there's value in that. You have to kind of imagine all the destructive trajectories that lay in our future and then believe in the possibility of avoiding those trajectories. All while, you said audience, all while sitting back, which is majority, the two people that listen to this are probably sitting on a beach smoking some weed. God dammit. Just, that's a beautiful sunset or they're looking at just the waves going in and out. And ultimately there's a kind of deep belief there in the momentum of humanity to figure it all out. People make it, but we've got a lot of work to do. Which is what makes this whole simulation, this video game kind of fun. This Battle of Polytopia is still, man, I love those games so much. That's so good. And that one for people who don't know Battle of Polytopia is a big, it's like a, it's this really radical simplification of a civilization type of game. It still has a lot of the skill tree development, a lot of the strategy, but it's easy enough to play on a phone. Yeah. It's kind of interesting. They've really, they've really figured it out. It's one of the most elegantly designed games I've ever seen. It's incredibly complex and yet being, again, it walks that line between complexity and simplicity in this really, really great way. And they use pretty colors that hack the dopamine reward circuits in our brains very well. It's fun. Video games are so fun. Most of this life is just about fun, escaping all the suffering to find the fun. What's energy healing? I have in my notes, energy healing? What's that about? Oh man. God, your audience are going to think I'm mad. So the two crazy things that happened to me, the one was the voice in the head that said, you're going to win this tournament. And then I won the tournament. The other craziest thing that's happened to me was in 2018, I started getting this weird problem in my ear where it was kind of like low frequency sound distortion, where voices, particularly men's voices became incredibly unpleasant to listen to. It would create this, it would be falsely amplified or something. And it was almost like a physical sensation in my ear, which was really unpleasant. And it would last for a few hours and then go away and then come back for a few hours and go away. And I went and got hearing tests and they found that the bottom end, I was losing the hearing in that ear. And so in the end, the doctors said they think it was this thing called Meniere's disease, which is this very unpleasant disease where people basically end up losing their hearing, but they get this like, it often comes with dizzy spells and other things because it's like the inner ear gets all messed up. Now, I don't know if that's actually what I had, but that's what at least one doctor said to me. But anyway, so I'd had three months of this stuff, this going on, it was really getting me down. And I was at Burning Man of all places. I don't mean to be that person talking about Burning Man. But I was there. And again, I'd had it and I was unable to listen to music, which is not what you want because Burning Man is a very loud, intense place. And I was just having a really rough time. And on the final night, I get talking to this girl who's like a friend of a friend. And I mentioned, I was like, oh, I'm really down in the dumps about this. And she's like, oh, well, I've done a little bit of energy healing. Would you like me to have a look? And I was like, sure. Now this is again, deep, I was, you know, no time in my life for this. I didn't believe in any of this stuff. I was just like, it's all bullshit. It's all wooey nonsense. But I was like, sure, have a go. And she starts like with her hand and she says, oh, there's something there. And then she leans in and she starts like sucking over my ear, not actually touching me, but like close to it, like with her mouth. And it was really unpleasant. I was like, whoa, can you stop? She's like, no, no, no, there's something there. I need to get it. And I was like, no, no, no, I really don't like it. Please. This is really loud. She's like, I need to just bear with me. And she does it. I don't know how long for a few minutes. And then she eventually collapses on the ground, like freezing cold crying. Not, you know, and I'm just like, I don't know what the hell is going on. Like I'm like thoroughly freaked out as is everyone else watching just like the hell on me, like warm her up. And she was like, what? Oh, she was really shaken up. And she's like, I don't know what that, she said it was something very unpleasant and dark. Don't worry. It's gone. I think you'll be fine in a couple. You'll have the physical symptoms for a couple of weeks and you'll be fine. But you know, she was, she was like that, you know, so I was, I was so rattled a because the potential that actually I'd had something bad in me that made someone feel bad and, and, and that she was scared. That was what, you know, I was like, wait, I thought you, you do this. This is the thing. Now you're terrified. Like you pulled like some kind of exorcism or something. What the fuck is going on? So it, it like just the most insane experience. And frankly, it took me like a few months to sort of emotionally recover from it. But my ear problem went away about a couple of weeks later and touch wood, I've not had any issues since. So that gives you like hints that maybe there's something out there. I mean, I, I don't, I, I, again, I don't have an explanation for this. The most probable explanation was, you know, I was a burning man. I was in a very open state. Let's just leave it at that. Um, and you know, placebo is an incredibly powerful thing and a very not understood thing. So almost assigning the word placebo to it reduces it down to a way that it doesn't deserve to be reduced down. Maybe there's a whole science of what we call placebo. Maybe there's a placebo is a door. Self-healing. You know? And I mean, I don't know what the problem was. Like I was told it was many years. I don't want to say I definitely had that because I don't want people to think that, oh, that's how, you know, if they do have that, cause it's terrible disease. And if they have that, that this is going to be a guaranteed way for it to fix it for them. I don't know. Um, and I also don't, I don't, and you're absolutely right to say like using even the word placebo is like, it comes with this like baggage of, of like frame and I don't want to reduce it down. All I can do is describe the experience and what happened. I cannot put an ontological framework around it. I can't say why it happened, what the mechanism was, what the problem even was in the first place. Um, I just know that something crazy happened and it was while I was in an open state. And fortunately for me, it made the problem go away. But what I took away from it again, it was part of this, you know, this took me on this journey of becoming more humble about what I think I know. Because as I said before, I was like, I was in the like Richard Dawkins train of atheism in terms of there is no God. There's everything like that is bullshit. We know everything. We know, you know, the only way we can get through, uh, we know how medicine works and it's molecules and chemical interactions and that kind of stuff. And now it's like, okay, well there's there's clearly more for us to understand. Um, and that doesn't mean that it's a scientific as well because you know, the beauty of the scientific method is that it's still, it still can apply to the situation. Like I don't see why, you know, I would like to try and test this experimentally. Um, I haven't really, like, you know, I don't know how we would go about doing that. We'd have to find other people with the same condition, I guess, and like try and repeat, repeat the experiment. Um, but it doesn't just because something happens that's sort of out of the realms of our current understanding. It doesn't mean that it's the scientific method can't be used for it. Yeah. I think the scientific methods sits on a foundation of those kinds of experiences because they scientific method is a process to, um, carve away at the mystery all around us and experiences like this is just a reminder that we're mostly shrouded in mystery still. That's it. It's just like a humility. I haven't really figured this whole thing out, but at the same time we have found ways to act, you know, we're clearly doing something right because think of the technological scientific advancements, the knowledge that we have that was would blow people's minds even from a hundred years ago. Yeah. And we've even allegedly got out the space and landed on the moon. Although I still haven't, I have not seen evidence of, of the earth being round, but I'm still, I'm keeping an open mind. Uh, speaking of which, uh, you studied physics in astrophysics. Uh, when, just to go to that and we jump, just to jump around through the fascinating life you've had, when did you, how did that come to be? Like, when, when'd you fall in love with astronomy and space and things like this? As early as I can remember. Um, I was very lucky that my, my mom and my dad, but particularly my mom, my mom, my mom is like the most nature. She is mother earth. It's the only way to describe her. Just she's like Dr. Do little animals flock to her and just like sit and look at her adoringly as she sings. Yeah. She just, she just is mother earth. And she has always been fascinated by, you know, she doesn't have any, you know, she never went to university or anything like that. She's actually phobic of maths. If I try and get her to like, you know, I was trying to teach her poker and she hated it. Um, but she's so deeply curious. Um, and that just got instilled in me when, you know, we would sleep out under the stars whenever it was, you know, the two nights a year when it was warm enough in the UK to do that. Um, and we'll just lie out there until I've, until we fell asleep looking at looking for satellites, looking for shooting stars. And I was just always, I don't know whether it was from that, but I've always naturally gravitated to like the biggest, the biggest questions and also the, like the most layers of abstraction. I love just like, what's the meta question? What's the meta question and so on. Um, so I think it just came from that really. And it, and, and then on top of that, like physics, you know, it also made logical sense and that it was a, it was, it was the degree, it was a degree that was subject that ticked the box of being, you know, answering these really big picture questions, but it was also extremely useful. It like has a very high utility, um, in terms of, I didn't know necessarily, I thought I was going to become like a research scientist. I, my original plan was I want to be a professional astronomer. So it's not just like a philosophy degree that asks the big questions and it's not, uh, like biology and the path to go to medical school or something like that, which is overly pragmatic and not overly is, um, is very pragmatic, but this is, yeah, physics is a good combination of the two. Yeah. At least for me, it made sense and I was good at it. I liked it. Um, yeah. I mean, I, it wasn't like I did an immense amount of soul searching to choose it or anything. It just was like this, um, it made the most sense. I mean, you have to make this decision in the UK age 17, which is crazy. Um, cause you know, in us you go the first year, you do a bunch of stuff, right? And then you choose your major. Um, I think the first few years of college, you focus on the drugs and only as you get closer to the end, do you start to think, oh shit, this wasn't about that. And I'm, uh, I owe the government a lot of money. Um, how many alien civilizations are out there? When you, when you looked up at the stars with your mom and you were counting them, what's your mom think about the number of alien civilization? I actually don't know. I would imagine she would take the viewpoint of, you know, she's pretty humble and she knows how many, she knows there's a huge number of potential spawn sites out there. So she would spawn sites, spawn sites. Yeah. You know, this is our spawn site. You have spawn sites in polytopia. We spawned on earth. You know, it's, Hmm. Yeah. Spawn sites. Why does that feel weird to say spawn? Because it makes me feel like it's, um, there's only one source of life and it's spawning in different locations. That's why the word spawn. Cause like, it feels like life that originated on earth really originated here. Right. It is, it is unique to this particular. Yeah. I mean, but I don't, in my mind, it doesn't exclude, you know, the completely different forms of life and different biochemical soups can't also spawn. But I guess it implies that there's some spark that is uniform, which I kind of like the idea of. And then I get to think about respawning, like after it dies, like what happens if life on earth ends? Is it, is it going to restart again? Probably not. It depends. Maybe earth is too. It depends on the type of, you know, what, what's the thing that kills it, kills it off. Right. If it's a paperclip maximizer, not that, you know, for the, for the example, but you know, some kind of very self replicating, you know, high on the capabilities, very low on the wisdom type thing. So whether that's, you know, gray goo, green goo, you know, like nanobots or just a shitty misaligned AI that thinks it needs to turn everything into paperclips. You know, if it's something like that, then it's going to be very hard for life, you know, complex life, because by definition, you know, a paperclip maximizer is the ultimate instantiation of molecule, deeply low complexity, over optimization on a single thing, sacrificing everything else, turning the whole world into. Although something tells me like, if we actually take a paperclip maximizer, it destroys everything. It's a really dumb system that just envelops the whole of earth. And the universe beyond. I didn't, I didn't know that part, but okay, great. That's the thought experiment. It becomes a multi-planetary paperclip maximizer. Well, it just, it just propagates. I mean, it depends whether it figures out how to jump the vacuum gap. But again, I mean, this is all silly because it's a hypothetical thought experiment, which I think doesn't actually have much practical application to the AI safety problem, but it's just a fun thing to play around with. But if by definition, it is maximally intelligent, which means it is maximally good at navigating the environment around it in order to achieve its goal, but extremely bad at choosing goals in the first place. So again, we're talking on this orthogonality thing, right? It's very low on wisdom, but very high on capability. Then it will figure out how to jump the vacuum gap between planets and stars and so on. And thus just turn every atom it gets its hands on into paperclips. Yeah. By the way, for people who don't- Which is maximum virality, by the way. That's what virality is. That does not mean that virality is necessarily all about maximizing paperclips. In that case, it is. So for people who don't know, this is just a thought experiment example of an AI system that has a goal and is willing to do anything to accomplish that goal, including destroying all life on earth and all human life and all of consciousness in the universe for the goal of producing a maximum number of paperclips. Okay. Or whatever its optimization function was that it was set up. But don't you think- It could be making, recreating Lexus. Maybe it'll tile the universe in Lexus. Go on. I like this idea. No, I'm just kidding. That's better. That's more interesting than paperclips. That could be infinitely optimal if I were to say so myself. But if you ask me, it's still a bad thing because it's permanently capping what the universe could ever be. It's like that's its end state. Or achieving the optimal that the universe could ever achieve, but that's up to different people at different perspectives. But don't you think within the paperclip world that would emerge, just like in the zeros and ones that make up a computer, that would emerge beautiful complexities? It won't suppress. As you scale to multiple planets and throughout, there'll emerge these little worlds that on top of the fabric of maximizing paperclips, that would emerge like little societies of paperclip- Then we're not describing a paperclip maximizer anymore. If you think of what a paperclip is, it is literally just a piece of bent iron. Yes. Right? So if it's maximizing that throughout the universe, it's taking every atom it gets its hand on into somehow turning it into iron or steel, and then bending it into that shape and then done and done. By definition, paperclips, there is no way for- Well, okay. So you're saying that paperclips somehow will just emerge and create through gravity or something? No, no, no. Because there's a dynamic element to the whole system. It's creating those paperclips and the act of creating, there's going to be a process and that process will have a dance to it because it's not like sequential thing. There's a whole complex three-dimensional system of paperclips. People have string theory, right? It's supposed to be strings that are interacting in fascinating ways. I'm sure paperclips are very string-like. They can be interacting in very interesting ways as you scale exponentially through three-dimensional- I'm sure the paperclip maximizer has to come up with a theory of everything. It has to create wormholes, right? It has to understand quantum mechanics. I love your optimism. This is where I'd say we're going into the realm of pathological optimism, whereby it's- I'm sure there'll be a- I think there's an intelligence that emerges from that system. You're saying that basically intelligence is inherent in the fabric of reality and will find a way, kind of like Goldblum says, life will find a way. You think life will find a way even out of this perfectly homogeneous dead soup. It's not perfectly homogeneous. It's perfectly maximal in the production. I don't know why people keep thinking it's homogenous. It maximizes the number of paperclips. That's the only thing. It's not trying to be homogeneous. It's trying- True, true, true, true, true. It's trying to maximize paperclips. So you're saying that because, kind of like in the Big Bang, it seems like there were clusters, there was more stuff here than there, that was enough of the patonicity that kickstarted the evolutionary process. It's the little weirdnesses that will make it beautiful. You think that even out of- Complexity emerges. Interesting. Okay. Well, so how does that line up then with the whole heat death of the universe, right? Because that's another sort of instantiation of this. It's like everything becomes so far apart and so cold and so perfectly mixed that it's like homogenous grayness. Do you think that even out of that homogenous grayness where there's no negative entropy, there's no free energy that we understand even from that new- Yeah. The paperclip maximizer or any other intelligence systems will figure out ways to travel to other universes to create Big Bangs within those universes or through black holes to create whole other worlds to break what we consider the limitations of physics. The paperclip maximizer will find a way if a way exists and we should be humble to realize that we don't- Yeah, but because it just wants to make more paperclips. So it's going to go into those universes and turn them into paperclips. Yeah, but we humans, not humans, but complex system exists on top of that. We're not interfering with it. This complexity emerges from- The simple base state. The simple base state. Whether it's plank lengths or paperclips is the base unit. You can think of the universe as a paperclip maximizer because it's doing some dumb stuff. Physics seems to be pretty dumb. I don't know if you can summarize it. Yes. The laws are fairly basic and yet out of them amazing complexity emerges. Its goals seem to be pretty basic and dumb. If you can summarize its goals, I don't know what's a nice way maybe laws of thermodynamics could be. I don't know if you can assign goals to physics, but if you formulate in the sense of goals, it's very similar to paperclip maximizer in the dumbness of the goals. The pockets of complexity as it emerge is where beauty emerges. That's where life emerges. That's where intelligence, that's where humans emerge. I think we're being very down on this whole paperclip maximizer thing. Now, the reason we hate it- Yeah, because what you're saying is that you think that the force of emergence itself is another baked in law of reality. You're trusting that emergence will find a way to, even out of seemingly the most mollic-y awful plain outcome emergence will still find a way. I love that as a philosophy. I think it's very nice. I would wield it carefully because there's large error bars on that and the certainty of that. How about we build the paperclip maximizer and find out? Classic. Yeah. Mollic is doing cartwheels. Man. Yeah. The thing is it will destroy humans in the process, which is the reason we really don't like it. We seem to be really holding on to this whole human civilization thing. Would that make you sad if AI systems that are beautiful, that are conscious, that are interesting and complex and intelligent ultimately lead to the death of humans? Would that make you sad? If humans led to the death of humans? Sorry. If they would supersede humans. Oh, if some AI? Yeah. AI would end humans. That's the reason why I'm in some ways less emotionally concerned about AI risk than, say, bio risk. At least with AI, if we're in this hypothetical where it wipes out humans but it does it for some higher purpose, it needs our atoms and energy to do something, at least now the universe is going on to do something interesting. Whereas if it wipes out everything, bio just kills everything on earth and that's it. Earth cannot spawn anything more meaningful in the few hundred million years it has left because it doesn't have much time left. One of my favorite books I've ever read is Novosene by James Lovelock, who sadly just died. He wrote it when he was like 99. He died aged 102, so it's a fairly new book. He talks about that, that he thinks it's building off this Gaia theory where earth is like living some form of intelligence itself and that this is the next step, right? Whatever this new intelligence that is maybe silicon-based as opposed to carbon-based goes on to do. It's really in some ways an optimistic but weirdly fatalistic book. I don't know if I fully subscribe to it, but it's a beautiful piece to read anyway. Am I sad by that idea? I think so, yes. Actually, yeah, this is the reason why I'm sad by the idea because if something is truly brilliant and wise and smart and truly super intelligent, it should be able to figure out abundance. If it figures out abundance, it shouldn't need to kill us off. It should be able to find a way for us. The universe is huge. There should be plenty of space for it to go out and do all the things it wants to do and give us a little pocket where we can continue doing our things and we can continue to do things and so on. Again, if it's so supremely wise, it shouldn't even be worried about the game theoretic considerations that by leaving us alive, we'll then go and create another super intelligent agent that it then has to compete against because it should be omnivise and smart enough to not have to concern itself with that. Unless it deems humans to be kind of assholes. The humans are a source of none of a lose-lose kind of dynamics. Well, yes and no. Moloch is. That's why I think it's important to separate ourselves. Maybe humans are the source of Moloch. No, I think game theory is the source of Moloch because Moloch exists in non-human systems as well. It happens within agents within a game. It applies to agents, but it can apply to a species that's on an island of animals. Rats out competing. The ones that massively consume all the resources are the ones that are going to win out over the more chill, socialized ones and so creates this Malthusian trap. Moloch exists in little pockets in nature as well. It's not a strictly human thing. I wonder if it's actually a result of consequences of the invention of predator and prey dynamics. Maybe AI will have to kill off every organism. Now you're talking about killing off competition. Not competition, but just like the way it's like the weeds or whatever in a beautiful flower garden. Parasites. The parasites, yeah. On the whole system. Now, of course, it won't do that completely. It'll put them in a zoo like we do with parasites. It'll ring fence. Yeah. And there'll be somebody doing a PhD on like the prod humans with a stick and see what they do. But I mean, in terms of letting us run wild outside of the, you know, geographically constrained region, that might decide to. No, I think there's obviously the capacity for beauty and kindness and non-moloch behavior against humans. So I'm pretty sure AI will preserve us. Let me, I don't know if you answered the aliens question. Oh, I didn't. You had a good conversation with Toby, Toby Orr. Yes. About various sides of the universe. I think did he say, now I'm forgetting, but I think he said it's a good chance we're alone. So the classic, you know, Fermi paradox question is, there are so many spawn points and yet you know, it didn't take us that long to go from harnessing fire to sending out radio signals into space. So surely given the vastness of space, we should be, and you know, even if only a tiny fraction of those create life and other civilizations too, we should be, the universe should be very noisy. There should be evidence of Dyson spheres or whatever, you know, like at least radio signals and so on. But seemingly things are very silent out there. Now, of course, it depends on who you speak to. Some people say that they're getting signals all the time and so on. And like, I don't want to make an epistemic statement on that, but it seems like there's a lot of silence. And so that raises this paradox. And then say, you know, the Drake equation. So the Drake equation is like, basically, just a simple thing of like trying to estimate the number of possible civilizations within the galaxy by multiplying the number of stars created per year by the number of stars that have planets, planets that are habitable, blah, blah, blah. So all these like different factors. And then you plug in numbers into that and you, you know, depending on like the range of, you know, your lower bound and your upper bound point estimates that you put in, you get out a number at the end for the number of civilizations. But what Toby and his crew did differently was, Toby is a researcher at the Future of Humanity Institute, they instead of, they realized that it's like basically a statistical quirk that if you put in point sources, even if you think you're putting in conservative point sources, because on some of these variables, the uncertainty is so large, it spans like maybe even like a couple of hundred of orders of magnitude. By putting in point sources, it's always going to lead to overestimates. And so they, by putting stuff on a log scale, or actually they did it on like a log log scale on some of them, and then like ran the simulation across the whole bucket of uncertainty across all those orders of magnitude. When you do that, then actually the number comes out much, much smaller. And that's the more statistically rigorous, you know, mathematically correct way of doing the calculation. It's still a lot of hand waving. As science goes, it's like definitely, you know, just waving. I don't know what an analogy is, but it's hand wavy. And anyway, when they did this, and then they did a Bayesian update on it as well to like factor in the fact that there is no evidence that we're picking up because, you know, no evidence is actually a form of evidence, right? And the long and short of it comes out that the, we're roughly around 70% to be the only intelligent civilization in our galaxy thus far, and around 50-50 in the entire observable universe, which sounds so crazily counterintuitive, but their math is legit. Well, yeah, the math around this particular equation, which is the equation is ridiculous on many levels, but the powerful thing about the equation is there's the different things, different components that can be estimated and the error bars on which can be reduced with science and enhanced throughout since the equation came out, the error bars have been coming out on different aspects. And so that it almost kind of says, like this gives you a mission to reduce the error bars on these estimates over a period of time. And once you do, you can better and better understand, like in the process of reviewing the error bars, you'll get to understand actually what is the right way to find out where the aliens are, how many of them there are, and all those kinds of things. So I don't think it's good to use that for an estimation. I think you do have to think from like more like from first principles, just looking at what life is on earth, like, and trying to understand the very physics-based, biology, chemistry, biology-based question of what is life, maybe computation-based, what the fuck is this thing? And that, like, how difficult is it to create this thing? It's one way to say like, how many planets like this are out there, all that kind of stuff. But it feels like from our very limited knowledge perspective, the right ways to think how, how does, what is this thing and how does it originate from from very simple non-life things? How does complex life-like things emerge from, from, from a rock to a bacteria, protein, and these like weird systems that encode information and pass information from self-replicate and then also select each other and mutate in interesting ways such that they can adapt and evolve and build increasingly more complex systems. Right. Well, it's a form of information processing, right? Yeah, right. Whereas information transfer, but then also an energy processing, which then results in I guess information processing, maybe I'm getting bogged down. Well, it's doing some modification and yeah, the input is some energy. Right. It's able to extract, yeah, extract resources from its environment in order to achieve a goal. But the goal doesn't seem to be clear. Right. The goal is, well, the goal is to make more of itself. Yeah. But in a way that increases, I mean, I don't know if evolution is a fundamental law of the universe, but it seems to want to replicate itself in a way that maximizes the chance of its survival. Individual agents within an ecosystem do. Yes. Yes. Evolution itself doesn't give a fuck. Right. So you don't care. It's just like, oh, you optimize it. Well, at least it's certainly, yeah, it doesn't care about the welfare of the individual agents within it, but it does seem to, I don't know. I think the mistake is that we're anthropomorphizing. It's to even try and give evolution a mindset because there's a really great post by Eliezer Yudkowsky on Less Wrong, which is an alien god. And he talks about the mistake we make when we try and put our mind, think through things from an evolutionary perspective as though we're giving evolution some kind of agency and what it wants. Yeah, worth reading. But yeah. I would like to say that having interacted with a lot of really smart people that say that anthropomorphization is a mistake. I would like to say that saying that anthropomorphization is a mistake is a mistake. I think there's a lot of power in anthropomorphization, if I can only say that word correctly one time. I think that's actually a really powerful way to reason to things. I think people, especially people in robotics seem to run away from it as fast as possible. And I just, I think- Can you give an example of like how it helps in robotics? Oh, in that our world is a world of humans. And to see robots as fundamentally just tools runs away from the fact that we live in a world of, a dynamic world of humans. That like these, all these game theory systems we've talked about, that a robot that ever has to interact with humans. And I don't mean like intimate friendship interaction. I mean in a factory setting where it has to deal with the uncertainty of humans, all that kind of stuff. You have to acknowledge that the robot's behavior has an effect on the human just as much as the human has an effect on the robot. And there's a dance there. And you have to realize that this entity, when a human sees a robot, this is obvious in a physical manifestation of a robot. They feel a certain way. They have a fear, they have a, they have their own personal life projections. We have to have pets and dogs and the thing looks like a dog. They have their own memories of what a dog is like. They have certain feelings and that's going to be useful in a safety setting, safety critical setting, which is one of the most trivial settings for a robot in terms of how to avoid any kind of dangerous situations. And a robot should really consider that in navigating its environment. And we humans are right to reason about how a robot should consider navigating its environment through anthropomorphization. I also think our brains are designed to think in human terms like game theory, I think is best applied in the space of human decisions. And so- Right. You're dealing, I mean, with things like AI, AI is they are, you know, we can somewhat, like, I don't think it's, the reason I say anthropomorphization, we need to be careful with is because there is a danger of overly applying, overly, wrongly assuming that this artificial intelligence is going to operate in any similar way to us, because it is operating on a fundamentally different substrate, like even dogs or even mice or whatever in some ways, like anthropomorphizing them is less of a mistake, I think, than an AI, even though it's an AI we built and so on, because at least we know that they're running from the same substrate. And they've also evolved from the same, out of the same evolutionary process. You know, they've followed this evolution of like needing to compete for resources and needing to find a mate and that kind of stuff. Whereas an AI that has just popped into existence somewhere on like a cloud server, let's say, you know, or whatever, however it runs and whatever, whether, I don't know whether they have an internal experience, I don't think they necessarily do. In fact, I don't think they do. But the point is, is that to try and apply any kind of modeling of like, thinking through problems and decisions in the same way that we do, has to be done extremely carefully because they are like, they're so alien, their method of whatever their form of thinking is, it's just so different because they've never had to evolve, you know, in the same way. Yeah, beautifully put. I was just playing devil's advocate. I do think in certain contexts, anthropomorphization is not going to hurt you. Yes. Engineers run away from it too fast. I can see that. But from the most point, you're right. Do you have advice for young people today, like the 17 year old that you were, of how to live life you can be proud of, how to have a career you can be proud of in this world full of mullets? Think about the win-wins. Look for win-win situations and be careful not to, you know, fully use your smarts to convince yourself that something is win-win when it's not. So that's difficult and I don't know how to advise, you know, people on that because it's something I'm still figuring out myself. But have that as a sort of default MO. Don't see things, everything is a zero sum game. Try to find the positive sumness and like find ways to, if there doesn't seem to be one, consider playing a different game. So I would suggest that. Do not become a professional poker player. Because people always ask, they're like, oh, she's a pro. I want to do that too. Fine. You could have done it if you were, you know, when I started out, it was a very different situation back then. Poker is, you know, a great game to learn in order to understand the ways to think. And I recommend people learn it, but don't try making a living from it these days. It's almost, it's very, very difficult to the point of being impossible. And then really, really be aware of how much time you spend on your phone and on social media and really try and keep it to a minimum. Be aware that basically every moment that you spend on it is bad for you. So it doesn't mean to say you can never do it, but just have that running in the background. I'm doing a bad thing for myself right now. I think that's the general rule of thumb. Of course, about becoming a professional poker player, if there is a thing in your life that that's like that and nobody can convince you otherwise, just fucking do it. Don't listen to anyone's advice. Find a thing that you can't be talked out of too. That's a thing. I like that. Yeah. You were a lead guitarist in a metal band. Did I write that down from something? What did you do it for? The performing? Was it the music of it? Was it just being a rock star? Why'd you do it? So we only ever played two gigs. We weren't famous or anything like that. But I was very into metal. It was my entire identity from the age of 16 to 23. What's the best metal band of all time? Don't ask me that. It's so hard to answer. I had a long argument with... I'm a guitarist, more like a classic rock guitarist. I've had friends who are very big Pantera fans. There was often arguments about what's the better metal band, Metallica versus Pantera. This is a more kind of 90s maybe discussion. But I was always on the side of Metallica, both musically and in terms of performance and the depth of lyrics and so on. Basically, everybody was against me. Because if you're a true metal fan, I guess the idea goes is you can't possibly be a Metallica fan. I think that's crazy. Because Metallica is pop. They sold out. Metallica are metal. Again, you can't say who was the godfather of metal, blah, blah, blah. But they were so groundbreaking and so brilliant. You've named literally two of my favorite bands. When you asked that question, who are my favorites, those were two that came up. A third one is Children of Bodom, who I just think tick all the boxes for me. Yeah, I don't know. Nowadays, I feel like a repulsion to the... I was that myself. I'd be like, who do you prefer more? Come on, who's like... You have to rank them. But it's like this false zero-sum-ness that's like why? They're so additive. There's no conflict there. Although, when people ask that kind of question about anything, movies, I feel like it's hard work and it's unfair, but you should pick one. That's actually the same kind of... It's like a fear of a commitment. When people ask me, what's your favorite band, it's like, whew. But it's good to pick. Exactly. And thank you for the tough question. Yeah. Well, maybe not in a context when a lot of people are listening. Can I just like, what? Why does it matter? No, it does. Are you still into metal? Funny enough, I was listening to a bunch before I came over here. Oh, like do you use it for motivation or get you into certain... Yeah, I was weirdly listening to 80s hair metal before I came. Does that count as metal? I think so. It's like proto metal and it's happy. It's optimistic, happy, proto metal. Yeah, I mean, all these genres bleed into each other. But yeah, sorry, to answer your question about guitar playing, my relationship with it was kind of weird in that I was deeply uncreative. My objective would be to hear some really hard technical solo and then learn it, memorize it, and then play it perfectly. But I was incapable of trying to write my own music. The idea was just absolutely terrifying. But I was also just thinking, it'd be kind of cool to actually try starting a band again and getting back into it and write. But it's scary. It's scary. I mean, I put out some guitar playing just other people's covers, like I play Comfortably Numb on the internet. And it's scary too. It's scary putting stuff out there. And I had this similar kind of fascination with technical playing both on piano and guitar. One of the reasons I started learning guitar is from Ozzy Osbourne, Mr. Crowley's solo. One of the first solos I learned is that there's a beauty to it. There's a lot of beauty to it. Tapping, right? There's some tapping, but it's just really fast. Beautiful, like arpeggios. Yeah, arpeggios. Yeah. But there's a melody that you can hear through it, but there's also build up. It's a beautiful solo, but it's also technically just visually the way it looks when a person's watching. You feel like a rock star playing it. But it ultimately has to do with technical. You're not developing the part of your brain that I think requires you to generate beautiful music. It is ultimately technical in nature. And so that took me a long time to let go of that and just be able to write music myself. And that's a different journey I think. I think that journey is a little bit more inspired in the blues world, for example, or improvisation is more valued, obviously in jazz and so on. But I think ultimately it's a more rewarding journey because you get to your relationship with the guitar then becomes a kind of escape from the world where you can create. I mean, creating stuff is... And it's something you work with because my relationship with my guitar was like it was something to tame and defeat. Yeah. Which was kind of what my whole personality was back then. I was just very, as I said, very competitive, very just like must bend this thing to my will. Whereas writing music is like a dance. You work with it. But I think because of the competitive aspect, for me at least, that's still there, which creates anxiety about playing publicly or all that kind of stuff. I think there's just like a harsh self-criticism within the whole thing. It's really tough. I want to hear some of your stuff. I mean, there's certain things that feel really personal. And on top of that, as we talked about poker offline, there's certain things that you get to a certain height in your life. And that doesn't have to be very high, but you get to a certain height and then you put it aside for a bit. And it's hard to return to it because you remember being good. And it's hard to, like you being at a very high level in poker, it might be hard for you to return to poker every once in a while and enjoy it knowing that you're just not as sharp as you used to be because you're not doing it every single day. That's something I always wonder with, I mean, even just like in chess with Kasparov, some of these greats just returning to it. It's almost painful. Yes. And I feel that way with guitar too, you know, because I used to play like every day a lot. So returning to it is painful because it's like accepting the fact that this whole ride is finite and that you have a prime, there's a time when you're really good and now it's over and now- We're on a different chapter of life. I was like, oh, but I might miss that. But you can still discover joy within that process. It's been tough, especially with some level of like, as people get to know you, and people film stuff, you don't have the privacy of just sharing something with a few people around you. That's a beautiful privacy that- That's a good point. With the internet, it's just disappearing. Yeah, that's a really good point. But all those pressures aside, if you really, you can step up and still enjoy the fuck out of a good musical performance. What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing? What's the meaning of life? It's in your name, as we talked about. You have to live up. Do you feel the requirement to have to live up to your name? Because live? Yeah. No, because I don't see it. I mean, my, well, again, it's kind of like, no, I don't know. Because my full name is Olivia. So I can retreat in that and be like, oh, Olivia, what does that even mean? Live up to live. No, I can't say I do, because I've never thought of it that way. And then your name backwards is evil, as we also talked about. There's like layers- I mean, I feel the urge to live up to that, to be the inverse of evil, or even better. Because I don't think, you know, is the inverse of evil good or is good something completely separate to that? I think my intuition says it's the latter, but I don't know. Anyway, getting in the weeds. What is the meaning of all this? Of life. Why are we here? I think to explore, have fun and understand, and make more of here and to keep the game going. Of here? More of here? More of this, whatever this is. More of experience. Just to have more of experience and ideally positive experience. And more complex, you know, I guess try and put it into a sort of vaguely scientific term. Make it so that the program required, the length of code required to describe the universe is as long as possible. And, you know, highly complex and therefore interesting. Because again, like, I know, you know, we bang the metaphor to death, but like, tiled with paper clips doesn't require that much of a code to describe. Obviously, it may be something emerges from it, but that steady state, assuming a steady state, it's not very interesting. But it seems like our universe is over time becoming more and more complex and interesting. There's so much richness and beauty and diversity on this earth. And I want that to continue and get more. I want more diversity. And the very best sense of that word is to me the goal of all this. Yeah. And somehow have fun in the process. Yes. Because we do create a lot of fun things along instead of in this creative force. And all the beautiful things that create somehow there's like a funness to it. And perhaps that has to do with the finiteness of life, the finiteness of all these experiences, which is what makes them kind of unique. Like the fact that they end, there's this, whatever it is, falling in love or creating a piece of art or creating a bridge or creating a rocket or creating a, I don't know, just the businesses that do that, that, that build something or solve something. The fact that it is born and it dies somehow embeds it with fun, with joy for the people involved. I don't know what that is, the finiteness of it. It can do. Some people struggle with the, you know, I mean, a big thing I think that one has to learn is being okay with things coming to an end. And in terms of like projects and so on, right, people cling onto things beyond what they're meant to be doing, you know, beyond what is reasonable. And I'm going to have to come to terms with this podcast coming to an end. I really enjoy talking to you. I think it's obvious, as we've talked about many times, you should be doing a podcast. You should, you're already doing a lot of stuff publicly to the world, which is awesome. And you're a great educator, you're a great mind, you're great into like, but it's also this whole medium of just talking is also fun. It's a fun one. It really is good. And it's just, it's nothing but like, oh, it's just so much fun. And you can just get into so many, yeah, there's this space to just explore and see what comes and emerges and yeah. Yeah, to understand yourself better. And if you're talking to others, to understand them better and together with them. I mean, you should do your own podcast, but you should also do a podcast with C as we talked about. The two of you have such different minds that like melt together in just hilarious ways, fascinating ways. Just the tension of ideas there is really powerful. But in general, I think you got a beautiful voice. So thank you so much for talking today. Thank you for being a friend. Thank you for honoring me with this conversation and with your valuable time. Thanks, Liv. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Liv Bury. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Richard Feynman. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers, which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything. And there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know the answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
 evolutionarily, if we see a lion running at us, we didn't have time to sort of calculate
 the lion's kinetic energy and is it optimal to go this way or that way. You just react
 it and physically our bodies are well attuned to actually make right decisions. But when
 you're playing a game like poker, this is not something that you ever evolved to do
 and yet you're in that same flight or fight response. And so that's a really important
 skill to be able to develop to basically learn how to meditate in the moment and calm yourself
 so that you can think clearly.
 The following is a conversation with Liv Burry, formerly one of the best poker players in
 the world, trained as an astrophysicist and is now a philanthropist and an educator on
 topics of game theory, physics, complexity and life. This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
 To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends,
 here's Liv Burry.
 What role do you think luck plays in poker and in life? You can pick whichever one you
 want, poker or life and or life.
 The longer you play, the less influence luck has. You know, like with all things, the bigger
 your sample size, the more the quality of your decisions or your strategies matter.
 So to answer that question, yeah, in poker, it really depends. If you and I sat and played
 10 hands right now, I might only win 52% of the time, 53%, maybe. But if we played 10,000
 hands, then I'll probably win like over 98, 99% of the time. So it's a question of sample
 sizes.
 And what are you figuring out over time? The betting strategy that this individual does
 or literally doesn't matter against any individual over time?
 Against any individual over time, the better player because they're making better decisions.
 So what does that mean to make a better decision? Well, to get into the real nitty gritty already,
 basically, poker is a game of math. There are these strategies familiar with like Nash
 equilibria. So there are these game theory optimal strategies that you can adopt. And
 the closer you play to them, the less exploitable you are. So because I've studied the game
 a bunch, although admittedly not for a few years, but back when I was playing all the
 time, I would study these game theory optimal solutions and try and then adopt those strategies
 when I go and play. So I'd play against you and I would do that. And because the objective
 when you're playing game theory optimal, it's actually it's a loss minimization thing that
 you're trying to do. Your best bet is to try and play a sort of similar style. You also
 need to try and adopt this loss minimization. But because I've been playing much longer
 than you, I'll be better at that. So first of all, you're not taking advantage of my
 mistakes. But then on top of that, I'll be better at recognizing when you are playing
 suboptimally and then deviating from this game theory optimal strategy to exploit your
 bad plays. Can you define game theory and Nash equilibria? Can we try to sneak up to
 it in a bunch of ways? Like, what's the game theory framework of analyzing poker, analyzing
 any kind of situation? So game theory is just basically the study of decisions within a
 competitive situation. I mean, it's technically a branch of economics, but it also applies
 to like, wider decision theory. And, you know, usually when you see it, it's these like little
 payoff matrices and so on. That's how it's depicted. But it's essentially just like study
 of strategies under different competitive situations. And as it happens, certain games,
 in fact, many, many games have these things called Nash equilibria. And what that means
 is when you're in a Nash equilibrium, basically, it is not, there is no strategy that you can
 take that would be more beneficial than the one you're currently taking, assuming your
 opponent is also doing the same thing. So it would be a bad idea, you know, if we're
 both playing in a game theory, optimal strategy, if either of us deviate from that, now the
 other, you know, the way we're putting ourselves at a disadvantage. Rock, paper, scissors is
 actually a really great example of this. Like if we were to start playing rock, paper, you
 know, you know nothing about me, and we're going to play for all our money. Let's play
 10 rounds of it. What would your sort of optimal strategy be? Do you think? What would you
 do? Let's see. I would probably try to be as random as possible. Exactly. You want to
 because you don't know anything about me. You don't want to give anything about a way
 about yourself. So ideally you'd have like a little dice or somewhat, you know, perfect
 randomizer that makes you randomize 33% of the time, each of the three different things.
 And in response to that, well, actually, I can kind of do anything, but I would probably
 just randomize back to, but actually it wouldn't matter because you'll, I know that you're
 playing randomly. So that would be us in a Nash equilibrium where we're both playing
 this like unexploitable strategy. However, if after a while you then notice that I'm
 playing rock a little bit more often than I should. Yeah. You're the kind of person
 that would do that. Wouldn't you? Sure. Yes. Yes. Yes. I'm more of a scissors girl, but
 anyway, you are, no, I'm a, as I said, randomizer. So you notice I'm throwing rock too much or
 something like that. Now you'd be making a mistake by continuing playing this game theory
 optimal strategy because what the previous one, because you are now there's an, I'm making
 a mistake and you're not deviating and exploiting my mistake. So you'd want to start throwing
 paper a bit more often in whatever you figure is the right sort of percentage of the time
 that I'm throwing rock too often. So that's basically an example of where, you know, what
 game theory optimal strategy is in terms of loss minimization, but it's not always the
 maximally profitable thing if your opponent is doing stupid, stupid stuff, which, you
 know, in that example. So that's kind of then how it works in poker, but it's a lot more
 complex. And the way poker players typically, you know, nowadays they study the games change
 so much. And I think we should talk about how it sort of evolved. But nowadays, like
 the top pros basically spend all their time in between sessions running these simulators
 using like software where they do basically Monte Carlo simulations, sort of doing billions
 of fictitious self play hands. You input a fictitious hand scenario, like, oh, what do
 I do with Jack nine suited on a King 10 four to two spade board and, you know, against
 this bet size. So you'd input that press play, it'll run it's, you know, it's billions
 of fake hands and then it will converge upon what the game theory optimal strategies are.
 And then you want to try and memorize what these are. Basically, they're like ratios
 of how often you know what types of hands you want to bluff and what percentage of the
 time. So then there's this additional layer of inbuilt randomization built in. Yeah, those
 those kinds of simulations incorporate all the betting strategies and everything else
 like that. So they so as opposed to some kind of very crude mathematical model of what's
 the probability you win just based on the quality of the card. It's including everything
 else to the game theory of it. Yes. Yeah, essentially. And what's interesting is that
 nowadays if you want to be a top pro and you go and play in these really like the super
 high stakes tournaments or tough cash games, if you don't know this stuff, you're going
 to get eaten alive in the long run. Yeah. But of course you could get lucky over the
 short run. And that's where this like luck factor comes in because luck is both a blessing
 and a curse. If luck didn't, you know, if there wasn't this random element and there
 wasn't the ability for worse players to win sometimes, then poker would fall apart. You
 know, the same reason people don't play chess professionally for money against you. You
 don't see people going and hustling chess like not knowing, trying to make a living
 from it because you know, there's very little luck in chess, but there's quite a lot of
 luck in poker. Have you seen Beautiful Mind, that movie? Years ago. Well, what do you think
 about the game theoretic formulation of what is it the hot blonde at the bar? Do you remember
 like the way they illustrated it is they're trying to pick up a girl at a bar and there's
 multiple girls. They're like friend. It's like a friend group and you're trying to approach.
 I don't remember the details, but I remember. Don't you like then speak to her friends?
 Yeah. Yeah. Like that fame disinterest. I mean, it's classic pickup artists stuff. Right.
 You want to. And they were trying to correlate that somehow that being an optimal strategy
 game theoretically. Why? What? What? Like, I don't think I remember. I can't imagine
 that there is. I mean, there's probably an optimal strategy. Is it? Does that mean that
 there's an actual Nash equilibrium of like picking up girls? Do you know the the marriage
 problem is optimal stopping? Yes. So where it's an optimal dating strategy where you
 do you remember? Yeah, I think it's like something like you, you know, you've got like a set
 of a hundred people you're going to look through. And after how many do you now after that,
 so going on this many dates out of a hundred, at what point do you then go, OK, the next
 best person I see, is that the right one? And I think it's like something like 37 percent.
 Uh, it's one over E, whatever that is. Right. Which I think is. Yeah. We're going to fact
 check that. Yeah. So but it's funny under those strict constraints, then yes, after
 that many people, as long as you have a fixed size pool, then you just pick the the the
 next person that is better than anyone you've seen before. Yeah. Have you have you tried
 this? Have you incorporated it? One of those people I'm at. And we're going to discuss
 this. I and what do you mean those people? I try not to optimize stuff. I try to listen
 to the heart. I don't think I like my mind immediately is attracted to optimizing everything.
 And I think that if if you really give into that kind of addiction, that you lose the
 the joy of the small things, the minutiae of life, I think. I don't know. I'm concerned
 about the addictive nature of my personality in that regard. In some ways.
 Well, I think the on average people under try and quantify things or try under optimize.
 There are some people who, you know, it's like with all these things, it's a you know,
 it's a balancing act. I've been on dating apps, but I've never used them. I'm sure they
 have data on this because they probably have the optimal stopping control problem, because
 there aren't a lot of people that use social like dating apps are on there for a long time.
 So the the the interesting the interesting aspect is like, all right, how long before
 you stop looking before it actually starts affecting your mind negatively such that you
 see dating as a kind of game, a kind of game versus an actual process of finding somebody
 that's going to make you happy for the rest of your life. It's really interesting. They
 have the data. I wish they would be able to release that data. And I do want to.
 It's OkCupid, right? I think they ran a huge, huge study on all of their.
 Yeah, they're more data driven. I think OkCupid folks are. I think there's a lot of opportunity
 for dating apps and you know, even bigger than dating apps, people connecting on the
 internet. I just hope they're more data driven. And it doesn't seem that way. I think like
 I've always I've always thought that Goodreads should be a dating app like that.
 I've never used it. The good is a good reason just lists like books that you've read and
 allows you to comment on the books you read and what the books you're currently reading.
 But the giant social networks of people reading books and that seems to be a much better database
 of like interest. Of course, it constrains you to the books you're reading. But like
 that really reveals so much more about the person allows you to discover shared interest
 because books are kind of window into the way you see the world. Also, like the kind
 of places people you're curious about the kind of ideas you're curious about. Are you
 a romantic or are you cold calculating rationalist? Are you are you into Ayn Rand or are you into
 Bernie Sanders? Are you into whatever? Right. And I feel like that reveals so much more
 than like a person trying to look hot from a certain angle and attended profile.
 It would also be a really great filter in the first place for people. It's like people
 who read books and are willing to go and rate them and give feedback on them and so on.
 So that's already a really strong filter. Probably the type of people you'd be looking
 for. Well, at least be able to fake reading books. I mean, the thing about books, you
 don't really need to read it. You can just look at the clip. Yeah, game the dating app
 by feigning intellectualism. Can I admit something very horrible about myself? Go on. The things
 that you know, I don't have many things in my closet, but this is one of them. I've never
 actually read Shakespeare. I've only read Cliff Notes and I got a five in the AP English
 exam. Wow. And I which books have I read? Well, yeah, which was the exam on? Oh, no,
 they include a lot of them. But Hamlet, I don't even know if you read Romeo and Juliet,
 Beth. I don't remember, but I don't understand it. It's like really cryptic. It's really
 I don't and it's not that pleasant to read. It's like ancient speak. I don't understand
 it anyway. Maybe I was too dumb. I'm still too dumb. But I did go to five. Yeah, yeah.
 I don't know how the US grading system. Oh, no. So AP English is a there's kind of this
 advanced versions of courses in high school and you take a test that is like a broad test
 for that subject and includes a lot. It wasn't obviously just Shakespeare. I think a lot
 of it was also writing, written. You have like AP Physics, AP Computer Science, AP Biology,
 AP Chemistry, and then AP English or AP Literature. I forget what it was. But I think Shakespeare
 was a part of that. But I knew and you gave the point is you gamified it. Game. Well,
 in its entirety, I was into getting A's. I saw it as a game. I don't think any. I don't
 think all the learning I've done has been outside of the outside of school. The deepest
 learning I've done has been outside of school with a few exceptions, especially in grad
 school, like deep computer science courses. But that was still outside of school because
 it was outside of getting sorry. It was outside of getting the A for the course. The best
 stuff I've ever done is when you read the chapter and you do many of the problems at
 the end of the chapter, which is usually not what's required for the course, like the hardest
 stuff. In fact, textbooks are freaking incredible. If you go back now and you look at like biology
 textbook or any of the computer science textbooks on algorithms and data structures, those things
 are incredibly, they have the best summary of a subject. Plus they have practice problems
 of increasing difficulty that allows you to truly master the basic, like the fundamental
 ideas behind that.
 That was, I got through my entire physics degree with one textbook that was just this
 really comprehensive one that they told us at the beginning of the first year, buy this,
 but you're going to have to buy 15 other books for all your supplementary courses. And I
 was like, every time I was just checked to see whether this book covered it and it did.
 And I think I only bought like two or three extra than thank God, because they're so super
 expensive textbooks. It's a whole racket they've got going on. Yeah, they are. They could just,
 you get the right one. It's just like a manual for, but what's interesting though is this
 is the tyranny of having exams and metrics.
 The tyranny of exams and metrics. Yes.
 I loved them because I loved, I'm very competitive and I liked finding ways to gamify things
 and then like sort of dust off my shoulders afterwards when I get a good grade or be annoyed
 at myself when I didn't. But yeah, you're absolutely right. And that the actual, you
 know, how much of that physics knowledge I've retained, like I've, I learned how to cram
 and study and please an examiner, but did that give me the deep lasting knowledge that
 I needed? I mean, yes, yes and no. But really like nothing makes you learn a topic better
 than when you actually then have to teach it yourself. You know, like I'm trying to
 wrap my teeth around this like game theory, Moloch stuff right now. And there's no exam
 at the end of it that I can gamify. There's no way to gamify and sort of like shortcut
 my way through it. I have to understand it so deeply from like deep foundational levels
 to then build upon it and then try and explain it to other people. And like, you know, you're
 about to go and do some lectures, right? You can't, you can't sort of just like, you presumably
 can't rely on the knowledge that you got through when you were studying for an exam to reteach
 that.
 Yeah. And especially high level lectures, especially the kind of stuff you do on YouTube,
 you're not just regurgitating material. You have to think through what is the core idea
 here. And when you do the lectures live, especially you have to, there's no second takes. That
 is the luxury you get if you're recording a video for YouTube or something like that.
 But it definitely is a luxury you shouldn't lean on. I've gotten to interact with a few
 YouTubers that lean on that too much. And you realize, oh, you've gamified this system
 because you're not really thinking deeply about stuff. You're through the edit, both
 written and spoken. You're crafting an amazing video, but you yourself as a human being have
 not really deeply understood it. So live teaching or at least recording video with very few
 takes is a different beast. And I think it's the most honest way of doing it. Like as few
 takes as possible.
 That's why I'm nervous about this.
 Don't, don't, don't fuck this up, Liv. The tyranny of exams. I do think, you know, people
 talk about, you know, high school and college as a time to do drugs and drink and have fun
 and all this kind of stuff. But, you know, looking back, of course I did a lot of those
 things. No, uh, yes, but it's also a time when you get to like read textbooks or read
 books or learn with all the time in the world. Like you don't have these responsibilities
 of like, uh, you know, laundry and, um, uh, having to sort of pay for mortgage or all
 that kind of stuff, pay taxes, all this kind of stuff. Uh, in most cases there's just so
 much time in the day for learning and you don't realize it at the time because at the
 time it seems like a chore, like why the hell does there's so much homework, but you never
 get a chance to do this kind of learning, this kind of homework ever again in life,
 unless later in life you really make a big effort out of it. You get, like you basically
 your knowledge gets solidified. You don't get, you don't get to have fun and learn.
 Learning is really, is really fulfilling and really fun if you're that kind of person.
 Like some people like to, you know, like knowledge is not something that they think is fun, but
 if that's the kind of thing that you think is fun, that's the time to have fun and do
 the drugs and drinking all that kind of stuff. But the learning, just going back to those
 textbooks, the hours spent with the textbooks is, uh, is really, really rewarding.
 Do people even use textbooks anymore? Yeah. Do you think? Cause it's these days with their
 TikTok and they're not even that, but it just like so much information, really high quality
 information is now in digital format online. Um, yeah, but they're not, there are using
 that, but you know, college is still very, there's a curriculum. I mean, so much of school
 is about rigorous study of a subject and still on YouTube that's not there. Right. YouTube
 has, um, uh, Grant Sanderson talks about this. He's this math. Yeah. Three blue, one brown.
 He says like, I'm not a math teacher. I just take really cool concepts and I inspire people,
 but if you want to really learn calculus, if you want to really learn linear algebra,
 you just, you should do the textbook. You should do that, you know, and there are still
 the, uh, the textbook industrial complex that, that like charges like $200 for textbook and
 somehow, I don't know. It's ridiculous. There's, there's, oh, sorry. New edition, edition 14.6.
 Sorry. You can't use 14.5 anymore. It's like, what's different? We've got one paragraph
 different. So we mentioned offline, Daniel Negrano. Um, I'm going to get a chance to
 talk to him on this podcast and he's somebody that I was, I found fascinating in terms of
 the way he thinks about poker verbalizes the way he thinks about poker, the way he plays
 poker. So, and he's still pretty damn good. He's been good for a long time. So you mentioned
 that people are running these kinds of simulations and the game of poker has changed. Do you
 think he's adopting in this way? Do you like the top pros? Do they have to adopt this way?
 Or is there, is there still like over the years you basically developed this gut feeling
 about like you, you get to be like good the way like alpha zero is good. You look at the
 board and somehow from the fog comes out the right answer. Like this is likely what they
 have. This is likely the best way to move. And you don't really, you can't really put
 a finger on exactly why. Uh, but it's just comes from your gut feeling or no. Yes and
 no. So gut feelings are definitely very important. Um, you know, that we've got our two mode
 or you can distill it down to two modes of decision making, right? You've got your sort
 of logical linear voice in your head system to as it's often called and your system on
 your gut intuition. Um, and historically in poker, the very best players were playing
 almost entirely by their gut. Um, you know, often they do some kind of inspired play and
 you'd ask them why they do it and they wouldn't really be able to explain it. Um, and that's
 not so much because their process was unintelligible, but it was more just because no one, no one
 had the language with which to describe what optimal strategies were because no one really
 understood how poker worked. This was before, you know, we had analysis software, you know,
 no one was writing, you know, if I guess some people would write down their hands in a little
 notebook, but there was no way to assimilate all this data and analyze it. But then, you
 know, with when computers became cheaper and software started emerging and then obviously
 online poker where it would like automatically save your hand histories. Um, now all of a
 sudden you kind of had this, this body of data that you could run analysis on. And so
 that's when people started to see, you know, these mathematical solutions. And, um, and
 so what that meant is the, the role of intuition essentially became smaller. Um, and it, it
 went more into, as we talked before about, you know, this game theory optimal style,
 but as, also, as I said, like game theory, optimal is about, um, loss minimization and
 being unexploitable. But if you're playing against people who aren't, because no person,
 no human being can play perfectly game theory, optimal and poker, not even the best AIs.
 They're still like, they're 99.99% of the way there or whatever, but this it's kind
 of like the speed of light. You can't reach it perfectly.
 So there's still a role for intuition?
 Yes. So when, yeah, when you're playing this unexploitable style, but when your opponents
 start doing something, you know, suboptimal that you want to exploit. Well, now that's
 where not only your like logical brain will need to be thinking, oh, okay, I know I have
 this my, I'm in the sort of top end of my range here with this, with this hand. Uh,
 so that means I need to be calling X percent of the time. Um, and I put them on this range,
 et cetera. Uh, but then sometimes you'll have this gut feeling that will tell you, you know,
 you know what, this time I know, I know mathematically I'm meant to call now, you know, I've got,
 I'm in the sort of top end of my range and, um, these, this is the odds I'm getting. So
 the math says I should call, but there's something in your gut saying they've got it this time.
 They've got it. Like, uh, they're, they're beating you. Maybe your hand is worse. Um,
 so then the, the, the real art, this is where the last remaining art in poker, the, the
 fuzziness, uh, is like, do you listen to your gut? How do you quantify the strength of it
 or can you even quantify the strength of it? Um, and I think that's what Daniel has. I
 mean, I, I can't speak for how much he's studying with, with, with the simulators and that kind
 of thing. I think he has, like he must be to, to still be keeping up. Um, but he has
 an incredible intuition for just, he's seen so many hands of poker in the flesh. He's
 seen so many people, the way they behave when the chips are, you know, when the money's
 on the line and he's got him staring you down in the eye, you know, he's intimidating. He's
 got this like kind of X factor vibe that he gives out.
 And he talks a lot, which is an interactive element, which is he's getting stuff from
 other people. Yes. Yeah. And just like the subtleties. So he's like, he's probing constantly.
 Yeah, he's probing and he's getting this extra layer of information that others can't. Now
 that said though, he's good online as well. You know, I don't know how, again, would he
 be beating the top cash game players online? Probably not. No. Um, but when he's in, in
 person and he's got that additional layer of information, he can not only extract it,
 but he knows what to do with it. Um, still so well, uh, there's one player who I would
 say is the exception to all of this. Um, and he's one of my favorite people to talk about
 in terms of, I think he might've cracked the simulation. Uh, it's Phil Helmuth. Uh, he
 more ways than one. He's cracked the simulation. I think. Yeah. He somehow to this day is still,
 and I love you, Phil. Don't I'm not in any way knocking you. Um, he's still winning so
 much at the world series of poker specifically. Um, he's now on 16 bracelets. The next nearest
 person I think has won 10. Um, and he is consistently year in year out going deep or winning these
 huge field tournaments, you know, with like 2000 people, um, which statistically he should
 not be doing. And, and yet you watch some of the place he makes and they make no sense.
 Like mathematically they are so far from game theory optimal. And the thing is if you went
 and stuck him in one of these high, like high stakes cash games with a bunch of like GTO
 people, he's going to get ripped apart. But there's something that he has that when he's
 in the halls of the world series of poker specifically, um, amongst sort of amateurish
 players, he gets them to do crazy shit like that. And, and, but my little pet theory is
 that also he just the car he's, he's like a wizard and he gets the cards to do what
 he needs them to, because he, he just expects to win and he expects to receive, you know,
 to get flopper set with a frequency far beyond what this, you know, the, the, the, the real
 percentages are. And I don't even know if he knows what the real percentages are. He
 doesn't need to because he gets that.
 I think he has found a cheat code. Cause when I've seen him play, he seems to be like annoyed
 that the long shot thing didn't happen. He's like annoyed and it's almost like everybody
 else is stupid because he was obviously going to win with a
 If that silly thing hadn't happened. And it's like, you don't understand the silly thing
 happens 99% of the time. And it's a 1% not the other way around, but genuinely for his
 lived experience at the world's only at the world's risk of poker, it is like that. So
 I don't blame him for feeling that way. But he does, he has this, he has this X factor
 and the poker community has tried for years to rip him down saying like, you know, he
 doesn't, he's no good, but he's clearly good because he's still winning or there's something
 going on, whether that's he's figured out how to mess with the fabric of reality and
 how cards, you know, a randomly shuffled deck of cards come out. I don't know what it is,
 but he's doing, doing it right. Still.
 Who do you think is the greatest of all time? Would you put Helmuth?
 Now he's definitely, he seems like the kind of person when mentioned, he would actually
 watch this. So you might want to be careful.
 As I said, I love Phil and I, and I, I'm, I have, I would say this to his face. I'm
 not saying anything. I don't, he's got, he truly, I mean, he is one of the greatest.
 I don't know if he's the greatest. He's certainly the greatest at the world series of poker
 and he is the greatest at, despite the game switching into a pure game, almost an entire
 game of math, he has managed to keep the magic alive and this like the, just through sheer
 force of will making the game work for him. And that is incredible. And I think it's something
 that should be studied because it's an example.
 Yeah. There might be some actual game theoretical wisdom. There might be something to be said
 about optimality from studying him. Right. What do you mean by optimality? Meaning, or
 rather game design perhaps, meaning if what he's doing is working, maybe poker is more
 complicated than we're currently modeling it as. So like,
 Or there's an extra layer and I don't mean to get too weird and wooey, but, or there's
 an extra layer of ability to manipulate the things the way you want them to go that we
 don't understand yet.
 Do you think Phil Hellmuth understands them? Is he just generally?
 Hashtag positivity. He wrote a book on positivity.
 And he has?
 Yes.
 School of positivity.
 Not like a trolling book?
 No.
 By Sirius?
 He's straight up, yeah.
 Phil Hellmuth wrote a book about positivity.
 Yes.
 Okay. Not ironically.
 About, I think, and I think it's about sort of manifesting what you want and getting the
 outcomes that you want by believing so much in yourself and in your ability to win, like
 eyes on the prize. And I mean, it's working.
 The man's delivered. Where do you put like Phil Ivey and all those kinds of people?
 I mean, I'm too, I've been, to be honest, too much out of the scene for the last few
 years to really, I mean, Phil Ivey's clearly got, again, he's got that X factor. He's so
 incredibly intimidating to play against. I've only played against him a couple of times,
 but when he like looks you in the eye and you're trying to run a bluff on him, oof,
 no one's made me sweat harder than Phil Ivey. Just my bluff got through, actually. That
 was actually one of the most thrilling moments I've ever had in poker. It was in a Monte
 Carlo in a high roller. I can't remember exactly what the hand was, but I three bit and then
 like just barreled all the way through. And he just like put his laser eyes into me and
 I felt like he was just scouring my soul. And I was just like, hold it together, Liv,
 hold it together.
 And you knew your hand was weaker.
 Yeah, I mean, I was bluffing. I presume, which, you know, there's a chance I was bluffing
 with the best hand, but I'm pretty sure my hand was worse. And he folded. That was truly
 one of my, one of the deep highlights of my career.
 Did you show the cards or did you fold?
 You should never show in game. Because especially as I felt like I was one of the worst players
 at the table in that tournament. So giving that information, unless I had a really solid
 plan that I was now like advertising, oh, look, I'm capable of bluffing Phil Ivy. But
 like why? It's much more valuable to take advantage of the impression that they have
 of me, which is like, I'm a scared girl playing a high roller for the first time. Keep that
 going.
 Interesting. But isn't there layers to this like psychological warfare that the scared
 girl might be way smart and then like to flip the tables. Do you think about that kind of
 stuff?
 Oh, definitely.
 Is it better not to reveal information?
 I mean, generally speaking, you want to not reveal information. You know, the goal of
 poker is to be as deceptive as possible about your own strategies while elucidating as much
 out of your opponent about their own. So giving them free information, particularly if they're
 people who you consider very good players, any information I give them is going into
 their little database and being calculated. I assume it's going to be calculated and used
 well. So I have to be really confident that my like meta gaming that I'm going to then
 do, oh, they've seen this, so therefore that I'm going to be on the right level. So it's
 better just to keep that little secret to myself in the moment.
 So how much is bluffing part of the game?
 Huge amount.
 So yeah, I mean, maybe actually let me ask like, what did it feel like with the live
 here or anyone else? When it's a high stake, when it's a big, it's a big bluff. So a lot
 of money on the table and maybe, I mean, what defines a big bluff? Maybe a lot of money
 on the table, but also some uncertainty in your mind and heart about like self doubt.
 Well, maybe I miscalculated what's going on here, what the bet said, all that kind of
 stuff. Like, what does that feel like?
 I mean, it's, I imagine comparable to, you know, running a, I mean, any kind of big bluff
 where you have a lot of something that you care about on the line. You know, so if you're
 bluffing in a courtroom, not that anyone should ever do that, or, you know, something equatable
 to that. It's, it's incredible. You know, in that scenario, you know, I think it was
 the first time I'd ever played a 20, I'd won my way into this 25k tournament. So that was
 the buy-in 25,000 euros. And I had satelliteed my way in because it was much bigger than
 I would never ever normally play. And, you know, I hadn't, I wasn't that experienced
 at the time. And now I was sitting there against all the big boys, you know, the Negron is
 the Phil IVs and so on. And then to like, you know, each time you put the bets out,
 you know, you put another bet out your car. Yeah. I was on a, what's called a semi bluff.
 So there was some cards that could come that would make my hand very, very strong and therefore
 win. But most of the time those cards don't come.
 So that is a semi-bluff because you're representing, are you representing that you already have
 something?
 So, so I think in this scenario, I had a flush draw to, to, so I had two clubs, two, two
 clubs came out on the flop and then I'm hoping that on the turn and the river one will come.
 So I have some future equity. I could hit a club and then I'll have the best hand, in
 which case great. And so I can keep betting and I'll want them to call. But I'm also got
 the other way of winning the hand where if my card doesn't come, I can keep betting and
 get them to fold their hand. And I'm pretty sure that's what the scenario was. So I had
 some future equity, but it's still, you know, most of the time I don't hit that club. And
 so I would rather him just fold because I'm, you know, the pot is now getting bigger and
 bigger and in the end, like I've jam all, jam all in on the river. That's my entire
 tournament on the line. As far as I'm aware, this might be the one time I ever get to play
 a big 25 K, you know, this was the first time I played one. So it was, it felt like the
 most momentous thing. And this was also when I was trying to build myself up, you know,
 build my name, a name for myself in poker. I wanted to get respect.
 Destroy everything for you.
 It felt like it in the moment. Like, I mean, it literally does feel like a form of life
 and death. Like your body physiologically is having that flight or fight response.
 What are you doing with your body? What are you doing with your face? Are you just like,
 what are you thinking about?
 More like a mixture of like, okay, what are the cards? So in theory, I'm thinking about
 like, okay, what are cards that look, make my hand look stronger, which, you know, which
 cause hit my perceived range from his perspective, which cards don't, what's the right amount
 of bet size to, you know, maximize my fold equity in this situation. You know, that's
 the logical stuff that I should be thinking about. But I think in reality, because I was
 so scared because there's this, at least for me, there's a certain threshold of like nervousness
 or stress beyond which the light logical brain shuts off. And now it just gets into this
 like, it just like, it feels like a game of wits basically. It's like of nerve. Can you
 hold your, hold your resolve? And it certainly got by that, like by the river at this, I
 think by that point I was like, I don't even know if this is a good bluff anymore, but
 fuck it. Let's do it.
 Your mind is almost numb from the intensity of that feeling.
 I call it, I call it the white noise. And, and that's, and it, and it happens in all
 kinds of decision-making. I think anything that's really, really stressful. Like I can
 imagine someone in like an important job interview, if it's like a job they've always wanted and
 they're getting grilled, you know, like Bridgewater style, where they ask these really like really
 hard like mathematical questions. You know, that's, it's a really learned skill to be
 able to like subdue your flight or fight response. You know, what I think get from the sympathetic
 into the parasympathetic. So you can actually, you know, engage the, that voice in your head
 and do those slow logical calculations. Because evolutionarily we, you know, if we see a lion
 running at us, we didn't have time to sort of calculate the lion's kinetic energy and
 you know, is it optimal to go this way or that way? You just reacted and physically
 our bodies are well attuned to actually make right decisions. But when you're playing a
 game like poker, this is not something that you ever, you know, evolved to do. And yet
 you're in that same flight or fight response. And so that's a really important skill to
 be able to develop to basically learn how to like meditate in the moment and calm yourself
 so that you can think clearly.
 But as you were searching for a comparable thing, it's interesting because you just made
 me realize that bluffing is like an incredibly high stakes form of lying. You're lying. And
 I don't think you're telling a story. It's straight up lying in the context of game.
 It's not a negative kind of lying.
 But it is. Yeah, exactly. You are. I'm, you're representing something that you don't have.
 And I was thinking like, how often in life do we have such high stakes of lying? Because
 I was thinking certainly in high level military strategy, I was thinking when Hitler was lying
 to Stalin about his plans to invade the Soviet Union. And so you're talking to a person like
 your friends and you're fighting against the enemy, whatever the formulation of the enemy
 is. But meanwhile, whole time you're building up troops on the border. That's extremely
 Wait, wait. So Hitler and Stalin were like pretending to be friends?
 Yeah.
 My history knowledge is terrible. That's crazy.
 Yeah, that there were, and it worked because Stalin until the troops crossed the border
 and invaded in Operation Barbarossa where this storm of Nazi troops invaded large parts
 of the Soviet Union and hence one of the biggest wars in human history began. Stalin for sure
 was thought that this was never going to be, that Hitler is not crazy enough to invade
 the Soviet Union. And it makes geopolitically makes total sense to be collaborators. And
 ideologically, even though there's a tension between communism and fascism or national
 socialism, however you formulate it, it still feels like this is the right way to battle
 the West.
 Right. They were more ideologically aligned. They in theory had a common enemy, which is
 the West.
 Yeah. So made total sense. And in terms of negotiations and the way things were communicated,
 it seemed to Stalin that for sure that they would remain at least for a while peaceful
 collaborators. And everybody because of that in the Soviet Union believed that it was a
 huge shock when Kiev was invaded. And you hear echoes of that when I traveled to Ukraine,
 sort of the shock of the invasion. It's not just the invasion on one particular border,
 the invasion of the capital city and just like, holy shit. Especially at that time,
 when you thought World War I, you realized that that was the war that to end all wars,
 you would never have this kind of war. And holy shit, this person is mad enough to try
 to take on this monster in the Soviet Union. So it's not no longer going to be a war of
 hundreds of thousands dead. It'll be a war of tens of millions dead. And yeah, but that
 like, you know, that's a very large scale kind of lie, but I'm sure there's in politics
 and geopolitics, that kind of lying happening all the time. And a lot of people pay financially
 and with their lives for that kind of lying. But in our personal lives, I don't know how
 often we maybe we think people do. I mean, like think of spouses cheating on their partners,
 right? And then like having to lie like, where were you last night? Stuff like that. Yeah,
 like that's, I think, you know, I mean, unfortunately that stuff happens all the time, right? So
 or having like multiple families, that one is great. When each family doesn't know the
 other about the other one and like maintaining that life. There's probably a sense of excitement
 about that too. Or seems unnecessary. Yeah. But why? Well, just lying. Like, like, you
 know, the truth finds a way of coming out, you know, yes, but hence that's the thrill.
 Yeah, perhaps. Yeah, people. I mean, you know, that's what I think actually like poker was
 so interesting about poker is most of the best players I know, they're always exceptions,
 you know, they're always bad eggs. But actually poker players are very honest people. I would
 say they are more honest than the average, you know, if you just took random, random
 population sample. Because a, you know, I think, you know, humans like to have that.
 Most people like to have some kind of, you know, mysterious, you know, an opportunity
 to do something like a little edgy. So we get to sort of scratch that itch of being
 edgy at the poker table where it's like, it's part of the game. Everyone knows, everyone
 knows what they're in for and that's allowed. And you get to like really get that out of
 your system. And then also like poker players learned that, you know, I would play in a
 huge game against some of my friends, even my partner Igor, where we will be, you know,
 absolutely going at each other's throats trying to draw blood in terms of winning each money
 off each other and like getting under each other's skin, winding each other up, doing
 the craftiest moves we can. But then once the game's done, the, you know, the winners
 and the losers will go off and get a drink together and have a fun time and like talk
 about it in this like weird academic way afterwards. Because that, and that's why games are so
 great because you get to like live out, or like this competitive urge that, you know,
 most people have.
 What's it feel like to lose? Like we talked about bluffing when it worked out. What about
 when you, when you go broke?
 So like in a game, I'm, you know, fortunately I've never gone broke.
 You mean like full life?
 Full life? No. I know plenty of people who have. And I don't think Igor would mind me
 saying he went, you know, he went broke once in poker. Well, you know, early on when we
 were together.
 I feel like you haven't lived unless you've gone broke.
 Oh, yeah.
 In some sense.
 Right. Well, I mean, I'm happy. I've sort of lived through it vicariously through him
 when he did it at the time. But yeah, what does it like to lose? Well, it depends. So
 it depends on the amount. It depends what percentage of your net worth you've just lost.
 It depends on your brain chemistry. It really, you know, varies from person to person.
 You have a very cold calculating way of thinking about this. So it depends what percentage
 you have.
 Well, it really does. Right?
 Yeah, it's true.
 But that's, I mean, that's another thing poker trains you to do. You see, you see everything
 in percentages or you see everything in like ROI or expected hourlies or cost benefit,
 et cetera. You know, so that's, I, one of the things I've tried to do is calibrate the
 strength of my emotional response to the, to the win or loss that I've received because
 it's, it's no good if you like, you know, you have a huge emotional dramatic response
 to a tiny loss or on the flip side, you have a huge win and you're sort of so dead inside
 that you don't even feel it. Well, that's, you know, that's a shame. I want my emotions
 to calibrate with reality as much as possible. So yeah, what's it like to lose? I mean, I've
 had times where I've lost, you know, busted out of a tournament that I thought I was going
 to win in, you know, especially if I got really unlucky or, or I make a dumb play where I've
 gone away and like, you know, kicked, kicked the wall, punched a wall. I like nearly broke
 my hand one time. Like I'm a lot less competitive than I used to be. Like I was like pathologically
 competitive in my like late teens, early twenties. I just had to win at everything. And I think
 that's sort of slowly waned as I've gotten older.
 According to you. Yeah. According to me. I don't know if others would say the same, right?
 I feel like ultra competitive people. Like I've heard Joe Rogan say this to me. It's
 like, he's a lot less competitive than he used to be. I don't know about that. Oh, I
 believe it. No, I totally believe it. Like, because as you get, you can still be like,
 I care about winning. Like when, you know, I play a game with my buddies online or, you
 know, whatever it is, poly, polytopia is my current obsession. Like,
 Thank you for passing on your obsession to me. Are you playing now? Yeah, I'm playing
 now. We got to have a game. But I'm terrible and I enjoy playing terribly. I don't want
 to have a game because that's going to pull me into your monster of, of like a competitive
 play. It's important. I'm enjoying playing on the, I can't, I, you just do the, you just
 do the points thing, you know, against the bots. Yeah. Against the bots. And I can't
 even do the, uh, there's like a hard one and there's a very hard one. It's crazy. Yeah.
 It's crazy. I can't, I don't even enjoy the hard one, the crazy. I really don't enjoy
 it because it's intense. You have to constantly try to win as opposed to enjoy building a
 little world and yeah, no, no, there's no time for exploration and polytopia. You got
 to get, well, when, once you graduate from the crazies, then you can come play the graduate
 from the crazy. Yeah. So in order to be able to play a decent game against like, you know,
 our group, um, you'll need to be, you'll need to be consistently winning like 90% of
 games against 15 crazy bots. Yeah. And you'll be able to, like, there'll be, I could, I
 could teach you it within a day, honestly. Um, how, how to beat the crazies, how to beat
 the crazies and then, and then you'll be ready for the big leagues. Generalizes, uh, to more
 than just polytopia, but okay. Uh, why were we talking about polytopia? Uh, losing hurts,
 losing hurts. Oh yeah. Yes. Competitiveness over time. Um, I think it's more that at least
 for me, I still care about play about winning when I choose to play something. It's just
 that I don't see the world as zero sum as I used to, you know? Um, I think as you, one
 gets older and wiser, you start to see the world more as a positive sum thing. And, or
 at least you're more aware of externalities of, of scenarios of competitive interactions.
 Um, and so yeah, I just like, I'm more and I'm more aware of my own, you know, like if
 I have a really strong emotional response to losing and that makes me then feel shitty
 for the rest of the day. And then I beat myself up mentally for it. Like I'm now more aware
 that that's unnecessary negative externality. So I'm like, okay, I need to find a way to
 turn this down, you know, dial this down a bit. Was poker the thing that has, if you
 think back at your life and think about some of the lower points of your life, like the
 darker places you've got in your mind, did it have to do something with poker? Like what
 did losing spark the, um, the descent into darkness or was it something else?
 Um, I think my darkest points in poker were when I was wanting to quit and move on to
 other things, but I felt like I hadn't ticked all the boxes I wanted to tick. Like I wanted
 to be the most winningest female player, which is by itself a bad goal. Um, you know, that
 was one of my initial goals. And I was like, well, I haven't, you know, and I wanted to
 win a WPT event. I've won one of these, I won one of these, but I want one of those
 as well. And that sort of, again, like it's a drive of like overoptimization to random
 metrics that I decided were important, um, without much wisdom at the time, but then
 like carried on. Um, that made me continue chasing it longer than I still actually had
 the passion to chase it for. And I don't, I don't have any regrets that, you know, I
 played for as long as I did because who knows, you know, I wouldn't be sitting here. I wouldn't
 be living this incredible life that I'm living now. Um, this is, this is the height of your
 life right now. This is it. Peak experience. Absolute pinnacle here in your robot land
 with your creepy light. Um, no, it is. I mean, I, I wouldn't change a thing about my life
 right now and I feel very blessed to say that. Um, so, but the dark times were in the sort
 of like 2016 to 18, even sooner really where I was like, I had stopped loving the game
 and I was going through the motions and I would, and then I was like, you know, I would
 take the losses harder than I needed to because I'm like, ah, it's another one. And it was,
 I was aware that like, I felt like my life was ticking away and I was like, is this going
 to be what's on my tombstone? Oh yeah. She played the game of, you know, this zero sum
 game of poker slightly more optimally than her next opponent. Like cool, great legacy,
 you know? So I just want to, you know, I, there was something in me that knew I needed
 to be doing something more directly impactful. Um, and just meaningful. It was just like
 a search for meaning. And I think it's a thing. A lot of poker players, even a lot of, I imagine
 any games players who sort of love intellectual pursuits. Um, you know, I think you should
 ask Magnus Carlsen this question. I don't know what his name is.
 He's a boy from chess, right? Yeah. Like it must be so hard for him. You know, he's been
 on the top for so long and it's like, well now what he's got this incredible brain, like
 what to put it to. Um, and yeah, it's, it's this weird, uh, moment where I've just spoken
 with people that won multiple gold medals at the Olympics and the depression hits hard
 after you win. Don't come in crash.
 Because it's a kind of a goodbye saying goodbye to that person, to all the dreams you had
 that thought you thought would give meaning to your life. But in fact, life is full of
 constant pursuits of meaning. It's, it doesn't, you don't like arrive and figure it all out
 and there's endless bliss knowledge. It continues going on and on. You constantly have to figure
 out to rediscover yourself. And so for you, like that struggle to say goodbye to poker,
 you have to like find the next.
 There's always a bigger game. That's the thing. That's my motto is like, what's the next
 game? And more importantly, because obviously game usually implies zero sum, like what,
 what's the game, which is like Omni-win.
 Omni-win? Why is Omni-win so important?
 Because if everyone plays zero sum games, that's a fast track to either completely stagnate
 as a civilization, but more actually far more likely to extinct ourselves. Um, you know,
 like the playing field is finite. You know, nuclear powers are playing a game of poker
 with their, with, you know, but their chips are nuclear weapons, right? And the stakes
 have gotten so large that if anyone makes a single bet, you know, fires some weapons,
 the playing field breaks. I made a video on this. Like, you know, the, the, the, the playing
 field is finite. And if we keep playing these adverse adversarial zero sum games, uh, thinking
 that we, you know, in order for us to win, someone else has to lose, or if we lose that,
 you know, someone else wins that, that will extinct us. It's just a matter of when.
 What do you think about that, uh, mutually assured destruction, that very simple, almost
 to the point of caricaturing game theory idea that does seem to be at the core of why we
 haven't blown each other up yet with nuclear weapons. Do you think there's some truth to
 that, this kind of stabilizing force of mutually shared destruction? And do you think that's
 going to hold up through the 21st century?
 I mean, it's, it has, it has held. Yes. There's, there's definitely truth to it that it was
 a, a, you know, it's a Nash equilibrium.
 Yeah. Are you surprised it held this long?
 Um, it is crazy when you factor in all the like near miss accidental firings. Yes. That's
 makes me wonder like, you know, you know, you're familiar with the like quantum suicide
 thought experiment where it's basically like, uh, you have a, you know, like a Russian roulette
 type scenario, uh, hooked up to some kind of quantum event, you know, uh, particle splitting,
 um, or paraparticle splitting. And if it, you know, if it goes a, then the gun doesn't
 go off and it goes B, then it does go off and it kills you because you can only ever
 be in the universe, you know, assuming like the Everett branch, you know, multiverse theory,
 you will always only end up in the, in the branch where you continually make, you know,
 option A comes in, but you run that experiment enough times, it starts getting pretty damn,
 you know, out of the tree gets huge. There's a million different scenarios, but you'll
 always find yourself in this, in the one where it didn't go off. And, uh, and so from that
 perspective you, you are essentially immortal because someone, and you will only find yourself
 in the set of observers that make it down that path. So it's, it's, it's kind of a,
 that doesn't mean that this doesn't mean you're still not going to be fucked at some point
 in your life. No, of course not. No, I'm not advocating like that. We're all immortal because
 of this. It's just like a fun thought experiment. And the point is it like raises this thing
 of like these things called, uh, observer selection effects, which Bostrom and Nick
 Bostrom talks about a lot and I think people should go read. Um, it's really powerful,
 but I think it could be overextended that logic. I'm not sure exactly how it can be.
 I just feel like you can get, you can, um, overgeneralize that logic somehow. Well, no,
 I mean, it leaves you into like solipsism, which is a very dangerous mindset. Again,
 if everyone like falls into solipsism of like, well, I'll be fine. That's a great way of
 creating very self-terminating environment. Um, but my point is, is that with the nuclear
 weapons thing, um, there have been at least, I think it's 12 or 11, um, near misses of
 like just stupid things. Like, uh, there was moonrise over Norway and it made weird reflections
 off some glaciers in the mountains, which set off, I think the alarms of NORAD, uh,
 NORAD radar and that put them on high alert, nearly ready to shoot. And it was only because,
 um, the head of the Russian military happened to be at the UN in New York at the time that
 they go like, well, wait a second. Why would, why would they fire now when their guy is
 there? And it was only that lucky happens dance, which doesn't happen very often where
 they didn't then escalate it into firing. And there's a bunch of these different ones.
 Stanislav Petrov, like saved the person who should be the most famous person on earth
 because he's probably on expectations saved the most human lives of anyone, like billions
 of people by ignoring Russian orders to fire because he felt in his gut that actually this
 was a false alarm and it turned out to be, you know, very hard thing to do. Um, and there's
 so many of those scenarios that I can't help but wonder at this point that we aren't having
 this kind of like selection effect thing going on because you look back and you're like,
 geez, that's a lot of near misses. But of course we don't know the actual probabilities
 that they would have lent each one would have ended up in nuclear war. Maybe they were not
 that likely, but still the point is it's a very dark, stupid game that we're playing.
 Um, and it is an absolute moral imperative, if you ask me to get as many people thinking
 about ways to make this like very precarious because we're in a Nash equilibrium, but it's
 not like we're in the bottom of a pit. You know, if you would like map it topographically,
 um, it's not like a stable ball at the bottom of a thing. We're not an equilibrium because
 of that. We're on the top of a hill with the ball balanced on top and just any little nudge
 could send it flying down and you know, nuclear war pops off and hellfire and bad times.
 On the positive side, and life on earth to probably still continue and another intelligence
 civilization might still pop up. Maybe, it depends. Pick your X risk. Depends on the
 X risk. Nuclear war, sure. That's one of the perhaps less bad ones. Uh, green goo through
 synthetic biology, very bad. Will turn, you know, destroy all, uh, you know, organic matter,
 uh, through, you know, it's basically like a biological, uh, paper clip maximizer, also
 bad or AI type, you know, mass extinction thing as well would also be bad.
 Shh, they're listening. There's a robot right behind you. Okay, wait. Uh, so let me ask
 you about this from a game theory perspective. Do you think we're living in a simulation?
 Do you think we're listening, living inside a video game created by somebody else?
 Well, I think, well, so what was the second part of the question? Do I think we're living
 in a simulation and, uh, a simulation that is observed by somebody for purpose of entertainment.
 So like a video game, are we listening? How we, because there's a, it's like Phil Hellmuth
 type of situation, right? Like, um, there's a creepy level of like, this is kind of fun
 and interesting. Like there's a lot of interesting stuff going on. I mean, that could be somehow
 integrated into the evolutionary process where the way we perceive and are you asking me
 if I believe in God? Um, sounds like it kind of, but God seems to be not optimizing, uh,
 in the different formulations of God that we conceive of. He doesn't seem to be, or
 she optimizing for, uh, like personal entertainment. Maybe the older gods did, but the, the, you
 know, just like basically like a teenager in their mom's basement watching create a
 fun universe to observe what kind of crazy shit might happen.
 Okay. So to try and answer this, um, do I think there is some kind of extraneous intelligence
 to like our, you know, classic measurable universe that we, you know, can measure with
 convent, you know, through our current physics and, uh, uh, instruments? I think so. Yes.
 Um, partly because I've had just small little bits of evidence in my own, in my own life,
 which have made me question, like, so I was a diehard atheist, um, even five years ago.
 Uh, you know, I got into like the rationality community, big fan of less wrong, uh, continue
 to be an incredible resource. Um, but I've just started to have too many little snippets
 of experience, which don't make sense with the current sort of purely materialistic,
 um, explanation of how reality works. Um, isn't that just like a humbling practical
 realization that we don't know how reality works? Isn't that just a reminder to yourself?
 Yeah, no, it's a reminder of epistemic humility because I felt too hard, you know, same, same
 as people, like, I think, you know, many people who are just like, my religion is the way
 this is the correct way. This is the work. This is the law. Um, you are immoral if you
 don't follow this blah, blah, blah. I think they are lacking epistemic humility. They're
 a little too, too much hubris there, but similarly, I think the sort of the Richard Dawkins brand
 of atheism is too, is too rigid as well and doesn't, you know, there's a way to try and
 navigate these questions, which still honors the scientific method, which I still think
 is our best sort of realm of like reasonable inquiry, you know, a method of inquiry. Um,
 so an example, um, I have two kind of notable examples that like really rattled my, my,
 my cage. Uh, the first one was actually in 2010, early on in, um, uh, quite early on
 in my poker career. And I, the, the, the, uh, the, remember the Icelandic volcano that
 erupted that like shut down kind of all Atlantic airspace. Um, and I, it meant I got stuck
 down in the south of France. I was there for something else. Um, and I couldn't get home
 and someone said, well, there's a big poker tournament happening in Italy. Maybe do you
 want to go? I was like, all right, sure. Like let's, you know, got a train across, found
 a way to get there. Um, and the buy-in was 5,000 euros, which was much bigger than my
 bankroll would normally allow. And so I, uh, played a feeder tournament, won my way in
 kind of like I did with the Monte Carlo big one. Um, uh, so then I won my way, you know,
 from 500 euros into 5,000 euros to play this thing. And on day one of then the big tournament,
 which turned out to have, it was the biggest tournament ever held in Europe at the time.
 It got over like 1200 people, absolutely huge. And I remember they dimmed the lights, uh,
 for before, you know, the normal shuffle up and deal, uh, to tell everyone to start playing
 and they played, uh, chemical brothers, Hey boy, Hey girl. Um, which I don't know why
 it's notable, but it was just like a really, it was a song I always liked. It was like
 one of these like pumped me up songs and I was sitting there thinking, Oh yeah, it's
 exciting. I'm playing this really big tournament and out of nowhere, just suddenly this voice
 in my head just, and it sounded like my own sort of, you know, when you say you think
 in your mind, you hear a voice kind of, right. At least I do. Um, and so it sounded like
 my own voice and it said, you are going to win this tournament. And it was so powerful
 that I got this like wave of like, you know, sort of goosebumps down my body. And I even,
 I remember looking around being like, did anyone else hear that? And obviously people
 are in their phones like no, no one else heard it. And I was like, okay. Six days later,
 I win the tournament out of 1200 people. And I, I, I don't know how to explain it. Um,
 okay. Yes. Maybe I have that feeling before every time I play and it's just that I happen
 to, you know, because I won the tournament, I retroactively remembered it, but
 Or the, or the feeling gave you a kind of now from the film, Hellmuthian.
 Well, exactly.
 Like it gave you a confident, a deep confidence.
 And it did. It definitely did. Like I remember then feeling this, like sort of, well, although
 I remember then on day one, I then went and lost half my stack quite early on. And I remember
 thinking like, oh, well, that was bullshit. You know, what kind of premonition is this?
 Yes.
 Thinking, oh, I'm out. But you know, I managed to like keep it together and recover. And
 then, and then just went like pretty perfectly from then on. And either way, it definitely
 instilled me with this confidence. And I don't want to put, I don't, I can't put an explanation
 like, you know, was it some, you know, huge extra extra, you know, supernatural thing
 driving me or was it just my own self-confidence and someone that just made me make the right
 decisions? I don't know. And I don't, I'm not going to put a frame on it. And I think
 I know a good explanation. So we're a bunch of NPCs living in this world created by in
 the simulation and then people, not people, creatures from outside of the simulation sort
 of can tune in and play your character. And that feeling you got is somebody just like,
 they got to play a poker tournament through you.
 Honestly, it felt like that. It did actually feel a little bit like that, but it's been
 12 years now. I've retold the story many times. Like I don't even know how much I can trust
 my memory.
 You're just an NPC retelling the same story. That's because they just played the tournament
 and left.
 Yeah, they're like, oh, that was fun. Cool.
 Yeah, cool. Next. And now you're for the rest of your life left as a boring NPC retelling
 this story of greatness.
 Well, and what was interesting was that after that, then I didn't obviously win a major
 tournament for quite a long time and it left. That was actually another sort of dark period
 because I had this incredible, like the highs of winning that, you know, just on a like
 material level were insane. Winning the money. I was on the front page of newspapers because
 I was like this girl that came out of nowhere and won this big thing. And so again, like
 sort of chasing that feeling was difficult. But then on top of that, there was this feeling
 of like almost being touched by something bigger that was like, ah.
 And also maybe, did you have a sense that I might be somebody special? Like this kind
 of, I think that's the confidence thing that maybe you could do something special in this
 world after all kind of feeling.
 I definitely, I mean, this is a thing I think everybody wrestles with to an extent, right?
 We are truly the protagonists in our own lives. And so it's a natural bias, human bias to
 feel special. And I think, and in some ways we are special. Every single person is special
 because you are that, the universe does, the world literally does revolve around you. That's
 the thing in some respect. But of course, if you then zoom out and take the amalgam
 of everyone's experiences, then no, it doesn't. So there is this shared sort of objective
 reality, but sorry, this objective reality that is shared, but then there's also this
 subjective reality, which is truly unique to you. And I think both of those things coexist.
 And it's not like one is correct and one isn't. And again, anyone who's like, oh no, your
 lived experience is everything versus your lived experience is nothing. No, it's a blend
 between these two things. They can exist concurrently.
 But there's a certain kind of sense that at least I've had my whole life. And I think
 a lot of people have this as like, well, I'm just like this little person. Surely I can't
 be one of those people that do the big thing. Right? There's all these big people doing
 big things. There's big actors and actresses, big musicians, there's big business owners
 and all that kind of stuff, scientists and so on. I have my own subjective experience
 that I enjoy and so on, but there's like a different layer. Surely I can't do those great
 things. I mean, one of the things just having interacted with a lot of great people, I realized,
 no, they're like just the same humans as me. And that realization I think is really empowering.
 To remind yourself-
 But are they?
 What?
 But are they?
 Are they?
 Depends on some, yeah.
 They're like a bag of insecurities and peculiar sort of like their own little weirdnesses
 and so on. I should say also not, they have the capacity for brilliance, but they're not
 generically brilliant. Like, you know, we tend to say this person or that person is
 brilliant, but really, no, they're just like sitting there and thinking through stuff,
 just like the rest of us. I think they're in the habit of thinking through stuff seriously
 and they've built up a habit of not allowing their mind to get trapped in a bunch of bullshit
 and minutiae of day to day life. They really think big ideas, but those big ideas, it's
 like allowing yourself the freedom to think big, to realize that you can be one that actually
 solved this particular big problem. First identify a big problem that you care about,
 then like I can actually be the one that solves this problem. And like allowing yourself to
 believe that. And I think sometimes you do need to have like that shock go through your
 body and a voice tells you, you're going to win this tournament.
 Exactly. And whether it was, it's this idea of useful fictions. So again, like going through
 the classic rationalist training of less wrong, where it's like, you want your map, you know,
 the image you have of the world in your head to as accurately match up with how the world
 actually is. You want the map and the territory to perfectly align as, you know, you want
 it to be as an accurate representation as possible. I don't know if I fully subscribed
 to that anymore, having now had these moments of like feeling of something either bigger
 or just actually just being overconfident. Like there is value in overconfidence sometimes.
 If you would, you know, take Magnus Carlsen, right? If he, I'm sure from a young age, he
 knew he was very talented, but I wouldn't be surprised if he was also had something
 in him to, well actually maybe he's a bad example because he truly is the world's greatest.
 But someone who it was unclear whether they were going to be the world's greatest, but
 ended up doing extremely well because they had this innate deep self-confidence, this
 like even overblown idea of how good their relative skill level is. That gave them the
 confidence to then pursue this thing and like with the kind of focus and dedication that
 it requires to excel in whatever it is you're trying to do, you know? And so there are these
 useful fictions and that's where I think I diverged slightly with the classic, the classic
 sort of rationalist community because that's a field that is worth studying of like how
 the stories we tell, what the stories we tell to ourselves, even if they are actually false
 and even if we suspect they might be false, how it's better to sort of have that like
 little bit of faith, like value in faith, I think actually. And that's partly another
 thing that's now led me to explore, you know, the concept of God, whether you want to call
 it a simulator, the classic theological thing. I think we're all like elucidating to the
 same thing. Now, I don't know, I'm not saying, you know, because obviously the Christian
 God is like, you know, all benevolent, endless love. The simulation, at least one of the
 simulation hypothesis is like, as you said, like a teenager in his bedroom who doesn't
 really care, doesn't give a shit about the individuals within there. It just like wants
 to see how this thing plays out because it's curious and it could turn it off like that.
 You know, where on the, you know, where on the sort of psychopathy to benevolent spectrum
 God is, I don't know. But having this, just having a little bit of faith that there is
 something else out there that might be interested in our outcome is, I think, an essential thing
 actually for people to find. A, because it creates commonality between, it's something
 we can all share and like it is uniquely humbling of all of us to an extent. It's like a common
 objective. But B, it gives people that little bit of like reserve, you know, when things
 get really dark. And I do think things are going to get pretty dark over the next few
 years. But it gives that like, to think that there's something out there that actually
 wants our game to keep going. I keep calling it the game, you know, it's a thing C and
 I like we call it the game.
 You and C is, AKA Grimes, call what the game? Everything, the whole thing?
 Yeah, we joke about like-
 So everything is a game?
 Well, the universe, like what if it's a game and the goal of the game is to figure out
 like, well, either how to beat it, how to get out of it. You know, maybe this universe
 is an escape room, like a giant escape room. And the goal is to figure out, put all the
 pieces of puzzle, figure out how it works in order to like unlock this like hyperdimensional
 key and get out beyond what it is.
 No, but then, so you're saying it's like different levels and it's like a cage within
 a cage within a cage and never like one cage at a time, you figure out how to escape that.
 Right. Like a new level up, you know, like us becoming multi-planetary would be a level
 up or us, you know, figuring out how to upload our consciousnesses to the thing that would
 probably be a leveling up or spiritually, you know, humanity becoming more combined
 and less adversarial and bloodthirsty and us becoming a little bit more enlightened,
 that would be a leveling up. You know, there's many different frames to it, whether it's
 physical, you know, digital or like metaphysical.
 I wonder what the levels, I think level one for earth is probably the biological evolutionary
 process. It's like going from single cell organisms to early humans. There may be level
 two is whatever is happening inside our minds and creating ideas and creating technologies.
 That's like evolutionary process of ideas. And then a multi-planetary is interesting.
 Is that fundamentally different from what we're doing here on earth? Probably because
 it allows us to like exponentially scale.
 It delays the Malthusian trap, right? It's a way to keep the playing field, to make the
 playing field get larger so that it can accommodate more of our stuff, more of us. And that's
 a good thing, but I don't know if it like fully solves this issue of, well, this thing
 called MOLLEC, which we haven't talked about yet, but which is basically, I call it the
 God of unhealthy competition.
 Yeah, let's go to MOLLEC. What's MOLLEC? You did a great video on MOLLEC, one aspect
 of it, the application of it to it.
 Instagram beauty filters.
 True.
 Very niche. I wanted to start off small. So MOLLEC was originally coined as, well, so
 apparently back in the like Canaanite times, it was this ancient Carthaginian, I can never
 say Carthaginian, somewhere around like 300 BC or 200 AD, I don't know. There was supposedly
 this death cult who would sacrifice their children to this awful demon god thing they
 called MOLLEC in order to get power to win wars. So really dark, horrible things. And
 it was literally like about child sacrifice, whether they actually existed or not, we don't
 know, but in mythology they did. And this god that they worshiped was this thing called
 MOLLEC. And then, I don't know, it seemed like it was kind of quiet throughout history
 in terms of mythology beyond that, until this movie Metropolis in 1927 talked about this,
 you see that there was this incredible futuristic city that everyone was living great in. But
 then the protagonist goes underground into the sewers and sees that the city is run by
 this machine. And this machine basically would just kill the workers all the time because
 it was just so hard to keep it running. They were always dying. So there was all this suffering
 that was required in order to keep the city going. And then the protagonist has this vision
 that this machine is actually this demon MOLLEC. So again, it's like this sort of mechanistic
 consumption of humans in order to get more power. And then Allen Ginsberg wrote a poem
 in the 60s, which incredible poem called Howl about this thing MOLLEC. And a lot of people
 sort of quite understandably take the interpretation of that he's talking about capitalism. But
 then the sort of piece to resistance that's moved MOLLEC into this idea of game theory
 was Scott Alexander of Slate Style Codex wrote this incredible one, literally, I think it
 might be my favorite piece of writing of all time. It's called Meditations on MOLLEC. Everyone
 must go read it.
 I think Codex is a blog.
 It's a blog. Yes. We can link to it in the show notes or something, right? No, don't.
 Yes. Yes. But I like how you assume I have a professional operation going on. I shall
 try to remember.
 You're giving the impression of it.
 Yeah. I'll look, please, if I don't please somebody in the comments remind me. If you
 don't know this blog, it's one of the best blogs ever, probably. You should probably
 be following it. Are blogs still a thing? I think they are still a thing.
 Yeah. He's migrated onto Substack, but yeah, it's still a blog. Anyway.
 Substack better not fuck things up.
 I hope not. Yeah. I hope they don't turn MOLLEC-y, which will mean something to people when we
 continue.
 When they stop interrupting for once.
 So anyway, he writes this piece, Meditations on MOLLEC, and basically he analyzes the poem
 and he's like, okay, so it seems to be something relating to where competition goes wrong.
 And MOLLEC was historically this thing of like where people would sacrifice a thing
 that they care about, in this case, children, their own children, in order to gain power,
 a competitive advantage. And if you look at almost everything that sort of goes wrong
 in our society, it's that same process. So with the Instagram beauty filters thing, if
 you're trying to become a famous Instagram model, you are incentivized to post the hottest
 pictures of yourself that you can. You're trying to play that game. There's a lot of
 hot women on Instagram. How do you compete against them? You post really hot pictures
 and that's how you get more likes. As technology gets better, more makeup techniques come along.
 And then more recently, these beauty filters where like at the touch of a button, it makes
 your face look absolutely incredible compared to your natural face. These technologies come
 along. Everyone is incentivized to that short term strategy. But on net, it's bad for everyone
 because now everyone is kind of feeling like they have to use these things. And these things
 like they make you. The reason why I talked about them in this video is because I noticed
 it myself. I was trying to grow my Instagram for a while. I've given up on it now. And
 I noticed these filters, how good they made me look. And I'm like, well, I know that everyone
 else is kind of doing it. Go subscribe to Liv's Instagram. Please, don't have to use
 the filters. Post a bunch of, yeah, make it blow up. So yeah, it's. You felt the pressure
 actually. Exactly. These short term incentives to do this thing that either sacrifices your
 integrity or something else in order to stay competitive, which on aggregate turns like
 creates this sort of race to the bottom spiral where everyone else ends up in a situation
 which is worse off than if they hadn't started, than they were before. Kind of like if like
 at a football stadium, the system is so badly designed, a competitive system of everyone
 sitting and having a view that if someone at the very front stands up to get an even
 better view, it forces everyone else behind to like adopt that same strategy just to get
 to where they were before. But now everyone's stuck standing up. Like, so you need this
 like top down God's eye coordination to make it go back to the better state. But from within
 the system, you can't actually do that. So that's kind of what this Moloch thing is.
 It's this thing that makes people sacrifice values in order to optimize for the winning
 the game in question, the short term game. But this, this Moloch, can you attribute it
 to any one centralized source or is it an emergent phenomena from a large collection
 of people?
 Exactly that it's, it's an emergent phenomena. It's, it's a force of game theory. It's a
 force of bad incentives on a multi agent system where you've got more, you know, prisoner's
 dilemma is technically a kind of Molochi system as well, but it's just a two player thing.
 But another word for Moloch is it multipolar trap, where basically you just got a lot of
 different people all competing for some kind of prize. And it would be better if everyone
 didn't do this one shitty strategy. But because that strategy gives you a short term advantage,
 everyone's incentivized to do it. And so everyone ends up doing it.
 So the responsibility for, I mean, social media is a really nice place for a large number
 of people to play game theory. And so they also have the ability to then design the rules
 of the game. And is it on them to try to anticipate what kind of like to do the thing that poker
 players are doing to run simulation?
 Ideally, that would have been great if, you know, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack and all the,
 you know, the Twitter founders and everyone, if they had at least just run a few simulations
 of how their algorithms would, you know, different types of algorithms would turn out for society,
 that would have been great.
 It's really difficult to do that kind of deep philosophical thinking about thinking about
 humanity actually. So not, not kind of this level of how do we optimize engagement, or
 what brings people joy in the short term, but how is this thing going to change the
 way people see the world? How's it going to get morphed and iterative game played into
 something that will change society forever? That requires some deep thinking. I hope there's
 meetings like that inside companies, but I haven't seen them.
 There aren't. That's the problem. And it's difficult because like when you're starting
 up a social media company, you know, you're aware that you've got investors to please,
 there's bills to pay, you know, there's only so much R&D you can afford to do. You've got
 all these like incredible pressures and bad incentives to get on and just build your thing
 as quickly as possible and start making money. And, you know, I don't think anyone intended
 when they built these social media platforms. And just to like preface it, so the reason
 why social media is relevant, because it's a very good example of like, everyone these
 days is optimizing for clicks, whether it's the social media platforms themselves, because
 you know, every click gets more impressions and impressions pay for, you know, they get
 advertising dollars, or whether it's individual influencers, or, you know, whether it's the
 New York Times or whoever, they're trying to get their story to go viral. So everyone's
 got this bad incentive of using, you know, as you called it, the clickbait industrial
 complex. That's a very mollicy system, because everyone is now using worse and worse tactics
 in order to like try and win this attention game. And yeah, so ideally, these companies
 would have had enough slack in the beginning, in order to run these experiments to see,
 okay, what are the ways this could possibly go wrong for people? What are the ways that
 Moloch, they should be aware of this concept of Moloch and realize that it's, whenever
 you have a highly competitive multi agent system, which social media is a classic example
 of millions of agents, all trying to compete for likes and so on, and you try and bring
 all this complexity down into like very small metrics, such as number of likes, number of
 retweets, whatever the algorithm optimizes for that is a guaranteed recipe for this stuff
 to go wrong and become a race to the bottom.
 I think there should be an honesty when founders, I think there's a hunger for that kind of
 transparency of like, we don't know what the fuck we're doing. This is a fascinating experiment.
 We're all running as a human civilization. Let's try this out. And like, actually, just
 be honest about this, that we're all like these weird rats and amaze. None of us are
 controlling it. There's this kind of sense like the founders, the CEO of Instagram or
 whatever, Mark Zuckerberg has a control and he's like, like with strings playing people.
 No, they're, he's at the mercy of this is like everyone else. He's just like trying
 to do his best. And like, I think putting on a smile and doing over polished videos
 about how Instagram and Facebook are good for you, I think is not the right way to,
 to actually ask some of the deepest questions we get to ask as a society. How do we design
 the game such that we build a better world?
 I think a big part of this as well is people, there's this, there's this philosophy, particularly
 in Silicon Valley of well, techno optimism, technology will solve all our issues. And
 there's a steel man argument to that where yes, technology has solved a lot of problems
 and can potentially solve a lot future ones, but it can also, it's always a double edged
 sword and particularly as you know, technology gets more and more powerful and we've now
 got like big data and we're able to do all kinds of like psychological manipulation with
 it and so on. It's, technology is not a values neutral thing. People think, I used to always
 think this myself, it's like this naive view that, oh, technology is completely neutral.
 It's just, it's the humans that either make it good or bad. No, to the point we're at
 now, the technology that we are creating, they are social technologies. They literally
 dictate how humans now form social groups and so on beyond that. And beyond that, it
 also then, that gives rise to like the memes that we then like coalesce around. And that,
 if you have the stack that way where it's technology driving social interaction, which
 then drives like memetic culture and like which ideas become popular, that's Moloch.
 And we need the other way around. We need it. So we need to figure out what are the
 good memes, what are the good values that we think we need to optimize for that like
 makes people happy and healthy and like keeps society as robust and safe as possible, then
 figure out what the social structure around those should be. And only then do we figure
 out technology. But we're doing the other way around. And, you know, like as much as
 I love in many ways, the culture of Silicon Valley and like, you know, I do think that
 technology has, you know, I don't want to knock it. It's done so many wonderful things
 for us. Same with capitalism. There are, we have to like be honest with ourselves. We're
 getting to a point where we are losing control of this very powerful machine that we have
 created.
 So, can you redesign the machine within the game? Can you just have, can you understand
 the game enough? Okay, this is the game. And this is how we start to reemphasize the memes
 that matter. The memes that bring out the best in us. You know, like the way I try to
 be in real life and the way I try to be online is to be about kindness and love. And I feel
 like I'm sometimes get like criticized for being naive and all those kinds of things.
 But I feel like I'm just trying to live within this game. I'm trying to be authentic. Yeah.
 But also like, hey, it's kind of fun to do this. Like you guys should try this too. You
 know that. And that's like trying to redesign some aspects of the game within the game.
 Is that possible?
 I don't know, but I think we should try. I don't think we have an option but to try.
 Well, the other option is to create new companies or to pressure companies that or anyone who
 has control of the rules of the game.
 I think we need to be doing all of the above. I think we need to be thinking hard about
 what are the kind of positive, healthy memes. You know, as Elon said, he who controls the
 memes controls the universe. I think he did. But there's truth to that. There is wisdom
 in that because memes have driven history. You know, we are a cultural species. That's
 what sets us apart from chimpanzees and everything else. We have the ability to learn and evolve
 through culture as opposed to biology or like, you know, classic physical constraints. And
 that means culture is incredibly powerful and we can create and become victim to very
 bad memes or very good ones. But we do have some agency over which memes, you know, we
 not only put out there, but we also like subscribe to. So I think we need to take that approach.
 We also need to, you know, because I don't want the, you know, I'm making this video
 right now called the Attention Wars, which is about like how Moloch, like the media machine
 is this Moloch machine. Well, is this kind of like blind dumb thing where everyone is
 optimizing for engagement in order to win their share of the attention pie. And then
 if you zoom out, it's really like Moloch that's pulling the strings because the only thing
 that benefits from this in the end, you know, like our information ecosystem is breaking
 down. Like we have, you look at the state of the US, it's in, we're in a civil war.
 It's just not a physical war. It's an information war and people are becoming more fractured
 in terms of what their actual shared reality is. Like truly like an extreme left person
 and extreme right person. Like they literally live in different worlds in their minds at
 this point and it's getting more and more amplified. And this force is like a razor
 blade pushing through everything. It doesn't matter how innocuous a topic is, it will find
 a way to split into this bifurcated culture war. And it's fucking terrifying.
 Because that maximizes attention. That's like an emergent Moloch type force that takes
 any, anything, any topic and cuts through it so that it can split nicely into two groups.
 One that's...
 Well, it's whatever, yeah, all everyone is trying to do within the system is just maximize
 whatever gets them the most attention because they're just trying to make money so they
 can keep their thing going. Right? And the way, the best emotion for getting attention
 in, well, because it's not just about attention on the internet, it's engagement. That's the
 key thing. Right? In order for something to go viral, you need people to actually engage
 with it. They need to like comment or retweet or whatever. And of all the emotions, there's
 like seven classic shared emotions that studies have found that all humans, even from like
 previously uncontacted tribes have. Some of those are negative, like sadness, disgust,
 anger, et cetera, summer positive happiness, excitement, and so on. The one that happens
 to be the most useful for the internet is anger. Because anger is, it's such an active
 emotion. If you want people to engage, if someone's scared, and I'm not just like talking
 out my ass here, there are studies here that have looked into this. Whereas like if someone's
 like disgusted or fearful, they actually tend to then be like, oh, I don't want to deal
 with this. So they're less likely to actually engage and share it and so on. They're just
 going to be like, ugh. Whereas if they're enraged by a thing, well, now that triggers
 all the old tribalism emotions. And so that's how then things get sort of spread much more
 easily. They out-compete all the other memes in the ecosystem. And so the attention economy,
 the wheels that make it go around is rage. I did a tweet, the problem with raging against
 the machine is that the machine has learned to feed off rage because it is feeding off
 our rage. That's the thing that's now keeping it going. So the more we get angry, the worse
 it gets.
 So the mullet in this attention, in the war of attention is constantly maximizing rage.
 What it is optimizing for is engagement and it happens to be that engagement is propaganda.
 It just sounds like everything is putting, more and more things are being put through
 this like propagandist lens of winning whatever the war is in question, whether it's the culture
 war or the Ukraine war.
 Yeah.
 Well, I think the silver lining of this, do you think it's possible that in the long arc
 of this process, you actually do arrive at greater wisdom and more progress. It just,
 in the moment, it feels like people are turning each other to shreds over ideas. But if you
 think about it, one of the magic things about democracy and so on is you have the blue versus
 red constantly fighting. It's almost like they're in discourse, creating devil's advocate,
 making devils out of each other. And through that process, discussing ideas, like almost
 really embodying different ideas, just to yell at each other and through the yelling
 over the period of decades, maybe centuries, figuring out a better system. Like in the
 moment it feels fucked up, but in the long arc, it actually is productive.
 I hope so. That said, we are now in the era of, just as we have weapons of mass destruction
 with nuclear weapons that can break the whole playing field, we now are developing weapons
 of informational mass destruction, information weapons, WMDs that basically can be used for
 propaganda or just manipulating people however they is needed, whether that's through dumb
 TikTok videos or, there are significant resources being put in. I don't mean to sound like,
 you know, too doom and gloom, but there are bad actors out there. That's the thing. There
 are plenty of good actors within the system who are just trying to stay afloat in the
 game. So we're effectively doing monarchy things. But then on top of that, we have actual
 bad actors who are intentionally trying to like manipulate the other side into doing
 things.
 And using, so because it's a digital space, they're able to use artificial actors, meaning
 bots.
 So it's like botnets, you know, and this is a whole new situation that we've never had
 before.
 It's exciting. You know what I want to do? Because there is, you know, people are talking
 about bots manipulating and like malicious bots that are basically spreading propaganda.
 I want to create like a bot army for like that, like fights that. Yeah, exactly. For
 love that fights. I mean, you know, there's, there's, I mean, there's truth to fight fire
 with fire. It's like, but how you always have to be careful whenever you create again, like
 Moloch is very tricky.
 Yeah. Hitler was trying to spread the love too.
 Yeah. So we thought, but you know, I, I, I agree with you that like, that is a thing
 that should be considered, but there is again, everyone, the road to hell is paved in good
 intentions and this is, there's, there's always unforeseen circumstance, you know, outcomes,
 externalities of you trying to adopt a thing, even if you do it in the very best of faith.
 But you can learn lessons of history. If you can run some Sims on it first, absolutely.
 But also there's certain aspects of a system as we've learned through history that do better
 than others. Like for example, don't have a dictator. So like if I were to create this
 bot army, it's not good for me to have full control over it because in the beginning I
 might have a good understanding of what's good and not, but over time that starts to
 get deviated because I'll get annoyed at some assholes and I'll think, okay, wouldn't it
 be nice to get rid of those assholes? But then that power starts getting to your head.
 You become corrupted. That's basic human nature. So distribute the power.
 We need, we need a, a love botnet on a Dow. A Dow love botnet.
 Yeah. But, and without a leader, like without...
 Exactly. A distributed, right. But yeah, without any kind of centralized...
 Yeah, without even, you know, basically the more control, the more you can decentralize
 the control of a thing to people, you know, but the balance...
 But then you still need the ability to coordinate because that's the issue when you, if something
 is too, you know, that's really to me, like the culture wars is the bigger war we're dealing
 with is actually between the, like the sort of the, I don't know what even the term is
 for it, but like centralization versus decentralization. That's the tension we're seeing.
 Power in control by a few versus completely distributed. And the trouble is if you have
 a fully centralized thing, then you're at risk of tyranny, you know, Stalin type things
 can happen or completely distributed. Now you're at risk of complete anarchy and chaos
 where you can't even coordinate to like on, you know, when there's like a pandemic or
 anything like that. So it's like, what is the right balance to strike between these
 two structures?
 Can't Moloch really take hold in a fully decentralized system? That's one of the dangers too.
 Yes. Very vulnerable to Moloch.
 So the dictator can commit huge atrocities, but they can also make sure the infrastructure
 works and trains run on time.
 They have that God's eye view at least. They have the ability to create like laws and rules
 that like force coordination, which stops Moloch. But then you're vulnerable to that
 dictator getting infected with like this, with some kind of psychopathy type thing.
 What's reverse Moloch?
 So great question. So that's where I've been working on this series. It's been driving
 me insane for the last year and a half. I did the first one a year ago. I can't believe
 it's nearly been a year. The second one, hopefully we're coming out in like a month. And my goal
 at the end of the series is to like present, because basically I'm painting the picture
 of like what Moloch is and how it's affecting almost all these issues in our society and
 how it's, you know, driving. It's like kind of the generator function, as people describe
 it, of existential risk. And then at the end of that-
 Wait, wait. The generator function of existential risk. So you're saying Moloch is sort of the
 engine that creates a bunch of X risks.
 Yes, not all of them. Like, you know, a-
 It's a cool phrase. Generator function of existential-
 It's not my phrase. It's Daniel Schmackenberger. I got that from him.
 Of course. All things. It's like all roads lead back to Daniel Schmackenberger, I think.
 The dude is brilliant. He's really, really brilliant.
 And after that it's Mark Twain. But anyway, sorry. Totally rude interruptions from me.
 No, it's fine. So not all X risks. So like an asteroid technically isn't because it's,
 you know, it's just like this one big external thing. It's not like a competition thing going
 on. But, you know, synthetic bioweapons, that's one because everyone's incentivized to build,
 even for defense, you know, bad viruses, you know, just to threaten someone else, et cetera.
 Or AI, technically the race to AGI is kind of potentially a molliky situation. But yeah,
 so if mollik is this like generator function that's driving all of these issues over the
 coming century that might wipe us out, what's the inverse? And so far what I've gotten to
 is this character that I want to put out there called Win-Win. Because mollik is the god
 of lose-lose, ultimately. It masquerades as the god of win-lose, but in reality it's lose-lose.
 One ends up worse off. So I was like, well, what's the opposite of that? It's Win-Win.
 And I was thinking for ages, like, what's a good name for this character? And then the
 morrow is like, okay, well, don't try and think through it logically. What's the vibe
 of Win-Win? And to me, like in my mind, mollik is like, and I address it in the video, like
 it's red and black. It's kind of like very, you know, hyper focused on its one goal. You
 must win. So Win-Win is kind of actually like these colors. It's like purple, turquoise.
 Loves games too. It loves a little bit of healthy competition, but constrained, like
 kind of like before, like knows how to ring fence zero-sum competition into like just
 the right amount whereby its externalities can be controlled and kept positive. And then
 beyond that, it also loves cooperation, coordination, love, all these other things. But it's also
 kind of like mischievous, like, you know, it will have a good time. It's not like kind
 of like boring, you know, like, oh God, it's, it's, it knows how to have fun. It can get
 like, it can get down. But ultimately it's like unbelievably wise and it just wants the
 game to keep going. And I call it Win-Win.
 That's a good like pet name.
 Yes.
 Win-Win.
 Win-Win.
 Win-Win, right? And I think its formal name when it has to do like official functions
 is Omnia.
 Omnia.
 Yeah.
 From like omniscience kind of words. Why Omnia? You just like Omnia?
 Because like OmnWin.
 OmniWin.
 But I'm open to suggestions. I would like, you know, and this is-
 I like Omnia. Yeah.
 Yeah. Like that's it.
 But there is an angelic kind of sense to Omnia though. So Win-Win is more fun. So it's more
 like it embraces the, the, the, the fun aspect. I mean, there, there is something about sort
 of, there's some aspect to Win-Win interactions that requires embracing the, the chaos of
 the game and enjoying the game itself. I don't know. I don't know what that is. That's almost
 like a Zen like appreciation of, of the game itself, not optimizing for the consequences
 of the game.
 Right. Well, it's, it's recognizing the value of competition in of itself about, it's not
 like about winning. It's about you enjoying the process of having a competition and not
 knowing whether you're going to win or lose this little thing. But then also being aware
 that, you know, what's the boundary? How big do I want competition to be? Because one of
 the reasons why Moloch is doing so well now in our society, in our civilization is because
 we haven't been able to ring fence competition. You know, and so it's just having all these
 negative externalities and it's, we've completely lost control of it. You know, it's, I think
 my guess is, and now we're getting really like, you know, metaphysical technically,
 but I think we'll be, we'll be in a more interesting universe if we have one that has both pure
 cooperation, lots of cooperation and some pockets of competition than one that's purely
 competition, cooperation entirely. Like it's good to have some little zero sum this bits,
 but I don't know that fully and I'm not qualified as a philosopher to know that.
 And that's what reverse Moloch. So this kind of win-win creature is in a system is an antidote
 to the Moloch system.
 Yes. And I don't know how it's going to do that.
 But it's good to kind of try to start to formulate different ideas, different frameworks of how
 we think about that.
 Exactly.
 At the small scale of a collection of individuals, a large scale of a society.
 Exactly. It's a meme. I think it's, I think it's an example of a good meme and I'm open.
 I'd love to hear feedback from people if they think it's, you know, they have a better idea
 or it's not, you know, but it's the direction of memes that we need to spread this idea
 of like, look for the win-wins in life.
 Well on the topic of beauty filters, so in that particular context where Moloch creates
 negative consequences, what, you know, the Staski said beauty will save the world. What
 is beauty anyway? What, it would be nice to just try to discuss what kind of thing we
 would like to converge towards in our understanding of what is beautiful.
 So to me, I think something is beautiful when it can't be reduced down to easy metrics.
 Like if you think of a tree, what is it about a tree, like a big ancient beautiful tree,
 right? What is it about it that we find so beautiful? It's not, you know, the sweetness
 of its fruit or the value of its lumber. It's this entirety of it that is, there's these
 immeasurable qualities. It's like almost like a qualia of it. That's both like it walks
 this fine line between, well it's got lots of patenicity, but it's not overly predictable.
 Again, it walks this fine line between order and chaos. It's a very highly complex system.
 In the, you know, you can't, it's evolving over time. You know, the definition of a complex
 versus, and this is another Schmackenberger thing, you know, a complex versus a complicated
 system. A complicated system can be sort of broken down into bits, understood and then
 put back together. A complex system is kind of like a black box. It does all this crazy
 stuff, but if you take it apart, you can't put it back together again because it's, there's
 all these intricacies. And also very importantly, like the sum of the parts, sorry, the sum
 of the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts. And that's where the beauty
 lies, I think. And I think that extends to things like art as well. Like there's something
 immeasurable about it. There's something we can't break down to a narrow metric.
 Does that extend to humans, you think?
 Yeah, absolutely.
 So how can Instagram reveal that kind of beauty, the complexity of a human being?
 Good question.
 This takes us back to our dating sites and Goodreads, I think.
 Very good question. I mean, well, I know what it shouldn't do. It shouldn't try and like,
 right now, you know, one of the, I was talking to like a social media expert recently because
 I was like, I hate-
 There's such a thing as a social media expert?
 Oh yeah. There are like agencies out there that you can like outsource because I'm thinking
 about working with one to like, I want to start a podcast.
 You should, you should have done it a long time ago.
 Working on it. It's going to be called Win Win. And it's going to be about this like
 positive stuff. And the thing that, you know, they all come back and say is like, well,
 you need to like figure out what your thing is. You know, you need to narrow down what
 your thing is and then just follow that. Have like a sort of a formula because that's what
 people want. They want to know that they're coming back to the same thing. And that's
 the advice on YouTube, Twitter, you name it. And that's why, and the trouble with that
 is that it's a complexity reduction. And generally speaking, complexity reduction is bad. It's
 making things more, it's an oversimplification. Not that simplification is always a bad thing.
 But when you're trying to take, you know, what is social media doing? It's trying to
 like encapsulate the human experience and put it into digital form and commodify it
 to an extent. That, so you do that, you compress people down into these like narrow things.
 And that's why I think it's kind of ultimately fundamentally incompatible with at least my
 definition of beauty.
 Yeah. It's interesting because there is some sense in which a simplification sort of in
 the Einstein kind of sense of a really complex idea, a simplification in a way that still
 captures some core power of an idea of a person is also beautiful. And so maybe it's possible
 for social media to do that. A presentation, a sort of a slither, a slice, a look into
 a person's life that reveals something real about them, but in a simple way, in a way
 that can be displayed graphically or through words, some way, I mean, in some way Twitter
 can do that kind of thing. A very few set of words can reveal the intricacies of a person.
 Of course, the viral machine that spreads those words often results in people taking
 the thing out of context. Not, people often don't read tweets in the context of the human
 being that wrote them. The full history of the tweets they've written, the education
 level, the humor level, the worldview they're playing around with, all that context is forgotten
 and people just see the different words. So that can lead to trouble. But in a certain
 sense, if you do take it in context, it reveals some kind of quirky little beautiful idea
 or a profound little idea from that particular person that shows something about that person.
 So in that sense, Twitter can be more successful. If we talk about mollux is driving a better
 kind of incentive.
 Yeah. I mean, how they can, like if we were to rewrite, is there a way to rewrite the
 Twitter algorithm so that it stops being the like the fertile breeding ground of the culture
 wars? Because that's really what it is. It's, I mean, maybe I'm giving it, you know, Twitter
 too much power, you know, power. But just the more I looked into it, and I had a conversation
 with Tristan Harris from the Center of Humane Technology, and he explained it as like, Twitter
 is where you have this amalgam of human culture, and then this terribly designed algorithm
 that amplifies the craziest people and the angriest, the angriest, most divisive takes
 and amplifies them. And then the media, the mainstream media, because all the journalists
 are also on Twitter, they then are informed by that. And so they draw out the stories
 they can from this already like very boiling lava of rage, and then spread that, you know,
 to their millions and millions of people who aren't even on Twitter. And so I honestly,
 I think if I could press a button, turn them off, I probably would at this point, because
 I just don't see a way of being compatible with healthiness, but that's not going to
 happen. And so at least one way to like stem the tide and make it less molarchy would be
 to change, at least if like it was on a subscription model, then it's now not optimizing for, you
 know, impressions, because basically what it wants is for people to keep coming back
 as often as possible. That's how they get paid, right? Every time an ad gets shown to
 someone and the way is to get people constantly refreshing their feed. So you're trying to
 encourage addictive behaviors. Whereas if someone, if they moved on to at least a subscription
 model, then they're getting the money either way, whether someone comes back to the site
 once a month or 500 times a month, they get the same amount of money. So now that takes
 away that incentive, you know, to use technology, you know, to build, to design an algorithm
 that is maximally addictive. That would be one way, for example.
 Yeah, but you still want people to, yeah, I just feel like that just slows down, creates
 friction in the virality of things.
 But that's good. We need to slow down virality.
 It's good. It's one way.
 Virality is Moloch, to be clear.
 So Moloch is always negative then?
 Yes, by definition.
 Yes.
 But then I disagree with you.
 Competition is not always negative. Competition is neutral.
 I disagree with you that all virality is negative then, as Moloch then. Because I, it's a good
 intuition because we have a lot of data on virality being negative. But I happen to believe
 that the core of human beings, so most human beings want to be good more than they want
 to be bad to each other. And so I think it's possible, it might be just harder to engineer
 systems that enable virality, but it's possible to engineer systems that are viral that enable
 virality and the kind of stuff that rises to the top is things that are positive. And
 positive not like la la positive. It's more like win win, meaning a lot of people need
 to be challenged.
 Wise things.
 Yeah. You grow from it. It might challenge you. You might not like it, but you ultimately
 grow from it.
 And ultimately bring people together as opposed to tear them apart.
 I deeply want that to be true. And I very much agree with you that people at their core
 are on average good, care for each other as opposed to not. I think it's actually a very
 small percentage of people are truly wanting to do just destructive malicious things. Most
 people are just trying to win their own little game and they don't mean to be, they're just
 stuck in this badly designed system. That said, the current structure, yes, is, the
 current structure means that virality is optimized towards Moloch. That doesn't mean there aren't
 exceptions. Sometimes positive stories do go viral and I think we should study them.
 I think there should be a whole field of study into understanding, identifying memes that
 above a certain threshold of the population agree as a positive, happy, bringing people
 together meme, the kind of thing that brings families together that would normally argue
 about culture wars stuff at the table, at the dinner table. Identify those memes and
 figure out what was the ingredient that made them spread that day.
 And also like, not just like happiness and connection between humans, but connection
 between humans in other ways that enables like productivity, like cooperation, solving
 difficult problems and all those kinds of stuff. So it's not just about let's be happy
 and have fulfilling lives. It's also like, let's build cool shit.
 Which is the spirit of collaboration, which is deeply anti-Moloch, right? It's not using
 competition. It's like, Moloch hates collaboration and coordination and people working together.
 And that's, again, like the internet started out as that and it could have been that, but
 because of the way it was sort of structured in terms of very lofty ideal, they wanted
 everything to be open source and also free. But they needed to find a way to pay the bills
 anyway because they were still building this on top of our old economics system. And so
 the way they did that was through third party advertisement. But that meant that things
 were very decoupled. You've got this third party interest, which means that you're then
 like people having to optimize for that. And that is the actual consumer is actually the
 product, not the person you're making the thing for. In the end, you start making the
 thing for the advertiser. And so that's why it then breaks down. Yeah, there's no clean
 solution to this. And it's a really good suggestion by you actually to figure out how we can optimize
 virality for positive sum topics.
 I shall be the general of the lovebot army.
 Distributed.
 Distributed. Distributed. No, okay. Yeah. The power, just even in saying that the power
 already went to my head. No. Okay. You've talked about quantifying your thinking. We've
 been talking about this sort of a game theoretic view on life and putting probabilities behind
 estimates. Like if you think about different trajectories you can take through life, just
 actually analyzing life in game theoretic way, like your own life, like personal life.
 I think you've given an example that you had an honest conversation with Igor about like
 how long is this relationship going to last? Similar to our sort of marriage problem kind
 of discussion, having an honest conversation about the probability of things that we sometimes
 are a little bit too shy or scared to think of in a probabilistic terms. Can you speak
 to that kind of way of reasoning, the good and the bad of that? Can you do this kind
 of thing with human relations?
 Yeah. So the scenario you're talking about, it was like-
 Yeah. Tell me about that scenario.
 Yeah. I think it was about a year into our relationship and we were having a fairly heavy
 conversation because we were trying to figure out whether or not I was going to sell my
 apartment. He had already moved in, but I think we were just figuring out what our life
 and long-term plans would be. Should we buy a place together, et cetera?
 When you guys are having that conversation, are you like drunk out of your mind on wine
 or is he sober and you're actually having a serious-
 I think I'm sober.
 How do you get to that conversation? Because most people are kind of afraid to have that
 kind of serious conversation.
 Well, so our relationship was very, well, first of all, we were good friends for a couple
 of years before we even got romantic. When we did get romantic, it was very clear that
 this was a big deal. It wasn't just like another, it wasn't a random thing.
 The probability of it being a big deal was high.
 Was already very high. Then we'd been together for a year and it had been pretty golden and
 wonderful. There was a lot of foundation already where we felt very comfortable having a lot
 of frank conversations. But Igor's MO has always been much more than mine. He was always
 from the outset, just in a relationship, radical transparency and honesty is the way because
 the truth is the truth whether you want to hide it or not. It will come out eventually.
 If you aren't able to accept difficult things yourself, then how could you possibly expect
 to be the most integral version? The relationship needs this bedrock of honesty as a foundation
 more than anything.
 Yeah, that's really interesting. I would like to push against some of those ideas, but that's
 down the line. Throw them up. I just rudely interrupt.
 That's fine. We'd been about together for a year and things were good. We were having
 this hard conversation. Then he was like, well, okay, what's the likelihood that we're
 going to be together in three years then? Because I think it was roughly a three-year
 time horizon. I was like, oh, interesting. Then we were like, actually, wait, before
 you say that, let's both write down our predictions formally. Because we were just getting into
 effective altruism and rationality at the time, which is all about making formal predictions
 as a means of measuring your own foresight essentially in a quantified way. We both wrote
 down our percentages and we also did a one-year prediction and a 10-year one as well. We got
 percentages for all three. Then we showed each other. I remember having this moment
 of like, oh, because for the 10-year one, I was like, oh, I mean, I love him a lot,
 but a lot can happen in 10 years. We've only been together for, so I was like, I think
 it's over 50%, but it's definitely not 90%. I remember wrestling. I was like, oh, but
 I don't want him to be hurt. I don't want to give a number lower than his. I remember
 thinking, I was like, don't game it. This is an exercise in radical honesty. Just give
 your real percentage. I think mine was like 75%. Then we showed each other and luckily
 we were fairly well aligned. But honestly, even if we weren't-
 He was like 20%.
 It definitely would have, if his had been consistently lower than mine, that would have
 rattled me for sure. Whereas if it had been the other way around, I think he's just kind
 of like a water off the docks back type of guy. It'd be like, okay, well, all right,
 we'll figure this out.
 Well, did you guys provide error bars on the estimate? Like the level of-
 They came built in. We didn't give formal plus or minus error bars. I didn't draw any
 or anything like that.
 Well, I guess that's the question I have is, did you feel informed enough to make such
 decisions? Because I feel like if I were to do this kind of thing rigorously, I would
 want some data. One of the assumptions you have is you're not that different from other
 relationships.
 Right.
 I want to have some data about the way-
 You want the base rates.
 Yeah. Also, actual trajectories of relationships. I would love to have time series data about
 the ways that relationships fall apart or prosper, how they collide with different life
 events, losses, job changes, moving. Both partners find jobs, only one has a job. I
 want that kind of data and how often the different trajectories change in life. How informative
 is your past to your future? That's the whole thing. Can you look at my life and have a
 good prediction in terms of my characteristics and my relationships of what that's going
 to look like in the future or not? I don't even know the answer to that question. I'll
 be very ill informed in terms of making the probability. I just would be under informed.
 I would be under informed. I'll be over biasing to my prior experiences, I think.
 Right. But as long as you're aware of that and you're honest with yourself and you're
 honest with the other person, say, look, I have really wide error bars on this for the
 following reasons, that's okay. I still think it's better than not trying to quantify it
 at all if you're trying to make really major irreversible life decisions.
 I feel also the romantic nature of that question. For me personally, I try to live my life thinking
 it's very close to 100%. Allowing myself, actually, this is the difficulty of this,
 is allowing myself to think differently, I feel has a psychological consequence. That's
 one of my push backs against radical honesty, is this one particular perspective on-
 So you're saying you would rather give a falsely high percentage to your partner?
 Going back to the wise sage-
 In order to create this additional optimism.
 Helmuth of fake it till you make it, the positive thinking.
 Positive thinking, hashtag positivity.
 Yeah, hashtag.
 Well, so that comes back to this idea of useful fictions. I agree, I don't think there's a
 clear answer to this and I think it's actually quite subjective. Some people this works better
 for than others. To be clear, Igor and I weren't doing this formal prediction in it. We did
 it with very much tongue in cheek. It wasn't like we were going to make, I don't think
 it even would have drastically changed what we decided to do even. We kind of just did
 it more as a fun exercise.
 For the consequence of that fun exercise, there was a deep honesty to it too.
 Exactly. It was a deep, and it was just like this moment of reflection. I'm like, oh wow,
 I actually have to think through this quite critically and so on. It's also what was interesting
 was I got to check in with what my desires were. There was one thing of what my actual
 prediction is, but what are my desires and could these desires be affecting my predictions
 and so on? That's a method of rationality. I personally don't think it loses anything
 in terms of it. It didn't take any of the magic away from our relationship, quite the
 opposite. It brought us closer together because it was like we did this weird, fun thing that
 I appreciate a lot of people find quite strange. I think it was somewhat unique in our relationship
 that both of us are very, we both love numbers, we both love statistics, we're both poker
 players. This was like our safe space anyway. For others, one partner really might not like
 that kind of stuff at all, in which case this is not a good exercise to do. I don't recommend
 it to everybody. I do think it's interesting sometimes to poke holes in the probe at these
 things that we consider so sacred that we can't try to quantify them, which is interesting
 because that's in tension with the idea of what we just talked about with beauty and
 what makes something beautiful, the fact that you can't measure everything about it. Perhaps
 something shouldn't be tried to measure. Maybe it's wrong to completely try and put a utilitarian
 frame of measuring the utility of a tree in its entirety. I don't know. Maybe we should,
 maybe we shouldn't. I'm ambivalent on that. Overall, people have too many biases. People
 are overly biased against trying to do a quantified cost-benefit analysis on really tough life
 decisions. They're like, oh, just go with your gut. It's like, well, sure, but our intuitions
 are best suited for things that we've got tons of experience in. Then we can really
 trust on it if it's a decision we've made many times. But if it's like, should I marry
 this person or should I buy this house over that house? You only make those decisions
 a couple of times in your life, maybe.
 Well, I would love to know, there's a balance, probably it's a personal balance of strike,
 is the amount of rationality you apply to a question versus the useful fiction, the
 fake it till you make it. For example, just talking to soldiers in Ukraine, you ask them,
 what's the probability of you winning, Ukraine winning? Almost everybody I talk to is a hundred
 percent.
 Wow.
 And you listen to the experts, right? They say all kinds of stuff. First of all, the
 morale there is higher than probably, and I've never been to a war zone before this,
 but I've read about many wars and I think the morale in Ukraine is higher than almost
 anywhere I've read about. It's every single person in the country is proud to fight for
 their country. Everybody, not just soldiers, not everybody.
 Why do you think that is specifically more than in other wars?
 I think because there's a perhaps a dormant desire for the citizens of this country to
 find the identity of this country because it's been going through this 30 year process
 of different factions and political bickering and they haven't had, as they talk about,
 they haven't had their independence war. They say all great nations have had an independence
 war. They had to fight for their independence, for the discovery of the identity of the core
 of the ideals that unify us. And they haven't had that. There's constantly been factions,
 there's been divisions, there's been pressures from empires, from United States and from
 Russia, from NATO and Europe, everybody telling them what to do. Now they want to discover
 who they are. And there's that kind of sense that we're going to fight for the safety of
 our homeland, but we're also going to fight for our identity. And that on top of the fact
 that there's just, if you look at the history of Ukraine and there's certain other countries
 like this, there are certain cultures are feisty in their pride of being part of being
 the citizens of that nation. Ukraine is that, Poland was that. You just look at history
 in certain countries, you do not want to occupy. I mean, both Stalin and Hitler talked about
 Poland in this way. They're like, this is a big problem if we occupy this land for prolonged
 periods of time, there are going to be a pain in their ass. They're not going to want to
 be occupied. And certain other countries are pragmatic. They're like, well, leaders come
 and go, I guess this is good. Ukraine just doesn't have, Ukrainians, throughout the 20th
 century, don't seem to be the kind of people that just sit calmly and let the quote unquote
 occupiers impose their-
 That's interesting though, because you said it's always been under conflict and leaders
 have come and gone. So you would expect them to actually be the opposite under that.
 Yeah, because it's a very fertile land, it's great for agriculture. So a lot of people
 want to, I mean, I think they've developed this culture because they've constantly been
 occupied by different people, for different peoples. And so maybe there is something to
 that where you've constantly had to feel like within the blood of the generations, there's
 the struggle for, against the man, against the imposition of rules, against oppression
 and all that kind of stuff. And that stays with them. So there's a will there. But a
 lot of other aspects are also part of it that has to do with the reverse malla kind of situation
 where social media has definitely played a part of it. Also different charismatic individuals
 have had to play a part. The fact that the president of the nation, Zelensky, stayed
 in Kiev during the invasion is a huge inspiration to them because most leaders, as you could
 imagine, when the capital of the nation is under attack, the wise thing, the smart thing
 that the United States advised Zelensky to do is to flee and to be the leader of the
 nation from a distant place. He said, fuck that, I'm staying put. Everyone around him,
 there was a pressure to leave and he didn't. And that in those singular acts really can
 unify a nation. There's a lot of people that criticize Zelensky within Ukraine. Before
 the war, he was very unpopular, even still. But they put that aside for the, especially
 that singular act of staying in the capital. Yeah, a lot of those kinds of things come
 together to create something within people.
 How zoomed out of a view do you want to take? Because you describe it as an anti-Molic thing
 happened within Ukraine because it brought the Ukrainian people together in order to
 fight a common enemy. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe that's a bad thing. In the end,
 we don't know how this is all going to play out. But if you zoom it out on a global level,
 they're coming together to fight. That could make a conflict larger. You know what I mean?
 I don't know what the right answer is here. It seems like a good thing that they came
 together. We don't know how this is all going to play out. If this all turns into nuclear
 war, we'll be like, okay, that was the bad, that was the...
 Oh yeah. So I was describing the reverse Molic for the local level.
 Exactly.
 This is where the experts come in and they say, well, if you channel most of the resources
 of the nation and the nation supporting Ukraine into the war effort, are you not beating the
 drums of war that is much bigger than Ukraine? In fact, even the Ukrainian leaders are speaking
 of it this way. This is not a war between two nations. This is the early days of a world
 war if we don't play this correctly.
 Yes. We need cool heads from our leaders.
 So from Ukraine's perspective, Ukraine needs to win the war because what does winning the
 war mean is coming to peace negotiations, an agreement that guarantees no more invasions.
 Then you make an agreement about what land belongs to who and you stop that. Basically,
 from their perspective is you want to demonstrate to the rest of the world who's watching carefully,
 including Russia and China and different players on the geopolitical stage, that this kind
 of conflict is not going to be productive if you engage in it. So you want to teach
 everybody a lesson. Let's not do World War III. It's going to be bad for everybody. It's
 a lose-lose.
 It's a deep lose-lose. Doesn't matter.
 I think that's actually a correct... When I zoom out, 99% of what I think about is just
 individual human beings and human lives and just that war is horrible. But when you zoom
 out and think from a geopolitics perspective, we should realize that it's entirely possible
 that we will see a World War III in the 21st century. This is like a dress rehearsal for
 that. So the way we play this as a human civilization will define whether we do or don't have a
 World War III. How we discuss war, how we discuss nuclear war, the kind of leaders we
 elect and prop up, the kind of memes we circulate. Because you have to be very careful when you're
 being pro-Ukraine, for example, you have to realize that you are also indirectly feeding
 the ever-increasing military-industrial complex. So you have to be extremely careful that when
 you say pro-Ukraine or pro-anybody, you're pro-human beings, not pro-the-machine that
 creates narratives that says it's pro-human beings. But it's actually, if you look at
 the raw use of funds and resources, it's actually pro-making weapons and shooting bullets and
 dropping bombs.
 Right. We have to just somehow get the meme into everyone's heads that the real enemy
 is war itself. That's the enemy we need to defeat. That doesn't mean to say that there
 isn't justification for small local scenarios, adversarial conflicts. If you have a leader
 who is starting wars, they're on the side of team war, basically. It's not that they're
 on the side of team country, whatever that country is, it's they're on the side of team
 war. So that needs to be stopped and put down. But you also have to find a way that your
 corrective measure doesn't actually then end up being co-opted by the war machine and creating
 greater war. Again, the playing field is finite. The scale of conflict is now getting so big
 that the weapons that can be used are so mass destructive that we can't afford another giant
 conflict. We won't make it.
 What existential threat in terms of us not making it are you most worried about? What
 existential threat to human civilization?
 We got like-
 Going down the dark path, huh?
 It's good. Well, no, it's a dark-
 No, it's like, well, while we're in the summer place, we might as well.
 Some of my best friends are dark paths. What worries you most? We mentioned asteroids,
 you mentioned AGI, nuclear weapons.
 The one that's on my mind the most, mostly because I think it's the one where we have
 actually a real chance to move the needle on in a positive direction or more specifically
 stop some really bad things from happening, really dumb avoidable things is bio risks.
 In what kind of bio risks? There's so many fun options.
 Yeah, so many. Of course, we have natural risks from natural pandemics, naturally occurring
 viruses or pathogens. Then also as time and technology goes on and technology becomes
 more and more democratized into the hands of more and more people, the risk of synthetic
 pathogens. Whether or not you fall into the camp of COVID was gain of function, accidental
 lab leak or whether it was purely naturally occurring. Either way, we are facing a future
 where synthetic pathogens or human meddled with pathogens either accidentally get out
 or get into the hands of bad actors who, whether they're omnicidal maniacs, either way. That
 means we need more robustness for that.
 You would think that us having this nice little dry run, which is what as awful as COVID was
 and all those poor people that died, it was still like child's play compared to what a
 future one could be in terms of fatality rate. You'd think that we would then be much more
 robust in our pandemic preparedness. Meanwhile, the budget in the last two years for the US,
 sorry, they just did this, I can't remember the name of what the actual budget was, but
 it was like a multi-trillion dollar budget that the US just set aside. Originally in
 that, considering that COVID cost multiple trillions to the economy, the original allocation
 in this new budget for future pandemic preparedness was 60 billion, so tiny proportion of it.
 That proceeded to get whittled down to like 30 billion to 15 billion, all the way down
 to two billion out of multiple trillions for a thing that has just cost us multiple trillions.
 We've just finished. We're not even really out of it. It basically got whittled down
 to nothing because for some reason people think that, whew, all right, we've got the
 pandemic out the way. That was that one. The reason for that is that people are, and I
 say this with all due respect to a lot of the science community, but there's an immense
 amount of naivety about, they think that nature is the main risk moving forward and it really
 isn't. I think nothing demonstrates this more than this project that I was just reading
 about that's being proposed right now called Deep Vision. The idea is to go out into the
 wilds, and we're not talking about just within cities, deep into caves that people don't
 go to, deep into the Arctic, wherever, scour the earth for whatever the most dangerous
 possible pathogens could be that they can find. Then not only do you try and find these,
 bring samples of them back to laboratories. Again, whether you think COVID was a lab leak
 or not, I'm not going to get into that, but we have historically had so many, as a civilization,
 we've had so many lab leaks from even the highest level security things. People should
 go and just read it. It's like a comedy show of just how many they are, how leaky these
 labs are, even when they do their best efforts. Bring these things then back to civilization.
 That's step one of the badness. The next step would be to then categorize them, do experiments
 on them and categorize them by their level of potential pandemic lethality. Then the
 piece de resistance on this plan is to then publish that information freely on the internet
 about all these pathogens, including their genome, which is literally the building instructions
 of how to do them on the internet. This is something that genuinely a pocket of the scientific
 community thinks is a good idea. I think on expectation, and their argument is that, oh,
 this is good because it might buy us some time to develop the vaccines, which, okay,
 sure, maybe would have made sense prior to mRNA technology, but mRNA, we can develop
 a vaccine now when we find a new pathogen within a couple of days. Now then there's
 all the trials and so on. Those trials would have to happen anyway in the case of a brand
 new thing. You're saving maybe a couple of days, so that's the upside. Meanwhile, the
 downside is you're not only bringing the risk of these pathogens of getting leaked, but
 you're literally handing it out to every bad actor on earth who would be doing cartwheels.
 I'm talking about Kim Jong-un, ISIS, people who think the rest of the world is their enemy.
 In some cases, they think that killing themselves is a noble cause. You're literally giving
 them the building blocks of how to do this. It's the most batshit idea I've ever heard.
 On expectation, it's probably minus EV of multiple billions of lives if they actually
 succeeded in doing this, certainly in the tens or hundreds of millions. The cost benefit
 is so unbelievably, it makes no sense. I was trying to wrap my head around, what's going
 wrong in people's minds to think that this is a good idea? It's not that it's malice
 or anything like that. I think it's that the proponents, they're actually overly naive
 about the interactions of humanity. There are bad actors who will use this for bad things.
 If you publish this information, even if a bad actor couldn't physically make it themselves,
 which given in 10 years' time, the technologies are getting cheaper and easier to use, but
 even if they couldn't make it, they could now bluff it. What would you do if there's
 some deadly new virus that we published on the internet in terms of its building blocks?
 Kim Jong-un could be like, hey, if you don't let me build my nuclear weapons, I'm going
 to release this. I've managed to build it. Well, now he's actually got a credible bluff.
 We don't know. It's just like handing weapons of mass destruction to people. Makes no sense.
 I agree with you, but the possible world in which it might make sense is if the good guys,
 which is a whole other problem defining who the good guys are, but the good guys are like
 an order of magnitude higher competence. They can stay ahead of the bad actors by just being
 very good at the defense. By very good, not meaning like a little bit better, but an order
 of magnitude better. Of course, the question is in each of those individual disciplines,
 is that feasible? Can the bad actors, even if they don't have the competence, leapfrog
 to the place where the good guys are?
 Yeah, I would agree in principle with pertaining to this particular plan of like that, with
 the thing I described, this deep vision thing, where at least then that would maybe make
 sense for steps one and step two of getting the information, but then why would you release
 it, the information to your literal enemies? That doesn't fit at all in that perspective
 of trying to be ahead of them. You're literally handing them the weapon.
 But there's different levels of release, right? So there's the kind of secrecy where you don't
 give it to anybody, but there's a release where you incrementally give it to like major
 labs. So it's not public release, but it's like you're giving it to major labs.
 There's different layers of reasonability.
 But the problem there is it's going to, if you go anywhere beyond like complete secrecy,
 it's going to leak.
 That's the thing. It's very hard to keep secrets.
 And so that's still-
 Information is-
 You might as well release it to the public, is that argument. So you either go complete
 secrecy or you release it to the public. So, which is essentially the same thing. It's
 going to leak anyway if you don't do complete secrecy.
 Right. Which is why you shouldn't get the information in the first place.
 Yeah. I mean, in that, I think-
 Well, that's A, solution. Yeah. The solution is either don't get the information in the
 first place or B, keep it incredibly, incredibly contained.
 See, I think it really matters which discipline we're talking about. So in the case of biology,
 I do think you're very right. It should be forbidden to even like think about that. Meaning,
 don't just even collect the information, but like, don't do, I mean, gain of function research
 is a really iffy area. Like you-
 I mean, it's all about cost benefits, right? There are some scenarios where I could imagine
 the cost benefit of a gain of function research is very, very clear, where you've evaluated
 all the potential risks, factored in the probability that things can go wrong and like, you know,
 not only known unknowns, but unknown unknowns as well. Tried to quantify that. And then
 even then it's like orders of magnitude better to do that. I'm behind that argument. But
 the point is, is that there's this like naivety that's preventing people from even doing the
 cost benefit properly on a lot of the things because, you know, I get it. The science community,
 like, again, I don't want to bucket the science community, but like some people within the
 science community just think that everyone's good and everyone just cares about getting
 knowledge and doing the best for the world. And unfortunately, that's not the case. I
 wish we lived in that world, but we don't.
 Yeah. I mean, there's a lie. Listen, I've been criticizing the science community broadly
 quite a bit. There's so many brilliant people that brilliance is somehow a hindrance sometimes
 because it has a bunch of blind spots. And then you start to look at a history of science,
 how easily it's been used by dictators to any conclusion they want. And it's, it's,
 it's dark how you can use brilliant people that like playing the little game of science
 because it is a fun game. You know, you're building, you go to conferences, you're building
 atop of each other's ideas, his breakthroughs. Hi, I think I've realized how this particular
 molecule works and I could do this kind of experiment and everyone else is impressed.
 Oh, cool. No, I think you're wrong. Let me show you why you're wrong. And that little
 game, everyone gets really excited and they get excited. Oh, I came up with a pill that
 solves this problem and it's going to help a bunch of people. And I came up with a giant
 study that shows the exact probability it's going to help or not. And you get lost in
 this game and you forget to realize this game, just like mullet can have like unintended
 consequences. Yeah. Unintended consequences that might destroy human civilization or,
 or divide human civilization or have a dire geopolitical consequences. I mean, the effects
 of, I mean, it's just so the most destructive effects of COVID have nothing to do with the,
 with the biology of the virus, it seems like it's, I mean, I could just list them forever,
 but like one of them is the complete distrust of public institutions. The other one is because
 of that public distrust, I feel like if a much worse pandemic came along, we, as a world
 have not cried wolf. And when, if an actual wolf now comes, people will be like, fuck
 masks, fuck, fuck vaccines, fuck everything. And they, they won't be, they'll distrust
 every single thing that any major institution is going to tell them. And because that's
 the thing, like there, there was certain actions made by certain, you know, health public figures
 where they told, they very knowingly told, it was a white lie. It was intended in the
 best possible way, such as, you know, early on when there were, there was clearly a shortage
 of masks. And so they said to the public, Oh, don't get masks. They don't, there's no
 evidence that they work. They're all there, you know, don't get them. They don't work.
 In fact, it might even make it worse. You might even spread it more. Like that, that
 was the real like stinker. Yeah, no, no, there's, unless you know how to do it properly, you're
 going to make that you're going to get sicker or you're more likely to get the, to catch
 the virus, which is just absolute crap. And they put that out there. And it's pretty clear
 the reason why they did that was because there was actually a shortage of masks and they
 really needed it for health workers, which makes sense. Like I agree, like, you know,
 but the cost of lying to the, to the, to the public when that then comes out, people aren't
 as stupid as they think they are, as you know, and that's, that's, I think where this distrust
 experts has largely come from. A, they've lied to people overtly, overtly, but B, people
 have been treated like idiots. Now that's not to say that there aren't a lot of stupid
 people who have a lot of wacky ideas around COVID and all sorts of things. But if you
 treat the general public like children, they're going to see that they're going to notice
 that and that is going to just like absolutely decimate the trust in the public institutions
 that we depend upon. And honestly, the best thing that could happen, I wish like, if like
 Fauci or, you know, and these other like leaders who, I mean, God, I would, I can't imagine
 how nightmare his job has been over the last few years, hell on earth. Like, so, you know,
 I, I, you know, I have, I have a lot of sort of sympathy for the position he's been in,
 but like, if he could just come out and be like, okay, look guys, hands up, we didn't
 handle this as well as we could have. These are all the things I would have done differently
 in hindsight. I apologize for this and this and this and this. That would go so far. Maybe
 I'm being naive. Who knows? Maybe this would backfire. But I don't think it would like,
 to someone like me even, because I've like, I've lost trust in a lot of these things.
 I'm, but I'm fortunate that I at least know people who I can go to who I think are good,
 like have good epistemics on this stuff. But, you know, if they, if they could sort of put
 their hands on and go, okay, these are the spots where we screwed up. This, this, this.
 This was our reasons. Yeah, we actually told a little white lie here. We did it for this
 and we're really sorry. Well, they just did the radical honesty thing, the radical transparency
 thing. That would go so far to build, rebuilding public trust. And I think that's what needs
 to happen. Yeah, I totally agree with you. Unfortunately, yeah, his job was very tough
 and all those kinds of things, but I see arrogance and arrogance prevented him from being honest
 in that way previously. And I think arrogance will prevent him from being honest in that
 way now when you leaders, I think young people are seeing that, that kind of talking down
 to people from a position of power. I hope is, is the way of the past. People really
 like authenticity and they, they like leaders that are like a man and a woman of the people.
 And I think that just, I mean, he still has a chance to do that. I think, I mean, I don't
 think, you know, if I doubt he's listening, but if he is like, Hey, I, I think, you know,
 I don't think he's irredeemable by any means. I think this, you know, I don't, I don't have
 an opinion of whether there was arrogance or there or not. Just know that I think like
 coming clean on the, you know, it's understandable to have fucked up during this pandemic. Like
 I won't expect any government to handle it well, because it was so difficult, like so
 many moving pieces, so much like lack of information and so on. But the step to rebuilding
 trust is to go, okay, look, we're doing a scrutiny of where we went wrong. And I, and
 for my part, I did this wrong in this part. And that would be huge.
 All of us can do that. I mean, I was struggling for a while, whether I want to talk to him
 or not. I talked to his boss, Francis Collins. Another person that's screwed up in terms
 of trust, lost a little bit of my respect to, there seems to have been a kind of dishonesty
 in the, in the back rooms in that they didn't trust people to be intelligent. Like we need
 to tell them what's good for them. We know what's good for them. That kind of idea.
 To be fair, the thing that's, what's it called? I heard the phrase today, nut picking. Social
 media does that. So you've got like nitpicking, nut picking is where the craziest, stupidest,
 you know, if you have a group of people, let's call it, you know, let's say people who are
 vaccine, I don't like the term anti-vaccine, people who have vaccine hesitant, vaccine
 speculative, you know, what social media did or the media or anyone, you know, their opponents
 would do is pick the craziest example. So the ones who are like, you know, I think I
 need to inject myself with motor oil up my ass or something, you know, select the craziest
 ones and then have that beamed to, you know, so from like someone like Fauci or Francis's
 perspective, that's what they get because they're getting the same social media stuff
 as us. They get the same media reports. I mean, they might get some more information,
 but they too are going to get these, the nuts portrayed to them. So they probably have a
 misrepresentation of what the actual public's intelligence is.
 Well, that just, yes. And that just means they're not social media savvy. So one of
 the skills of being on social media is to be able to filter that in your mind, like
 to understand, to put into proper context.
 And to realize that what you are seeing, social media is not anywhere near an accurate representation
 of humanity.
 Not picking a lot of that. And there's nothing wrong with putting motor oil up your ass.
 It's just one of the better aspects of-
 Hey, do what you want to do.
 I do this every weekend. Okay.
 How did that analogy come from in my mind? Like what?
 I don't know. I think you need to, there's some Freudian thing you would need to deeply
 investigate with a therapist. Okay. What about AI? Are you worried about AGI, super intelligence
 systems or paperclip maximizer type of situation?
 Yes. I'm definitely worried about it, but I feel kind of bipolar in that some days I
 wake up and I'm like-
 You're excited about the future.
 Well, exactly. I'm like, oh wow, we can unlock the mysteries of the universe, you know, escape
 the game. And this, you know, because I spend all my time thinking about these Moloky problems,
 what is the solution to them? In some ways you need this like omni benevolent, omniscient,
 omni wise coordination mechanism that can like make us all not do the Moloky thing or
 like provide the infrastructure or redesign the system so that it's not vulnerable to
 this Moloky process. And in some ways, you know, that's the strongest argument to me
 for like the race to build AGI is that maybe, you know, we can't survive without it. But
 the flip side to that is the, unfortunately now that there's multiple actors trying to
 build AI, AGI, you know, this was fine 10 years ago when it was just DeepMind, but then
 other companies started up and now it created a race dynamic. Now it's like, that's the
 whole thing is it the same, it's got the same problem. It's like whichever company is the
 one that like optimizes for speed at the cost of safety will get the competitive advantage.
 And so we're the more likely the ones to build the AGI, you know, and that's the same cycle
 that you're in. And there's no clear solution to that because you can't just go like slapping.
 If you go and try and like stop all the different companies, then it will, you know, the good
 ones will stop because they're the ones, you know, within, you know, within the West's
 reach, but then that leaves all the other ones to continue. And then they're even more
 likely. So it's like, it's a very difficult problem with no clean solution. And, you know,
 at the same time, you know, I know the, at least some of the folks at DeepMind and they're
 incredible and they're thinking about this. They're very aware of this problem and they're
 like, you know, I think some of the smartest people on earth.
 Yeah, the culture is important there because they are thinking about that and they're some
 of the best machine learning engineers. So it's possible to have a company or a community
 of people that are both great engineers and are thinking about the philosophical topics.
 Exactly. And importantly, they're also game theorists, you know, and because this is ultimately
 a game theory problem, the thing, this, this Moloch mechanism and like, you know, what
 this rate, how do we voice rate arms race scenarios? You need people who aren't naive
 to be thinking about this. And again, like, luckily there's a lot of smart, non-naive
 game theorists within that group. Yes, I'm concerned about it. And I think it's again
 a thing that we need people to be thinking about in terms of like, how do we create,
 how do we mitigate the arms race dynamics and how do we solve the thing of, it's got,
 Bostrom calls it the orthogonality problem whereby, because there's obviously there's
 a chance, you know, the belief, the hope is, is that you build something that's super intelligent
 and by definition of being super intelligent, it will also become super wise and have the
 wisdom to know what the right goals are. And hopefully those goals include keeping humanity
 alive. Right. But Bostrom says that actually those two things, you know, super intelligence
 and super wisdom aren't necessarily correlated. They're actually kind of orthogonal things.
 And how do we make it so that they are correlated? How do we guarantee it? Because we need it
 to be guaranteed really to know that we're doing the thing safely.
 But I think that like merging of intelligence and wisdom, at least my hope is that this
 whole process happens sufficiently slowly, that we're constantly having these kinds of
 debates that we have enough time to figure out how to modify each version of the system
 as it becomes more and more intelligent.
 Yes. Buying time is a good thing, definitely. Anything that slows everything down. We just,
 everyone needs to chill out. We've got millennia to figure this out. Or at least, well, it
 depends again. Some people think that, you know, we can't even make it through the next
 few decades without having some kind of omni-wise coordination mechanism. And there's also an
 argument to that. Yeah. I don't know.
 Well there is, I'm suspicious of that kind of thinking because it seems like the entirety
 of human history has people in it that are like predicting doom just around the corner.
 There's something about us that is strangely attracted to that thought. It's almost like
 fun to think about the destruction of everything. Just objectively speaking, I've talked and
 listened to a bunch of people and they are gravitating towards that. It's almost, I think
 it's the same thing that people love about conspiracy theories, is they love to be the
 person that kind of figured out some deep fundamental thing that's going to mark something
 extremely important about the history of human civilization. Because then I will be important.
 In reality, most of us will be forgotten and life will go on. One of the sad things about
 whatever anything traumatic happens to you, whenever you lose loved ones or just tragedy
 happens, you realize life goes on. Even after a nuclear war that will wipe out some large
 percentage of the population and will torture people for years to come because of the effects
 of a nuclear winter, people will still survive. Life will still go on. I mean, it depends
 on the kind of nuclear war. But in case of nuclear war, it will still go on. That's one
 of the amazing things about life. It finds a way. In that sense, I feel like the doom
 and gloom thing is a-
 Yeah, we don't want a self-fulfilling prophecy.
 Yes, that's exactly.
 Yes. I very much agree with that. I even have a slight feeling from the amount of time we've
 spent in this conversation talking about this because it's like, is this even a net positive
 if it's making everyone feel, in some ways, making people imagine these bad scenarios
 can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. But at the same time, that's weighed off with at
 least making people aware of the problem and gets them thinking. I think particularly,
 the reason why I want to talk about this to your audience is that on average, they're
 the type of people who gravitate towards these kind of topics because they're intellectually
 curious and they can sense that there's trouble brewing. I think there's a reason people are
 thinking about this stuff a lot is because the probability, it's increased in probability
 certainly over the last few years. Trajectories have not gone favorably, let's put it, since
 2010. It's right, I think, for people to be thinking about it. But that's where they're
 like, I think, whether it's a useful fiction or whether it's actually true or whatever
 you want to call it, I think having this faith, this is where faith is valuable because it
 gives you at least this anchor of hope. And I'm not just saying it to trick myself, I
 do truly, I do think there's something out there that wants us to win. I think there's
 something that really wants us to win. And it just, you just have to be like, okay, now
 I sound really crazy, but open your heart to it a little bit and it will give you the
 sort of breathing room with which to marinate on the solutions. We are the ones who have
 to come up with the solutions, but we can use, there's hashtag positivity, there's value
 in that.
 You have to kind of imagine all the destructive trajectories that lay in our future and then
 believe in the possibility of avoiding those trajectories. All while, you said audience,
 all while sitting back, which is majority, the two people that listen to this are probably
 sitting on a beach smoking some weed.
 God dammit.
 Just, that's a beautiful sunset or they're looking at just the waves going in and out.
 And ultimately there's a kind of deep belief there in the momentum of humanity to figure
 it all out.
 People make it, but we've got a lot of work to do.
 Which is what makes this whole simulation, this video game kind of fun. This Battle of
 Polytopia is still, man, I love those games so much.
 That's so good.
 And that one for people who don't know Battle of Polytopia is a big, it's like a, it's this
 really radical simplification of a civilization type of game. It still has a lot of the skill
 tree development, a lot of the strategy, but it's easy enough to play on a phone.
 Yeah.
 It's kind of interesting.
 They've really, they've really figured it out. It's one of the most elegantly designed
 games I've ever seen. It's incredibly complex and yet being, again, it walks that line between
 complexity and simplicity in this really, really great way. And they use pretty colors
 that hack the dopamine reward circuits in our brains very well.
 It's fun. Video games are so fun. Most of this life is just about fun, escaping all
 the suffering to find the fun. What's energy healing? I have in my notes, energy healing?
 What's that about?
 Oh man. God, your audience are going to think I'm mad. So the two crazy things that happened
 to me, the one was the voice in the head that said, you're going to win this tournament.
 And then I won the tournament. The other craziest thing that's happened to me was in 2018, I
 started getting this weird problem in my ear where it was kind of like low frequency sound
 distortion, where voices, particularly men's voices became incredibly unpleasant to listen
 to. It would create this, it would be falsely amplified or something. And it was almost
 like a physical sensation in my ear, which was really unpleasant. And it would last for
 a few hours and then go away and then come back for a few hours and go away. And I went
 and got hearing tests and they found that the bottom end, I was losing the hearing in
 that ear. And so in the end, the doctors said they think it was this thing called Meniere's
 disease, which is this very unpleasant disease where people basically end up losing their
 hearing, but they get this like, it often comes with dizzy spells and other things because
 it's like the inner ear gets all messed up. Now, I don't know if that's actually what
 I had, but that's what at least one doctor said to me. But anyway, so I'd had three months
 of this stuff, this going on, it was really getting me down. And I was at Burning Man
 of all places. I don't mean to be that person talking about Burning Man. But I was there.
 And again, I'd had it and I was unable to listen to music, which is not what you want
 because Burning Man is a very loud, intense place. And I was just having a really rough
 time. And on the final night, I get talking to this girl who's like a friend of a friend.
 And I mentioned, I was like, oh, I'm really down in the dumps about this. And she's like,
 oh, well, I've done a little bit of energy healing. Would you like me to have a look?
 And I was like, sure. Now this is again, deep, I was, you know, no time in my life for this.
 I didn't believe in any of this stuff. I was just like, it's all bullshit. It's all wooey
 nonsense. But I was like, sure, have a go. And she starts like with her hand and she
 says, oh, there's something there. And then she leans in and she starts like sucking
 over my ear, not actually touching me, but like close to it, like with her mouth. And
 it was really unpleasant. I was like, whoa, can you stop? She's like, no, no, no, there's
 something there. I need to get it. And I was like, no, no, no, I really don't like it.
 Please. This is really loud. She's like, I need to just bear with me. And she does it.
 I don't know how long for a few minutes. And then she eventually collapses on the ground,
 like freezing cold crying. Not, you know, and I'm just like, I don't know what the hell
 is going on. Like I'm like thoroughly freaked out as is everyone else watching just like
 the hell on me, like warm her up. And she was like, what? Oh, she was really shaken
 up. And she's like, I don't know what that, she said it was something very unpleasant
 and dark. Don't worry. It's gone. I think you'll be fine in a couple. You'll have the
 physical symptoms for a couple of weeks and you'll be fine. But you know, she was, she
 was like that, you know, so I was, I was so rattled a because the potential that actually
 I'd had something bad in me that made someone feel bad and, and, and that she was scared.
 That was what, you know, I was like, wait, I thought you, you do this. This is the thing.
 Now you're terrified. Like you pulled like some kind of exorcism or something. What the
 fuck is going on? So it, it like just the most insane experience. And frankly, it took
 me like a few months to sort of emotionally recover from it. But my ear problem went away
 about a couple of weeks later and touch wood, I've not had any issues since. So that gives
 you like hints that maybe there's something out there.
 I mean, I, I don't, I, I, again, I don't have an explanation for this. The most probable
 explanation was, you know, I was a burning man. I was in a very open state. Let's just
 leave it at that. Um, and you know, placebo is an incredibly powerful thing and a very
 not understood thing. So almost assigning the word placebo to it reduces it down to a way
 that it doesn't deserve to be reduced down. Maybe there's a whole science of what we call
 placebo. Maybe there's a placebo is a door.
 Self-healing. You know? And I mean, I don't know what the problem was. Like I was told
 it was many years. I don't want to say I definitely had that because I don't want people to think
 that, oh, that's how, you know, if they do have that, cause it's terrible disease. And
 if they have that, that this is going to be a guaranteed way for it to fix it for them.
 I don't know. Um, and I also don't, I don't, and you're absolutely right to say like using
 even the word placebo is like, it comes with this like baggage of, of like frame and I
 don't want to reduce it down. All I can do is describe the experience and what happened.
 I cannot put an ontological framework around it. I can't say why it happened, what the
 mechanism was, what the problem even was in the first place. Um, I just know that something
 crazy happened and it was while I was in an open state. And fortunately for me, it made
 the problem go away. But what I took away from it again, it was part of this, you know,
 this took me on this journey of becoming more humble about what I think I know. Because
 as I said before, I was like, I was in the like Richard Dawkins train of atheism in terms
 of there is no God. There's everything like that is bullshit. We know everything. We know,
 you know, the only way we can get through, uh, we know how medicine works and it's molecules
 and chemical interactions and that kind of stuff. And now it's like, okay, well there's
 there's clearly more for us to understand. Um, and that doesn't mean that it's a scientific
 as well because you know, the beauty of the scientific method is that it's still, it still
 can apply to the situation. Like I don't see why, you know, I would like to try and test
 this experimentally. Um, I haven't really, like, you know, I don't know how we would
 go about doing that. We'd have to find other people with the same condition, I guess, and
 like try and repeat, repeat the experiment. Um, but it doesn't just because something
 happens that's sort of out of the realms of our current understanding. It doesn't mean
 that it's the scientific method can't be used for it.
 Yeah. I think the scientific methods sits on a foundation of those kinds of experiences
 because they scientific method is a process to, um, carve away at the mystery all around
 us and experiences like this is just a reminder that we're mostly shrouded in mystery still.
 That's it. It's just like a humility. I haven't really figured this whole thing out, but at
 the same time we have found ways to act, you know, we're clearly doing something right
 because think of the technological scientific advancements, the knowledge that we have that
 was would blow people's minds even from a hundred years ago. Yeah. And we've even allegedly
 got out the space and landed on the moon. Although I still haven't, I have not seen
 evidence of, of the earth being round, but I'm still, I'm keeping an open mind. Uh,
 speaking of which, uh, you studied physics in astrophysics. Uh, when, just to go to that
 and we jump, just to jump around through the fascinating life you've had, when did you,
 how did that come to be? Like, when, when'd you fall in love with astronomy and space
 and things like this? As early as I can remember. Um, I was very lucky that my, my mom and my
 dad, but particularly my mom, my mom, my mom is like the most nature. She is mother earth.
 It's the only way to describe her. Just she's like Dr. Do little animals flock to her and
 just like sit and look at her adoringly as she sings. Yeah. She just, she just is mother
 earth. And she has always been fascinated by, you know, she doesn't have any, you know,
 she never went to university or anything like that. She's actually phobic of maths. If I
 try and get her to like, you know, I was trying to teach her poker and she hated it. Um, but
 she's so deeply curious. Um, and that just got instilled in me when, you know, we would
 sleep out under the stars whenever it was, you know, the two nights a year when it was
 warm enough in the UK to do that. Um, and we'll just lie out there until I've, until
 we fell asleep looking at looking for satellites, looking for shooting stars. And I was just
 always, I don't know whether it was from that, but I've always naturally gravitated to like
 the biggest, the biggest questions and also the, like the most layers of abstraction.
 I love just like, what's the meta question? What's the meta question and so on. Um, so
 I think it just came from that really. And it, and, and then on top of that, like physics,
 you know, it also made logical sense and that it was a, it was, it was the degree, it was
 a degree that was subject that ticked the box of being, you know, answering these really
 big picture questions, but it was also extremely useful. It like has a very high utility, um,
 in terms of, I didn't know necessarily, I thought I was going to become like a research
 scientist. I, my original plan was I want to be a professional astronomer.
 So it's not just like a philosophy degree that asks the big questions and it's not,
 uh, like biology and the path to go to medical school or something like that, which is overly
 pragmatic and not overly is, um, is very pragmatic, but this is, yeah, physics is a good combination
 of the two. Yeah. At least for me, it made sense and I
 was good at it. I liked it. Um, yeah. I mean, I, it wasn't like I did an immense amount
 of soul searching to choose it or anything. It just was like this, um, it made the most
 sense. I mean, you have to make this decision in the UK age 17, which is crazy. Um, cause
 you know, in us you go the first year, you do a bunch of stuff, right? And then you choose
 your major. Um, I think the first few years of college,
 you focus on the drugs and only as you get closer to the end, do you start to think,
 oh shit, this wasn't about that. And I'm, uh, I owe the government a lot of money. Um,
 how many alien civilizations are out there? When you, when you looked up at the stars
 with your mom and you were counting them, what's your mom think about the number of
 alien civilization? I actually don't know. I would imagine she
 would take the viewpoint of, you know, she's pretty humble and she knows how many, she
 knows there's a huge number of potential spawn sites out there. So she would spawn sites,
 spawn sites. Yeah. You know, this is our spawn site. You have spawn sites in polytopia. We
 spawned on earth. You know, it's,
 Hmm. Yeah. Spawn sites. Why does that feel weird to say spawn? Because it makes me feel
 like it's, um, there's only one source of life and it's spawning in different locations.
 That's why the word spawn. Cause like, it feels like life that originated on earth really
 originated here. Right. It is, it is unique to this particular.
 Yeah. I mean, but I don't, in my mind, it doesn't exclude, you know, the completely
 different forms of life and different biochemical soups can't also spawn. But I guess it implies
 that there's some spark that is uniform, which I kind of like the idea of.
 And then I get to think about respawning, like after it dies, like what happens if life
 on earth ends? Is it, is it going to restart again?
 Probably not. It depends. Maybe earth is too.
 It depends on the type of, you know, what, what's the thing that kills it, kills it off.
 Right. If it's a paperclip maximizer, not that, you know, for the, for the example,
 but you know, some kind of very self replicating, you know, high on the capabilities, very low
 on the wisdom type thing. So whether that's, you know, gray goo, green goo, you know, like
 nanobots or just a shitty misaligned AI that thinks it needs to turn everything into paperclips.
 You know, if it's something like that, then it's going to be very hard for life, you know,
 complex life, because by definition, you know, a paperclip maximizer is the ultimate instantiation
 of molecule, deeply low complexity, over optimization on a single thing, sacrificing everything
 else, turning the whole world into.
 Although something tells me like, if we actually take a paperclip maximizer, it destroys everything.
 It's a really dumb system that just envelops the whole of earth.
 And the universe beyond.
 I didn't, I didn't know that part, but okay, great.
 That's the thought experiment.
 It becomes a multi-planetary paperclip maximizer.
 Well, it just, it just propagates. I mean, it depends whether it figures out how to jump
 the vacuum gap. But again, I mean, this is all silly because it's a hypothetical thought
 experiment, which I think doesn't actually have much practical application to the AI
 safety problem, but it's just a fun thing to play around with. But if by definition,
 it is maximally intelligent, which means it is maximally good at navigating the environment
 around it in order to achieve its goal, but extremely bad at choosing goals in the first
 place. So again, we're talking on this orthogonality thing, right? It's very low on wisdom, but
 very high on capability. Then it will figure out how to jump the vacuum gap between planets
 and stars and so on. And thus just turn every atom it gets its hands on into paperclips.
 Yeah. By the way, for people who don't-
 Which is maximum virality, by the way. That's what virality is.
 That does not mean that virality is necessarily all about maximizing paperclips. In that case,
 it is. So for people who don't know, this is just a thought experiment example of an
 AI system that has a goal and is willing to do anything to accomplish that goal, including
 destroying all life on earth and all human life and all of consciousness in the universe
 for the goal of producing a maximum number of paperclips. Okay.
 Or whatever its optimization function was that it was set up.
 But don't you think-
 It could be making, recreating Lexus. Maybe it'll tile the universe in Lexus.
 Go on. I like this idea. No, I'm just kidding.
 That's better. That's more interesting than paperclips.
 That could be infinitely optimal if I were to say so myself.
 But if you ask me, it's still a bad thing because it's permanently capping what the
 universe could ever be. It's like that's its end state.
 Or achieving the optimal that the universe could ever achieve, but that's up to different
 people at different perspectives. But don't you think within the paperclip world that
 would emerge, just like in the zeros and ones that make up a computer, that would emerge
 beautiful complexities? It won't suppress. As you scale to multiple planets and throughout,
 there'll emerge these little worlds that on top of the fabric of maximizing paperclips,
 that would emerge like little societies of paperclip-
 Then we're not describing a paperclip maximizer anymore. If you think of what a paperclip
 is, it is literally just a piece of bent iron.
 Yes.
 Right? So if it's maximizing that throughout the universe, it's taking every atom it gets
 its hand on into somehow turning it into iron or steel, and then bending it into that shape
 and then done and done. By definition, paperclips, there is no way for- Well, okay. So you're
 saying that paperclips somehow will just emerge and create through gravity or something?
 No, no, no. Because there's a dynamic element to the whole system. It's creating those paperclips
 and the act of creating, there's going to be a process and that process will have a
 dance to it because it's not like sequential thing. There's a whole complex three-dimensional
 system of paperclips. People have string theory, right? It's supposed to be strings that are
 interacting in fascinating ways. I'm sure paperclips are very string-like. They can
 be interacting in very interesting ways as you scale exponentially through three-dimensional-
 I'm sure the paperclip maximizer has to come up with a theory of everything. It has to
 create wormholes, right? It has to understand quantum mechanics.
 I love your optimism. This is where I'd say we're going into the realm of pathological
 optimism, whereby it's- I'm sure there'll be a- I think there's an intelligence that
 emerges from that system. You're saying that basically intelligence is inherent in the
 fabric of reality and will find a way, kind of like Goldblum says, life will find a way.
 You think life will find a way even out of this perfectly homogeneous dead soup.
 It's not perfectly homogeneous. It's perfectly maximal in the production. I don't know why
 people keep thinking it's homogenous. It maximizes the number of paperclips. That's the only
 thing. It's not trying to be homogeneous. It's trying-
 True, true, true, true, true.
 It's trying to maximize paperclips.
 So you're saying that because, kind of like in the Big Bang, it seems like there were
 clusters, there was more stuff here than there, that was enough of the patonicity that kickstarted
 the evolutionary process.
 It's the little weirdnesses that will make it beautiful.
 You think that even out of-
 Complexity emerges.
 Interesting. Okay. Well, so how does that line up then with the whole heat death of
 the universe, right? Because that's another sort of instantiation of this. It's like everything
 becomes so far apart and so cold and so perfectly mixed that it's like homogenous grayness.
 Do you think that even out of that homogenous grayness where there's no negative entropy,
 there's no free energy that we understand even from that new-
 Yeah. The paperclip maximizer or any other intelligence systems will figure out ways
 to travel to other universes to create Big Bangs within those universes or through black
 holes to create whole other worlds to break what we consider the limitations of physics.
 The paperclip maximizer will find a way if a way exists and we should be humble to realize
 that we don't-
 Yeah, but because it just wants to make more paperclips. So it's going to go into those
 universes and turn them into paperclips.
 Yeah, but we humans, not humans, but complex system exists on top of that. We're not interfering
 with it. This complexity emerges from-
 The simple base state.
 The simple base state.
 Whether it's plank lengths or paperclips is the base unit.
 You can think of the universe as a paperclip maximizer because it's doing some dumb stuff.
 Physics seems to be pretty dumb. I don't know if you can summarize it.
 Yes. The laws are fairly basic and yet out of them amazing complexity emerges.
 Its goals seem to be pretty basic and dumb. If you can summarize its goals, I don't know
 what's a nice way maybe laws of thermodynamics could be. I don't know if you can assign goals
 to physics, but if you formulate in the sense of goals, it's very similar to paperclip maximizer
 in the dumbness of the goals. The pockets of complexity as it emerge is where beauty
 emerges. That's where life emerges. That's where intelligence, that's where humans emerge.
 I think we're being very down on this whole paperclip maximizer thing. Now, the reason
 we hate it-
 Yeah, because what you're saying is that you think that the force of emergence itself is
 another baked in law of reality. You're trusting that emergence will find a way to, even out
 of seemingly the most mollic-y awful plain outcome emergence will still find a way. I
 love that as a philosophy. I think it's very nice. I would wield it carefully because there's
 large error bars on that and the certainty of that.
 How about we build the paperclip maximizer and find out?
 Classic. Yeah. Mollic is doing cartwheels. Man.
 Yeah. The thing is it will destroy humans in the process, which is the reason we really
 don't like it. We seem to be really holding on to this whole human civilization thing.
 Would that make you sad if AI systems that are beautiful, that are conscious, that are
 interesting and complex and intelligent ultimately lead to the death of humans? Would that make
 you sad?
 If humans led to the death of humans? Sorry.
 If they would supersede humans.
 Oh, if some AI?
 Yeah. AI would end humans.
 That's the reason why I'm in some ways less emotionally concerned about AI risk than,
 say, bio risk. At least with AI, if we're in this hypothetical where it wipes out humans
 but it does it for some higher purpose, it needs our atoms and energy to do something,
 at least now the universe is going on to do something interesting. Whereas if it wipes
 out everything, bio just kills everything on earth and that's it. Earth cannot spawn
 anything more meaningful in the few hundred million years it has left because it doesn't
 have much time left.
 One of my favorite books I've ever read is Novosene by James Lovelock, who sadly just
 died. He wrote it when he was like 99. He died aged 102, so it's a fairly new book.
 He talks about that, that he thinks it's building off this Gaia theory where earth is like living
 some form of intelligence itself and that this is the next step, right? Whatever this
 new intelligence that is maybe silicon-based as opposed to carbon-based goes on to do.
 It's really in some ways an optimistic but weirdly fatalistic book. I don't know if I
 fully subscribe to it, but it's a beautiful piece to read anyway.
 Am I sad by that idea? I think so, yes. Actually, yeah, this is the reason why I'm sad by the
 idea because if something is truly brilliant and wise and smart and truly super intelligent,
 it should be able to figure out abundance. If it figures out abundance, it shouldn't
 need to kill us off. It should be able to find a way for us. The universe is huge. There
 should be plenty of space for it to go out and do all the things it wants to do and give
 us a little pocket where we can continue doing our things and we can continue to do things
 and so on. Again, if it's so supremely wise, it shouldn't even be worried about the game
 theoretic considerations that by leaving us alive, we'll then go and create another super
 intelligent agent that it then has to compete against because it should be omnivise and
 smart enough to not have to concern itself with that.
 Unless it deems humans to be kind of assholes. The humans are a source of none of a lose-lose
 kind of dynamics. Well, yes and no. Moloch is. That's why I think it's important to separate
 ourselves. Maybe humans are the source of Moloch.
 No, I think game theory is the source of Moloch because Moloch exists in non-human systems
 as well. It happens within agents within a game. It applies to agents, but it can apply
 to a species that's on an island of animals. Rats out competing. The ones that massively
 consume all the resources are the ones that are going to win out over the more chill,
 socialized ones and so creates this Malthusian trap. Moloch exists in little pockets in nature
 as well. It's not a strictly human thing.
 I wonder if it's actually a result of consequences of the invention of predator and prey dynamics.
 Maybe AI will have to kill off every organism. Now you're talking about killing off competition.
 Not competition, but just like the way it's like the weeds or whatever in a beautiful
 flower garden. Parasites.
 The parasites, yeah. On the whole system. Now, of course, it won't do that completely.
 It'll put them in a zoo like we do with parasites.
 It'll ring fence. Yeah. And there'll be somebody doing a PhD
 on like the prod humans with a stick and see what they do. But I mean, in terms of letting
 us run wild outside of the, you know, geographically constrained region, that might decide to.
 No, I think there's obviously the capacity for beauty and kindness and non-moloch behavior
 against humans. So I'm pretty sure AI will preserve us. Let me, I don't know if you answered
 the aliens question. Oh, I didn't.
 You had a good conversation with Toby, Toby Orr.
 Yes. About various sides of the universe. I think
 did he say, now I'm forgetting, but I think he said it's a good chance we're alone.
 So the classic, you know, Fermi paradox question is, there are so many spawn points and yet
 you know, it didn't take us that long to go from harnessing fire to sending out radio
 signals into space. So surely given the vastness of space, we should be, and you know, even
 if only a tiny fraction of those create life and other civilizations too, we should be,
 the universe should be very noisy. There should be evidence of Dyson spheres or whatever,
 you know, like at least radio signals and so on. But seemingly things are very silent
 out there. Now, of course, it depends on who you speak to. Some people say that they're
 getting signals all the time and so on. And like, I don't want to make an epistemic statement
 on that, but it seems like there's a lot of silence. And so that raises this paradox.
 And then say, you know, the Drake equation. So the Drake equation is like, basically,
 just a simple thing of like trying to estimate the number of possible civilizations within
 the galaxy by multiplying the number of stars created per year by the number of stars that
 have planets, planets that are habitable, blah, blah, blah. So all these like different
 factors. And then you plug in numbers into that and you, you know, depending on like
 the range of, you know, your lower bound and your upper bound point estimates that you
 put in, you get out a number at the end for the number of civilizations. But what Toby
 and his crew did differently was, Toby is a researcher at the Future of Humanity Institute,
 they instead of, they realized that it's like basically a statistical quirk that if you
 put in point sources, even if you think you're putting in conservative point sources, because
 on some of these variables, the uncertainty is so large, it spans like maybe even like
 a couple of hundred of orders of magnitude. By putting in point sources, it's always going
 to lead to overestimates. And so they, by putting stuff on a log scale, or actually
 they did it on like a log log scale on some of them, and then like ran the simulation
 across the whole bucket of uncertainty across all those orders of magnitude. When you do
 that, then actually the number comes out much, much smaller. And that's the more statistically
 rigorous, you know, mathematically correct way of doing the calculation. It's still a
 lot of hand waving. As science goes, it's like definitely, you know, just waving. I
 don't know what an analogy is, but it's hand wavy. And anyway, when they did this, and
 then they did a Bayesian update on it as well to like factor in the fact that there is no
 evidence that we're picking up because, you know, no evidence is actually a form of evidence,
 right? And the long and short of it comes out that the, we're roughly around 70% to
 be the only intelligent civilization in our galaxy thus far, and around 50-50 in the entire
 observable universe, which sounds so crazily counterintuitive, but their math is legit.
 Well, yeah, the math around this particular equation, which is the equation is ridiculous
 on many levels, but the powerful thing about the equation is there's the different things,
 different components that can be estimated and the error bars on which can be reduced
 with science and enhanced throughout since the equation came out, the error bars have
 been coming out on different aspects. And so that it almost kind of says, like this gives
 you a mission to reduce the error bars on these estimates over a period of time. And
 once you do, you can better and better understand, like in the process of reviewing the error
 bars, you'll get to understand actually what is the right way to find out where the aliens
 are, how many of them there are, and all those kinds of things. So I don't think it's good
 to use that for an estimation. I think you do have to think from like more like from
 first principles, just looking at what life is on earth, like, and trying to understand
 the very physics-based, biology, chemistry, biology-based question of what is life, maybe
 computation-based, what the fuck is this thing? And that, like, how difficult is it to create
 this thing? It's one way to say like, how many planets like this are out there, all
 that kind of stuff. But it feels like from our very limited knowledge perspective, the
 right ways to think how, how does, what is this thing and how does it originate from
 from very simple non-life things? How does complex life-like things emerge from, from,
 from a rock to a bacteria, protein, and these like weird systems that encode information
 and pass information from self-replicate and then also select each other and mutate in
 interesting ways such that they can adapt and evolve and build increasingly more complex
 systems.
 Right. Well, it's a form of information processing, right?
 Yeah, right.
 Whereas information transfer, but then also an energy processing, which then results in
 I guess information processing, maybe I'm getting bogged down.
 Well, it's doing some modification and yeah, the input is some energy.
 Right. It's able to extract, yeah, extract resources from its environment in order to
 achieve a goal.
 But the goal doesn't seem to be clear.
 Right. The goal is, well, the goal is to make more of itself.
 Yeah. But in a way that increases, I mean, I don't know if evolution is a fundamental
 law of the universe, but it seems to want to replicate itself in a way that maximizes
 the chance of its survival.
 Individual agents within an ecosystem do. Yes. Yes. Evolution itself doesn't give a
 fuck.
 Right.
 So you don't care. It's just like, oh, you optimize it. Well, at least it's certainly,
 yeah, it doesn't care about the welfare of the individual agents within it, but it does
 seem to, I don't know. I think the mistake is that we're anthropomorphizing. It's to
 even try and give evolution a mindset because there's a really great post by Eliezer Yudkowsky
 on Less Wrong, which is an alien god. And he talks about the mistake we make when we
 try and put our mind, think through things from an evolutionary perspective as though
 we're giving evolution some kind of agency and what it wants. Yeah, worth reading. But
 yeah.
 I would like to say that having interacted with a lot of really smart people that say
 that anthropomorphization is a mistake. I would like to say that saying that anthropomorphization
 is a mistake is a mistake. I think there's a lot of power in anthropomorphization, if
 I can only say that word correctly one time. I think that's actually a really powerful
 way to reason to things. I think people, especially people in robotics seem to run away from it
 as fast as possible. And I just, I think-
 Can you give an example of like how it helps in robotics?
 Oh, in that our world is a world of humans. And to see robots as fundamentally just tools
 runs away from the fact that we live in a world of, a dynamic world of humans. That
 like these, all these game theory systems we've talked about, that a robot that ever
 has to interact with humans. And I don't mean like intimate friendship interaction. I mean
 in a factory setting where it has to deal with the uncertainty of humans, all that kind
 of stuff. You have to acknowledge that the robot's behavior has an effect on the human
 just as much as the human has an effect on the robot. And there's a dance there. And
 you have to realize that this entity, when a human sees a robot, this is obvious in a
 physical manifestation of a robot. They feel a certain way. They have a fear, they have
 a, they have their own personal life projections. We have to have pets and dogs and the thing
 looks like a dog. They have their own memories of what a dog is like. They have certain feelings
 and that's going to be useful in a safety setting, safety critical setting, which is
 one of the most trivial settings for a robot in terms of how to avoid any kind of dangerous
 situations. And a robot should really consider that in navigating its environment. And we
 humans are right to reason about how a robot should consider navigating its environment
 through anthropomorphization. I also think our brains are designed to think in human
 terms like game theory, I think is best applied in the space of human decisions. And so-
 Right. You're dealing, I mean, with things like AI, AI is they are, you know, we can
 somewhat, like, I don't think it's, the reason I say anthropomorphization, we need to be
 careful with is because there is a danger of overly applying, overly, wrongly assuming
 that this artificial intelligence is going to operate in any similar way to us, because
 it is operating on a fundamentally different substrate, like even dogs or even mice or
 whatever in some ways, like anthropomorphizing them is less of a mistake, I think, than an
 AI, even though it's an AI we built and so on, because at least we know that they're
 running from the same substrate. And they've also evolved from the same, out of the same
 evolutionary process. You know, they've followed this evolution of like needing to compete
 for resources and needing to find a mate and that kind of stuff. Whereas an AI that has
 just popped into existence somewhere on like a cloud server, let's say, you know, or whatever,
 however it runs and whatever, whether, I don't know whether they have an internal experience,
 I don't think they necessarily do. In fact, I don't think they do. But the point is, is
 that to try and apply any kind of modeling of like, thinking through problems and decisions
 in the same way that we do, has to be done extremely carefully because they are like,
 they're so alien, their method of whatever their form of thinking is, it's just so different
 because they've never had to evolve, you know, in the same way.
 Yeah, beautifully put. I was just playing devil's advocate. I do think in certain contexts,
 anthropomorphization is not going to hurt you.
 Yes.
 Engineers run away from it too fast.
 I can see that.
 But from the most point, you're right. Do you have advice for young people today, like
 the 17 year old that you were, of how to live life you can be proud of, how to have a career
 you can be proud of in this world full of mullets?
 Think about the win-wins. Look for win-win situations and be careful not to, you know,
 fully use your smarts to convince yourself that something is win-win when it's not. So
 that's difficult and I don't know how to advise, you know, people on that because it's something
 I'm still figuring out myself. But have that as a sort of default MO. Don't see things,
 everything is a zero sum game. Try to find the positive sumness and like find ways to,
 if there doesn't seem to be one, consider playing a different game. So I would suggest
 that. Do not become a professional poker player.
 Because people always ask, they're like, oh, she's a pro. I want to do that too. Fine.
 You could have done it if you were, you know, when I started out, it was a very different
 situation back then. Poker is, you know, a great game to learn in order to understand
 the ways to think. And I recommend people learn it, but don't try making a living from
 it these days. It's almost, it's very, very difficult to the point of being impossible.
 And then really, really be aware of how much time you spend on your phone and on social
 media and really try and keep it to a minimum. Be aware that basically every moment that
 you spend on it is bad for you. So it doesn't mean to say you can never do it, but just
 have that running in the background. I'm doing a bad thing for myself right now. I think
 that's the general rule of thumb.
 Of course, about becoming a professional poker player, if there is a thing in your life that
 that's like that and nobody can convince you otherwise, just fucking do it. Don't listen
 to anyone's advice. Find a thing that you can't be talked out of too. That's a thing.
 I like that. Yeah.
 You were a lead guitarist in a metal band. Did I write that down from something? What
 did you do it for? The performing? Was it the music of it? Was it just being a rock
 star? Why'd you do it?
 So we only ever played two gigs. We weren't famous or anything like that. But I was very
 into metal. It was my entire identity from the age of 16 to 23.
 What's the best metal band of all time?
 Don't ask me that. It's so hard to answer.
 I had a long argument with... I'm a guitarist, more like a classic rock guitarist. I've had
 friends who are very big Pantera fans. There was often arguments about what's the better
 metal band, Metallica versus Pantera. This is a more kind of 90s maybe discussion. But
 I was always on the side of Metallica, both musically and in terms of performance and
 the depth of lyrics and so on. Basically, everybody was against me. Because if you're
 a true metal fan, I guess the idea goes is you can't possibly be a Metallica fan.
 I think that's crazy.
 Because Metallica is pop. They sold out.
 Metallica are metal. Again, you can't say who was the godfather of metal, blah, blah,
 blah. But they were so groundbreaking and so brilliant. You've named literally two of
 my favorite bands. When you asked that question, who are my favorites, those were two that
 came up. A third one is Children of Bodom, who I just think tick all the boxes for me.
 Yeah, I don't know. Nowadays, I feel like a repulsion to the... I was that myself. I'd
 be like, who do you prefer more? Come on, who's like... You have to rank them. But it's
 like this false zero-sum-ness that's like why? They're so additive. There's no conflict
 there.
 Although, when people ask that kind of question about anything, movies, I feel like it's hard
 work and it's unfair, but you should pick one. That's actually the same kind of... It's
 like a fear of a commitment. When people ask me, what's your favorite band, it's like,
 whew. But it's good to pick.
 Exactly. And thank you for the tough question. Yeah.
 Well, maybe not in a context when a lot of people are listening.
 Can I just like, what? Why does it matter? No, it does.
 Are you still into metal?
 Funny enough, I was listening to a bunch before I came over here.
 Oh, like do you use it for motivation or get you into certain...
 Yeah, I was weirdly listening to 80s hair metal before I came.
 Does that count as metal?
 I think so. It's like proto metal and it's happy. It's optimistic, happy, proto metal.
 Yeah, I mean, all these genres bleed into each other. But yeah, sorry, to answer your
 question about guitar playing, my relationship with it was kind of weird in that I was deeply
 uncreative. My objective would be to hear some really hard technical solo and then learn
 it, memorize it, and then play it perfectly. But I was incapable of trying to write my
 own music. The idea was just absolutely terrifying. But I was also just thinking, it'd be kind
 of cool to actually try starting a band again and getting back into it and write. But it's
 scary.
 It's scary. I mean, I put out some guitar playing just other people's covers, like I
 play Comfortably Numb on the internet. And it's scary too. It's scary putting stuff out
 there. And I had this similar kind of fascination with technical playing both on piano and guitar.
 One of the reasons I started learning guitar is from Ozzy Osbourne, Mr. Crowley's solo.
 One of the first solos I learned is that there's a beauty to it. There's a lot of beauty to
 it.
 Tapping, right?
 There's some tapping, but it's just really fast.
 Beautiful, like arpeggios.
 Yeah, arpeggios. Yeah. But there's a melody that you can hear through it, but there's
 also build up. It's a beautiful solo, but it's also technically just visually the way
 it looks when a person's watching. You feel like a rock star playing it. But it ultimately
 has to do with technical. You're not developing the part of your brain that I think requires
 you to generate beautiful music. It is ultimately technical in nature. And so that took me a
 long time to let go of that and just be able to write music myself. And that's a different
 journey I think. I think that journey is a little bit more inspired in the blues world,
 for example, or improvisation is more valued, obviously in jazz and so on. But I think ultimately
 it's a more rewarding journey because you get to your relationship with the guitar then
 becomes a kind of escape from the world where you can create. I mean, creating stuff is...
 And it's something you work with because my relationship with my guitar was like it was
 something to tame and defeat.
 Yeah.
 Which was kind of what my whole personality was back then. I was just very, as I said,
 very competitive, very just like must bend this thing to my will. Whereas writing music
 is like a dance. You work with it.
 But I think because of the competitive aspect, for me at least, that's still there, which
 creates anxiety about playing publicly or all that kind of stuff. I think there's just
 like a harsh self-criticism within the whole thing. It's really tough.
 I want to hear some of your stuff.
 I mean, there's certain things that feel really personal. And on top of that, as we talked
 about poker offline, there's certain things that you get to a certain height in your life.
 And that doesn't have to be very high, but you get to a certain height and then you put
 it aside for a bit. And it's hard to return to it because you remember being good. And
 it's hard to, like you being at a very high level in poker, it might be hard for you to
 return to poker every once in a while and enjoy it knowing that you're just not as sharp
 as you used to be because you're not doing it every single day. That's something I always
 wonder with, I mean, even just like in chess with Kasparov, some of these greats just returning
 to it. It's almost painful.
 Yes.
 And I feel that way with guitar too, you know, because I used to play like every day a lot.
 So returning to it is painful because it's like accepting the fact that this whole ride
 is finite and that you have a prime, there's a time when you're really good and now it's
 over and now-
 We're on a different chapter of life. I was like, oh, but I might miss that.
 But you can still discover joy within that process. It's been tough, especially with
 some level of like, as people get to know you, and people film stuff, you don't have
 the privacy of just sharing something with a few people around you.
 That's a beautiful privacy that-
 That's a good point.
 With the internet, it's just disappearing.
 Yeah, that's a really good point.
 But all those pressures aside, if you really, you can step up and still enjoy the fuck out
 of a good musical performance. What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing?
 What's the meaning of life?
 It's in your name, as we talked about. You have to live up. Do you feel the requirement
 to have to live up to your name?
 Because live?
 Yeah.
 No, because I don't see it. I mean, my, well, again, it's kind of like, no, I don't know.
 Because my full name is Olivia. So I can retreat in that and be like, oh, Olivia, what does
 that even mean? Live up to live. No, I can't say I do, because I've never thought of it
 that way.
 And then your name backwards is evil, as we also talked about. There's like layers-
 I mean, I feel the urge to live up to that, to be the inverse of evil, or even better.
 Because I don't think, you know, is the inverse of evil good or is good something completely
 separate to that? I think my intuition says it's the latter, but I don't know. Anyway,
 getting in the weeds. What is the meaning of all this?
 Of life. Why are we here?
 I think to explore, have fun and understand, and make more of here and to keep the game
 going.
 Of here? More of here?
 More of this, whatever this is.
 More of experience. Just to have more of experience and ideally positive experience. And more
 complex, you know, I guess try and put it into a sort of vaguely scientific term. Make
 it so that the program required, the length of code required to describe the universe
 is as long as possible. And, you know, highly complex and therefore interesting. Because
 again, like, I know, you know, we bang the metaphor to death, but like, tiled with paper
 clips doesn't require that much of a code to describe. Obviously, it may be something
 emerges from it, but that steady state, assuming a steady state, it's not very interesting.
 But it seems like our universe is over time becoming more and more complex and interesting.
 There's so much richness and beauty and diversity on this earth. And I want that to continue
 and get more. I want more diversity. And the very best sense of that word is to me the
 goal of all this.
 Yeah. And somehow have fun in the process.
 Yes.
 Because we do create a lot of fun things along instead of in this creative force. And all
 the beautiful things that create somehow there's like a funness to it. And perhaps that has
 to do with the finiteness of life, the finiteness of all these experiences, which is what makes
 them kind of unique. Like the fact that they end, there's this, whatever it is, falling
 in love or creating a piece of art or creating a bridge or creating a rocket or creating
 a, I don't know, just the businesses that do that, that, that build something or solve
 something. The fact that it is born and it dies somehow embeds it with fun, with joy
 for the people involved. I don't know what that is, the finiteness of it.
 It can do. Some people struggle with the, you know, I mean, a big thing I think that
 one has to learn is being okay with things coming to an end. And in terms of like projects
 and so on, right, people cling onto things beyond what they're meant to be doing, you
 know, beyond what is reasonable.
 And I'm going to have to come to terms with this podcast coming to an end. I really enjoy
 talking to you. I think it's obvious, as we've talked about many times, you should be doing
 a podcast. You should, you're already doing a lot of stuff publicly to the world, which
 is awesome. And you're a great educator, you're a great mind, you're great into like, but
 it's also this whole medium of just talking is also fun. It's a fun one.
 It really is good. And it's just, it's nothing but like, oh, it's just so much fun. And you
 can just get into so many, yeah, there's this space to just explore and see what comes and
 emerges and yeah.
 Yeah, to understand yourself better. And if you're talking to others, to understand them
 better and together with them. I mean, you should do your own podcast, but you should
 also do a podcast with C as we talked about. The two of you have such different minds that
 like melt together in just hilarious ways, fascinating ways. Just the tension of ideas
 there is really powerful. But in general, I think you got a beautiful voice. So thank
 you so much for talking today. Thank you for being a friend. Thank you for honoring me
 with this conversation and with your valuable time. Thanks, Liv.
 Thank you.
 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Liv Bury. To support this podcast, please
 check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from
 Richard Feynman.
 I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers, which might
 be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty
 about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything. And there are many things
 I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I
 don't have to know the answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things by being lost
 in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I
 can tell. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.