Liv Boeree: Poker, Game Theory, AI, Simulation, Aliens & Existential Risk | Lex Fridman Podcast #314

evolutionarily, if we see a lion running at us, we didn't have time to calculate the lion's kinetic energy and is it optimal to go this way or that way. You just reacted. 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 evolved to do. Yet you're in that same flight or fight response. 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. The following is a conversation with Liv Boree, 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 Boree. 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. 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 Nash equilibria. Yes. Right? 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 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? What's a 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 wider decision theory. And usually when you see it, it's these 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, there is no strategy that you can use to try and get a win. Basically, 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 if we're both playing in a game theory optimal strategy, if either of us deviate from that, now we're putting ourselves at a disadvantage. Rock-paper-scissors is actually a really great example of this. If we were to start playing rock-paper-scissors, 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 optimal strategy be, do you think? What would you do? Let's see. I would probably try to be as random as possible. Exactly. 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 too. But actually, it wouldn't matter because I know that you're playing randomly. So that would be us in a Nash equilibrium, where we're both playing this 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, no, I'm a, as I said, randomizer. So you notice I'm playing rock too much or something like that. Now you'd be making a mistake by continuing playing this game theory optimal strategy, the previous one, because you are now, 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 percentage of the time that I'm throwing rock too often. So that's basically an example of 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 stuff, 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, nowadays they study, the game's changed so much, and I think we should talk about how it's sort of evolved. But nowadays, the top pros basically spend all their time in between sessions running these simulators using 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-9 suited on the King-10-4 two-spade board against this bet size? So you'd input that, press play, it'll run its billions of fake hands, and then it'll 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 kind of simulations incorporate all the betting strategies and everything else like that. 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 too. 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. 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? Oh, yeah. The way they illustrated it is they're trying to pick up a girl at a bar and there's multiple girls. 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 first? Yeah, yeah. Something like that. Yeah. Fane disinterest. I mean, it's classic pick up artist stuff, right? You want to... And they were trying to correlate that somehow, that being an optimal strategy game, theoretically. Why? What? 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 picking up girls? Do you know the marriage problem? It's 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 know you've got like a set of 100 people you're going to look through and after how many do you now... After going on this many dates out of 100, at what point do you then go, okay, the next best person I see, is that the right one? And I think it's like something like 37%? 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 next person that is better than anyone you've seen before. Anyone else you've seen, yeah. Have you tried this? Have you incorporated it? I'm not one of those people. And we're going to discuss this. I'm not one of those people. And we're going to discuss this. And what do you mean, those people? I try not to optimize stuff. I try to listen to the heart. I don't think... My mind immediately is attracted to optimizing everything. And I think that if you really give into that kind of addiction, that you lose 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 on average, people under try and quantify things or try under optimize. There are some people who, it's like with all these things, 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... Dating apps are on there for a long time. So 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... A 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. That'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 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, 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 thought that Goodreads should be a dating app. I've never used it. Goodreads is just lists books that you've read. And it allows you to comment on the books you read and what books you're currently reading. It's a giant social network of people reading books. And that seems to be a much better database of interests. Of course, it constrains you to the books you're reading, but that really reveals so much more about the person. It allows you to discover shared interests because books are a kind of window into the way you see the world. Also, the kind of places, people you're curious about, the kind of ideas you're curious about. Are you a romantic? Are you cold, calculating rationalist? Are you into Ayn Rand? Or are you into Bernie Sanders? Are you into whatever? And I feel like that reveals so much more than a person trying to look hot from a certain angle in a Tinder profile. Well, and it would also be a really great filter in the first place for people, it's for 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 of 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 Cliff Notes. 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. Which book? 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, Macbeth. I don't remember, but I don't understand it. It's like really cryptic. It's hard. 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- You got a five, which is- Yeah, yeah. I don't know how the US grading system- Oh, no. So AP English is, 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- And you game, the point is you gamified it. Gamified. Well, 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 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 incredible. 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. 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 would just check to see whether this book covered it and it did. And I think I only bought like two or three extra and thank God because they're super expensive textbooks. It's a whole racket they've got going on. Yeah, they are. You get the right one. It's just like a manual. But what's interesting though is this is the tyranny of having exams and metrics. CBT The tyranny of exams and metrics. Yes. HMW I loved them because 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 in that the actual, 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, I'm trying to wrap my teeth around this like game theory 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 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. LBW Yeah, and especially high level lectures, 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. LBW That's why I'm nervous about this. Don't go back and be like, let's do that. AC 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, 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, you know, laundry and having to sort of pay for mortgage or all that kind of stuff, pay taxes, all this kind of stuff. Of 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 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, 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 drink and all that kind of stuff. But the learning, just going back to those textbooks, the hours spent with the textbooks is really, really rewarding. Do people even use textbooks anymore? Yeah. Do you think? Because- Kids these days with their TikTok and their- Well, not even that, but just like so much information, really high quality information, you know, is now in digital format online. Yeah, but they're not, they 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, Grant Sanderson talks about this, he's this math- 331 Brown. Yeah, 331 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 should do the textbook. You should do that, you know, and there's still the textbook industrial complex that like charges like $200 for a textbook and somehow, I don't know, it's ridiculous. Well, they're like, 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. I'm going to get a chance to talk to him on this podcast. And he's somebody that I found fascinating in terms of the way he thinks about poker, verbalizes the way he thinks about poker, the way he plays poker. 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 adapting in this way? Like the top pros, do they have to adapt this way? Or is there still like over years, you basically develop this gut feeling about, like, 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. But it just comes from your gut feeling or no. Yes and no. So gut feelings are definitely very important. 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. And historically in poker, the very best players were playing almost entirely by their gut. 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. And that's not so much because their process was unintelligible, but it was more just because 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. 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, when computers became cheaper and software started emerging, and then obviously online poker, where it would like automatically save your hand histories. Now all of a sudden you kind of had 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 so what that meant is the role of intuition essentially became smaller. And it went more into, as we talked before about, you know, this game theory optimal style. But also, as I said, like game theory optimal is about 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 in poker, not even the best AIs. They're still like, they're 99.99% of the way there or whatever, but it's kind of like the speed of light. You can't reach it perfectly. LUCAS So there's still a role for intuition? HANNAH Yes. So 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, well, okay, I know I have this, I'm in the sort of top end of my range here with this hand. So that means I need to be calling X percent of the time and I put them on this range, etc. But then sometimes you'll have this gut feeling that will tell you, you know, this time I know mathematically I'm meant to call now. I'm in the sort of top end of my range and 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. They're beating you. Maybe your hand is worse. So then the real art, this is where the last remaining art in poker, the fuzziness, 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? And I think that's what Daniel has. I mean, I can't speak for how much he's studying with the simulators and that kind of thing. I think he has, like he must be to still be keeping up. 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 money's on the line and you've 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 subtlety. 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. I don't know how, again, would he be beating the top cash game players online? Probably not. No. But when he's 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 still so well. There's one player who I would say is the exception to all of this. And he's one of my favorite people to talk about in terms of, I think he might have cracked the simulation. It's Phil Helmuth. He... In more ways than one, he's cracked the simulation, I think. Yeah. He somehow to this day is still, and I love you, Phil, I'm not in any way knocking you. He's still winning so much at the World Series of Poker specifically. He's now won 16 bracelets. The next nearest person I think has won 10. And he is consistently year in year out going deep or winning these huge field tournaments with like 2000 people, which statistically he should not be doing. And yet, you watch some of the plays he makes and they make no sense. Mathematically, they are so far from game theory optimal. And the thing is, if you went and stuck him in one of these high stakes cash games with a bunch of 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, amongst sort of amateurish players, he gets them to do crazy shit like that. But my little pet theory is that also, he's like a wizard and he gets the cards to do what he needs them to. Because he just expects to win and he expects to get flop a set with a frequency far beyond what 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 because when I've seen him play, he seems to be annoyed that the long shot thing didn't happen. Yes. He's annoyed and it's almost like everybody else is stupid because he was obviously going to win with this. 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 1% not the other way around. But genuinely, for his lived experience at the World Series of Poker, it is like that. So I don't blame him for feeling that way. But he does. He has this X factor. And the poker community has tried for years to rip him down saying like, he's no good. But he's clearly good because he's still winning. There's something going on. Whether that's he's figured out how to mess with the fabric of reality and how cards, a randomly shuffled deck of cards come out. I don't know what it is, but he's doing it right still. Who do you think is the greatest of all time? Would you put Helmuth? It depends. 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. I would say this to his face. I'm not saying anything. 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 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. 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. 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. He has? He did? Yes. Not like a trolling book? No. Like serious? 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. Demands delivered. But 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, 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 was 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. I 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 Ivey, 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. Got it. Keep that going, you know. 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? Or 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, 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 Phil Ivey 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. 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 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 satellited 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 Negranos, the Phil Iveys and so on. And then to like, you know, each time you put the bets out, you know, you put another bet out, your card, you know, I was on what's called a semi-bluff. So there were 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 I think in this scenario, I had a flush draw. So I had two clubs, two clubs came out on the flop. And then I'm hoping that on the turn in 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've 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 a flush draw. I had a flush draw. I'm pretty sure that's what the scenario was. So I had some future equity, but it's still, most of the time, I don't hit that club. And so I would rather him just fold because the pot is now getting bigger and bigger. And in the end, I 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 25K. This was the first time I played one. So it felt like the most momentous thing. And this was also when I was trying to build myself up, build a name for myself in poker. I wanted to get respect. It felt like it in the moment. I mean, it literally does feel like a form of life and death. Your body physiologically is having that flight or fight response. What are you doing with your body? What are you doing with your face? What are you thinking about? More like a mixture of, okay, what are the cards? So in theory, I'm thinking about, okay, what are cards that make my hand look stronger? Which cards hit my perceived range from his perspective? Which cards don't? What's the right amount of bet size to maximize my fold equity in this situation? That's the logical stuff that I should be thinking about. But I think in reality, because I was so scared, because at least for me, there's a certain threshold of nervousness or stress beyond which the logical brain shuts off. And now it just gets into this... It feels like a game of wits, basically. It's like of nerve. Can you hold your resolve? And it certainly got by that, by the river. 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 the white noise. And it happens in all kinds of decision making. I think anything that's really, really stressful. I can imagine someone in an important job interview. It's like a job they've always wanted, and they're getting grilled, Bridgewater style, where they ask these really hard mathematical questions. It's a really learned skill to be able to subdue your flight or fight response. I think get from the sympathetic into the parasympathetic, so you can actually engage that voice in your head and do those slow logical calculations. Because evolutionarily, if we see a lion running at us, we didn't have time to calculate the lion's kinetic energy. 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 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. LBW But as you were searching for a comparable thing, it's interesting because you just made me realize that bluffing is an incredibly high stakes form of lying. You're lying. And I don't think you can- HB Telling a story. LBW No, it's straight up lying. In the context of the game, it's not a negative kind of lying. HB But it is. Yeah, exactly. You're representing something that you don't have. LBW 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 that enemy is. But meanwhile, whole time you're building up troops on the border. That's extremely- HB Wait, wait, so Hitler and Stalin were like pretending to be friends? LB Yeah. HB Well, my history knowledge is terrible. That's crazy. LB Oh yeah, yeah, that they 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 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. HB Right. They were more ideologically aligned. They in theory had a common enemy, which was the West. LB So it 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 travel to Ukraine, sort of the shock of the invasion. It's not just the invasion on one particular border, but 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 way 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 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'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- HB I 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. CB Yeah, that's true. HB I think, you know, I mean, unfortunately that stuff happens all the time, right? So- CB Or having like multiple families, that one is great. When each family doesn't know about the other one, and like maintaining that life. There's probably a sense of excitement about that too. HB Seems unnecessary. Yeah. CB Why? HB Well, just lying, like, you know, the truth finds a way of coming out, you know? CB Yes, but hence that's the thrill. HB Yeah, perhaps. Yeah, people. I mean, and, you know, that's why I think actually like poker, what's 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 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 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 are 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. Some fundamental sense. 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's 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. 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 hourly or cost benefit, etc. You know, so that's one of the things I've tried to do is calibrate the strength of my emotional response to the win or loss that I've received. Because 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 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 I thought I was going to win in, you know, especially if I got really unlucky or I make a dumb play, where I've gone away and like, you know, 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 pathologically competitive in my like, late teens, early 20s. I just had to win at everything. And I think that 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, is like, he's a lot less competitive than he used to be. I don't know about that. I don't know about that. Oh, I believe it. No, I totally believe it. Like, because as you get older, 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, polytopia is my current obsession. Like, when I... Thank you for passing on your obsession to me. Are you playing now? Yeah, I'm playing now. We gotta 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 like, competitive play. It's important. It's an important skill. I'm enjoy playing on the... I can't... You just do the points thing, you know, against the bots. Yeah, against the bots. And I can't even do the... There's like a hard one and there's a very hard one. And then there's crazy, yeah. There's crazy. I don't even enjoy the hard one. The crazy I really don't enjoy. 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 in Polytopia. You gotta get... Well, once you graduate from the crazies, then you can come play the... Graduate from the crazies. Yeah. So in order to be able to play a decent game against like, you know, our group, you'll need to be consistently winning like 90% of games against 15 crazy bots. Yeah. And you'll be able to. Like, I could teach you it within a day, honestly. How to beat the crazies? How to beat the crazies. And then you'll be ready for the big leagues. I feel like this generalizes to more than just Polytopia. But okay. Why were we talking about Polytopia? Losing hurts. Losing hurts. Oh, yeah. Yes. Competitiveness over time. I think it's more that, at least for me, I still care about playing, 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. I think as one gets older and wiser, you start to see the world more as a positive something. Or at least you're more aware of externalities of scenarios, of competitive interactions. 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 of your life, and think about some of the lower points of your life, like the darker places you've gone in your mind, did it have to do something with poker? Like, did losing spark the descent into darkness, or was it something else? 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. 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've won one of these, but I want one of those as well. And that sort of, again, like, is a drive of like over-optimization to random metrics that I decided were important, without much wisdom at the time, but then like carried on. That made me continue chasing it longer than I still actually had the passion to chase it for. And 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, you know, I wouldn't be doing this, I wouldn't be doing this, I wouldn't be sitting here, I wouldn't be living this incredible life that I'm living now. This is the height of your life right now. This is it. Peak experience. Absolute pinnacle here in your robot land. Yeah. With your creepy light. No, it is. I mean, I wouldn't change a thing about my life right now, and I feel very blessed to say that. So, but the dark times were in the sort of like 2016 to 18, even sooner really, where I was like, I'd stopped loving the game, and I was going through the motions. And then I was like, you know, I would take the losses harder than I needed to, because I'm like, it's another one. And 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 wanted, you know, there was something in me that knew I needed to be doing something more directly impactful 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. You know, I think you should ask Magnus Carlsen this question. I know he's on- Yeah, walking away 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? And yeah, it's- It's this weird moment where I've spoken with people that won multiple gold medals at the Olympics, and the depression hits hard after you win. Dopamine crash. Because it's a kind of a goodbye, saying goodbye to that person, to all the dreams you had, the dreams you had, the thought you thought would give meaning to your life. But in fact, life is full of constant pursuits of meaning. You don't like arrive and figure it all out, and there's endless bliss. No, 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 like motto. It's like, what's the next game? And more importantly, because obviously game usually implies zero sum, like what's the game which is like Omniwin? Why is Omniwin 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. The playing field is finite. Nuclear powers are playing a game of poker with their chips of nuclear weapons, right? And the stakes have gotten so large that if anyone makes a single bet, fires some weapons, the playing field breaks. I made a video on this. The playing field is finite, and if we keep playing these adversarial zero sum games, thinking that in order for us to win, someone else has to lose, or if we lose, someone else wins, that will extinct us. It's just a matter of when. What do you think about that 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 assured destruction? And do you think that's gonna hold up through the 21st century? I mean, it has held, yes. There's definitely truth to it that it was a, you know, it's a Nash equilibrium. Yeah. Are you surprised it held this long? Isn't it crazy? It is crazy when you factor in all the near miss accidental firings. Yes, that makes me wonder, like, you know, are you familiar with the quantum suicide thought experiment? Yeah. Where it's basically like, you have a Russian roulette type scenario hooked up to some kind of quantum event, you know, particle splitting, or paraparticle splitting. And 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 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 the one where it didn't go off. And so from that perspective, 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- Yeah, but that doesn't mean you're still not going to be fucked at some point in your life. No, of course not. 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 observer selection effects, which Bostrom, Nick Bostrom talks about a lot and I think people should go read. 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 overgeneralize that logic somehow. Well, no, I mean, it leads 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 a very self-terminating environment. But my point is, is that with the nuclear weapons thing, there have been at least, I think it's 12 or 11 near misses of like just stupid things. Like 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 radar. And that put them on high alert, nearly ready to shoot. And it was only because the head of Russian military happened to be at the UN in New York at the time that they go like, well, wait a second, why would they fire now when their guy is there? And it was only that lucky happenstance, 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 expectation 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 a very hard thing to do. 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 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. And it is an absolute moral imperative, if you ask me, to get as many people thinking about ways to make this very precarious. Because we're in a Nash equilibrium, but it's not like we're in the bottom of a pit. If you would map it topographically, it's not like a stable ball at the bottom of a thing. We're not in equilibrium because we're on the top of a hill with a ball balanced on top. And just any little nudge could send it flying down and nuclear war pops off and hellfire and bad times. On the positive side, life on Earth will probably still continue. And another intelligent civilization might still pop up. Maybe. Pick your X risk. Depends on the X risk. Nuclear war, sure. That's one of the perhaps less bad ones. Green goo through synthetic biology, very bad. Will destroy all organic matter. It's basically like a biological paper clip maximizer. Also bad. Or AI type mass extinction thing as well would also be bad. Shh, they're listening. There's a robot right behind you. Okay, wait. 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 living inside a video game created by somebody else? Well, so what was the second part of the question? Do I think we're living in a simulation and... A simulation that is observed by somebody for purpose of entertainment. So like a video game. Are we listening? Because it's like Phil Hellmuth type of situation, right? There's a creepy level of like, this is kind of fun and interesting. 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? Sounds like it. Kind of, but God seems to be not optimizing in the different formulations of God that we conceive of. He doesn't seem to be, or she, optimizing for like personal entertainment. Maybe the older gods did, but 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, do I think there is some kind of extraneous intelligence to our classic measurable universe that we can measure with current physics and instruments? I think so, yes. Partly because I've had just small little bits of evidence in my own life, which have made me question, like, so I was a diehard atheist, even five years ago. You know, I got into like the rationality community, big fan of less wrong, continue to be an incredible resource. 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 explanation of how reality works. 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 fell too hard, you know, 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 law, you are immoral if you don't follow this, blah, blah, blah. I think they are lacking epistemic humility. They're a little too much hubris there. But similarly, I think the sort of the Richard Dawkins brand of atheism 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 reasonable inquiry, you know, a method of inquiry. So, an example. I have two kind of notable examples that really rattled my cage. The first one was actually in 2010, early on in, quite early on in my poker career. And I, the, I, the, I, remember the Icelandic volcano that erupted that shut down kind of all Atlantic airspace. And I, it meant I got stuck down in the south of France. I was there for something else. 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, oh, right, sure. Like, let's, you know, got a train across, found a way to get there. And the buy-in was 5,000 euros, which was much bigger than my bankroll would normally allow. And so I played a feeder tournament, won my way in, kind of like I did with the Monte Carlo big one. 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 1,200 people, absolutely huge. And I remember they dimmed the lights for before, you know, the normal shuffle up and deal to tell everyone to start playing. And they played Chemical Brothers, Hey Boy, Hey Girl, 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 pump 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 think in your mind, you hear a voice kind of, right? At least I do. 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 remember looking around being like, did anyone else hear that? And obviously people are in their phones, like no one else heard it. And I was like, okay. Six days later, I win the fucking tournament out of 1,200 people. And I don't know how to explain it. Okay. Yes. Maybe I have that feeling before every time I play. And it's just that I happened to, you know, because I won the tournament, I retroactively remembered it. But- Or the feeling gave you a kind of, now from the film Helmuthian, like it gave you 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? Thinking, oh, I'm out. But you know, I managed to like keep it together and recover. And then it just went like pretty perfectly from then on. And either way, it definitely instilled me with this confidence. And I can't put an explanation. Like, you know, was it some huge extra supernatural thing driving me? Or was it just my own self-confidence and so on that just made me make the right decisions? I don't know. And I'm not going to put a frame on it. 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. Because they just played the tournament and left. Yeah, they're like, oh, that was fun. Cool. Yeah, cool. Next time. And now for the rest of your life, left as a boring NPC retelling this story of greatness. But 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 material level were insane, winning the money. I was on the front page of newspapers, because it 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. So maybe, did you have a sense that I might be somebody special? Like, this kind of, I think that's a confidence thing, that maybe you could do something special in this world after all kind of feeling? I definitely, I mean, this is the 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, is 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. Like, 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- What are they? Huh? What are they? Are they? Well- Depends on something, yeah. They're like a bag of insecurities and- Yes. 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. Right. 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 big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big, big. In a 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 solve 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 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. Well, exactly. It's this idea of useful fictions. So again, going through the classic rationalist training of Less Wrong where it's like, you want your map, 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. You want it to be as an accurate representation as possible. I don't know if I fully subscribe 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 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 with the kind of focus and dedication that it requires to excel in whatever it is you're trying to do. And so there are these useful fictions and that's where I think I diverge slightly with the classic sort of rationalist community because that's a field that is worth studying of like 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 like now led me to explore 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'm not saying, because obviously the Christian God is 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. Where on the sort of psychopathy to benevolent spectrum God is, I don't know. But 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 us. It's something we can all share. 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 reserve 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. It's a thing C and I, we call it the game. You and C is aka Grimes, we call what the game? Everything. The whole thing. Yeah. We joke about like- So everything is a game. Well, the universe. What if it's a game and the goal of the game is to figure out either how to beat it, how to get out of it. 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 unlock this hyper-dimensional key and get out beyond what it is. That's- 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 one cage at a time you figure out how to escape that. Right. And you level up. Us becoming multi-planetary would be a level up or us figuring out how to upload our consciousnesses to the thing, that would probably be a leveling up. Or spiritually, humanity becoming more combined and less adversarial and bloodthirsty and us becoming a little bit more enlightened, that would be a leveling up. There's many different frames to it, whether it's physical, digital or metaphysical. I think level one for Earth is probably the biological evolutionary process. It's like going from single cell organisms to early humans. And maybe level two is whatever's happening inside our minds and creating ideas and creating technologies. That's like evolutionary process of ideas. And then multi-planetary is interesting. Is that fundamentally different from what we're doing here on Earth? Probably, because it allows us to exponentially scale. It delays the Malthusian trap. It's a way 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 fully solves this issue of this thing called Moloch, which we haven't talked about yet, which is basically, I call it the god of unhealthy competition. Yeah, let's go to Moloch. What's Moloch? You did a great video on Moloch, one aspect of it, the application of it to one aspect. Instagram beauty filters. Very niche. I wanted to start off small. So Moloch was originally coined as, well, apparently back in the Canaanite times, it was to say ancient Carthaginian, I can never say it, Carthaginian, somewhere around 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 Moloch in order to get power to win wars. So really dark, horrible things. And it was literally about child sacrifice. Whether they actually existed or not, we don't know. But in mythology, they did. And this god that they worshipped was this thing called Moloch. 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's 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's 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 Moloch. 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, an incredible poem called Howl about this thing Moloch. And a lot of people sort of quite understandably take the interpretation of that. He's talking about capitalism. But then the piece of resistance that's moved Moloch into this idea of game theory was Scott Alexander of Slate's Zarkodex. Literally, I think it might be my favorite piece of writing of all time. It's called Meditations on Moloch. Everyone must go read it. And- Slate's Zarkodex 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 here. I mean- I shall try to remember to- You're giving the impression of it. Yeah. 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 Molochy, which will mean something to people when we- We'll continue. When I stop interrupting for once. No, no. It's quiet. Yeah. So anyway, he writes this piece, Meditations on Moloch. And basically, he analyzes the poem and he's like, okay, so it seems to be something relating to where competition goes wrong. And Moloch was historically this thing of 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 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 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 feeling like they have to use these things. And 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, I know that everyone else is kind of doing it. Go subscribe to Liz's Instagram. Please! So I don't have to use the filters. I'll post a bunch of... Yeah, make it blow up. But 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 creates this race to the bottom spiral where everyone else ends up in a situation which is worse off than if they hadn't started, than it were before. Kind of 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 adopt that same strategy just to get to where they were before. But now everyone's stuck standing up. So you need this 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 winning the game in question, the short-term game. But 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 an emergent phenomena. It's a force of game theory. It's a force of bad incentives on a multi-agent system. Prisoner's dilemma is technically a kind of Moloch-y system as well, but it's just a two-player thing. Another word for Moloch is multipolar trap. Basically, you've just got a lot of different people all competing for some kind of prize. 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 Mark Zuckerberg and Jack and all the Twitter founders and everyone, if they had at least just run a few simulations of how their algorithms would... different types of algorithms would turn out for society, that would have been great. That's really difficult to do that kind of deep philosophical thinking about humanity, actually. So 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 is it going to get morphed in iterative games 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 when you're starting up a social media company, you're aware that you've got investors to please, there's... bills to pay, there's only so much R&D you can afford to do. You've got all these incredible pressures, bad incentives to get on and just build your thing as quickly as possible and start making money. And I don't think anyone intended when they built these social media platforms, and just to preface it, so the reason why social media is relevant, because it's a very good example of everyone these days is optimizing for clicks, whether it's a social media platform, whether it's a social media platform themselves, because every click gets more impressions and impressions pay for advertising dollars, or whether it's individual influencers, or 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, 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 try and win over the world. 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 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 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, 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 actually just be honest about this, that we're all these weird rats in a maze. 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 with strings playing people. No, they're... He's at the mercy of this, like everyone else. He's just trying to do his best. And 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 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 philosophy, particularly in Silicon Valley, of 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 of future ones. But it can also... It's always a double edged sword. And particularly as technology gets more and more powerful, and we've now got like big data and we're able to do all kinds of psychological manipulation with it and so on. 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 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 the idea that we're not necessarily good at social interaction. And that gives rise to the memes that we then coalesce around. And if you have the stack that way, where it's technology driving social interaction, which then drives mimetic culture and 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 need to optimize for that makes people happy and healthy and 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 as much as I love in many ways the culture of Silicon Valley, I do think that technology... I don't want to knock it. It's done so many wonderful things for us. Same with capitalism. We have to be honest with ourselves. We're getting to a point where we are losing control of this very powerful machine that we have created. Can you redesign the machine within the game? Can you understand the game enough? Okay, this is the game. And this is how we start to reemphasize the memes that matter, or the memes that bring out the best in us. 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 sometimes get 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. You guys should try this too. 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 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. 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. 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 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 we not only put out there but we also subscribe to. So I think we need to take that approach. I'm making this video right now called The Attention Wars which is about how the media machine is this Moloch machine. Is this kind of blind, dumb thing where everyone is optimizing for everything and then it's 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. Our information ecosystem is breaking down. You look at the state of the US. 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. Truly, an extreme left person and extreme right person, 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 the topic is, it will find a way to split into this bifurcated culture war. And it's fucking terrifying. Because that maximizes attention. And that's 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. 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. And the best emotion for getting attention, 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 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 previously uncontacted tribes, have. Some of those are negative, like sadness, disgust, anger, etc. Some are positive, happiness, excitement, and so on. The one that happens to be the most useful for the internet is anger. Because anger is such an active emotion. If you want people to engage, if someone's scared- And I'm not just talking out my ass here. There are studies here that have looked into this. Whereas if someone's disgusted or fearful, they actually tend to then be like, 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 moloch in this 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 being put through this propagandist lens of winning whatever the war is in question. Whether it's the culture war or the Ukraine war. Yeah. 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? In the moment, it feels like people are tearing 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. In the moment, it feels fucked up. Right. 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 is needed. Whether that's through dumb TikTok videos or... There are significant resources being put in. I don't mean to sound like 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 effectively doing monarchy things. But then on top of that, we have actual bad actors who are intentionally trying to manipulate the other side into doing things. And using... So because of the digital space, they're able to use artificial actors, meaning bots. Exactly. Botnets. And this is a whole new situation that we've never had before. Yeah. It's exciting. You know what I want to do? That because there is... People are talking about bots manipulating and malicious bots that are basically spreading propaganda. I want to create a bot army for fights that... For love? Yeah, exactly. For love. That fights... I mean... You know, there's truth to fight fire with fire. It's like, but how... You always have to be careful whenever you create... Again, Moloch is very tricky. Yeah. Hitler was trying to spread the love too. Well, yeah. So we thought... But I agree with you that that is a thing that should be considered. But there is... Again, everyone... The road to hell is paved in good intentions. And there's always unforeseen outcomes, externalities, if you're 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 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 a love botnet on a DAO. A DAO love botnet. Yeah, but without a leader. Exactly, distributed, right. Without any kind of centralized... Yeah, without even... Basically, the more you can decentralize the control of a thing to people... But then you still need the ability to coordinate. Because that's the issue when you think something is too... Really, to me, the culture wars, the bigger war we're dealing with is actually between the... I don't know what even the term is for it, but centralization versus decentralization. That's the tension we're seeing. Power and 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. 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, when there's 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 a dictator can commit huge atrocities, but they can also make sure the infrastructure works. They have that God's eye view, at least. They have the ability to create laws and rules that force coordination, which stops Moloch. But then you're vulnerable to that dictator getting infected 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, will be coming out in like a month. And my goal at the end of the series is to present... Because basically I'm painting the picture of what Moloch is and how it's affecting almost all these issues in our society and how it's 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. It's a cool phrase. Generator function... It's not my phrase. It's Daniel Schmachtenberger. I got that from him. All things. It's like all roads lead back to Daniel Schmachtenberger. The dude is brilliant. After that, it's Mark Twain. But anyway, sorry. Totally rude interruptions from me. No, it's fine. So not all x risks. So an asteroid technically isn't because it's just like this one big external thing. It's not like a competition thing going on. But synthetic bioweapons, that's one because everyone's incentivized to build. Even for defense, bad viruses just to threaten someone else, etc. Or AI, technically, the race to AGI is kind of potentially a Moloch-y situation. But yeah, so if Moloch is this 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 Moloch is the god of lose-lose, ultimately. It masquerades as the god of win-lose, but in reality, it's lose-lose. Everyone 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 tomorrow, I was like, okay, well, don't try and think through it logically. What's the vibe of Win-Win? And to me, in my mind, Moloch is like, and I address it in the video, it's red and black. It's kind of like very hyper-focused on its one goal, you must win. So Win-Win is kind of actually like these colors. It's like purple, turquoise. It loves games too. It loves a little bit of healthy competition, but constrained, kind of like before. It knows how to ring-fence zero-sum competition into 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 mischievous. It will have a good time. It's not boring. It knows how to have fun. It can get down. But ultimately, it's unbelievably wise and it just wants the game to keep going. And I call it Win-Win. That's a good pet name. Win-Win. Yes. Win-Win, right? And I think its formal name, when it has to do official functions, is Omnia. Omnia. Yeah. From like omniscience, kind of, why Omnia? You just like Omnia? Just like Omni-Win. Omni-Win. But I'm open to suggestions. I would like, you know, and this is- I like Omnia. Yeah. Yeah. But there's an angelic kind of sense to Omnia though. So Win-Win is more fun. Exactly. It's more like it embraces the fun aspect. I mean, there is something about sort of, there's some aspect to Win-Win interactions that requires embracing 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 the game itself, not optimizing for the consequences of the game. Right. Well, it's recognizing the value of competition in of itself. 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 civilization is because we haven't been able to ring fence competition. And so it's just having all these negative externalities and we've completely lost control of it. I think my guess is, and now we're getting really metaphysical technically, but I think we'll be in a more interesting universe if we have one that has both pure cooperation, you know, lots of cooperation and some pockets of competition than one that's purely cooperation entirely. It's good to have some little zero-sum-ness bits, but it's not good to have some little zero-sum-ness bits. But I don't know that fully and I'm not qualified as a philosopher to know that. And that's what reversed Moloch. So this kind of win-win creature 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, at the large scale of a society. Exactly. It's a meme. I think it's an example of a good meme. And I'd love to hear feedback from people if they think they have a better idea or it's not. But it's the direction of meme 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, Dostoevsky said beauty will save the world. What is beauty anyway? 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. 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 the sweetness of its fruit or the value of its lumber. It's this entirety of it that there's these immeasurable qualities. It's almost like a qualia of it. It's got lots of patternicity, but it's not overly predictable. Again, it walks this fine line between order and chaos. It's a very highly complex system. It's evolving over time. The definition of 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 there's all these intricacies. And also, very importantly, there's some of the problems that we're dealing with. And also, very importantly, 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. There's something immeasurable about it. There's something we can't break down to a narrow metric. LRWN Does that extend to humans, you think? HMW Yeah, absolutely. LRWN So how can Instagram reveal that kind of beauty, the complexity of a human being? HMW Good question. LRWN This takes us back to dating sites and Goodreads, I think. HMW 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- LRWN There's such a thing as a social media expert? HMW 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. LRWN You should, you should have done it a long time ago. HMW 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 always 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 a 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, you know, complexity reduction is bad. It's making things more, it's an over simplification. 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. 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. LRW 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, 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. 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 world view 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're talking about Mulligans 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. I mean, maybe I'm giving it, you know, Twitter too much power, but just the more I looked into it, and I had a conversation with Tristan Harris from the Center for 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 moloch-y 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, is moloch, then. Because 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. Wise things. Wise things. Yes. You grow from it. It might challenge you. You might not like it, but you ultimately grow from it. Yes. 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're just stuck in this badly designed system. That said, the current structure, yes. 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 is a positive, happy, bringing people together meme, the kind of thing that brings families together that would normally argue about cultural stuff at the dinner table. Identify those memes and figure out what was the ingredient that made them spread that day. And also not just happiness and connection between humans, but connection between humans in other ways that enables productivity, like cooperation, solving difficult problems and all those kinds of stuff. It's not just about, let's be happy and have fulfilling lives. It's also like, let's build cool shit. Yeah. Which is the spirit of collaboration, which is deeply anti-Moloch. It's not using competition. Moloch hates collaboration and coordination and people working together. And that's, again, 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, you know, 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 love bot army. Distributed. Distributed. Distributed. 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 gonna 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. 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 gonna sell my apartment. Well, you know, he had already moved in, but I think we were just figuring out what like our 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 we were 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. And when we did get romantic, it was very clear that this was a big deal. It wasn't just like another, wasn't a random thing. So the probability of it being a big deal was high. Was already very high. And then we'd been together for a year and it had been pretty golden and wonderful. So 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, like 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. And 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, but I would like to push against some of those ideas. Okay, all right. But that's the down the line, yes, throw them up. I just rudely interrupt. No, it's fine. And so we'd been about together for a year and things were good. And we were having this hard conversation. And then he's 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. And I was like, oh, interesting. And 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. So we both wrote down our percentages and we also did a one-year prediction and a 10-year one as well. So we got percentages for all three. And then we showed each other. And I remember having this moment of like, ooh, because for the 10-year one, I was like, ooh, well, I mean, I love him a lot, but a lot can happen in 10 years. And we've only been together for, so I was like, I think it's over 50%, but it's definitely not 90%. And I remember wrestling, I was like, oh, but I don't want him to be hurt. I don't want him to, I don't want to give a number lower than his. And I remember thinking, I was like, uh-uh, don't game it. This is an exercise in radical honesty. So just give your real percentage. And I think mine was like 75%. And then we showed each other and luckily we were fairly well aligned. But honestly, but if we weren't- 20%. Huh? 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 duck's 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 uncertainty? 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. I would want to say one of the assumptions you have is you're not that different from other relationships. Right. And so I want to have some data about the way- You want the base rates. Yeah. And 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 about, in terms of my characteristics and my relationships, 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 would be far... Yeah, 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. And 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 a difficult deal, this is allowing myself to think differently, I feel like has a psychological consequence. That's one of my pushbacks against radical honesty, is this one particular perspective. So you're saying you would rather give a falsely high percentage to your partner? Going back to the wise sage-filled... In order to create this additional optimism....helm youth... Yes....of fake it till you make it. The positive thinking. Hashtag positivity. Yeah, hashtag. Well, so that comes back to this idea of useful fictions. And 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. We did it with very much tongue in cheek. I don't think it even would have drastically changed what we decided to do, even. We just did it more as a fun exercise. But the consequence of that fun exercise, there was a deep honesty to it, too. Exactly. And it was just this moment of reflection. I'm like, oh wow, I actually have to think through this quite critically, and so on. And it's also what was interesting was I got to check in with what my desires were. So 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? And that's a method of rationality. And I personally don't think it loses anything. It didn't take any of the magic away from our relationship. Quite the opposite. It brought us closer together because we did this weird fun thing that I appreciate a lot of people find quite strange. And 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. So this was kind of like our safe space anyway. For others, one partner really might not like that kind of stuff at all, in which case it's not a good exercise to do. I don't recommend it to everybody. But I do think it's interesting sometimes to poke holes in the – or 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. And perhaps something shouldn't be tried to measure. Maybe it's wrong to completely try and value the utilitarian – 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. But 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 guts – 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. LBW 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 100%. And you listen to the experts, 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 any war I've read about. It's every single person in the country is proud to fight for their country. Not just soldiers, not everybody. MS. Why do you think that is specifically more than in other wars? LBW I think because there's 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 in 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, they're going to be a pain in their ass. They're not going to be, want to be occupied. And certain other countries are pragmatic. They're like, well, you know, leaders come and go. I guess this is good. Ukraine just doesn't have, Ukrainians, those seem throughout the 20th century, don't seem to be the kind of people that just like sit calmly and let the quote unquote occupiers impose their rules. 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, well, 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 that has to do with the reverse Mollick 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 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 especially that singular act of staying in the capital. Yeah. A lot of those kinds of things come together to create something within people. These things always, of course, though, like how zoomed out of a view do you want to take? Because yeah, you describe it as like an anti-Molotov 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, right? But if you zoom it out from a level, 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. But 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. Oh yeah. So I was describing the reverse Moloch for the local level. Exactly. Yeah. Now, this is where the experts come in and they say, well, if you channel most of the resources, 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. And then you make an agreement about what land belongs to who. And you stop that. And 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 gonna be bad for everybody. It's a lose-lose. It's a deep lose-lose. Doesn't matter. And I think that's actually a correct... When I zoom out, I mean, 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, I 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. And this is like a dress rehearsal for that. And 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're being... 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. And 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- We're going down a dark path, huh? It's good. Well, no, it's a dark- No, it's like, while we're in the somber place, we might as well. Some of my best friends are dark paths. What worries you the most? We mentioned asteroids. We 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? In terms of- There's so many fun options. So many. So, of course, we have natural risks from natural pandemics, naturally occurring viruses or pathogens. And 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. And 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, whether they're omnicidal maniacs, either way. And so that means we need more robustness for that. And 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. And so you'd think that we'd be much more robust in our pandemic preparedness. And 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. And originally in that, considering that COVID cost multiple trillions to the economy, right? 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 2 billion out of multiple trillions for a thing that has just cost us multiple trillions. We've just finished, we're barely even, 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 of the way. That was that one. And 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. And I think nothing demonstrates this more than this project that I was just reading about that's sort of being proposed right now called Deep Vision. And the idea is to go out into the wilds, and we're not talking about just like, you know, within cities, like deep into like 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. And then not only do you try and find these, bring samples of them back to laboratories. And 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 like 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. So 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. And 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 like the building instructions of how to do them on the internet. And this is something that genuinely a pocket of the scientific community thinks is a good idea. And I think on expectation, and their argument is that, oh, this is good because it might buy us some time to develop 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. So 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 like Kim Jong-un, ISIS, people who think the rest of the world is their enemy. And in some cases, they think that killing themselves is a noble cause. And 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 like minus EV of multiple billions of lives if they actually succeeded in doing this. Certainly in the tens or hundreds of millions. So the cost benefit is so unbelievably, it makes no sense. And I was trying to wrap my head around what's going wrong in people's minds to think that this is a good idea. And 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. And well, like that there are bad actors who will use this for bad things. Because not only will it- if you publish this information, even if a bad actor couldn't physically make it themselves, which given in 10 years time, the technology is getting cheaper and easier to use. But even if they couldn't make it, they could now bluff it. Like what would you do if there's like some deadly new virus that we were 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 the keys, it's handing weapons of mass destruction to people. Makes no sense. The possible, I agree with you, but the possible world in which it might make sense is if the good guys, which is a whole another problem, defining who the good guys are. But the good guys are like an order of magnitude higher competence. And so 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. But of course, the question is in each of those individual disciplines, is that feasible? Can you, can the bad actors, even if they don't have the competence, leapfrog to the place where the good guys are? Yeah. I mean, I would agree in principle with pertaining to this particular plan of like, 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 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 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- So 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. The solution is either don't get the information in the first place or be, 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. We shouldn't even be, it should be forbidden to even think about that. Meaning don't just even collect the information, but don't do, I mean, gain-of-function research is a really iffy area. 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 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 that there's this naivety that's preventing people from even doing the cost benefit properly on a lot of the things because, I get it, the science community, again, I don't want to bucket the science community, but 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 the history of science, how easily it's been used by dictators to any conclusion they want. And it's dark how you can use brilliant people that like playing the little game of science, because it is a fun game. You're building, you're going to conferences, you're building on top of each other's ideas, breakthroughs. Hi, I think I've realized how this particular molecule works and I can 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. 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 Mullick, can have unintended consequences that might destroy human civilization or divide human civilization or have dire geopolitical consequences. The most destructive effects of COVID have nothing to do with the biology of the virus, it seems like. I mean, I could just list them forever, but 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 if an actual wolf now comes, people will be like, fuck masks, fuck- Fuck vaccines, fuck everything. And they'll distrust every single thing that any major institution is going to tell them. Because that's the thing, there were certain actions made by certain health public figures where they very knowingly told, it was a white lie, it was intended in the best possible way, such as early on when there was clearly a shortage of masks. And so they said to the public, oh, don't get masks, there's no evidence that they work. Don't get them, they don't work. In fact, it might even make it worse. You might even spread it more. That was the real stinker. Yeah, no, no. Unless you know how to do it properly, you're going to get sicker, or you're more likely 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. I agree. But the cost of lying to the public when that then comes out, people aren't as stupid as they think they are. And that's, I think, where this distrust of experts has largely come from. A, they've lied to people 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 absolutely decimate the trust in the public institutions that we depend upon. And honestly, the best thing that could happen, I wish, if Fauci and these other leaders who, I mean, I can't imagine how nightmare his job has been over the last few years. Hell on earth. So I have a lot of sympathy for the position he's been in. But 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. To someone like me, even, because I've lost trust in a lot of these things. But I'm fortunate that I at least know people who I can go to who I think have good epistemics on this stuff. But if they could sort of put their hands up 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 reason. We're really sorry. Where they just did the radical honesty thing, the radical transparency thing. That would go so far to rebuilding public trust. And I think that's what needs to happen. Yeah, I totally agree with you. Unfortunately, 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 the way of the past. People really like authenticity and 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 want to- Yeah, sure. I mean, just- I don't think he's- I doubt he's listening, but if he is, like, hey, I don't think he's irredeemable by any means. I don't have an opinion on whether there was arrogance or there or not. Just know that I think coming clean on the- It's understandable to have fucked up during this pandemic. I won't expect any government to handle it well because it was so difficult. So many moving pieces, so much 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 for my part, I did this wrong in this part. 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 screwed up in terms of trust, lost a little bit of my respect too. There seems to have been a kind of dishonesty 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- what's it called? I heard the phrase today, nut picking. Nut picking. Social media does that. So you've got like nitpicking. Nut picking is where the craziest, stupidest- if you have a group of people, let's say people who are vaccine- I don't like the term anti-vaxxer. People who are vaccine hesitant, vaccine speculative. What social media did or the media or anyone, their opponents would do is pick the craziest example. So the ones who are like, I think I need to inject myself with motor oil up my ass or something. Select the craziest ones and then have that beamed to- so from someone like Fauci or Francis's perspective, that's what they get because they're getting the same social media stuff as us. They're getting the same media reports. I mean, they might get some more information. But they too are going to get the nuts portrayed to them. So they probably have a misrepresentation of what the actual public's intelligence is. Like, the real. Right. 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. To realize that what you are saying, social media is not anywhere near an accurate representation of humanity. Nut picking. 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. Depends on what you want to do. I do this every weekend. Okay. Where the hell 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, superintelligence 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, wow, we can unlock the mysteries of the universe, escape the game. Because I spend all my time thinking about these molecule problems, what is the solution to them? In some ways you need this omnibenevolent, omniscient, omni-wise coordination mechanism that can make us all not do the molecule thing, or provide the infrastructure or redesign the system so that it's not vulnerable to this molecule process. In some ways, that's the strongest argument to me for the race to build AGI, is that maybe we can't survive without it. But the flip side to that is, unfortunately, now that there's multiple actors trying to build AGI, 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 the whole thing has got the same problem. It's like whichever company is the one that optimises for speed at the cost of safety will get the competitive advantage, and so we're more likely the ones to build the AGI. That's the same cycle that you're in, and there's no clear solution to that. If you go and try and stop all the different companies, then the good ones will stop because they're the ones within the West's reach, but then that leaves all the other ones to continue, and then they're even more likely. It's a very difficult problem with no clean solution. At the same time, I know 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 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. 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, and because this is ultimately a game theory problem, this Moloch mechanism, and how do we voice arms race scenarios? You need people who aren't naive to be thinking about this. Again, 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 how do we mitigate the arms race dynamics, and how do we solve the thing of, Bostrom calls it the orthogonality problem. Because obviously, there's a chance. The hope 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. Hopefully, those goals include keeping humanity alive, right? But Bostrom says that actually those two things, super intelligence and super wisdom, aren't necessarily correlated. They're actually 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. I think that 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. Everyone needs to chill out. We've got millennia to figure this out. Or at least, well, it depends. Again, some people think that we can't even make it through the next few decades without having some kind of omni-wise coordination mechanism. There's also an argument to that. Yeah, I don't know. LBW Well, I'm suspicious of that kind of thinking because it seems like the entirety of human history has people in it that are predicting doom just around the corner. There's something about us that is strangely attracted to that thought. It's almost 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. I think it's the same thing that people love about conspiracy theories, is they love to be the person that figured out some deep, fundamental thing about the, that's going to mark something extremely important about the history of human civilization. Because then I will be important. When in reality, most of us will be forgotten, and life will go on. One of the sad things about whenever 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 sort of, I mean, 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 the 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... HM. Yeah, we don't want a self-fulfilling prophecy. CB. Yes, that's exactly. HM. Yes. I very much agree with that. I 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, or 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 sort of 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. So 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. I'm not just saying it to trick myself. I do think there's something out there that wants us to win. I think there's something that really wants us to win. You just have to be okay, now I sound really crazy, but open your heart to it a little bit. Yeah. 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. Yeah, 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 the two people that listen to this are probably sitting on a beach smoking some weed. Gosh, dammit. It'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. I think we'll make it, but we've got a lot of work to do. What makes this whole simulation, this video game kind of fun, this battle of Polytopia, I still, man, I love those games so much. They're so good. And that one for people who don't know, Battle of Polytopia is a 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 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 question mark. What's that about? Oh, man. God, your audience is 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 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 in the end, the doctor 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. It often comes with dizzy spells and other things because 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 a couple of 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. 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? 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 with her hand and she says, oh, there's something there. And then she leans in and she starts sucking over my ear, not actually touching me, but close to it, 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, freezing cold, crying. And I'm just like, I don't know what the hell is going on. I'm thoroughly freaked out, as is everyone else watching. Just like, what the hell? And we warm her up and she's like, oh, what? She was really shaken up. And she's like, I don't know what that was. She said it was something very unpleasant and dark. Don't worry, it's gone. I think you'll be fine in a couple of weeks. You'll have the physical symptoms for a couple of weeks and you'll be fine. But, you know, she was like that. So I was so rattled, A, because the potential that actually I'd had something bad in me that made someone feel bad and that she was scared. That was what, you know, I was like, wait, I thought you do this. This is the thing. And now you're terrified. Like you pulled like some kind of exorcism or something. What the fuck is going on? So it was 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. That gives you like hints that maybe there's something out there. I mean, I don't, 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. 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 ears. 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 because it's a 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. 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 like frame and I don't want to reduce that. 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. 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, we know how medicine works and its molecules and chemical interactions and that kind of stuff. And now it's like, okay, well, there's clearly more for us to understand. And that doesn't mean that it's ascientific as well. Because, you know, the beauty of the scientific method is that it still can apply to this situation. Like I don't see why, you know, I would like to try and test this experimentally. I haven't really, 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 the experiment. 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 the scientific method can't be used for it. LRW2 Yeah, I think the scientific method sits on a foundation of those kinds of experiences. Scientific method is a process to 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. Like we haven't really figured this whole thing out. MP 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 would blow people's minds even from 100 years ago. LRW2 Yeah, and we've even allegedly got out to space and landed on the moon. Although I still haven't, I have not seen evidence of the earth being round, but I'm keeping an open mind. Speaking of which, you studied physics and astrophysics. Just to go to that, just to jump around through the fascinating life you've had, when did you, how did that come to be? Like, when did you fall in love with astronomy and space and things like this? MP As early as I can remember. I was very lucky that my mom and my dad, but particularly 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. Dolittle, animals flock to her and just like sit and look at her adoringly. LRW2 As she sings. MP Yeah, she's 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. But she's so deeply curious. 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. And we'll just lie out there 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 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. So I think it just came from that really. And then on top of that, like physics, you know, it also made logical sense in that 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 in terms of, I didn't know necessarily, I thought I was going to become like a research scientist. 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 like biology and the path to go to medical school or something like that, which is overly pragmatic, not overly, 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. Yeah. I mean, it wasn't like I did an immense amount of soul searching to choose it or anything. It just was like this, it made the most sense. I mean, you have to make this decision in the UK, age 17, which is crazy because, you know, in US you go the first year, you do a bunch of stuff, right? And then you choose your major. Yeah. 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 owe the government a lot of money. How many alien civilizations are out there? 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 there's a huge number of potential spawn sites out there. So she would- Spawn sites? Spawn sites, yeah. This is our spawn site. Spawn sites. Yeah, 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, there's only one source of life and it's spawning in different locations. That's why the word spawn. Because it feels like life that originated on earth really originated here. Right. It is unique to this particular. Yeah. I mean, but I don't, in my mind, it doesn't exclude, you know, that 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- Yeah. Which I kind of like the idea of it. Yeah. And then I get to think about respawning, like after it dies, like what happens if life on earth ends? Is it going to restart again? Probably not. It depends. It depends on the type of, you know, what's the thing that kills it off, right? If it's a paperclip maximizer, not for the example, but some kind of very self-replicating, 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 know that part, but okay, great. It becomes a multi-planetary paperclip maximizer? Well, 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- Which is maximum virality, by the way. That's what virality is. But 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 at. But don't you think- It could be 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. It's still a bad thing because it's permanently capping what the universe could ever be. That's its end state. Or achieving the optimal that the universe could ever achieve, but that's up to... Different people have 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. Like 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 little societies of paperclip. Well, then we're not describing a paperclip maximizer anymore because by the day... 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, like paperclips, there is no way for... Okay, so you're saying that paperclips somehow will just emerge and create through gravity or something. Well, no, no, no. Because there's a dynamic element to the whole system. It's not just... 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 like string theory, 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. It has to break... 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, where it's... I'm sure there'll be a... I think there's an intelligence that emerges from that system. So you're saying that basically intelligence is inherent in the fabric of reality and will find a way. Kind of like Goblin says, life will find a way. You think life will find a way even out of this perfectly homogenous dead soup. It's not perfectly homogenous. It has to... 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 homogenous. It's trying to... 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. Even out of... Yeah, 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 stuff? Yeah, the paperclip maximizer or any other intelligent 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 are 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, yeah, whether it's plank lengths or paperclips as the base unit. Yeah, 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. Yeah, the laws are fairly basic and yet out of them amazing complexity emerges. And its goals seem to be pretty basic and dumb. If you can summarize its goals, I mean, 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 maximizing in the dumbness of the goals. But 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. And I think we're being very down on this whole paperclip maximizer thing. Now, the reason we hate it... I think, yeah, because what you're saying is that you think that the force of emergence itself is another baked in law of reality. And you're trusting that emergence will find a way to even out of seemingly the most malachy, 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. Moloch is doing cartwheels, man. Yeah. But 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. I mean, that's the reason why I'm in some ways less emotionally concerned about AI risk than, say, bio risk. Because 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 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 Novacene 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 sort of talks about that. He thinks it's building off this Gaia theory where Earth is a living some form of intelligence itself and that this is the next step. It's this new intelligence that is maybe silicon based as opposed to carbon based, goes on to do. It's really sort of, in some ways, an optimistic but really 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 will then go and create another super intelligent agent that it then has to compete against. Because it should be omniwise 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 a lose-lose kind of dynamics. Well, yes and no. Moloch is. That's why I think it's important to say. But 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, it creates this Malthusian trap. Moloch exists in little pockets in nature as well. Well, 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 that's- 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, they'll prod humans with a stick and see what they do. But in terms of letting us run wild outside of the geographically constricted region, that might decide to make it. No, I think there's obviously the capacity for beauty and kindness and non-Moloch behavior amongst humans. So, I'm pretty sure AI will preserve us. I don't know if you answered the aliens question. No, I didn't. You had a good conversation with Toby Ward about various sides of the universe. Did he say, now I'm forgetting, but I think he said it's a good chance we're alone. So, the classic Fermi paradox question is there are so many spawn points, and yet, 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 even if only a tiny fraction of those create life and other civilizations too, the universe should be very noisy. There should be evidence of Dyson spheres or whatever, 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. I don't want to make an epistemic statement on that. 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 basically just a simple thing of 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 different factors. And then you plug in numbers into that, and depending on the range of 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 realized that it's 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 maybe even a couple of hundred of orders of magnitude. By putting in point sources, it's always going to lead to overestimates. And so, by putting stuff on a log scale, and then 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, mathematically correct way of doing the calculation. It's still a lot of hand-waving. As science goes, it's definitely just waving. I don't know what an analogy is, but it's hand-wavy. Anyway, when they did this, and then they did a Bayesian update on it as well to factor in the fact that there is no evidence that we're picking up. Because no evidence is actually a form of evidence, right? And the long and short of it comes out that 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 the equation is ridiculous on many levels, but the powerful thing about the equation is there's different things, different components that can be estimated, and the error bars on which can be reduced with science. And hence, throughout, since the equation came out, the error bars have been coming out on different aspects. And so that it almost kind of says, 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. In the process of reducing 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 more like from first principles, just looking at what life is on Earth, and trying to understand the very physics-based, 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 way is to think what is this thing, and how does it originate? From very simple non-life things, how does complex life-like things emerge? 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. HB Right. Well, it's a form of information processing, right? LB Right. HB Whereas information transfer, but then also an energy processing, which then results in, I guess, information processing? Maybe I'm getting bogged down. LB Well, it's doing some modification, and yeah, the input is some energy. HB Right. It's able to extract resources from its environment in order to achieve a goal. LB But the goal doesn't seem to be clear. HB Right. Well, the goal is to make more of itself. LB 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. HB Individual agents within an ecosystem do, yes. Yes, evolution itself doesn't give a fuck. LB Right. HB It's a very, it 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 majority 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 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. LB 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 through things. And I think people, especially people in robotics, seem to run away from it as fast as possible. And I just- Can you give an example of 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, a dynamic world of humans. That 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 uncertainty, they have their own personal life projections. They 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 gonna 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 with things like AI. 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. Even dogs or even mice or whatever, in some ways, 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 out of the same evolutionary process. They've followed this evolution of 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 a cloud server, let's say, or however it runs. 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 that to try and apply any kind of modeling of thinking through problems and decisions in the same way that we do has to be done extremely carefully because 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 in the same way. LBW Yeah, beautifully put. I was just playing devil's advocate. I do think in certain contexts, anthropomorphization is not going to hurt you. Engineers run away from it too fast. CMH I can see that. LBW For 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 mullocks? CMH Think about the win-wins, look for win-win situations. And be careful not to overly use your smarts to convince yourself that something is win-win when it's not. That's difficult. I don't know how to advise 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 find ways, 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 when I started out. It was a very different situation back then. Poker is a great game to learn in order to understand the ways to think. And I recommend people learn it, but don't try and make a living from it these days. 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'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 for something? What did you, what did you do it for? The performing? Was it the pure, the music of it? Was it just being a rock star? Why did you do it? So we only ever played two gigs. We didn't last, you know, it wasn't a very, we weren't famous or anything like that. But I was very into metal. It was my entire identity, sort of 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. So I know I had a long argument with, I'm a guitarist, more like a classic rock guitarist. So, you know, I've had friends who are very big Pantera fans. And so 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. But they were, 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. Metallica's pop, it's like they sold out. Metallica are metal. They were the, I mean, 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 ask that question, who are your favorite bands? I'm like, I don't know. Those are two that came up. A third one is Children of Bodom, who I just think, they just tick all the boxes for me. Yeah, I don't know. Nowadays, I kind of feel like a repulsion to the... I was that myself. I'd be like, who do you prefer more? You have to rank them. But it's this false zero-sum-ness that's like, why? They're so additive. There's no conflict. 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, but it's good to pick. Exactly. And thank you for the tough question. Well, maybe not in a context when a lot of people are like, what? Why does this 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 in a certain mood? 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 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. It's like, 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. I play Comfortably Numb on the internet. 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. And one of the first solos I learned is that there's a beauty to it. There's a melodic beauty to it. It's tapping, right? Yeah, it's tapping. And it's a beautiful thing. And it's a beautiful thing to learn. And there's a beauty to it. There's a melodic beauty to it. There's some tapping, but it's just really fast. Beautiful, like arpeggios. Yeah, arpeggios. 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 watches, 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, where improvisation is more valued, obviously in jazz and so on. But I think ultimately, it's a more rewarding journey because 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, it's a challenge. 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 a harsh self-criticism within the whole thing. It's really, 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. I can imagine. Yeah. And I feel that way with guitar too, because I used to play every day a lot. So returning to it is painful because it's like accepting the fact that this whole ride is finite and 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. It's like, oh, but I 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 with the internet just gets disappearing. Yeah, that's a really good point. Yeah. 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... 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 layers of evil there. I feel the urge to live up to that, to be the inverse of evil. Or even better, because I don't think... 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. More of experience. Just to have more of experience and ideally positive experience. And to try and put it into a vaguely scientific term, make it so that the length of code required to describe the universe is as long as possible. And highly complex and therefore interesting. I know we banged the metaphor to death, but tiled with paperclips doesn't require that much of a code to describe. Obviously, maybe something emerges from it, but that steady state, assuming a steady state, is not very interesting. Whereas 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 in the very best sense of that word is to me the goal of all this. Yeah. Yeah. And somehow have fun in the process. Because we do create a lot of fun things. Instead of in this creative force and all the beautiful things we 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 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, 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 projects and so on, people cling on to things beyond what they're meant to be doing, 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'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 a great intellect. 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 Cee, 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 Boree. 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.