Liv Boeree: Poker, Game Theory, AI, Simulation, Aliens & Existential Risk | Lex Fridman Podcast #314
evolutionarily we you know if we see a lion running at us we didn't have time to sort of calculate the lion's kinetic energy and you know is it optimal to go this way or that way you just reacted and physically our bodies are well attuned to actually make right decisions but when you're playing a game like poker this is not something that you ever you know evolved to do and yet you're in that same flight or fight response um 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 the following is a conversation with liv marie 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 bree what role do you think luck plays in poker and in life you can pick whichever one you want poker or life and or life the longer you play the less influence luck has you know like with all things the bigger your sample size um the more the quality of your decisions or your strategies matter um so to answer that question yeah in poco it really depends if you and i sat and played ten hands right now i might only win 52 of the time 53 maybe um 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 ah to get into the real nitty-gritty already um basically poker is a game of math um there are these strategies familiar with like nash equilibria that's yes right so there are these game theory optimal strategies that you can adopt um and the closer you play to them the less exploitable you are so because i've studied the game a bunch um although admittedly not for a few years but back in you know when i was playing all the time um 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 um your best bet is to try and play uh the sort of similar style you also need to try and adopt this loss minimization um 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 sub-optimally and then deviating from this game theory optimal strategy to exploit your bad plays can you define game theory and nash equilibria can we try to sneak up to it in a bunch of ways like oh what's the game theory framework of analyzing poker analyzing any kind of situation so game theory is just basically the study of decisions within a competitive situation um i mean it's stately a branch of economics um but it also applies to like wider decision theory um and you know usually when you see it it's these like little payoff matrices and so on that's how it's depicted but it's essentially just like study of strategies under different competitive situations um and as it happens certain games in fact many many games um have these things called nash equilibria and what that means is when you're in a nash equilibrium basically uh it is not there is no strategy that you can take that would be more beneficial than the one you're currently taking assuming your opponent is also doing the same thing um so it'd be a bad idea you know if we're both playing a in you know a game three optimal strategy if either of us deviate from that now the other you know the we're putting ourselves at a disadvantage um rock paper scissors is actually a really great example of this like if we to 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 sort of optimal strategy be do you think what would you do um let's see i would probably try to be as random as possible exactly you want to because you don't know anything about me you don't want to give anything about a way about yourself so ideally you'd have like a little dice or somewhat you know perfect randomizer that makes you randomize 33 of the time each of the three different things and in response to that um well actually i can kind of do anything but i would probably just randomize back too but actually it wouldn't matter because you're i know that you're playing randomly um so that would be us in a nash equilibrium um where we're both playing this like unexploitable strategy however if after a while you then notice that i'm playing rock a little bit more often than i should yeah you're the kind of person that would do that wouldn't you sure yes yes yes i'm more of a scissors girl but anyway you are uh no i'm a as i said randomizer uh so you notice i'm throwing rock too much or something like that right now you'd be making a mistake by continuing playing this game theory optimal strategy because well the previous one because you are now there's an i'm making a mistake and you're not deviating and exploiting my mistake um so you'd want to start throwing paper a bit more often um in whatever you figure is the right sort of percentage of the time that i'm throwing rock too often so that's basically an example of where you know what what game three optimal strategy is in terms of loss minimization but it's not always uh the maximally profitable thing if your opponent is doing stupid stupid stuff which you know in that example so that's kind of then how it works in poker but it's a lot more complex um and the way poker players typically you know nowadays they study the games change so much and i think we should talk about how it sort of evolved um but nowadays like the top pros basically spend all their time in between sessions running these simulators uh using like software where they do basically monte carlo simulations sort of doing billions of fictitious self-play hands you input a fictitious hand scenario like oh what do i do with jack nine suited on a king ten four two two spade board um uh and and you know against this bet size so you'd input that press play it'll run it's it's uh you know it's billions of fake hands and then it'll converge upon what the game theory optimal strategies are um 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 uh you want to bluff and what percentage of the time so then there's this additional layer of inbuilt randomization built in yeah those those kind of simulations incorporate all the betting strategies and everything else like that so they so as opposed to some kind of very crude mathematical model of what's the probability you went just based on the quality of the card uh it's including everything else too the the game theory of it yes yeah essentially and what's interesting is that nowadays if you want to be a top pro and you go and play in these really like the super high stakes tournaments or tough cash games if you don't know this stuff you're going to get eaten alive in the long run yeah but of course you could get lucky over the short run and that's where this like luck factor comes in because luck is both a blessing and a curse if luck didn't you know if there wasn't this random element and there wasn't the ability for worse players to win sometimes then poker would fall apart you know the same reason people don't play chess professionally for money against you don't see people going and hustling uh 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 a beautiful mind that movie years ago well what do you think about the game theoretic formulation of uh what is it the hot blonde at the bar do you remember like oh yeah the way they illustrated it is they're trying to pick up a girl at a bar and there's multiple girls they're like friend it's like a friend group and you're trying to approach i don't remember the details but i remember don't you like then speak to her friends yeah yeah like that fame disinterest i mean it's classic pick-up artist stuff right you you want to and they were trying to uh correlate that somehow that being an optimal strategy a game theoretically why why what like i don't think i remember don't imagine that there i mean there's probably an optimal strategy is it does that mean that there's an actual nash equilibrium of like picking up girls do you know the uh the marriage problem it's optimal stopping yes so where it's an optimal dating strategy where you uh do you remember yeah i think it's like something like you you 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 that after going on this many dates out of a hundred 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 percent uh it's one over e whatever that is right which i think is yeah we're gonna fact-check that um yeah so but it's funny under those strict constraints then yes after that many people as long as you have a fixed sized pool then you just pick the the per the next person that is better than anyone you've seen before yeah um have you have you tried this have you incorporated it i'm one of those people i might we're and we're going to discuss this i and what do you mean those people i try not to optimize stuff i try to uh listen to the heart i don't think um i like my mind immediately is attracted to optimizing everything and i think that if if you really give in to that kind of addiction that you lose the the joy of the small things the minutia of life i think i don't know it says i'm concerned about the addictive nature of my personality in that regard in some ways while i think the on average people under try and quantify things or try under optimize um there are some people who you know it's like with all these things it's a you know it's a balancing act i've been on dating apps but i've never used them i i'm sure they have data on this because they probably have the optimal stopping control problem because aren't a lot of people that use social like dating apps are on there for a long time so the the the interesting the interesting aspect is like all right how long before you stop looking before it actually starts affecting your mind negatively such that you see dating as a kind of um a game a kind of game versus an actual uh process of finding somebody that's going to make you happy for the rest of your life that's really interesting uh they have the data i wish they would be able to release that data and i do want to it's okay cupid right i think they ran a huge huge study on all of their yeah they're more data-driven i think what folks are yeah i think there's a lot of opportunity for dating apps in general you know even bigger than dating apps people connecting on the internet i just hope they're more data driven and it doesn't seem that way i think like uh i've always want i always thought that um good reads should be a dating app like uh i've never used it the goodreads is a good reason just list like books that you've read okay and allows you to comment on the books you read and what books you're currently reading it's a giant social networks of people reading books and that seems to be a much better database of like interests of course to constrain you to the books you're reading but like that really reveals so much more about the person allows you to discover shared interests because books are kind of window into the way you see the world also like the kind of places people you're curious about the kind of ideas you're curious about are you a romantic or are you called calculating rationalists are you are you into iron rand or are you into bernie sanders are you into whatever right and i feel like that reveals so much more than like a a person trying to look hot from a certain angle and a tinder profile and it would also be a really great filter in the first place for people it selects 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 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 game 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 really read shakespeare i've only read cliff notes and i got a five in the ap english uh exam and i took uh the which books have i read oh yeah which was the the exam on which oh no they they include a lot of them um but hamlet uh i don't even know if you read romeo and juliet uh 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 uh i did go to five which is yeah yeah i don't know how the u.s grading system oh no so ap english is a there's kind of this advanced versions of courses in high school and you take a test that is like a broad test for that subject and includes a lot it wasn't obviously just shakespeare i think a lot of it was also writing uh written you have like ap physics ap computer science ap biology ep 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 and your gamer the point is you gamified it 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 the outside of school the deepest learning i've done has been outside of school with a few exceptions especially in grad school like deep computer science courses but that was still outside of school because it was outside of getting site 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 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 that was i go through my entire physics degree with one textbook that was just really comprehensive one that they told us at the beginning of the first year buy this but you're gonna have to buy 15 other books for all your supplementary courses and i was like every time i just checked 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 so super expensive textbooks it's a whole racket they've got going on um yeah they are they could just you get the right one it's just like a manual for but what's interesting though is this is the tyranny of of having exams and metrics it's the journey of exams and metrics yes i loved them because i loved i'm very competitive and i liked yes i liked finding ways to gamify things and then like sort of dust off my shoulders afterwards when i get get a good grade or be annoyed at myself when i didn't um but yeah you're absolutely right and that the actual you know how much of that physics knowledge i've retained like i've i learned how to cram and study and please an examiner but did that give me the deep lasting knowledge that i needed i mean yes yes and no um but really like nothing makes you learn a topic better than when you actually then have to teach it yourself um you know like i'm trying to wrap my teeth around this like game theory molok stuff right now and there's no exam at the end of it uh 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 them to 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 you you can't you can't sort of just like you probably presumably can't rely on the knowledge that you got through when you were studying for an exam to reteach that yeah and especially high level lectures especially the kind of stuff you do on youtube you're not just regurgitating material you have to think through what is the core idea here and when you do the lectures live especially you have to there's no second takes that is a 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're you've gamified this system because you're not really thinking deeply about stuff you're through the edit both written and uh 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 on recording video with very few takes is is uh is a different beast and i think it's it's the most honest way of doing it like as few takes as possible that's why i'm nervous about this don't go back ah let's do that don't  this up liv uh the tyranny of exams i do think you know people talk about you know high school and college as a time to do drugs and drink and have fun and all this kind of stuff but you know looking back of course i did a lot of those things no uh yes but it's also a time when you get to like read textbooks or read books or learn with all the time in the world like you don't have these responsibilities of like uh you know laundry and uh having to sort of uh pay for mortgage or all that kind of stuff pay taxes all this kind of stuff uh in most cases there's just so much time in the day for learning and you don't realize it at the time because at the time it seems like a chore like why the hell does there's so much homework but you never get a chance to do this kind of learning this kind of homework ever again in life unless later in life you really make a big effort out of it you get so like you basically your knowledge gets solidified you don't get you don't get to have fun and learn learning is really is really fulfilling and really fun if you're that kind of person like some people like to you know like knowledge is not something that they think is fun but if if that's a kind of thing that you think is fun that's the time to have fun and do the drugs and drinking all that kind of stuff but the learning just going back to those textbooks the hours spent with the textbooks is uh is really really rewarding do people even use textbooks anymore yeah do you think because there's days with their well well not even that but just like so much information really high quality information you know is now in digital format online um 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 um uh grant sanderson talks about this he's the this masterpiece yeah three blue one brown he says like i'm not a math teacher i just take really cool concepts and i inspire people but if you want to really learn calculus if you want to really learn linear algebra you just you should do the textbook you should do that you know and there's still the uh the textbook industrial complex that that like charges like two hundred dollars for a textbook and somehow i don't know this 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 um i'm going to get a chance to talk to him on this podcast and he's somebody that i was i found fascinating in terms of the way he thinks about poker verbalizes the way he thinks about poker the way he plays poker so and he's still pretty damn good he's been good for a long time so you mentioned that people are running these kind of simulations and the game of poker has changed do you think he's adapting in this way do you like the top pros do they have to adopt this way or is there is there still like over years you basically develop this gut feeling about like you you get to be like good the way like alpha zero is good you look at the board and somehow from the fog comes out the right answer like this is likely what they have this is likely the best way to move and you don't really you can't really put a finger on exactly why but it just comes from your gut feeling or no yes and no so gut feelings are definitely very important um you know that we've got our two mo 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 two as it's often called and your system on your your gut intuition um and historically in poker the very best players were playing almost entirely by their gut um you know often they'd do some kind of inspired play and you'd ask them why they do it and they wouldn't really be able to explain it um and that's not so much because their process was unintelligible but it was more just because no one unders no one had the language with which to describe what optimal strategies were because no one really understood how poker worked this was before you know we had analysis software you know no one was writing you know if i guess some people would write down their hands in a little notebook but there was no way to assimilate all this data and analyze it but then you know with when computers became cheaper and software started emerging and then obviously online poker where it would like automatically save your hand histories um now all of a sudden you kind of had this this body of data that you could run analysis on and so that's when people started to see you know these mathematical solutions and um and so what that meant is the the role of intuition essentially became smaller um and it it meant more into as as we talked before about you know this game theory optimal style but as also as i said like game theory optimal is about um loss minimization and being unexploitable but if you're playing against people who aren't because no one person no human being can play perfectly game through optimal in poker not even the best ais they're still like they're not you know they're 99.99 of the way there or whatever but this it's kind of like the speed of light you can't reach it perfectly so there's still a role for intuition yes so when yeah when you're playing this unexploitable style but when your opponents start doing uh something you know sub-optimal 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 my i'm in the sort of top end of my range here with this with this hand so that means i need to be calling x percent of the time um and i put them on this range et cetera but then sometimes you'll have this gut feeling that will tell you you know you know what this time i know i know mathematically i'm meant to call now you know i've got i'm in the sort of top end of my range and um these this is the odds i'm getting so the math says i should call but there's something in your gut saying they've got it this time they've got it like uh they're beating you maybe your hand is worse um so then the the real art this is where the last remaining art in poker the fuzziness uh is like do you listen to your gut how do you quantify the strength of it or can you even quantify the strength of it um and i think that's what daniel has i mean i i can't speak for how much he's studying with with with the simulators and that kind of thing i think he has like he must be to still be keeping up um but he has an incredible intuition for just he's seen so many hands of poker in the flesh he's seen so many people the way they behave when the chips are you know when the money's on the line and 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 you know gives out and he talks a lot which is an interactive element which is he's getting stuff from other people yes yeah 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 you know i don't know how again would he be beating the top cash game players online probably not no um but when he's in in person and he's got that additional layer of information he he can not only extract it but he knows what to do with it um still so well there's one player who i would say is the exception to all of this um and he's one of my favorite people to talk about in terms of i think he might have cracked the simulation uh is phil hellmuth uh he in more ways than one he's a practice simulation i think yeah he somehow to this day is still and i love you phil don't i'm not in any way knocking you um he's still winning so much at the world series of poker specifically um he's now on 16 bracelets the next nearest person i think has won ten um and he is consistently year in year out going deep or winning these huge field tournaments you know with like 2 000 people um which statistically he should not be doing and and yet you watch some of the plays he makes and they make no sense like mathematically they are so far from game theory optimal yeah and the thing is if you went and stuck him in one of these like high stakes cash games with a bunch of like gto people he's gonna get ripped apart but there's something that he has that when he's in the halls of the world series of poker specifically um amongst sort of amateurish players he gets them to do crazy like that and and but my little pet theory is that also he just the car he he's he's like a wizard and he gets the cards to do what he needs them to do because he ex he just expects to win and he expects to rece you know to get flopper set with a frequency far beyond what this you know the the the real percentages are and i don't even know if he knows what the real percentages are he doesn't need to because he gets there i think he has found the chico because when i've seen him play he seems to be like annoyed that the long shot thing didn't happen yes he's like annoyed and it's almost like everybody else is stupid because he was obviously going to win with us if that silly thing hadn't happened and it's like you understand the silly thing happens 99 of the time and it's a one percent not the other way around but genuinely for his lived experience at the well only at the monster as a poker it is like that so i don't blame him for feeling that way um but he does he has this he has this x factor and the poker community has tried for years to rip him down saying like you know he doesn't he's no good but he's clearly good because he's still winning or there's something going on whether that's he's figured out how to mess with the fabric of reality and how cards are you know a randomly shuffled deck of cards come out i don't know what it is but he's doing doing it right still who do you think is the greatest of all time would you put hellmuth no no he's definitely he seems like the kind of person would mention he would actually watch this so you might want to be careful as i said i love phil and i and i'm i'm i have i would say this to his face i'm not saying anything i don't he's got he truly i mean he is one of the greatest yeah i don't know if he's the greatest he's certainly the greatest at the world series of poker and he is the greatest at despite the game switching into a pure game almost an entire game of math he has managed to keep the magic alive and this like 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 theoretic wisdom there there might be something to be said about optimality from studying him right what do you mean by optimality meaning uh or rather game design perhaps meaning if what he's doing is working maybe poker is more complicated than we're currently modeling it as so like or there's an extra layer and i don't mean to get too weird and wooy but or there's an extra layer of ability to manipulate the things the way you want them to go that we don't understand yet do you think phil hellmuth understands them is he just generally hashtag positivity he wrote a book on positivity and he has yes he did positivity trolling books no a wrote a book about positivity yes okay 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 um and i mean it's working the man's delivered where do you put like phil ivey and all those kinds of people um 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 um 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 um my 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 and a high roller i can't remember exactly what the hand was but um i i you know 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 live hold together weaker you know your hand a it yeah i mean i was bluffing i 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 um and uh and he folded i was truly one of my one of the deep highlights of my correct did you show the cards are you useful what would you you should never show in game like 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 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 to flip the tables do you think about that kind of stuff or definitely i mean not going 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 or they've seen this so therefore that i'm going to be on the right level um so it's better just to keep that little secret to myself in a moment so how much is bluffing part of the game huge amount so yeah i mean maybe actually let me ask like what did it feel like with the ivy or anyone else when it's a high stake when it's a big it's a big bluff um so a lot of money on the table and maybe i mean what defines a big bluff maybe a lot of money on the table but also some uncertainty in your mind and heart about like self-doubt well maybe i miscalculated what's going on here what the bet said all that kind of stuff like what does that feel like i mean it's i imagine comparable to you know running a i mean any kind of big bluff where you have a lot of something that you care about on the line you know so if you're bluffing in a courtroom not that anyone should ever do that or you know something equatable to that it's it's incr 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 negra news the fill ivs and so on um and then uh to like you know each time you put the bets out you know you put another bet out your car yeah i was on a what's called a semi-bluff so there 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 it's the same above because you're representing what are you representing that you already have something so i think in this scenario i had a flush draw two two so i had two clubs two 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 um and so i can keep betting and i'll want them to call but i'm also got the other way of winning the hand where if my card doesn't come i can keep betting and get them to fold their hand and i'm pretty sure that's what the scenario was um so i had some future equity but it's still you know most of the time i don't hit that club and so i would rather him just fold because i'm you know the pot is now getting bigger and bigger and in the end like i jam all jam all in on the river that's my entire tournament on the line as far as i'm aware this might be the one time i ever get to play a big 25k you know this is the first time i played once so it was it felt like the most momentous thing and this is also when i was trying to build myself up you know build my name a name for myself in in poker i wanted to get respect destroy everything for you it felt like it in the moment like i mean it literally does feel like a form of life and death like your body physiologically is having that flight or fight response what are you doing with your body what are you doing with your face are you just like what are you thinking about a mixture of like okay what are the cards so in theory i'm thinking about like okay what are cards that look make my hand look stronger which you know which cards hit my perceived range from his perspective which cards don't um what's the right amount of bet size to you know maximize my fold equity in this situation you know that's the logical stuff that i should be thinking about but i think in reality because i was so scared because there's this at least for me there's a certain threshold of like nervousness or stress beyond which the like logical brain shuts off and now it just gets into this like it's just like it feels like a game of wits basically it's like of nerve can you hold your hold your resolve um and it certainly got by that like by the river at this i think by that point i was like i don't even know if this is a good bluff anymore but it let's do it your mind is almost numb from the intensity of that feeling i call it the white noise and and that's this and it happens in all kinds of decision making i think anything that's really really stressful like i can imagine someone in like an important job interview if it's like a job they've always wanted and they're getting grilled you know like bridgewater style where they ask these very like really hard like mathematical questions you know that's it's a really learned skill to be able to like subdue your flight or fight response you know what i think get from the sympathetic into the parasympathetic so you can actually you know engage the that voice in your head and do those slow logical calculations because evolutionarily we you know if we see a lion running at us we didn't have time to sort of calculate the line's kinetic energy and you know is it optimal to go this way or that way you just reacted and physically our bodies are well attuned to actually make right decisions but when you're playing a game like poker this is not something that you ever you know evolved to do and yet you're in that same flight or fight response and so that's a really important skill to be able to develop to basically learn how to like meditate in the moment and calm yourself so that you can think clearly but as you were searching for a comparable thing it's interesting because i you just made me realize that bluffing is like an incredibly high stakes form of lying you're you're you're lying and i don't think you're telling a story it's not it's straight up lying in in the context of game it's not a negative kind of lying but it is yeah exactly you are you're i'm you're representing something that you don't have and i was thinking like in how often in life do we have such high stakes of lying because i was thinking um certainly in high-level military strategy i was thinking um when hitler was lying to stalin about his plans to invade the soviet union and so you're you're you're talking to a person like your friends and uh you're fighting against the enemy whatever the the the formulation that enemy is but meanwhile whole time you're building up troops on the border um that's extremely wait so hitler and stalin were like pretending to be friends yeah my history knowledge is terrible that's crazy yeah that they were uh yeah man uh and it worked because stalin until the troops crossed the border and invaded in operation barbarossa where they this storm of nazi troops invaded large parts of the soviet union and hence one of the biggest wars in human history uh began stalin for sure was thought that this was uh never going to be uh that hillary is not crazy enough to invade the soviet union that they it makes geopolitically makes total sense to be collaborators and ideologically even though there's a tension between communism and fascism or uh national socialism however you formulated it still feels like this is the right way to battle the west right they were more ideologically aligned you know they in theory had a common enemy which is the west so made total sense and in terms of negotiations and the way things were communicated it um it seemed to stalin that for sure that they would remain at least for a while uh peaceful collaborators and uh that uh and everybody everybody because of that in the soviet union believed that it was a huge shock when kiev was invaded and you hear echoes of that when i traveled to ukraine sort of the shock of the invasion it's not just the invasion on one particular border but the invasion of the capital city and just like holy especially at that time when you thought world war one you realized that that was the war that to end all wars you would never have this kind of war and holy this this person is mad enough to try to take on this monster in the soviet union uh so it's not no longer going to be a war of hundreds of thousands dead it'll be a war of tens of millions dead and um yeah but that like you know that's a very large scale kind of lie but i'm sure there's in politics and geopolitics that kind of lying happening all the time uh 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 uh maybe we 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 that's tough yeah like that's i think you know i mean unfortunately that stuff happens all the time right so or having like multiple families that one is great when when each family doesn't know the other about the other one and like maintaining that life there's probably a sense of excitement about that too um or it seems unnecessary yeah but why well just lying like like you know the truth finds a way of coming out you know yes but hence that's the thrill yeah perhaps yeah people i mean and you know that's that's why i think actually like poker what 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 uh random population example um because a you know i think you know humans like to have that most people like to have some kind of you know mysterious you know an opportunity to do something like a little edgy so we get to sort of scratch that itch of being edgy at the poker table where it's like it's part of the game everyone knows everyone knows what they're in for and that's allowed and you get to like really get that out of your system um and then also like poker players learned that you know i'll 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 um 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 our 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 i'm you know unfortunately i've never gone broke um um i know plenty of people who have um uh and i don't think eagle would mind me saying he went you know he went broke once in pokeball you know early on when we were together i feel like you haven't lived unless you've gone broke oh yeah i i in some sense right well i i i mean i'm happy i i've sort of lived through it vicariously through him when he did it at the time but yeah what is 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 um 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 uh so it depends what percentage well it really does right yes but that's i mean that's another thing poker trains you to do you see you you see everything in percentages um or you see everything in like roi or expected hourlies or cost benefit etc you know so um that's i i one of the things i've tried to do is calibrate the strength of my emotional response to the to the win or loss that i've received because it's it's no good if you like you know you have a huge emotional dramatic response to a tiny loss um 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 um 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 is you know especially if i got really unlucky or um or i make a dumb play uh where i've gone away and like you know kicked kicked the wall punched a wall i like nearly broke my hand one time like um i'm a lot less competitive than i used to be like i was like pathologically competitive in my like late teens early 20s i just had to win everything um and i think that's sort of slowly waned as i've gotten older according to you yeah according to me i i don't know if others would say the same right um i feel like ultra competitive people like i've heard joe rogan say this to me it's like i think he's a lot less competitive than he used to be i don't know about that oh i believe it no i totally believe it like because as you get you can still be like i care about winning like when you know i play a game with my buddies online or you know whatever it is polytopia is my current obsession like why not 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 gonna pull me into your monster of of like uh competitive play it's important i'm enjoying playing on the i can't you just do that you just do the points thing you know against the bots yeah against the bots and i can't even do the uh uh there's like a hard one and there's a very crazy yeah that's crazy i can't 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 when once you graduate from the crazies then you can come play the graduate from the crazy yeah so in order to be able to play a decent game against like you know our group um you'll need to be you'll need to be consistently winning like 90 of games against 15 crazy bots yeah and you'll be able to like there'll be i could i could teach you it within a day honestly um how how to be the crazies how to be the crazies and then and then you'll be ready for the big leagues generalizes uh to more than just polotopia but okay uh why were we talking about polytopia losing hurts losing hers oh yeah yes competitiveness over time um oh yeah 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 be you know um i think as you 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 of scenarios of competitive interactions um and so yeah i just like i'm more and i'm more aware of my own you know like if i have a really strong emotional response to losing and that makes me then feel shitty for the rest of the day and then i beat myself up mentally for it like i'm now more aware that that that's unnecessary negative externality so i'm like okay i need to find a way to turn this down you know dial this down a bit was poker the thing that has if you think back at your life and think about some of the lower points of your life like the darker places you've gone in your mind did it have to do something with poker like what did losing spark the um the descent into darkness or was it something else um i think my darkest points in poker were when i was wanting to quit and move on to other things but i felt like i hadn't ticked all the boxes i wanted to tick yeah like i wanted to be the most winningest female player which is by itself a bad goal um you know that was one of my initial goals and i was like well i haven't you know and i wanted to win a wpt event i won one of these i won one of these but i want one of those as well and that sort of again like it's a drive of like over optimization to random metrics that i decided were important um without much wisdom at the time but then like carried on um that made me continue chasing it longer than i still actually had the passion to chase it for and i don't i don't have any regrets that you know i played for as long as i did because who knows you know i wouldn't be sitting here i wouldn't be living this incredible life that i'm living now um this is this is the height of your life right now this is it experience absolute pinnacle here in your in your robot land yeah yeah with your creepy light no it is i mean i i wouldn't change a thing about my life right now and i feel very blessed to say that um so but the dark times were in sort of like 2016 to 18 even sooner really where i was like i had stopped loving the game and i was going through the motions and i would that and and then i was like you know i would take the losses harder than i needed to yeah because i'm like oh it's another one and it was i was aware that like i felt like my life was ticking away and i was like is this going to be what's on my tombstone oh yeah she played the game of you know this zero-sum game of poker slightly more optimally than her next opponent like cool great legacy you know so i just wanted you know there was something in me that knew i needed to be doing something more directly impactful um and just meaningful it was like a search for meaning and i think it's a thing a lot of poker players even a lot of i imagine any games players who sort of love intellectual pursuits um you know i think you should ask magnus carlsen this question 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 um and yeah it's it's this weird uh moment where i just spoken with people that won multiple gold medals at the olympics and the depression hits hard after you win doesn't mean crash because it's a kind of a goodbye saying goodbye to that person to all 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 it doesn't you don't like arrive and figure it all out and there's endless bliss now 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 is like what's the next game and more importantly because obviously game usually implies zero sum like what what's the game which is like omni win look what you win how many went when why is so so important because if everyone plays zero sum games that's a fast track to either completely stagnate as a civilization but more actually far more likely to extinct ourselves um you know like the playing field is finite yeah you know nuclear powers are playing uh you know a game of poker with uh with you know but their chips are nuclear weapons right and the stakes have gotten so large that if anyone makes a single bet you know fires some weapons the the playing field breaks i made a video on this like you know the the the fight the playing field is finite and if we keep playing these adversarial zero-sum games uh thinking that we you know in order for us to win someone else has to lose or if we lose that you know someone else wins that that will extinct us it's just a matter of when what do you think about that uh mutually sure 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 sure destruction and do you think that's gonna hold up through the 21st century i mean it's it has it has held yes there's there's definitely truth to it that it was a you know it's a nash equilibrium yeah are you surprised it held this long um isn't crazy it is crazy when you factor in all the like near-miss accidental firings yes that's makes me wonder like you know you know they're familiar with the like quantum suicide thought experiment where it's basically like uh you have a you know like a russian roulette type scenario uh hooked up to some kind of quantum event you know particle splitting um or paraparticle splitting and if it you know if it goes a then the gun doesn't go off and it goes b then it does go off and it kills you because you can only ever be in the universe know assuming like the everett branch you know multiverse theory you will always only end up in the in the branch where you continually make you know option a comes in but you run that experiment enough times it starts getting pretty damn you know out of the the tree gets huge there's a million different scenarios in but you'll always find yourself in this in the one where it didn't go off and uh and so from that perspective you are essentially immortal because someone and you will only find yourself in the set of observers that make it down that path yeah so it's it's it's that doesn't mean it doesn't it just doesn't mean you're you're still not going to be at some point in your life no i'm 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 uh observer selection effects which bostrom nick bostrom talks about a lot and i think people should go read um it's really powerful but i think it could be overextended that logic i'm not sure exactly how it can be i just feel like you can get you can um overgeneralize that logic somehow well no i mean it 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 you know self-terminating environment um but my point is is that with the nuclear weapons thing um there have been at least i think it's 12 or 11 um near-misses were of like just stupid things like uh there was moon rise over norway and it made weird reflections off some glaciers in the mountains which set off i think the alarms of norad norad radar and that put them on high alert nearly ready to shoot and it was only because um the head of the russian military happened to be at the u.n in new york at the time that they go like well wait a second why would why would they fire now when their guy is there it was only that lucky happenstance which doesn't happen very often where they didn't then escalate 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 you know very hard thing to do um and there's so many of those scenarios that i can't help but wonder at this point that we aren't having this kind of like selection effect thing going on because you look back and you're like geez that's a lot of near misses but of course we don't know the actual probabilities that they would have lent each one would have ended up in nuclear war maybe they were not that likely but still the point is it's a very dark stupid game that we're playing um and it is an absolute moral imperative if you ask me to get as many people thinking about ways to make this like very precarious because we're in a nash equilibrium but it's not like we're in the bottom of a pit you know if you would like map it topographically um it's not like a stable ball at the bottom of a thing we're not an equilibrium because that 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 you know 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 several yeah depend pick your x-risk depends on the x-risk nuclear war sure that's one of the perhaps less bad ones uh green goo through synthetic biology very bad will turn you know destroy all uh organic matter uh through you know it's basically like a biological uh paperclip maximizer also bad or ai type you know mass extinction thing as well would also be shhh they're listening there's a robot right behind you okay wait uh so well let me ask you about this from a game theory perspective do you think we're living in a simulation do you think we're listening living inside a video game created by somebody else well i think well so what was the second part of the question do i think we're living in a simulation and a simulation that is observed by somebody for purpose of entertainment so like a video game are we listening how we be because there's a cree it's like phil hellmuth type of situation right like um there's a creepy level of like this is kind of fun and interesting like there's a lot of interesting stuff going on i mean that could be somehow integrated into the evolutionary process where in the way we perceive and are you asking me if i believe in god um sounds like it kind of but god seems to be not optimizing uh in the different formulations of god that we conceivo he doesn't seem to be or she optimizing for uh like personal entertainment or maybe the older gods did but the the the you know just like basically like a teenager in in their mom's basement watching create a fun right universe to observe so what kind of crazy might happen okay so to try and ask this um do i think there is some kind of ex extraneous intelligence to like our you know classic measurable universe that we you know can measure with convent you know through our current physics and uh uh instruments i think so yes um partly because i've had just small little bits of evidence in my own ex in my own life which have made me question like so i was a die-hard atheist um even five years ago uh you know i got into like the rationality community big fan of les wrong uh continued to be incredible uh resource um but i've just started to have too many little [Applause] snippets of experience which don't make sense with the current sort of purely materialistic um explanation of how reality works um isn't that just like a humbling practical realization that we don't know how reality works isn't that just a reminder to yourself yeah no it's a reminder of epistemic humility because i fell too hard you know same same as people like i think you know many people who are just like my religion is the way this is the correct way this is the work this is the law um you are immoral if you don't follow this blah blah i think they are lacking epistemic humility they're a little too too much hubris there but similarly i think the sort of the richard dawkins brand of atheism is too is too rigid as well and doesn't you know there's a way to try and navigate these questions which still honors the scientific method which i still think is our best sort of realm of like reasonable inquiry you know a method of inquiry um so an example um i've two kind of notable examples that like really rattled my my uh my cage uh the first one was actually in 2010 early on in um uh quite early on in my poker career and i the the the uh the remember the icelandic volcano that erupted that like shut down kind of all atlantic airspace um and i meant i got stuck down in the south of france i was there for something else um and i i couldn't get home and someone said well there's a big poke 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 um and the buy-in was 5 000 euros which was much bigger than my bankroll would normally allow and so i uh played a feeder tournament won my way in kind of like i did with the monte carlo big one um uh so then i won my you know from 500 euros into 5 000 euros to play this thing and on day one of them 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 uh for before you know the normal shuffle up and deal uh to tell everyone to start playing and they played uh chemical brothers hey boy hey girl um which i don't know why it's notable but it was just like a really it was a song i always liked it was like one of these like 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 it sounded like my own sort of you know when you say you think in your mind you hear a voice kind of right at least i do um and so it sounded like my own voice and it said you were going to win this tournament and it was so powerful that i got this like wave of like you know sort of goosebumps down my body and i even i remember looking around being like did anyone else hear that and obviously people are in their phones like no one else heard and i was like okay six days later i win the tournament out of 1 200 people and i i i don't know how to explain it um okay yes but maybe i have that feeling it before every time i play and it's just that i happen to you know because i won the tournament i retroactively remembered it but or the or the feeling gave you a kind of now from the film hellmuthian well exactly like it gave you a confident a deep confidence and it did it definitely did like i remember then feeling this like sort of well although i remember then on day one i then went and lost half my stack quite early on and i remember thinking like well that was you know what kind of premonition is this yes thinking i'm out but you know i managed to like keep it together and recover and then and then just went like pretty perfectly from then on and either way it definitely instilled me with this confidence and i don't want to put a i don't i can't put an explanation like you know was it some you know huge extra extra you know supernatural thing driving me or was it just my own self-confidence in someone that just made me make the right decisions i don't know and i don't i'm not going to put a frame on it and i 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 uh uh not people creatures from outside of the simulation uh 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 we're telling the same story this because they just played the tournament and left yeah they're like oh that was fun cool yeah cool next time um and now you're for the rest of your life left as a boring npc retelling this is greatness but it was and what was interesting was that after that then i didn't obviously win a major tournament for quite a long time and it left that was that was actually another sort of dark period because i had this incredible like the highs of winning that you know just on a like material level were insane winning the money i was on the front page of newspapers because there was like this girl that came out of nowhere and won this big thing um and so again like sort of chasing that feeling was was difficult um but then on top of that there was this feeling of like almost being touched by something bigger that was like uh uh so maybe did you have a sense that i might be somebody special like the this kind of i i think that's the confidence thing that uh maybe you could do something special in this world after all kind of feeling i i definitely i mean this is a thing i think everybody wrestles with to an extent right we all we are truly the protagonists in our own lives and so it's a natural bias human bias to feel to feel special and i think and in some ways we are special every single person is special because that you are that the universe does the world literally does revolve around you that's the thing in 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 subject of 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 uh oh no your lived experience is everything versus your lived experience is nothing no it's 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 uh business owners and all that kind of stuff scientists and so on i you know i have my own subject experience that i enjoy and so on but there's like a different layer like um surely i can't do those great things i mean one of the things just having interacted with a lot of great people i realize no they're like just the same the same the same humans as me and that realization i think is really empowering and like for you to remind yourself are they what what are they are they uh well depends on something yeah they're like a bag of insecurities and yes um peculiar sort of like their own little weirdnesses and so on um i i should say also not um 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 them their mind to get trapped in a bunch of and minutiae of day-to-day life they really think big ideas but those big ideas it's like allowing yourself the freedom to think big to realize that you you you can be one that actually solved this particular big problem first identify a big problem that you care about then like i can actually be the one that solves this problem and like allowing yourself to believe that and i think sometimes you do need to have like that shock go through your body and a voice tells you you're going to win this tournament well exactly and whether it was it's it's this idea of uh useful fictions so again like going through all like the rat the classic rationalist training of less wrong where it's like you want your map you know the the image you have of the world in your head to as accurately match up with how the world actually is yeah you want the map and the territory to perfectly align as you know you want it to be as an accurate representation as possible i don't know if i fully subscribe to that anymore having now had these moments of like feeling of something either bigger or just actually just being overconfident like there's there is value in overconfidence sometimes i do if you would you know take you know take magnus carlsen right if he i'm sure from a young age he knew he was very talented but i wouldn't be surprised if he was also had something in him to well actually maybe he's a bad example because he truly is the world's greatest um but someone who is 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 uh idea of how good their relative skill level is that gave them the confidence to then pursue this thing and they're like with the kind of focus and dedication that it requires to excel in whatever it is you're trying to do you know and so there are these useful fictions and that's where i think i diverge slightly with the classic um the classic sort of rationalist community um because that's a field that is worth studying um of like how the stories we tell what the stories we tell to ourselves even if they are actually false and even if we suspect they might be false um how it's better to sort of have that like little bit of faith um like value in faith i think actually and that's partly another thing that's like now led me to explore um you know the concept of god whether you want to call it a simulator the classic theological thing i think we're all like elucidating to the same thing now i don't know i'm not saying you know because obviously the christian god is like you know all benevolent um endless love the simulation one of 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 how about the individuals within there it just like wants to see how the thing plays out because it's curious and it can turn it off like that you know where on the you know where on the sort of psychopathy to benevolent spectrum god is i don't know um but having having this 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 to find a because it creates commonality between it's something we can all share and like it like it is uniquely humbling of all of us to an extent it's like a like a common objective um but b it gives people that little bit of like reserve you know when things get really dark and i do think things are going to get pretty dark over the next few years um but it gives that like to think that there's something out there that actually wants our game to keep going i keep calling it the game you know uh it's a thing c and i like we call it the game um you and c is aka grimes called what the game everything the whole thing ever yeah we joke about like everything is a game no well the universe like what if what if it's a game and the goal of the game is to figure out like well either how to beat it how to get out of it you know maybe maybe that maybe this universe is an escape room like a giant escape room and the goal is to figure out all the pieces of the puzzle figure out how it works in order to like unlock this like hyper-dimensional key and get out beyond what it is that's no but but then so you're saying it's like different levels and it's like a cage within a cage within a cage and never locate one cage at a time you figure out how to describe that um again you level up you know like us becoming multi-planetary would be a level up or us you know figuring out how to upload our consciousnesses to the thing that would probably be a leveling up or spiritually you know humanity becoming more combined and and less adversarial and and uh bloodthirsty and us becoming a little bit more enlightened that would be a leveling up you know there's many different frames to it whether it's physical you know digital uh or like metaphysical levels i think i think level one for earth is probably the biological evolutionary process it's like going from single cell organisms to to early humans and maybe level two is what whatever is happening inside our minds and creating ideas and creating technologies that's like evolutionary process of ideas and then uh multiplanetary is interesting is that fundamentally different from what we're doing here on earth probably because it allows us to like exponentially scale it it delays the malthusian trap right it it's a way to keep the playing field get lot to make the playing field get larger so that we can it can accommodate more of our stuff more of us um and that's a good thing but i don't know if it like fully solves this issue um of uh well this thing called molok which we haven't talked about yet but um which is basically i call it the god of unhealthy competition yeah let's go let's go to mark what's malloc you you did uh a great video on malik one aspect of it the application of it to instagram beauty filters very niche uh i wanted to start off small um so uh molok was originally um [Music] coined as well so apparently back in the like uh canaanite times it was to say ancient carthaginian i can never say it carthage in somewhere around like 300 bc or 280 i don't know um there was supposedly this death cult who would sacrifice their children to this awful demon god thing they called molok um in order to get power to win wars so really dark horrible things and it was literally like about child sacrifice whether they actually existed or not we don't know but in mythology they they did and this god that they worshipped was this thing called molok and then i don't know it seemed like it was kind of quiet throughout history um in terms of mythology beyond that until um this movie metropolis uh in 1927 talked about um this is you you see that there was this incredible futuristic city that everyone was living great in um 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 like 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 like mechanistic consumption of of humans in order to get more power um and then alan ginsberg wrote a poem in the 60s um which incredible poem called howl about this thing molok um and a lot of people sort of quite understandably take the the interpretation of that he's that he's talking about capitalism um but then the bet like the sort of piece the resistance that's moved molok into this idea of game theory uh was scott alexander of slate starcodex wrote this incredible one literally i think it might be my favorite piece of writing of all time it's called meditations on molok everyone must go read it uh and i say codex is a blog it's a blog yes we can link to it in the show notes or something right um no don't i yes yes but i i like how you do how how you assume um i have a professional operation going on here i i i shall try to remember you're giving the impression of it yeah yeah i'll like please if i if i don't please somebody in the comments remind me i'll also you know if you don't know this blog it's one of the best blogs ever probably you should probably be following it yes our blog's still a thing i think they it's still a thing yeah he's migrated onto sub stack but yeah it's still a blog um anyway just like better enough  things up but i have not yeah i hope they don't i hope they don't turn moloky which will mean something to people when we continue when they stop interrupting for once that's good uh so anyway so he writes he writes this this piece meditations on molok and basically he analyzes the poem and he's like okay so it seems to be something relating to where competition goes wrong and you know moloch was historically this thing of like where people would sacrifice a thing that they care about in this case children their own children uh in order to gain power a a competitive advantage and if you look at almost everything that sort of goes wrong in our society it's that same process um so with the instagram beauty filters thing um you know if you're trying to become a a famous instagram model you are incentivized to post the hottest pictures of yourself that you can you know you're trying to play that game um 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 um you know more makeup techniques come along um and then more recently these beauty filters where like at the touch of a button it makes your face look absolutely incredible um compared to your natural natural natural face uh these these technologies come along it's everyone is incentivized to that short-term strategy um but over on on net it's bad for everyone because now everyone is kind of like feeling like they have to use these things and these things like they make you like the reason why i talked about them in this video is because i noticed it myself you know like i i was trying to grow my instagram for a while i've given up on it now but um yeah and i noticed these filters how good they made me look and i'm like well i know that everyone else is kind of doing this subscribe who lives instagram please don't have to use the filters uh post a bunch of yeah make make it blow up uh so yeah it's you felt the pressure actually exactly these short-term incentives to do this like this thing that like either sacrifices your integrity or something else um in order to like stay competitive um which on aggregate turns like creates this like sort of race to the bottom spiral where everyone else ends up in a situation which is worse off than if they hadn't start you know than it were before kind of like if um like a at a football stadium uh like the system is so badly designed a competitive system of like everyone's sitting and having a view that if someone at the very front stands up to get an even better view it forces everyone else behind to like adopt that same strategy just to get to where they were before but now everyone's stuck standing up like so you need this like top down god's eye coordination to make it go back to the better state but from within the system you can't actually do that so that's kind of what this molec thing is it's this thing that makes people sacrifice uh values in order to optimize for the winning the game in question the short term game but this this molec do you can you attribute it to any one centralized source or is it an emergent phenomena from a large collection of people exactly that it's it's an emergent phenomena it's it's a force of game theory um it's a force of bad incentives on a multi-agent system where you've got more you know prisoner's dilemma is technically a kind of molecule you know system as well but it's just a two-player thing but um another word for moloka's multi-polar trap where basically you just got a lot of different people all competing for some kind of prize um and it would be better if everyone didn't do this one shitty strategy but because that strategy gives you a short-term advantage everyone's incentivized to do it and so everyone ends up doing it so the responsibility for i mean social media is a really nice place for a large number of people to play game theory and so they also have the ability to then design the the rules of the game and uh is it on them to try to anticipate what kind of like to do the thing that poker players are doing to run simulation ideally that would have been great if you know mark zuckerberg and jack and all that you know the twitter founders and everyone if they had at least just run a few simulations of how their algorithms would you know different types of algorithms would turn out for society that would have been great that's really difficult to do that kind of deep philosophical thinking about thinking about humanity actually so not not kind of this level of how do we optimize engagement or what brings people joy in the short term but how is this thing going to change the way people see the world how is it going to get morphed in iterative games played into something that will change society forever that's that requires some deep thinking that's i hope there's meetings like that inside companies but there aren't that's the problem and and it's difficult because like when you're starting up a social media company you know you're aware that you you've got investors to please there's you bills to pay um you know there's only so much r d you can afford to do you've got all these like incredible pressures it's bad you know bad incentives to get on and just build your thing as quickly as possible and start making money and you know i don't think anyone intended when they built these social social media platforms and just to like preface it so the reason why you know social media is relevant because it's a very good example of like everyone these days is optimizing for you know clicks um whether it's the social media platforms themselves because you know every click gets more you know impressions and impressions pay for you know they get advertising dollars or whether it's individual influencers or you know whether it's the new york times or whoever they're trying to get their story to go viral so everyone's got this bad incentive of using you know as you call it the clickbait industrial complex um that's a very molecule system because everyone is now using worse and worse tactics in order to like try and win this attention game um and yeah so ideally these companies would have had enough slack in the beginning in order to run these experiments to see okay what are the ways this could possibly go wrong for people what are the ways that molok they should be aware of this concept of molok and realize that it's any whenever you have a highly competitive multi-agent system which social media is a classic example of millions of agents all trying to compete for likes and so on and you try and bring all this complexity down into like very small metrics such as number of likes number of retweets whatever the algorithm optimizes for that is a like guaranteed recipe for this stuff to go wrong and become a race to the bottom yeah i think there should be an honesty when founders i think there's a hunger for that kind of transparency of like we don't know what the we're doing this is a fascinating experiment we're all running as a human civilization let's try this out yes and like actually just be honest about this that we're all like these weird rats and a maze not none of us are controlling it there's this kind of sense like the founders the ceo of instagram or whatever mark zuckerberg has a control and he's like like with strings playing people no they're he's at the mercy of this like everyone else he's just like trying to do his best and like i think putting on a smile and doing over uh polished videos about how instagram and facebook are good for you i think is not the right way to uh to actually ask some of the deepest questions we get to ask as a society how do we design the game such that we build a better world i think a big part of this as well is people there's this there's this philosophy particularly in silicon valley um of well techno optimism technology will solve all our issues and there's a steel man argument to that where yes technology has solved a lot of problems and can potentially solve a lot future ones but it can also it's always a double-edged sword and particularly as you know technology gets more and more powerful and we've now got like big data and we're able to do all kinds of like psychological manipulation with it and so on um it's technology is not about values neutral thing people think i used to always think this myself it's like this naive view that oh technology is completely neutral it's just it's the humans that either make it good or bad no to the point we're at now the technology that we are creating they are social technologies they literally dictate how humans now form social groups and so on beyond that and beyond that it also then that gives rise to like the memes that we then like coalesce around and that you know if you have the stack that way where it's technology driving social interaction which then drives like mimetic uh mimetic culture and like which ideas become popular that's molok and the we need the other way around we need it so we need to figure out what are the good memes what are the good um values that we think are we we need to optimize for the like makes people happy and healthy and like keeps society as robust and safe as possible then figure out what the social structure around those should be and only then do we figure out technology but if we're doing the other way around and you know like as much as i love in many ways the culture of silicon valley and like you know i do think that technology has you know i don't want to knock it it's done so many wonderful things for us same with capitalism um there are we have to like be honest with ourselves we're getting to a point where we are losing control of this very powerful machine that we have created can you redesign the machine within the game can can you just have can you understand the game enough okay this is the game and this is how we start to re-emphasize the memes that matter the the memes that bring out the best in us uh you know like the way i try to be in real life and the way i try to be online is to be about kindness and love and i feel like i'm sometimes get like criticized for being naive and all those kinds of things but i feel like i'm just trying to live within this game i'm trying to be authentic yeah but also like hey it's kind of fun to do this like you guys should try this too you know that and that's like trying to redesign some aspects of the game within the game um is that possible i don't know but i think we should try uh i don't think we have an option but to try well the other option is to create new companies or to pressure companies uh that or anyone who has control of the rules of the game i think we need to be doing all of the above i think we need to be thinking hard about what are the kind of positive healthy memes um uh you know as elon said he who controls the memes controls the universe um i think he did yeah um but there's truth to that it's very there is wisdom in that because memes have driven history you know we are we are a cultural species that's what sets us apart from chimpanzees and everything else we have the ability to learn and evolve through culture as opposed to biology or like you know classic physical constraints and that means culture is incredibly powerful and we can create and become victim to very bad memes or very good ones um but we do have some agency over which means you know we we sub but not only put out there but we also like subscribe to um so i think we need to take that approach we also need to you know because i don't want the the the i'm making this video right now are called the attention wars which is about like how molok like the media machine is this moloch machine uh well is this is this kind of like blind dumb thing that where everyone is optimizing for engagement in order to win their share of the attention pie um and then if you zoom out it's really like molok that's pulling the strings because the only thing that benefits from this in the end you know like oh our information ecosystem is breaking down like we have you look at the state of the us it's in we're we're in a civil war it's just not a physical war it's it's it's a it's an information war and people people are becoming more fractured in terms of what their actual shared reality is like truly like an extreme left person an extreme right person like they they literally live in different worlds in their in their in their minds at this point and it's getting more and more amplified and this this force is like a like razor blade pushing through everything it doesn't matter how innocuous the topic is it will find a way to split into this you know bifurcated culture war and it's terrifying because that maximizes the tension and that's like an emergent moloch type force right that takes any any topic and cuts through it so they it can split nicely into two groups one one that's well it's whatever yeah all everyone is trying to do within the system is just maximize whatever gets them the most attention because they're just trying to make money so they can keep their thing going right and the way the the best emotion for getting attention in well because it's not just about attention on the internet it's engagement that's the key thing right in order for something to go viral you need people to actually engage with it they need to like comment or retweet or whatever um and of all the emotions the uh you know there's like seven classic shared emotions that studies have found that all humans even from like un un previously uncontacted tribes have um some of those are negative you know like sadness uh disgust anger etc summer positive happiness um excitement and so on the one that happens to be the most useful for the internet is anger because anger is it's such an active emotion if you want people to engage if someone's scared and i'm not just like talking about my essay there are studies here that looked into this um where it's like if someone's like 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 gonna be like whereas if they're enraged by a thing well now that like that triggers all the like the the old tribalism emotions um and so that's how then things get sort of spread you know much more easily they out compete all the other memes in the ecosystem um and so this like the attention economy the the wheels that make it go around are is rage um i did a you know tweet the the the the problem with raising against the machine is that the machine has learned to feed off rage because it is feeding off our age that's the thing that's now keeping it going so the more we get angry the worse it gets um so the malloc and this attention in in the war of attention is constantly maximizing rage what it is optimizing for is engagement and it happens to be the engagement um is what propaganda you know is that i mean it just sounds like everything is is putting is more and more things being put through this like propagandist lens of winning whatever the war is in question whether it's the culture war or the ukraine war yeah well i think the silver lining of this do you think it's possible that in the long arc of this process you actually do arrive at greater wisdom and more progress it's just 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 like in the moment it feels up right but in the long arc it actually is pretty productive i hope so um that said we are now in the era of just as we have weapons of mass destruction with nuclear weapons you know that can break the whole playing field we now are developing weapons of informational mass destruction information you know wmds that basically can be used for propaganda or just manipulating people however they you know is needed whether that's through dumb tick-tock videos or you know there are significant resources being put in um i don't mean to sound like you know to doom and gloom but there are bad actors out there that's the thing there are plenty of good actors within the system who are just trying to stay afloat in the game so we're effectively doing monarchy things but then on top of that we have actual bad actors who are intentionally trying to like manipulate the other side into doing things and using uh so because of the digital space they're able to use uh artificial actors meaning bots exactly botnets you know and this is a whole new situation that we've never had before it's exciting you know you know what i want to do you know what i want to do that um because there is you know people talking about boss manipulating and uh like malicious bots that are basically spreading propaganda i want to create like a bot army for like that like fights that yeah exactly for love that fights though that i mean you know there's there i mean there's truth to fight fire with fire it's like but how you always have to be careful whenever you create again like molok is very tricky yeah hitler was trying to spread the love too well yeah so we thought but you know i i i agree with you that like that is a thing that should be considered but there is again everyone the road to hell is paved good intentions and this is there's there's always unforeseen circums you know outcomes uh externalities of you trying to adopt a thing even if you do it in the very best of faith but you can learn lessons if you can run some sims on it first absolutely but 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 um like if i were to create this bot army it's not good for me to have full control over it because in the beginning i might have a good understanding of what's good and not but over time that starts to get deviated because i'll get annoyed at some and i'll think okay wouldn't it be nice to get rid of those but then that power starts getting to your head you become corrupted that's basic human nature so distribute the powers we need we need a a love botnet on a dao a dow love botnet yeah but and without a leader like without exactly distributed right yeah without any kind of centralized yeah without even you know basically is the more control the more you can decentralize the control of a thing uh to people you know but the the they don't need the ability to coordinate because that's the issue when you if something is too you know that's really to me like the culture wars is the bigger war we're dealing with is actually between the like the sort of i don't know what even the term is for it but like centralization versus decentralization that's the tension we're seeing power in control by a few versus completely distributed and the trouble is if you have a fully centralized thing then you're at risk of tyranny you know stalin type things can happen uh or completely distributed uh now you're at risk of complete anarchy and chaos where you can't even coordinate to like on you know when there's like a pandemic or anything like that so it's like what is the right balance to strike between these two well structures can't molec really take hold in a fully decentralized system that's the one of the dangers too yes the the very vulnerable so the dictator can commit huge atrocities but they can also make sure the the infrastructure works and uh they have that god's eye view at least they have the ability to create like laws and rules that like force coordination which stops moloch but then you're vulnerable to that dictator getting infected with like this with some kind of psychopathy type thing what's uh what's your verse malloc sorry 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 uh i did the first one a year ago i can't believe it's nearly been a year uh the second one hopefully will be coming out in like a month um and my goal at the end of the series is to like present because basically i'm painting the picture of like what molok is and how it's affecting almost all these issues in our in our society and how it's you know driving it's like kind of the generator function as people describe it of existential risk and then at the end wait wait the generator function of existential risk so you're saying molok is sort of the engine that creates a bunch a bunch of x-risks yes not all of them like like a uh you know a um it's a cool phrase generator function it's not my phrase it's daniel schmacktenberger oh i got that from him of course all things it's like all the roads lead back to daniel schmuckenberger the dude is the dude is brilliant no he's not ready for that it's mark twain sorry um totally rude interruptions from me no it's fine uh so not all likes risks so like an asteroid technically isn't because it's um you know it's just like this one big external thing it's not like a competition thing going on but you know synthetic biola you know bio weapons that's one because everyone's incentivized to build even for defense you know bad bad viruses you know just threaten someone else etc or ai technically the race to adi is kind of potentially a monarchy situation um but yeah so if molok is this like generator function that's driving all of these issues over the coming century that might wipe us out what's the inverse and so far what i've gotten to is this character that i want to put out there called win-win because monica's 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 the more i was like okay well don't try and you know think through it logically what's the vibe of win-win and to me like in my mind molok is like and i dress as it in the video like it's red and black it's kind of like very you know hyper focused on it's one goal you must win um so win-win is kind of actually like these colors it's like purple turquoise um it's loves games too it loves a little bit of healthy competition but constrained like kind of like before like knows how to ring fence zero sum competition into like just the right amount uh whereby its externalities can be controlled and kept positive and then beyond that it also loves cooperation coordination love all these other things um but it's also kind of like mischievous uh like you know it will have a good time it's not like kind of like boring you know like oh god it's it's it knows how to have fun it can get like it can get down um but ultimately it's like unbelievably wise and it just wants the game to keep going um and i call it win-win um that's a good like pet name yes the i think the win right and i think it's formal name when it has to do like official functions is uh omnia omnia yeah from like um omniscience kind of what's why omnia you just like omnia omni win but i'm open to suggestions oh like you know and this is like yeah yeah like that but there's an angelic kind of sense to omnia though so win-win is more fun so it's more it's more like uh it embraces the the the fun aspect i mean there is something about sort of um there's some aspect to win-win interactions that requires embracing [Music] the chaos of the game and enjoying the game itself i don't know i don't know what that is that's almost like a zen-like appreciation of of the game itself not optimizing for the consequences of the game right well it's recognizing the value of competition in of itself about it's not like about winning it's about you enjoying the process of having a competition and not knowing whether you're going to win or lose this little thing but then also being aware that you know what's the boundary how big do i want competition to be because one of the reasons why molok is doing so well now in our society in our civilization is because we haven't been able to ring fence competition uh you know and so it's just having all these negative externalities and we've completely lost control of it um you know it's i think my guess is and now we're getting really like you know metaphysical technically but i i think we would be 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 then one that's purely competition cooperation entirely like it's good to have some little zero sumness bits um but i don't know that fully and i'm not qualified as a philosopher to know that and that's what reverse molex so this kind of win-win creature is in uh system is an antidote to the molex system yes and i don't know how it's going to do that um but it's good to kind of try to start to formulate different ideas different frameworks of how we think about that exactly at the small scale of a collection of individuals a large scale of a society exactly it's a meme i think it's i think it's an example of a good meme and i'm open i'd love to hear feedback from people if they think it's you know they have a better idea or it's not you know but it's the direction of 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 uh malik creates uh negative consequences what do you know 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 like if you think of a tree what is it about a tree like a big ancient beautiful tree right what is it about it that we find so beautiful it's not you know the the you know what the sweetness of its fruit or the value of its lumber it's it's this entirety of it that is that there's these immeasurable qualities it's like almost like a qualia of it um that's both like it walks this fine line between pattern well it's got lots of patronicity but it's not overly predictable um you know again it walks this fine line between order and chaos it's a very highly complex system um in the you know you can't it's evolving over time you know that the definition of a complex versus and this is another smackdom burger thing you know a complex versus a complicated system a complicated system can be sort of broken down into bits understood and then put back together a complex system it's kind of like a black box it does all this crazy stuff but if you take it apart you can't put it back together again because it's there's there's all these intricacies and also very importantly like there's some of the parts sorry the sum of the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts and that's where the beauty lies i think and i think that extends to things like art as well like there's something there's something immeasurable about it there's something we can't break down to a narrow metric does that extend to humans you think yeah absolutely so how can instagram reveal that kind of beauty the complexity of a human being good question um this takes us back to uh dating sites and good reads i think very good question i mean well i know what it shouldn't do it shouldn't try and like right now you know one of the i was talking to like a social media expert recently because i was like oh i hate things the social media expert oh yeah there are like agencies out there that you can like outsource because i'm thinking about working with one to like i said i want to start a podcast you should you should have done it a long time ago checking on it gonna be called win-win um and it's gonna be about this like positive some stuff uh and the thing that you know they they all come back and say it's like well you need to like figure out what your thing is you know you need to narrow down what your thing is and then just follow that have like a sort of a formula because that's what people want they want to know that they're coming back to the same thing and that's the advice on youtube twitter you name it and that's why and and the trouble with that is that it's it's a complexity reduction and generally speaking complex you know complexity reduction is bad it's making things more it's an oversimplification not that simplification is always a bad thing um but when you're trying to take you know what is social media doing is trying to like encapsulate the the human experience and put it into digital form and and commodify it to an extent that you so you do that you compress people down into these like narrow things and i that's why i think it's it's kind of ultimately fundamentally incompatible with at least my definition of beauty it's interesting because there is some sense in which a simplification sort of in the in the einstein kind of sense of a really complex idea a simplification in a way that still captures some core power of an idea of a person is also beautiful and so maybe it's possible for social media to do that a presentation a sort of a slither a sl 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 the viral machine that spreads those words uh often results in people taking the thing out of context not people often don't read tweets in the context of the human being that wrote them the full the full history of the tweets they've written the education level the humor level the 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 in a certain sense if you do take it in context it reveals some kind of quirky little beautiful idea or a profound little idea from that particular person that shows something about that person so in that sense twitter can be more successful if we talk about molex is driving a better kind of incentive yeah i mean how they can like if if we were to rewrite it is there a way to rewrite the twitter algorithm so that it stops being the like the fertile breeding ground of the culture wars because that's really what it is it's um i mean maybe i'm giving it you know twitter too much power you know power but just the more i looked into it and i had conversations with uh tristan harris uh from center of humane technology and he explained it as like twitter is where you have this amalgam of human culture and then this terribly designed algorithm that amplifies the craziest people um and the 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 of of rage and then spread that you know to their millions and millions of people who aren't even on twitter um and so i honestly i think if i could press a button and 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 gonna happen um and so at least one way to like stem the tide and make it less molecule would be to um change at least if like it was on a subscription model then it's now not optimizing for in you know uh impressions because basically what it wants is for people to keep coming back as often as possible that's how they get paid right um 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 um 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 um 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 good it's one way variety is monarch to be clear so molec is always negative then yes by definition yes but then i disagree with you it's not always negative competition is neutral i disagree with you that all virality is negative then uh as molok then because i i it's a good intuition because we have a lot of data on virality being negative but i happen to believe that the core of human beings so most human beings want to be good more than they want to be bad to each other and so i think it's possible it might be just harder to engineer systems that enable virality but it's possible to engineer systems that are viral that enable virality and the kind of stuff that rises to the top is things that are positive and positive not like lala positive it's more like win-win meaning a lot of people need to be challenged wise things yeah you grow from it it might challenge you you might not like it but you ultimately grow from it and ultimately bring people together as opposed to tear them apart yeah i deeply want that to be true and i very much agree with you that people at their core are on average good as opposed to you know care for each other as opposed to not like a you know i think it's actually a very small percentage of people are truly like wanting to do just like destructive malicious things most people are just trying to win their own little game and they don't mean to be you know they're just stuck in this badly designed system um that said the current structure yes is the current structure means that virality is optimized towards molok that doesn't mean there aren't exceptions you know 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 you know identifying memes that you know above a certain threshold of the population agree is a positive happy bringing people together meme the kind of thing that you know brings families together that would normally argue about cultural stuff at the table at the dinner table um identify those memes and figure out what it was what was the ingredient that made them spread that day um and also like uh not just like happiness and connection between humans but uh connection between humans and other ways that enables like productivity like cooperation solving difficult problems and all those kinds of stuff um you know this so it's not just about let's let's be happy and have a fulfilling lives it's also like let's build cool yeah which is the spirit of collaboration which is deeply anti-moloch right that's that's uh it's not using competition it's like you know molech hates collaboration and coordination and people working together and that's you know again like the internet started out as that and it and um it could have been that but because of the way it was sort of structured um in terms of uh you know very lofty ideal they wanted everything to be open source so open source and also free and but they needed to find a way to pay the bills anyway because they were still building this on top of our old economic system um and so the way they did that was through a third-party ad advertisement but that meant that things were very decoupled you know you've got this third-party interest um which means that you're then like people having to optimize for that and that is the you know the actual consumer is actually the product not the not the the the person you're making the thing for you're in in the end you start making the thing for the advertiser and so that's why it then like breaks down um yeah like it's there's no clean solution to this um and i i it's a really good suggestion by you actually to like um figure out how we can optimize virality for positive some topics i shall be the general of the love bot army um strip you did distribute it distribute no okay yeah the power just even insane that the palm already went to my head no okay you've talked about quantifying your thinking we've been talking about this sort of 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 a game theoretic way like your own life like personal life you i think you've given an example that you had an honest conversation with igor about like how long is this relationship gonna last so 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 probabilistic terms can you speak to that kind of way of reasoning uh the good and the bad of that can you do this kind of thing with human relations yeah so the the scenario you're talking about it was like yeah tell me about that yeah uh i think he was about a year into our relationship um and we were having a fairly heavy conversation because we were trying to figure out whether or not i was going to sell my apartment 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 should we buy a place together et cetera well 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 like how do you get to that conversation because most people are kind of afraid to have that kind of serious conversation well so you know our relationship was very well first of all we were good friends for a couple of years before we even you know got you know romantic um and when we did get romantic it was very clear that this was a big deal it wasn't just like another like you know it wasn't a random thing um and 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 you know 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 you know but it will come out eventually and um if you aren't able to accept difficult things yourself then how could you possibly expect to be like the most integral version that you know you can't the relationship needs this bedrock of like honesty as a foundation more than anything yeah that's really interesting but i would like to push against some of those ideas but okay all right but that's the down the line just throw them up uh i just rudely interrupt um and so you know we we've been about together for a year and things were good and we were having this hard conversation and and then he was like well okay what's the likelihood that we're going to be together in three years then because i think it was roughly a three-year time horizon and i was like oh interesting and everybody actually wait don't before you said out loud let's both write down our predictions formally um because we'd been like we were just getting into like effective altruism and rationality at the time which is all about making you know formal predictions as a means of uh measuring your own um well your your own foresight essentially in a quantified way so we like 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 um and i remember like having this moment of like oh because after the ten year and i was like oh well i mean i love them a lot but like a lot can happen in ten years you know and um we've only been together for you know so i was like i think it's over 50 but it's definitely not 90 percent and i remember like wrestling i was like oh but i don't want him to be hurt i don't want him to you know i don't want to give a number lower than his and i remember thinking ah don't game it this is a exercise in radical honesty so just give you a real percentage and i think mine was like 75 and then we showed each other and luckily we were fairly well aligned um and but honestly even if we weren't 20 it definitely it definitely would have i 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 would he's just kind of like a water off the duck's back type of guy he'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 one they became built in we didn't give formal plus or minus error bars i didn't draw any or anything like that i guess that's the question i have is did you feel informed enough to make such decisions because like i feel like if you were if i were to do this kind of thing rigorously i would want some data uh 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 i want to have some data about the base rates yeah and and also actual trajectories of relationships i would love to have um like 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 like how rep how informative is your past to your future that's the whole thing like i can you look at my life and have a good prediction about in terms of my characteristics of my relationships what that's going to look like in the future or not i don't even know the answer that question i'll be very ill informed in terms of making the probability i would be far yeah i 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 i still 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 would i try to live my life thinking it's very close to 100 percent like allowing myself actually the this is this is the difficulty of this is allowing myself to think differently i feel like has a psychological consequence that's where that's what's one of my pushbacks against radical honesty is uh this one one particular perspective so you're saying you would you would rather give a falsely high percentage to your partner going back to uh in order to survive the traditional optimism yes of uh fake it till you make it about the positive the power of the positive well so that and this comes back to this idea of useful fictions yeah right and i 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 um you know to be clear igor and i weren't doing this formal prediction in it like we we did it with very much tongue-in-cheek it wasn't like we were going to make i don't think it even would have me drastically changed what we decided to do even we kind of just did it more as a fun exercise um but the consequence of that fun exercise you really actually kind of there was a deep honesty to it too exactly it was a deep and it was it was just like this moment of reflection i'm like oh wow i actually have to think like through this quite critically and so on and and it's also what was interesting was like you know i got to like check in with what what my what my desires were so there was one thing of like what my actual prediction is but what are my desires and could these desires be affecting my predictions and so on and you know that's a that's a method of rationality and i personally don't think it loses anything in terms of i didn't take any of the magic away from our relationship quite the opposite like it brought us closer together because it was like we did this weird fun thing um that i appreciate a lot of people find quite strange um and i think it was somewhat you know unique in our relationship that both of us are very you know we both love numbers we both love statistics we're both poker players um so this this was kind of like our safe space anyway for others you know one part one partner like really might not like that kind of stuff at all in which cases it's not a good exercise to do you know i don't recommend it to everybody um but i do think there's you know it's interesting sometimes to poke holes in the or you know probe at these things that we consider so sacred that we can't try to quantify them but which is interesting because that's intention with like the idea of what we just talked about with beauty and like what makes something beautiful the fact that you can't measure everything about it um and perhaps something shouldn't be tried to make you know maybe it's wrong to completely try and value the utilitarian you know put a utilitarian frame of measuring the the utility of a tree in 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 like a quantified cost-benefit analysis on really tough life decisions um you know they're like oh just go with your gut it's like well sure but guts are our intuitions are best suited for things that we've got tons of experience in then we can really you know 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 um well i i would love to know this there's a balance that probably is a personal balance of strike is the amount of rationality you you apply to a question versus um 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 um almost everybody i talk to is a hundred percent wow and you listen to the experts right they they say all kinds of stuff right they are they first of all the morale there is higher than probably and i've i've never been to a war zone before this but i've read about many wars and i think the morale in ukraine is higher than almost anywhere i've read about it's every single person in the country is proud to fight for their country everybody not just soldiers not everybody why do you think that is specifically more than you know in other words um i think because there's uh 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 the united states and from russia from nato and europe everybody telling them what to do now they want to discover who they are and there's that kind of sense that we're going to fight for the safety of our homeland but we're also going to fight for our identity and that on top of the fact that there's just if you look at the history of ukraine and there's certain other countries like this there are certain cultures are feisty in their pride of being part of being the citizens of that nation ukraine is that poland was that there's you just look at history in certain countries you do not want to occupy right i mean both stalin and hitler talked about poland in this way they're like this is 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 like they're not going to be want to be occupied and certain other countries are like pragmatic they're like well you know leaders come and go i guess this is good you know they're ukraine just doesn't have ukrainians those team throughout the 20th century don't seem to be the kind of people that just like sit calmly and let the quote unquote occupiers um in in uh impose their that that's interesting though because you said it's you know it's always been under conflict and leaders have come and gone yeah so you would expect them to actually be the opposite under that yeah because well because they're 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 um 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 there's a will there um but you know a lot of other aspects are also part of that that has to do with the reverse smaller kind of situation where social media has definitely played a part of it um also different charismatic individuals have had to play a part the fact that uh the president of the nation zelonski stayed in kiev during the the invasion uh was 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 zalensky to do is to flee and to to be the leader of the nation from a from a distant place right he said that i'm staying put you know everyone around him there was a pressure to leave and he didn't and that that in you know those singular acts um really can unify a nation there's a lot of people that criticize the landscape within ukraine uh before the war is very unpopular even still but they put that aside for the for the especially that singular act of staying in the capital yeah a lot of those kinds of things come together to to to create something within people these things always of course though like the you know which how zoomed out of a view do you want to take because yeah you describe it it's like an antimonic 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 um but if you zoom it out from the level you know on a global level they're coming together to you know fight that that could you know that could make a conflict larger you know what i mean i don't i don't know what the right answer is here um yeah it seems like a good thing that they came together i but i like we don't know how this is all going to play out if this all turns into nuclear war we'll be like okay that was the bad that was the oh yeah so i was describing the the reverse molec for the local level exactly now this is where the experts come in and they say well if you uh channel most of the resources the nation and the nations 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 this is the early days of a world war if we don't play this correctly yes uh and they we need cool heads from our leaders so you from ukraine's perspective we need to win ukraine needs to win the war because what is winning the war mean is coming up coming to peace negotiations an agreement that guarantees no more invasions and then you make an agreement about what land belongs to who right and that that's you stop that and and to sh 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 right if you engage in it so you want to teach everybody a lesson let's not do world war three it's not it's gonna be bad for everybody it's a it's a lose lose deep lose lose doesn't matter so but they you know uh but it and i think that's actually a correct uh 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 and think from a geopolitics perspective we should realize that it's entirely possible that we will see a world war iii in the 21st century and this is like a dress rehearsal for that and so the way we play this as a as a human civilization will will define whether we do or don't have a world war three um you know um how we discuss war how we discuss nuclear war the kind of leaders we we elect and uh 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 be extremely careful that when you say pro ukraine or pro anybody your you're pro human beings uh not pro the machine exactly that uh that uh creates narratives that says it's pro-human beings but it's actually if you look at the raw use of uh funds and resources it's actually probe making weapons and shooting bullets and dropping bombs right the real 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 you know there isn't justification for small local scenarios you know adversarial adversarial conflicts you know if you have a a leader who is starting wars you know 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 ways 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 in conflict is now getting so big that you know the weapons that can be used are so mass destructive um that we can't afford another giant conflict we just 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 a dark path huh this is good but no well no it's a dark no it's like while we're in the summer place we might as well uh some of my best friends are dark paths um uh what what worries you the most well mentioned uh asteroids will mention agi uh 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 uh bio bio risks um so what in what what kind of violence and so many fun options so many so of course like we have natural risks from natural pandemics you know naturally occurring viruses or pathogens and then also as time and technology goes on and technology becomes more and more democratized and you know into the hands of more people the risk of synthetic pathogens um you know and whether or not you fall into the camp of covid was you know gain a function accidental lab leak or whether it was purely naturally occurring either way we are facing a future where synthetic pathogens or like art human human meddled with pathogens um either accidentally get out or get into the hands of bad actors who you know whether they're omnicidal maniacs you know um 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 um you know and all those poor people that died it was still like like child's play compared to what a future one could be in terms of fatality rate um and so you'd think that we would then becoming we'd be much more robust in our pandemic preparedness um and meanwhile the budget uh in the last two years for the u.s um sorry they just did this uh 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 you know considering that covert cost multiple trillions to the economy right the original allocation in this 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 barely even we're not even really out of it it basically got whittled down to nothing because for some reason people think that all right we've got the pandemic out the way that was that one and the reason for that is that people are and and i say this with all due respect to a lot of the science community but they are there's an immense amount of naivety about they they they think that nature is the main risk moving forward and it really isn't um and i think nothing demonstrates this more than this uh this project that i was just reading about that's sort of being proposed right now called um deep vision and the idea is to go out into the wilds and we're not talking about it's 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 know try and find these bring samples of them back to laboratories and again whether you think covered with 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 like it it just it people should go and just read it it's like it's like a comedy show of just how many they are how leaky these these labs are even when they do their best efforts um so bring these things then back to civilization that's step one of the badness the the next plan 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 of 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 like bio of the scientific community thinks is a good idea and i think on expectation like the and their argument is is that oh this is good because you know it might buy us some time to buy to development vaccines which okay sure maybe would have made sense prior to mrna technology but you know like they mrna we can bank we can develop a vaccine now when we find a new uh pathogen within a couple of days now then there's all the trials and so on but 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 giving you're bringing the risk of these pathogens of like getting leaked but you're literally handing it out to every bad actor on earth who would be doing cartwheels and i'm talking about like kim jong-un isis people who like want they think the rest of the world is their enemy um and in some cases they think that killing it themselves is is is like a noble cause and you're literally giving them the building blocks of how to do this it's the most batshit i'd ever heard like on expectation it's probably like minus ev of like multiple billions of lives if they actually succeeded in doing this certainly certainly in the tens or hundreds of millions so the cost benefit is so unbelievably it makes no sense and i was like trying to wrap my head around like why why like 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 it's i think it's that people don't you know the proponents they don't it they're actually overly naive about the interactions of humanity and well like that that there are bad actors who will use this for bad things because not only will it um if you publish this information even if a bad actor couldn't physically make it themselves which given you know in 10 years time like the technologies are getting cheaper and easier uh 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 um we were published on the internet in terms of its building blocks kim jong-un could be like hey if you don't you know let me build my nuclear weapons i'm going to release this i've managed to build it well now he's actually got incredible bluff we don't know you know and so that's it's just like handing the keys sending weapons of mass destruction to people though makes no sense the possible i agree with you but the possible world in which you might make sense is if the um 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 leap frog to the place where uh the good guys are yeah i mean i would agree in principle um with pertaining to this like particular plan of like that you know 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 like getting the information but then why would you release it the information to your literal enemies you know that's that makes that that doesn't fit at all in that perspective of like trying to be ahead of them you're literally handing them the weapon but there's different levels of release right so uh there's the kind of secrecy where you don't give it to anybody but there's a release where you incrementally give it to like major labs so it's not public release but it's like you're giving it to yeah there's different layers of reasonability but but the problem there is it's going to if if you go anywhere beyond like complete secrecy it's going to leak that's the thing it's very hard to keep secrets and so that's the information is so you might as well release it to the public it's 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 what in that i think well that's a solution yeah the solution is either don't get the information in the first place or be keep keep it incredibly incredibly contained see i think i think it really matters which discipline we're talking about so in the case of biology i do think you're a very right we shouldn't even be it should be forbidden to even like think about that meaning don't coll don't just even collect information but like don't do i mean gain a functional research is a really iffy area like you start i mean it's all about cost benefits right there are some scenarios where i could imagine the cost benefit of a gain of function research is very very clear where you've evaluated all the potential risks factored in the probability that things can go wrong and like you know not only known unknowns but unknown unknowns as well tried to quantify that and then even then it's like orders of magnitude better to do that i'm behind that argument but the point is is that there's this like naivety that's preventing people from even doing the cost benefit properly on a lot of the things because you know the site this i i get it the science community there again i don't want to bucket the science community but like some people within the science community just think that everyone's 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 hindering sometimes because it has a bunch of blind spots and then you start to look at a history of science how easily has been used by dictators to any conclusion they want and it's it's it's dark how you can use brilliant people that like playing the little game of science because it is a fun game you know you're building you're going to conferences you're building on top of each other's ideas as breakthroughs hi i think i've realized how this particular molecule works and i could do this kind of experiment and everyone else is impressed ooh 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 or i came up with a pill that solves this problem and it's going to help a bunch of people and i came up with a giant study that shows the exact probability it's going to help or not and you get lost in this game and you forget to realize this game just like malik it can have like unintended yeah unintended consequences that might destroy human civilization right uh or or divide human civilization or have a geopolitical consequences i mean the the effects of i mean it's just so the most destructive effects of covid have nothing to do with the with the biology of the virus it seems like uh it's i mean i could just list them forever but like one of them is the complete distrust of public institutions uh the other one is because of that public distrust i feel like if a much worse pandemic came along we as a world have not cried wolf and when if an actual wolf now comes people will be like masks  vaccines it yeah everything and they they won't be they'll distrust every single thing that any major institution is going to tell them and because that's the thing like that there were certain actions made by certain you know health public figures where they told they very knowingly told it was a white lie it was intended in the best possible ways such as you know early on when there were there was clearly a shortage of masks and so they said to the public oh don't get masks they don't there's no evidence that they work there or the you know don't get them they don't work in fact it might even make it worse you might even spread it more like that that was a real like stinker uh yeah no no there's a unless you know how to do it properly you're gonna make that you're gonna get sicker or you're more likely to get the to catch the virus which is just absolute crap and they put that out there and it's pretty clear the reason why they did that was because there was actually a shortage of masks and they really needed it for health workers which makes sense like i agree like it you know but the cost of lying to the popul to the to the public when that then comes out people aren't as stupid as they think they are as a you know and that's that's i think where this distrust of ex 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 just dis like absolutely decimate the trust in the public institutions that we depend upon and honestly the best thing that could happen i wish like if like faulty or you know and these other like leaders who i mean god i would i can't imagine how nightmare his job has been over the last few years hell on earth like so you know i i you know i have i have a lot of sort of sympathy for the position he's been in but like if he could just come out and be like okay look guys hands up we didn't handle this as well as we could have these are all the things i would have done differently in hindsight i apologize for this and this and this and this that would go so far and maybe i'm being naive who knows maybe this would backfire but i don't think it would like to someone like me even because i've like i've lost trust in a lot of these things i'm unfortunate that at least no people who i can go to who i think are good like have good epistemics on this stuff um but you know if they if they could sort of put their hands on my okay these are the spots where we screwed up this this this um this was our reasons yeah we actually told a little white lie here we did it for this reason we're really sorry but they just did the radical honesty thing the radical transparency thing that would go so far to build rebuilding public trust and i think that's what needs to happen yeah i know i totally agree with you unfortunately yeah his job was very tough and all those kinds of things but um 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 we need leaders and i think young people are seeing that that kind of talking down to people from a position of power i'm i hope is is the way of the past people really like authenticity and they they like leaders that are like a man and a woman of the people and i i think that just i mean he still has a chance to do that i think i mean yeah sure you know i i don't think you know if i i doubt he's listening but if he is like hey i i i think he you know i don't think he's irredeemable by any means i think there's you know um i don't know i don't have an opinion whether there was arrogance or there or not um just know that i think like coming clean on the you know it's understandable to have up during this pandemic like i won't expect any government to handle it well because it was so difficult like so many moving pieces so much like lack of information and so on um but the step to rebuilding trust is to go okay look we're doing a scrutiny of where we went wrong and i and for my part i did this wrong in this part and that would be huge all of us can do that i mean i was struggling for a while whether i want to talk to to him or not i talked to his boss francis collins um another person that's screwed up in terms of trust um lost a little bit of my respect to there seems to have been a kind of dishonesty in the in the back rooms in that p 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 the thing that's what's it called i heard the phrase today uh nut picking social media does that so you've got like nitpicking nut picking is where the the the craziest stupidest you know if you have a group of people let's call you know let's say people who are vaccine i don't like the term anti-vaccine people who are vaccine hesitant vaccine speculative you know what social media did or the media or anyone you know their opponents would do is pick the craziest example so the ones who are like you know i think i need to inject myself with like motor oil at my ass or something yeah you know select the craziest ones and then have that beamed to you know so from like someone like fauci or francis's perspective that's what they get because they're getting the same social media stuff as us they're getting the same media reports i mean they might get some more information but they're they too are going to get these the nuts portrayed to them so they probably have a misrepresentation of what the actual public's intelligence is well that's that's 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 own mind like to understand to put into proper context realize that what you are seeing social media is not anywhere near an accurate representation of humanity not picking a leather and there's nothing uh wrong with putting uh motor oil up your ass it's just one it's one of them i i do this every weekend okay uh how did that analogy come from in my mind like what i don't know i think we 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 type of situation yes i'm definitely worried about it but i feel kind of bipolar in the 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 you know escape the game um and this this you know if because i spend all my time thinking about these molecule problems that you know what what is the solution to them well you know in some ways you need this like omni-benevolent omniscient omni-wise coordination mechanism that can like make us all not do the the molecule thing uh or like provide the infrastructure would redesign the system so that it's not vulnerable to this molecule process um and in some ways you know that's that's the strongest argument to me for like the race to build agi is that maybe you know we can't survive without it but the flip side to that is the the the the unfortunately now that there's multiple actors trying to build ai agi you know this is this was fine ten years ago when it was just deep mind but then other companies started up and now it created a race dynamic now it's like that's the whole thing is it the same it's got the same problem it's like whichever company is the one that like optimizes for speed at the cost of safety will get the competitive advantage and so it will be the more likely the ones to build the adi you know and and that's the same cycle that you're in and there's no clear solution to that because you can't just go like um slapping you know if you go and try and like stop all the different companies then it will you know the good ones will stop because they're the ones you know within you know within the west's reach but then that leaves all the other ones to continue and then they're even more likely so it's like it's a very difficult problem with no clean solution um and you know at the same time you know i i know the at least some of the folks at deepmind and they're incredible and they're thinking about this they're very aware of this problem and they're like you know i think some of the smartest people on earth yeah the the culture is important there because they are thinking about that and they're some of the best machine learning engineers so it's possible to have a a company or a community of people that are both great engineers and are thinking about the philosophical topics exactly and importantly they're also game theorists you know and because this is ultimately a game theory problem the thing this this monologue mechanism and like you know what this ra how do we voice arms race scenarios um you need people who aren't naive to be thinking about this and again like luckily there's a lot of smart non-naive game theorists within within that group yes i'm concerned about it and i i think it's again a thing that we need people to be thinking about um in terms of like how do we create how do we mitigate the arms race dynamics and how do we solve the thing of it's got boston calls it the orthogonality problem whereby because obviously there's a chance you know that the belief the hope is is that you build something that's super intelligent and by definition of being super intelligent it will also become super wise and have the wisdom to know what the right goals are and hopefully those goals include keeping humanity alive right um but bostrom says that actually those two things you know um super intelligence and super wisdom aren't necessarily correlated they're actually kind of orthogonal things and how do we make it so that they are correlated how do we guarantee it because we need it to be guaranteed really to know that we're doing the thing safely but i think that like um 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 um to figure out how to modify each version of the system as it becomes more and more intelligent yes buying time is is a good thing definitely anything that slows everything down we just everyone needs to chill out we've got millennia to figure this out yeah um or at least at least um well it depends again it's some people think that you know we can't even make it through the next few decades without having some kind of omni-wise coordination mechanism um and there's also an argument to that yeah i don't know well there is uh i'm suspicious of that kind of thinking because it seems like the entirety of human history is has people in it that are like predicting doom uh or just around the corner there's something about us that is strangely attracted to that thought it's almost like fun to think about the destruction of everything just objectively speaking i've talked and listened to a bunch of people and they are gravitating towards that it's almost i think it's the same thing that people love about conspiracy theories is they love to be the person that kind of figured out some deep fundamental thing about the that's going to be it's going to mark something extremely important about the history of human civilization because then i will be important right when in reality most of us will be forgotten and and and life will will go on i mean 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 in case in yoko world it will still go on that's one of the amazing things about life it finds a way and so in that sense i just i feel like the doom and gloom thing is um well what we don't yeah we don't want a self-fulfilling prophecy yes that's exactly yes and i very much agree with that and i you know even i have a slight like feeling from the amount of time we spent in this conversation talking about this because it's like you know is this even a net positive if it's like making everyone feel oh in some ways like making people imagine these bad scenarios can be a self-fulfilling prophecy but at the same time that's how that's weighed off with at least making people aware of the problem and gets them thinking and i think particularly you know 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 they're intellectually curious and and they can sort of sense that there's trouble brewing yeah they can smell that there's you know i think there's a reason people are thinking about this stuff a lot is because the probability the probability you know it's increased in probability over certainly over the last few years um trajectories have not gone favorably let's put it in you know since 2010. so um 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 like anchor of hope and and i and i'm not just saying it to like trick myself like i do truly i do think there's something out there that wants us to win yeah i think there's something that really wants us to win and it just you just have to be like just like okay now i sound really crazy but like open your heart to it a little bit yeah and it will give you the like the sort of breathing room with which to marinate on the solutions we are the ones who have to come up with solutions but we can use that there's like this 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 he's an audience all while sitting back which is majori the the two people that listen to this are probably sitting in a beach smoking some weed um that's a beautiful sunset or they're looking at just the waves going in and out and ultimately there's a kind of deep belief there and um the 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 which is which what makes this whole simulation this video game kind of fun this battle of polytopia i still man i love those games so much so good and that that one for people who don't know but uh battle polytopia is a it's a big it's like a really radical sim simplification of a civilization type of game it still has a lot of the skill tree development a lot of the strategy um but it's easy enough to play in a phone yeah it's kind of interesting they've really they've really figured it out it's 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 um and they use pretty colors that hack the dopamine reward circuits in our brains very well yeah it's fun video games are so fun yeah most of this life is just about fun escaping all the suffering to find the fun uh what's energy healing i have in my notes energy healing question mark what's that about uh oh man um god your audience are gonna think i'm mad uh so the two crazy things that happened to me the one was the voice in the head that said you're gonna win this tournament and then i won the tournament the other craziest thing uh that's happened to me was in 2018 um i started getting uh this like weird problem in my ear where it was kind of like low frequency sound distortion uh where voices particularly men's voices became incredibly unpleasant to listen to um it would it would like create this it would be falsely amplified or something and it was almost like a physical sensation in my ear which was really unpleasant and i it would like 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 like the bottom end i was losing the the hearing in that ear um and i also in the end i got the doctor said they think it was this thing called meniere's disease um which is this very unpleasant disease where people basically end up losing their hearing but they get this like um it often comes with like dizzy spells and other things because it's like the inner ear gets all messed up um now i don't know if that's actually what i had um but that's what at least a couple of one doctor said to me um but anyway so i had three months of this stuff this going on it was really getting me down i was and i was at burning man um of all places i don't mean to be that person talking about burning man um 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 uh 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 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 it's all woo nonsense um i was like sure have a go and she starts like with her hand and she says oh there's something there and then she leans in and she starts like sucking over my ear not actually touching me but like close to it like with her mouth and it was really unpleasant i was like bro can you stop she's like no no there's something there i need to get it i was like no no i really don't like it please this is really loud she's like i need to just bear with me and she does it i don't know how long for a few minutes and then she eventually collapses on the ground like freezing cold crying not you know and i'm just like i don't know what the hell is going on like i'm like thoroughly freaked out as there's everyone else watching just like what the hell me like warm her up and she was like she was really shaken up and she's like i don't know what that she said it was something very unpleasant and dark don't worry it's gone i think you'll be fine in a couple you'll have the physical symptoms for a couple of weeks and you'll be fine but you know she was like that you know so i was i was so rattled a because the potential that actually i had something bad in me that made someone feel bad and and and that she was scared that was what you know i was like wait i thought you you do this this is the thing and now you're terrified like you pulled like some kind of an exorcism or something yeah what the is going on yeah um so it like just the most insane experience um and frankly it took me like a few months to sort of emotionally recover from it um but my ear problem went away about a couple of weeks later and touchwood i've not had any issues since so that gives you uh like hints that maybe there's something out there i mean i i don't i i again i don't have an explanation for this the most probable explanation was uh you know i was a burning man i was in a very open state let's just leave it at that um and you know placebo is an incredibly powerful thing in 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 yeah you know and i mean i don't know what the problem was like i was told it was many years i don't want to say i definitely had that because i don't want people to think that oh that's how you know if they do have that because it's terrible disease and if they have that that this is going to be a guaranteed way for it to fix it for them i don't know um and i also don't i don't you're absolutely right to say like using even the word placebo is like it comes with this like baggage of of like frame and i don't want to reduce it down all i can do is describe the experience and what happened i cannot put an ontological framework around it i can't say why it happened what the mechanism was what the problem even was in the first place um i just know that something crazy happened and it was while i was in an open state and fortunately for me it made the problem go away but what i took away from it again it was part of this you know this took me on this journey of becoming more humble about what i think i know because as i said before i was like i was in the like richard dawkins train of atheism in terms of there is no god there's and everything like that is  we know everything we know you know the only way we can get through uh we know how medicine works and it's molecules and and chemical interactions and that kind of stuff and now it's like okay well there's there's clearly more for us to understand um and that doesn't mean that it's a scientific as well because you know the beauty of the scientific method is that it still it still can apply to this situation like i don't see why you know i would like to try and test this experimentally um 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 repeat the experiment um but it doesn't just because something happens that's sort of out of the realms of our current understanding it doesn't mean that it's the scientific method can't be used for it yeah i think the scientific method sits on a foundation of those kinds of experiences as a scientific method is a process to um carve away at the mystery all around us and experiences like this is just a reminder that uh we're mostly shrouded mysteries though that's it it's just like a humility like we haven't really figured this whole thing out but at the same time we have found ways to act you know we're clearly doing something right because think of the technological scientific advancements the knowledge that we have that was would blow people's minds even from 100 years ago yeah and you know we've even allegedly gone out to space and landed on the moon although i still haven't i have not seen evidence of of the earth being round but i'm still i'm keeping an open mind uh speaking of which uh you studied physics and astrophysics uh would when just just to go to that and we jump just to jump around through the fascinating life you've had when did you how did that come to be like when did you fall in love with astronomy and space and things like this as early as i can remember um i was very lucky that my my mum 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 doctor doolittle animals flock to her and just like sit and look at her adoringly as she sings 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 ever went to university or anything like that she's actually phobic of maths if i try and get her to like you know i was trying to teach her poker and she hated it um but she's so deeply curious um and that just got instilled in me when you know we would sleep out under the stars whenever it was you know the two nights a year when it was warm enough in the uk to do that um and we'll just lie out there until until we fell asleep looking at looking for satellites looking for shooting stars and and i was just always i don't know whether it was from that but i've always naturally gravitated to like the biggest the biggest questions and also the like the most layers of abstraction i love just like what's the meta question what's the meta question and so on um so i think it just came from that really and it and and then on top of that like physics you know it also made logical sense and that it was a it was it was the degree it was a degree that was a subject that ticked the box of being you know answering these really big picture questions but it's also extremely useful it like has a very high utility um in terms of i didn't know necessarily i thought i was going to become like a research scientist i my original plan was i want to be a professional astronomer so it's not just like a philosophy degree that asks the big questions and it's not uh like biology in the path to be going to medical school or something like that which is all overly pragmatic not overly is um this is very pragmatic yeah physics is a good combination of the two yeah at least for me it made sense and i was good at it i liked it um yeah i mean i it wasn't like i did an immense amount of soul-searching to choose it or anything it just was like this it made the most sense i mean you have to make this decision in the uk age 17 which is crazy um because you know in us you go the first year you do a bunch of stuff right and then you choose your major um 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 this wasn't about that and i'm uh i owe the government a lot of money um how many alien civilizations are out there when you when you looked up at the stars with your mom [Music] and you were counting them what's your mom think about a number of alien civilizations i actually don't know i would imagine she would take the viewpoint of you know she's pretty humble and she knows how many you know there's a huge number of potential spawn sites out there so she would sponsor spawn sites yeah you know this is our sport we have spawn sites in polytopia we spawned on earth you know it's hmm yeah spawn sights why does that feel weird to say spawn because it makes me feel like it's um there's only one source of life and it's spawning in different locations that's why the word spawn because like it feels like life that originated on earth really originated here right it is it is a unique to this particular yeah i mean but i don't in my mind it doesn't exclude you know the completely different forms of life and different biochemical soups can't also spawn but i guess it implies that there's some spark that is yeah which i kind of like the idea of it yeah and then i i get to think about respawning like after it dies like what happens if life on earth ends is it is it going to restart again probably not it depends maybe earth is depends on the type of you know what what's the thing that kills it kills it off right if it's a paper clip maximizer not that you know for the for the example but you know some kind of very self-replicating you know high on the capabilities very low on the wisdom type thing so whether that's you know grey goo green goo you know like nano bots or just a shitty misaligned ai that thinks it needs to turn everything into paper clips um 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 i although something tells me like if we actually take a paper clip maximizer it destroys everything it's a really dumb system that just and envelops the whole of earth and that diverse beyond yeah i didn't i didn't know that part but okay great that's what it takes it becomes a multi-planetary paperclip maximizer well it just it just propagates i mean it it depends whether it figures out how to jump the vacuum gap um 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 yeah 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 about this orthogonality thing right it's very low on wisdom but very high on capability um 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 paper clips yeah uh by the way for for people who which is maximum virality by the way that's what virality is but does not mean that morality is necessarily all about maximizing paper clips in that case it is so for people who don't know this is just a thought experiment example of an ai system that's very 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 you know for the goal of producing a maximum number of paper clips okay uh or whatever its optimization function was that it was set up but don't you think could be making recreating lexus maybe it'll tile the universe and lex uh go on i like this idea now i'm scared that's better that's that's more interesting than paperclip that could be infinitely optimal if i were to say so it's still a bad thing because it's permanently capping what the universe could ever be it's like that's that's its end or achieving the optimal that the universe could ever achieve but that's up to different people have different perspectives uh 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 it won't suppress you know as you scale to multiple planets and throughout they'll emerge these little worlds that uh on top of the fabric of maximizing paper clips there will be that that would emerge like little societies of of a paper clip well then we're not with them we're not describing a paper clip maximizer anymore because by the like if you think of what a paper clip 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 on by definition like paper clips there is no there is no way for well okay so you're saying that paper clips somehow will just emerge and create through gravity or something no no no no because there's there's a dynamic element to the whole system it's not just it's creating those paper clips 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 paper clips uh you know like you know people like string theory right it's supposed to be strings that are interacting in fascinating ways i'm sure paper clips are very string like they can be interacting very interesting ways as you scale exponentially through three-dimensional i mean i'm sure the paperclip maximizer has to come up with the theory of everything it has to create like wormholes right it has to break uh like it has to understand quantum mechanics i i love you i love your optimism this is where i'd say this we're going into the realm of pathological optimism whereby it's um i'm sure there will be a i 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 goldblum says life will find a way you think life will find a way even out of this perfectly homogeneous dead soup it's not perfectly homogeneous it has to it's perfectly maximal in the production i don't know why people keep thinking it's harmonic it's it maximizes the number of paper clips that's the only thing it's not trying to be homogeneous it's trying true it's true maximize paper clips so you're saying you're saying that because it because you know kind of like in the big bang or you know it seems like you know things there were clusters there was more stuff here than there that was enough of the pathonicity that kick-started the evolutionary process the little weirdnesses that will make it even out of yeah so yeah emerges interesting okay well so how does that line up then with the the whole heat death of the universe right because that's 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 homogeneous greatness where there's no you know negative entropy that you know there's no uh free energy that we understand even from that new 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 the what we consider the limitations of physics the paperclip maximizer will find a way if a way exists and we're we should be humble to realize that we've been yet but because it just wants to make more paper clips yeah so it's going to go into those universes and turn them into paper clips yeah but we humans not humans but complex systems exist on top of that we're not interfering with it this complexity emerges from this simple base state the simple basis whether it's yeah whether it's you know plank lengths or paper clips is the base unit yeah you can think of like the universe as a paper clip maximizer because it's doing some dumb stuff like physics seems to be pretty dumb it has like i don't know if you can summarize it yeah yeah the 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 as goals i mean i don't i don't know what's a nice way maybe um maybe laws of thermodynamics could be i don't know if you can assign goals to physics but if you formulate in the science in the sense of goals it's very similar to paper clip maximizing in in the dumbness of the goals but the the pockets of complexity has emerged is where beauty emerges that's where life emerges that's where intelligence that's where humans emerge and i 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 like unwritten unwritten but like another fake to in law of the of of reality yeah and and you you're trusting that emergence will find a way to even out of seemingly the most molechy awful out you know 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 on that and the certainty of that yeah um and while we build the paper clip maximizer and find out classic yeah molok is doing cartwheels man yeah but the thing is it will destroy humans in the process which is the thing which is the reason we really don't like it we we seem to be really holding on to this whole human civilization thing would you would that make you said if ai systems that are beautiful that are conscious that are interesting and complex and intelligent ultimately lead to the death of humans that make you sad if humans led to the death of humans sorry like if they would supersede humans oh if some ai yeah ai would uh would end humans i mean that's that's that's the reason why i'm like in some ways in less emotionally concerned about ai risk as then say bio you know bio risk because at least with ai there's a chance you know if if we're in this hypothetical where it wipes out humans but it does it for some like higher purpose it needs our atoms to an energy to do something at least now there's the universe is going on to do something interesting um whereas if it wipes everything you know bio like just kills everything on earth and that's it and there's no more you know earth cannot spawn anything more meaningful in the in the few hundred million years it has less left because it doesn't have much time left um then uh yeah i i don't know so one of my favorite books i've ever read is uh nova scene by james lovelock who sadly just died um he wrote it when he was like 99. he died aged 102 so it's a fairly new book um and he sort of talks about that that he thinks it's you know so building off this gaia theory where like earth is like living some form of intelligence itself and that this is the next like step right is this this whatever this new intelligence that is maybe silicon based as opposed to carbon-based goes on to do um and it's really sort of in some ways an optimistic but rudely fatalistic book um and i don't know if i fully subscribe to it but it's a beautiful piece to read anyway so am i sad by that idea i think so yes and 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 so if it figures out abundance it shouldn't need to kill us off it should be able to find a way for us it should be there's plenty 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 like give us a little pocket where we can continue doing our things and we can continue to do things and so on um and again if it's so supremely wise it shouldn't even be worried about the game theoretic considerations that by leaving us alive we'll then go and create another like super intelligent agent that it then has to compete against because it should be omni-wise and smart enough to not have to concern itself with that unless unless it deems humans to be kind of like uh like the humans are a source of none of a lose-lose kind of dynamics well yes and no we're not molecules that's why i think it's important to say well maybe humans are the source of molecule no i mean i think game theory is the source of moloch and you know because molecule exists in in non-human systems as well it happens within like agents within a game in terms of like you know uh it applies to agents but it like it can apply to you know uh a species that's on an island of animals you know rats out competing the ones that like massively consume all the resources are the ones that are going to win out over the more like chill socialized ones and so you know creates this malthusian trap like moloch exists in little pockets in nature as well well so it's not a strictly human i wonder if it's actually a result the consequences of the invention of predator and prey dynamics maybe it needs to ai will have to kill off every organism that you're talking about killing of competition not competition but just um like the way it's like uh like the weeds or whatever in in a beautiful flower garden the parasites yeah on on the whole system now of course it will it will it won't do that completely it'll put them in a zoo like we do with parasites it'll ring fence yeah and there'll be somebody doing a phd on like they'll prod humans with a stick and see what they do [Laughter] but uh i mean in terms of letting us run wild outside of the uh uh you know a geographically constrained region that might be uh that you might have uh decided against that no i think there's obviously the capacity for beauty and kindness and non-uh non-malic behavior amidst humans so i'm pretty sure ai will preserve us uh let me you i don't know if you answered the the aliens question you no i didn't you had a good conversation with toby uh toby yes about various sides of the universe i think did did he say no i'm forgetting but i think he said it's a good chance we're alone so the the the classic you know fermi paradox question is um there are so many spawn points and yet you know it didn't take us that long to go from harnessing fire to sending out radio signals into space so surely given the vastness of space we should be and you know even if only a tiny fraction of those create life and other civilizations too we should be the universe should be very noisy there should be evidence of dyson spheres or whatever you know like at least radio signals and so on but seemingly things are very silent out there um now of course it depends on who you speak to some people say that they're getting signals all the time and so on and like i don't want to make an epistemic statement on that but um it seems like there's a lot of silence and so that raises this paradox and then they the the you know the drake equation so the drake equation is like uh basically just a simple thing of like trying to estimate the number of possible uh civilizations within the galaxy by multiplying the number of uh stars created per year by the number of stars that have planets planets that are habitable blah blah blah so all these like different factors um and then you plug in numbers into that and you you know depending on like the range of you know your lower bound and your upper bound point 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 um differently was toby this is a researcher at the future humanity institute uh they instead of they realize that it's like basically a statistical quirk that if you put in point sources even if you think you're putting in conservative point sources because on some of these variables the the uncertainty is so large it spans like maybe even like a couple of hundred orders of magnitude um by putting in point sources it's always going to lead to um overestimates um and so they by putting stuff on a log scale actually they did it on like a log log scale on some of them um and then like ran the simulation across the whole um bucket of uncertainty across all those orders of magnitude when you do that then actually the number comes out much much smaller and that's the more statistically rigorous you know mathematically correct way of doing the calculation it's still a lot of hand waving as science goes it's it's like definitely you know just waving i don't know what an analogy is but it's hand wavy um and uh anyway when they did this and then they did a bayesian update on it as well to like factor in the fact that there is no evidence that we're picking up because you know no evidence is actually a form of evidence right um and the long and short of it comes out that the we're roughly around 70 to be the only uh 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 equation is ridiculous on many levels but uh the the the the powerful thing about the equation is there's the different things different components that can be estimated and the error bars on which can be reduced with science and enhanced throughout since the equation came out the error box have been coming out on different atoms yeah that's right aspects and so that it almost kind of says uh what like this gives you a mission to reduce the error bars on these estimates now over a period of time and once you do you can better and better understand like in the process of redoing the error bars you'll get to understand actually what is the right way to find out where the aliens are how many of them there are and all those kinds of things so i don't think it's good to use that for an estimation i think you do have to think from like more like from first principles just looking at what life is on earth like and trying to understand the very physics-based biologic chemistry biology-based question of what is life maybe computation based what the is this thing right and that like how difficult is it to create this thing right it's one way to say like how many plants like this are out there all that kind of stuff but it feels like from our very limited knowledge perspective the right ways to think how how does what is this thing and how does it originate from from very simple non-life things how does complex life like things emerge from from a rock to a bacteria protein and these like weird systems that encode information and pass information from self-replicate and then also select each other and mutate in interesting ways such that they can adapt and evolve and build increasingly more complex systems right well it's a form of information processing yeah right right whereas information transfer but then also an energy processing which then results in if i guess information processing maybe i'm getting buggered well it's doing some modification and yeah the input is some energy right it's able to extract yeah extract resources uh from its environment in order to achieve a goal but the goal doesn't seem to be clear right the goal is well the goal is to make more of itself yeah but in a way that uh increases i mean i don't know if evolution is a fundamental law of the universe but it seems to want to replicate itself in a way that maximizes the chance of its survival individual agents within yeah an ecosystem do yes yes evolution itself doesn't give a right it's a very it don't care it's just like oh you optimize it well at least it's certainly um yeah it doesn't care about the the welfare of the individual agents within it but it does seem to i don't know i i think it's i think the mistake is that we're anthropomorphizing and to even try to you know give evolution a mindset um because it is there's a really great post by eliezer uh yudkowski on um uh less wrong which is um an alien god and he talks about like the mistake we make when we try and like put our mind think through things from an evolutionary perspective as though like giving evolution like some kind of agency and what it wants um yeah worth reading but yeah i 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 i i think that's actually a really powerful way to reason through things and i think people especially people on robotics seem to run away from it as fast as possible and uh i i just can you give an example of like how it helps in robotics oh in uh that our world is a world of humans and to see robots as fundamentally just tools runs away from the fact that we live in a world of a dynamic world of humans that like these all these game theory systems we've 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 um they they have their own personal life projections we have pets and dogs and the thing looks like a dog they have their own memories of what a dog is like they have certain feelings and that's going to be useful in a safety setting safety critical setting which is one of the most trivial settings for a robot in terms of how to avoid any kind of dangerous situations and a robot should really con 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 i i also think our brains are designed to think in in in human um human terms like game theory i think is um is is best applied in the space of human decisions and so uh right you're dealing i mean with things like ai ais they are you know we can somewhat like i don't think it's the reason i i say anthropomorphization we need to be careful with is because there is a danger of overly applying overly wrongly assuming that that this artificial intelligence is going to operate in any similar way to us because it is operating on a fundamentally different substrate like even dogs or even mice or whatever in some ways like anthromorphizing 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 and they've also evolved from the same out of the same evolutionary process you know they've followed this evolution of like needing to compete for resources and needing to find a mate and that kind of stuff whereas an ai that has just popped into an existence somewhere on a like a cloud server let's say you know or whatever however it runs and whatever whether i don't know whether they have an internal experience i don't think they necessarily do in fact i don't think they do but the point is is that to try and apply any kind of modeling of like see thinking through problems and decisions in the same way that we do has to be done extremely carefully because they are like they're so alien their method of whatever their form of thinking is it's just so different because they've never had to evolve you know in the same way yeah i was beautifully put i was just playing devil's advocate i do think in certain contexts anthropomorphization is not going to hurt you yes engineers run away from it too fast for the most point you're right uh do you have advice for young people today like the the 17 year old that you were of uh how to live life you can be proud of how to have a career you can be proud of in this world full of molex think about the win-wins look for win-win situations and be careful not to you know overly use your smarts to convince yourself that something is win-win when it's not so that's difficult and i don't know how to advise you know people on that because it's something i'm still figuring out myself um but have that as a sort of default mo uh don't see things everything as a zero-sum game try to find the positive sumness and like find waste if it if there isn't seem to be one consider playing a different game so that i would suggest that um do not become a professional poker player because people always ask they're like oh she's a pro i want to do that too fine you could have done it if you were you know when i started out it was a very different situation back then poker is you know uh a great game to learn in order to understand the way ways to think and i recommend people learn it but don't try to make a living from it these days it's almost it's very very difficult to the point of being impossible um 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 this i'm doing a bad thing for myself right now um 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 uh that's like that and nobody can convince you otherwise just do it um don't listen to anyone's advice find a thing that you can't be talked out of too that's that's i like that yeah uh you you were uh a lead guitarist in the metal band oh did i write that down for something uh what that did you uh what would you do it for the the the the performing was it the the pure the the music of it was it just being a rock star why'd you do it um so we only ever played two gigs we we didn't last you know it wasn't a very we weren't famous or anything like that um but i i was very into metal like it was my entire identity sort of from the age of 16 to 23. the best metal band of all time ah don't ask me that it's so hard to answer uh ah so i know i had a long argument with um 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 the depth of war and lyrics and and so on so um 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 metallica's pop it's just like it's they sold out metallica are metal like they they were the i mean again you can't say who was the godfather of metal blah blah but like they were so groundbreaking and so brilliant um i i you've named literally two of my favorite bands like that's that when you ask that question who are my favorites like those were two that came up a third one is children of bodom um who i just think they just take all the boxes for me um yeah i don't know it's nowadays like i kind of sort of feel like a repulsion to the i mean i was that myself like i'd be like who do you prefer more come on who's like no you have to rank them but it's like this false zero sumness that's like why they're so additive like there's no conflict there when people ask that kind of question about anything movies i feel like it's hard work and it's unfair but it's it's you should pick one yeah like and i that's actually you know the same kind of it's like a fear of a commitment people ask me what's your favorite band it's like but i you know it's good to pick exactly and thank you for yeah thank you for the tough question yeah uh well maybe not no i don't know when a lot of people are listening um can i just like what what is it uh no it does it it's are you still into metal uh funny enough i was listening to a bunch before i came over here oh like you do you use it for like motivation yeah or get you in a certain way yeah i was weirdly listening to 80s hair metal before i came does that count as metal i think i think so it's it's like proto-metal and it's happy it's optimistic happy proto-metal um yeah i mean these things you know all these genres bleed into each other um but yeah sorry to answer your question about guitar playing my relationship with it was kind of weird and 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 like the idea was just absolutely terrifying um uh but i was also just thinking i was like it'd be kind of cool to actually try starting a band again and getting back into it and right but it's scary that's scary i mean i i put out some guitar playing just other people's covers like i play comfortably numb on on the internet nice it's scary too it's scary putting stuff out there uh and i had this similar kind of fascination with technical playing both on piano and guitar you know uh one of the first um one of the reasons i started learning guitar is the from ozzy osbourne mr crowley solo and one of the first solos i learned is that um and it's there's a beauty to it there's a lot of beauty right yeah is there some tapping but it's it's just really fast it's beautiful like arpeggios yes arpeggios yeah and 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 is watched you feel like a rockstar player but it ultimately has to do with technical you 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 and that's a different that's a different journey i think i think that journey is a little bit more inspired in the blues world for example or improvisation is more valued obviously in jails and so on but um i i think ultimately it's a more rewarding journey because you get to your relationship with the guitar then becomes a kind of escape from the world where you can create create i mean creating stuff is uh and it's something you work with because my relationship with my guitar was like it was something to tame and defeat yeah which was kind of what my whole personality was back then like i was just very like you know as i said like very competitive very just like must bend this thing to my will whereas writing music is you were it's 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 uh playing publicly or all that kind of stuff i think there's just like a harsh self-criticism within the whole thing it's really really it's it's it's really tough to hear some of your stuff i mean that there is there's certain things that feel really personal and and on top of that as we talked about poker offline there are certain things that you get to 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 um 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 you enjoy it knowing that you're just not as sharp as it used to be because you're not doing it every single day uh that 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 just it's almost painful yes yeah and i feel that way with guitar too you know because i used to play like every day a lot so returning to it is painful because like it's like accepting the fact that this whole ride is finite and the you have you have a prime there's a time when you're really good and now it's over and now we're on a different chapter of life i was like but you can still you can still discover joy within that process it's been tough especially with some level of like as people get to know you there's a and people film stuff you you don't have the privacy of just sharing something with a few people around you yeah that's a beautiful privacy that that's the point well the internet is 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 out of uh a good musical performance um what what do you think is the meaning of this whole thing what's the meaning of life wow it's in your name as we talked about you have to have to live up do you feel the requirement to have to live up to your name because live yeah no because i don't see it i mean my well again it's kind of like no i don't know because my full name is olivia yeah so i can retreat in that and be like oh olivia what does that even mean um live up to live uh no i i can't say i i do because i've never thought of it that way okay and then your name backwards is evil that's what i also talked about um there's there's like layers i mean i i feel the urge to to live up to that to be to be the inverse of evil yeah um or even better because i don't think you know is the inverse of evil good or is good something completely separate to that i think my intuition says it's the latter but i don't know anyway again getting in the weeds um what is the meaning of all this uh of life um why are we here i think to explore have fun and understand um and make more of here and to keep the game going over here more more of more of this whatever this is more of experience just to have more of experience and ideally positive experience um and more complex you know to i guess try and put it into a sort of vaguely scientific term um make it so that the program required the length of code required to describe the universe is as long as possible uh and you know highly complex and therefore interesting because again like i know you know we bang the the the metaphor to death but like tiled with x you know told with uh paper clips doesn't require that much of a code to describe um obviously maybe something emerges from it but at that steady state assuming a steady state it's 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 more more diversity and i in the very best sense of that word um is i to me the the the the goal of all this uh yeah yeah and somehow have fun in the process yes because we do create a lot of fun things along instead of in this creative force and all the beautiful things 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 the fact that they end there's this uh whatever it is falling in love or um creating a piece of art or creating a bridge or creating a rocket or creating a i don't know just the the businesses that do that that that build something or solve something the fact that it is born and it dies um somehow uh embeds it with fun with joy for the people involved i don't know what that is the finiteness of it it can do some people struggle with the you know i mean a big thing i think that one has to learn is is being okay with things coming to an end and uh in terms of like some projects and so on right people cling on to things beyond what they're meant to be doing you know beyond what make is reasonable and i'm gonna have to come to terms with this podcast coming to an end i really enjoy talking to you i i think it's obvious as we've talked about many times you should be doing a podcast you should you're already doing a lot 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 about it it's good it's a fun one it's it really is good and it's 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 and see what comes and emerges and yeah yeah to understand yourself better and if you're talking to others to understand them better yeah and together with them i mean i you should do your you should do your own podcast but you should also do a podcast with c as you talked about the two of you have such uh different minds that like melt together in just hilarious ways fascinating ways just uh the tension of ideas there is really powerful but in general i think you you got a beautiful voice so thank you thank you so much for talking today thank you for being a friend thank you for honoring me with this conversation with your valuable time thanks liv thank you thanks for listening to this conversation with little berry to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from richard fineman 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 you