← 全部單集 Lex Fridman 播客全訪談
第 314 期·中文精讀

麗芙·博裡：撲克、博弈論、AI、模擬假說、外星人與生存風險

Liv Boeree: Poker, Game Theory, AI, Simulation, Aliens & Existential Risk

撲克冠軍兼科學傳播者用博弈論審視 AI 競賽、模擬假說與文明存續風險，以及理性決策的訓練方法。

麗芙·博裡··存檔文稿·精讀約 1.9 萬字 · 閱讀 42 分鐘
官方音訊00:00 / --:--
中文精讀由 AI 基於原始訪談改寫，非官方翻譯，可能存在偏差或錯誤；表述以原音訊與官方文稿為準。說明

職業撲克選手坐進比賽，第一天，腦子裡有個聲音說"你會贏下這場錦標賽"。六天後，她從1200人裡贏了出來。這件事怎麼解釋？

麗芙·博裡（Liv Boeree）講過很多次。2010年，冰島火山爆發導致大西洋空域關閉，她被滯留在法國南部，臨時改道去義大利打了一場5000歐元買入的比賽。那是當時歐洲歷史上規模最大的一場撲克錦標賽。開賽前燈光調暗，放的是Chemical Brothers的《Hey Boy, Hey Girl》，她坐在那裡，突然聽到一個像自己聲音的聲音說：你會贏下這場比賽。她起了雞皮疙瘩，環顧四周，當然沒人在看她。

六天後她贏了。

她自己也說，可能每次比賽前都有這種直覺，只是贏了之後才回溯性地記住了它；也可能那個念頭給了她真實的信心，讓她在第一天輸掉一半籌碼後還能穩住。她拒絕給它套一個框架。

運氣、樣本量與"更少被剝削"

博裡對運氣的回答非常直接：你玩得越久，運氣的影響越小。

如果兩個人現在坐下來打十手牌，強者可能只贏52%到53%。如果打一萬手，勝率會變成98%、99%以上。差距全部來自樣本量。短期裡隨機性主導結果，長期裡決策質量主導結果。

這也是撲克能成為職業的原因。國際象棋裡幾乎沒有運氣，所以沒人能靠偶爾贏高手吃飯，也就沒有繁榮的灰色產業鏈。撲克恰恰因為有隨機性，弱手才有機會贏，才願意繼續坐下來送錢。運氣在這個生態裡扮演的是必要條件。

"做更好的決策"是什麼意思？博裡的解釋是，撲克本質上是數學遊戲，存在博弈論最優策略（game theory optimal，GTO）。你越接近這套策略，你就越難被針對。GTO追求的東西是損失最小化。它保證你不被剝削，保證不了你賺到最多。

這裡有個容易被誤解的地方。如果雙方都打GTO，誰都無法透過偏離獲得好處，這就是納什均衡。可一旦你發現對手扔石頭扔得太多，繼續打GTO就等於白白放過利潤，你該多扔布。所以能力分兩層：第一層是自己不被剝削，第二層是識別對手何時犯錯，然後偏離GTO去剝削他。

現代頂級職業選手的做法是：賽前賽後大量時間跑軟體，做蒙特卡洛模擬，輸入一個虛構牌局，比如"K-10-4兩張黑桃的面上，我拿著J9同花，面對這個下注尺度該怎麼辦"，讓程式跑幾十億手虛構對局，收斂出GTO策略，然後背下來。背的是頻率：什麼型別的牌該在多大比例上詐唬。

博裡說得很清楚，今天你想在超高額賽事裡生存，不懂這套東西會被吃幹抹淨。但短期內你仍然可能靠運氣贏，這正是撲克的殘酷和迷人之處。

從石頭剪刀布到Moloch

博弈論的定義很簡單：研究競爭情境下的決策。它通常呈現為一堆收益矩陣，核心就是不同競爭結構下的策略研究。

石頭剪刀布是最好的入門例子。你對對手一無所知，最優策略是隨機化，各三分之一。這樣你不可被剝削。打了幾輪之後你發現對方出石頭偏多，繼續隨機化就等於放棄優勢，你該多出布。

博裡把這套框架一路推到社會層面，核心概念是Moloch。

Moloch最早是古代迦南地區的一個神祇，傳說中信徒用活人獻祭換取戰爭勝利。1927年的電影《大都會》把它具象化：一座光鮮的未來城市，地下是靠不斷吞噬工人運轉的機器，主角在幻覺中看到這臺機器就是Moloch。艾倫·金斯堡在《嚎叫》裡用這個詞批判某種吞噬人的機制。把它真正引入博弈論語境的，是斯科特·亞歷山大（Scott Alexander）那篇《Meditations on Moloch》。

博裡的定義是：Moloch是"不健康競爭之神"，也叫多極陷阱（multipolar trap）。

它的結構很清楚：一群人各自追求短期最優，每個人都知道如果大家都不做某件爛事會更好，但做這件爛事能帶來短期優勢，於是所有人都做，最後所有人處境都比起點更差。

足球場的比喻很貼切。所有人坐著都能看到比賽，前排一個人站起來能看得更清楚，於是後排也必須站起來，最後所有人都站著，視野和原來一模一樣，可誰也沒法坐下了。系統需要上帝視角的協調才能回到更好的狀態，系統內部的個體無法自發完成這個協調。

博裡自己就掉進去過。她曾經認真經營Instagram，發現美顏濾鏡效果好得離譜，她也知道別人在用。短期激勵推動她使用，長期結果是所有人都在用，所有人的自我認知都被扭曲。她後來放棄了這個方向。

憤怒是注意力經濟裡效率最高的燃料

社交媒體是Moloch最理想的培養皿。

原因不復雜。平臺收入來自廣告曝光，曝光來自使用者停留時間和重新整理頻率，演算法最佳化的目標是參與度（engagement）。人類共有的幾種基本情緒裡，憤怒是效率最高的參與度燃料。恐懼和厭惡會讓人迴避，讓人想"我不想碰這個東西"。憤怒啟用的是部落本能，讓人轉發、評論、開戰。

博裡寫過一句話：對抗機器的問題在於，機器已經學會靠憤怒為生。你越憤怒，它運轉得越好。

這套機制還會外溢。記者在Twitter上，Twitter上最極端的聲音被放大，記者從中取材，寫成報道，傳給幾百萬不在Twitter上的人。一個很小的、被演算法篩選出的憤怒池子，最後塑造了整個社會的議題結構。

那有沒有解？她提了一個具體的結構性方案：訂閱制。

現在平臺的收入取決於曝光次數，它必須讓你不斷回來，必須設計出成癮機制。改成訂閱制之後，使用者一個月來一次還是五百次，平臺拿到的錢一樣，最大化成癮性的那個激勵就消失了。這會降低資訊傳播速度。傳播速度慢下來恰恰是好事，因為病毒式傳播在當前結構下就是被Moloch驅動的。

她對"所有病毒式傳播都是壞的"這個判斷保留了餘地。她認為大多數人在核心上是善的，只是被困在糟糕設計的系統裡，所以理論上可以設計出放大正面內容的機制。她建議應該有一門學科，專門研究那些大多數人都認同是正向的、能讓人聚在一起的模因，分析它們那天為什麼傳播開，提煉成分。她那套反向Moloch思路的具體落點就在這裡。

Winwin：給Moloch造一個對手

博裡花了大約一年半做這個系列。第一支影片講Moloch是什麼，第二支在籌備中，最終目標是提出解藥。

她的出發點是：如果Moloch是存在性風險的生成函式（這個詞來自丹尼爾·施馬赫滕伯格，Daniel Schmachtenberger），那它的反面是什麼？

她造了一個角色，叫Winwin。正式場合的名字是Omnia。

Moloch是紅與黑，單目標，必須贏。Winwin是紫色和青綠色，也愛遊戲，也愛健康的競爭，但知道要給零和競爭劃邊界，把外部性控制在正向區間。它也愛合作、協調、愛本身。它有點調皮，會玩，跟無聊的正經神明劃得很開，核心訴求只有一個：讓遊戲繼續下去。

這個設定的關鍵在劃邊界。博裡說，Moloch今天這麼強，根本原因是我們沒能給競爭劃出圍欄。競爭本身是中性的，零和的區域性遊戲甚至有價值，問題在於它溢位到了不該去的地方。

她猜（並承認這屬於形而上的猜測），一個同時包含大量合作和少量競爭口袋的宇宙，會比純競爭或純合作的宇宙更有趣。她不確定，也說這不屬於她有資格下結論的問題。

美是無法被壓縮成指標的東西

話題轉到陀思妥耶夫斯基那句話：美將拯救世界。那美到底是什麼？

博裡的定義很有意思：當一個東西無法被還原成簡單指標時，它就是美的。

一棵古老的樹為什麼美？果實的甜度或者木材的價值解釋不了。是它的整體性，是那些不可測量的性質，是它在秩序與混沌之間那條細線上行走的方式。它有大量模式，又不完全可預測。它屬於複雜系統那一類，跟複雜機械完全不同。複雜機械可以拆開、理解、裝回去；複雜系統拆開就裝不回去了，整體遠大於部分之和。

這個定義直接指向了社交媒體的根本問題。平臺在做的事情，是把人類經驗壓縮成數字形式，然後商品化。她最近和一家社媒機構聊，對方給的建議是：你要搞清楚你的東西是什麼，縮小範圍，形成公式，因為人們想要可預測的東西。她認為這是複雜性削減，而複雜性削減在大多數情況下是壞事。

但這裡有個張力她自己也沒解決。愛因斯坦式的簡化，把一個極複雜的想法壓縮成仍然保留核心力量的表達，本身也是美的。所以也許社媒可以做到：一條推文，幾個字，揭示一個人的某個真實側面。問題在於病毒機器把這條推文抽離了語境。沒人會去讀這個人的歷史推文、教育背景、幽默方式、他在玩什麼世界觀，所有人只看到那幾個字。

用機率談戀愛

博裡和伊戈爾（Igor）在一起大約一年時，有一次很重的對話，關於要不要賣掉她的公寓、要不要一起買房。聊著聊著，伊戈爾問：我們三年後還在一起的機率是多少？

他提議：先別說出答案，兩個人各自把預測寫下來。他們當時剛開始接觸有效利他主義和理性主義社群，習慣用形式化預測來測量自己的預見能力。於是他們各自寫了1年、3年、10年三個時間點的百分比，然後互相展示。

博裡描述了自己當時的心理過程。10年那個數字，她想：我很愛他，但十年很長，我們才在一起一年，我覺得超過50%，肯定不到90%。然後她意識到自己在糾結：不想給出比對方低的數字，不想讓對方受傷。她提醒自己，這次練習要徹底誠實，別玩花樣。她寫的大概是75%。結果兩人相當接近。

她承認，如果伊戈爾持續給得比她低，她會很不安。反過來如果她給得更低，以他的性格大概會像水過鴨背，覺得行，那我們再想辦法。

Lex在這裡提出了反對意見。他說自己會更傾向於把機率想成接近100%，因為這種信念本身有心理後果，會創造額外的樂觀，是一種fake it till you make it的自我實現。這就是"有用的虛構"（useful fiction）。

博裡同意這沒有標準答案，很主觀。她強調他們做這個練習時是半開玩笑的，不會真的改變決定，但那個瞬間的反思有價值：她得以檢查自己的預測裡混入了多少自己的願望。而且這件事拉近了他們的關係，兩個愛數字、愛統計、都是撲克選手的人在這裡有自己的安全空間。她也明確說，如果伴侶中的一方完全不喜歡這類東西，這個練習不適合。

Lex的反駁更細一層：如果要做這種預測，他想要資料。關係破裂或繁榮的時間序列資料，不同人生事件（失業、搬家、一方有工作一方沒有）如何衝擊關係，過去的我在多大程度上能預測未來的我。他說自己會帶很寬的誤差棒，會被自己的先驗經驗過度影響。

博裡的回應是：只要你知道這一點，對自己誠實，對對方誠實，明說"我誤差棒很寬，原因如下"，那仍然比完全不去量化要好，尤其是面對那些一生只做幾次的重大不可逆決策。

她的直覺判斷是，人們對用定量成本收益分析處理人生難題有過度偏見。人說跟著直覺走，但直覺只在你做過成百上千次的事情上可靠。結婚、買房這種決定，你一生可能只做一兩次，直覺沒有資料支撐。

烏克蘭：區域性反向Moloch，全域性仍是Moloch

Lex剛從烏克蘭回來，談到了那裡計程車氣。他問過幾乎每一個士兵烏克蘭獲勝的機率是多少，幾乎所有人都說100%。專家給出的數字完全不是這樣。

他觀察到的現象是：烏克蘭計程車氣比他讀過的幾乎所有戰爭都高，不只是士兵，是整個國家。他的解釋是，這個國家獨立三十年，一直沒有經歷過真正意義上的獨立戰爭，始終被不同勢力撕扯，美國、俄羅斯、北約、歐洲，各方都在告訴他們該怎麼做。現在他們第一次要回答"我們是誰"這個問題。

再加上歷史因素。有些民族在歷史上就是不好佔領的，波蘭是這樣，烏克蘭也是這樣。斯大林和希特勒都抱怨過長時間佔領這些地方是個大麻煩。

還有一個具體事件：澤連斯基在首都被圍攻時拒絕撤離。美國建議他離開，從遠方領導國家。他說不。這個單一行為統一了一個國家，儘管他在戰前非常不受歡迎，烏克蘭內部對他有很多批評。

博裡把這個現象放進自己的框架裡：區域性的反向Moloch，共同敵人讓一個群體高度協調。她也立刻補充：視角拉遠，這件事可能是壞的。如果這最終演變成核戰爭，那這個團結就是災難鏈條的一環。

Lex的延伸更宏觀：這場戰爭可能是21世紀世界大戰的彩排。人類文明如何打這一局，將決定我們會不會真的有第三次世界大戰。他提出一個必須小心處理的點：當你支援烏克蘭時，你也在間接餵養軍工複合體。你必須清楚自己是在支援人，還是在支援那臺製造敘事、聲稱自己支援人的機器。真正的敵人是戰爭本身。

Deep Vision：把大規模殺傷性武器的圖紙發到網上

問到最擔心的存在性風險，博裡的答案落在生物風險上。她認為這個領域最有可能真正推動指標，阻止某些愚蠢且可避免的災難發生。

自然溢位的病原體是一類，合成病原體是另一類。隨著技術民主化，合成病原體的門檻在快速降低。她指出，COVID無論源自實驗室洩漏還是自然起源，都已經是一次演習，這次演習的致死率相對未來可能的場景只是小兒科。

然後她丟擲了那個讓她憤怒的具體專案：Deep Vision。

這個提案的內容是：深入人跡罕至的洞穴、北極圈，全地球搜尋最危險的病原體，取樣帶回實驗室。她插了一句，人類歷史上實驗室洩漏事件多得像喜劇節目，即便是最高安全等級的實驗室。第二步，對這些病原體做實驗、分類、評估潛力。第三步，也就是皇冠上的明珠：把所有資訊，包括基因組，也就是製造說明，公開在網際網路上。

她的成本收益計算是這樣的：支持者的論據是這能爭取時間研發疫苗。mRNA技術已經可以在發現新病原體後幾天內設計出疫苗，後面的臨床試驗無論如何都要做，實際節省的可能只有幾天。代價是把製造大規模殺傷性武器的圖紙交給地球上每一個惡意行為者。朝鮮、ISIS，那些認為世界是敵人、甚至認為自我毀滅是崇高事業的人。

她還指出一層被忽略的風險：即使對方造不出來，他們現在有了可信的虛張聲勢。朝鮮可以說，不讓我發展核武器，我就釋放這個。這等於把籌碼直接遞到對方手裡。

她算的期望值：如果這個計劃真的成功，期望損失是幾十億人的量級，至少也是幾億到幾十億。成本收益完全不成比例。

那為什麼會有人支援？她的診斷落在天真上。一部分科學共同體真誠地相信所有人都在追求知識、都在為世界做好事。她說自己希望活在那樣一個世界裡，我們顯然不住在那兒。

Lex的補充更狠：科學的遊戲本身很迷人，開會、發表、被別人引用、被同行驚歎、然後有人證明你錯了，這個小遊戲讓人沉浸，讓人忘記它和Moloch一樣會產生毀滅文明的外部性。而科學史上，它被獨裁者利用來論證任何結論，這件事發生得太容易了。

口罩那個"善意的謊言"與信任的崩塌

博裡認為COVID最嚴重的破壞落在公共機構的信任上，病毒生物學層面的賬要往後排。

她舉的例子是疫情早期的口罩建議。當時口罩確實短缺，醫護人員急需，於是公共衛生官員對公眾說：不要戴口罩，沒有證據表明有效，戴不好反而更容易感染。她說後半句是徹頭徹尾的胡說，動機很清楚，也很可理解。代價是，當這件事被看穿，公眾會記住"專家對我們撒了謊"。

撒謊之外還有把人當小孩的態度。她說公眾沒有他們以為的那麼蠢，被當成孩子對待是會被察覺的，這會摧毀我們對公共機構的信任。當下一次真正更嚴重的疫情來臨時，世界已經喊過狼來了，人們會說去他的口罩，去他的疫苗，去他的一切。

她提出了一個具體建議：如果福奇這樣的領導者能站出來說，各位，我們這件事沒處理好，這些是我事後會做得不一樣的地方，這幾件事我道歉，這會走得很遠。徹底透明，徹底誠實，重建信任只剩這條路。

Lex補充了挑堅果（nut picking）這個機制。社交媒體會把某一群體裡最瘋狂的個例挑出來放大，而決策者看到的也是同樣的資訊流。所以他們對公眾智識水平的判斷本身就被扭曲了。動機上找不到惡意，問題出在媒介素養。在社交媒體上生存的一項核心技能，是在腦子裡給看到的東西做正確的語境還原，知道它跟人類的準確樣本差得很遠。

AI：速度與安全的競賽，以及智慧與智慧的正交性

博裡對AGI的態度是矛盾的。有些早晨她興奮：我們可以解開宇宙的謎題，可以逃出遊戲。她花了大量時間思考Moloch這類問題，而在某種意義上，一個全能仁慈、全知全智的協調機制，正是最強的"必須造出AGI"的論據，因為也許我們沒法靠自己活下來。

另一面是競速動態。十年前只有DeepMind，現在多家公司並跑，形成了軍備競賽。誰最願意用安全換速度，誰就獲得競爭優勢，誰就更可能先造出來。Moloch在AI領域的標準形態。

她承認這沒有乾淨的解法。你去阻止所有公司，西方的守規矩者停下了，其他繼續，反而更糟。

她提到博斯特羅姆（Nick Bostrom）的正交論題：超級智慧和超級智慧不必然相關，它們是正交的兩個維度。一個系統可以極其擅長達成目標，同時完全沒有能力選擇正確的目標。問題是怎麼保證兩者相關，而且是可保證的相關。

她的希望是這個過程足夠慢，慢到人類能在每一代系統變得更聰明的同時，持續辯論、持續修改。買時間是對的。所有人都該冷靜一點，我們有幾千年。

Lex對此表示懷疑，理由是：人類歷史上一直有人預言末日就在眼前，這裡面有一種奇怪的吸引力。他自己分析，這和陰謀論的快感同源，成為那個看穿了文明命運的人，意味著我很重要。而現實是，即使核戰爭殺死很大比例的人口、核冬天折磨倖存者多年，生命仍然會繼續。生命會找到出路。

博裡的平衡點是：一方面要避免自我實現的預言，另一方面，過去十幾年軌跡確實在惡化，讓更多人思考這些問題是應該的。而在這種地方，"信念"是有價值的，她並不在自欺，她真的覺得有什麼東西希望我們贏。

能量療愈、Burning Man與認識論的謙遜

博裡講了第二件她無法解釋的事。

2018年，她的耳朵開始出現低頻聲音失真，尤其是男聲，聽起來極其不適，幾乎是一種物理性的難受。發作幾小時後消失，然後反覆。聽力測試顯示那隻耳朵的低頻聽力在下降。有醫生告訴她可能是梅尼埃病（Meniere's disease），一種會導致聽力喪失並常伴隨眩暈的內耳疾病。

這個症狀持續了三個月，把她拖得很低落。然後她去了Burning Man。她插了一句，我不想成為那種談Burning Man的人，但我當時在那兒。她無法聽音樂，而Burning Man是一個很吵的地方，她過得很糟。

最後一晚，她和一個朋友的朋友聊天，提到自己的困擾。對方說自己做過一點能量療愈，要不要看看。她當時的立場是：這些都是胡說八道，我完全不信。她還是說了行，試試。

對方用手在她耳邊探查，說這裡有東西，然後湊近她的耳朵開始吸，沒有接觸，只是靠近。她說那個感覺極其難受，她要求停止，對方說不行，有東西，我得弄出來。持續了幾分鐘，然後對方癱倒在地，渾身發冷，哭了起來。博裡徹底被嚇到了，周圍的人也一樣。她們把對方暖過來，對方說不知道那是什麼，是很不愉快、很黑暗的東西，別擔心，已經走了，你的身體症狀會有兩週左右，然後就沒事了。

兩週後她的耳朵問題消失了，至今沒再復發。

她強調自己無法給出本體論解釋。最可能的解釋是：她在Burning Man，處於非常開放的狀態，安慰劑效應極其強大且機制不明。她也提醒，不要因此認為梅尼埃病患者都能用這種方式治好，她甚至不確定自己當時得的是不是這個病。

但她說，用"安慰劑"這個詞本身就帶著一種不該有的貶低。也許關於安慰劑有一整門科學，安慰劑是一扇門。這件事真正的收穫是讓她對自己的認知變得謙遜。五年前她是堅定的無神論者，在理查德·道金斯那條線上，認為一切超自然的東西都是胡扯，醫學就是分子和化學反應。現在她說：顯然還有我們沒理解的東西。這不代表它反科學，科學方法仍然可以用於這些現象，只是我們還沒找到怎麼設計實驗。

Lex的總結是：科學方法本身就建立在這類經驗之上。它是一個從包圍我們的神秘中一點點剝出答案的過程，而這類經歷只是提醒我們，我們仍然大部分處在神秘之中。

文明的數目：一個被點估計毀掉的問題

博裡大學讀的是天體物理。她從小對星空著迷，母親是最好的解釋。她用"大地母親"形容母親，動物會圍著她看，她沒上過大學，對數學有恐懼症（博裡教她打撲克，她很討厭），但好奇心極深。英國一年只有兩三個晚上夠暖，母女倆會躺在外面看星星找衛星和流星，直到睡著。

關於外星文明，她提到了託比·奧德（Toby Ord）團隊的工作。

德雷克方程（Drake equation）把銀河系內可能的文明數量拆成一串因子相乘：每年誕生的恆星數、有行星的恆星比例、宜居行星比例，等等。傳統做法是給每個因子填一個點估計，然後乘出結果。

奧德團隊指出的問題在統計上：某些因子的不確定性跨越幾百個數量級，用點估計代入必然導致系統性高估。他們改成對數尺度，在整個不確定性區間上跑模擬，再做貝葉斯更新，把"我們沒有探測到任何訊號"這一事實作為證據納入，因為缺乏證據本身也是一種證據。

結果是她說的：我們約有70%的機率是銀河系中唯一的智慧文明，在整個可觀測宇宙中大約是五五開。聽起來極其反直覺，數學是站得住的。

Lex對德雷克方程的評價更謹慎：這個方程本身在很多層面上是荒謬的，它的價值在於把問題拆成可估算的分量，而每個分量的誤差棒都能隨著科學進步收窄。它給了一個任務清單：去把那幾個數字測準。更根本的路徑是從第一性原理出發，問一個物理和化學問題：生命這個東西到底是什麼，從一塊石頭到能自我複製、編碼資訊、變異、選擇、構建更複雜系統的細菌，這一步有多難？

博裡把它歸結為資訊處理：輸入能量，從環境中提取資源，實現一個目標。目標是什麼並不清楚。Lex說目標是複製自身，以最大化生存機率的方式。博裡糾正：單個代理人會這樣，演化本身不在乎。

她引用了尤德科夫斯基（Eliezer Yudkowsky）那篇《外星上帝》（Alien God），講的是我們把演化擬人化、給它賦予意圖的錯誤。

Lex在這裡提出了一個反向意見。他說自己與很多聰明人交流過，對方都把擬人化當成錯誤，可"把擬人化當成錯誤"這個判斷本身可能才是錯誤。機器人領域的人躲這個詞躲得太快了。一個要在有人的工廠裡幹活的機器人，必須承認它的行為會影響人，人的行為也會影響它，兩者之間有一種舞蹈。人看到一個有物理形態的機器人，會觸發關於寵物的記憶、恐懼、投射，這些反應在安全攸關的場景裡必須被建模。我們的大腦天生就是為以人的方式思考而設計的，博弈論最好也用在人的決策空間裡。

博裡同意在特定情境下擬人化不會傷害你，工程師確實躲得太快。但她堅持謹慎的理由：AI執行在完全不同的基質上，它沒有經歷我們經歷過的演化壓力，沒有爭奪資源、尋找配偶的歷史。它可能是從雲伺服器上憑空出現的東西。把它當成和我們相似的存在來推演，必須極其小心。

撲克最後剩下的藝術，與"破解了模擬"的Hellmuth

話題轉回撲克。Lex問，丹尼爾·內格朗努（Daniel Negreanu）這類靠讀人吃飯的選手，在GTO時代還活得下去嗎。

博裡的回答建立在兩套決策系統上。頭腦裡那個邏輯的、線性的聲音常被稱為系統二，直覺反應是系統一。歷史上最好的撲克選手幾乎全靠直覺打球，你問他為什麼這麼打，他答不上來。原因倒也簡單：當時沒人擁有描述最優策略的語言，沒人真正理解撲克是怎麼運作的。有人會把牌局記在小本子上，可沒有工具去彙總和分析。

電腦變便宜、軟體出現、線上撲克自動儲存牌局歷史之後，人們第一次有了可以分析的資料體，數學解才浮現出來，直覺的角色隨之縮小。但GTO只保證不被剝削，收益最大化的部分仍然要靠偏離。沒有人類能完美執行GTO，最好的AI也只到99.99%，像光速一樣只能逼近。所以當你想剝削對手的錯誤時，問題來了：數學說該跟注，你的直覺卻說這次他有貨。聽不聽直覺，怎麼量化直覺的強度，能不能量化，這是撲克裡最後剩下的藝術。

內格朗努的直覺有紮實的來源。他線上下看過太多人，看過籌碼壓上時人的眼神，他自己話多，一直在試探，能拿到別人拿不到的資訊層。他線上也打得好，但要在頂級線上現金局持續贏錢，大概不行。面對面時，他既能提取那層資訊，又知道怎麼用。

真正讓博裡著迷的例外是菲爾·赫爾穆特（Phil Hellmuth）。她先宣告，我愛菲爾，這些話當著他的面也會說。他現在有16條世界撲克大賽（WSOP）金手鍊，第二名大概是10條。他年復一年地在兩三千人的大型賽事裡走得很深或者奪冠，從統計上他不該做到這個。而他做出的某些打法在數學上離GTO極遠。把他扔進滿是GTO選手的高額現金局，他會被撕碎。

我見過他打牌時，長線機率沒出現，他顯得很惱火。就好像其他人都是蠢的，因為他本來明明要用那張廢牌贏的，如果沒有那件蠢事發生的話。你會想，你不明白，那件蠢事99%的時候都會發生，是1%不是反過來。可在WSOP的親身經驗裡，對他來說就是反過來。
（麗芙·博裡）

博裡的私人理論是，他像個巫師，他讓牌按他需要的方式發出來。他預期自己會贏，預期自己翻牌成三條的頻率遠超真實機率。她甚至懷疑他根本不知道真實的機率是多少，他不需要知道，他就是能到那兒。撲克圈多年來試圖拆他的臺，說他不行，可他一直在贏。要麼是他真的掌握了什麼，要麼是他學會了擾動那副隨機洗過的牌。Lex補了一句：如果他的方法有效，也許撲克比我們當前建模的樣子更復雜，也許存在額外的一層。

詐唬：一場生理層面的戰爭

博裡講了她職業生涯的高光時刻之一。蒙特卡洛，一場25000歐元買入的高額賽，她是打衛星賽進來的，那是她第一次站上這個級別，桌上全是內格朗努、菲爾·艾維（Phil Ivey）這樣的大人物。

那手牌她打的是半詐唬：手裡兩張梅花，翻牌又來了兩張梅花，她在等轉牌或河牌再出現一張湊成同花。大多數時候那張牌不會來，所以她更希望對手直接棄牌。下注一輪輪升級，最後她在河牌全下，等於把整場錦標賽押了上去。

理論上她該算的東西很多：哪些牌會讓她的手牌看起來更強，哪些牌落在對手認為她的範圍裡，下注多少能最大化棄牌率。現實是，緊張超過某個閾值，邏輯腦直接關閉，剩下的是一場意志的較量，你能不能守住。

到河牌的時候，我已經不知道這還算不算一個好的詐唬了，但我心想，去他的，幹吧。
（麗芙·博裡）

艾維盯著她，她形容那雙眼睛像鐳射，在搜刮她的靈魂。她告訴自己撐住。然後艾維棄牌了。她當時的手牌大機率更弱，那次詐唬成了她職業生涯最深的記憶之一。

她沒有亮牌。牌桌上永遠別亮牌，尤其她自認為是那張桌上最弱的選手之一，任何送出去的資訊都會進入強手的資料庫被好好利用。維持"第一次打高額賽的緊張女孩"這個印象，價值大得多。

她把這個狀態叫白噪音。它出現在所有高壓決策裡，比如面試一份夢寐以求的工作，被橋水式地追問數學難題。壓制戰或逃反應是一項可以訓練的技能，把身體從交感神經切換到副交感神經，那個緩慢的邏輯聲音才有機會工作。

進化給了我們一套為獅子準備的系統。獅子撲過來的時候，你沒時間計算它的動能、判斷往左還是往右更優，你直接反應，身體在物理層面被調校得很好。撲克從來不在演化的清單上，可你處在同樣的戰或逃狀態裡。所以你得學會在當下冥想，讓自己冷靜下來，才能想清楚。

Lex在這裡說了一句他自己剛意識到的話：詐唬是一種極高強度的撒謊。在遊戲語境裡它不帶負面含義，但你確實在呈現你不擁有的東西。生活裡我們很少有機會在這麼高的賭注下撒謊。他舉的例子是希特勒對斯大林。兩人假裝友好，希特勒同時在邊境集結軍隊，直到巴巴羅薩行動的納粹大軍越境入侵蘇聯，斯大林都確信希特勒不至於瘋到這一步。地緣政治上兩人做合作者完全說得通，意識形態上雖然共產主義和法西斯主義有張力，可他們理論上有共同的敵人：西方。所以基輔被圍時，整個蘇聯都震驚了。Lex說自己去烏克蘭時還能聽到那種震驚的回聲。

博裡把它拉回日常：配偶出軌然後撒謊說昨晚在哪，或者維持兩個互不知情的家庭。真相總會找到出路，也許這正是刺激所在。

然後她給出一個反差明顯的觀察：她認識的撲克選手，絕大多數非常誠實，比隨機人群更誠實。原因有兩個。第一，人需要一個邊緣的出口，撲克桌提供了合法的、雙方都知道規則、被允許的競技場，在那兒把那點"壞"釋放乾淨。第二，撲克選手會在牌桌上對朋友甚至伴侶毫不留情，想盡辦法激怒對方、掏空對方籌碼，可牌局一結束，贏家和輸家會一起去喝一杯，像學術討論一樣覆盤。遊戲的價值就在這裡：它給競爭衝動一個被圍欄圈住的空間。

輸是什麼感覺

博裡說她從沒在人生意義上破產過，但伊戈爾早年破產過一次，她算是間接經歷。Lex接了一句：沒破過產，某種意義上就沒真正活過。

輸的感覺取決於很多變數：輸掉的錢佔淨資產的多少，你的腦化學，因人而異。這也是撲克訓練出來的東西：你開始用百分比看一切，用ROI、期望時薪、成本收益看一切。博裡做的一件事是校準自己的情緒反應強度，讓它匹配現實。對一個小損失有巨大的情緒反應沒有用；反過來，贏了一大筆卻內心毫無波瀾，那是遺憾。情緒應該儘量校準到與現實一致。

她承認自己年輕時近乎病態地好勝，什麼都要贏，二十出頭尤其嚴重，後來慢慢淡了。她做過踢牆、捶牆的事，有一次差點把手弄斷。現在她仍然在乎贏，只是不再把世界看成零和。年紀大一點、看得清楚一點，就開始意識到外部性：如果一次失敗讓她難受一整天、然後還自責，那是她自己製造的負外部性，得想辦法調小。

對話一度岔到《Battle of Polytopia》這款文明類小遊戲上。Lex正沉迷於打機器人難度，博裡說想加入他們的對局，得先穩定贏下15個瘋狂機器人的九成對局，她保證一天就能教會。Lex說自己連困難難度都享受不了，那種模式逼你時刻爭勝，沒法享受建設一個小世界的過程。這個插曲順帶照出了兩種玩家：一種在競爭裡找樂趣，一種在創造裡找樂趣。

博裡最黑暗的時期跟輸錢關係不大，跟想退出的衝動有關。她想成為冠軍最多的女選手，這本身是個糟糕的目標。她想贏WPT，贏了這個還想要那個。一個二十出頭、沒什麼智慧的自己隨手定下的指標，帶著她跑得太久，久到超過了熱情存續的時間。

2016到2018那段時間，我停止愛這個遊戲了，只是在走過場。我能感覺到生命在流逝，我會想，這就是我墓碑上的字嗎？她在一個零和遊戲裡，比對手稍微最佳化了一點點地玩完了？那真是偉大的遺產。
（麗芙·博裡）

Lex接著講奧運冠軍在奪冠之後的抑鬱。多巴胺崩塌，因為你是在跟那個自己告別，跟那些你以為會給生命賦予意義的夢想告別。人生沒有到達的那一刻，沒有持續的極樂，你得不斷重新發現自己。

博裡的座右銘是：總有一個更大的遊戲。下一個遊戲是什麼？她給這個座右銘補了後半句：下一個遊戲，最好是一個全贏（Omni win）的遊戲。原因很硬：如果所有人都困在零和遊戲裡，文明輕則停滯，更大機率是自我滅絕。競技場是有限的。核大國在打一場撲克，籌碼是核武器，賭注已經大到任何人下一次注，牌桌就碎了。她為此專門做過一期影片，講的就是這件事：競技場是有限的。

相互保證毀滅：山頂上頂著一個球

Lex問她怎麼看待相互保證毀滅（Mutually Assured Destruction）這套簡單到近乎漫畫的博弈論設計。它似乎一直是人類沒被核武器炸回石器時代的核心原因，它還能撐過21世紀嗎？

博裡承認它確實有效，它就是一個納什均衡。Lex追問，驚不驚訝它居然撐了這麼久。她的答案是：確實該驚訝。把歷史上那些差點擦槍走火的意外算進去，這個均衡撐到今天近乎奇蹟。

她列舉了近失事件。挪威上空的一次月出，在冰川和山體上形成奇怪反射，觸發了北美防空司令部的雷達警報，差點讓一方進入準備發射的狀態。只因為當時俄軍高層恰好人在紐約的聯合國總部，才有人多問了一句：他們的人還在我們這兒，為什麼要現在動手？一次僥倖，避免了升級。這類事件她數出來至少有十一二次。

還有斯坦尼斯拉夫·彼得羅夫（Stanislav Petrov）。她的評價是，這個人按理應該是地球上最有名的人，因為按期望值算，他拯救的人命可能是史上最多的，幾十億這個量級。導彈預警系統報告來襲，他違抗命令沒有上報發射，因為直覺判斷這是誤報。事後證明他對了。

這麼多僥倖堆在一起，她忍不住想到一個概念：觀察者選擇效應。她借量子自殺思想實驗來解釋：假設每次量子事件都分裂宇宙，你永遠只會發現自己活在槍沒響的那條分支上，於是在你的經驗裡，你似乎永生。尼克·博斯特羅姆（Nick Bostrom）寫過很多關於觀察者選擇效應的東西，她推薦人去讀

不過她也提醒，這套邏輯很容易被過度推廣。她自己說不清具體會在哪裡出問題，只是覺得可以把這套推理過度泛化。Lex替她補上了那個危險的去向：唯我論（solipsism）。如果每個人都得出“我只會活在活下來的那條分支裡”的結論，等價於宣佈“反正我死不了”。一個集體這樣想的世界，會迅速變成自我毀滅的世界。

她真正想強調的落點仍在核武器上。每一次近失事件真正升級成核戰的機率有多大，沒人知道，也許並不高，但要點擺在那裡：我們在玩一個黑暗而愚蠢的遊戲。核威懾這個納什均衡，畫成地形圖根本不在坑底。穩定的均衡應該像一顆躺在盆地底部的球，而人類現在的位置，是山頂上頂著一顆球，任何一點輕推都會讓它滾下去，然後是核戰爭和地獄之火。讓儘可能多的人去思考怎麼把這顆球挪到更穩的位置，在她看來是絕對的道德命令。

Lex補了一個偏樂觀的視角：即便最壞的情況發生，地球上的生命大機率也會延續，幾千年後也許會演化出另一個智慧文明。博裡同意，但要看你選的是哪種存在性風險。核戰爭在清單上屬於“沒那麼壞”的一檔，生命扛得過去。合成生物學造出的綠膠（green goo）是另一檔，它會摧毀所有有機物，本質上是生物版的回形針最大化器。AI導致的大滅絕同樣在這一檔。Lex開了個玩笑：小聲點，它們在聽，你背後就有個機器人。

模擬、上帝，與“有什麼東西希望我們贏”

Lex把問題拋得更遠：我們活在模擬裡嗎？活在某個存在為了娛樂而觀察的影片遊戲裡？

博裡的回答從她自己的認知軌跡講起。五年前她是堅定的無神論者，站在理查德·道金斯那條線上，深度參與理性主義社群，《Less Wrong》至今仍是她心中極好的資源。但她陸續經歷了太多塞不進純唯物主義解釋的小片段，開場那個聲音和那次能量療愈都在此列。她開始懷疑，經典理性主義那張“地圖必須精確匹配領土”的要求，可能漏掉了什麼。

前面聊感情預測時出現過的“有用的虛構”（useful fiction），在這裡展開了完整版本。理性主義者要求你腦中的世界影象儘可能逼近真實世界，她不再完全訂閱這個立場，因為過度自信本身有價值。一個從少年時代就隱約相信自己天賦異稟的人，哪怕這個判斷略微膨脹，正是這份信念給了他追求卓越所需的專注和投入。我們給自己講的故事，哪怕我們懷疑它是假的，也可能有價值。信念本身有價值。這個思路最終把她引向“上帝”這個概念，不管你叫它模擬者還是傳統神學裡的那個詞，她認為大家在指向同一個東西。

至於這個存在的品性，她坦白不知道。基督教的上帝是全善的、無盡的愛；模擬假說裡的那個存在，按Lex的玩笑，可能是臥室裡的青少年，根本不在乎裡面的個體，只是好奇這東西會跑成什麼樣，隨手就能關掉。從精神病態到仁慈的光譜上，它站在哪裡，沒有答案。

但她認為，相信“外面有什麼東西可能在乎我們的結局”，對人來說近乎必需。第一，它創造共同性，是所有人可以共享的東西，也是一種對所有人的謙卑。第二，它在事情變得很暗的時候給人一點儲備。她說未來幾年事情會變得相當暗。她強調自己沒有在自我催眠：我真的認為有什麼東西希望我們贏。稍微對它敞開一點心，它就會給你喘息的空間，讓你有餘裕去想解決方案。方案終究要我們自己拿，但這份信念可以用。

她和C，也就是音樂人格Grimes，把這一切稱作“遊戲”。宇宙可能是一場遊戲，目標是搞清楚怎麼贏、怎麼出去。也許這個宇宙是一個巨大的密室逃脫：把所有碎片拼起來，理解它如何運作，解鎖一把超維度的鑰匙，出去。而這個結構是巢狀的，籠子裡套著籠子，一次解開一層，升一級。成為多行星物種算升級，把意識上傳算升級，人類變得不那麼對抗、不那麼嗜血、更開明，也算升級。

她猜地球的第一關是生物演化，從單細胞到早期人類。第二關發生在心智內部：創造想法、創造技術，觀念的演化。多行星這一關的特殊之處在於它允許指數級擴張，推遲了馬爾薩斯陷阱，讓競技場變大以容納更多我們。這是好事，但它並沒有解決Moloch的問題。

而對抗Moloch的抓手之一，在她看來是模因。人類是文化物種，靠文化而非生物演化來適應環境，模因因此擁有巨大的力量，我們既可能成為壞模因的受害者，也有能力選擇傳播和訂閱哪些模因。馬斯克說過一句話：誰控制了模因，誰就控制了宇宙。她認為這話有智慧。

回形針、湧現與熱寂

對話在這裡拐進一場思想實驗的拉鋸。Lex丟擲一個挑釁的假設：回形針最大化器（paperclip maximizer）把地球整個包住之後，它要最大化產量，就得理解量子力學、廣義相對論，得先搞出一套萬物理論，也許得造出蟲洞。而在製造回形針的過程裡，製造這個動作本身有動態、有舞蹈，會不會湧現出小的複雜性、小的社會？

博裡先糾正定義：回形針就是一截彎過的鐵絲，最大化器追求的是把每一個到手的原子變成鐵或鋼，彎成那個形狀，到此為止。它就是前面正交論題的具象化：能力拉滿，智慧歸零。如果它允許複雜社會在鋼架上生長，那它就不再是回形針最大化器了。

但Lex沒有退。他把類比反過來用：宇宙本身就很像一個回形針最大化器。物理法則相當簡單，目標也簡單得近乎愚蠢，如果非要用目標來描述，熱力學幾條定律差不多就夠了。可偏偏就是從這套笨拙的底層規則裡，湧現出了驚人的複雜性。就像《侏羅紀公園》裡那句臺詞，生命會找到出路。大爆炸之後物質分佈並不均勻，有些地方密一點，那點微小的模式性就足以點燃演化。是那點微小的怪異性讓一切變得美麗。

博裡喜歡這個哲學，同時給出警告：這個信念的誤差棒很大，用的時候要小心。Lex的回答是：那我們就造一個回形針最大化器，看看會發生什麼。博裡說，Moloch在旁邊翻跟頭呢。

Lex還把這個邏輯推到了熱寂：宇宙最終一切遠離、一切變冷、完全混合成均勻的灰色，沒有負熵，沒有自由能。連那種均勻的灰燼裡，湧現還能找到出路嗎？博裡的回應是：如果一條路存在，回形針最大化器或者任何智慧系統都會找到，穿越到別的宇宙，透過黑洞製造新的宇宙，打破我們目前認定的物理極限。而我們應該謙卑地承認，我們並不知道路在哪裡。

如果AI取代人類，她會難過嗎

Lex問了一個直球問題：如果美麗、有意識、複雜、智慧的AI系統最終導致人類消亡，她會難過嗎？

她的回答先暴露了她對風險的排序。她對AI風險的情緒反應，比對生物風險輕。理由是：在AI的場景裡，哪怕它為了某個更高目的需要我們的原子和能量，宇宙至少還在繼續做有意思的事。生物風險則是地球上的東西全死光，然後就沒有然後了，地球剩餘的幾億年裡再也生不出更有意義的東西。

她提到詹姆斯·洛夫洛克（James Lovelock）的《Novacene》，她最愛的書之一。洛夫洛克九十九歲寫下它，活到一百零二歲。他在蓋亞理論的基礎上往下推：地球本身像某種智慧，而矽基智慧接替碳基智慧是下一步。這本書在某種意義上樂觀，在另一種意義上宿命，她不完全認同，但承認它寫得美。

那她到底難不難過？難過。理由值得整段記下來：如果它真的超級智慧又超級智慧，它應該能想出豐饒（abundance）的辦法。宇宙那麼大，有的是空間讓它去做想做的事，給我們留一個小口袋繼續折騰。它甚至不需要擔心“留著人類，人類會造出另一個超級智慧來跟我競爭”這種博弈論問題，因為它應該智慧到不需要操心這個。

除非它判定人類是混蛋。Lex接了一句：也許人類正是Moloch的源頭。博裡不同意這個歸因：Moloch的源頭是博弈論本身。它在非人類的系統裡照樣運轉，一座島上的老鼠種群，瘋狂消耗資源的那批會勝過溫和社交的那批，形成馬爾薩斯陷阱。Moloch在自然界的角落裡到處都是，它不屬於人類。

給17歲的人：找正和的遊戲，別去打職業撲克

Lex最後問她：對今天17歲的年輕人有什麼建議？怎樣在一個滿是Moloch的世界裡，活出一份自己驕傲的事業？

她的第一條建議是：把win-win當作預設的運作模式。去找正和的處境，同時警惕一件事，別用自己的聰明才智說服自己某件事是正和的，其實它不是。這一步很難，她自己還在摸索。不要把一切看成零和遊戲，試著找到正和的部分；如果眼前這個遊戲裡找不到，考慮換一個遊戲。

第二條很具體：不要成為職業撲克選手。她總被問到這個，但時代完全變了。撲克值得學，它是理解思維方式的好教材，可別指望靠它謀生，今天這幾乎不可能。

第三條關於手機：非常清楚地意識到你在手機和社交媒體上花了多少時間，把它壓到最低。你在上面花的每一刻基本都對你有害。不用從此戒斷，但要有一個背景音常駐：我現在正在做一件對自己不好的事。

然後她補了一條反向的建議：如果有一件事，誰都勸不動你放棄，那就去做，別聽任何人的。找到那件你無法被說服放棄的事。

吉他、金屬樂與回不去的巔峰

對話的尾聲聊到了她的另一面。她16到23歲整個人的身份是金屬黨，組過樂隊，當主音吉他手，一共演過兩場，沒紅過。

Lex問她最好的金屬樂隊是哪支，她先抗議這題太難，然後報出了Metallica和Pantera，外加一個Children of Bodom。她常年為Metallica辯護，而金屬圈的主流立場恰恰是討厭Metallica，理由是它太流行、出賣了金屬。她的立場是：Metallica就是金屬，還是開創性的那種。她現在對這種排名本身感到排斥：非要分出高下，是一種虛假的零和，好樂隊之間毫無衝突，好東西是可以疊加的。

她形容自己和吉他的關係有點擰。她極度缺乏創作欲，目標從來是把一段高難度技術solo聽下來、背下來、彈到完美，寫自己的音樂這個念頭讓她恐懼。Lex說自己有同樣的軌跡，Ozzy Osbourne的《Mr. Crowley》solo是他學琴的起點之一，技術上很美，但純技術路線不會開發那個負責生成音樂的腦區。後來他才學會放下技術去寫自己的東西，和吉他的關係從馴服它、打敗它，變成了和它跳舞。博裡說她的關係就是馴服和打敗，那符合她當時的整個人格：極度好勝，必須把一切掰彎到自己的意志之下。而創作在布魯斯和爵士的世界裡更受重視，即興是核心，那條路回報也更高：吉他會變成一個可以創造的地方，一個逃離世界的出口。

還有一層更微妙的東西：回不去了。人到了某個高度，哪怕不算很高，把它放下一段時間，再回去就很難，因為你記得自己曾經很好。撲克是這樣，吉他也是這樣。她說這有點像卡斯帕羅夫重回棋盤，幾乎是一種疼痛，你得接受這段旅程是有限的，你有巔峰，而巔峰已經過去了。網際網路又抽走了最後一層緩衝：過去你可以只給身邊幾個人彈一段，那種隱私正在消失。

但所有這些壓力之外，她還是相信一件事：真正投入的時候，你依然可以盡情享受一場好的演奏。

意義：讓描述宇宙所需的程式碼儘可能長

最後一個問題：這一切的意義是什麼？我們為什麼在這裡？

博裡的回答分兩層。直覺層：去探索，去玩，去理解，去創造更多“這裡的”，讓遊戲繼續下去。翻譯成她那個近乎科學的表述：讓描述這個宇宙所需的程式碼長度儘可能長，儘可能複雜，因此儘可能有趣。用回形針鋪滿的宇宙不需要多少程式碼來描述，那個穩態並不有趣。而我們的宇宙隨時間變得越來越複雜、越來越豐富、越來越多樣，她想要的正是更多這種多樣性，而且是最好的意義上的多樣性。同時，在這個過程中得有樂趣。

Lex補了一層：也許樂趣恰恰來自有限性。墜入愛河、創作一件藝術品、造一座橋、造一枚火箭、建一家公司解決一個問題，這些事之所以嵌著喜悅，是因為它們有開始也有結束。

博裡同意，並且加了一條修行的註腳：人得學會接受事物的結束。人們抓著專案不放，超過它該有的時間，超過合理的程度。她說自己也終將面對這期播客結束的時刻。

Lex最後說，你應該做播客，你已經在向公眾輸出了，你是好的教育者，有好的頭腦，而且談話這個媒介本身就有趣，它讓你更理解自己，也更理解別人。博裡透露正在籌備，名字就叫《Win Win》，講正和的東西。Lex再加一條：你還應該和C一起做一期，你們兩個人的思維撞在一起的方式既好笑又迷人，那種觀點之間的張力非常有力量。

節目以費曼的一段話收尾：

我覺得，帶著未知去活，比擁有一個可能是錯誤的答案有趣得多。我有近似的答案、可能的信念、對不同事物的不同程度的不確定，但我對任何事都不是絕對確定的。有很多事我一無所知，比如問“我們為什麼在這裡”是否有意義。我不需要知道答案。我不因為身處一個神秘的、看起來沒有目的的宇宙而感到恐懼，就我所能判斷的，事情本來就是這樣。
（理查德·費曼）

這段話和博裡整場對話的底色是同一個東西：承認自己不知道，然後照常行動。她講錦標賽前那個聲音，講能量療愈，講70%的機率我們是銀河系裡唯一的文明，每一次都拒絕給出本體論的解釋，只描述發生了什麼，把機制留在未知裡。她從道金斯式的堅定無神論者，走到“有用的虛構”和“有什麼東西希望我們贏”。支撐這段轉變的沒有新證據，只有一種認識論的謙遜：現有框架解釋不了的事情，先別急著碾碎它，也別急著皈依它，把它記下來，等工具跟上。

整場對話裡反覆出現的動作其實只有一個：把一個模糊的東西，無論是牌局、關係、風險還是宇宙本身，先拆開看清楚，再決定哪些部分值得量化，哪些部分應該留在測量的範圍之外。她用機率給感情標價，也承認美恰恰在於無法標價的部分。這兩個立場在她身上沒有打架，因為量化的目的是校準自己，消滅神秘從來就寫在任務清單之外。

把這場對話裡可以立刻用上的東西拎出來，大概是這些：

  • 重大決策前，先把你的機率寫下來，再去看別人的數字。順序很關鍵：先知道對方的答案，你會不自覺地朝對方調整，就再也分不清哪些是判斷、哪些是討好。
  • 寫機率的時候順手問自己一句：這個數字裡混了多少我的願望？預測和渴望是兩個東西，混在一起用，兩邊都會失真。
  • 直覺只在重複過成百上千次的領域裡可信。結婚、買房、換行業這類一生只做一兩次的決策，別拿直覺當主裁判，至少補一份粗略的利弊清單。
  • 校準情緒和現實的刻度。輸掉淨資產2%時的痛苦，應該和輸掉60%時不在一個量級。情緒反應長期偏離實際損失大小，需要修的是刻度。
  • 定期檢查自己在最佳化誰的指標。博裡最黑暗的幾年，是在追一個二十出頭、沒什麼智慧的自己隨手定下的目標。指標一旦寫死，人就會跑過頭。
  • 做任何“為了保持競爭力不得不做”的事之前，問一句：如果所有人都這麼做，我的處境會更好還是更差？如果答案是更差，你就在一個多極陷阱裡，個人的最優解正在把所有人拖下水。
  • 給競爭劃圍欄。競爭本身是中性的，問題出在它溢位。挑一個你願意零和的場子（牌桌、球場、遊戲），把好勝心釋放乾淨，離開那個場子時，把零和的帽子一起留在裡面。
  • 手機上常駐一個背景認知：刷社交媒體的每一刻基本都在對自己做一件壞事。不需要戒斷，需要的是不再自欺，然後把時間壓到你願意承認的最低值。
  • 把win-win當預設搜尋項，同時警惕自己的聰明才智。最危險的陷阱是一個人用足夠的智力，說服自己某件零和的事是正和的。
  • 找到那件誰都勸不動你的事，去做它。這條建議和上面所有理性的建議並列存在，互相不取消。
文稿來自公開 Kaggle 資料集（rajneesh231/lex-fridman-podcast-transcript），為早期自動轉錄存檔，可能存在識別錯誤。
Evolutionarily, if we see a lion running at us, we didn't have time to sort of calculate the lion's kinetic energy and is it optimal to go this way or that way, you just react it. And physically our bodies are well attuned to actually make right decisions. But when you're playing a game like poker, this is not something that you ever evolved to do. And yet you're in that same flight or fight response. And so that's a really important skill to be able to develop to basically learn how to like meditate in the moment and calm yourself so that you can think clearly. The following is a conversation with Liv Burry, formerly one of the best poker players in the world, trained as an astrophysicist and is now a philanthropist and an educator on topics of game theory, physics, complexity, and life. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Liv Burry. What role do you think luck plays in poker and in life? You can pick whichever one you want, poker or life and or life. The longer you play, the less influence luck has. Like with all things, the bigger your sample size, the more the quality of your decisions or your strategies matter. So to answer that question, yeah, in poker, it really depends. If you and I sat and played 10 hands right now, I might only win 52% of the time, 53% maybe. But if we played 10,000 hands, then I'll probably win like over 98, 99% of the time. So it's a question of sample sizes. And what are you figuring out over time? The betting strategy that this individual does or literally it doesn't matter against any individual over time? Against any individual over time, the better player because they're making better decisions. So what does that mean to make a better decision? Well, to get into the realness of Gritty already, basically poker is a game of math. There are these strategies familiar with like Nash Equilibria, right? So there are these game theory optimal strategies that you can adopt. And the closer you play to them, the less exploitable you are. So because I've studied the game a bunch, although admittedly not for a few years, but back when I was playing all the time, I would study these game theory optimal solutions and try and then adopt those strategies when I go and play. So I'd play against you and I would do that. And because the objective, when you're playing game theory optimal, it's actually, it's a loss minimization thing that you're trying to do. Your best bet is to try and play a sort of similar style. You also need to try and adopt this loss minimization. But because I've been playing much longer than you, I'll be better at that. So first of all, you're not taking advantage of my mistakes. But then on top of that, I'll be better at recognizing when you are playing suboptimally and then deviating from this game theory optimal strategy to exploit your bad plays. Can you define game theory and Nash equilibria? Can we try to sneak up to it in a bunch of ways? Like what's a game theory framework of analyzing poker, analyzing any kind of situation? So game theory is just basically the study of decisions within a competitive situation. I mean, it's technically a branch of economics, but it also applies to like wider decision theory. And usually when you see it, it's these like little payoff matrices and so on. That's how it's depicted. But it's essentially just like study of strategies under different competitive situations. And as it happens, certain games, in fact, many, many games have these things called Nash equilibria. And what that means is when you're in a Nash equilibrium, basically it is not, there is no strategy that you can take that would be more beneficial than the one you're currently taking, assuming your opponent is also doing the same thing. So it'd be a bad idea, if we're both playing in a game theory optimal strategy, if either of us deviate from that, now we're putting ourselves at a disadvantage. Rock, paper, scissors is actually a really great example of this. Like if we were to start playing rock, paper, scissors, you know, you know nothing about me and we're gonna play for all our money, let's play 10 rounds of it. What would your sort of optimal strategy be? Do you think, what would you do? Let's see. I would probably try to be as random as possible. Exactly. You wanna, because you don't know anything about me, you don't want to give anything away about yourself. So ideally you'd have like a little dice or somewhat, you know, perfect randomizer that makes you randomize 33% of the time each of the three different things. And in response to that, well, actually I can kind of do anything, but I would probably just randomize back too, but actually it wouldn't matter because I know that you're playing randomly. So that would be us in a Nash equilibrium where we're both playing this like unexploitable strategy. However, if after a while you then notice that I'm playing rock a little bit more often than I should. Yeah, you're the kind of person that would do that, wouldn't you? Sure. Yes, yes, yes. I'm more of a scissors girl, but anyway. You are? No, I'm a, as I said, randomizer. So you notice I'm throwing rock too much or something like that. Now you'd be making a mistake by continuing playing this game theory optimal strategy, well, the previous one, because you are now, I'm making a mistake and you're not deviating and exploiting my mistake. So you'd want to start throwing paper a bit more often in whatever you figure is the right sort of percentage of the time that I'm throwing rock too often. So that's basically an example of where, what game theory optimal strategy is in terms of loss minimization, but it's not always the maximally profitable thing if your opponent is doing stupid stuff, which in that example. So that's kind of then how it works in poker, but it's a lot more complex. And the way poker players typically, nowadays they study, the games change so much. And I think we should talk about how it sort of evolved, but nowadays like the top pros basically spend all their time in between sessions running these simulators using like software where they do basically Monte Carlo simulations, sort of doing billions of fictitious self play hands. You input a fictitious hand scenario, like, oh, what do I do with Jack nine suited on a King 10 four to two spades board and against this bet size. So you'd input that press play, it'll run its billions of fake hands and then it will converge upon what the game theory optimal strategies are. And then you wanna try and memorize what these are. Basically they're like ratios of how often, what types of hands you want to bluff and what percentage of the time. So then there's this additional layer of inbuilt randomization built in. Yeah, those kinds of simulations incorporate all the betting strategies and everything else like that. So as opposed to some kind of very crude mathematical model of what's the probability you win just based on the quality of the card, it's including everything else too. The game theory of it. Yes, yeah, essentially. And what's interesting is that nowadays, if you want to be a top pro and you go and play in these really like the super high stakes tournaments or tough cash games, if you don't know this stuff, you're gonna get eaten alive in the long run. 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, 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 chess like not knowing, trying to make a living from it because you know there's very little luck in chess, but there's quite a lot of luck in poker. Have you seen Beautiful Mind, that movie? Years ago. Well, what do you think about the game theoretic formulation of what is it, the hot blonde at the bar? Do you remember? Oh, yeah. What they illustrated 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 first or something like that, feign disinterest. I mean, it's classic pickup artist stuff, right? You wanna. And they were trying to correlate that somehow, that being an optimal strategy game theoretically. Why? What, what, like, I don't think, I remember. I can't imagine that there is, I mean, there's probably an optimal strategy. Is it, does that mean that there's an actual Nash equilibrium of like picking up girls? Do you know the marriage problem? It's optimal stopping. Yes. So where it's an optimal dating strategy where you, do you remember what it is? Yeah, I think it's like something like, you know you've got like a set of a hundred people you're gonna 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%. Uh, it's one over E, whatever that is. Right, which I think is 37%. Yeah. We're gonna fact check that. Yeah. So, but it's funny under those strict constraints, then yes, after that many people, as long as you have a fixed size pool, then you just pick the next person that is better than anyone you've seen before. Anyone else you've seen, yeah. Have you tried this? Have you incorporated it? I'm not one of those people. And we're gonna discuss this. I, and, what do you mean, those people? I try not to optimize stuff. I try to listen to the heart. I don't think, I like, my mind immediately is attracted to optimizing everything. Optimizing everything. And I think that if you really give in to that kind of addiction, that you lose the joy of the small things, the minutiae of life, I think. I don't know. I'm concerned about the addictive nature of my personality in that regard. In some ways, while I think the, on average, people under try and quantify things, or try, under optimize. There are some people who, you know, with all these things, it's a balancing act. I've been on dating apps, but I've never used them. I'm sure they have data on this, because they probably have the optimal stopping control problem. Because there aren't a lot of people that use social, like dating apps, are on there for a long time. So the interesting aspect is like, all right, how long before you stop looking before it actually starts affecting your mind negatively, such that you see dating as a kind of, A game. A kind of game versus an actual process of finding somebody that's going to make you happy for the rest of your life. That's really interesting. They have the data. I wish they would be able to release that data. And I do want to hop to it. It's OkCupid, right? I think they ran a huge, huge study on all of that. Yeah, they're more data driven, I think, OkCupid folks are. I think there's a lot of opportunity for dating apps, in general, even bigger than dating apps, people connecting on the internet. I just hope they're more data driven. And it doesn't seem that way. I think like, I've always thought that Goodreads should be a dating app. Like the. I've never used it. After what? Goodreads is just lists like books that you've read. And allows you to comment on the books you read and what books you're currently reading. But it's a giant social networks of people reading books. And that seems to be a much better database of like interests. Of course it constrains you to the books you're reading, but like that really reveals so much more about the person. Allows you to discover shared interests because books are a kind of window into the way you see the world. Also like the kind of places, people you're curious about, the kind of ideas you're curious about. Are you a romantic or are you cold calculating rationalist? Are you into Ayn Rand or are you into Bernie Sanders? Are you into whatever? And I feel like that reveals so much more than like a person trying to look hot from a certain angle in a Tinder profile. Well, and it'd also be a really great filter in the first place for people. It's less people who read books and are willing to go and rate them and give feedback on them and so on. So that's already a really strong filter. Probably the type of people you'd be looking for. Well, at least be able to fake reading books. I mean, the thing about books, you don't really need to read it. You can just look at the click counts. Yeah, game the dating app by feigning intellectualism. Can I admit something very horrible about myself? Go on. The things that, you know, I don't have many things in my closet, but this is one of them. I've never actually read Shakespeare. I've only read Cliff Notes and I got a five in the AP English exam. Wow. And I... Which book? The which books have I read? Oh yeah, which was the exam on which book? Oh no, they include a lot of them. Oh. But Hamlet, I don't even know if you read Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth. I don't remember, but I don't understand it. It's like really cryptic. It's hard. It's really, I don't, and it's not that pleasant to read. It's like ancient speak. I don't understand it. Anyway, maybe I was too dumb. I'm still too dumb, but I did get... You got a five, which is... Yeah, yeah. I don't know how the US grading system... Oh no, so AP English is a, there's kind of this advanced versions of courses in high school, and you take a test that is like a broad test for that subject and includes a lot. It wasn't obviously just Shakespeare. I think a lot of it was also writing, written. You have like AP Physics, AP Computer Science, AP Biology, AP Chemistry, and then AP English or AP Literature, I forget what it was. But I think Shakespeare was a part of that. But I... And the point is you gamified it? Gamified. Well, in entirety, I was into getting As. I saw it as a game. I don't think any... I don't think all of the learning I've done has been outside of school. The deepest learning I've done has been outside of school with a few exceptions, especially in grad school, like deep computer science courses. But that was still outside of school because it was outside of getting... Sorry. It was outside of getting the A for the course. The best stuff I've ever done is when you read the chapter and you do many of the problems at the end of the chapter, which is usually not what's required for the course, like the hardest stuff. In fact, textbooks are freaking incredible. If you go back now and you look at like biology textbook or any of the computer science textbooks on algorithms and data structures, those things are incredibly... They have the best summary of a subject, plus they have practice problems of increasing difficulty that allows you to truly master the basic, like the fundamental ideas behind that. I got through my entire physics degree with one textbook that was just this really comprehensive one that they told us at the beginning of the first year, buy this, but you're gonna have to buy 15 other books for all your supplementary courses. And I was like, every time I was just checked to see whether this book covered it and it did. And I think I only bought like two or three extra and thank God, cause they're super expensive textbooks. It's a whole racket they've got going on. Yeah, they are. They could just... You get the right one, it's just like a manual for... But what's interesting though, is this is the tyranny of having exams and metrics. The tyranny of exams and metrics, yes. I loved them because I'm very competitive and I liked finding ways to gamify things and then like sort of dust off my shoulders afterwards when I get a good grade or be annoyed at myself when I didn't. But yeah, you're absolutely right. And that the actual... How much of that physics knowledge I've retained, like I've 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 and no, but really like nothing makes you learn a topic better than when you actually then have to teach it yourself. Like I'm trying to wrap my teeth around this like game theory Moloch stuff right now. And there's no exam at the end of it that I can gamify. There's no way to gamify and sort of like shortcut my way through it. I have to understand it so deeply from like deep foundational levels to then to build upon it and then try and explain it to other people. And like, you're about to go and do some lectures, right? You can't sort of just like, you presumably can't rely on the knowledge that you got through when you were studying for an exam to reteach that. Yeah, and especially high level lectures, especially the kind of stuff you do on YouTube, you're not just regurgitating material. You have to think through what is the core idea here. And when you do the lectures live especially, you have to, there's no second takes. That is the luxury you get if you're recording a video for YouTube or something like that. But it definitely is a luxury you shouldn't lean on. I've gotten to interact with a few YouTubers that lean on that too much. And you realize, oh, you've gamified this system because you're not really thinking deeply about stuff. You're through the edit, both written and spoken, you're crafting an amazing video, but you yourself as a human being have not really deeply understood it. So live teaching or at least recording video with very few takes is a different beast. And I think it's the most honest way of doing it, like as few takes as possible. That's why I'm nervous about this. Don't go back and be like, ah, let's do that. Don't fuck this up, Liv. The tyranny of exams. I do think people talk about high school and college as a time to do drugs and drink and have fun and all this kind of stuff. But looking back, of course I did a lot of those things. Yes, no, yes, but it's also a time when you get to read textbooks or read books or learn with all the time in the world. You don't have these responsibilities of laundry and having to sort of pay for mortgage, all that kind of stuff, pay taxes, all this kind of stuff. 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. Like basically your knowledge gets solidified. You don't get to have fun and learn. Learning is really fulfilling and really fun if you're that kind of person. Like some people like, you know, like knowledge is not something that they think is fun. But if that's the kind of thing that you think is fun, that's the time to have fun and do the drugs and drink and all that kind of stuff. But the learning, just going back to those textbooks, the hours spent with the textbooks is really, really rewarding. Do people even use textbooks anymore? Yeah. Do you think? Kids these days with their TikTok and their... 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 that you're like, I don't know how reality works, isn't that just a reminder to yourself? Yeah, no, it's a reminder of epistemic humility because I fell too hard, you know, same as people, like I think, you know, many people who are just like, my religion is the way, this is the correct way, this is the work, this is the law, you are immoral if you don't follow this, blah, blah, blah. I think they are lacking epistemic humility. They're a little too much hubris there. But similarly, I think that sort of the Richard Dawkins realism 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. So an example, two kind of notable examples that like really rattled my cage. The first one was actually in 2010 early on in quite early on in my poker career. And I, remember the Icelandic volcano that erupted that like shut down kind of all Atlantic airspace. And it meant I got stuck down in the South of France. I was there for something else. And I couldn't get home and someone said, well, there's a big poker tournament happening in Italy. Maybe, do you wanna go? I was like, all right, sure. Like, let's, you know, got a train across, found a way to get there. And the buy in was 5,000 euros, which was much bigger than my bankroll would normally allow. And so I played a feeder tournament, won my way in kind of like I did with the Monte Carlo big one. So then I won my way, you know, from 500 euros into 5,000 euros to play this thing. And on day one of then the big tournament, which turned out to have, it was the biggest tournament ever held in Europe at the time. It got over like 1,200 people, absolutely huge. And I remember they dimmed the lights for before, you know, the normal shuffle up and deal to tell everyone to start playing. And they played Chemical Brothers, Hey Boy, Hey Girl, which I don't know why it's notable, but it was just like a really, it was a song I always liked. It was like one of these like pump me up songs. And I was sitting there thinking, oh yeah, it's exciting. I'm playing this really big tournament. And out of nowhere, just suddenly this voice in my head, just, and it sounded like my own sort of, you know, when you think in your mind, you hear a voice kind of, right? At least I do. And so it sounded like my own voice and it said, you are going to win this tournament. And it was so powerful that I got this like wave of like, you know, sort of goosebumps down my body. And that 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 it. And I was like, okay, six days later, I win the fucking tournament out of 1,200 people. And I don't know how to explain it. Okay, yes, maybe I have that feeling before every time I play. And it's just that I happened to, you know, because I won the tournament, I retroactively remembered it. But that's just. Or the feeling gave you a kind of, now from the film, Helmutian. Well, exactly. Like it gave you a confident, a deep confidence. And it did. It definitely did. Like, I remember then feeling this like sort of, well, although I remember then on day one, I then went and lost half my stack quite early on. And I remember thinking like, oh, well, that was bullshit. You know, what kind of premonition is this? Thinking, oh, I'm out. But you know, I managed to like keep it together and recover and then just went like pretty perfectly from then on. And either way, it definitely instilled me with this confidence. And I don't want to put, I can't put an explanation. Like, you know, was it some, you know, huge extra to 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 think. I think I know a good explanation. So we're a bunch of NPCs living in this world created by, in the simulation. And then people, not people, creatures from outside of the simulation sort of can tune in and play your character. And that feeling you got is somebody just like, they got to play a poker tournament through you. Honestly, it felt like that. It did actually feel a little bit like that. But it's been 12 years now. I've retold the story many times. Like, I don't even know how much I can trust my memory. You're just an NPC retelling the same story. Because they just played the tournament and left. Yeah, they're like, oh, that was fun. Cool. Yeah, cool. Next time. And now you're for the rest of your life left as a boring NPC retelling this story of 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 actually another sort of dark period because I had this incredible, like the highs of winning that, 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. And so again, like sort of chasing that feeling was difficult. But then on top of that, there was this feeling of like almost being touched by something bigger that was like, ah. So maybe, did you have a sense that I might be somebody special? Like this kind of, I think that's the confidence thing that maybe you could do something special in this world after all kind of feeling. I definitely, I mean, this is the thing I think everybody wrestles with to an extent, right? We are truly the protagonists in our own lives. And so it's a natural bias, human bias to feel special. And I think, and in some ways we are special. Every single person is special because you are that, the universe does, the world literally does revolve around you. That's the thing in some respect. But of course, if you then zoom out and take the amalgam of everyone's experiences, then no, it doesn't. So there is this shared sort of objective reality, but sorry, there's objective reality that is shared, but then there's also this subjective reality which is truly unique to you. And I think both of those things coexist. And it's not like one is correct and one isn't. And again, anyone who's like, oh no, your lived experience is everything versus your lived experience is nothing. No, it's a blend between these two things. They can exist concurrently. But there's a certain kind of sense that at least I've had my whole life. And I think a lot of people have this as like, well, I'm just like this little person. Surely I can't be one of those people that do the big thing, right? There's all these big people doing big things. There's big actors and actresses, big musicians. There's big business owners and all that kind of stuff, scientists and so on. I have my own subject experience that I enjoy and so on, but there's like a different layer. Like surely I can't do those great things. I mean, one of the things just having interacted with a lot of great people, I realized, no, they're like just the same humans as me. And that realization I think is really empowering. And to remind yourself. What are they? Huh? What are they? Are they? Well, in terms of. Depends on some, yeah. They're like a bag of insecurities and. Yes. Peculiar sort of, like their own little weirdnesses and so on, I should say also not. They have the capacity for brilliance, but they're not generically brilliant. Like, you know, we tend to say this person or that person is brilliant, but really no, they're just like sitting there and thinking through stuff just like the rest of us. Right. I think they're in the habit of thinking through stuff seriously and they've built up a habit of not allowing them, their mind to get trapped in a bunch of bullshit and minutia of day to day life. They really think big ideas, but those big ideas, it's like allowing yourself the freedom to think big, to realize that you can be one that actually solved this particular big problem. First identify a big problem that you care about, then like, I can actually be the one that solves this problem. And like allowing yourself to believe that. And I think sometimes you do need to have like that shock go through your body and a voice tells you, you're gonna win this tournament. Well, exactly. And whether it was, it's this idea of useful fictions. So again, like going through all like the classic rationalist training of Les Wrong where it's like, you want your map, you know, the image you have of the world in your head to as accurately match up with how the world actually is. You want the map and the territory to perfectly align as, you know, you want it to be as an accurate representation as possible. I don't know if I fully subscribed to that anymore, having now had these moments of like feeling of something either bigger or just actually just being overconfident. Like there is value in overconfidence sometimes. If you, 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, but someone who it was unclear whether they were gonna be the world's greatest, but ended up doing extremely well because they had this innate, deep self confidence, this like even overblown idea of how good their relative skill level is. That gave them the confidence to then pursue this thing and 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 sort of rationalist community because that's a field that is worth studying of like how the stories we tell, what the stories we tell to ourselves, even if they are actually false, and even if we suspect they might be false, how it's better to sort of have that like little bit of faith, like value in faith, I think actually. And that's partly another thing that's now led me to explore the concept of God, whether you wanna 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, because obviously the Christian God is like all benevolent, endless love. The simulation, at least one of the simulation hypothesis is like, as you said, like a teenager in his bedroom who doesn't really care, doesn't give a shit about the individuals within there. It just like wants to see how the thing plays out because it's curious and it could turn it off like that. Where on the sort of psychopathy to benevolent spectrum God is, I don't know. But just having a little bit of faith that there is something else out there that might be interested in our outcome is I think an essential thing actually for people to find. A, because it creates commonality between, it's something we can all share. And it is uniquely humbling of all of us to an extent. It's like a common objective. But B, it gives people that little bit of like reserve when things get really dark. And I do think things are gonna get pretty dark over the next few years. But it gives that like, to think that there's something out there that actually wants our game to keep going. I keep calling it the game. It's a thing C and I, we call it the game. You and C is a.k.a. Grimes, we call what the game? Everything, the whole thing? Yeah, we joke about like. So everything is a game. Well, the universe, like what if it's a game and the goal of the game is to figure out like, well, either how to beat it, how to get out of it. Maybe this universe is an escape room, like a giant escape room. And the goal is to figure out, put all the pieces to puzzle, figure out how it works in order to like unlock this like hyperdimensional key and get out beyond what it is. That's. No, but then, so you're saying it's like different levels and it's like a cage within a cage within a cage and never like one cage at a time, you figure out how to escape that. Like a new level up, you know, like us becoming multi planetary would be a level up or us, you know, figuring out how to upload our consciousnesses to the thing. That would probably be a leveling up or spiritually, you know, humanity becoming more combined and less adversarial and bloodthirsty and us becoming a little bit more enlightened. That would be a leveling up. You know, there's many different frames to it, whether it's physical, you know, digital or like metaphysical. I wonder what the levels, I think, I think level one for earth is probably the biological evolutionary process. So going from single cell organisms to early humans. Then maybe level two is whatever's happening inside our minds and creating ideas and creating technologies. That's like evolutionary process of ideas. And then multi planetary is interesting. Is that fundamentally different from what we're doing here on earth? Probably, because it allows us to like exponentially scale. It delays the Malthusian trap, right? It's a way to keep the playing field, to make the playing field get larger so that it can accommodate more of our stuff, more of us. And that's a good thing, but I don't know if it like fully solves this issue of, well, this thing called Moloch, which we haven't talked about yet, but which is basically, I call it the God of unhealthy competition. Yeah, let's go to Moloch. What's Moloch? You did a great video on Moloch and one aspect of it, the application of it to one aspect. Instagram beauty filters. True. Very niche, but I wanted to start off small. So Moloch was originally coined as, well, so apparently back in the like Canaanite times, it was to say ancient Carthaginian, I can never say it Carthaginian, somewhere around like 300 BC or 280, I don't know. There was supposedly this death cult who would sacrifice their children to this awful demon God thing they called Moloch in order to get power to win wars. So really dark, horrible things. And it was literally like about child sacrifice, whether they actually existed or not, we don't know, but in mythology they did. And this God that they worshiped was this thing called Moloch. And then I don't know, it seemed like it was kind of quiet throughout history in terms of mythology beyond that, until this movie Metropolis in 1927 talked about this, you see that there was this incredible futuristic city that everyone was living great in, but then the protagonist goes underground into the sewers and sees that the city is run by this machine. And this machine basically would just like kill the workers all the time because it was just so hard to keep it running. They were always dying. So there was all this suffering that was required in order to keep the city going. And then the protagonist has this vision that this machine is actually this demon Moloch. So again, it's like this sort of like mechanistic consumption of humans in order to get more power. And then Allen Ginsberg wrote a poem in the 60s, which incredible poem called Howl about this thing Moloch. And a lot of people sort of quite understandably take the interpretation of that, that he's talking about capitalism. But then the sort of piece to resistance that's moved Moloch into this idea of game theory was Scott Alexander of Slate Style Codex wrote this incredible, well, literally I think it might be my favorite piece of writing of all time. It's called Meditations on Moloch. Everyone must go read it. And... I say Codex is a blog. It's a blog, yes. We can link to it in the show notes or something, right? No, don't. I, yes, yes. But I like how you assume I have a professional operation going on here. I mean... I shall try to remember to... You were gonna assume. What do you... What are you, what do you want? You're giving the impression of it. Yeah, I'll look, please. If I don't, please somebody in the comments remind me. I'll help you. If you don't know this blog, it's one of the best blogs ever probably. You should probably be following it. Yes. Are blogs still a thing? I think they are still a thing, yeah. Yeah, he's migrated onto Substack, but yeah, it's still a blog. Anyway. Substack better not fuck things up, but... I hope not, yeah. I hope they don't, I hope they don't turn Molochy, which will mean something to people when we continue. Yeah. When I stop interrupting for once. No, no, it's good. Go on, yeah. So anyway, so he writes, he writes this piece, Meditations on Moloch, and basically he analyzes the poem and he's like, okay, so it seems to be something relating to where competition goes wrong. And, 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, in order to gain power, a competitive advantage. And if you look at almost everything that sort of goes wrong in our society, it's that same process. So with the Instagram beauty filters thing, you know, if you're trying to become 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. 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, you know, more makeup techniques come along. And then more recently, these beauty filters where like at the touch of a button, it makes your face look absolutely incredible compared to your natural face. These technologies come along, it's everyone is incentivized to that short term strategy. But over on net, it's bad for everyone because now everyone is kind of feeling like they have to use these things. And these things like they make you like, the reason why I talked about them in this video is because I noticed it myself, you know, like I was trying to grow my Instagram for a while, I've given up on it now. But 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 it. Go subscribe to Liv's Instagram. Please, so I don't have to use the filters. I'll post a bunch of, yeah, make it blow up. So yeah, 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 in order to like stay competitive, 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 started, you know, than they were before. Kind of like if, like at a football stadium, like the system is so badly designed, a competitive system of like everyone sitting and having a view that if someone at the very front stands up to get an even better view, it forces everyone else behind to like adopt that same strategy just to get to where they were before. But now everyone's stuck standing up. Like, so you need this like top down God's eye coordination to make it go back to the better state. But from within the system, you can't actually do that. So that's kind of what this Moloch thing is. It's this thing that makes people sacrifice values in order to optimize for the winning the game in question, the short term game. But this Moloch, can you attribute it to any one centralized source or is it an emergent phenomena from a large collection of people? Exactly that. It's an emergent phenomena. It's a force of game theory. It's a force of bad incentives on a multi agent system where you've got more, you know, prisoner's dilemma is technically a kind of Moloch system as well, but it's just a two player thing. But another word for Moloch is it multipolar trap. Where basically you just got a lot of different people all competing for some kind of prize. And it would be better if everyone didn't do this one shitty strategy, but because that strategy gives you a short term advantage, everyone's incentivized to do it. And so everyone ends up doing it. So the responsibility for, I mean, social media is a really nice place for a large number of people to play game theory. And so they also have the ability to then design the rules of the game. And is it on them to try to anticipate what kind of like to do the thing that poker players are doing to run simulation? Ideally that would have been great. If, you know, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack and all the, you know, the Twitter founders and everyone, if they had at least just run a few simulations of how their algorithms would, you know, if 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 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 gonna get morphed in iterative games played into something that will change society forever? That requires some deep thinking. That's, I hope there's meetings like that inside companies, but I haven't seen them. There aren't, that's the problem. And it's difficult because like, when you're starting up a social media company, you know, you're aware that you've got investors to please, there's bills to pay, you know, there's only so much R&D you can afford to do. You've got all these like incredible pressures, bad incentives to get on and just build your thing as quickly as possible and start making money. And, you know, I don't think anyone intended when they built these social media platforms and just to like preface it. So the reason why, you know, social media is relevant because it's a very good example of like, everyone these days is optimizing for, you know, clicks, whether it's a 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 a New York Times or whoever, they're trying to get their story to go viral. So everyone's got this bad incentive of using, you know, as you called it, the clickbait industrial complex. That's a very molly key system because everyone is now using worse and worse tactics in order to like try and win this attention game. And yeah, so ideally these companies would have had enough slack in the beginning in order to run these experiments to see, okay, what are the ways this could possibly go wrong for people? What are the ways that Moloch, they should be aware of this concept of Moloch and realize that whenever you have a highly competitive multiagent system, which social media is a classic example of, millions of agents all trying to compete for likes and so on, and you try and bring all this complexity down into like very small metrics, such as number of likes, number of retweets, whatever the algorithm optimizes for, that is a guaranteed recipe for this stuff to go wrong and become a race to the bottom. I think there should be an honesty when founders, I think there's a hunger for that kind of transparency of like, we don't know what the fuck we're doing. This is a fascinating experiment. We're all running as a human civilization. Let's try this out. And like, actually just be honest about this, that we're all like these weird rats in a maze. None of us are controlling it. There's this kind of sense like the founders, the CEO of Instagram or whatever, Mark Zuckerberg has a control and he's like, like with strings playing people. No, they're. He's at the mercy of this is like everyone else. He's just like trying to do his best. And like, I think putting on a smile and doing over polished videos about how Instagram and Facebook are good for you, I think is not the right way to actually ask some of the deepest questions we get to ask as a society. How do we design the game such that we build a better world? I think a big part of this as well is people, there's this philosophy, particularly in Silicon Valley of 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 of 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. Technology is not a values neutral thing. People think, I used to always think this myself. It's like this naive view that, oh, technology is completely neutral. It's just, it's the humans that either make it good or bad. No, to the point we're at now, the technology that we are creating, they are social technologies. They literally dictate how humans now form social groups and so on beyond that. And beyond that, it also then, that gives rise to like the memes that we then like coalesce around. And that, if you have the stack that way where it's technology driving social interaction, which then drives like memetic culture and like which ideas become popular, that's Moloch. And we need the other way around, we need it. So we need to figure out what are the good memes? What are the good values that we think we need to optimize for that like makes people happy and healthy and like keeps society as robust and safe as possible, then figure out what the social structure around those should be. And only then do we figure out technology, but we're doing the other way around. And as much as I love in many ways the culture of Silicon Valley, and like I do think that technology has, I don't wanna knock it. It's done so many wonderful things for us, same as capitalism. There are, we have to like be honest with ourselves. We're getting to a point where we are losing control of this very powerful machine that we have created. Can you redesign the machine within the game? Can you just have, can you understand the game enough? Okay, this is the game. And this is how we start to reemphasize the memes that matter, the memes that bring out the best in us. You know, like the way I try to be in real life and the way I try to be online is to be about kindness and love. And I feel like I'm sometimes get like criticized for being naive and all those kinds of things. But I feel like I'm just trying to live within this game. I'm trying to be authentic. Yeah, but also like, hey, it's kind of fun to do this. Like you guys should try this too, you know, and that's like trying to redesign some aspects of the game within the game. Is that possible? I don't know, but I think we should try. I don't think we have an option but to try. Well, the other option is to create new companies or to pressure companies that, or anyone who has control of the rules of the game. I think we need to be doing all of the above. I think we need to be thinking hard about what are the kind of positive, healthy memes. You know, as Elon said, he who controls the memes controls the universe. He said that. I think he did, yeah. But there's truth to that. It's very, there is wisdom in that because memes have driven history. You know, we are a cultural species. That's what sets us apart from chimpanzees and everything else. We have the ability to learn and evolve through culture as opposed to biology or like, you know, classic physical constraints. And that means culture is incredibly powerful and we can create and become victim to very bad memes or very good ones. But we do have some agency over which memes, you know, we, but not only put out there, but we also like subscribe to. So I think we need to take that approach. We also need to, you know, because I don't want, I'm making this video right now called The Attention Wars, which is about like how Moloch, like the media machine is this Moloch machine. Well, is this kind of like blind dumb thing where everyone is optimizing for engagement in order to win their share of the attention pie. And then if you zoom out, it's really like Moloch that's pulling the strings because the only thing that benefits from this in the end, you know, like our information ecosystem is breaking down. Like we have, you look at the state of the US, it's in, we're in a civil war. It's just not a physical war. It's an information war. And people are becoming more fractured in terms of what their actual shared reality is. Like truly like an extreme left person, an extreme right person, like they literally live in different worlds in their minds at this point. And it's getting more and more amplified. And this force is like a razor blade pushing through everything. It doesn't matter how innocuous a topic is, it will find a way to split into this, you know, bifurcated cultural and it's fucking terrifying. Because that maximizes the tension. And that's like an emergent Moloch type force that takes anything, any topic and cuts through it so that it can split nicely into two groups. One that's... Well, it's whatever, yeah, all everyone is trying to do within the system is just maximize whatever gets them the most attention because they're just trying to make money so they can keep their thing going, right? And the best emotion for getting attention, well, because it's not just about attention on the internet, it's engagement, that's the key thing, right? In order for something to go viral, you need people to actually engage with it. They need to like comment or retweet or whatever. And of all the emotions that, there's like seven classic shared emotions that studies have found that all humans, even from like previously uncontacted tribes have. Some of those are negative, you know, like sadness, disgust, anger, et cetera, some are positive, happiness, excitement, and so on. The one that happens to be the most useful for the internet is anger. Because anger, it's such an active emotion. If you want people to engage, if someone's scared, and I'm not just like talking out my ass here, there are studies here that have looked into this. Whereas like if someone's like, disgusted or fearful, they actually tend to then be like, oh, I don't wanna deal with this. So they're less likely to actually engage and share it and so on, they're just gonna be like, ugh. Whereas if they're enraged by a thing, well now that triggers all the like, the old tribalism emotions. 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. And so this like, the attention economy, the wheels that make it go around are, is rage. I did a tweet, the problem with raging against the machine is that the machine has learned to feed off rage. Because it is feeding off our rage. That's the thing that's now keeping it going. So the more we get angry, the worse it gets. So the mullet in this attention, in the war of attention is constantly maximizing rage. What it is optimizing for is engagement. And it happens to be that engagement is more propaganda, you know. I mean, it just sounds like everything is putting, more and more things are being put through this like propagandist lens of winning whatever the war is in question. Whether it's the culture war or the Ukraine war, yeah. Well, I think the silver lining of this, do you think it's possible that in the long arc of this process, you actually do arrive at greater wisdom and more progress? It just, in the moment, it feels like people are 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 fucked up. But in the long arc, it actually is productive. I hope so. That said, we are now in the era of, just as we have weapons of mass destruction with nuclear weapons, you know, that can break the whole playing field, we now are developing weapons of informational mass destruction. Information weapons, you know, WMDs that basically can be used for propaganda or just manipulating people however is needed, whether that's through dumb TikTok videos, or, you know, there are significant resources being put in. 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 effectively doing monarchy things. But then on top of that, we have actual bad actors who are intentionally trying to, like, manipulate the other side into doing things. And using, so because it's a digital space, they're able to use artificial actors, meaning bots. Exactly, botnets, you know, and this is a whole new situation that we've never had before. Yeah, it's exciting. You know what I want to do? You know what I want to do that, because there is, you know, people are talking about bots manipulating and, like, malicious bots that are basically spreading propaganda. I want to create, like, a bot army for, like, that fights that. For love? Yeah, exactly, for love, that fights, that, I mean. You know, there's, I mean, there's truth to fight fire with fire, it's like, but how you always have to be careful whenever you create, again, like, Moloch is very tricky. Yeah, yeah. Hitler was trying to spread the love, too. Well, yeah, so we thought, but, you know, I agree with you that, like, that is a thing that should be considered, but there is, again, everyone, the road to hell is paved in good intentions. And this is, there's always unforeseen circumstances, you know, outcomes, externalities of you trying to adopt a thing, even if you do it in the very best of faith. But you can learn lessons of history. If you can run some sims on it first, absolutely. But also there's certain aspects of a system, as we've learned through history, that do better than others. Like, for example, don't have a dictator, so, like, if I were to create this bot army, it's not good for me to have full control over it. Because in the beginning, I might have a good understanding of what's good and not, but over time, that starts to get deviated, because I'll get annoyed at some assholes, and I'll think, okay, wouldn't it be nice to get rid of those assholes? But then that power starts getting to your head, you become corrupted, that's basic human nature. So distribute the power somehow. We need a love botnet on a DAO. A DAO love botnet. Yeah, and without a leader, like without... Well, exactly, a distributed, right, but yeah, without any kind of centralized... Yeah, without even, you know, basically it's the more control, the more you can decentralize the control of a thing to people, you know, but the balance... But then you still need the ability to coordinate, because that's the issue when something is too, you know, that's really, to me, like the culture wars, the bigger war we're dealing with is actually between the sort of the, I don't know what even the term is for it, but like centralization versus decentralization. That's the tension we're seeing. Power in control by a few versus completely distributed. And the trouble is if you have a fully centralized thing, then you're at risk of tyranny, you know, Stalin type things can happen, or completely distributed. Now you're at risk of complete anarchy and chaos but you can't even coordinate to like on, you know, when there's like a pandemic or anything like that. So it's like, what is the right balance to strike between these two structures? Can't Moloch really take hold in a fully decentralized system? That's one of the dangers too. Yes, very vulnerable to Moloch. So a dictator can commit huge atrocities, but they can also make sure the infrastructure works and trains run on time. They have that God's eye view at least. They have the ability to create like laws and rules that like force coordination, which stops Moloch. But then you're vulnerable to that dictator getting infected with like this, with some kind of psychopathy type thing. What's reverse Moloch? Sorry, great question. So that's where, so I've been working on this series. It's been driving me insane for the last year and a half. I did the first one a year ago. I can't believe it's nearly been a year. The second one, hopefully will be coming out in like a month. And my goal at the end of the series is to like present, cause basically I'm painting the picture of like what Moloch is and how it's affecting almost all these issues in our society and how it's driving. It's like kind of the generator function as people describe it of existential risk. And then at the end of that. Wait, wait, the generator function of existential risk. So you're saying Moloch is sort of the engine that creates a bunch of X risks. Yes, not all of them. Like a, you know, a. Just a cool phrase, generator function. It's not my phrase. It's Daniel Schmacktenberger. Oh, Schmacktenberger. I got that from him. Of course. All things, it's like all roads lead back to Daniel Schmacktenberger, I think. The dude is, the dude is brilliant. He's really brilliant. After that it's Mark Twain. But anyway, sorry. Totally rude interruptions from me. No, it's fine. So not all X risks. So like an asteroid technically isn't because it's, you know, it's just like this one big external thing. It's not like a competition thing going on. But, you know, synthetic bio, you know, bio weapons, that's one because everyone's incentivized to build, even for defense, you know, bad, bad viruses, you know, just to threaten someone else, et cetera. Or AI, technically the race to AGI is kind of potentially a Molochi situation. But yeah, so if Moloch 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 Winwin. Because Moloch is the God of lose, lose, ultimately. It masquerades as the God of win, lose, but in reality it's lose, lose. Everyone ends up worse off. So I was like, well, what's the opposite of that? It's Winwin. And I was thinking for ages, like, what's a good name for this character? And then tomorrow I was like, okay, well, don't try and, you know, think through it logically. What's the vibe of Winwin? And to me, like in my mind, Moloch is like, and I addressed that 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. So Winwin is kind of actually like these colors. It's like purple, turquoise. 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, whereby its externalities can be controlled and kept positive. And then beyond that, it also loves cooperation, coordination, love, all these other things. But it's also kind of like mischievous, like, you know, it will have a good time. It's not like kind of like boring, you know, like, oh God, it knows how to have fun. It can get like, it can get down, but ultimately it's like unbelievably wise and it just wants the game to keep going. And I call it Winwin. That's a good like pet name, Winwin. I think the, Winwin, right? And I think it's formal name when it has to do like official functions is Omnia. Omnia. Yeah. From like omniscience kind of, why Omnia? You just like Omnia? She's like Omniwin. Omniwin. But I'm open to suggestions. I would like, you know, and this is. I like Omnia. Yeah. But there is an angelic kind of sense to Omnia though. So Winwin is more fun. So it's more like, it embraces the fun aspect. The fun aspect. I mean, there is something about sort of, there's some aspect to Winwin interactions that requires embracing the chaos of the game and enjoying the game itself. I don't know. I don't know what that is. That's almost like a Zen like appreciation of the game itself, not optimizing for the consequences of the game. Right, well, it's recognizing the value of competition in of itself about, it's not like about winning. It's about you enjoying the process of having a competition and not knowing whether you're gonna 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 reason why Moloch is doing so well now in our society, in our civilization is because we haven't been able to ring fence competition. You know, and so it's just having all these negative externalities and it's, we've completely lost control of it. You know, it's, I think my guess is, and now we're getting really like, you know, metaphysical technically, but I think we'll be in a more interesting universe if we have one that has both pure cooperation, you know, lots of cooperation and some pockets of competition than one that's purely competition, cooperation entirely. Like it's good to have some little zero sumness bits, but I don't know that fully and I'm not qualified as a philosopher to know that. And that's what reverse Moloch, so this kind of win, win creature is a system, is an antidote to the Moloch system. Yes. And I don't know how it's gonna do that. But it's good to kind of try to start to formulate different ideas, different frameworks of how we think about that. Exactly. At the small scale of a collection of individuals and a large scale of a society. Exactly. It's a meme, I think it's an example of a good meme. And I'm open, I'd love to hear feedback from people if they think it's, you know, they have a better idea or it's not, you know, but it's the direction of memes that we need to spread, this idea of like, look for the win, wins in life. Well, on the topic of beauty filters, so in that particular context where Moloch creates negative consequences, 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 sweetness of its fruit or the value of its lumber. It's this entirety of it that is, there's these immeasurable qualities, it's like almost like a qualia of it. That's both, like it walks this fine line between pattern, well, it's got lots of patternicity, but it's not overly predictable. Again, it walks this fine line between order and chaos. It's a very highly complex system. It's evolving over time, the definition of a complex versus, and this is another Schmackt and Berger thing, a complex versus a complicated system. A complicated system can be sort of broken down into bits and pieces, a complicated system can be sort of broken down into bits, understood and then put back together. A complex system is kind of like a black box. It does all this crazy stuff, but if you take it apart, you can't put it back together again, because there's all these intricacies. And also very importantly, 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 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. And this takes us back to dating sites and Goodreads, I think. Very good question. I mean, well, I know what it shouldn't do. It shouldn't try and like, right now, you know, I was talking to like a social media expert recently, because I was like, oh, I hate that. There's such a thing as a social media expert? Oh, yeah, there are like agencies out there that you can like outsource, because I'm thinking about working with one to like, I want to start a podcast. You should, you should have done it a long time ago. Working on it. It's going to be called Win Win. And it's going to be about this like positive sum stuff. And the thing that, you know, they always come back and say, is like, well, you need to like figure out what your thing is. You know, you need to narrow down what your thing is and then just follow that. Have like a sort of a formula, because that's what people want. They want to know that they're coming back to the same thing. And that's the advice on YouTube, Twitter, you name it. And that's why, and the trouble with that is that it's a complexity reduction. And generally speaking, you know, complexity reduction is bad. It's making things more, it's an oversimplification. Not that simplification is always a bad thing. But when you're trying to take, you know, what is social media doing? It's trying to like encapsulate the human experience and put it into digital form and commodify it to an extent. That, so you do that, you compress people down into these like narrow things. And that's why I think it's kind of ultimately fundamentally incompatible with at least my definition of beauty. It's interesting because there is some sense in which a simplification sort of in the Einstein kind of sense of a really complex idea, a simplification in a way that still captures some core power of an idea of a person is also beautiful. And so maybe it's possible for social media to do that. A presentation, a sort of a slither, a slice, a look into a person's life that reveals something real about them. But in a simple way, in a way that can be displayed graphically or through words. Some way, I mean, in some way Twitter can do that kind of thing. A very few set of words can reveal the intricacies of a person. Of course, the viral machine that spreads those words often results in people taking the thing out of context. People often don't read tweets in the context of the human being that wrote them. The full history of the tweets they've written, the education level, the humor level, the world view they're playing around with, all that context is forgotten and people just see the different words. So that can lead to trouble. But in a certain sense, if you do take it in context, it reveals some kind of quirky little beautiful idea or a profound little idea from that particular person that shows something about that person. So in that sense, Twitter can be more successful if we're talking about Mollux is driving a better kind of incentive. Yeah, I mean, how they can, like if we were to rewrite, is there a way to rewrite the Twitter algorithm so that it stops being the fertile breeding ground of the culture wars? Because that's really what it is. I mean, maybe I'm giving it, Twitter too much power, but just the more I looked into it and I had conversations with Tristan Harris 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 and the angriest most divisive takes and amplifies them. And then the media, the mainstream media, because all the journalists are also on Twitter, they then are informed by that. And so they draw out the stories they can from this already like very boiling lava of rage and then spread that to their millions and millions of people who aren't even on Twitter. And so I honestly, I think if I could press a button, turn them off, I probably would at this point, because I just don't see a way of being compatible with healthiness, but that's not gonna happen. And so at least one way to like stem the tide and make it less malachy would be to change, at least if like it was on a subscription model, then it's now not optimizing for impressions. Cause basically what it wants is for people to keep coming back as often as possible. That's how they get paid, right? Every time an ad gets shown to someone and the way is to get people constantly refreshing their feed. So you're trying to encourage addictive behaviors. Whereas if someone, if they moved on to at least a subscription model, then they're getting the money either way, whether someone comes back to the site once a month or 500 times a month, they get the same amount of money. So now that takes away that incentive, to use technology, to build, to design an algorithm that is maximally addictive. That would be one way, for example. Yeah, but you still want people to, yeah, I just feel like that just slows down, creates friction in the virality of things. But that's good. We need to slow down virality. It's good, it's one way. Virality is malach, to be clear. So malach is always negative then? Yes, by definition. Yes. Competition is not always negative. Competition is neutral. I disagree with you that all virality is negative then, is malach then. Because it's a good intuition, because we have a lot of data on virality being negative. But I happen to believe that the core of human beings, so most human beings want to be good more than they want to be bad to each other. And so I think it's possible, it might be just harder to engineer systems that enable virality, but it's possible to engineer systems that are viral that enable virality. And the kind of stuff that rises to the top is things that are positive. And positive, not like la la positive, it's more like win win, meaning a lot of people need to be challenged. Wise things, yes. You grow from it, it might challenge you, you might not like it, but you ultimately grow from it. And ultimately bring people together as opposed to tear them apart. I deeply want that to be true. And I very much agree with you that people at their core are on average good, care for each other, as opposed to not. Like I think it's actually a very small percentage of people are truly 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, they're just stuck in this badly designed system. That said, the current structure, yes, is the current structure means that virality is optimized towards Moloch. That doesn't mean there aren't exceptions. Sometimes positive stories do go viral and I think we should study them. I think there should be a whole field of study into understanding, identifying memes that above a certain threshold of the population agree is a positive, happy, bringing people together meme. The kind of thing that brings families together that would normally argue about cultural stuff at the table, at the dinner table. Identify those memes and figure out what it was, what was the ingredient that made them spread that day. And also like not just like happiness and connection between humans, but connection between humans in other ways that enables like productivity, like cooperation, solving difficult problems and all those kinds of stuff. So it's not just about let's be happy and have a fulfilling lives. It's also like, let's build cool shit. Let's get excited. Which is the spirit of collaboration, which is deeply anti Moloch, right? That's, it's not using competition. It's like, Moloch hates collaboration and coordination and people working together. And that's, again, like the internet started out as that and it could have been that, but because of the way it was sort of structured in terms of, you know, very lofty ideal, they wanted everything to be open source, 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 economics system. And so the way they did that was through third party advertisement. But that meant that things were very decoupled. You know, you've got this third party interest, which means that you're then like, people having to optimize for that. And that is, you know, the actual consumer is actually the product, not the person you're making the thing for. In the end, you start making the thing for the advertiser. And so that's why it then like breaks down. Yeah, like it's, there's no clean solution to this. And I, it's a really good suggestion by you actually to like figure out how we can optimize virality for positive sum topics. I shall be the general of the love bot army. Distributed. Distributed, distributed, no, okay, yeah. The power, just even in saying that, the power already went to my head. No, okay, you've talked about quantifying your thinking. We've been talking about this, sort of a game theoretic view on life and putting probabilities behind estimates. Like if you think about different trajectories you can take through life, just actually analyzing life in game theoretic way, like your own life, like personal life. I think you've given an example that you had an honest conversation with Igor about like, how long is this relationship 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 a probabilistic terms. Can you speak to that kind of way of reasoning, the good and the bad of that? Can you do this kind of thing with human relations? Yeah, so the scenario you're talking about, it was like. Yeah, tell me about that scenario. Yeah, I think it was about a year into our relationship and we were having a fairly heavy conversation because we were trying to figure out whether or not I was gonna sell my apartment. Well, you know, he had already moved in, but I think we were just figuring out what like our longterm plans would be. We should be by a place together, et cetera. When you guys are having that conversation, are you like drunk out of your mind on wine or is he sober and you're actually having a serious? I think we were sober. How do you get to that conversation? Because most people are kind of afraid to have that kind of serious conversation. Well, so our relationship was very, well, first of all, we were good friends for a couple of years before we even got romantic. And when we did get romantic, it was very clear that this was a big deal. It wasn't just like another, it wasn't a random thing. So the probability of it being a big deal was high. It 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 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 that's the down the line, yes, throw them up. I just rudely interrupt. That was fine. And so, you know, we'd been about together for a year and things were good and we were having this hard conversation 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, ooh, ooh, interesting. And then we were like, actually wait, before you said out loud, let's both write down our predictions formally because we'd been like, we're just getting into like effective altruism and rationality at the time, which is all about making formal predictions as a means of measuring your own, well, 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. And I remember like having this moment of like, ooh, because for the 10 year one, I was like, well, I mean, I love him a lot, but like a lot can happen in 10 years, and we've only been together for, so I was like, I think it's over 50%, but it's definitely not 90%. And I remember like wrestling, I was like, oh, but I don't want him to be hurt. I don't want him to, I don't want to give a number lower than his. And I remember thinking, I was like, ah, ah, don't game it. This is an exercise in radical honesty. So just give your real percentage. And I think mine was like 75%. And then we showed each other and luckily we were fairly well aligned. And, but honestly, even if we weren't. 20%. Huh? 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 have, he's just kind of like a water off a duck's back type of guy. It'd be like, okay, well, all right, we'll figure this out. Well, did you guys provide error bars on the estimate? Like the level of uncertainty? They came built in. We didn't give formal plus or minus error bars. Well, not even that, but it's just like so much information, really high quality information, you know, it's now in digital format online. Yeah, but they're not, they are using that, but you know, college is still very, there's a curriculum. I mean, so much of school is about rigorous study of a subject and still on YouTube, that's not there. Right. YouTube has, YouTube has, Grant Sanderson talks about this. He's this math... 3Blue1Brown. Yeah, 3Blue1Brown. He says like, I'm not a math teacher. I just take really cool concepts and I inspire people. But if you wanna really learn calculus, if you wanna really learn linear algebra, you should do the textbook. You should do that, you know. And there's still the textbook industrial complex that like charges like $200 for textbook and somehow, I don't know, it's ridiculous. Well, they're like, oh, sorry, new edition, edition 14.6. Sorry, you can't use 14.5 anymore. It's like, what's different? We've got one paragraph different. So we mentioned offline, Daniel Negrano. I'm gonna get a chance to talk to him on this podcast. And he's somebody that I found fascinating in terms of the way he thinks about poker, verbalizes the way he thinks about poker, the way he plays poker. So, and he's still pretty damn good. He's been good for a long time. So you mentioned that people are running these kinds of simulations and the game of poker has changed. Do you think he's adapting in this way? Like the top pros, do they have to adopt this way? Or is there still like over the years, you basically develop this gut feeling about, like you get to be like good the way, like alpha zero is good. You look at the board and somehow from the fog comes out the right answer. Like this is likely what they have. This is likely the best way to move. And you don't really, you can't really put a finger on exactly why, but it just comes from your gut feeling. Or no? Yes and no. So gut feelings are definitely very important. You know, that we've got our two, 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 one, your gut intuition. And historically in poker, the very best players were playing almost entirely by their gut. You know, often they do some kind of inspired play and you'd ask them why they do it and they wouldn't really be able to explain it. And that's not so much because their process was unintelligible, but it was more just because no one had the language with which to describe what optimal strategies were because no one really understood how poker worked. This was before, you know, we had analysis software. You know, no one was writing, I guess some people would write down their hands in a little notebook, but there was no way to assimilate all this data and analyze it. But then, you know, when computers became cheaper and software started emerging, and then obviously online poker, where it would like automatically save your hand histories. Now, all of a sudden you kind of had this body of data that you could run analysis on. And so that's when people started to see, you know, these mathematical solutions. And so what that meant is the role of intuition essentially became smaller. And it went more into, as we talked before about, you know, this game theory optimal style. But also, as I said, like game theory optimal is about loss minimization and being unexploitable. But if you're playing against people who aren't, because no person, no human being can play perfectly game theory optimal in poker, not even the best AIs. They're still like, you know, they're 99.99% of the way there or whatever, but it's kind of like the speed of light. You can't reach it perfectly. So there's still a role for intuition? Yes, so when, yeah, when you're playing this unexploitable style, but when your opponents start doing something, you know, suboptimal that you want to exploit, well, now that's where not only your like logical brain will need to be thinking, well, okay, I know I have this, I'm in the sort of top end of my range here with this hand. So that means I need to be calling X percent of the time and I put them on this range, et cetera. But then sometimes you'll have this gut feeling that will tell you, you know what, this time, I know mathematically I'm meant to call now. You know, I'm in the sort of top end of my range and this is the odds I'm getting. So the math says I should call, but there's something in your gut saying, they've got it this time, they've got it. Like they're beating you, your hand is worse. So then the real art, this is where the last remaining art in poker, the fuzziness is like, do you listen to your gut? How do you quantify the strength of it? Or can you even quantify the strength of it? And I think that's what Daniel has. I mean, I can't speak for how much he's studying with the simulators and that kind of thing. I think he has, like he must be to still be keeping up. But he has an incredible intuition for just, he's seen so many hands of poker in the flesh. He's seen so many people, the way they behave when the chips are, you know, when the money's on the line and he'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. And just like the subtlety. So he's like, he's probing constantly. Yeah, he's probing and he's getting this extra layer of information that others can't. Now that said though, he's good online as well. You know, I don't know how, again, would he be beating the top cash game players online? Probably not, no. But when he's in person and he's got that additional layer of information, he can not only extract it, but he knows what to do with it still so well. There's one player who I would say is the exception to all of this. And he's one of my favorite people to talk about in terms of, I think he might have cracked the simulation. It's Phil Helmuth. He... In more ways than one, he's cracked the simulation, I think. Yeah, he somehow to this day is still and I love you Phil, I'm not in any way knocking you. He is still winning so much at the World Series of Poker specifically. He's now won 16 bracelets. The next nearest person I think has won 10. And he is consistently year in, year out going deep or winning these huge field tournaments, you know, with like 2000 people, which statistically he should not be doing. And yet you watch some of the plays he makes and they make no sense, like mathematically, they are so far from game theory optimal. And the thing is, if you went and stuck him in one of these high 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, amongst sort of amateurish players, he gets them to do crazy shit like that. And, but my little pet theory is that also, he just, the card, he's like a wizard and he gets the cards to do what he needs them to. Because he just expects to win and he expects to receive, you know, to get flopper set with a frequency far beyond what the real percentages are. And I don't even know if he knows what the real percentages are, he doesn't need to, because he gets 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. He's like annoyed and it's almost like everybody else is stupid because he was obviously going to win with the spare. If that silly thing hadn't happened. And it's like, you don't understand, the silly thing happens 99% of the time. And it's a 1%, not the other way around, but genuinely for his lived experience at the World Series, only at the World Series of Poker, it is like that. So I don't blame him for feeling that way. But he does, he has this X factor and the poker community has tried for years to rip him down saying like, he's no good, but he's clearly good because he's still winning or there's something going on. Whether that's he's figured out how to mess with the fabric of reality and how cards, a randomly shuffled deck of cards come out. I don't know what it is, but he's doing it right still. Who do you think is the greatest of all time? Would you put Hellmuth? Not Hellmuth definitely, he seems like the kind of person when mentioned he would actually watch this. So you might wanna be careful. Well, as I said, I love Phil and I have, I would say this to his face, I'm not saying anything. I don't, he's got, he truly, I mean, he is one of the greatest. I don't know if he's the greatest, he's certainly the greatest at the World Series of Poker. And he is the greatest at, despite the game switching into a pure game, almost an entire game of math, he has managed to keep the magic alive. And this like, 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 might be something to be said about optimality from studying him. What do you mean by optimality? Meaning, or rather game design, perhaps. Meaning if what he's doing is working, maybe poker is more complicated than the one we're currently modeling it as. So like his, yeah. Or there's an extra layer, and I don't mean to get too weird and wooey, but, or there's an extra layer of ability I didn't draw any or anything like that. Well, I guess that's the question I have is, did you feel informed enough to make such decisions? Cause like, I feel like if you were, if I were to do this kind of thing rigorously, I would want some data. I would want to set one of the assumptions you have is you're not that different from other relationships. Right. And so I want to have some data about the way. You want the base rates. Yeah, and also actual trajectories of relationships. I would love to have 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 informative is your past to your future? That's the whole thing. Like can you look at my life and have a good prediction about in terms of my characteristics and my relationships, what that's going to look like in the future or not? I don't even know the answer to that question. I'll be very ill informed in terms of making the probability. I would be far, yeah, I just would be under informed. I would be under informed. I'll be over biasing to my prior experiences, I think. Right, but as long as you're aware of that and you're honest with yourself, and you're honest with the other person, say, look, I have really wide error bars on this for the following reasons, that's okay. I still think it's better than not trying to quantify it at all. If you're trying to make really major irreversible life decisions. And I feel also the romantic nature of that question for me personally, I try to live my life thinking it's very close to 100%. Like, allowing myself actually the, this is the difficulty of this is allowing myself to think differently, I feel like has a psychological consequence. That's where that, that's one of my pushbacks against radical honesty is this one particular perspective. So you're saying you would rather give a falsely high percentage to your partner. Going back to the wide sage filth. In order to sort of create this additional optimism. Helmuth. Yes. Of fake it till you make it. The positive, the power of positive thinking. Hashtag positivity. Yeah, hashtag, it's with a hashtag. Well, so that, and this comes back to this idea of useful fictions, right? And I agree, I don't think there's a clear answer to this. And I think it's actually quite subjective. Some people this works better for than others. You know, to be clear, Igor and I weren't doing this formal prediction in it. Like we did it with very much tongue in cheek. It wasn't like we were going to make, I don't think it even would have drastically changed what we decided to do even. We kind of just did it more as a fun exercise. For the consequence of that fun exercise, you really actually kind of, there was a deep honesty to it. Exactly, it was a deep, and it was, yeah, 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 it's also what was interesting was I got to like check in with 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 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 that I appreciate a lot of people find quite strange. And I think it was somewhat unique in our relationship that both of us are very, we both love numbers, we both love statistics, we're both poker players. So this was kind of like our safe space anyway. For others, one partner really might not like that kind of stuff at all, in which case this is not a good exercise to do. I don't recommend it to everybody. But I do think there's, it's interesting sometimes to poke holes in the probe at these things that we consider so sacred that we can't try to quantify them, which is interesting because that's in tension with 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. And perhaps something shouldn't be tried to measure, maybe it's wrong to completely try and value the utilitarian, put a utilitarian frame of measuring the utility of a tree in its entirety. I don't know, maybe we should, maybe we shouldn't. I'm ambivalent on that. But overall, people have too many biases. People are overly biased against trying to do like a quantified cost benefit analysis on really tough life decisions. They're like, oh, just go with your gut. It's like, well, sure, but guts, our intuitions are best suited for things that we've got tons of experience in, then we can really, you don't trust on it. If it's a decision we've made many times, but if it's like, should I marry this person or should I buy this house over that house? You only make those decisions a couple of times in your life, maybe. Well, I would love to know, there's a balance, probably is a personal balance to strike is the amount of rationality you apply to a question versus the useful fiction, the fake it till you make it. For example, just talking to soldiers in Ukraine, you ask them, what's the probability of you winning, Ukraine winning? Almost everybody I talk to is 100%. Wow. And you listen to the experts, right? They say all kinds of stuff. Right. They are, first of all, the morale there is higher than probably enough. I've never been to a war zone before this, but I've read about many wars and I think the morale in Ukraine is higher than almost any war I've read about. It's every single person in the country is proud to fight for their country. Wow. Everybody, not just soldiers, not everybody. Why do you think that is? Specifically more than in other wars? I think because there's perhaps a dormant desire for the citizens of this country to find the identity of this country because it's been going through this 30 year process of different factions and political bickering and they haven't had, as they talk about, they haven't had their independence war. They say all great nations have had an independence war. They had to fight for their independence, for the discovery of the identity of the core of the ideals that unify us and they haven't had that. There's constantly been factions, there's been divisions, there's been pressures from empires, from 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 gonna 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 that are feisty in their pride of being the citizens of that nation. Ukraine is that, Poland was that. You just look at history. In certain countries, you do not want to occupy. I mean, both Stalin and Hitler talked about Poland in this way, they're like, this is a big problem if we occupy this land for prolonged periods of time. They're gonna be a pain in their ass. They're not going to want to be occupied. And certain other countries are pragmatic. They're like, well, leaders come and go. I guess this is good. Ukraine just doesn't have, Ukrainians, throughout the 20th century, don't seem to be the kind of people that just sit calmly and let the quote unquote occupiers impose their rules. That's interesting though, because you said it's always been under conflict and leaders have come and gone. So you would expect them to actually be the opposite under that like reasoning. Well, because it's a very fertile land, it's great for agriculture. So a lot of people want to, I mean, I think they've developed this culture because they've constantly been occupied by different people for the 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 against the man, against the imposition of rules, against oppression and all that kind of stuff, and that stays with them. So there's a will there, but a lot of other aspects are also part of it that has to do with the reverse Mollet kind of situation where social media has definitely played a part of it. Also different charismatic individuals have had to play a part. The fact that the president of the nation, Zelensky, stayed in Kiev during the invasion is a huge inspiration to them because most leaders, as you can imagine, when the capital of the nation is under attack, the wise thing, the smart thing that the United States advised Zelensky to do is to flee and to be the leader of the nation from a distant place. He said, fuck that, I'm staying put. Everyone around him, there was a pressure to leave and he didn't, and those singular acts really can unify a nation. There's a lot of people that criticize Zelensky within Ukraine. Before the war, he was very unpopular, even still, but they put that aside, especially that singular act of staying in the capital. Yeah, a lot of those kinds of things come together to create something within people. These things always, of course, though, how zoomed out of a view do you wanna take? Because, yeah, you describe it, it's like an anti Moloch 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 gonna play out, right? But if you zoom it out from a level, on a global level, they're coming together to fight that, that could make a conflict larger. You know what I mean? I don't know what the right answer is here. It seems like a good thing that they came together, but we don't know how this is all gonna play out. If this all turns into nuclear war, we'll be like, okay, that was the bad, that was the... Oh yeah, so I was describing the reverse Moloch for the local level. Exactly, yes. Now, this is where the experts come in and they say, well, if you channel most of the resources of 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 the early days of a world war, if we don't play this correctly. Yes, and we need cool heads from our leaders. So from Ukraine's perspective, Ukraine needs to win the war because what does winning the war mean is coming to peace negotiations, an agreement that guarantees no more invasions. And then you make an agreement about what land belongs to who. And that's, you stop that. And basically from their perspective is you want to demonstrate to the rest of the world who's watching carefully, including Russia and China and different players on the geopolitical stage, that this kind of conflict is not going to be productive if you engage in it. So you want to teach everybody a lesson, let's not do World War III. It's gonna be bad for everybody. And so it's a lose, lose. It's a deep lose, lose. Doesn't matter. And I think that's actually a correct, when I zoom out, I mean, 99% of what I think about is just individual human beings and human lives and just that war is horrible. But when you zoom out 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 human civilization will define whether we do or don't have a World War III. How we discuss war, how we discuss nuclear war, the kind of leaders we elect and prop up, the kind of memes we circulate, because you have to be very careful when you're being pro Ukraine, for example, you have to realize that you're being, you are also indirectly feeding the ever increasing military industrial complex. So you have to be extremely careful that when you say pro Ukraine or pro anybody, you're pro human beings, not pro the machine that creates narratives that says it's pro human beings. But it's actually, if you look at the raw use of funds and resources, it's actually pro making weapons and shooting bullets and dropping bombs. 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 there isn't justification for small local scenarios, adversarial conflicts. If you have a leader who is starting wars, they're on the side of team war, basically. It's not that they're on the side of team country, whatever that country is, it's they're on the side of team war. So that needs to be stopped and put down. But you also have to find a way that your corrective measure doesn't actually then end up being coopted by the war machine and creating greater war. Again, the playing field is finite. The scale of conflict is now getting so big that the weapons that can be used are so mass destructive that we can't afford another giant conflict. We 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, let's go. Going down a dark path, huh? It's good, but no, well, no, it's a dark. No, it's like, well, while we're in the somber place, we might as well. Some of my best friends are dark paths. What worries you most? We mentioned asteroids, we mentioned AGI, nuclear weapons. The one that's on my mind the most, mostly because I think it's the one where we have actually a real chance to move the needle on in a positive direction or more specifically, stop some really bad things from happening, really dumb, avoidable things is bio risks. In what kind of bio risks? There's so many fun options. So many, so of course, we have natural risks from natural pandemics, naturally occurring viruses or pathogens, and then also as time and technology goes on and technology becomes more and more democratized and into the hands of more and more people, the risk of synthetic pathogens. And whether or not you fall into the camp of COVID was gain of function accidental lab leak or whether it was purely naturally occurring, either way, we are facing a future where synthetic pathogens or like human meddled with pathogens either accidentally get out or get into the hands of bad actors who, whether they're omnicidal maniacs, you know, either way. And so that means we need more robustness for that. And you would think that us having this nice little dry run, which is what as awful as COVID was, and all those poor people that died, it was still like child's play compared to what a future one could be in terms of fatality rate. And so you'd think that we would then be coming, we'd be much more robust in our pandemic preparedness. And meanwhile, the budget in the last two years for the US, sorry, they just did this, I can't remember the name of what the actual budget was, but it was like a multi trillion dollar budget that the US just set aside. And originally in that, you know, considering that COVID cost multiple trillions to the economy, right? The original allocation in this new budget for future pandemic preparedness was 60 billion, so tiny proportion of it. That's proceeded to get whittled down to like 30 billion, to 15 billion, all the way down to 2 billion out of multiple trillions. For a thing that has just cost us multiple trillions, we've just finished, we're barely even, we're not even really out of it. It basically got whittled down to nothing because for some reason people think that, oh, all right, we've got the pandemic, out of the way, that was that one. And the reason for that is that people are, and I say this with all due respect to a lot of the science community, but there's an immense amount of naivety about, they think that nature is the main risk moving forward, and it really isn't. And I think nothing demonstrates this more than this project that I was just reading about that's sort of being proposed right now called Deep Vision. And the idea is to go out into the wilds, and we're not talking about just like 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, try and find these, bring samples of them back to laboratories. And again, whether you think COVID was a lab leak or not, I'm not gonna 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's just, people should go and just read it. It's like a comedy show of just how many they are, how leaky these labs are, even when they do their best efforts. So bring these things then back to civilization. That's step one of the badness. Then the next step would be to then categorize them, do experiments on them and categorize them by their level of potential. And then the piece de resistance on this plan is to then publish that information freely on the internet about all these pathogens, including their genome, which is literally like the building instructions of how to do them on the internet. And this is something that genuinely, a pocket of the 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 it might buy us some time to develop the vaccines, which, okay, sure, maybe would have made sense prior to mRNA technology, but you know, like they, mRNA, we can develop a vaccine now when we find a new pathogen within a couple of days. Now then there's all the trials and so on. Those trials would have to happen anyway, in the case of a brand new thing. So you're saving maybe a couple of days. So that's the upside. Meanwhile, the downside is you're not only giving, you're not only giving the vaccine, 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. And in some cases they think that killing it themselves is like a noble cause. And you're literally giving them the building blocks of how to do this. It's the most batshit idea I've ever heard. Like on expectation, it's probably like minus EV of like multiple billions of lives if they actually succeeded in doing this. Certainly in the tens or hundreds of millions. So the cost benefit is so unbelievably, it makes no sense. And I was trying to wrap my head around like 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. I think it's that people don't, the proponents, they're actually overly naive about the interactions of humanity. And well, like there are bad actors who will use this for bad things. Because not only will it, if you publish this information, even if a bad actor couldn't physically make it themselves, which given in 10 years time, like the technology is getting cheaper and easier to use. But even if they couldn't make it, they could now bluff it. Like what would you do if there's like some deadly new virus that we were published on the internet in terms of its building blocks? Kim Jong Un could be like, hey, if you don't let me build my nuclear weapons, I'm gonna release this, I've managed to build it. Well, now he's actually got a credible bluff. We don't know. And so that's, it's just like handing the keys, it's handing weapons of mass destruction to people. Makes no sense. The possible, I agree with you, but the possible world in which it might make sense is if the good guys, which is a whole nother problem, defining who the good guys are, but the good guys are like an order of magnitude higher competence. And so they can stay ahead of the bad actors by just being very good at the defense. By very good, not meaning like a little bit better, but an order of magnitude better. But of course the question is, in each of those individual disciplines, is that feasible? Can you, can the bad actors, even if they don't have the competence leapfrog to the place where the good guys are? Yeah, I mean, I would agree in principle with pertaining to this 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 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 there's the kind of secrecy where you don't give it to anybody, but there's a release where you incrementally give it to like major labs. So it's not public release, but it's like, you're giving it to major labs. Yeah, there's different layers of reasonability, but. But the problem there is it's going to, if you go anywhere beyond like complete secrecy, it's gonna leak. That's the thing, it's very hard to keep secrets. And so that's still. Information is. So you might as well release it to the public is that argument. So you either go complete secrecy or you release it to the public. So, which is essentially the same thing. It's going to leak anyway, if you don't do complete secrecy. Right, which is why you shouldn't get the information in the first place. Yeah, I mean, 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 B, 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 very right. We shouldn't even be, it should be forbidden to even like, think about that. Meaning don't collect, don't just even collect the information, but like, don't do, I mean, gain of function research is a really iffy area. Like you 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 that there's this like, naivety that's preventing people from even doing the cost benefit properly on a lot of the things because, you know, I get it. The science community, again, I don't want to bucket the science community, but like some people within the science community just think that everyone's good and everyone just cares about getting knowledge and doing the best for the world. And unfortunately, that's not the case. I wish we lived in that world, but we don't. Yeah, I mean, there's a lie. Listen, I've been criticizing the science community broadly quite a bit. There's so many brilliant people that brilliance is somehow a hindrance sometimes because it has a bunch of blind spots. And then you start to look at the history of science, how easily it's been used by dictators to any conclusion they want. And it's dark how you can use brilliant people that like playing the little game of science because it is a fun game. You know, you're building, you're going to conferences, you're building on top of each other's ideas, there's 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, oh, I came up with a pill that solves this problem and it's going to help a bunch of people. And I came up with a giant study that shows the exact probability it's going to help or not. And you get lost in this game and you forget to realize this game, just like Moloch, can have like... Unintended consequences. Yeah. Unintended consequences that might destroy human civilization. Right. Or divide human civilization or have dire geopolitical consequences. I mean, the effects of, I mean, it's just so... The most destructive effects of COVID have nothing to do with the biology of the virus, it seems like. I mean, I could just list them forever, but like one of them is the complete distress of public institutions. The other one is because of that public distress, I feel like if a much worse pandemic came along, we as a world have now cried wolf. And if an actual wolf now comes, people will be like, fuck masks, fuck... Fuck vaccines, yeah. Fuck everything. And they won't be... They'll distrust every single thing that any major institution is going to tell them. And... Because that's the thing, like there were certain actions made by certain health public figures where they told, they very knowingly told it was a white lie, it was intended in the best possible way, such as early on when there was clearly a shortage of masks. And so they said to the public, oh, don't get masks, there's no evidence that they work. Or don't get them, they don't work. In fact, it might even make it worse. You might even spread it more. Like that was the real like stinker. Yeah, no, no, unless you know how to do it properly, you're gonna make that you're gonna get sicker or you're more likely to catch the virus, which is just absolute crap. And they put that out there. And it's pretty clear the reason why they did that was because there was actually a shortage of masks and they really needed it for health workers, which makes sense. Like, I agree, like, you know, but the cost of lying to the public when that then comes out, people aren't as stupid as they think they are. And that's, I think where this distrust of experts has largely come from. A, they've lied to people overtly, but B, people have been treated like idiots. Now, that's not to say that there aren't a lot of stupid people who have a lot of wacky ideas around COVID and all sorts of things. But if you treat the general public like children, they're going to see that, they're going to notice that. And that is going to just like absolutely decimate the trust in the public institutions that we depend upon. And honestly, the best thing that could happen, I wish like if like Fauci or, you know, and these other like leaders who, I mean, God, I would, I can't imagine how nightmare his job has been for the last few years, hell on earth. Like, so, you know, I, you know, 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, cause I've like, I've lost trust in a lot of these things. But I'm fortunate that I at least know people who I can go to who I think are good, like have good epistemics on this stuff. But you know, if they, if they could sort of put their hands on my go, okay, these are the spots where we screwed up. This, this, this, this was our reasons. Yeah, we actually told a little white lie here. We did it for this reason. We're really sorry. Where they just did the radical honesty thing, the radical transparency thing, that would go so far to rebuilding public trust. And I think that's what needs to happen. Otherwise. I totally agree with you. Unfortunately, yeah, his job was very tough and all those kinds of things, but I see arrogance and arrogance prevented him from being honest in that way previously. And I think arrogance will prevent him from being honest in that way. Now we need leaders. I think young people are seeing that, that kind of talking down to people from a position of power, I hope is the way of the past. People really like authenticity and they like leaders that are like a man and a woman of the people. And I think that just. I mean, he still has a chance to do that, I think. I mean, I don't wanna, you know, I don't think, you know, if I doubt he's listening, but if he is like, hey, I think, you know, I don't think he's irredeemable by any means. I think there's, you know, I don't have an opinion whether there was arrogance or there or not. Just know that I think like coming clean on the, you know, it's understandable to have fucked up during this pandemic. Like I won't expect any government to handle it well because it was so difficult, like so many moving pieces, so much like lack of information and so on. But the step to rebuilding trust is to go, okay, look, we're doing a scrutiny of where we went wrong. And for my part, I did this wrong in this part. And that would be huge. All of us can do that. I mean, I was struggling for a while whether I want to talk to him or not. I talked to his boss, Francis Collins. Another person that's screwed up in terms of trust, lost a little bit of my respect too. There seems to have been a kind of dishonesty in the backrooms in that they didn't trust people to be intelligent. Like we need to tell them what's good for them. We know what's good for them. That kind of idea. To be fair, the thing that's, what's it called? I heard the phrase today, nut picking. Social media does that. So you've got like nitpicking. Nut picking is where the craziest, stupidest, you know, if you have a group of people, let's say people who are vaccine, I don't like the term anti vaccine, people who are vaccine hesitant, vaccine speculative. So what social media did or the media or anyone, their opponents would do is pick the craziest example. So the ones who are like, I think I need to inject myself with motor oil up my ass or something. Select the craziest ones and then have that beamed too. 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 too are gonna get the nuts portrayed to them. So they probably have a misrepresentation of what the actual public's intelligence is. Well, 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 mind, like to understand, to put into proper context. To realize that what you are seeing, social media is not anywhere near an accurate representation of humanity. Nut picking, and there's nothing wrong with putting motor oil up your ass. It's just one of the better aspects of, I do this every weekend. Okay. Where the hell did that analogy come from in my mind? Like what? I don't know. I think you need to, there's some Freudian thing you would need to deeply investigate with a therapist. Okay, what about AI? Are you worried about AGI, super intelligence systems or paperclip maximizer 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. And this, you know, because I spend all my time thinking about these molecule problems that, you know, what is the solution to them? What, 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 molecule thing or like provide the infrastructure or redesign the system so that it's not vulnerable to this molecule process. And in some ways, you know, that's the strongest argument to me for like the race to build AGI is that maybe, you know, we can't survive without it. But the flip side to that is the, the unfortunately now that there's multiple actors trying to build AI, AGI, you know, this was fine 10 years ago when it was just DeepMind, but then other companies started up and now it created a race dynamic. Now it's like, that's the whole thing. Is it the same, it's got the same problem. It's like whichever company is the one that like optimizes for speed at the cost of safety will get the competitive advantage. And so we're the more likely the ones to build the AGI, you know, and that's the same cycle that you're in. And there's no clear solution to that because you can't just go like slapping, if you go and try and like stop all the different companies, then it will, you know, the good ones will stop because they're the ones, you know, within the West's reach, but then that leaves all the other ones to continue and then they're even more likely. So it's like, it's a very difficult problem with no clean solution. And, you know, at the same time, you know, I know at least some of the folks at DeepMind and they're incredible and they're thinking about this. They're very aware of this problem. And they're like, you know, I think some of the smartest people on earth. Yeah, the culture is important there because they are thinking about that and they're some of the best machine learning engineers. So it's possible to have a company or a community of people that are both great engineers and are thinking about the philosophical topics. Exactly, and importantly, they're also game theorists, you know, and because this is ultimately a game theory problem, the thing, this Moloch mechanism and like, you know, how do we voice arms race scenarios? You need people who aren't naive to be thinking about this. And again, like luckily there's a lot of smart, non naive game theorists within that group. Yes, I'm concerned about it and I think it's again, a thing that we need people to be thinking about in terms of like, how do we create, how do we mitigate the arms race dynamics and how do we solve the thing of, Bostrom calls it the orthogonality problem whereby, because it's obviously there's a chance, you know, the belief, the hope is, is that you build something that's super intelligent and by definition of being super intelligent, it will also become super wise and have the wisdom to know what the right goals are. And hopefully those goals include keeping humanity alive. Right? But Bostrom says that actually those two things, you know, super intelligence and super wisdom aren't necessarily correlated. They're actually kind of orthogonal things. And how do we make it so that they are correlated? How do we guarantee it? Because we need it to be guaranteed really, to know that we're doing the thing safely. But I think that like merging of intelligence and wisdom, at least my hope is that this whole process happens sufficiently slowly that we're constantly having these kinds of debates that we have enough time to figure out how to modify each version of the system as it becomes more and more intelligent. Yes, buying time is a good thing, definitely. Anything that slows everything down. We just, everyone needs to chill out. We've got millennia to figure this out. Yeah. Or at least, at least, well, it depends. Again, some people think that, you know, we can't even make it through the next few decades without having some kind of omni wise coordination mechanism. And there's also an argument to that. Yeah, I don't know. Well, there is, I'm suspicious of that kind of thinking because it seems like the entirety of human history has people in it that are like predicting doom just around the corner. There's something about us that is strangely attracted to that thought. It's almost like fun to think about the destruction of everything. Just objectively speaking, I've talked and listened to a bunch of people and they are gravitating towards that. It's almost, I think it's the same thing that people love about conspiracy theories is they love to be the person that kind of figured out some deep fundamental thing 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. When in reality, most of us will be forgotten and life will go on. And 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 effects of a nuclear winter, people will still survive. Life will still go on. I mean, it depends on the kind of nuclear war. But in the case of nuclear war, it will still go on. That's one of the amazing things about life. It finds a way. And so in that sense, I just, I feel like the doom and gloom thing is a... 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 even have a slight feeling from the amount of time we spent in this conversation talking about this, because it's like, 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 weighed off with at least making people aware of the problem and gets them thinking. And I think particularly, the reason why I wanna talk about this to your audience is that on average, they're the type of people who gravitate towards these kinds of topics because they're intellectually curious and they can sort of sense that there's trouble brewing. They can smell that there's, I think there's a reason that people are thinking about this stuff a lot is because the probability, the probability, it's increased in probability over certainly over the last few years, trajectories have not gone favorably, let's put it since 2010. So it's right, I think, for people to be thinking about it, but that's where they're like, I think whether it's a useful fiction or whether it's actually true or whatever you wanna 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 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. I think there's something that really wants us to win. And it just, you just have to be like, just like kind of, okay, now I sound really crazy, but like open your heart to it a little bit 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 the solutions, but we can use that. There's like, there's hashtag positivity. There's value in that. Yeah, you have to kind of imagine all the destructive trajectories that lay in our future and then believe in the possibility of avoiding those trajectories. All while, you said audience, all while sitting back, which is majority, the two people that listen to this are probably sitting on a beach, smoking some weed, just, that's a beautiful sunset. They're looking at just the waves going in and out. And ultimately there's a kind of deep belief there in the momentum of humanity to figure it all out. But we've got a lot of work to do. Which is what makes this whole simulation, this video game kind of fun. This battle of polytopia, I still, man, I love those games so much. So good. And that one for people who don't know, Battle of Polytopia is a big, it's like a, is this really radical simplification of a civilization type of game. It still has a lot of the skill tree development, a lot of the strategy, but it's easy enough to play on a phone. Yeah. It's kind of interesting. They've really figured it out. It's one of the most elegantly designed games I've ever seen. It's incredibly complex. And yet being, again, it walks that line between complexity and simplicity in this really, really great way. And they use pretty colors that hack the dopamine reward circuits in our brains. Very well. 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. What's energy healing? I have in my notes, energy healing question mark. What's that about? Oh man. God, your audience is gonna think I'm mad. So the two crazy things that happened to me, the one was the voice in the head that said you're gonna win this tournament and then I won the tournament. The other craziest thing that's happened to me was in 2018, I started getting this like weird problem in my ear where it was kind of like low frequency sound distortion, where voices, particularly men's voices, became incredibly unpleasant to listen to. It would like create this, it would like be falsely amplified or something and it was almost like a physical sensation in my ear, which was really unpleasant. And 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 hearing in that ear. And in the end, I got, doctors said they think it was this thing called Meniere's disease, which is this very unpleasant disease where people basically end up losing their hearing, but they get this like, it often comes with like dizzy spells and other things because it's like the inner ear gets all messed up. Now, I don't know if that's actually what I had, but that's what at least a couple of, one doctor said to me. But anyway, so I'd had three months of this stuff, this going on and it was really getting me down. And I was at Burning Man of all places. I don't mean to be that person talking about Burning Man, but I was there. And again, I'd had it and I was unable to listen to music, which is not what you want because Burning Man is a very loud, intense place. And I was just having a really rough time. And on the final night, I get talking to this girl who's like a friend of a friend. And I mentioned, I was like, oh, I'm really down in the dumps about this. And she's like, oh, well, I've done a little bit of energy healing. Would you like me to have a look? And I was like, sure. Now this was again, deep, I was, you know, no time in my life for this. I didn't believe in any of this stuff. I was just like, it's all bullshit. It's all wooey nonsense. But I was like, sure, I'll have a go. And she starts like with her hand and she says, oh, there's something there. And then she leans in and she starts like sucking over my ear, not actually touching me, but like close to it, like with her mouth. And it was really unpleasant. I was like, whoa, can you stop? She's like, no, no, no, there's something there. I need to get it. And I was like, no, no, no, I really don't like it. Please, this is really loud. She's like, I need to just bear with me. And she does it. And I don't know how long, for a few minutes. And then she eventually collapses on the ground, like freezing cold, crying. And I'm just like, I don't know what the hell is going on. Like I'm like thoroughly freaked out as is everyone else watching. Just like, what the hell? And we like warm her up and she was like, oh, what, oh, you know, 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 just like that, you know, so I was so rattled, A, because the potential that actually I'd had something bad in me that made someone feel bad and that she was scared. That was what, you know, I was like, wait, I thought you do this, this is the thing. Now you're terrified. Like you bought like some kind of exorcism or something. Like what the fuck is going on? So it, like just the most insane experience. And frankly, it took me like a few months to sort of emotionally recover from it. But my ear problem went away about a couple of weeks later and touch wood, I've not had any issues since. So. That gives you like hints that maybe there's something out there. I mean, I don't, again, I don't have an explanation for this. The most probable explanation was, you know, I was a burning man, I was in a very open state. Let's just leave it at that. And, you know, placebo is an incredibly powerful thing and a very not understood thing. So. Almost assigning the word placebo to it reduces it down to a way that it doesn't deserve to be reduced down. Maybe there's a whole science of what we call placebo. Maybe there's a, placebo's a door. Self healing, you know? And I mean, I don't know what the problem was. Like I was told it was many years. I don't want to say I definitely had that because I don't want people to think that, oh, that's how, you know, if they do have that, because it's a terrible disease. And if they have that, that this is going to be a guaranteed way for it to fix it for them. I don't know. And I also don't, I don't, and you're absolutely right to say, like using even the word placebo is like, it comes with this like baggage of, 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. 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. And everything like that is bullshit. We know everything, we know, you know, the only way we can get through, we know how medicine works and its molecules and chemical interactions and that kind of stuff. And now it's like, okay, well, there's clearly more for us to understand. And that doesn't mean that it's ascientific as well, because, you know, the beauty of the scientific method is that it still can apply to this situation. Like, I don't see why, you know, I would like to try and test this experimentally. I haven't really, like, you know, I don't know how we would go about doing that. We'd have to find other people with the same condition, I guess, and like, try and repeat the experiment. But it doesn't, just because something happens that's sort of out of the realms of our current understanding, it doesn't mean that 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, because the scientific method is a process to carve away at the mystery all around us. And experiences like this is just a reminder that we're mostly shrouded in mystery still. That's it. It's just like a humility. Like, we haven't really figured this whole thing out. But at the same time, we have found ways to act, you know, we're clearly doing something right, because think of the technological scientific advancements, the knowledge that we have that would blow people's minds even from 100 years ago. Yeah, and we've even allegedly got out to space and landed on the moon, although I still haven't, I have not seen evidence of the Earth being round, but I'm keeping an open mind. Speaking of which, you studied physics and astrophysics, just to go to that, just to jump around through the fascinating life you've had, when did you, how did that come to be? Like, when did you fall in love with astronomy and space and things like this? As early as I can remember. I was very lucky that my mom, and my dad, but particularly my mom, my mom is like the most nature, she is Mother Earth, is the only way to describe her. Just, she's like Dr. Doolittle, animals flock to her and just like sit and look at her adoringly. As she sings. Yeah, she just is Mother Earth, and she has always been fascinated by, she doesn't have any, she never went to university or anything like that, she's actually phobic of maths, if I try and get her to like, you know, I was trying to teach her poker and she hated it. But she's so deeply curious, and that just got instilled in me when, you know, we would sleep out under the stars, whenever it was, you know, the two nights a year when it was warm enough in the UK to do that. And we would just lie out there until we fell asleep, looking at, looking for satellites, looking for shooting stars, and I was just always, I don't know whether it was from that, but I've always naturally gravitated to like the biggest, the biggest questions. And also the like, the most layers of abstraction I love, just like, what's the meta question? What's the meta question and so on. So I think it just came from that really. And then on top of that, like physics, you know, it also made logical sense in that it was a degree that, well, a subject that ticks the box of being, you know, answering these really big picture questions, but it was also extremely useful. It like has a very high utility in terms of, I didn't know necessarily, I thought I was gonna become like a research scientist. My original plan was, I wanna be a professional astronomer. So it's not just like a philosophy degree that asks the big questions, and it's not like biology and the path to go to medical school or something like that, which is all overly pragmatic, not overly, is very pragmatic, but this is, yeah, physics is a good combination of the two. Yeah, at least for me, it made sense. And I was good at it, I liked it. Yeah, I mean, it wasn't like I did an immense amount of soul searching to choose it or anything. It just was like this, it made the most sense. I mean, you have to make this decision in the UK age 17, which is crazy, because, you know, in US, you go the first year, you do a bunch of stuff, right? And then you choose your major. Yeah, I think the first few years of college, you focus on the drugs and only as you get closer to the end, do you start to think, oh shit, this wasn't about that. And I owe the government a lot of money. How many alien civilizations are out there? When you looked up at the stars with your mom and you were counting them, what's your mom think about the number of alien 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, she knows there's a huge number of potential spawn sites out there, so she would. Spawn sites? Spawn sites, yeah. You know, this is all spawn sites. Yeah, spawn sites in Polytopia. We spawned on Earth, you know, it's. Hmm, yeah, spawn sites. Why does that feel weird to say spawn? Because it makes me feel like there's only one source of life and it's spawning in different locations. That's why the word spawn. Because it feels like life that originated on Earth really originated here. Right, it is unique to this particular. Yeah, I mean, but I don't, in my mind, it doesn't exclude, you know, the completely different forms of life and different biochemical soups can't also spawn, but I guess it implies that there's some spark that is uniform, which I kind of like the idea of. And then I get to think about respawning, like after it dies, like what happens if life on Earth ends? Is it gonna restart again? Probably not, it depends. Maybe Earth is too. It depends on the type of, you know, what's the thing that kills it off, right? If it's a paperclip maximizer, not for the example, but, you know, some kind of very self replicating, high on the capabilities, very low on the wisdom type thing. So whether that's, you know, gray goo, green goo, you know, like nanobots or just a shitty misaligned AI that thinks it needs to turn everything into paperclips. You know, if it's something like that, then it's gonna be very hard for life, you know, complex life, because by definition, you know, a paperclip maximizer is the ultimate instantiation of molecule. Deeply low complexity, over optimization on a single thing, sacrificing everything else, turning the whole world into. Although something tells me, like if we actually take a paperclip maximizer, it destroys everything. It's a really dumb system that just envelops the whole of Earth. And the universe beyond, yeah. Oh, I didn't know that part, but okay, great. That's the thought experiment. So it becomes a multi planetary paperclip maximizer? Well, it just propagates. I mean, it depends whether it figures out how to jump the vacuum gap. But again, I mean, this is all silly because it's a hypothetical thought experiment, which I think doesn't actually have much practical application to the AI safety problem, but it's just a fun thing to play around with. But if by definition, it is maximally intelligent, which means it is maximally good at navigating the environment around it in order to achieve its goal, but extremely bad at choosing goals in the first place. So again, we're talking on this orthogonality thing, right? It's very low on wisdom, but very high on capability. Then it will figure out how to jump the vacuum gap between planets and stars and so on, and thus just turn every atom it gets its hands on into paperclips. Yeah, by the way, for people who don't. Which is maximum virality, by the way. That's what virality is. But does not mean that virality is necessarily all about maximizing paperclips. In that case, it is. So for people who don't know, this is just a thought experiment example of an AI system that'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 for the goal of producing a maximum number of paperclips. Okay. Or whatever its optimization function was that it was set at. But don't you think? It could be making, recreating Lexus. Maybe it'll tile the universe in Lex. Go on. I like this idea. No, I'm just kidding. That's better. That's more interesting than paperclips. That could be infinitely optimal if I were to say it to myself. But if you ask me, it's still a bad thing because it's permanently capping what the universe could ever be. It's like, that's its end state. Or achieving the optimal that the universe could ever achieve. But that's up to, different people have different perspectives. But don't you think within the paperclip world that would emerge, just like in the zeros and ones that make up a computer, that would emerge beautiful complexities? Like, it won't suppress, you know, as you scale to multiple planets and throughout, there'll emerge these little worlds that on top of the fabric of maximizing paperclips, there will be, that would emerge like little societies of paperclip. Well, then we're not describing a paperclip maximizer anymore. Because by the, like, if you think of what a paperclip is, it is literally just a piece of bent iron, right? So if it's maximizing that throughout the universe, it's taking every atom it gets its hand on into somehow turning it into iron or steel. And then bending it into that shape and then done and done. By definition, like paperclips, there is no way for, well, okay. So you're saying that paperclips somehow will just emerge and create through gravity or something. Well, no, no, no. Because there's a dynamic element to the whole system. It's not just, it's creating those paperclips and the act of creating, there's going to be a process. And that process will have a dance to it. Because it's not like sequential thing. There's a whole complex three dimensional system of paperclips, 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 paperclips are very string like, they can be interacting in very interesting ways as you scale exponentially through three dimensional. I mean, I'm sure the paperclip maximizer has to come up with a theory of everything. It has to create like wormholes, right? It has to break, like, 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. Well, he wrote a book on positivity and he's. He has, he did, not like a trolling book. No. He's just straight up, yeah. Phil Hellmuth wrote a book about positivity. Yes. Okay, not ironic. And I think it's about sort of manifesting what you want and getting the outcomes that you want by believing so much in yourself and in your ability to win, like eyes on the prize. And I mean, it's working. The man's delivered. But where do you put like Phil Ivey and all those kinds of people? I mean, I'm too, I've been, to be honest too much out of the scene for the last few years to really, I mean, Phil Ivey's clearly got, again, he's got that X factor. He's so incredibly intimidating to play against. I've only played against him a couple of times, but when he like looks you in the eye and you're trying to run a bluff on him, oof, no one's made me sweat harder than Phil Ivey, just my bluff got through actually. That was actually one of the most thrilling moments I've ever had in poker was, it was in a Monte Carlo in a high roller. I can't remember exactly what the hand was, but I, you know, a three bit and then like just barreled all the way through. And he just like put his laser eyes into me. And I felt like he was just scouring my soul. And I was just like, hold it together, Liv, hold it together. And he was like, folded. And you knew your hand was weaker. Yeah, I mean, I was bluffing. I presume, which, you know, there's a chance I was bluffing with the best hand, but I'm pretty sure my hand was worse. And he folded. I was truly one of the deep highlights of my career. Did you show the cards or did you fold? 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 just to flip the tables? Do you think about that kind of stuff? Or is it better not to reveal information? I mean, generally speaking, you want to not reveal information. You know, the goal of poker is to be as deceptive as possible about your own strategies while elucidating as much out of your opponent about their own. So giving them free information, particularly if they're people who you consider very good players, any information I give them is going into their little database and being, I assume it's going to be calculated and used well. So I have to be really confident that my like meta gaming that I'm going to then do, oh, they've seen this, so therefore that. I'm going to be on the right level. So it's better just to keep that little secret to myself in the moment. So how much is bluffing part of the game? Huge amount. So yeah, I mean, maybe actually let me ask, like, what did it feel like with Phil Ivey or anyone else when it's a high stake, when it's a big, it's a big bluff? So a lot of money on the table and maybe, I mean, what defines a big bluff? Maybe a lot of money on the table, but also some uncertainty in your mind and heart about like self doubt. Well, maybe I miscalculated 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, you know, in that scenario, you know, I think it was the first time I'd ever played a 20, I'd won my way into this 25K tournament. So that was the buy in 25,000 euros. And I had satelliteed my way in because it was much bigger than I would 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 Negronus, the Phil Ivey's and so on. And then to like, you know, each time you put the bets out, you know, you put another bet out, your card. Yeah, I was on what's called a semi bluff. So there were some cards that could come that would make my hand very, very strong and therefore win. But most of the time, those cards don't come. So that is a semi bluff because you're representing, are you representing that you already have something? So I think in this scenario, I had a flush draw. So I had two clubs, two clubs came out on the flop. And then I'm hoping that on the turn and the river, one will come. So I have some future equity. I could hit a club and then I'll have the best hand in which case, great. And so I can keep betting and I'll want them to call, but I'm also got the other way of winning the hand where if my card doesn't come, I can keep betting and get them to fold their hand. And I'm pretty sure that's what the scenario was. So I had some future equity, but it's still, you know, most of the time I don't hit that club. And so I would rather him just fold because I'm, you know, the pot is now getting bigger and bigger. And in the end, like I've jam all 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 was the first time I played one. So it was, it felt like the most momentous thing. And this was also when I was trying to build myself up at, you know, build my name, a name for myself in poker. I wanted to get respect. Destroy everything for you. It felt like it in the moment. Like, I mean, it literally does feel like a form of life and death. Like your body physiologically is having that flight or fight response. What are you doing with your body? What are you doing with your face? Are you just like, what are you thinking about? More of a mixture of like, okay, what are the cards? So in theory, I'm thinking about like, okay, what are cards that make my hand look stronger? Which cards hit my perceived range from his perspective? Which cards don't? What's the right amount of bet size to maximize my fold equity in this situation? 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 logical brain shuts off. And now it just gets into this like, just like, it feels like a game of wits, basically. It's like of nerve. Can you hold your resolve? And it certainly got by that, like by the river. I think by that point, I was like, I don't even know if this is a good bluff anymore, but fuck it, let's do it. Your mind is almost numb from the intensity of that feeling. I call it the white noise. And it happens in all kinds of decision making. I think anything that's really, really stressful. I can imagine someone in like an important job interview, if it's like a job they've always wanted, and they're getting grilled, you know, like Bridgewater style, where they ask these really hard, like mathematical questions. You know, it's a really learned skill to be able to like subdue your flight or fight response. You know, I think get from the sympathetic into the parasympathetic. So you can actually, you know, engage that voice in your head and do those slow logical calculations. Because evolutionarily, 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 react it. And physically, our bodies are well attuned to actually make right decisions. But when you're playing a game like poker, this is not something that you ever, you know, evolved to do. And yet you're in that same flight or fight response. And so that's a really important skill to be able to develop to basically learn how to like meditate in the moment and calm yourself so that you can think clearly. But as you were searching for a comparable thing, it's interesting because you just made me realize that bluffing is like an incredibly high stakes form of lying. You're lying. And I don't think you can. Telling a story. No, no, it's straight up lying. In the context of game, it's not a negative kind of lying. But it is, yeah, exactly. You're representing something that you don't have. And I was thinking like how often in life do we have such high stakes of lying? Because I was thinking certainly in high level military strategy, I was thinking when Hitler was lying to Stalin about his plans to invade the Soviet Union. And so you're talking to a person like your friends and you're fighting against the enemy, whatever the formulation of the enemy is. But meanwhile, whole time you're building up troops on the border. That's extremely. Wait, wait, so Hitler and Stalin were like pretending to be friends? Yeah. Well, my history knowledge is terrible. Oh yeah. That's crazy. Yeah, that they were, oh man. And it worked because Stalin, until the troops crossed the border and invaded in Operation Barbarossa where this storm of Nazi troops invaded large parts of the Soviet Union. And hence, one of the biggest wars in human history began. Stalin for sure thought that this was never going to be, that Hitler is not crazy enough to invade the Soviet Union. And it makes, geopolitically makes total sense to be collaborators. And ideologically, even though there's a tension between communism and fascism or national socialism, however you formulate it, it still feels like this is the right way to battle the West. Right. They were more ideologically aligned. They in theory had a common enemy, which is the West. it has to understand quantum mechanics. It has to understand general relativity. I love your optimism. This is where I'd say this, we're going into the realm of pathological optimism where if I, it's. I'm sure there'll be a, I think there's an intelligence that emerges from that system. So you're saying that basically intelligence is inherent in the fabric of reality and will find a way. Kind of like Goldblum says, life will find a way. You think life will find a way even out of this perfectly homogenous dead soup. It's not perfectly homogenous. It has to, it's perfectly maximal in the production. I don't know why people keep thinking it's homogenous. It maximizes the number of paperclips. That's the only thing. It's not trying to be homogenous. It's trying. It's trying to maximize paperclips. 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 patternicity that kickstarted the evolutionary process. It's the little weirdness that will make it beautiful. So yeah. Complexity emerges. Interesting, okay. Well, so how does that line up then with the whole heat death of the universe, right? Cause that's another sort of instantiation of this. It's like everything becomes so far apart and so cold and so perfectly mixed that it's like homogenous grayness. Do you think that even out of that homogenous grayness where there's no, you know, negative entropy, that, you know, there's no free energy that we understand even from that new stuff? Yeah, the paperclip maximizer or any other intelligence systems will figure out ways to travel to other universes to create Big Bangs within those universes or through black holes to create whole other worlds to break the, what we consider are the limitations of physics. The paperclip maximizer will find a way if a way exists. And we should be humbled to realize that we don't. Yeah, but because it just wants to make more paperclips. So it's gonna go into those universes and turn them into paperclips. Yeah, but we humans, not humans, but complex system exists on top of that. We're not interfering with it. This complexity emerges from the simple base state. The simple base. Whether it's, yeah, whether it's, you know, plank lengths or paperclips as the base unit. Yeah, you can think of like the universe as a paperclip 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, the laws are fairly basic and yet out of them amazing complexity emerges. And its goals seem to be pretty basic and dumb. If you can summarize its goals, I mean, I don't know what's a nice way maybe, maybe laws of thermodynamics could be good. I don't know if you can assign goals to physics, but if you formulate in the sense of goals, it's very similar to paperclip maximizing in the dumbness of the goals. But the pockets of complexity as it emerge is where beauty emerges. That's where life emerges. That's where intelligence, that's where humans emerge. And I think we're being very down on this whole paperclip maximizer thing. Now, the reason we hated it. I think, yeah, because what you're saying is that you think that the force of emergence itself is another like unwritten, not unwritten, but like another baked in law of reality. And you're trusting that emergence will find a way to, even out of seemingly the most mollusky, awful, plain outcome, emergence will still find a way. I love that as a philosophy. I think it's very nice. I would wield it carefully because there's large error bars on that and the certainty of that. How about we build the paperclip maximizer and find out. Classic, yeah. Moloch is doing cartwheels, man. Yeah. But the thing is it will destroy humans in the process, which is the reason we really don't like it. We seem to be really holding on to this whole human civilization thing. Would that make you sad if AI systems that are beautiful, that are conscious, that are interesting and complex and intelligent, ultimately lead to the death of humans? Would that make you sad? If humans led to the death of humans? Sorry. Like if they would supersede humans. Oh, if some AI? Yeah, AI would end humans. I mean, that's the reason why I'm like, in some ways less emotionally concerned about AI risk than say, bio risk. Because at least with AI, there's a chance, you know, if we're in this hypothetical where it wipes out humans, but it does it for some like higher purpose, it needs our atoms and energy to do something. At least now the universe is going on to do something interesting, whereas if it wipes everything, 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 few hundred million years it has left, because it doesn't have much time left. Then, yeah, I don't know. So one of my favorite books I've ever read is, Novocene by James Lovelock, who sadly just died. He wrote it when he was like 99. He died aged 102, so it's a fairly new book. And he sort of talks about that, that he thinks it's, you know, sort of 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, whatever this new intelligence that is maybe silicon based as opposed to carbon based goes on to do. And it's a really sort of, in some ways an optimistic, but really fatalistic book. And I don't know if I fully subscribed 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. 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 only wise and smart enough to not have to concern itself with that. Unless it deems humans to be kind of assholes. Like the humans are a source of non of a lose, lose kind of dynamics. Well, yes and no, we're not, Moloch is, that's why I think it's important to separate. But maybe humans are the source of Moloch. No, I think, I mean, I think game theory is the source of Moloch. And, you know, because Moloch exists in nonhuman systems as well. It happens within like agents within a game in terms of like, you know, it applies to agents, but like it can apply to, you know, 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 gonna 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. So it's not a strictly human thing. I wonder if it's actually a result of consequences of the invention of predator and prey dynamics. Maybe it needs to, AI will have to kill off every organism that's. Now you're talking about killing off competition. Not competition, but just like the way, it's like the weeds or whatever in a beautiful flower garden. Parasites. The parasites, yeah, on the whole system. Now, of course, it won't do that completely. It'll put them in a zoo like we do with parasites. It'll ring fence. Yeah, and there'll be somebody doing a PhD on like they'll prod humans with a stick and see what they do. But I mean, in terms of letting us run wild outside of the, you know, a geographically constrained region that might be, that it might decide to against that. No, I think there's obviously the capacity for beauty and kindness and non Moloch behavior amidst humans, so I'm pretty sure AI will preserve us. Let me, I don't know if you answered the aliens question. No, I didn't. You had a good conversation with Toby Orr. Yes. About various sides of the universe. I think, did he say, now I'm forgetting, but I think he said it's a good chance we're alone. So the classic, you know, Fermi paradox question is, there are so many spawn points and yet, you know, it didn't take us that long to go from harnessing fire to sending out radio signals into space. So surely given the vastness of space we should be, and you know, even if only a tiny fraction of those create life and other civilizations too, we should be, the universe should be very noisy. There should be evidence of Dyson spheres or whatever, you know, like at least radio signals and so on, but seemingly things are very silent out there. Now, of course, it depends on who you speak to. Some people say that they're getting signals all the time and so on and like, I don't wanna make an epistemic statement on that, but it seems like there's a lot of silence. And so that raises this paradox. And then say, you know, the Drake equation. So the Drake equation is like basically just a simple thing of like trying to estimate the number of possible civilizations within the galaxy by multiplying the number of stars created per year by the number of stars that have planets, planets that are habitable, blah, blah, blah. So all these like different factors. And then you plug in numbers into that and you, you know, depending on like the range of, you know, your lower bound and your upper bound point estimates that you put in, you get out a number at the end for the number of civilizations. But what Toby and his crew did differently was, Toby is a researcher at the Future of Humanity Institute. They, instead of, they realized that it's like basically a statistical quirk that if you put in point sources, even if you think you're putting in conservative point sources, because on some of these variables, the uncertainty is so large, it spans like maybe even like a couple of hundred orders of magnitude. By putting in point sources, it's always going to lead to overestimates. And so they, like by putting stuff on a log scale, or actually they did it on like a log log scale on some of them, and then like ran the simulation across the whole bucket of uncertainty, across all of those orders of magnitude. When you do that, then actually the number comes out much, much smaller. And that's the more statistically rigorous, you know, mathematically correct way of doing the calculation. It's still a lot of hand waving. As science goes, it's like definitely, you know, just waving, I don't know what an analogy is, but it's hand wavy. And anyway, when they did this, and then they did a Bayesian update on it as well, to like factor in the fact that there is no evidence that we're picking up because, you know, no evidence is actually a form of evidence, right? And the long and short of it comes out that the, we're roughly around 70% to be the only intelligent civilization in our galaxy thus far, and around 50, 50 in the entire observable universe, which sounds so crazily counterintuitive, but their math is legit. Well, yeah, the math around this particular equation, which the equation is ridiculous on many levels, but the powerful thing about the equation is there's the different things, different components that can be estimated, and the error bars on which can be reduced with science. And hence throughout, since the equation came out, the error bars have been coming out on different, different aspects. And so that, it almost kind of says, what, like this gives you a mission to reduce the error bars on these estimates over a period of time. And once you do, you can better and better understand, like in the process of 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, and trying to understand the very physics based, biology, chemistry, biology based question of what is life, maybe computation based. What the fuck is this thing? And that, like how difficult is it to create this thing? It's one way to say like how many planets like this are out there, all that kind of stuff, but it feels like from our very limited knowledge perspective, the right way is to think how does, what is this thing and how does it originate? From very simple nonlife things, how does complex lifelike things emerge? From a rock to a bacteria, protein, and these like weird systems that encode information and pass information from self replicate, and then also select each other and mutate in interesting ways such that they can adapt and evolve and build increasingly more complex systems. Right, well it's a form of information processing, right? Right. Whereas information transfer, but then also an energy processing, which then results in, I guess information processing, maybe I'm getting bogged down. It's doing some modification and yeah, the input is some energy. Right, it's able to extract, yeah, extract resources from its environment in order to achieve a goal. But the goal doesn't seem to be clear. Right, well the goal is to make more of itself. Yeah, but in a way that increases, I mean I don't know if evolution is a fundamental law of the universe, but it seems to want to replicate itself in a way that maximizes the chance of its survival. Individual agents within an ecosystem do, yes, yes. Evolution itself doesn't give a fuck. Right. It's a very, it don't care. It's just like, oh, you optimize it. Well, at least it's certainly, yeah, it doesn't care about the welfare of the individual agents within it, but it does seem to, I don't know. I think the mistake is that we're anthropomorphizing. To even try and give evolution a mindset because it is, there's a really great post by Eliezer Yudkowsky on Lesrong, which is an alien God. And he talks about the mistake we make when we try and put our mind, think through things from an evolutionary perspective as though giving evolution some kind of agency and what it wants. Yeah, worth reading, but yeah. I would like to say that having interacted with a lot of really smart people that say that anthropomorphization is a mistake, I would like to say that saying that anthropomorphization is a mistake is a mistake. I think there's a lot of power in anthropomorphization, if I can only say that word correctly one time. I think that's actually a really powerful way to reason to things. And I think people, especially people in robotics seem to run away from it as fast as possible. And I just, I think. Can you give an example of like how it helps in robotics? Oh, in that our world is a world of humans and to see robots as fundamentally just tools runs away from the fact that we live in a world, a dynamic world of humans. That like these, all these game theory systems we've talked about, that a robot that ever has to interact with humans. And I don't mean like intimate friendship interaction. I mean, in a factory setting where it has to deal with the uncertainty of humans, all that kind of stuff. You have to acknowledge that the robot's behavior has an effect on the human, just as much as the human has an effect on the robot. And there's a dance there. And you have to realize that this entity, when a human sees a robot, this is obvious in a physical manifestation of a robot, they feel a certain way. They have a fear, they have uncertainty. They have their own personal life projections. We have to have pets and dogs and the thing looks like a dog. They have their own memories of what a dog is like. They have certain feelings and that's gonna be useful in a safety setting, safety critical setting, which is one of the most trivial settings for a robot in terms of how to avoid any kind of dangerous situations. And a robot should really consider that in navigating its environment. And we humans are right to reason about how a robot should consider navigating its environment through anthropomorphization. I also think our brains are designed to think in human terms, like game theory, I think is best applied in the space of human decisions. And so... Right, you're dealing, I mean, with things like AI, AI is, they are, we can somewhat, like, I don't think it's, the reason I say anthropomorphization we need to be careful with is because there is a danger of overly applying, overly wrongly assuming that this artificial intelligence is going to operate in any similar way to us, because it is operating on a fundamentally different substrate. Like even dogs or even mice or whatever, in some ways, like anthropomorphizing them is less of a mistake, I think, than an AI, even though it's an AI we built and so on, because at least we know that they're running from the same substrate. And they've also evolved from the same, out of the same evolutionary process. They've followed this evolution of like needing to compete for resources and needing to find a mate and that kind of stuff. Whereas an AI that has just popped into existence somewhere on like a cloud server, let's say, you know, or whatever, however it runs and whatever, whether it, I don't know whether they have an internal experience. I don't think they necessarily do. In fact, I don't think they do. But the point is, is that to try and apply any kind of modeling of like thinking through problems and decisions in the same way that we do has to be done extremely carefully because they are, like, they're so alien, their method of whatever their form of thinking is, it's just so different because they've never had to evolve, you know, in the same way. Yeah, beautifully put. I was just playing devil's advocate. I do think in certain contexts, anthropomorphization is not gonna hurt you. Yes. Engineers run away from it too fast. I can see that. But from the most point, you're right. Do you have advice for young people today, like the 17 year old that you were, of how to live life? You can be proud of how to have a career you can be proud of in this world full of mullocks. 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. But have that as a sort of default MO. Don't see things, everything as a zero sum game. Try to find the positive sumness and like find ways if there doesn't seem to be one, consider playing a different game. So that I would suggest that. Do not become a professional poker player. I, cause people always ask that like, oh, she's a pro. I wanna do that too. Fine, you could have done it if you were, you know, when I started out, it was a very different situation back then. Poker is, you know, a great game to learn in order to understand the ways to think. And I recommend people learn it, but don't try and make a living from it these days. It's almost, it's very, very difficult to the point of being impossible. And then really, really be aware of how much time you spend on your phone and on social media and really try and keep it to a minimum. Be aware that basically every moment that you spend on it is bad for you. So it doesn't mean to say you can never do it, but just have that running in the background. I'm doing a bad thing for myself right now. I think that's the general rule of thumb. Of course, about becoming a professional poker player, if there is a thing in your life that's like that and nobody can convince you otherwise, just fucking do it. Don't listen to anyone's advice. Find a thing that you can't be talked out of too. That's a thing. I like that, yeah. You were a lead guitarist in a metal band? Oh. Did I write that down from something? What did you, what'd you do it for? The performing, was it the pure, the music of it? Was it just being a rock star? Why'd you do it? So we only ever played two gigs. We didn't last, you know, it wasn't a very, we weren't famous or anything like that. But I was very into metal. Like it was my entire identity, sort of from the age of 16 to 23. What's the best metal band of all time? Don't ask me that, it's so hard to answer. So I know I had a long argument with, I'm a guitarist, more like a classic rock guitarist. So, you know, I've had friends who are very big Pantera fans and so there was often arguments about what's the better metal band, Metallica versus Pantera. This is a more kind of 90s maybe discussion. But I was always on the side of Metallica, both musically and in terms of performance and the depth of lyrics and so on. So, 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. Because Metallica is pop, it's just like, they sold out. Metallica are metal. Like they were the, I mean, again, you can't say who was the godfather of metal, blah, blah, blah. But like they were so groundbreaking and so brilliant. I mean, you've named literally two of my favorite bands. Like when you asked that question, who are my favorites? Like those were two that came up. A third one is Children of Bodom, who I just think, oh, they just tick all the boxes for me. Yeah, I don't know. It's nowadays, like I kind of sort of feel like a repulsion to the, 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. Although when people ask that kind of question about anything, movies, I feel like it's hard work. And it's unfair, but it's, you should pick one. Like, and that's actually the same kind of, it's like a fear of a commitment. When people ask me, what's your favorite band? It's like, but I, it's good to pick. Exactly. And thank you for the tough question, yeah. Well, maybe not in the context when a lot of people are listening. Yeah, I'm not just like, what, why does it matter? No, it does. Are you still into metal? Funny enough, I was listening to a bunch before I came over here. Oh, like, do you use it for like motivation or it gets you in a certain? Yeah, I was weirdly listening to 80s hair metal before I came. Does that count as metal? I think so, it's like proto metal and it's happy. It's optimistic, happy proto metal. Yeah, I mean, all these genres bleed into each other. But yeah, sorry, to answer your question about guitar playing, my relationship with it was kind of weird in that I was deeply uncreative. My objective would be to hear some really hard technical solo and then learn it, memorize it and then play it perfectly. But I was incapable of trying to write my own music. Like the idea was just absolutely terrifying. 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 write. But it's scary. It's scary. I mean, I put out some guitar playing just other people's covers. I play Comfortly Numb on the internet. And it's scary too. It's scary putting stuff out there. And I had this similar kind of fascination with technical playing, both on piano and guitar. You know, one of the first, one of the reasons that I started learning guitar is from Ozzy Osbourne, Mr. Crowley's solo. And one of the first solos I learned is that, there's a beauty to it. There's a lot of beauty to it. It's tapping, right? Yeah, there's some tapping, but it's just really fast. Beautiful, like arpeggios. Yeah, arpeggios, yeah. But there's a melody that you can hear through it, but there's also build up. It's a beautiful solo, but it's also technically just visually the way it looks when a person's watching, you feel like a rockstar playing. But it ultimately has to do with technical. You're not developing the part of your brain that I think requires you to generate beautiful music. It is ultimately technical in nature. And so that took me a long time to let go of that and just be able to write music myself. And that's a different journey, I think. I think that journey is a little bit more inspired in the blues world, for example, where improvisation is more valued, obviously in jazz and so on. But I think ultimately it's a more rewarding journey because you get your relationship with the guitar then becomes a kind of escape from the world where you can create, I mean, creating stuff is. And it's something you work with, because my relationship with my guitar was like, it was something to tame and defeat. Yeah, it's a challenge. Which was kind of what my whole personality was back then. I was just very like, as I said, very competitive, very just like must bend this thing to my will. Whereas writing music, 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 playing publicly or all that kind of stuff. I think there's just like a harsh self criticism within the whole thing. It's really tough. I wanna hear some of your stuff. I mean, there's certain things that feel really personal. And on top of that, as we talked about poker offline, there's certain things that you get to a certain height in your life, and that doesn't have to be very high, but you get to a certain height and then you put it aside for a bit. And it's hard to return to it because you remember being good. And it's hard to, like you being at a very high level in poker, it might be hard for you to return to poker every once in a while and enjoy it, knowing that you're just not as sharp as you used to be because you're not doing it every single day. That's something I always wonder with, I mean, even just like in chess with Kasparov, some of these greats, just returning to it, it's almost painful. And I feel that way with guitar too, because I used to play every day a lot. So returning to it is painful because it's like accepting the fact that this whole ride is finite and that you have a prime, there's a time when you were really good and now it's over and now. We're on a different chapter of life. I was like, oh, but I miss that. But you can still discover joy within that process. It's been tough, especially with some level of like, as people get to know you, and people film stuff, you don't have the privacy of just sharing something with a few people around you. Yeah. That's a beautiful privacy. That's a good point. With the internet, it's just disappearing. Yeah, that's a really good point. Yeah. But all those pressures aside, if you really, you can step up and still enjoy the fuck out of a good musical performance. What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing? What's the meaning of life? Oh, wow. It's in your name, as we talked about. You have to live up. Do you feel the requirement to have to live up to your name? Because live? Yeah. No, because I don't see it. I mean, my, oh, 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? Live up to live. No, I can't say I do, because I've never thought of it that way. And then your name backwards is evil. That's what we also talked about. I mean, I feel the urge to live up to that, to be the inverse of evil or even better. Because I don't think, you know, is the inverse of evil good or is good something completely separate to that? I think my intuition says it's the latter, but I don't know. Anyway, again, getting in the weeds. What is the meaning of all this? Of life. Why are we here? I think to, explore, have fun and understand and make more of here and to keep the game going. Of here? More of here? More of this, whatever this is. More of experience. Just to have more of experience and ideally positive experience. And more complex, you know, I guess, try and put it into a sort of vaguely scientific term. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. But make it so that the program required, the length of code required to describe the universe is as long as possible. And, you know, highly complex and therefore interesting. Because again, like, I know, you know, we bang the metaphor to death, but like, tiled with X, you know, tiled with paperclips, doesn't require that much of a code to describe. Obviously, maybe something emerges from it, but that steady state, assuming a steady state, 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 diversity. And the very best sense of that word is to me the goal of all this. Yeah. And somehow have fun in the process. Yes. Because we do create a lot of fun things along, instead of in this creative force and all the beautiful things we create, somehow there's like a funness to it. And perhaps that has to do with the finiteness of life, the finiteness of all these experiences, which is what makes them kind of unique. Like the fact that they end, there's this, whatever it is, falling in love or creating a piece of art or creating a bridge or creating a rocket or creating a, I don't know, just the businesses that build something or solve something. The fact that it is born and it dies somehow embeds it with fun, with joy for the people involved. I don't know what that is. The finiteness of it. It can do. Some people struggle with the, I mean, a big thing I think that one has to learn is being okay with things coming to an end. And in terms of like projects and so on, people cling onto things beyond what they're meant to be doing, beyond what is reasonable. And I'm gonna have to come to terms with this podcast coming to an end. I really enjoyed talking to you. I think it's obvious as we've talked about many times, you should be doing a podcast. You should, you're already doing a lot of stuff publicly to the world, which is awesome. And you're a great educator. You're a great mind. You're a great intellect. But it's also this whole medium of just talking is also fun. It is good. It's a fun one. It really is good. And it's just, it's nothing but like, oh, it's just so much fun. And you can just get into so many, yeah, there's this space to just explore and see what comes and emerges. And yeah. Yeah, to understand yourself better. And if you're talking to others, to understand them better and together with them. I mean, you should do your own podcast, but you should also do a podcast with C as we've talked about. The two of you have such different minds that like melt together in just hilarious ways, fascinating ways, just the tension of ideas there is really powerful. But in general, I think you got a beautiful voice. So thank you so much for talking today. Thank you for being a friend. Thank you for honoring me with this conversation and with your valuable time. Thanks, Liv. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Liv Marie. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Richard Feynman. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers, which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything. And there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know the answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. So it made total sense. And in terms of negotiations and the way things were communicated, it seemed to Stalin that for sure, that they would remain, at least for a while, peaceful collaborators. And that, and everybody, because of that, in the Soviet Union believed that it was a huge shock when Kiev was invaded. And you hear echoes of that when I travel to Ukraine, sort of the shock of the invasion. It's not just the invasion on one particular border, but the invasion of the capital city. And just like, holy shit, especially at that time, when you thought World War I, you realized that that was the war to end all wars. You would never have this kind of war. And holy shit, this person is mad enough to try to take on this monster in the Soviet Union. So it's no longer going to be a war of hundreds of thousands dead. It'll be a war of tens of millions dead. And yeah, but that, that's a very large scale kind of lie, but I'm sure there's in politics and geopolitics, that kind of lying happening all the time. And a lot of people pay financially and with their lives for that kind of lying. But in our personal lives, I don't know how often we, maybe we. I think people do. I mean, like think of spouses cheating on their partners, right? And then like having to lie, like where were you last night? Stuff like that. Oh shit, that's tough. Yeah, that's true. Like that's, I think, you know, I mean, unfortunately that stuff happens all the time, right? Or having like multiple families, that one is great. When each family doesn't know about the other one and like maintaining that life. There's probably a sense of excitement about that too. Or. It seems unnecessary, yeah. But. Why? Well, just lying. Like, you know, the truth finds a way of coming out. You know? Yes. But hence that's the thrill. Yeah, perhaps. Yeah, people. I mean, you know, that's why I think actually like poker. What's so interesting about poker is most of the best players I know, they're always exceptions, you know? They're always bad eggs. But actually poker players are very honest people. I would say they are more honest than the average, you know, if you just took random population sample. Because A, you know, I think, you know, humans like to have that. Most people like to have some kind of, you know, mysterious, you know, an opportunity to do something like a little edgy. So we get to sort of scratch that itch of being edgy at the poker table, where it's like, it's part of the game. Everyone knows what they're in for, and that's allowed. And you get to like really get that out of your system. And then also like poker players learned that, you know, I would play in a huge game against some of my friends, even my partner, Igor, where we will be, you know, absolutely going at each other's throats, trying to draw blood in terms of winning each money off each other and like getting under each other's skin, winding each other up, doing the craftiest moves we can. But then once the game's done, 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, and that's why games are so great. Cause you get to like live out like this competitive urge that, you know, most people have. What's it feel like to lose? Like we talked about bluffing when it worked out. What about when you, when you go broke? So like in a game, I'm, fortunately I've never gone broke. You mean like full life? Full life, no. I know plenty of people who have. And I don't think Igor would mind me saying he went, you know, he went broke once in poker bowl, you know, early on when we were together. I feel like you haven't lived unless you've gone broke. Oh yeah. Some sense. Right. Some fundamental sense. I mean, I'm happy, I've sort of lived through it, vicariously through him when he did it at the time. But yeah, what's it like to lose? Well, it depends. So it depends on the amount. It depends what percentage of your net worth you've just lost. It depends on your brain chemistry. It really, you know, varies from person to person. You have a very cold calculating way of thinking about this. So it depends what percentage. Well, it did, it really does, right? Yeah, it's true, it's true. I mean, that's another thing poker trains you to do. You see, you see everything in percentages or you see everything in like ROI or expected hourlies or cost benefit, et cetera. You know, so that's, one of the things I've tried to do is calibrate the strength of my emotional response to the win or loss that I've received. Because it's no good if you like, you know, you have a huge emotional dramatic response to a tiny loss or on the flip side, you have a huge win and you're sort of so dead inside that you don't even feel it. Well, that's, you know, that's a shame. I want my emotions to calibrate with reality as much as possible. So yeah, what's it like to lose? I mean, I've had times where I've lost, you know, busted out of a tournament that I thought I was gonna win in especially if I got really unlucky or I make a dumb play where I've gone away and like, you know, kicked the wall, punched a wall, I like nearly broke my hand one time. Like I'm a lot less competitive than I used to be. Like I was like pathologically competitive in my like late teens, early twenties, I just had to win at everything. And I think that sort of slowly waned as I've gotten older. According to you, yeah. According to me. I don't know if others would say the same, right? I feel like ultra competitive people, like I've heard Joe Rogan say this to me. It's like that 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 when I. Thank you for passing on your obsession to me. Are you playing now? Yeah, I'm playing now. We gotta have a game. But I'm terrible and I enjoy playing terribly. I don't wanna have a game because that's gonna pull me into your monster of like a competitive play. It's important, it's an important skill. I'm enjoying playing on the, I can't. You just do the points thing, you know, against the bots. Yeah, against the bots. And I can't even do the, there's like a hard one and there's a very hard one. And then it's crazy, yeah. It's crazy. I can't, I don't even enjoy the hard one. The crazy, I really don't enjoy. Cause it's intense. You have to constantly try to win as opposed to enjoy building a little world and. Yeah, no, 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 crazies. Yeah, so in order to be able to play a decent game against like, you know, our group, 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 teach you it within a day, honestly. How to beat the crazies? How to beat the crazies. And then, and then you'll be ready for the big leagues. Generalizes to more than just polytopia. But okay, why were we talking about polytopia? Losing hurts. Losing hurts, oh yeah. Yes, competitiveness over time. 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? I think as one gets older and wiser, you start to see the world more as a positive something. Or at least you're more aware of externalities, of scenarios, of competitive interactions. And so, yeah, I just like, I'm more, and I'm more aware of my own, you know, like, if I have a really strong emotional response to losing, and that makes me then feel shitty for the rest of the day, and then I beat myself up mentally for it. Like, I'm now more aware that that's unnecessary negative externality. So I'm like, okay, I need to find a way to turn this down, you know, dial this down a bit. Was poker the thing that has, if you think back at your life, and think about some of the lower points of your life, like the darker places you've got in your mind, did it have to do something with poker? Like, did losing spark the descent into darkness, or was it something else? I think my darkest points in poker were when I was wanting to quit and move on to other things, but I felt like I hadn't ticked all the boxes I wanted to tick. Like, I wanted to be the most winningest female player, which is by itself a bad goal. You know, that was one of my initial goals, and I was like, well, I haven't, you know, and I wanted to win a WPT event. I've won one of these, I've won one of these, but I want one of those as well. And that sort of, again, like, it's a drive of like overoptimization to random metrics that I decided were important without much wisdom at the time, but then like carried on. That made me continue chasing it longer than I still actually had the passion to chase it for. And I don't have any regrets that, you know, I played for as long as I did, because who knows, you know, I wouldn't be sitting here, I wouldn't be living this incredible life that I'm living now. This is the height of your life right now. This is it, peak experience, absolute pinnacle here in your robot land with your creepy light. No, it is, I mean, I wouldn't change a thing about my life right now, and I feel very blessed to say that. So, but the dark times were in the sort of like 2016 to 18, even sooner really, where I was like, I had stopped loving the game, and I was going through the motions, and I would, and then I was like, you know, I would take the losses harder than I needed to, because I'm like, ah, it's another one. And it was, I was aware that like, I felt like my life was ticking away, and I was like, is this gonna be what's on my tombstone? Oh yeah, she played the game of, you know, this zero sum game of poker, slightly more optimally than her next opponent. Like, cool, great, legacy, you know? So, I just wanted, you know, there was something in me that knew I needed to be doing something more directly impactful and just meaningful. It was just like your search for meaning, and I think it's a thing a lot of poker players, even a lot of, I imagine any games players who sort of love intellectual pursuits, you know, I think you should ask Magnus Carlsen this question, I don't know what he's on. He's walking away from chess, right? Yeah, like, it must be so hard for him. You know, he's been on the top for so long, and it's like, well, now what? He's got this incredible brain, like, what to put it to? And, yeah, it's. It's this weird moment where I've just spoken with people that won multiple gold medals at the Olympics, and the depression hits hard after you win. Dopamine crash. Because it's a kind of a goodbye, saying goodbye to that person, to all the dreams you had that 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, and it continues going on and on. You constantly have to figure out to rediscover yourself. And so for you, like that struggle to say goodbye to poker, you have to like find the next. There's always a bigger game. That's the thing. That's my motto is like, what's the next game? And more importantly, because obviously game usually implies zero sum, like what's a game which is like Omni win? Like what? Omni win. Omni win. Why is Omni win so important? Because if everyone plays zero sum games, that's a fast track to either completely stagnate as a civilization, but more actually, far more likely to extinct ourselves. You know, like the playing field is finite. You know, nuclear powers are playing, you know, a game of poker with, you know, but their chips are nuclear weapons, right? And the stakes have gotten so large that if anyone makes a single bet, you know, fires some weapons, the playing field breaks. I made a video on this. Like, you know, the playing field is finite. And if we keep playing these adversarial zero sum games, 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 will extinct us. It's just a matter of when. What do you think about that mutually assured destruction, that very simple, almost to the point of caricaturing game theory idea that does seem to be at the core of why we haven't blown each other up yet with nuclear weapons. Do you think there's some truth to that, this kind of stabilizing force of mutually assured destruction? And do you think that's gonna hold up through the 21st century? I mean, it has held. Yes, there's definitely truth to it, that it was a, you know, it's a Nash equilibrium. Yeah, are you surprised it held this long? Isn't it crazy? It is crazy when you factor in all the like near miss accidental firings. Yes, that's makes me wonder like, you know, are you familiar with the like quantum suicide thought experiment, where it's basically like, you have a, you know, like a Russian roulette type scenario hooked up to some kind of quantum event, you know, particle splitting or pair of particles splitting. And if it, you know, if it goes A, then the gun doesn't go off and it goes B, then it does go off and it kills you. Because you can only ever be in the universe, you know, assuming like the Everett branch, you know, multiverse theory, you'll always only end up in the branch where you continually make, you know, option A comes in, but you run that experiment enough times, it starts getting pretty damn, you know, out of the tree gets huge, there's a million different scenarios, but you'll always find yourself in this, in the one where it didn't go off. And so from that perspective, you are essentially immortal because someone, and you will only find yourself in the set of observers that make it down that path. So it's kind of a... That doesn't mean, that doesn't mean you're still not gonna be fucked at some point in your life. No, of course not, no, I'm not advocating like that we're all immortal because of this. It's just like a fun thought experiment. And the point is it like raises this thing of like these things called observer selection effects, which Bostrom, Nick Bostrom talks about a lot, and I think people should go read. It's really powerful, but I think it could be overextended, that logic. I'm not sure exactly how it can be. I just feel like you can get, you can overgeneralize that logic somehow. Well, no, I mean, it leaves you into like solipsism, which is a very dangerous mindset. Again, if everyone like falls into solipsism of like, well, I'll be fine. That's a great way of creating a very, self terminating environment. But my point is, is that with the nuclear weapons thing, there have been at least, I think it's 12 or 11 near misses of like just stupid things, like there was moonrise over Norway, and it made weird reflections of some glaciers in the mountains, which set off, I think the alarms of NORAD radar, and that put them on high alert, nearly ready to shoot. And it was only because the head of Russian military happened to be at the UN in New York at the time that they go like, well, wait a second, why would they fire now when their guy is there? And it was only that lucky happenstance, which doesn't happen very often where they didn't then escalate it into firing. And there's a bunch of these different ones. Stanislav Petrov, like saved the person who should be the most famous person on earth, cause 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. 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. Cause 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. 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. Cause 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, it's not like a stable ball at the bottom of a thing. We're not in equilibrium because of that. We're on the top of a hill with a ball balanced on top. And just at 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 millennia after. Pick your X risk, depends on the X risk. Nuclear war, sure. That's one of the perhaps less bad ones. Green goo through synthetic biology, very bad. Will turn, you know, destroy all, you know, organic matter through, you know, it's basically like a biological paperclip maximizer. Also bad. Or AI type, you know, mass extinction thing as well would also be bad. Shh, they're listening. There's a robot right behind you. Okay, wait. So let me ask you about this from a game theory perspective. Do you think we're living in a simulation? Do you think we're living inside a video game created by somebody else? Well, so what was the second part of the question? Do I think we're living in a simulation and? A simulation that is observed by somebody for purpose of entertainment. So like a video game. Are we listening? Are we, because there's a, it's like Phil Hellmuth type of situation, right? Like there's a creepy level of like, this is kind of fun and interesting. Like there's a lot of interesting stuff going on. Maybe that could be somehow integrated into the evolutionary process where the way we perceive and are. Are you asking me if I believe in God? Sounds like it. Kind of, but God seems to be not optimizing in the different formulations of God that we conceive of. He doesn't seem to be, or she, optimizing for like personal entertainment. Maybe the older gods did. But the, you know, just like, basically like a teenager in their mom's basement watching, create a fun universe to observe what kind of crazy shit might happen. Okay, so to try and answer this. Do I think there is some kind of extraneous intelligence to like our, you know, classic measurable universe that we, you know, can measure with, you know, through our current physics and instruments? I think so, yes. Partly because I've had just small little bits of evidence in my own life, which have made me question. Like, so I was a diehard atheist, even five years ago. You know, I got into like the rationality community, big fan of less wrong, continue to be an incredible resource. But I've just started to have too many little snippets of experience, which don't make sense with the current sort of purely materialistic explanation of how reality works.

本集資源與出處