The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or John Krakauer. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is Liv Boeree, science communicator with degrees in physics and astrophysics, former heavy metal guitarist, and she’s a semi-retired professional poker player with many impressive wins in tournament play and actually holds the title for largest tournament win by a female poker player. Is that right?
Liv: That is. That is amazing. Though I have always wondered why we should imagine women and men being in different leagues for poker because not much upper body strength there.
Jim: Right? Oh, I completely agree.
Liv: I mean, I do think higher testosterone levels slightly correlate with the types of personality that is often best for reaching the very upper echelons. I think it’s helpful to have more testosterone, it seems to be. We can get into why, but probably not. It’s a very, very arbitrary title, one I feel, frankly, mixed about because it’s nice to hold the world record in something. At the same time, I don’t like making a bigger thing out of femaleness, or maleness. I think it’s relatively arbitrary and irrelevant in a game like poker.
Jim: That makes sense. But it is, as you say, it is impressive nonetheless.
Liv: I’m going to take it. I’m going to take it.
Jim: And Liv is also the host of the very excellent Win Win Podcast where she puts on her superhero costume and turns Moloch Slayer. I actually appeared on her podcast not too long ago, and we talked a lot about Game B at two and a half hours. And I will say that Liv and her cohost Igor, her husband, are the best prepared podcast hosts I had ever seen. Amazing. Right?
Liv: Oh, wow. Thank you.
Jim: And it was extremely impressive, the level of preparation they’d done for the podcast. I think it ran two and a half hours. It was really, really good. Anyway, this is another in my series of worldview podcasts, where instead of talking about people’s current work in any detail, or their coming projects, etcetera, we try to get behind that and find out what is it that they are. What are they about? What do they believe? What is it that motivates them? What are their values? And so we’ll probably be less specific about actual projects than usual and have fun learning how some of the smartest and most interesting people in the world think. So with that, let’s start off where I normally do, which is: heavy metal guitarist, poker player, science educator, astrophysicist, lots of things going on in this Liv head. Come morning, you go from being deeply asleep, nondream state. Liv is gone. Right? And then you start to wake up—five seconds, a minute, people vary in how long it takes for them to wake up—and then Liv reappears, we think. Right? Who is this Liv?
Liv: As in, is it the same Liv that went to sleep? That’s one aspect of it. That’s the first thing that came to mind when you were asking that question. I recently read this interesting Twitter post that was very basically making the argument that you truly die each night and are reborn, and you are not the same person. And I think it gets into that classic philosophical thought experiment where it’s like, if would you go through a machine, like a teleportation machine, which completely disassembles you and then reassembles you? And most people are like, yeah, why not? That’s still me. But then it’s like, ah, but what happens if the machine breaks? And it turns out that you reappear on the other side, but there’s still your original copy over there, and they’re like, we need to kill that now because you can’t have two copies, and you’d be like, no. Both of you would feel weird about it, probably. Certainly the one that’s still left there would be like, no, I’m not—no. No. No. I don’t know if this is what you were asking, but that’s where my mind went to. In terms of who is Liv, I don’t know, man. It’s like, I feel like I have—I don’t want to say personalities, but I have many—I’m one of those people that struggles to pick a lane and stick to it, which can be a blessing and a curse. Clearly, I’ve had a fairly varied career for my age thus far. But it’s a hard question.
Jim: Well, let me then focus it down a little bit because that was not exactly what I was getting at, but it was interesting nonetheless. And that was, what is the nature of human consciousness?
Liv: I see. This thing wasn’t there, and now it is. What is that thing? I don’t know. In some ways, it’s like it’s a story. Right? It’s a thing that comes online that is sufficiently self-aware of itself and its past and its future from which to thread a needle and create a story about itself, that it is an individual thing that has a journey that it’s on. That’s kind of what human consciousness is. And I think animals presumably have a similar—well, do they have a sense of “I”? I think so. I think certainly some do, above a certain threshold. Some of them pass the mirror test, for instance. And I think something like a dog or a pig at that level, I think they have a sense of consistent identity. You know, they dream like we do and they certainly show us a depth of emotion similar to us. They just can’t problem solve as well. But like my lizards—I have a weird, I should get him out at some point. I have a weird skink, which is just this—don’t even know what he is. He’s like some weird evolutionary step between—I mean, I’ve got to get him out. You see him? Whoa. He’s big. He’s a big fat boy.
Jim: The skinks we have around Virginia, they’re little, about—wait. You have skinks? Yeah. I thought they were only an Australian and Indonesian thing. No. Skinks are one of our kinds of lizards in the woods. And they’re not big. They’re like three inches long including the tail.
Liv: Yeah. No. He’s huge. He’s quite heavy. This is how he came. He’s naturally this fat. Wow. And I mean, like, this thing—as much as I’ve tried, I don’t think he knows who I am. He definitely recognizes me as a source of food. But does he have a sense of—like, we were literally just remarking, all he does is he’ll eat, and then he’ll sit and digest. And there is no sense of “I” going on in this being, even though they’re capable of still obviously suffering and having preferences. So I don’t know. And then the other thing about human consciousness is it’s, like, to me it’s like the flashlight that can shine upon different aspects of its own existence or something like that.
Jim: Yeah. I call it an attention scheme, as one way you look at it, or just the order of attention, one attention spotlight after another. In fact, I often say that attention is the cursor of consciousness. It is. That’s actually what consciousness is at some level—the mechanism of going from one attention thing to the other. And my own hypothesis is that memory is what substantially steers that attention sequence. Because it says, alright, the scene I’m in, this conscious scene that I’m in, is kind of like this and this and this, and all the different episodic memories that are sort of similar to the one I’m in are making votes. And by the way, some of those may be, ah, get out of there. And others, this—pick door number three. Right? This is actually pretty cool. And so there’s going to be competition between the various memories. And after the competition, one object in consciousness will come into focus, into attention. And it happens about a quarter of a second, which is kind of—
Liv: That’s fascinating. So there’s actually competition going on within our own minds.
Jim: Yeah. Oh, that’s my theory. It’s a theory of a lot of guys. Gerald Edelman believed that, so did Daniel Dennett, who were two top thinkers about the nature of consciousness. Again, we’ve all got to be careful here. We’re all to some degree talking out of our ass because we have not actually solved the scientific problem of consciousness, but these are some models and thinking that do seem to be generative.
Liv: So I recently saw a live interview—have you heard of the Telepathy Tapes?
Jim: Yeah.
Liv: Oh, it was so—it’s this—it was like the podcast of last year, which is this lady who—these claims that she met—she started meeting people, like, extremely autistic children, like full-on nonverbal autistic children, but like, they just can’t speak at all. They can’t communicate. And but they managed to teach them to start being able to point to letters as a way. Because they basically have an intellect which can speak and have thinking thoughts, and they can understand language. They just can’t—their brain-body connection doesn’t exist where they can form the words. But they can learn to point at letters and spell things out. And during this process, sometimes the parents would say, look, I don’t know how to explain it, but it seems like they can read my mind. Like, I’ll be in the other room and I’ll think of something and I’ll come back through and they’ll have spelled it out already. Like, oh, I want this. They’re like, oh, I wonder what’s for dinner? And they’ve already said what I wanted for dinner. And then she digs into it more and more. And basically, from her view—and I have to say, listening to it, it sounds pretty damn convincing evidence—that these kids are not only like telepathic of people closer than their own family, but they have like this—there’s this thing they call the Hill that independently, all these kids that had never met each other all referred to like it was a very normal thing. It’s this like place in consciousness land where they literally go and hang out, almost like—
Jim: I have heard about that.
Liv: Yeah. Exactly. Like, it’s like a coffee shop, basically. You know, a sort of metaphysical coffee shop. And all the kids go there and it’s very hard for normal people to access it. But anyway, and then this woman—her name is Ky Dickens—she seemed pretty epistemically humble, at least I would say. Because I think a lot of these people who delve into this, they all have very strong opinions of like, this is what’s going on. Oh, it’s Starseed, blah blah blah. All the crazy sort of overconfident woo stuff. But she did put forward one interesting theory, which was—she’s like, I don’t think consciousness is—you know, people always think of it, it’s like chemistry emerges from physics, biology emerges from that, then you get psychology and consciousness is downstream of psychology. Her claim is that consciousness is actually the base substrate, or at least she’s like, that would be an explanation for these phenomena. Is that actually the base thing through which then—and people like Donald Hoffman, I don’t know what you think of him, but I think there’s something there, this idea that actually, you know, from different consciousnesses talking with each other, existence emerges. I’ve been really playing with this idea more. I wish I could speak about it with more depth or certainty, but I think there’s something there.
Jim: I know a number of people, including some people I respect tremendously, who have become enamored of the panpsychic explanation—that there’s something in the fundamental substrate of reality that’s conscious and that these things aggregate together to produce these higher consciousnesses, like ours. I will say, I am quite skeptical, as you might imagine.
Liv: As you should be. Like, they’re huge claims. Right? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. At the same time, there are increasingly—I’ve had some absolutely wacky things happen to me that cannot be explained by conventional physics or psychology, frankly. I don’t know if you want to get into that, but—
Jim: Lay one on me.
Liv: Well, okay. Riddle me this one. When I’ve been playing poker—I’ve been playing professionally, I would say, for like a year and a half and I had yet to—I’d won a few small minor tournaments but I’d never had like my big breakout moment. And then by a series of random—well, just chance events—I ended up in a position to play a really big tournament that I’d not played one of that real size before. At least, yeah, one of the first few I’d ever played. And on day one, I sit down to play this thing and just before it started, they dim the lights and they’re playing this music. And out of nowhere—I’ve never had an experience like this since, or well, not to this level—it was like someone else’s voice in my head said, “You’re going to win this tournament.” And it was like, it was so shocking that I literally looked around the room to see if—and around the table was like, did you guys hear that? And everyone was just like in their own world. And I was like—and then I was like, oh my god, I’m going crazy. That was—and I remember it clear as day, like a wave of goosebumps over my body. I was a little almost scared, but certainly just like, whoa. And then we start playing and I go and lose half my chips within like a couple of hours. And again, that was the moment where I was like, well, that voice was bullshit. Like, ugh. But then I clawed my way back and so on and I had some other ups and downs. And then, oh, I made it to day two of this tournament. And at this point—so this is why I have some evidence—I told a close female friend of mine in the bathroom. I was like, I will tell you, I had this really weird premonition that I’m going to win this tournament. And like, I feel good. And she looked at me and she was like, you seem like something is going—she was like, I feel something too. Anyway, that was only day two. There were still like hundreds of people left. This was the biggest tournament I’d ever been held in Europe to this date as well. It had like 1,240 players. Six days later, I win the whole thing for—it’s like it catapulted me to like relative superstardom in poker. You know, I was on the front page of all these British newspapers because it was like, young girl comes out of nowhere, wins $1,700,000 or whatever. You know, like it was huge. And I’ve never had anything like that since. I’ve had moments where I felt like something big was going to happen in poker and I even tried to replicate it because I’m like, wow, if I can hack this. But no, never had anything like that since. And I don’t know how to explain it. It felt like some kind of time loop or something. Something coming from somewhere else. It felt like it came from outside of my normal stream of consciousness. Let’s put it that way. And it was a very accurate prediction. I mean, it was a one in 1,240, I guess, if you want to play the odds. But yeah.
Jim: Well, that’s assuming you’re an average player, but I’m sure you—
Liv: Exactly. Which I—yeah. I mean, I wasn’t much above average, I would say, back then. Okay. So it was really quite a long shot, not quite an impossible one.
Jim: Next thing I was going to drill into is how you think that consciousness is instantiated, actually. You talked about one of the common ways, typically the way most scientists do, that consciousness is emergent from biology, basically. You know, no biology, no consciousness. But also nothing additional beyond emergence, which emergence itself can create some very interesting effects that you don’t see at the lower levels, but it is a biological emergent phenomenon like digestion, for instance. That would probably not lead to strange messages that you’re going to win that actually happen. But another theory, which is also popular, generally from people who are using this panpsychic perspective, is that our consciousness is more like a radio tuner than we think, and that each of us is tuned to some frequency in the universe of consciousnesses. And a fair amount of the time we’re in sort of our own private space, but sometimes we leak over into things like what you described, and that perhaps some meditation techniques or drugs, etcetera, can put you into a state where you have greater control of your ability to operate the tuner on your conscious interface to the cosmic consciousness.
Liv: If you’d asked me that ten years ago, I would have been very confident and certain in my answer—and that, you know, the laws of probability are the laws of probability, and there is no—you know, it is a baked-in fact of the universe and there is no such thing as you make your own luck. I mean, it depends on how you define the word luck. Some people mean it to be like, you know, the outcomes of your life. It’s like, well, of course you can influence those. You can put yourselves in positions where you can have more lucky moments. I think that’s true. But thinking through what you’ve just posed now, I would say that my probability distribution has shifted more into that explanation, that we are actually more like—or it’s both. Like, I think there’s maybe different—maybe we’re using different words to describe two real phenomena. You know, the type of consciousness that is actually purely emergent and downstream of biology and psychology, but then there’s this base level—there’s this base substrate, which is also a form of consciousness, or where we’re using the same word—from which everything else emerges. I think both seem to be true, but maybe that’s a cop-out. Feels like a bit of a cop-out from a rationality perspective, but certainly this base—I mean, I’ve done a lot of psychedelics at this point, like, it’s no real secret. And again, I’ve now had like a bunch of experiences that is just like, how would I have known that? And from an internal experience, it certainly feels like you’re dialing into a different frequency. I wouldn’t say you can always control the frequency that you dial into. Sometimes you’re like, oh shit, you know? And I think that’s part of the—certainly with some of these more powerful ones like Ayahuasca and so on, you’re taken on a ride and it’s like, you kind of have to just be like, all right, I’ll relax. And the more you relax into it, generally the better it is and the more you gain. But yeah, I think it’s both, but maybe we just need different words for them.
Jim: Yeah. Maybe there’s two consciousnesses. It’s possible.
Liv: Two flavors of it. I mean, there’s probably a bunch more, frankly, but there certainly feels like there’s this soup out there from which we can draw upon and tune into through meditation and so on.
Jim: I’m going to be interviewing Philip Goff, who’s probably the leading philosopher of panpsychism, in the next month or so. That should be interesting. He and I have argued a bit in email, so it’ll be interesting to see where it goes. What are your biggest claims against panpsychism?
Liv: There’s no mechanism that’s been purported or measured or anything else. It’s one of these explanations without any evidentiary support, which we can create as many as we want, basically, of hypotheses without evidentiary support.
Jim: Well, what if, for example, let’s say that these autistic kids being telepathic and able to dial in and go to the Hill and all that, if that is in some way verified—
Liv: That would surely be evidence of it. Right?
Jim: Absolutely. And I also always make that point. You know, I’m a show-me guy. Right? But if you show me, I will say, gentlemen, I was wrong. Right? Because the evidence now says that something like panpsychism or cosmic radio tuners are real. I don’t think there’s any logical reason they can’t be true, but they contradict a lot of what we know about the world, so they would require some fairly stout proof. But if the proof is there, then you have to change your thinking. So one of the things that some people are now getting into is they believe that not only can these autistic kids read what their parent is reading in a different room, but that normal children can be trained to do this, and even adults, if they can get themselves into a sufficiently childlike state of being, which kind of feels logically consistent—like, it would be easier for a child, if something like this is real, it’s generally easier for a child who has fewer formed belief structures about the world and how things work.
Liv: Because—and then I met, I spoke to someone who claims, you know, is starting to do this training for adults on being able to do this, they call it like mind sight. And her claim is like, if you go in not believing, it won’t work. You have to suspend disbelief and suspend your skepticism. But it’s like, that’s also what every charlatan in history has also said, you know, right? All of these, you know, like the magicians or whoever—it’s like, you must suspend disbelief. You mustn’t—if you question it, it won’t work. So it’s just like, okay, so we can’t use the scientific method. Is that what we’re saying? I’m always skeptical of that. Right?
Jim: Right. No. As we should be. And I do think like that—again, that is a core part of being—like, our curiosity and desire to believe and open-mindedness is one thing, but you can’t throw out all your skepticism or your rational questioning. One of the tools I use looking at things like that and other things is: if the meme plex seems to have built-in defenses against refutation, be skeptical. For instance, medieval Christianity—it’s literally a mortal sin to even consider that medieval Christianity might be false or any aspect of it, even a minor aspect, literally a heresy, and you’d be burned at the stake if you admitted such. Marxist-Leninism had some also—all your self-deluded. You know, you’re the oppressor of yourself. Yeah. So they had answers for everything. And so that doesn’t mean it’s not true, but it’s a yellow flag at least saying, be careful if the meme plex itself clearly has some defense mechanisms against being challenged.
Liv: For sure. For sure.
Jim: Cool. So poker—would you consider it closer to being a heavy metal guitarist or a Bayesian analyst? Or is it something entirely different for you?
Liv: Well, I will say that’s actually—the way you phrased it makes it—because what you’re getting at is, is it an art or a science. Right? Yeah. That’s what you’re essentially asking. Although, funny enough, my approach to heavy metal guitar was very non-artistic. I was very algorithmic in my approach. I would basically—I had very little creativity, almost zero creativity. I would just listen to my favorite heavy metal bands and some insanely beautiful solo, and I would try and emulate it. And I got really, really good at doing that, but I was basically a parrot, a very dextrous parrot. And so that was—to me, my version of heavy metal guitar was not particularly artistic. That said, what in the spirit of your question—it is truly both. That’s what makes poker—I think that’s true of most games. Poker in particular is such a—it puts you through the full gamut of emotions, first of all. It also spans the spectrum between a game of pure luck and of pure skill. It has both. But also, it tests you on all of these quantitative skills like statistics, game theory, all of the sort of scientific applications, basically. And then it also has these very much more qualitative—I mean, whether you put psychology in the quantitative or qualitative is a different thing, but there are these—there are just vibes sometimes. Like, when you’re playing, especially in tournaments, or like, any—you’ve been playing against the same group of people for six hours. There’s just like these flows and dynamics and like these waves that come and go and like really great players can figure out how to ride these waves and also just like feeling it. It’s like sensing someone’s the strength of their hand. Yes, you can do it in a very logical way of like, well, when the king of diamonds came out here, they bet big but then the nine of spades came and they seem to slow down a bit, you know, and you put together a sort of logical argument to try and determine what kind of strength of hand they have. But there are also these more hard-to-quantify flows of information coming at you, like their body language. Just the energy sometimes. Like, sometimes when I’m really tapped in in a game, I just sense that suddenly the person is uncomfortable and I don’t know why. Now probably because my unconscious processing has just seen enough people playing poker hands—you know, I’ve probably played a million poker hands in my life now—where it just knows. Okay. It’s picking up on these very subtle things that my logical brain isn’t picking up on. But yeah, that’s a very long-winded way to say it is truly both an art and a science. And it’s also at its most fun—for me at least—when it’s mostly actually an art. So the game went through a really interesting evolution. When I first learned to play—and certainly back in the sort of the nineties and eighties when it was like the old school glory days of poker, you know, no one knew the game theory. No one had any simulations. No one—I think the extent of the math was like they would add up the pot and do some basic pot odds. And so it was very much a game of like hot street smarts and hustling and, you know, it was very artistic. And then it went through a kind of data revolution, a scientific revolution when online poker came along because now you could save all of your hand histories as digital files and you could run analysis software on it and it just became more and more quantified and more and more of a science. And I have to say after a while, that took some of the shine away from me because, a, it took away a bit of my edge, frankly, because I could do some of that stuff pretty well, but also it enabled people who didn’t have the—who would never have had the balls to run a big bluff. They can now just look and be like, well, the math says I have to bluff here. So they have this layer of confidence they wouldn’t have had before, and that’s a little annoying. But it’s interesting that nowadays, the real greats are people who know all of the math. They’ve done all the science. You know, they’ve lived with all the simulators and tried to memorize all that, but they still also have this x factor of being able to sort of read the vibes and so on. Those are the real greats.
Jim: So it is still both, but it has a lot more science to it than it ever did. Interesting. And I don’t discount at all the artistry part of it because one of the things I’ve learned from many years working in the complexity science field is there are many, many questions that are just too hard to solve analytically. And yet we as naked apes have evolved for three and a half billion years, all kinds of weird skills, many of which we do not understand, but are being processed in parallel in a brain that’s more powerful still, at least barely, than any computer on earth. And so there’s no reason to disbelieve that the ability to make high-dimensional subjective reads on people with respect to something like poker is not a real thing. And of course, we also see that there is considerable variance amongst poker players and how well they do, even the grinders. Right? In theory, if it’s all math, the grinders should win, but they don’t.
Liv: I mean, it’s still so complex though because of course, it’s like over what sample size as well. Like, it’s just such a messy, messy game.
Jim: What do you think today? Is it the grinders versus the artists?
Liv: Well, I think it’s really—again, at the real top levels, it’s quite hard to separate the two. That said, I can’t talk about it yet because it hasn’t been aired, but I recently saw a hand go down between one of the absolute greats of all time who is not a grinder anymore, hasn’t been for many years, and he made a read that just—I think it might be one of the greatest reads of all time. That’s something you just can’t teach and you can’t grind to develop. I don’t know. I mean, it’s kind of like, if you take a grinder person who doesn’t have that x factor and they play 100,000,000 hands, not that anyone’s—but you know what I mean? It’s like, can you give a sort of mediocre player just sufficient data such that they can develop such good intuitions that they can spot such an outlier hand like that and make the correct play? Maybe. Maybe. But in reality, that’s not what’s happening. And this player—it just—if it was anyone but him, I think people might even accuse cheating, you know? It was that crazy. I mean, you know, part of it—some people would argue it’s like, yeah, well, maybe you can make these really crazy outlandish plays and then you just happen to see the one that—people only talk about the ones that are successful. But that’s not the case because you’d be losing too much money to be doing these kind of real extreme outsider plays all the time.
Jim: Yep. In fact, that’s my next topic. Perfect transition. What does a physics-trained poker player think about the concept of luck?
Liv: Again, if you’d asked me this question ten, fifteen years ago, I would have been very confident and certain in my answer—that, you know, the laws of probability are the laws of probability, and there is no—you know, it is a baked-in fact of the universe and there is no such thing as you make your own luck. I mean, it depends on how you define the word luck. Some people mean it to be like, you know, the outcomes of your life. It’s like, well, of course you can influence those. You can put yourselves in positions where you can have more lucky moments. I think that’s true. But one of my favorite lyrics of all time is in a Sting song, “The Shape of My Heart,” when he’s talking about, like, he deals the cards as a meditation and those he plays never suspect. He doesn’t play for the money he wins. He doesn’t play for respect. He deals the cards to find the answer, the sacred geometry of chance, the hidden law of a probable outcome, the numbers lead a dance. Like, it’s just so beautiful and it speaks—”Ego and I” is one of our favorite songs because it just—there’s something there. It feels like even though the cards are technically doing a random thing, all the dice or whatever game of chance you’re playing, it feels like—maybe it’s just because humans are meaning-making machines. Right? Like, I do think that’s one of the purposes of life is just to find meaning in seemingly meaningless stuff, but that doesn’t make it any less real. And there’s something in like, poker players—they can’t help themselves. Even like the most ardent game theory robots still talk about the poker gods. They’re like, oh, the poker gods weren’t having that. And you can feel it. You can just sometimes—people go on these streaks, running hot or whatever. And again, it’s not like poker is a pure game of chance. Like, there is obviously skill. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have professionals. But it’s like there’s this—I can’t shake this feeling that there is almost like—this is going to sound insane, but like, poker itself is an egregore. The game itself almost has a playfulness and is having fun with the players and sometimes throws you a little bone or like the opposite of that, you know, but it messes with you in order for you to learn something and have lessons. And the more you tune into this frequency of like, oh, the game is playing with me—it’s not just that I’m playing the game, the game is also playing me—the more magic emerges. And I had my biggest win absolutely out of the blue, like last year. I hadn’t been playing basically any poker for five years. I formally retired from the sort of the grind of the game because I’d kind of fallen out of love with it, if I’m honest. I just didn’t want to be doing all the studying that it required to be good. I just couldn’t. I wanted to do other things. But I got this opportunity to go play down in The Bahamas. They were doing this special tournament. They invited me down to play. And it was going to be like the biggest $25k ever. They had like 2,000 people. And again, talking about funny feelings—I had no voice in the head, no nothing, but I felt like it was so—I almost didn’t go because I was nervous. I was like, something’s going to go down. I don’t know why. And then right before the tournament, the night before, I was having a shower and I had just been reading about the horror of factory farming for pigs, particularly pigs, all kinds of animals, but especially pigs and chickens and how they’re just—it’s like it’s basically hell on earth created by us. Like, these animals are just tortured beyond imagination. Like, they’re just living like this. And I was so bummed about it. I was like, you know what? I’m probably not going to win anything in this tournament, but screw it. I’ll donate 20% of whatever I win to the best pig welfare—well, animal welfare farming charities. And sort of forgot all about it, and then I go and win $2,800,000. I come fourth in this bloody thing. And I felt—I don’t know how to describe it. I felt like I had the wind at my back the entire time. I was having so much fun, and I came into it with the spirit of I’m going to let the game play me. And I will be playing my best. I’m going to try my hardest. But I didn’t have high expectations because I hadn’t been studying, as I said, in forever. I was like, I’m going to play by pure vibes. But, you know, and you can say, oh, yes, well, you just got lucky. The cards were on your side. And yes, they were. But I swear it felt like there was some additional momentum. But maybe that’s just me being like trying to craft a story, make my hero’s journey. I think all of the above can kind of be true in different ways and it’s like which realm—but life is way more fun if the explanation is the game was playing me, the game wanted me to do well because it wanted a win-win out of it. And I’ve used it since as an opportunity to talk about this concept of looking for win-wins, which is like my whole personal philosophy, even in seemingly zero-sum situations like a game of poker. Like, what do you want to do with—if you win in this, what are you going to do with that? Are you going to just go, you know, buy a Lamborghini? Or can you actually put it to something that can make real meaningful change to other people or other beings? And I got rewarded beyond belief for that. And it’s such a powerful meme. So I don’t know. What do I think of probability? I think on the micro scale, it’s a very real thing in terms of the laws of probability. You can do math with it, and it will follow a Gaussian distribution. Like, those hold. But on a sort of meso or macro scale, and certainly if you want to start playing with these ideas of probability also having intentions and like maybe the universe has some goals, or even like smaller sub-universes like the poker game, then you can play with those too.
Jim: Interesting perspective. Last thing on poker before we move on, which is if you believe what you see on TV—I mean, I haven’t watched poker games in many years, but I used to watch quite a few, more than I should have probably. The boys, mostly boys in those days, few girls, were extremely superstitious about what glasses they wore and what angle they put their hat on, etcetera. Is that real, or is that just part of their shtick?
Liv: Oh, no. I think a lot of them are superstitious. Yes. At least they used to be. I think it’s less so now. But people still have their routines and their mantras. Even like really top players who I would say fall more into the scientific category, they still have their sort of process, their ikigai, whatever you want to call it, that they follow. Could you call that superstition? Maybe. Like, depends—what is the difference? Like, I’m sure like a basketball player, right? When they’re just about to take a penalty—I’m at the edge of my knowledge here of the game. But, you know, when they’re about to take a penalty, they might have a certain thing they do with their body before they get in and it’s like, boom. Could you call that superstition or is that just them somatically getting into this space where they know success is likely to come through moving their body? I mean, like, is putting on a certain pair of glasses, you know, your lucky poker glasses—is that the same process? Probably. And so it kind of ties into like, well, are you making your own luck? You know, by believing in these things—again, it’s like we’re meaning-making machines. And I see it as a useful tool in the strategy, but it can go too far. Like, I went through a period of time where I refused to believe in any silly superstitious things like that because in some ways, if you feel—if you walk around fully believing in all these superstitious things like, oh, I said a thing I hoped for, if I don’t touch wood then it won’t come true—well, now if you fall too much into that, then you just lose all your agency. Right? You’re basically saying that you don’t have any impact over the course of your life other than these silly little predetermined hacks. And like, no. The world would be a very boring world if that was true. But it would also be a very boring world if none of it was true. So, again, it’s a blend.
Jim: Indeed. My granddaughter, till very recently, was obsessed with not stepping on a crack when she’s walking along the sidewalk.
Liv: I went through that one. Yep. I know that one. Been there.
Jim: Don’t step on the crack because you’ll break your mother’s back. Right? I think was the way she put it.
Liv: So I mean, it’s pretty grim. Like, who came up with that? Like, what are you doing? Exactly. It’s like, what? I feel like there must have just been something to take advantage of some kid that was walking too fast. Some parent came up with it one time. And then it spread. Just to slow them down, and it’s like, yeah, be even more conscientious.
Jim: Alright. Let’s move on to our next topic, which you did mention in passing, which is egregores, and particularly Moloch. Probably half our audience will know what those two words mean, but for the other half that doesn’t, maybe you could explain them.
Liv: Yeah. So my understanding of egregore is it’s basically another word for like a hive mind or an emergent property of usually a group of people. You know, the Democratic Party is an egregore. Christianity, Islam—these are kind of like—they’re almost like you could call them ideas, but I think they’re more than that because people tend to—when used in the sense of someone using the word egregore, they usually seem to imply that it almost has—it’s like a higher order form of life that is running off the sort of collective substrate of the group of people who are feeding into it. And so it’s almost like an egregore is a being in meme space.
Jim: I used to refer to them as meme plexes before the word egregore came around.
Liv: And it’s almost—and then if you sort of take this a little further, then you can have this idea of like, there’s an ecosystem of egregores. Just as you have, you know, like a petri dish with an ecosystem of different bacteria growing in it, or fungi, you can have—the meme space is filled with these meme plexes or these egregores which are competing, and you certainly see this on the Internet. Like, it’s just, you know, it’s QAnon versus—I can’t even keep track with all the different hashtags, but like, in some ways, if enough people believe in a thing, it becomes a thing. Exactly. And it becomes almost like self-perpetuating, or at least the successful ones do. Moloch would be an example of that in that Moloch originally comes from like an old Bible story from, I think, the Canaanite times where there was—it was like a warning, basically. There was this cult. It was like a death cult who was so focused on getting military power, on winning whatever war or skirmish they were getting into, that they would do these horrific ceremonies where they would sacrifice—they would make the ultimate sacrifice, which was burning their own children alive in effigy to this awful demon called Moloch. And presumably in the Bible, it was a warning of like, don’t make these bad sacrifices to win a narrow goal. And I think it’s a very, very wise piece of advice. And over the years, it has become more specifically associated with this idea of people making—of these collective forces of incentives where maybe it’s individually rational from the perspective of winning at a narrow goal, you know, like trying to increase your share price if you’re in a company, let’s say, and there’s a short-term way of doing that. And if everybody does it, then it makes the world worse. So it creates these downward spirals. An example I always like to give from a more personal time I experienced it was back when I was playing the Instagram game and trying to be like a kind of cute poker girl and raise my following, you know, the number of people who followed me. And I noticed—this was back in, I don’t know, like 2017 or so—when these Instagram face filters started appearing where you press a button and it would give you this perfect makeup and you’d look great. And it was really quick and easy to make yourself look really hot. But I noticed that if I would upload a photo I really liked where I thought I looked great, but then I applied the filter to it, I no longer liked the original picture. In other words, I wouldn’t like my real face, but I did like this new one. Meanwhile, if I posted the filtered picture, it would do so much better because I looked hotter—at least in the standard view of what hot beauty is—it would always perform much better. So there was this short-term incentive for me to use this thing even though I knew it wasn’t particularly good for me. But if I didn’t do it, I knew that I would lose out to everybody else because all the other girls were doing it. Right? So I kind of have to do it too if I want to stay relevant in this game. And so that’s like a little micro example of this where the short-term incentive is misaligned with what’s good. Like if everyone could collectively coordinate to agree, like none of the girls like this stuff, like, hey, can we all just stop doing this please? And we’ll all be mentally healthier and also the world will be more accurate, you know—then you would do it. But because there’s millions and millions of people using these things, it’s almost impossible to create some kind of coordination mechanism to stop it. And if even a few people break it, then often it falls back down into that well. That mechanism of I don’t want to do this thing, but if I don’t do it, all of my competitors will outcompete me, so I have to do it too—
Jim:—is what that’s Moloch. That is Moloch. Yeah. Nobody wants the outcome, but nobody can withdraw because of the game theory dynamics.
Liv: Exactly. And Moloch has become the personification of that very non-personified nebulous concept. I think it’s very powerful because, a, if egregore theory is true, that is an example of an egregore. But b, giving a name to it and personifying it is actually useful because it makes people realize that it’s a true enemy. Like, we’re not very good at being mad at something that doesn’t have a face. But I think that as a civilization, we should be really, really mad at that thing. So that’s why I’ve been banging on about it for so long and making all these weird videos where I dress up as it and trying to get people to feel how shitty this thing is.
Jim: Yeah. This thing is near the center of the problems in our society in my view. You know? And it’s a pattern. Once you can see it, you can’t unsee it. You know? Everything you look at that’s messed up—
Liv: Like, most of the ecosystem problems we’re facing are downstream of Moloch because it’s like—a patch of rainforest isn’t particularly—you know, then there’s a bunch of cattle companies or lumber companies nearby. It’s not worth anything to them while it’s still standing even though it’s worth so much to the collective whole in all these intangible, hard-to-quantify ways. But if they can cut it down, if you can price it up into lumber, you can turn that into money you can spend on anything. And so it’s like, yeah, all these tragedy of the commons scenarios, arms races, the breakdown of the information ecosystem, clickbait, rage bait, all that stuff. It’s all the same Molochian process that’s driving it.
Jim: Yep. Yep. Absolutely. For those who want to learn more about this, Scott Alexander wrote the first piece. What was it called? “Meditations on Moloch,” and we’ll have a link on the episode page. He’s just an amazing writer. You know, I actually pay for his Substack because it’s just so good. Right? The other thing I’d like to point to is I actually did a podcast, Currents 090, with a guy named BJ Campbell and another guy named Patrick Ryan, where they talked about the theory of egregores in great detail. In fact, BJ claims to be the, if not the inventor of the name, the popularizer of the name. So just a couple of pointers, and they’re both interesting characters. And I also have a real homey example of a Moloch or multipolar trap that’s so simple that it’s easier to understand perhaps. It’s a historically true one, which is back in the twenties and thirties when they first came around, dry breakfast cereals were crackpot health foods. Right? Very pure grain, no sugar, no artificial colors, etcetera, including Kellogg. Right? And for quite a while, people competed on price and taste and all those sorts of things. But then one of the players in the industry said, what happens if we put sugar, a lot of sugar, into the recipe? And guess what? Kids loved it. Right? And who drives the decision to buy breakfast cereal? What the kids think of it, basically. And so the moms say, oh, yeah, little Johnny loves Froot Loops. And then you find out Froot Loops are 50 percent by weight sugar. And then, of course, all the other cereal companies either go out of business or play the same game. And by the sixties, I don’t know, 85, 90 percent of the breakfast cereals were high sugar content, which adds to the obesity crisis and the diabetes crisis, etcetera. And probably, they would all like to get out of that racket, but they can’t. Perfect example. And it’s the same mechanism, unfortunately, that’s driving a lot of the AI race.
Liv: People are like, why are we seeing so much AI slop? It’s like—well, beyond the AI slop stuff, like, more specifically, I think ideally—I don’t know if you’ve seen the Mythos thing that came out yesterday.
Jim: Yes. Everybody I know—I mean, that’s all we were talking about yesterday.
Liv: I mean, I would love to talk to you about that more because I would love your view on that. You’ve been involved in—you know about cybersecurity. Right? It’s kind of your background? Up until now, whoever was the—whoever could produce the fastest model, the most powerful model as fast as possible, which generally means there’s probably going to be a lot of corner cutting going on at least on safety testing. And okay. By and large, we’ve been okay. Clearly, we’re still here. But the design of the game is such that the most reckless is most likely to win the race to superintelligence. And it’s like, okay. Great. So we want a superintelligence designed by the most reckless, power-hungry people. Cool. And yeah. So it scales from everything from Froot Loops to beauty filters to the race to superintelligence. We’re not good. And it’s very frustrating because I think actually a lot of the people building it are actually acutely aware of this, but there are a lot of these ancillary people like Marc Andreessen and someone who—I don’t understand why, but, you know, like, are very adamant that there is no misalignment within the system. Like, no. The techno-capital machine is perfectly good. It just makes all of human capital and flourishing only ever better. It’s like, yes. It’s made a lot of things better, but look at all of the harms that are happening in an ecosystem that is probably on the verge of collapse. Oh, yeah. Look at the mental health crisis coming out of social media, for instance.
Jim: Or the destruction of the social infrastructure that came from the smartphone. So I know Marc, and he is a smart guy, but he is just monomaniacal on this tech accelerationism.
Liv: Yes. He’s a zealot. He’s a zealot. The answer to whatever problem is caused by technology is more technology.
Jim: Right. And more technology as fast as possible. And also the introspection is bad. Anyway, can we stop? Let’s talk about the AI multipolar traps a little bit, Moloch. And then this is a particularly pernicious one, worse than the breakfast cereal or any of the other simple examples that you get, and that is there are three interlocked multipolar traps, at least so I’d argue. The first is the obvious one that, as you said, you know, whoever gets to ASI or at least AGI first gets a big win. So you’ve got Sam Altman versus Dario Amodei at Anthropic. You’ve got the Google guys, and now Facebook has jumped back in and Musk—hard to tell how serious he is, but he’s doing stuff. And so there’s the classic competition amongst the companies for their own self-interest of being there first or being perceived to be the market leader. And most of these kinds of tech markets, even if they don’t go all the way to ASI, there’s usually one or two winners that get all the profit and everybody else gets nothing. So there’s a huge race to be as fast as possible, ignore safety to the degree that you can. But now here’s the second level. Because there’s so much money in this stuff, you have to be able to seduce the capital markets. You know, most of our tech companies did not require huge investments and particularly didn’t require a lot of debt. But unlike them, the capital requirements are more like steel mills or railroads. And so there’s a second competition—your story about how well you’re doing in the company-to-company competition has to be optimized for the providers of capital. Because that’s—even if you’re OpenAI and you’re beating Anthropic, but you can’t convince the bond community that your business model is viable, then you’re not going to get the billions of dollars necessary to build these huge data centers, etcetera. So that’s level two. It’s competition amongst the asset allocators. And if anything, in my experience, the asset allocators are even more psychopathic than the company CEOs because they have nothing to sell. They have no sex appeal except rate of return. Period. Right? So that’s what they sell. It’s rate of return. They don’t care what the companies they invest in do as long as they have the highest rate of return. So that reinforces it. And then here’s the third one, which is not unique to AI, but it’s stronger in AI than in most things. And that is the geopolitical multipolar trap. I mean, how many times have I heard people say, but China. Right? If we slow down, they won’t and we’ll be screwed. Right? Which is actually true without some coordination, some agreements not to do this. So I would suggest that the AI conundrum is one of the worst examples of Moloch that I could see on the horizon, and unfortunately, one with potentially the worst outcomes.
Liv: Exactly. It’s the one with the highest stakes. I mean, arguably. I mean, you could also argue—I mean, actually, what China are doing to the oceans is also pretty damn—like, the overfishing. Like, it’s a classic example of Moloch. Right? Like, you have a shared commons of fish and it’s like, if someone overfishes it, all the stocks collapse. And I mean, that’s literally what China are doing on an industrial, oceanic, global scale. The AI one is obviously very scary for those reasons and it’s like, show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome, and that is holding as true as ever. Thank you, Charlie Munger for that gold quote. At the same time though, the AI one in some ways should be easier to solve because, for example, the leading companies are all American or at least Western. All of the CEOs speak English or are Western people. One of them is British, but the rest are all Americans. Well, one of them is Indian, technically. It depends who you define as the head of Google, you know, running AI stuff. The fact that we have so many people who, in theory, have shared values, they are all aligned with the West—that should make it easier for coordination, except most of them seem to hate each other.
Jim: Yeah. Yeah. That’s extra fuel on the first layer.
Liv: Elon and—I mean, Dario, I think, seemed like he didn’t really hate anybody. Well, he didn’t like Sam. But like now they’re all kind of mostly all picking on each other and it’s like, guys, come on. I just want to stand them all on a step and bang their heads together. Like, that’s actually what needs to happen. Just come on guys. Just pack it in. Like, coordinate, just cooperate. You know what I mean? Coordinate, just cooperate on some things. Like, you can still compete on other things. We can still have a like annual contest of who’s got, you know, the biggest—well done, you know, but it’s just—so there are ways and I hope, hope, hope, hope that there’s some kind of back-channel diplomacy going on with China. I have no idea if there is and I don’t know how or what the path would be. But in theory, like, China should be aligned too. Like, they aren’t people who like to lose control. I mean, it depends which aspects of AI you’re concerned about. Are you worried about, like, the dangers of—with Mythos, like, the ability for cyber attack, you know, any terrorist person or even like some kid in a basement can do like civilization-crashing cyber attacks or create some novel pathogen, you know, based on the way ChatGPT tells them to? Though you have those issues, but then there’s also the risk of like actually just losing control of superintelligence itself, which, you know, is a very polarizing topic. Some people think it’s impossible, some people think it’s inevitable. I don’t know. I’m fairly agnostic on it. It seems like Anthropic is somewhat able to align their models even as they get more powerful and same with the rest. But at the same time, it’s still no guarantee. Nonetheless, like, China don’t like the idea of losing control. They are control freaks to the max. So there should be alignment there. If anything, they’re probably very, very concerned about what’s going on in the West with this and probably want the West to slow down, not only for the geopolitical reasons, but also just the lack of control, the potential for loss of control. So I hope that is happening. So in some ways, the AI one is less hard, for example, than stopping the deforestation of the Amazon Basin, where you’ve got thousands of competing interests all spread out in a very hard-to-police area, and they’re all just slowly chipping away doing their little Molochian thing. That feels almost harder in some ways, but at the same time, it doesn’t have quite the same amount of capital behind it. Yeah. Nor the level of potential short-term risk. The level of catastrophe—and especially short-term catastrophe. Like, this AI stuff might play out literally within the next four years, more or less. Or some people say 2027 will be the—I just hosted a debate between Daniel Kokotajlo and Dean Ball. Daniel Kokotajlo is the author of AI 2027, and Dean Ball was the author of Trump’s AI policy before he left. Stephanie’s concept, and she was there helping me. It was my first time hosting it, and it was amazing. They were such—to see these two brilliant thinkers on the opposing—because one, basically, the premise was should markets or governments be left in charge of AI? They both argue the different thing. One comes from government. One comes from markets. Sorry. One comes from, like, you know, the labs. And funny enough, they’re both arguing in the opposite direction because they’re both so horrified by what they saw. Dean Ball, the former Trump guy, is just like, you cannot trust the government to control it. Like, no way. This will be a disaster. And, like, you know, Daniel from OpenAI, former OpenAI employee, is like, you cannot trust the labs. They were crazy. So I was like, okay, guys. Well—
Jim: That’s really reassuring. Right? Yeah. But they found some synthesis, so that was good. It’s a really, really interesting conversation. Yeah. I’m looking forward to that one. All of her things have been good, so I’d look forward to this one for sure. Now let’s get a little more philosophical, worldview-y. Things like multipolar traps and Moloch—what are they? What kind of things are they in the universe?
Liv: They are collections of forces—collections of game-theoretic incentives, essentially, forces, whatever you want to call them—that when they do their thing, create a describable entity. So what kind of thing are they? I mean, they are a concept, ultimately. Do they have a physical body? No. But do they impact the physical world? Absolutely. Yes. They are like a form of gravity. You know, I describe—Moloch is one of the two attractor states, as they are called, negative attractor states. There may be more, but in terms of the big obvious negative ones, you have Moloch in one direction, which is kind of like scorched earth, Mad Max. You know, if played out to its fruition, it will be some kind of thermonuclear war or death by just AI loss of control or complete destruction of the ecosystem or the complete destruction of the brain because everyone’s just been farmed off by social media. You know, everything gets sold down the river for the almighty dollar—or for the almighty power, I should say, more specifically. And that’s one attractor state. But then you also have—and we haven’t talked about this yet, and I think it’s one that actually needs to be talked about much more. I mean, people talk about it. It’s like the risk of authoritarianism, centralization, death by bureaucracy. And I’ve started—it needs a name. Because again, we’ve got the bad guy in Moloch, but there’s its counterpart because they kind of feed into each other, these two things. And I’m trying to make it a thing—I’m calling her Norma. Norma. And she’s got kind of like—did you see Harry Potter? Oh yeah. So do you remember Dolores Umbridge, who I personally found a much scarier bad guy than Voldemort because she was so much more insidious? She’s like, she wears little pink bows and she’s, I’m just trying to keep you all safe. You need to listen to me and follow my rules. That’s Norma. And she’s terrifying because—you know, I’m seeing her strangle my country, The UK, my homeland, to death. Like, Norma is everywhere there. Yeah. And you’ve got a GDP that’s completely flatlined. You’ve got people scared to say their real views on social media. You know, it has the veneer of freedom there but—I mean, to be fair, there’s a lot I bite my tongue on a lot of things here too, frankly. But yeah, like, Norma—her mild form is like red tape and bureaucracy and her worst form is, you know, Mao’s Great Leap Forward or Stalin. Yeah, exactly. You know. And if you actually look at history, she’s killed more people than Moloch thus far. That doesn’t mean to say that Moloch doesn’t in the end. But what’s also interesting about these is I feel like these days we can’t talk about one without the other because they do actually feed into one another. So, you know, what is one solution to a Molochian problem? Oh, more regulation. We need top-down laws. Okay. But if those laws are not well designed, they can stifle other very important things or worse, you know, like they can be used for regulatory capture and other things. And they do, over time, erode people’s freedom. They’re two sides of the same hideous beast. And unfortunately, levers of power attract sociopaths. People forget that. They assume that, you know, Jimmy Carter will be running the levers of power. You know? He was a very unusual president of The United States. The typical president is closer to Trump. Well, maybe not quite that bad, but, you know, a person driven by bizarre psychological needs essentially. And so if you build that damn power, maybe not immediately, sooner or later, a sociopath will be driving it.
Jim: Moloch often relies on psychopaths to get stuff, you know, because—
Liv: like, going back to the Froot Loops, it’s kind of a psychopathic act, right, to go and add—the first mover is often a psychopath. Exactly. The first mover who will start off a more Molochian race to the bottom does a psychopathic action. You know, the first person to cheat in a poker game or do something that’s—we call it angle shooting, but break the rules in a sort of subtle but sketchy way where now kind of everyone else has to do it or they’re left behind, but it makes the game worse. That is a psychopathic action. So psychopaths go there and will take advantage and often win in Molochian races, but then you’ll also get psychopaths or sociopaths who love the idea of just having—being the king or queen of the world and controlling—
Jim: Yeah. The dominator model, which has essentially plagued humanity since the invention of agriculture. I also call it the big man phenomenon because it’s almost always men, not quite always, but almost always. And, you know, that’s one of the ways that humanity went wrong in its transition from the forager epoch to the agricultural epoch.
Liv: And I got lots of things I can say about that, but let’s not go down those roads today. I felt like I wanted to give the demon of centralization and bureaucracy and tyranny a female name, in part because Moloch is very male-coded. And I think it’s also true Moloch feeds upon the toxic masculine urge to crush enemies, win at all costs. That’s more of a classic masculine urge, typically. Again, there are plenty of women that do that stuff, to be clear, but it’s more of a masculine thing. Norma, you know—we need more regulations to protect and preserve and keep people safe from their own worst impulses. That’s a toxic feminine urge typically. Yeah. Plenty of men feel that way. But if I had to pick, one male and female or feminine masculine—like, what was wokeism? Right? That was toxic femininity going way, way, way too far. And, you know, what is the manosphere? It’s toxic masculinity coming back in, you know, and it’s like this stupid swinging of a pendulum between these two very unhealthy, non-integrated mindsets, ways of being. Like, we just need—you know, we can have a small number of people be extremely masculine and extremely feminine. That’s fine. But when whole societies start swinging into one direction or the other, it’s bad in both situations. It’s like you need to have a healthy balance of both. And frankly, like, positive masculinity is something that tries to take care and, like, no—actually, we need to protect and defend these precious things from the forces of toxic masculinity. And positive femininity is like, no, we do need to also defend. You know, they’re both trying to defend, essentially. Yeah. So that’s why I just think Norma needs to be female.
Jim: And certainly in The UK, the current manifestation of over-bureaucracy is the nanny state. Exactly. Nannies are usually female. It’s just associated with that. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, that makes a lot of sense, particularly in The UK state. Maybe not so much in Russia, right, which is a much more male dynamic, big man, chest pounder. I’m the greatest.
Liv: Yes. Yeah. And I don’t suppose they say—although, I mean, again, I actually wonder, do they use the word safety in any way to justify what they do? I don’t know. Interesting question.
Jim: One of the things you talk about on Win Win a lot is how do we turn Molochian traps into positive-sum games? What are some of your thoughts on how to do that?
Liv: Well, as we’ve sort of alluded to, a lot of things that kick-start a Molochian problem—you know, get the trap going—is a psychopath or a number of psychopaths. So step one would probably be to rein them in somehow. Develop better mechanisms whereby we can detect the real psychopaths who just don’t care about the whole and are going to—make people better at spotting psychopaths. I think that may be because, like, I don’t want to name particular people, but there are certain companies where it’s kind of obvious they’re being led by someone high on the psychopath scale. And had the people around been more aware of that, they would have not selected that person perhaps. That would be one of the mechanisms. I think it’s very situational. You know, not all—there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to different Moloch traps. But generally speaking, you want to have some kind of combination of top-down and bottom-up. You certainly don’t want just top-down regulations only. Again, I mean, there probably may be some situations where it works, but usually if you do that, then you’re just now leaving yourself vulnerable to Norma. So generally speaking, the best solutions are where they are bottom-up. And, like, you know, the work of Elinor Ostrom, who if anyone’s not familiar, should go read her writing on managing the commons. She found that certainly back in the day, you know, like these sort of indigenous tribes and so on, when they had a shared resource like a lake with fish and so on, they would have these norms that developed from the bottom up. There was no centralizing authority managing them. It was like the norms themselves were the centralizing authority. And I use the word norm in the good sense. Like, norm is good when they’re from the bottom up, and Norma is bad when they’re top-down. There are these kind of third-path solutions, like win-win solutions where you do sort of escape from this seeming trade-off. Like, I’ve been going reading about zero-knowledge proofs. And they seem like such an elegant solution to this seemingly impossible trade-off between—when you’re on the Internet, do you want to preserve people’s anonymity and have people have that freedom? How do you preserve that and at the same time actually verify who you’re transacting with and have that be a secure verification? Like, that seemed like an impossible dichotomy. Right? But then someone put in the work, sort of stepped out of the false dichotomy. Well, assumed it was a false dichotomy. Like, what third option is there? What higher solution can there be? Oh, zero-knowledge proofs. It’s a way to develop trust. Well, you can verify without needing to trust who the other person is. Well, at least you can say that this is the same person.
Jim: Right. But at the same time, their reputation can actually collect.
Liv: Exactly. Exactly. So it’s really about probably increasing information flows. I think a lot of—again like, if it was clearer—coming back to, like, the Amazon deforestation. Right? If there was a clearer way—it’s surely been helpful to preventing Amazon deforestation that we now have companies like Planet or, you know, citizen science tracking the rates of deforestation. So at least there’s now information about how fast this resource is getting depleted, which gives third parties a chance to try and come together to stop it from happening. So, yeah, I think taking anything that increases feedback loops and information flows such that there’s awareness, you can shine light on a Moloch trap—that is one of the steps. Curtailing the impact of psychopaths, or trying to design incentives so that it’s very, very hard for a psychopath to get into a position of power—that by itself would be huge. Huge. Of course, there’d be a whole bunch of empty CEO suites to be filled.
Jim: Yeah.
Liv: I mean, it’s true that it does attract them, and I think it’s also a fine line because you get people who have occasional psychopathic traits. Because you could argue that, you know, like a military general who has to make a horrible trade-off. Right? I don’t want to send—I don’t want to bomb this town, but if I don’t bomb this town, there’s a very, you know, 80 percent probability that this bigger bomb is going to go off somewhere else because there are really bad people here. You know, that decision to bomb those people is technically—some people say that’s a psychopathic thing. Right? And especially if they can find a way to sort of desensitize themselves from what’s happening, which I think is probably a necessary thing to do. Like, how can you press the button to go and bomb where you know that probably innocent people are going to die? That is a form of psychopathy in some ways. They’re doing it to prevent an even greater harm. So you get people—and I think a lot of—I don’t want to just shit on CEOs as, hey. I know a bunch of CEOs who are not remotely psychopathic, but even then, they still have to make these tough trade-offs. Anyone in positions of power of sufficient size is put into positions where they have to functionally be one. You know, Daniel Schmachtenberger calls it the obligate psychopath or sociopath, like, where you have to, by law, optimize for shareholder value, you know, make share price go up ahead of—and if it’s like, well, if I’m depleting—you know, if there’s an—don’t break the law, but laws are insufficient. So, like, go and pollute this ecosystem, the information ecosystem with whatever. I’m just doing the right thing by this. So it’s like sometimes situations make people obligate psychopaths. So it’s really, yeah, as you say, that’s the crux. It’s like how do we design situations where, a, true psychopaths don’t get into power and we’re better at spotting them, and b, good people aren’t forced to be them. And I think it’s b that is far more important. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Institutional design essentially. Because, you know, our current rules, as you say, or at least the interpretation of it—I always point out to people, the “must maximize shareholder value” can easily be changed by an amendment to your bylaws. Right? Or when you set the company up, you say our ethos is not optimizing shareholder value. It’s perfectly legal to do that. Problem is the default legal state is that you must.
Liv: Yes. And also too, you’re then stuck in this game of—it’s harder to get investment. Exactly. This is the second-order multipolar trap, second-order Moloch of capital allocation, then is another big problem.
Jim: Alright. We’re getting close to our time here. Let’s—I really want to save a little bit of time for one of your passion areas, and that is industrial farming.
Liv: Yes. As in one of my anti-passions. Yeah.
Jim: So one of your—yeah. Not yeah. Well, I thought you were investing all your money to build pig factories. Right?
Liv: No. Definitely not. No.
Jim: But so let’s tie it back a little bit. Because one of the amazing blotches on Western civilization was Descartes’ view that animals couldn’t feel pain, didn’t have any consciousness. And even though he was the sort of philosophical father of Western thinking about consciousness, he did some of the most horrible things to animals imaginable. So let’s start with your thinking about what is the standing of animals with respect to our value systems.
Liv: Like, what is the point in us having these huge prefrontal cortexes and these wonderful—whether you believe they’re just purely from evolution or God-given—capabilities to solve problems and make the world better for ourselves. Why should that stop at—you know, like, over time, we have increased our moral circle from our immediate family to our tribe to our village to our country to—you know, we might not—and I think it’s okay if you don’t value someone else’s life in a different country as much as people in your own country. I think that’s okay, but it’s not that you value it at zero, right? We expand our moral circle over time in part, you know, as life gets easier, it makes it easier to expand your moral circle. Well, I think that has quite clearly by most people’s standards extended to animals. Now which type of animals? Again, I’m one of these—my friends call me crazy bug lady because I literally can’t hurt a fly. I’ve gotten to that point where I just—I mean, with the exception of mosquitoes, if there’s a mosquito trying to eat my blood, sorry, buddy, you’ve got to go. And like, oh, you know, I have killed plenty of insects intentionally and unintentionally. But generally speaking, like, I get very—if there’s a spider, I’ll always put it out. I even—I even cockroaches at this point. I’m like, I’ll try and catch it and put it somewhere far away. What are we here for if not to improve the lot of those that are less fortunate? And I think we don’t have to go as far as cockroaches, but, you know, most people agree that it’s not okay to torture dogs. And why do we think that? Because they have the ability to sense—clearly, they yelp. You stand on their foot, they yelp. They look at you with horror if you shout at them and cower. They behave like children. They have similar—you know, children—choose your age of child. But I mean, border collies out there are for sure smarter than three-year-old kids, you know, and seem to have at least as much emotional depth, if not more. Now, if you extend that to unfortunately the majority of the animals that are actually under our purview, that are under our care—99.9 percent of them are farm animals. Of those, close to 99 percent—or at least, let’s not get misquoted by someone who’s like, it’s not quite 99 percent—over 95 percent are kept in the most horrific, torturous conditions for the majority of their lives. Chickens stacked in, you know, packed into these tiny little cages with just wire flooring in layers and layers of their own feces and like dead bodies of their counterparts and they never get to see natural light, they never get to stretch their wings. That’s just chickens, who a lot of people don’t think have any moral worth, but I don’t know. I’ve kept chickens. They have personalities. Some of them are friendly, some are not, some can get attached to you, some don’t. They have emotional depth. Is it as much as a dog? Of course not. Arguably the worst and the most heinous is what’s happening to pigs. Again, way over 95 percent of all pigs in America—the female pigs are kept in what is called gestation crates. And these crates—these aren’t just—they’re farrowing crates because people think, oh, it’s just when the babies are born so they don’t lie on the babies. No. Those are farrowing crates, which are also not great, but those are like a little bit more short-lived. When they’re taken out of their farrowing crate, they are then put into a brand new crate called a gestation crate, where they are artificially inseminated, and the cycle repeats again. And all the while that they are in that cycle, which is basically way over 90 percent of their lives, they are kept in a crate so small that they cannot turn around. They have a flag three inches in front of them and three inches behind them and like two inches on either side. So they literally—they’re big long animals. They cannot turn around. If someone did that to a dog for an hour, like—and that crate where it literally can’t even turn its body, people freak out. And pigs are—there’s a lot of evidence pigs are quite a bit smarter than and have more emotional depth than dogs. And they live their entire lives like this. And it’s all in the name of a few cents on the dollar of corporate profit. It’s not like it’s making the meat much cheaper and we wouldn’t be able to afford it if it was—like, even giving them like 10 square feet and a few pigs in a pen where at least they can move around—it’s probably like an order of magnitude improvement in quality of life. And that’s like a few extra cents. It’s still a shitty life, by the way. They’re still stuck inside and in cramped conditions where they can’t wallow. But even that would be—I’m trying to be pragmatic here—that would be such an improvement. And yet, like, these giant companies, these corporations, some of which are owned by China, by the way—like, the biggest pork—well, I think it’s the second biggest pork company in The US, Smithfield. Smithfield in Virginia where I live.
Jim: Well, they’re owned by China.
Liv: Yep. I knew that. By the way, their factory farming is even—I mean, it’s as bad, if not even worse than what they do to pigs. Also because they are the ones who eat the most pigs. But yeah. Like, the vast majority of pigs in America, way over 95 percent, are kept in these absolutely unfathomably horrific conditions. And it’s to save a—like, most of the price difference just goes into the pocket of these companies. And even if it was passed on to the consumer, it’s a few cents on the dollar. It’s madness. And so it’s obviously horrific from an animal welfare standpoint. It’s also horrific for our health because to keep pigs in these kind of conditions, they need to be pumped full of antibiotics. They use all kinds of synthetic hormones. You get all these bros being like, oh, don’t be a soy boy and drink soy milk that’s got like phytoestrogens in it. It’s like, do you know what kind of artificial hormones are being pumped into your bacon? That’s making you way more of a soy boy than any of the soy that you’re eating, like, bro. But it’s also making—something like, I think yes—animal agriculture in The US uses as many antibiotics per year as the entire US health care system. So it’s contributed as much, if not more, because the farmers use it and these industrial farms use it really recklessly, to the antibiotic resistance crisis. So that in and of itself is just a huge pending disaster. And then there’s probably, like, the—there’s swine flu and it’s like the perfect breeding ground for the next horrific pathogen is likely to come out of one of these factory farms. I mean, to be clear, organic pathogen. There’s plenty of potentially man-made ones in the risk profile as well out there. Yeah. So there’s that. And then there’s also the environmental impact. I mean, anyone living near one of these things—just the smell of them, like, runoff, the waterways are just like, everything downstream of them is just poisoned, dead because it’s just all this manure, like, concentrated. So it’s just so unnecessary. Like, there are just some basic things that can be done. And so that’s why I was just like, oh—and it’s unbelievably underfunded compared to anything else. When I meet people who are like, I love animals so much, I’m going to donate to my local dog shelter. I’m just like, bro, your money can go about a thousand times as far if you donate to one of the best anti-factory farming intervention charities.
Jim: Name a couple of them so I can put them on the website.
Liv: Animal Equality. They’re really good, you can specify like what specific areas. What I donated to last year, the Accountability Board—just go look them up, run by a guy called Josh Balk. Animal Equality, you cannot go wrong. I did a lot of vetting on those and they were—I hope I win another huge chunk of money so I can donate a bunch more to them because they are far from reaching their funding cap. They all work for peanuts, these people. Like, because they’re so—you know, they’re awesome.
Jim: I suspect 500 years from now, and we look back—or the people of that time look back—they will be unbelievably appalled at our industrial farming.
Liv: I will say there are—less than 500 years. I think we’ll be there in basically as soon as we get a new viable alternative, you know, the way we look back at slavery. It’s like unimaginable, right? Because it’s like, well, you don’t need to do that, we have better—you know. But part of the problem is people can’t, when they’re in the thing, they can’t see out. And you’ll never see greater cognitive dissonance than when you point out to someone who’s chowing down on some cheap bacon and they claim they’re an animal lover. You’ll never see someone be angrier. I’ve almost gotten punched in the face by just pointing out this objectively true thing because people can’t handle their cognitive dissonance on it. So that’s why I’m so pro alternative proteins, especially like, you know, you have the plant-based ones, but actual—whatever you want to call it, cultivated meat, lab-grown meat. It’s not genetically modified. It is genetically identical. It’s just like growing the steak without the nervous system of the animal that’s suffering to produce your steak. Like, I think I hope that’s the future because that’s the win-win solution. People want—if you want to eat—people aren’t going to become vegan, unfortunately. I’m aspirationally vegan but even I still eat meat now and then. So then the pragmatic solution is okay, which is more environmentally friendly without all the suffering and without all the antibiotics and all the bullshit—is cultivated meat.
Jim: Yeah. It’s still a long ways from financial viability.
Liv: But it’s not as far as you think. I recently went to some meetings where I’ve met with some of the companies. Like, they’re way within—I think it’s, like, ranges between—yeah, it was 10x. It’s come down a lot. It’s come down a lot. In some cases it’s like two times. More now the issue is just how quickly can they scale it? That’s a problem. You just need to scale it. And they just need more capital. And then also, you’re fighting against a very powerful incumbent lobby who are doing everything in their power to stop this technology from existing. Isn’t it illegal in Texas or something?
Jim: In certain states. Yeah. There are some states. There are a bunch of states. Florida, Texas where I am, like, they’ve all banned it. And it’s just because of the big agriculture lobby. But it’s just a matter of time.
Liv: The other stupid thing is—again, like, this is going to be the technology of the future. This is how we’re going to feed the majority of the world because you cannot copy-paste factory farming and feed all of India, who’s still mostly vegetarian, but they are going to be wanting the same kind of diets as the average Texan eventually. The world will collapse if you do that, like guaranteed. The solution is this, and it’s like, do you want to let China get this entire industry too? Like we’ve done with everything else? Like, or should we get ahead of the curve where we actually have the best technology? China are going all in on this stuff as are other countries. So wait, we want to be the one backward nation that doesn’t do it? Come on guys. Yeah. So like, again, the incentives.
Jim: There’s a bunch of money to be made. Alright. I just had a wonderful conversation here today with Liv Boeree. Check out her podcast, winwinpodcast.com. Thank you very much, Liv, for being a guest on The Jim Rutt Show.
Liv: Thank you, Jim. This is amazing. It was great.