Liv Boeree: Poker Rules Of Life, Game Theory, AI & Effective Altruism
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Bloody hell.

What you're about to hear is an interview between me and Liv Borey. Now, Liv is a World Series of Poker and European Poker Tour champion. Now, Liv's story is super interesting because she actually has a degree in astrophysics and she combined her science background and passion for games to get into the world of poker and to win all of these championships. I remember sort of...

end of my third year hanging out with a bunch of PhD students and they didn't seem like they were having a particularly good time so I decided to take a gap year at the end of my graduation which was coincided right around when I went on this game show that introduced me to poker. I

I went to a local card club in London. I had, I think, literally a tenner on me or maybe 15 quid and I ended up winning the whole thing. In the conversation, we talk about a whole bunch of things and by the end of the episode, you'll learn firstly about Liv's inspirational story around how she took risks and followed her hunch and ended up building a life that she could have never imagined.

We talk a little bit about effective altruism and how we can become better philanthropists and have more of an impact by using logic and reason to figure out the most high expected value thing that we can do to help solve the world's most pressing problems. And we talk about the dangers of social media as it relates to artificial intelligence and why AI is the most high stakes creation by humans to date and what the implications are for our future.

Part of the problem with social media is it reduces the richness and complexity of the human experience down to like these very narrow metrics. By definition, it's inherently dehumanizing. It's like we're trapped in this, an attention game, but game is the nice way of calling it. In reality, it's an attention war.

Liv, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. You seem to be doing lots and lots of things, like former professional poker player. You've got like television broadcasting and presenting, YouTube channel and podcast. You're associated with the Effective Altruism community. And I was really struggling to figure out what is it that you're doing right now? Like, how would you describe what you do if someone asks you at like a party, for example? Yeah, good question. Well, my main focus right now is getting a podcast off the ground.

And that's going to be on the sort of the topic of how do we find more healthy competition in the world? And what is people's relationship with competition as this sort of way of interacting with one another? Because it seems like, you know, competition is a core part, not only of human nature, but of nature itself. But the more I look into it, it seems like competition is getting a little, it's going in the unhealthy direction, certainly in things like

fast developing technologies where there's so much pressure, you know, so many short term incentives on companies, you know, like the AI, AI, for example, all these companies are under so much pressure to be the first one to develop the next thing that it's hard for them to also do, you know, focus on safety as much as perhaps they should be. Um,

Same goes with like the competitive forces that are driving deforestation, you know People are just trying to survive, you know get by and they see that their neighbors are cutting down a bit of rainforest Well, I'm gonna do it too, right? Yeah so that's sort of my current area of obsession. Yeah, and I'm trying to raise awareness of the Mechanisms that seem to be driving this stuff through my youtube channel. I've been working on this series called Moloch and

which we can talk about a bit more. And then, yeah, the podcast. And then I also give talks regularly on poker thinking, really whatever people want to hear about. Nice. So, yeah. I don't know how you put that. Yeah, it's hard to turn that into like a noun or something. I feel like when I was a doctor, it was very easy to be like, that's a thing. But now it's like some combination of YouTube videos, podcasts, writing, like...

I guess influencer? Yeah. Why does that word come to such baggage, right? Influencer, creator. Creator, yeah. Something like that. So you're on this game show as the professor of one of the five personalities. Are you like 22, 20-ish? 21. 21 at this point. So what happened on the game show?

Oh, man. So the way it worked was, I think we filmed sort of six, it was six or seven episodes. And each episode we would play a sit and go. So sit and go is where, so there'd be the five of us playing plus a qualifier each week. This whole show was sponsored by an online poker company.

You know, it was a marketing thing for them. And so, you know, it was trying to get people to go, oh, watch the show, play online, see if you can qualify to the next episode or whatever. And so we would all play and it basically, a sit and go is like a mini tournament where...

You all start with an equal number of chips. And if you lose all your chips, you're out. And it's a last person standing type thing. And so based on the results of each of those, we would accumulate points, which would go forward into the final, where it would be just the five of us playing for the £100,000, which again, winner take all. Pretty aggressive. Yeah. Especially for a bunch of beginners where none of us really knew what we were doing. And so the first few episodes of the show went very well for me. Like I

Clearly had, you know, I got the game and I loved the game from the outset. And the funny thing is during the filming, I went to a local card club in London called the Gutshot and,

And they had this infamous tournament called the five pound rebuy, where it was just, you know, you could rebuy for the first hour for five quid. But I didn't know that it was a rebuy. And, you know, I was fairly broke. Yeah. So you were like five pounds one off. Yeah, I bought 10. I had five, 10, I think literally a tenner on me or maybe 15 quid. But, you know, that was like, this is for drinks and I've got my five pound entry.

And so then I'm watching like people literally going all in every hand, just like, you know, rebuy, rebuy, rebuy. And I'm like, I can't, I can't do this. So somehow I get through the rebuy period with my one buy-in and I end up winning the whole thing that like coming home at like five in the morning with, you know, it was like 120 entrants. And like, I am a straight up beginner. Yeah. Win this thing. And I remember going home to my boyfriend at the time with this handful of cash, more cash than I've ever seen, like 800 quid and just like throwing it on him. We're like, I've got my new career. Yeah.

So that was a very interesting sort of start to it all. And that was midway through filming for the TV show. Yes. So like, are they training you on how to play poker? Yeah. So we had, they had three pros that would come and like help us, you know, two of whom, well, it was,

Devilfish, Dave Devilfish Elliott, who sadly has passed away now, but he was the UK's most famous poker player for a while, certainly back then. Annie Duke, who at the time was a successful female poker player, now does a lot of work. Yeah, she's written books about like bets and things. Yeah, she's a very good writer. And Phil Helmuth, who is probably the most famous poker player alive today. Oh, okay, cool. So these guys are coaching you on how to play poker. Yes. So these were the three coaches and

And it was, you know, so now all of a sudden I meet these, I remember looking up sort of what their lives are like. And I'm like, wow, these guys, wait, this is even better than being a rock star. These guys get to travel the world. They're treated like rock stars. They, you know, they have all these adoring fans. They're having a great time, but they get to play this incredible game, which frankly seems a lot more fun than actually guitar. So that's where I first was like, ooh, maybe this could be my new career. Yeah.

uh it certainly yeah it definitely came it was definitely the most exciting thing i'd seen thus far because i guess for most people if you're just kind of playing poker casually you wouldn't then jump to thinking this could be a career but i guess because you're interacting with these three people who've literally made professional poker playing their career right and then you win this competition you're like hang on maybe there's something in this like free easy money or whatever what's what's going through your mind

No, I mean, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I was just like, well, I've clearly got a gift for this. Yeah. Like go and win this tournament. And I mean, looking back on it, I must have just run, you call it running, running like God, where just the cards are so on your side. Because to win any tournament, you need, you can be the best player in the world. But if the cards are not cooperating, you just cannot win. Like it's almost impossible. And certainly when the tournament that sort of fast paced.

So the cards must have just been completely, I don't really remember. I remember I flopped four of a kind and so on, which is very unlikely given, you know, I'm probably playing like 400 hands across the whole tournament. What does it mean to flop a four of a kind?

So I had, you have, let's say you have two sevens as your whole cards. And then the flop comes out, which is three cards. Oh, okay. And two of those were the two other sevens, which is extraordinarily unlikely. I can't remember the odds right now. So it's a good thing to flop a four of kind. Oh, it's incredible. Oh, yeah, yeah. Very, very, very good thing. Incredibly rare. We're talking like, I embarrassingly can't remember the odds right now, but it's like on the order of like one in 36,000 or something like that.

So had that in this. So that's what I'm saying. The cards were absolutely on my side. It was definitely more a luck than a skill thing, clearly knowing what I know now. But I didn't know that. And I was just like, wow, I must be the best. And then coupled with, I then win the first sit and go on the show. And I think I do well on the second or the third one. And...

And I remember like, you know, the pros and the shows organizers being all excited, like, you're clearly the favorite, you're going to win this, you're going to win this, like, you're clearly very good at this game, you're the big favorite. And so I was just like, dead sure I was going to win it. But I did not win it. Because on the final sit and go, you know, when we're playing for the 100k, again, I

It was against this other player, Lee, who was probably the second best player, actually.

He made a big bet on the river and I had rivered a straight. Sorry, what does river mean? The final card, the fifth card. So the three come out on the flop, then the turn is the fourth, and then the river is the fifth. And then you have your two cards and you've got to make out of those seven. Why is it called flop, turn, river? I don't know. Okay, cool. It's one of those things. Yeah. So he's betting on the final card. Yes. So we get to the final card, which is after this is where you turn your hands over. And he bets big.

And I've riveted a straight. So five cards in a row, essentially. And I'm so excited. I'm like, I raise. So that means I'm now committed to at least double his bet. Yep. Which would leave me behind with basically nothing. Yep. As I say, I raise. And then look back at the board and I realize there's four diamonds out there. Oh, okay. And I know that both my cards were black. Yep. So all it means is if he just has one diamond... Yeah, he's got a flush. He's got a flush and he's beating me. And...

Even pros make mistakes like this sometimes. They misread the board and so on. But this is what you train your poker face for. You just stay, if you notice something like that, you just stay cool. I did not do that. I looked at the board and went, and I remember him looking at me and I'm like, and we're looking and he's looking at the board and he's looking back at me. And a single tear starts, and I know this because the footage starts rolling down my face.

And he's just like, I'm all in. So he re-raises to put me all in. And I just have a complete meltdown, start crying. I think I've run away. Yeah, run away from the table. The cameras follow like classic, like reality. I'm like getting the camera out my face. Awful. And then I bust shortly after. So that's how that's how that went. So it was a nice slap back down to earth.

How does that feel to kind of have 100,000 pounds snatched away? It was awful because I was so sure I was winning it. And, you know, life-changing amounts of money, absolute life-changing. And it was, yeah, it was brutal. Because I think it was probably, it sounds weird thing to say, but, you know, I'd had a pretty charmed life. I've had a very charmed life. But this was the first real, like,

You're not always going to get your way. I was so sure like, oh yes, this is the next great good thing that's going to happen to me. And like, no. How long did it take you to forgive yourself for that? I mean, definitely lingered for a few years. A few years? Oh yeah. Well, just like the what ifs. Just like, oh man, my career would have been...

I mean, it would have provided me with a bankroll from the outset. But then again, had I won that, I would have carried on, you know, because I was essentially delusional, right, about my skill level. Everything up until that point had deluded me. You know, winning the first few sit-and-goes, having the producers tell me I'm the best, you know.

clever by them because they want drama for their show. And I was probably the most likely to be, you know, this precocious overconfident 21 year old girl most likely to cause drama, you know, be the drama, which was the case. Um, but yeah, if I had won that, then I, who knows, I probably wouldn't have studied the game very hard. Um,

I have no idea. I mean, I just, I certainly wouldn't change anything. Yeah. Because, you know, here we are. Absolutely. Okay. So you're 21 at this point. You're on your gap year from university and you've just nearly won £100,000 on a poker show. What happens next? So I tell my parents that I want to make it, I'm putting physics on hold. I'm not going to apply for my master's just yet.

I want to see if I can make a go at this poker thing. I start playing regularly at that gut shot card club to fairly decent success actually and start actually learning the game and becoming a bit better. But my dad was just like, this is still not acceptable. You need to get a job. Like you can't just try and live off this. You need to go into, you know, grow up essentially. So yeah,

I just apply, I can't remember, you know, through some recruitment website for just jobs in London that want physicists. And one of the first ones that came up that I, you know, had an opportunity to interview for was for a company called advertising.com, which was a subsidiary of AOL. And it was like early days Google marketing.

search ads. And I was essentially, it was, my role was like data analyst to figure out the optimal time to present the ads using their, they had some kind of algorithm that would, I can't even remember it, frankly. But so I got that job and it was, you know, in Clerkenwell and I hated it so much.

So I was never a morning person. And it just felt like I was just going through the motions every day. Like you have to be there at 9 a.m. But then if you walked in 9 a.m., people would be looking and tutting at you. And don't get me wrong, the people there were actually really nice. But I just...

I just was getting by doing the bare minimum, just feeling like I didn't believe in what I was doing. But again, glad for the experience because it, you know, at least showed me what my person, what worked for my personality and what didn't. But yeah, so did that for about a year. And then,

Right around, you know, I was looking for an opportunity to quit. Poker wasn't going enough. It wasn't enough to replace my salary. But then one December I was playing an online satellite tournament. So satellites are where, you know, usually instead of winning money directly as a prize, you win an entry to a bigger tournament. Yeah.

And it was a $300 online buy-in. I played it and it was again, a winner take all. And I won it for this $19,000 package to go to Las Vegas. Oh, nice. To go and play in the World Poker Tour, this $15,000 buy-in. So it was like 15 plus 4K expenses. Nice. And I won it again at like six in the morning and I had to go into work the next day. And also by that point I had used up all of my holiday money.

on like traveling to go and like, I started doing poker reporting as well at the same time. Cause I was like, just like, how do I get into this industry as well? Maybe I can, you know, do media and that sort of thing. Um, report on it, meet people. Uh, so I'd use up all my holidays sort of moonlighting as this poker reporter, uh,

And I went to my boss and I was like, look, I know I don't have any left, but I need to go to Vegas next week. I just won this. I obviously will take unpaid. And he's like, you can't. No, we need you. And I was like, but this is worth almost as much as my entire annual salary. And this is my dream. And he's like, well, we need you. And I was like, well, I'm sorry, I'm going. So I quit. Yeah.

actually it wasn't, I wasn't as douchey as that. I like, I mean, he didn't actually say they needed me, but it was just like, for some reason they couldn't give me the unpaid. I mean, I totally understand. He was so understanding. Um, and he's like, well, I totally understand. Off you go. So I went off to Vegas. I did not win, but I met like all the stars. I saw Phil Helmuth and Annie again, Devilfish, you know, reconnected with them. And I was just like, and it cemented like, okay, this is what I want to do. I want to travel to these events. This is the funnest thing imaginable. Um,

And so, yeah, that, so then I quit and that's when I started going sort of full time. Okay. So let's say someone's listening to this and they're in the, so let's say they're 21, they've got a degree and they could get a normal job, but they want to take a risk doing something like a startup or start a YouTube channel or a podcast or poker or something like that.

What like I get emails from people in that kind of position quite a lot where they're always like do I get the job or do I go full time on the thing given it's a bit of a risk or do I go like full time on the job and sort of half off the job and like kind of do the thing on the side like what would you advise kind of your younger self or someone in that position given what you know now? It's so difficult because I've been my story is

usually like falling on the sort of the good fortune outcomes. So, you know, if I ran the simulation of my life again, it's very statistically unlikely that it would end up this way. Right. So technically on paper, the decisions I made, we probably, you know, I definitely took this a riskier decision each time and it happened to work out, but that doesn't mean to say that that is actually the correct, that was the correct decision at the time. Right. So it really depends. Um,

Yeah, it's so situationally dependent. I wouldn't want to say like, to say, oh yeah, always take the risk. The people who say, no, always go with your heart, take the risk. It's a nice guiding principle, but it shouldn't be a hard and fast rule. Similarly, no, stick with what you know, do the safe thing, can be a good guiding principle, but you shouldn't stick to it hard and fast. So I think it somewhat depends on your personality a bit. You know, like there is, we all sort of fall somewhere on the spectrum of risk tolerance. Yeah.

And I think the best thing you can do is like get to know yourself as much as possible. You know, some people like, like a thing a lot of poker players have in common is they would much rather gamble and lose than to have never had the opportunity to gamble in the first place.

You know, like the best outcome is to gamble and win. The second best outcome is to gamble and lose. And the worst outcome is to never have any action in the first place. Like that's a sort of common theme amongst this breed of people. So if you fall into that category, then you're the sort of, you know, you're more likely to, you know, you take the risk. A lot of the time you lose, but you can sort of stomach it, right? It just works for you. But

That's fairly rare. Most people have like a large loss aversion. And there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, it's probably a healthier way of existing. So if you are someone who's going to experience more sort of suffering from having, you know, taking a risky decision that then doesn't work out, that should come into your calculus. And again, there's no right or wrong answer. It's just really, it is very subjective and situationally dependent. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I guess it's almost, you know, Jeff Bezos talks about regret minimization, like, you know, try and project yourself forward into the future and figure out which of these am I more likely to regret? Yes. Kind of regardless of the outcome. For me, I find that that generally leans towards, I mean, in my 20s, generally taking the risk is reasonable. But then I also have a financial safety net and a family who can support me if needed. And all of this other kind of stuff feeds into that. Right. And then people sometimes look at my stuff and they're like, oh, but you took a risk. And I'm like, yeah, but it wasn't really a risk because it's like,

you know, if things don't work out, I'm not going to starve. I just get a job as a doctor. Like we all have different degrees of backup. Absolutely. And I mean, that's actually one of the biggest forms of like innate privilege is do you have parents at home that if it all goes tits up, we'll take you in and let you stay there? Yeah. Like I was very lucky that I had that as this safety net where I was like, I feel the confidence to go out and do that. A lot of people don't have that. And so they don't have the luxury of taking these big, you know, these, these big gambles, because if like it doesn't work out, they might literally end up on the streets.

And it sucks that there's that disparity there. Your parents is one of the biggest things you can't control, and yet it influences the course of your life so much. So yeah, it's...

It's interesting though, like, you know, now having gotten to know, you know, a lot of tech leaders or just really, really successful people in, you know, in very sort of competitive industries. Like they are, you know, the biggest sort of thing they have in common is that they are extremely comfortable with very audacious risks. And, you know, so there's a selection effect going on there. But at the same time, these are by definition the outliers. And so we can't over...

you know, just because that's what happened to them, that doesn't mean you're statistically likely to have to you. No, exactly. So it's, it's, it's, it's so difficult. So I think that, yeah, the main thing to do is just like get, get to know yourself. And that's why like actually poker is such a good, it's, it's probably the best game ever.

in terms of to learn, in terms of learning how to make high stakes decisions for your life, because it's so messy and there's so many different sort of types of skills you need to hone from the like analytical, statistical, game theory stuff to, you know, the more sort of artistic fuzzy things like people reading, psychology, being aware of your own emotions and emotional control and that kind of thing. And then on top of that, you've got, you know, because I'm like a game of chess where it's sort of,

It's complete information. There's no sort of hidden things aside of what's going on in the person's mind. You know what's up. Whereas poker, the cards are randomly shuffled between every hand, right? And you can be the best player in the world. And if the cards aren't cooperating, you're going to lose. And vice versa. You can be the worst player in the world. And if the cards are on your side, you'll win. And...

And so this, and that's, you know, this, this messiness, but especially with the luck factor is so true of life and the true, the, the, the, the, the real skill comes in identifying when your results are, you know, if you have a string of success, is it down to your good decision-making or is it down to good fortune?

Or maybe a bit of both. And if so, what's the mix of those? And that's the hard thing to figure out, both in poker and in life. But I want to just make a very clear caveat right now. I do not recommend anybody go out and try and become a professional poker player now. Oh, okay. I was going to ask you this. Let's say someone's listening to this and they're like, side hustle as a poker player. Sounds better than side hustle as a part-time model. Why would you not recommend it? So the game, in short...

It's because of AI and, well, computation, essentially. The game, you know, when I learned in 2005, no one really knew how poker worked. It was, you know, the best players in the world, like, particularly like someone like Phil, who was on the show, Doyle Branson, those guys, they, what made them so great is that they have had and still have poker.

these incredible intuitions about human behavior. You know, they have these street smarts that they've gained from just years and years and years of sitting at the poker table and just seeing the full gamut of human behavior and just having so much experience. They know how to hustle and outmaneuver people. And that was sufficient to be a great poker player. And I had a bit of the sort of statistical side, but I also like honed a lot of those skills as well. But then around sort of 2010, 2011,

game theory started becoming more of a field of study in poker and particularly analysis software started emerging because, you know, with online poker for the first time,

Now all your hand histories were digitized and so you could save them. So you had all this data from which you could learn from. And then, you know, software developed that where you could just basically upload your hand histories and it would show you, oh, okay, in these sort of positions, you're losing money here. Yeah, you need to work on your small blind game, et cetera. So for those who were willing to like take the analytical route, now there was this, there was all this low hanging fruit of information you could use. And

So there was all that that was happening, making it much more of a science. Before it was an art and it started shifting more towards a science. And then on top of that, there's this, so technically there's a theoretical maximum of perfect play that exists in poker. It's called game theory optimal.

And if you get two game theory optimal players, you know, if let's say we're both perfect GTO players and we play against each other, then we will, we're in what's called a Nash equilibrium, where what that means is there is no single strategy that either one of us can take.

to exploit the other one's mistakes. So we're essentially breaking even against each other. If you play over infinity, one might get luckier than the other over an hour or so, but if we play to infinity, we would break even. So it's like if two computers play against each other in chess, they will almost always draw. Yeah, if two equally matched ones, yes. And I think chess has Nash equilibria as well, yeah. But certainly in poker, that's the case. So what that means is that there's actually a theoretical ceiling of perfect play. Yeah.

And back in 2005 or whatever, the best players in the world were down here, the medium ones were down there, and the beginners were on the floor. But now, because of the ceiling, everyone has shifted up to here. And not only has everyone shifted so much closer, but the gap between beginners and the pros has shrunk.

Because this information that was previously sort of like proprietary information in everyone's heads has been democratized through these analysis softwares. They're called simulators. There's this one called Pyosolver that was, you know, certainly the one everyone used back when I was, you know, still playing pro, where you'd like input a scenario and it would play

millions or billions of fictitious hands against itself to find these mathematically optimal solutions. And then your job was basically just to memorize what the like appropriate frequencies are of bluffing versus playing passively or whatever. And so it changed again. Like it was less of a, it made the game in many ways sort of less dynamic because it turned it more into chess. It was more about like

you know, choosing a position and like memorizing the optimal plays as opposed to just sort of like thinking on your feet. Yeah. Um, so that's why it's, I would not recommend anyone try and make a living from it now. Um,

A, because everyone's so much closer. It's easier to get very good fast. So you should go and learn. I highly recommend people go and learn because you can learn so much about yourself and all the skills that it will give you that apply to life. But I wouldn't recommend it as a source of income. And especially not now that AI, because in 2017, we had the first superhuman poker AI ever.

And at the time that was, it ran off a supercomputer. It was very slow and clunky. But, you know, Moore's law and all that. Now you can have it on an app that works almost, I don't know if it's completely in real time, but it's close to real time. Okay. And that's for like the very, very best, but you can have a very, very proficient one running. So why does that mean that you shouldn't? Well,

It means that online poker, at least in its classical form, Texas Hold'em, I wouldn't recommend playing high stakes online poker anymore because if... If the other person's using an AI to help out. The incentives are just so strong. Yeah. And, you know, the same reason that people don't play chess for lots of money online. Yeah, because... You add enough incentive, there's going to be cheating. It doesn't mean everyone's cheating, but you can't be sure. So...

That said, and actually live poker is booming. So, you know, in-person poker is seeing a bit of a resurgence, maybe because, you know, people still want that action. They want to play for money. So you want to, you just want to be able to see the person and see that they're not on a phone. Yeah.

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It's available on iPhone and Android, and you can check it out by typing in Trading212 into your respective app store. So thank you so much, Trading212, for sponsoring this episode. It strikes me that poker would be a good game to develop the skill of resilience. Because if you know you're playing well and then something, you know, the cards just don't go your way. Yes.

It would be easy in that context, like in real life to beat yourself up and kind of go into a spiral about this. But I guess as a professional poker player, you have to just get over it. Yes, exactly. And it took me and I mean, I struggled with that, frankly, to the end of my career. You know, if I went on a period of not winning much, a downswing, as we call it, it would because I guess I just always had such high expectations of myself. And especially as my career sort of started off so spectacularly.

Some people are better than others at not getting bogged down by the downswings, but it always got me. And that was my weakness, frankly. But either way, it still definitely taught me a lot of resilience. I'm more resilient now than I would have been without it, for sure. What were some strategies that you used to sort of somewhat cope with the downswings?

Probably the most useful one is just sort of doing the perspective game, you know, just go, okay, well, so the last three months have been terrible. I've lost this much. I've not, you know, my, I'm slipping down the, because this thing came out, which was like a sort of point system of recent tournament results called the global poker index. So it was a way to try and like rank players, even though it was a terrible actual metric of, you know, who's, all it shows is like, who's been playing a lot recently and cashing.

But if you didn't, if you didn't play much and you drop down the rankings, but nonetheless, my silly brain that loves to optimize for rankings, as I mentioned, you know, since kids looking at my number one in the exams was obsessed with this. And I would, so I have a period of three or four months with no results to start feeling it.

And so the thing that would be helpful would just sort of do, you know, zoom out. Okay. So the last three months were shit, but let's look at the last year. Okay. It wasn't that good. Okay. But three years ago, I won that big one there. And that was like still above expectation. And then prior to that and prior to that, and generally speaking, just there will be a radius of sort of time that you can go back to where things are actually clearly on the positive.

So just choose that because it's up to you which perspective you choose. That's what you can control. You can't necessarily control what life does, but you can control the timeframe with which you want to compare it of how it's going, where the trend line is. Is it doing this overall over a 10 year period or is it doing this? Okay, but let's look at 20 years or whatever. So that's frankly the most useful one. And it's also the longer the time period, the more meaningful the data.

Especially in poker, the bigger the sample size, then the more relevant it is. So that's the main one. And then the other thing as well, especially when you're dealing with any kind of decision-making process that has luck involved, is before you even sort of stop playing... Okay, I'll just bring it back to poker as the analogy.

in between playing whether it's cash games or tournaments in between the actual action you need to be studying on developing a good sort of thinking process when you when you play so you know you need to go and do your homework and what I found helpful was coming up with sort of

literally like a step-by-step process that I would follow during hand where, you know, which I know in a vacuum is the optimal way of thinking through a problem. And I'd work with a lot with like my partner, Igor, who's much better player than me and other pros, you know, what's, what is their step-by-step process? Okay. I'm going to try and emulate this and work out what works for me. And then at the end of a tournament, I don't look back and see, you know, how much I won or not. I look back and to see how closely I adhered to that process that I know is the optimal process for me.

So basically just being process focused as opposed to results based. And that's, again, that's what I, that became the new metric to measure myself by. And that was much healthier way of approaching it. And it, again, built that resilience and so on. Now, if I was spending a lot of time not following my process, then technically I should be annoyed at myself. But interestingly, I never, yeah. Yeah.

Would never get that annoyed with myself. I would not feel as bad about that as I would, for example, if I was just looking at the results. Yeah. Okay, so you've got your sponsorship deal. You're flying around these tournaments. You've won the Women's European Championship. Just on that note, men players versus women players, is there a difference, advantage, different styles of thinking? Like in sports, clearly there's like, you know, that's why we have men's and women's leagues. Like what is it like in poker? Yeah. It's such a...

I sort of flip-flop on this topic because technically, you know, there is, there's no reason to have women's only tournaments. It's not a physical game. It's not, you know, there's no body weight or height or strength advantage. But for some reason, the ratios, certainly on like the high stakes circuit of males to females are incredibly imbalanced. We're talking like

97 to 3. Wow. Okay. It's about as extreme as it gets. And the reason why female, you know, women-only tournaments continue to be popular seems to be that, you know, there's women who will come out and play those that wouldn't play necessarily in an open tournament. Now, I'm very... In an ideal world, I don't... I can see arguments for both sides, basically. In an ideal world, we don't need those because...

It's like saying, you know, it's like, oh, we need our own special event because we can't compete with the boys. And I hate that that's a sort of narrative that can be concluded from that. But at the same time, there's obviously some reason going on why the ratios are so imbalanced. And, you know, this is now, you know, the reasons behind this is a big point of contention, obviously.

From my experience, the arguments are like, oh, it's all because of sexism and women are treated badly. Or it's just because women are not interested and they don't find the game as fun as men, certainly not at high stakes. And the real answer is it's both. It's a mixture of both. Certainly, there's been plenty of sexism. I've experienced plenty of sexism throughout my career.

But it's also very true that poker as a game typically correlates more with what you would classically call like more like masculine type personality traits. So,

things instead of people, you know, especially as the games become more and more analytical. You have to be willing to just like go down the rabbit hole and like just narrow focus on this one thing, which tends to correlate more with masculine traits. But perhaps the more notable thing, it's so much a game that requires a huge tolerance for risk, which like, I mean, just go look at a children's playground, right?

The girls will be typically playing nicer games with each other. The boys will be up a tree, fighting, jumping off high things. Yeah. Now some girls do that too. I happen to be one of those girls that love that kind of stuff. But again, this is all averages, but on average, that tends to be more of a... Higher risk tolerance correlates more with males than females. And then the other thing as well is it's an incredibly cutthroat competitive game. You have to be...

You have to be a little bit psychopathic sometimes to be a really good poker player. Well, because, you know, you're looking for the weakness in your opponent, right? Your opponent wants, you know, it's their money that they want and you are trying to take it from them. And again, that typically correlates that like, yeah, I'm going to beat you. I'm going to look for your weakness and get into your head and mess with you.

Don't get me wrong, plenty of women can be very good at that and can do that, but it tends to correlate more with males. So that's why I, you know, the question is how much of it is due to the innate traits, the nature versus the nurture of like, the game has not always been the most welcoming place for women.

Probably back in the day, it was almost entirely the nurture reasons. You know, like the classic imagery of, it was like a boys club thing. Sometimes women literally weren't allowed in, you know, poker rooms. So clearly like that was a whole nurture thing going on. These days, you know, I have been a beneficiary myself of poker.

all the sort of affirmative action trying to get more women in. Had I been a guy, there's no way I would have had all the sponsorship deals I've had. So it's been a real double-edged sword in that like I've clearly benefited massively from it. And there has been so many great initiatives to get more women into the game. But we're still like, and the ratios have improved, like much better than they used to be. But anyone who thinks it's going to get to 50-50 is absolutely delusional. Hmm.

Because it's just, certainly, maybe not like home games. You could probably get close to 50-50 in home games. But when we're talking about high stakes poker, where there's a lot of money on the line, and it's really so competitive these days in cutthroat, like, it's just not going to happen. And, yeah, so that's a very long-winded answer to say it's complicated. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. People who are professional poker players these days,

How much are people making from this? Like, what does it take to make a full-time living from professional poker? Well, I guess it depends where you live, right? And interestingly, I bet, you know, I should caveat this now. I've been out of poker for a number of years, so I actually don't know. But from what I recently heard, the biggest pool of players who are still like trying to play online or like really, really grinding that are sort of new tend to come from more like Eastern Europe.

or poorer countries, which makes sense, right? Because, you know, it's harder to get by on, you know, you can get by on a small amount of money there. So it makes sense for more people to go into, you know, into something like poker. But yeah, there's no clear answer. It's something that's up to your personal circumstances, right? And I guess if you're like, let's say top 10 poker players in the world, are these guys making like hundreds of thousands or like millions or like tens of millions? Like what kind of ballpark are we talking in terms of, I guess, poker?

So like peak poker times, let's say like 2011, 12, that's when all like the nosebleeds, we call them nosebleeds games, like the super high stakes online games were happening. Yeah.

They were making tens of millions. Wow. Well, certainly like around 10 million. But this is all the like sort of well-known ones. Probably the biggest winners in poker are the people who've been playing just like these underground big cash games with what we call whales. The lingo is you've got fish who are like the bad players, the amateurs. Yeah.

You've got sharks who are the pros, and then you've got whales who are the very wealthy fish, if that makes sense. And a lot of poker players, perhaps even some of the best poker players we've probably never even heard of because they are the ones who, they never play anything public. They're just seeking out these very juicy big cash games against very wealthy people. Who knows how much they're winning there?

And, oh, they might not even be pros. You know, maybe the biggest winner of all time is probably some wealthy businessman. Wouldn't surprise me, you know, playing $20, $30 million buy-in games. Yeah. But certainly in terms of like tournament poker players, then it's like, so the biggest tournament in the world is the World Series of Poker main event. Happens in Vegas every year. First prize one year in that in 2006 was like $12 million, but it's typically around $7, $8 million.

Um, so yeah, the, the, like the, the, the, the most extreme end of the bell curve will be someone somewhere in like the 10, 10 to 15 million, something like that. Cool. So you've got your sponsorship deal right now. You're going around these tournaments. What's, what's, what's happening next? Uh, yeah, going around the tour, going around the, that's where I got to like travel so much, got to go to Australia, um, all over Europe, Costa Rica, just having the best time.

And then I'm in the south of France in 2010. And remember that Icelandic volcano? Yeah. Whose name I can never, every little, exploded. And I was actually down there for another reason, but I couldn't get home. And I was there with another poker player, a lady called Liz Liu. And she was like, well, we can't leave, but there's this big tournament, a European poker tour happening in Italy, northern Italy. Should we try and let's see if we can make it to that?

So we get, it was a French rail strike or whatever. We eventually get there on the train. And I remember we get there just in time for me to enter this satellite tournament to the main event. So it's a 500 euro buy-in. One in 10 people win their 5,000 euro seat. That's how much the buy-in is for the main event. And I win it at like four in the morning. And then I play the next day at noon. And I think it's only like my second or third day.

EPT, the European Poker Tour event, where it's like this. So I'm not comfortable. This is much higher stakes than I'm used to playing, really. It's a 5,000 euro buy-in. Fairly inexperienced at it. And long story short, after six days of playing, I ended up winning the whole thing for 1.25 million euros. Bloody hell. Yeah. Damn. Okay. What was that like? Mad. Absolutely insane. Yeah.

Yeah, because especially as I didn't even plan to play, you know, so I win my seat. So technically the 500 euros into the 5000. And then, you know, day one was like, whatever, I made it through. But then day two, I think I've got quite a decent chip stack. But then day three, which is where there's like, it had 1280 entrants. And I think

The money bubble, as we call it, where you can start getting payout from that point onwards was about 230 people. And I was around chip leader from that point onwards. So I made it into the money day three, day four. And I remember that final, the night before the final table. So there was nine of us left.

And that meant that going into the next day, I was guaranteed for ninth, I think around 80,000 euros, which was probably double roughly what I had in my bank account at the time. So already just like, again, we're talking life-changing money here. Yeah.

That night, talking about like playing poker in your head, I don't even know if I slept, frankly, because it was just all I could see was poker hands and these scenarios. And I was so nervous the next day walking to the tournament, I had to stop like multiple times to throw up. Wow. Yeah. Like nerves beyond nerves. But when I actually sat down and like felt the cards in my hand, just in the zone and the nerves sort of disappeared. Not completely, you know, definitely in a heightened state.

But you just sort of entered this flow state, I guess. At least that was my experience. And it all went right. And then I won. What was your... Do you have like a sort of pregame ritual or things to get you into the zone? You know, like Michael Phelps does this thing. Right. Everyone seems to have a routine of some sort. I think I was doing a meditation thing at the time where I would listen to this track for 30 minutes where I would like have a chime. So...

Pretty sure I had something like that going on, but I didn't have any particular ritual. I certainly did later on in my career. I would have like certain music I would listen to, metal song by a band called Children of Bodum. It would just like pump me up, give me energy. I'd have a mantra. For a little while I worked with a sort of, with a coach. And the mantra we developed was, I can't remember it now, but it was something like,

I will not worry about the results. I will focus on my process and the results will take care of themselves. So getting you into that process-focused mindset, which was so helpful. Yoga, try and sleep well, although never been very good at that. Yeah, the usual stuff. I mean, there was a real shift again around sort of 2010 where before, you know, the top pros would be

you know, they play until all hours of the night, they drink, you know, whatever, whatever. And then there was sudden like wellness push where the top pros started treating themselves, you know, like, like professional athletes. And you notice the difference, like people like all of a sudden, like everyone was getting into yoga. A lot of them were meditating. They're very healthy, getting really fit and strong.

And people just, it was really impressive. And I definitely got into that a lot more and it helped. Surprise, surprise, take care of your body and your mind follows along. Surprise. What were the thoughts and feelings going through your mind as you're sitting there and as you're, I guess, as the game is progressing and you're thinking, oh shit, I might actually win this. Can you remember what that was like? Well, so I've told this story a couple of times. So the funny thing is, is that

On the very day one of that tournament, right before the first cards were dealt, I had a voice in my head that came seemingly out of nowhere that said, I can't remember if it said you or I, which seems kind of critical, but to the effect of you are going to win this tournament. And I got this like wave of goosebumps. So imagine that sort of being in the back of your mind throughout the tournament and

sort of giving it, I didn't, it was such a strange experience that I didn't know whether to take it seriously. I was just like, okay, cool. But it definitely gave me this like sense of calm. Like I don't need to worry too much. Like this is mine. This is my one to win.

And when things got stressful, which they invariably do, like you lose half your, you know, it's not like a smooth sailed, you know, as you slowly accumulate everyone's chips until you're the last man standing. You'll be like, double up, lose it all, you know, lose 80% back up. But as long as the trend is this and having that in the back of my mind, definitely like took the edge off the nerves when I would like lose a big pot.

It just gave this additional sort of layer of confidence. And yeah, and then I ended up winning it. So I don't even know what that was. You know, the logical explanation is, is that it's something I would have experienced before every tournament. And I only happen to remember that because I won that one. But I really don't think that's the case because I've won other things and I never had the same experience. So...

Arguably the biggest mystery of my life. Yeah, I was going to ask you more about this. So was it you who told that story of having a friend who the energy healer sucked something out of their ear? Because I can't remember. Was it Tim Ferriss? Or was it like Les? I think I told it on both actually. Yeah, like I remember hearing that a few months ago. I just...

I still think about that every few days. I'm just like, there's something around energy and the spirituality stuff. There's like something there. And I've kind of vaguely dabbled with meditation and like read Waking Up and stuff. It seems like such this world of interesting stuff that I'm just like, once I finish my book, I just want to explore this area and just go all in. Like, what sort of explorations have you done in the field of the occult? Yeah. I mean, do you want me to tell the story for viewers? Yeah, please. So,

Yeah, this ear thing that happened was I'd been having, it was 2018, and one morning I woke up and I was having sort of sound distortion. It felt like something, like my ear was muffled. I couldn't hear properly, like low frequencies. It was like having cotton wool in there. But then on top of that, certain sounds would be really distorted in a very unpleasant way, particularly men's voices.

And it was really upsetting because I'm a pretty social person and whenever it was happening, I couldn't go to parties or anything because it was just so unbearable. It was like simultaneously being deaf but also having a megaphone in a really unpleasant way. And it would come in clusters. I would have it for a few days and it would disappear and then it would come back again. And I went and saw doctors and doctors.

In the end, it seemed like the diagnosis was Meniere's, which, you know, for those who don't know, it's like a pretty awful degenerative hearing loss thing where you'll also get like distortion and often like vertigo attacks. So, you know, we're doing tons of research. Like, is there anything you can do about this? No, it's incurable. You can maybe try and manage it. But cut to like three months later, I'm at Burning Man and I'd actually had like another attack of it and including some vertigo.

So I was like so down in the dumps. And then we're in the last night of the burn, the Burning Man, and I get talking to this girl. Now, I was not sober, take that for what it will, but I was talking to this girl and I mentioned about my ear and she's like, well, I've done some energy healing. Do you want me to have a go? I was like, sure. Now, I was as skeptical as you get about this stuff, even though I had that weird poker tournament experience before.

Aside of that, you know, I'd like, I called myself a rationalist, physics background. It's all bullshit, woo-woo nonsense, no time for this stuff. But I was in such a desperate state. I was like, sure, have a go. Not expecting anything. And she's like feeling around over my ear with her hand. You know, it's kind of in the dark. So memory's a little slightly hazy, but I remember her hand being there. And she's like, oh, there's something there. Let me, I'm going to have to do this. It's going to be unpleasant. And she leans in and starts like over my ear.

with her mouth and I'm like, please stop because it's like loud. I don't like this. She's like, I've got to get it. She does this for a few minutes and then sort of drops to the floor, freezing cold, very scared, like seemingly scared and like discomfort. And she's like, oh, this is horrible. Okay. And then after we sort of try and warm her up and make her feel better after about 20 minutes and she's like, well, I've definitely pulled something out of you. It's gone. You

And I was like, and at this point I'm now like really freaked out because I've never seen anything like this. And she, I remember asking her, I was like, well, at least am I, is my ear better? She's like, yeah, your physical symptoms will last for a couple of weeks probably. And then you'll be fine. And that's exactly what happened. My hearing is, I had a hearing test, I don't know, six months ago, no noticeable loss. So what the fuck? And it was insane.

again talk about like paradigm shifting moment like it just blew my entire understanding of what might be reality open because I was like wait maybe energies are real and not only that maybe you can have negative ones or positive you know they could be positive or negative and and and you could fix things in another way a side of medicine and it was so I mean it was disorienting for a while frankly like I went through a period of just being very scared of like okay well you know

being like concerned about like what energies am I letting into myself and so on. And then the sort of found a middle ground of, I guess, you know, poker teaches you to think about things probabilistically, right? You can never be certain about anything. Like I think you're bluffing. My prediction is you're bluffing me here with like 30% confidence, something like that. 40% of the time you have a better hand or whatever. That's how I now approach this stuff. I think

with some percentage, and it depends on the day, that there's a classical explanation for what happened was that, you know, maybe I was in such a heightened state, you know, placebo, maybe I'd had like a viral infection, which actually just, that's what was the cause and it faded away. There's all of those probabilities. And like, I'm certainly willing to entertainment, but you know, if my prior before that, the energy healing was a thing was around, you know, one in a million, let's say it's now shifted to

Honestly, like 40%, which is a huge, like orders of magnitude change. Also, because now since I've been like more open to it, I've noticed, you know, I've paid attention to like other friends who've dealt with similar things and it clearly brings a benefit. Now what's causing that benefit? I don't know, but there is extreme value in it. And I think it's something that is worth study so much. Yeah.

And now again, I want this to come with a huge caveat that like, don't expect there to be a magical sort of, you know, because unfortunately after telling the story, I've had people message me like, I've got many as who was the person who did this for you, you know? And I can't like, I can't give that, you know, I can't help.

And I don't know that I had many errors. All I know is that that was what the experience was. I was diagnosed with something like it and it went away after this. But again, causally, we don't know. But there's clearly potential here. We really don't understand how consciousness works. We don't understand the power of the human mind anywhere near as much as we should. And it is so worthy of study.

that we need to just... It feels like there's a sort of... Unfortunately, a lot of the people who are best equipped to actually sort of apply the scientific method to this stuff are not open to even considering it in the first place. And that's where we need to address... That's the sort of imbalance we need to address.

This episode is very kindly brought to you by WeWork. Now, this is particularly exciting for me because I have been a full-paying customer of WeWork for the last two years now. I discovered it during, you know, when the pandemic was on the verge of being lifted and I'd spent like the whole year just sort of sitting in my room making YouTube videos.

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which is why it's particularly exciting that they're now sponsoring this episode. And if you want to get 50% off your first booking, then do head over to we.co forward slash Ali. And you can use the coupon code Ali at checkout ALI to get 50% off your first booking. So thank you so much WeWork for sponsoring this episode. So you become an overnight millionaire. Sorry, were you going to say something? Oh, well, I was going to say another thing I found that actually helps me and I've noticed help other friends. If you're having anxiety issues,

Sounds dumb, but like dropping to the ground barefoot, ideally outside grass, barefoot, hands and feet, and just like sort of rock backwards and forwards and push into the ground. And just imagine your anxiety is just being dissipated into the earth, kind of like a lightning rod, essentially. You're grounding. Yep. Does the trick. Yeah. So you become an overnight millionaire thanks to winning this tournament. What was that like? The next week after that win was...

Again, one of the most insane weeks imaginable because I don't know whether it was because the papers picked up on it themselves or because of the tournament organizer pushed it, you know, made a press release, but somehow it got into the national papers, especially in the UK.

Uh, you know, cause I was just like strange looking 25 year old girl come out of nowhere, wins a million pounds in a poker tournament. And so it was a good story. And so there was like a period of like four or five days where I was on the front page of almost every major newspaper, like the daily mail turned up. They found out my parents' address and turned up at the house, um, came into pictures of my

like childhood pictures grant, you know, graduation pictures. And, and I mean, it was fun. It was really cool, but it was just like, my phone was ringing nonstop for interviews. Um, so that was very intense and very, you know, it was, it was definitely enjoyable. Uh, and then after that, that was the, so this is when I was like, Ooh, maybe PokerStars. Cause that was, it was their tournament as well. And remember I said that it would have been my goal to become a team pro for them.

And a few months later, you know, they offered me a spot on their roster. So then I joined them. And then for the next few years, you know, played as one of their team pros. And it was some of the best years of my life. Just like it's like this big traveling family of, you know, some of my closest friends who continue to be good friends to this day where we would just, you know, OK, see you in...

See you in Australia. See you in Vegas. See you in Monaco. And, you know, you just followed the tour, playing in the events, doing, you know, doing media, that kind of stuff. Yeah. Did that initial windfall change your relationship with money in any way?

No, not that much, weirdly. Like I'd always been, we have a term in poker where you call someone who's like kind of tight and cautious with money a nit. And I'd been on the nittier side of things throughout. It was a weird sort of false scarcity mindset, frankly. I was definitely a bit tighter with money than I should have been. And it did, it took me a while to sort of

I definitely didn't suddenly go, all right, let's go crazy in terms of buying lavish things. I've never been into particularly brands or expensive clothing or anything like that. I didn't even buy a new car, in fact, for a while. What I did spend money on was I bought a house. I bought an apartment in London, which was nice. And my parents were very pleased. Yeah. Good. Something sensible. You've done something sensible. Please. Okay. Yeah.

So, yeah, I can't say my attitude to money changed that much. But what did change was my attitude to poker.

particularly my attitude to learning, you know, studying and working hard because kind of like, you know, on that TV show back in 2005 where I had the win, I was like, well, I guess I'm God's gift. That old, uh, unhelpful meme sort of resurfaced in my head. And I was like, well, I must be the best at this because like, or at least I must, I must be so insanely talented to win such a big tournament still relatively early on. Um, so I became a bit

Just got a bit lazy for a period of time. And, you know, like with many things, if you don't carry on studying, everyone else is studying. So the game will slowly start to overtake you. And that coupled with a bit of regression to the mean meant that like the next year, actually my next six or seven months, my results were definitely suboptimal. And it was a bit of a, again, I needed another wake up call.

On this occasion, it was some friends sitting me down and going, Liv, you need to carry on studying. It was just one tournament. Don't get deluded by that incredible success. So that was another nice little life lesson period. So you won this tournament in 2010, and then I guess you become a member of the PokerStars squad. And then what is the rest of the...

So that carries on in terms of just poker. I was sort of concurrently doing, trying to get into TV presenting. So I was doing presenting in poker, like interviewing people, introducing the show, et cetera. But I started feeling, I started missing science again, frankly. And so started doing the occasional science TV show.

and completely unrelated things from poker. And I loved that. And then around 2014...

It was when Igor and I get introduced to effective altruism. And we decided to start an organization that basically encourages poker players to donate a portion of their winnings to the most cost-effective charities. Yeah. How did you get into effective altruism? So, well, first I'll define what it is because, you know, some people have probably heard of it. And there's a lot of like confusing... Yeah, people don't seem to have a clear definition of it. But at least my definition of it is...

It's basically the question of like applying the, well, given there are so many different problems in the world, so many, and ideally we would be able to fix them all straight away. But because we have limited resources, time, money, brainpower, we have to kind of triage these problems and figure out which ones are most urgent, which affect the most people and which we can actually make a difference on.

Effective altruism is essentially just that process of trying to use logic and reason to figure out how to best allocate resources. It's like the scientific method applied to philanthropy. It deeply resonated with me and Igor and Phil and Stefan, who was the other two co-founders of the org.

Like Stefan, he'd actually been doing it for a while. He was giving away like huge percentages. I think almost all of his winnings above a certain amount to these cost-effective charities. Because he's just like, well, look, I don't need more than this. And the evidence is out there. Like for every roughly around $4,000, $5,000 you donate, say to Against Malaria Foundation, you on expectation save a literal life. So it's like, would you, you know, if you saw...

someone dying in the street and it would mean that you would, I don't know, would you sacrifice your car to like save someone who you see is about to die? Probably, right? Not always. Again, I'm not saying you have to do that, but the point is for every $4,000 you donate, you will on expectation save a life. So it's just like,

From his perspective, he's like, okay, well, I'm going to be donating. This made enough sense to him that he decided to dedicate his poker career to making as much as he could to give away. He introduced us to this group of Swiss philosophers whose full-time living was researching basically what are the most cost-effective charities, what are the best ways to improve the world. And it

It just resonated so much that we decided to try and basically bring this to the poker community because we felt like these concepts would resonate a lot with poker players who are used to thinking in terms of return on investment, expected value, allocating their personal time and money as best in the most cost efficient and effective manner to maximize their profits at the poker table.

Well, it's the same process for like your charitable giving. And by and large, poker players, they got it. They really resonated as well. So we started this thing called Raising for Effective Giving. Silly pun on raising, et cetera. Oh, yeah, nice. And to be a member, I mean, it was just basically you give a pledge to say you'll donate at least 2% of your winnings, I think it was quarterly or annually.

Um, or whatever you felt, but basically just join the movement and like give what you can. Um, and, uh, over, you know, by the time we sort of all quit poker and we sort of sunsetted it back in like 2019, uh, it moved about $14 million to these charities. Pretty like counterfactually as well, like money that wouldn't have gone. Um, and then even better, uh,

Dan Smith, who's another very, very successful poker player, sort of took these same principles and started his own thing called Double Up Drive, which has been even more successful. I think it's probably over $20 million he's moved to, again, like very cost-effective charities. A lot of them similar ones overlapping to what Reg was doing, which is our organization. Yeah.

But yeah, so that was a really interesting sort of moment in my career because up until then, really everything I'd been doing was very zero-sum, right? Poker is by definition a zero-sum game. You know, I win, you lose. And it was around sort of that time, around 2013, where I was like...

I was like, is this really what I want to do for like, is this what I want on my gravestone? You know, she was really good at check raising people in this certain position. Like, you know, the world seems to be more of a positive something. I think there's probably better uses of what I'm doing than just playing. And yeah, so for a period of time, Raising for Effective Giving sort of found a way to like make a win-win after what seems like a win-lose game. Yeah.

Yeah, because I guess, you know, as we talked about at the start, the stuff that you're super into now is kind of raising awareness of positive sum kind of situations and win-wins. And thinking. Yeah. Having it as just a philosophy, like a sort of a guide star. Like, is what I'm doing a win-win thing or is it a win-lose? Or actually, could it be a lose-lose? Yeah. And like really trying to be honest with yourself. Yeah.

to think about the externalities of whatever it is you're doing. Because in reality, there's no such thing as an actual zero-sum game. Like, in physicality, I should say. You know, if we play a game of chess, yes, technically, one of us will win, one will lose, so that evens out. But

In practicality, there are externalities. We'll both get better at chess. Maybe we'll become better friends. Maybe we'll actually hate each other, have a big argument. So there's always externalities, even to these zero-sum games that we might play. And it's, I think, an error to not truly factor those in. And we can expand the definition of games as well. Like,

you know, technically any kind of interaction that you do, you could consider it as a game, you know? So if you are a trader, technically you're playing the trading game. If you're a scientist, it's, you're playing the science game, um, you know, and certainly some industries are more like inclined to be positive some or negative some. Um, but it's, it's,

it's important that we sort of just take a step back and really ask ourselves that you know whether whether the industry that we are you know or the career path we are choosing is actually going to benefit the world are we are we just optimizing for what's like the short-term win game for us um and it's it's okay you know if you if you do decide no you know i just want to do something that is immediately beneficial to me um i'm not saying that's wrong but like don't delude yourself that you're doing something good at least just like have that as an awareness in your back in the back of your mind

How does poker with partners work? Poker with partners? Yeah. Is that like a tag team type situation? Well, no, not usually. Okay. But there is a particular format called tag team poker, which, I mean, varies, but the way...

Are you asking because of the tournament I won? Yeah, a tournament with partner and boyfriend Igor. Yes. Yeah, what was that? So the way that one worked was in between hands. So not during a hand, but in between a hand. At the end of a hand, you could tap out and tag your partner in. And you had to both play a minimum amount throughout the tournament. But yeah, Igor and I won our bracelets in that. Bracelets?

Yeah. So there's a, if you win a World Series of Poker tournament, then it's called winning a bracelet and you get this like gold bracelet thing. And that was one of my biggest goals in poker was to win a bracelet. And so for us to win both our first bracelets together was just painfully cute. And it was really, really fun. How did you and Igor meet?

We met through poker. Funnily enough, actually, the first time we ever crossed paths, as far as we know, was on like day three of that big European poker tournament in Italy. He says he remembers me. I don't actually remember him. Apparently, we were only at the table against each other for a couple of hours. And I think I won a couple of pots off him. But yeah,

Yeah, I mean, I presumably stuck out. Very few girls playing and then I win the tournament. So that was when we first crossed paths. But we became friends sometime in like 2012. And again, yeah, we just became really good friends. He lived near me in London and it wasn't until like

being friends for a couple of years that we ever like got romantic. And actually I was kind of like resistant to it because it was like, he was such a close friend. I was like, Oh no, this is weird. Like, no, you're almost like,

You're my bro. Like, but there was clearly something there. And then when we did turn romantic, it was just like, oh, obviously. Yeah. And then we've just been inseparable since. Oh, nice. Yeah. Because people often worry about that. I think girls in particular worry about that situation more than guys do around like, oh, but we're good friends and this could potentially ruin a friendship. Yeah. Yeah. I guess it's worked out well. It's one of those, I guess, risks that. Well, it was partly because I was just like...

I wanted to be single for a while. You know, I hadn't had much time single and just wanted to sort of... I'd had like a bad... come out of a bad relationship. And I knew that if we did ever turn romantic, it was going to be a big deal either way. And I just loved our friendship that we had. And I think he felt the same way too, you know. I'm not saying it was all one way street or anything. But yeah, I don't know. It was definitely very...

And this, again, selection bias. Like I'm coming from, you know, this happened to be the one that worked out so well. But it was just that like, ugh, duh moment when we finally were like, okay, we're a thing. Yeah. And yeah, it was great. So you and Igor started playing then together as like tag team partners? Well, no. So that tag team tournament, I think that was the first year they ever ran it. Right. As far as I'm aware. And it's a very rare, like it's literally like,

I mean, it's probably like one in a thousand, less even. Oh, okay. One in 5,000 poker tournaments are a tag team. They're kind of like a novelty style of event. So poker is very much an individualistic game. But that doesn't mean that like...

poker players don't benefit from, you know, not at the table, but when, you know, when they're away doing their homework, working together kind of as like a, you know, as a brain trust, as a research group. There's a lot of that. Especially sort of back in, you know, around the 2010s, there would be like,

just, you know, "Oh, the Germans. Who are the best at the moment? Oh, it's the Germans are the best." And you'd see the different sort of strategies arise out of the different groups. Because, you know, like with so many problems, more minds are better than one. And there's long been this like really collaborative spirit within the game, which is also then so interesting because, you know, they'll be best friends

who've been studying together, but then they'll end up at the table against each other. Oh, yeah. And then the gloves are off. Yeah, well, at least it should be off. And like certainly Igor and I, on the rare occasions where we have ended up at the same table as each other, if anything, we go after each other harder than others. Yeah.

Partly because people are always scrutinizing you, like, oh, you're a couple, so you have to really make sure that you do. But the foundation of our relationship is on competition. We find a way to turn almost every endeavor into some kind of competition.

We gamify everything. Even like we're really into bouldering right now and we shit talk each other nonstop. Like that, it's truly like, oh, that's our love language is banter and shit talking. Nice. Because we're just both incredibly competitive people. And I think that's one of the cool things about poker players is that they find a way to like compartmentalize things.

Again, best friends can be playing against each other, bluffing the hell out of one another, taking money, getting under each other's skin. And then once you leave the tournament, they're like arm around each other. Oh, are you in that hand? Oh, yeah, I would have done that this way. And drinking. And then they're back at it again the next day. And it's a really hard skill to cultivate, but I think it's a really important one to be able to go, okay, well, this is where we express this

competitive side of our nature but then still value you know collaboration above all else nice so in 2019 uh you announced that you were gonna quit professional poker yes what led to that being the decision i get how long were you playing for at that point like over a decade oh yeah yeah uh yeah like pro yeah like 11 years or so 12 years um

I've been starting to lose my fire for poker sort of from 2015 onwards, honestly. Because, you know, as I mentioned before, the way that the game was played and studied had just drastically shifted into this more like rote learning. At least that's how it felt, honestly.

and, and less, it felt like it was getting sort of less creative. It was like, now we understood the mechanics of how the game plays. You see the rabbit hole. And the question is, do you want to go down the rabbit hole? And so it kind of like took away a bit of the mystery and it was, you know, again, less about sort of people reading. And even though that's still important, you know, you couldn't make it as a player, like a top pro, unless you were really studying the charts as well. And it just, I don't know whether that was, you know, whether my sort of

loss of love for the game around that time was because of that or maybe just because I've been doing it too long. You know, all things, we tend to get bored of things eventually. But either way, I just started losing interest to like try and stay on top. Not that I ever was on top, but you know, like stay the best version of myself that I could be as a player. And, you know, frankly,

I kind of wish I'd quit earlier than 2019. It was just like a cushy life. I still had my sponsorship deal. I couldn't imagine another life from that. So much of my identity was wrapped up in, as lived the poker pro who goes on tour and go, "I couldn't, wait, I would miss the EPT final in Monaco? Inconceivable. I've been going for the last nine years. All my friends are going to be there. Am I really not going to go?"

And so it's kind of hard to make that leap. And I see a lot of poker players, frankly, today who are like going through the same thing. And it's just so hard to hang up your hat because it's like you're now stepping into the big unknown. You're a big fish in a small pond and now you're a tiny fish in an ocean of uncertainty, which frankly we should be good at dealing with, but it's still hard. But yeah, and it was...

I mean, I technically stopped playing properly sort of around 2018, frankly. But I think it was 2019 when my PokerStars contract expired and they didn't want to renew. And frankly, I don't know if I would have wanted to. And I'm glad. It was time to move on. But yeah, it's hard. And it was funny. I went back and played in December for the first time in ages.

And I was playing this lovely big World Poker Tour Championship. And the players on average were very amateur. And I was like, wow, I'm not any better than most of these people anymore. Like the muscle memory has just, while it's still there, like it's just so rusty. And I'm really struggling to add up. You know, I used to be able to add up the pot like that, like instantaneous count combos, boom.

And it was just like, I could hear the rusty gears like drying, but not even really not sure if they can remember how to. And it was a nice moment. I was like, well, I'm not a good poker player anymore. Great. And it was actually very freeing just being able to like say that to myself and say it out loud because it was such a big part of my identity. Yeah. How did you navigate that identity, that sudden loss of identity when you're no longer this life that you've been leading for 11 years?

It's no longer your day-to-day. It was actually easier than I expected it to be. Like the anticipation of it was worse than the reality. You know, it partly coincided with... Yeah, it sort of coincided with my...

I met a new group of friends, both Igor and I met a new group of friends around that time and we were clearly being pulled in a different direction, again, a more positive direction to try and help with some of these big catastrophic risks that

that we're facing, you know, and we felt, you know, we both felt so pulled to go into that. It like, I guess, lubricated the ride out. So yeah, it was, it wasn't too hard. How much, how much was money a decision in terms of like deciding what you needed to do next? Or like, had you made enough from Progo to just not have to work? Like,

What was the vibe? Yeah, I mean, certainly not enough to like retire from, but enough to be like, I can take a year or two and breathe. Yes. Take a couple of years to breathe and think about, you know, what's the next thing. And actually this coincided, another thing that made it easier. I started giving talks as a sort of, you know, a way of disseminating the thinking lessons that poker had taught me. I gave a TED talk.

And turns out that you do a TED talk, it's a really, really good sizzle reel for companies, you know, to show companies, hey, look, I can talk about this stuff. Would you like me to come and talk to your employees or to your clients? Yes, we would. We'll pay you some money. So simultaneously, my speaking career started sort of taking off. And I guess like, you know, as a public intellectual, whatever you want to call it. Yeah.

That again helps soften the blow because I could like I still could sort of somewhat have the hat of I'm a pro poker player But without actually having to play and instead actually doing something more useful again much more useful It's much more positive some use of the sort of of the game So over the last few years, it seems like you've taken a big interest in AI in particular or more potentially over the last few months I've just seen a few YouTube videos and you've mentioned in interviews and on socials. How did the interest in AI start?

I mean, it started, I guess, around when I first learned about effective altruism and went on a reading spiral of all the different sort of directions that you can take. Because what's so cool about the effective altruism community is that there's very little agreement.

Because it's so difficult, you know, we don't even know what correct moral framework is. You know, is it deontology? Is it virtue ethics? Is it utilitarianism? We don't know, but let's try and figure it out. And so, you know, some people come to the conclusion that actually the most effective thing we can do is like global health in the world's poorest countries, you know, poverty alleviation. Really strong arguments for that. There's really strong arguments that actually, you know, the same amount of money can save a thousand times as many animals from like a life of torture on a factory farm.

There's a strong argument for that. There's also a strong argument that actually the best thing is, you know, these, it seems like there's a growing probability that we go extinct from our own technologies over the next century. So actually that's the most expected value, high expected value thing you can do. And there's so much disagreement amongst that. So in reading all of the arguments for these things, one that pops up is like,

We seem to be on this inexorable march of creating more and more powerful artificial intelligence. There's a possibility that if you do successfully build something that by definition is super intelligent, is orders of magnitude more intelligent than any of us, that for the same reason, even though a chimpanzee is much physically stronger than a human,

we can just draw a fence around it and control it because we're much smarter, it will be able to do things and predict things that we couldn't even dream of. So we're essentially creating a kind of alien god, and that's like the most high stakes thing that's ever happened on Earth.

Even if we think it's only a small chance of happening, we should probably spend at least some resources on making sure that goes well. Because there's no guarantee that super... Intelligence correlates with wisdom or kindness or fairness or caring about biological matter even existing. Because super intelligence and AI lives off silicon.

We rely on carbon, so we're fundamentally operating on different substrates. So there's a chance this might not go well. And even if you think that chance is very, very tiny, considering we're spending like 500 million on lipstick a year, maybe we should just put a little bit into this. So that was sort of what got me thinking. And also, because the other interesting thing about AI as well, it's not all potentially negative. It could be the best thing we ever make.

as well. It might be the answer to so many of our problems because so many of these issues that we're facing are our inability to coordinate. There are so many, you know, there's 8 billion of us on this planet, all with conflicting interests and desires. Even though in the big picture, we actually all want the same thing. We all want love and an oxygen rich environment and food and shelter and, and, you know, the, the hierarchy of needs. But

On a short-term sort of day-to-day scale, we all have differing incentives and we're all playing sort of trapped in different games, whether it's the money-making game or the prestige game or whatever. And how do we navigate this when we're simultaneously giving more and more power, which could be used for good, but also could be used for massive destruction to more and more people?

Um, so, you know, once you sort of go down the rabbit hole of that, it's hard to see it. You know, it's like this, like, how can we be thinking about anything but this? Um, at least again, not saying that's what you have to do, but that was my experience. Um, yeah. What was I going with that?

We were talking about kind of how you first got interested in the AI stuff, I guess, through the effective altruism route. Yeah. So, I mean, that was just one of the things that like stuck out. I was like, wow, this is a big deal. And I remember reading like a lot of Eliezer Yudkowsky's writing on Less Wrong, which talks about, you know, he's been sounding the alarm on AI since the early 2000s.

And, you know, it's like, okay, yeah, this makes sense. Again, even if we give it a low probability, we need some people to be thinking about it. And especially like, even today, when people have been talking about AI safety now for years, the ratio of like money that's spent on pure progress versus safety is like 500 to one. Yeah. Certainly more than 100 to one, it might be thousands to one, frankly. So there's like this huge gap between

Where there's like some are, it's so desperately needed more people working on, on the, just the sort of the safety side of stuff. What's called the alignment problem, getting it to be aligned with what's good for humanity. Um,

And, you know, that's not to say I'm like not knocking any, like the companies that are working on AGI development, you know, artificial general intelligence, you know, the ones that are currently leading the charge. You know, certainly the folks at DeepMind, like they're thinking about this deeply, deeply, deeply, but they're just one company. There's so many others that are all now trying to be there first. And like, again, coordination problem. How do you, how do you...

They're all playing this game of who can get there. How do you keep the externalities to a minimum, the negative externalities, if everyone's optimizing for speed? Because if, you know, like, well, if we don't get there first, they're going to get there first. Yeah. So it's a challenge. Yeah. No, absolutely. I guess, yeah, especially...

It seems like the AI progress conversation has really been kickstarted in the last few months with the whole like GPT-3, chat GPT-E type stuff. And now everyone on Twitter is like, oh my God, like now we see the power of AI. Right, finally people are waking up to it. Before it was like Space Invaders and I go, okay, fine. But now it's like, oh shit, like this is actually replacing people's jobs and uh-oh. Right. I can ask it a question and it responds like a human. Yeah, it's giving something because the thing is like the sort of the super intelligence thing, you know, the AGI. Yeah.

I mean, it is fair to question that it might not even be possible. But what ChatGPT and DALI and all of these have shown is like, we don't even have to get to AGI to know that this is going to be the most... The AIs we're having now are clearly going to disrupt industry after industry after industry. And it's at an accelerating rate of change. Yeah.

And we are just not reacting fast enough to this in terms of like, if you care about sort of stability to an extent, and we need some degree of stability, like, you know, I'm not saying we should just like stay in lockstep with what we're currently doing. Clearly we need to fix a lot of things, but again, fine line between order and chaos and we've got to mitigate the chaos direction a little bit.

Nice. So we talked at the start around kind of your, I guess, day job being with the Center for Effective Altruism. Is that right? Yeah. I guess technically I'm an ambassador for Longview Philanthropy, whose main focus is existential risk reduction.

you know, how do we mitigate so many of these growing threats, not only from emerging technology, but climate change, environmental destruction, so that the next couple of generations have a world to live in. And again, there's a lot of dissent, you know, about are these threats happening in the next 10 years or are they happening in the next 100 years?

In my opinion, there's not much difference between the two. I mean, the 10 years affects me personally, but like I intend to have children probably. So I would like them to have a life and their grandkids. But, you know, it's anyone who says to you, oh, we're fine. The next 20 years are fine. Like their head is in the sand. Or anyone who says to you, we're definitely going to die in the next five years.

They're a little overconfident. The point is there's enough uncertainty that it's clearly a big problem. And so, yeah, Longview's focus is mitigating these risks, usually through like advising donors on opportunities to, you know, what good projects to fund. Another big area that's really like should be on all of our minds is like pandemic preparedness. Like COVID is small fry, right?

compared to what could potentially be coming. Because again, we are developing more and more, with biotech developments, more and more capabilities that over time will become more and more available to more people. And whether you believe COVID was natural origin or lab leak, doesn't really matter. The point is at some point, the probability of artificially enhanced or entirely synthesized pathogens

is going to be widespread and you know, if it falls into the wrong hands, that would be concerning. So, um,

Yeah, that's another very neglected cause area. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, after I went to the Longview retreat a few months ago, I ended up reading a book, The Bomb by Fred Kaplan, which is about the history of the nuclear bomb and how that's progressed from World War II onwards till now. And that was really scary and sobering as well. Like, oh my God. It's not fun, is it? I don't want to go back to my Disney film. Yeah, exactly. Just play some Ed Sheeran. Good times. And I mean, it's...

The trouble is when you talk about, when you mention existential risk, the first thing people's minds go to is like, oh yeah, asteroids, super volcano. I'm like, I wish it was just those. Those are the easy ones because they're coming from a single source. It's like, okay, there's an asteroid coming, right? Get together, we've got to build a thing, lasers, whatever the technique. At least it's like a physical thing and a single point that you can work on.

Even something like a super volcano would still feel probably a bit easier than these coordinate the other risks are coming from coordination failure. And these like again these unhealthy competitive pressures. Those are the hard ones. And that's what we need as many people thinking about how to like how we need like a hive mind solution because it's a hive mind problem. So let's say someone's listening to this and they're like damn this is really important. What are some kind of actions that people like normal people can can take to

I mean, probably the main, the first thing I would recommend is just to, to, to read, to try and understand the problem as best possible, um, or listen to, so some good people, some good podcasts, aside of this one, obviously, uh, to recommend, um, and aside of mine that will be coming out hopefully soon, um, are the 80,000 hours podcast. Absolutely incredible. Really sort of very, very deep dive on sort of individual problems that seem to be, you know,

very high stakes with like leading, leading experts. And then some general thinkers that have informed so much of my thinking, especially over the last few years. Daniel Schmachtenberger. I don't know if you've heard of him. Jordan Hall. These guys are, they do a lot of sort of public, public facing stuff. And they are truly some of the best, like real sort of systems thinkers, like deeply holistic thinkers, right?

who both you know background in like hardcore background in science technical knowledge um but are also willing to like they have the again this like open-mindedness to perhaps the more esoteric stuff and some of the like i remember watching this talk by daniel schmachtenberger on emergence just search his name and then emergence you'll find it yeah we'll put a link down below as well um

And that sort of was like, it just, it was again, a little light bulb moment. I was like, Ooh, there's, there's some, there's some, there's something here, but just listen to honestly any of his interviews, particularly around civilizational risk.

talking about this concept that has become referred to as Moloch, which is Moloch essentially the god of unhealthy competition. If you were to give it a face, in reality, it's just a collection of game theoretic forces. Again, it's like the bad incentives that make people optimize for the short-term goal at the cost of the long-term whole. So a good example of Moloch would be

Oh no, so like in terms of like a bad system design is like you're in a stadium and everyone's watching a football game.

everyone's sitting down. So it's kind of like a static state. Everyone's reasonably comfortable. But then someone near the front, you know, actually they just want like a little bit of a better view. So they stand up to just get themselves that short-term edge over everyone else. But because of the design of the system, that forces the people behind them to stand up. You know, they have a choice. Like if they want to continue sort of playing the game and watch, you know, in this case, you know, continue watching the game, they have to stand up too. But then they screw the people behind them and so on until, you know, that one person sort of

selfish action causes everyone to have to stand up and there's no way for everyone to then sit down again without some like God's eye view like magical coordination you know someone over the tannoy say hey everyone sit down so that would be an example of like a monarchy system where

It's very easy to like... It's like a ball perched on top of a hill. It's not in an equilibrium where it's in the bottom or it's like stable. It's actually a very unstable equilibrium and it just takes a little nudge from like one slightly selfish act for the whole thing to fall down. And unfortunately, that's how so many of our systems are designed. They're not in a stable equilibrium at the bottom of a hill. They're like precariously balanced. Like, ugh. And...

So that's sort of one definition of Moloch. Right. And then another way of thinking about this like unhealthy competition thing is like the sort of mindset that gives rise to people doing that. Because again, even with that football situation-

If the person at the front had just a little bit more awareness and were a little bit less self-interested and just thought about how this would affect the entire system, then also the problem wouldn't have happened. So defeating this... The technical word for it is a multipolar trap, which... Just Google it. But... Sorry. Yeah.

Yeah, the technical term for this thing is this phenomenon is a multipolar trap, but it's a bit of a mouthful and I like it. There was this really great blog, actually, this is what people should go and read to understand this, blog called Meditations on Moloch, written by Scott Alexander. His website was once called Slaystar Codex, it's now Astral Codex 10. But just Google Meditations on Moloch and read that.

That is the best primer to this, like, these forces of game theory that create so many of these sort of issues in our society. And the same thing applies, you know, as I mentioned before, deforestation. The farmer, he might not want to cut down the forest on his land, but...

He needs to make money and it's the most valuable resource he has. And he's like, well, look, I mean, it's only this little patch doesn't mean everything else is going to go. But if everyone thinks that way, then it, and you know, if he does, if his neighbor does it, well now he's definitely got to do it because his neighbor's getting richer. And so it's, you know, once you see this thing, you know, once you understand the process behind it,

Every time you see there's an issue, more often than not, it's caused by this same process. So to create a sort of sustainable society moving forward, we need to figure out how to solve these coordination problems. Hmm.

And so that can come either, I guess, through people becoming more aware of them and their own Malochian incentives or whatever the phrase is. Also systems design, like the Tannoy guy being like, hang on, I have the chance to influence everyone. Right. Well, that would be a very like top down centralized approach. But even better would be to just redesign the stadium somehow. And I don't know what that would look like. Redesign the landscape of the system so that

It doesn't just take one person to like defect essentially, you know, do the shit, do the selfish action in the prisoner's dilemma, which, you know, this is what it is, right? A multi-way prisoner's dilemma. It, we need systems that aren't vulnerable to, you know, the worst, the, the, the, the worst aspects of human nature. Because that's, you know, while, while we can definitely raise a sanity waterline and get more people thinking in a more like win-win way, you know, in a more like,

less adversarial way. We're always, you know, what is the percentage of psychopaths in the population? It's like 1%, right? There will always be people who end up, not even necessarily through like bad action, you know, bad intent, but just because of their life situation, feel like they have no other choice. So we need to design systems that are robust and essentially align even the people who only want to act selfishly, align their incentives with the good of the whole.

And it's very, very hard to do, but it's not possible. And that's, so that's a long wind way of saying like, well, if you want to dive into that stuff more, I really recommend listening to like Jordan Hall, Daniel Schmachtenberger, because they're like some of the leading thinkers on that topic. Nice. So we talked about, actually, I'm curious about your thoughts on social media. There've been a few kind of Instagram reels that I've seen of yours where you've basically been like social media is bad and

All of the kind of bad things around social media. I wonder if you can just riff on that for a moment. Yeah. Well, so I guess I started thinking about this because I noticed in myself just like I'm so horribly addicted to Twitter. I mean, it's a fascinating place, but it's like, you know, it's just like watching a car crash over and over and over. Well, for two reasons. A, because it's like it sucks you in.

often with like the areas that you personally care about the most. The algorithm figures out what gets you triggered and will show it to you over and over because, and that's not just true of Twitter, it's true of most social media platforms. And so there's that, but then there's also the like,

dopamine reward system that it's got going on in terms of like the, you know, how many likes did you get and so on. And I was like, you know, it started sort of setting off the same red flags that, you know, when I would have like bad days of playing poker where I was like chasing losses or something like that. I was like, oh, this is feeling a little similar. And as well, caring about what my results look like to others. And like, well, am I getting, you know, are people talking about me enough or whatever they're like?

the unhealthy aspects of whether you're playing the fame game or whatever game you're playing i was like oh this is this is a lot of the same stuff um but so i made a video again to explain this like mollick concept um made it about a year ago called the beauty wars which talked about how on instagram i noticed this like explosion in popularity of these beauty filters um

that weren't around like in certainly 2017, 2018. But all of a sudden you notice that everyone's pictures are starting to look a little bit better. And, you know, I remember playing around with these and inputting a picture of myself, which I liked, but then applied the filter to it where it just like tweaks your eyes a little bit like this, just very subtly. It's hard to put your finger on exactly what it's doing, but it makes you look great. And it's like the click of a button. And then you'd look at the original picture, which you loved,

next to this new one, you're like, "Oh, fuck that. This is great." This is another example of one of these molecule processes because even if you... Even though I was aware of this whole dynamic, at the time I was trying to grow my Instagram, be a bit of an influencer, I noticed that most of my... If I post a hot picture, it gets a lot more likes than one where I'm trying to say something intellectual. So there's an incentive pressure to push more hot pictures.

And then that's what I'm trying to play that game. And I know that everyone else is using these things, so I might as well. So then I do it, but then there's an even better one that comes out. And so it creates this race to the bottom scenario, which is like archetypal of Moloch. And so I made a video about that and it's, and yeah, it's, and it's, and it's just much of the same thing really. It's, it's part of the problem with social media is it's,

it reduces the richness and complexity of the human experience down to like these very narrow metrics. And so by definition, it's inherently dehumanizing. Because, you know, I'm sure you've noticed it in yourself, right? You're like, well, how many followers have I got now? And so on. And even if you are trying to be as wise and as thoughtful about this as possible, it's such an alluring thing because it's such a simple way of measuring success.

But that loss of complexity, that reduction of information essentially about ourselves is not healthy. It's not sustainable. And then when you couple this with... So the next part in this Moloch video series I've been making, which will hopefully be out by this time this video comes out, it's going to be called The Media Wars, that the same process is happening within our media.

Because, you know, they've always been in a bit of competition, right? Even since sort of the 50s. The competition was much less intense on the media industries, you know, the big companies back then. Because usually they had their market and it was fairly safe. But then with the internet coming along, which in many ways is wonderful because it actually democratized the ability to speak to people. But it also simultaneously turned up the competition dial. And so now these media companies are having to compete with all these citizen journalists. Yeah.

which is incentivizing them to do, you know, they've still got to try and make money. So all these, the incentives and rewards for being the one who can put out the most clickable headline overwhelm them. And that's why we're seeing this sea of clickbait and frankly, you know, dishonesty and divisiveness, because that's the other thing. Divisiveness seems to be the most profitable way. Anger is the surefire way of getting clicks. Yeah.

So it seems like the culture wars, maybe, I don't know if the culture wars were inevitable, but they certainly seem to be a product of this improperly designed system. No one designed the internet, no one designed the media industry. It just kind of evolved. But if it carries on on the current trajectory, it's not boding well for sort of truth and unity, or like even the ability to make sense of reality. Yeah.

What do we do about something like this? It's a trillion dollar question. I don't know what the solution is to this, but the one practical thing we can each be doing is basically making a commitment to being integrity in integrity to ourselves. So if we have a belief about something, we should obviously do our best to like navigate the various biases and wants and so on that we will have when we get a belief. But

At the very least, make a commitment to only saying what we believe to be true. Which so many people are not even following. Because it's just like, well, you know, I could spin my title this way. If I write my tweet in this way, I know it's going to get more attention. And it's not technically lying. It's just a flair I'm adding to it.

Just making a commitment to be like, no, I'm going to, as best I can, minimize that. And just whatever I put out there is as close to what I personally believe to be true. That's a huge stepping stone. Because then at least we're not having, we're honest with ourselves about what we think. And in the people in our immediate network who we know we trust, if you all make an agreement, okay, we're going to do this with ourselves, at least now there's a small cluster of truth. And I

Sounds pie in the sky, but I just think this will be like an emergent thing that if enough people start doing it, then we're going to start seeing something cool and more like grounded in reality arise. So that's step one. And it's actually something practical that we can all do. But beyond that...

Uh, so I'll hopefully have my, uh, as I said, my podcast will be out by the time this comes out. And I did an interview with Jordan Hall and we talk a lot about this. So go listen to that because we go into it in quite a lot of depth. Um, and then perhaps we can sort of utilize some, um,

you know, technology to help us with this, you know, like blockchain seems like it has a lot of potential, right? Because it's a way of recording truth, you know, in an indelible way. So I'm not a blockchain expert anyway, but again, the sort of the systems thinkers who've spoken to a lot and say like, there's, there's, there's some value in there. Um,

But yeah, no, don't know. That's part of the reason I'm like talking about this is just I want smart people who like, you know, you have a lot of smart people listening to this to just be inspired and start thinking about it. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. I can't begin to think of what the solutions are, but we'll put links to all this stuff. Honestly, not really. Like as you as you were describing that whole clickbait thing, I was like, man, so many video titles where...

You know, I know if I called a video how I ranked first at Cambridge University, it would get loads of clicks. It's not strictly true. Maybe in one exam in one year where it's like won the joint first prize for like technically, you know, spin it. And it's those incentives at like the sort of like dozens of times a day, if not hundreds across the population, especially in an internet enabled world of social media where you're chasing clicks and attention. I just as you were describing that, I was like, oh, shit.

It's like we're trapped in this, an attention game, but game is the nice way of calling it. In reality, it's an attention war, you know, because what's a different, you know, the definition of war. You could argue it's the ultimate negative sum game. Like look at the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Russia decided to start this, it seems to me like an incredibly needless conflict.

There are no winners. It's just lose-lose the more it continues. So that's what war is. It's the ultimate negative sum game. And by the way, the original definition of Moloch, Moloch came from an old Bible story about this cult who were war-obsessed and were so desperate to gain military power, they would sacrifice their children to a burning effigy of this thing

in order to get more military might. Dark as it gets. And then it's sort of like the legend of this thing has sort of come through, survived through the years. And it was Scott Alexander who first put it into the meditations on Moloch blog into game theoretic terms. And then I've sort of tweaked the definition. I call it the god of unhealthy competition. But you can think of it as the god of war. And which brings me to, so talking about solution,

Again, no clear answer, but the thing that sort of resonates the most to me is, you know, I was thinking like, okay, so if that's what Moloch is and let's try and, you know, in my videos, I dress up as it to try and give it a personality because it's such a nebulous concept. Like how can you make it a little bit more memeable to people so they can understand it? Uh, so give it a personality. What would its personality be like? It's like this mono focused, I will win this, like unable to see what else is going on. Um,

like capable at that non-narrow game, but just like lacking again, wisdom. So it's like, okay, if that's Moloch, what's its inverse? Or at least what, you know, what is something better than that? You know, if Moloch is the god of lose-lose, what's the god of win-win? And so I haven't come up with a better name. I just call it win-win. And win-win's vibe. So again, I can only paint it as an aesthetic, but its vibe is...

It's like, it's fun loving. It just, it wants, it wants, it wants to have a good time, but it wants everyone to have a good time. If Moloch's thing is about

winning the game win-wins thing is like making sure that the game can continue as many as many people can play as many games as possible and it's like aesthetic is kind of turquoise and purple and it's a fun time but it's not like holier than thou like it likes to get it likes to play a oh you want to have a heads up game all right let's go and it will play um you know it will have a really fun

it'll throw itself into like a sort of zero sum game when it, you know, when it's okay to do so, but it has the wisdom to go, okay, that's, that's enough competition. Now we need to cooperate and so on. So it's, it's like this, it's just this wise, but fun loving, not austere. Like it like wants to have a good time type of deity. Um,

Again, sounds nuts, but like this is what has been the thing that resonates most with me personally. And I think, I'm not saying that's what people, you know, others should follow, but like think about what that, you know, this, this, this...

this, this essence of win-win competition and collaboration looks like to you. And it's, to be clear, it's not opposite of Moloch because that would have put it on the same scale. It's something bigger. It, it can exist comfortably. Like Moloch can exist in its world. It just knows how to like slap it down when he's like, ah, that's enough out of you. Yeah. Your little arms race there is getting a bit much. Stop that. Um, so that's where, that's where I've gotten to in this.

Yeah, that really resonates with me as well. As you were describing that, I was thinking of playing board games, for example. I'm a big fan of the board game, Articulate, amazing stuff. And it can get very competitive and you can start shouting people and all this kind of stuff. I think certainly when I was younger, I was very hyper-competitive on this thing. Just like, we have to win. And then after a while, I was like, hang on. The point of the game is for all of us to have fun. So there are occasions in which even though...

our team could win by sort of steamrolling the other team. That's not particularly fun for them. So let's like pull our punches just a little bit because ultimately people have come over to my place to hang out and have pizza and board games. Let's take a chill pill. You know, that kind of vibe. You want the game to happen again. Yeah. You don't want it to get so intense that you essentially break the playing field. You know, you're

Piss off your friends so much that like, actually, we didn't have a good time. We're not going to play again. Yes, that's exactly it. And there's a really good book as well that sort of encapsulate this called Infinite and Finite Games. Honestly, you can just read the first two chapters and you get the premise. It's again like...

is winning the short term game right in front of you whatever it takes including sacrificing your children or whatever um win win is like just keeping the game keeping the game going um that's that that is the ultimate game is to keep the game going what's your infinite game oh great question um

I think about this in the context of how I want to spend my time. Right. I think when earlier in my life, like, especially with like a medical career trajectory, it's very sort of, there's always like a next goal, a next thing to do. And it's very finite gaming of like, I need to try and get a first in the exams or whatever. And then kind of since losing that identity for me, I've been thinking a lot around what is the game I want to play purely for the sake of playing the game?

for like this YouTube channel and this podcast business and stuff. Infinite game is just like actually just being able to continue to do cool interviews with cool people and,

And so when it comes to the choice of getting a ridiculously controversial guest on the podcast just to get views versus does that actually reduce the risk of reduce the chances of being able to continue to play this game and enjoy it over the long term? So I think about that a lot in terms of like, how do I want to spend my own time and what are the things I want to be working on almost infinitely rather than finitely? I'm curious if you think of that at all, like what that's like for you. Yeah. I mean, the thing that's coming up is just like more new experiences. Yeah.

Right. Just if I look back at my life, the most notable, I mean, sometimes I'll be just doing the same thing, you know, like cuddling on the couch with Igor or whatever. And just like those moments, but just having these like, what the fuck moments in life where like, you think you've got it all figured out and then like, whoa. And then there's this, just this new surprise comes at you from left field. I want more of that. And it,

Because now you've got a new puzzle to solve. You're like, wait, wait, wait, wait. I thought I'd figured out the territory of this map. I thought I'd discovered everything. The fog of war has lifted. No, wait, there's a whole realm beyond here. And I suspect that, you know, I mean, I don't know whether it's finite or infinite, but we haven't even begin to explore what is actually going on in this reality yet.

So that's the infinite game to me. A friend of mine, she, one of our favorite sort of things we like to play with is the idea, we call it the game, which is that we're actually in a giant escape room and the goal is to find the key to unlock it, you know, to find out what's really going on outside and to solve all the puzzles. Nice. And

I think that's, who knows, maybe that's our purpose as humans. We've spawned on this particular planet and each of us have subspawned in our own little spots. But as a collective, we are slowly, what's the purpose of science is, right? It's just understanding reality. And it now seems like, because it's having more and more, the more people I mentioned, like this energy stuff too or whatever, the more people are like, actually, I've had a little bit of something like this too. And-

So it seems like the territory has grown a little bit. And, you know, I hope we make it off the planet too and actually explore in the sort of three-dimensional physical space. But it seems like there's some hyper-dimensional stuff going on as well that we can play with. Mental stuff. Have you ever had it? No, not really. My brother has and a lot of friends close to me have. Can you share it? Yeah, my brother had an experience where...

And this was a thing that gave him a lot of conviction about religion, about Islam in particular. He had an experience at university where he wasn't feeling particularly great. He was struggling with exams and kind of stressed out. And he randomly got a call from one of his friends who happened to be the president of the Islamic Society. And the guy just was asking him, hey, how's it going? And that was completely random for him. He just hadn't...

their relationship wasn't the sort where the guy would randomly ring him but the guy said that yeah you know i just i just had the feeling that you know i should just like check up on you and think and see how things were going and they had a conversation after that conversation my brother was like oh my god like how how could he possibly have known how did he have the intuition it's like that doesn't make any sense at all and that really helped get my brother out of like a kind of dark spot in his life and that gave him conviction that like there's got to be something out there right um

And I'm quite kind of jealous of people who have those sorts of experiences because it really seems to, on an emotional level, help you really know that there is something out there that we don't quite understand. Whereas I feel like right now for me, I'm still stuck in the rational world of...

materialism and the things that I can see and touch are the things that exist. So I'm keen to explore like meditation stuff, the psychedelic stuff, don't tell my mum and like all of the other occult-y type stuff at some point. Yeah. And maybe, I don't know, look more into the religion thing as well. Yeah. No, it's on the TBR. There's clearly, again, there's something going on. The fact that shamans

independently arose in almost every indigenous tribe who had not spoken to each other ever, but diverged millions of years... Well, no, I'm sorry. Diverged tens of thousands of years ago, and yet these same things pop up where shamans were often this seemingly unnecessary part of the human experience, and that monotheistic religion... Okay, that kind of came out from a similar place, but...

There's clearly something to this. And it also seems somewhat absurd to me that... It seems more implausible to me that the universe sprung out of randomness and nothing.

than like was in was creating you know intentionally created by something yeah and what's funny is like you know so many of the sort of like materialist types are now like subscribing to the simulation argument yeah that's indistinguishable from religion actually like it's it's you know it's the same it's just it's just put into like modern day terms and that's great you know so there's clearly like there's something that we keep converging on and doesn't mean it's

definitely true but it's worth exploring and it's okay it's okay to be agnostic essentially which I imagine most people I think most people are like it's rare to find someone who's so staunchly atheist definitely doesn't exist but at the same time like I do the classical biblical definitions of this like all loving God when you then see all these like terrible things happening it's like

and that's hard to marry up so maybe that definition doesn't quite work as well but maybe it's like something created and it was like oh no no don't no don't do that you know like that's possible you know it can still be caring but like unable to do something for example i don't know you know like a simulator presses play on their thing they can't then like tweak it necessarily who knows yes so much to explore

Thank you so much. This has been wonderful. I'd love to end by asking for a few recommendations from you. So we've got all these things that we're going to put in the video description and in the show notes. And, you know, your latest YouTube video, which will be out by the time this thing's a YouTube channel, your podcast. I have a gym session now, so I'm going to be listening to Metallica as a bit of a gateway into metal. Any books that you'd recommend for me and the audience? Fiction, nonfiction can be anything that you found interesting.

Novocine by James Lovelock. Fairly nice short read. He's amazing because he only very recently died at like age 100. And he wrote this when he was 98. And he was one of the most polymath-y brilliant scientists. He was everything. He was like incredible scientist, made so many... Just go read his Wikipedia. It's incredible. So he wrote that. Inadequate Equilibrium, which is technically an e-book by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

And then the next one will be, and I haven't read it fully, but I've read parts of it. And I've been very much like close to the writing of it. It's by one of my dearest friends, Tim Urban. Oh, yeah. And it's going to be called The Tale of Us. And it should be out by the time this comes out. But if it's not, it will be out imminently. And it's about understanding, again, this like divisiveness and why we seem to be...

everyone's so angry and like this or why tribalism is what it is and why it's gotten so bad in particular lately um

That's going to be a really important read. Nice. Yeah. I love Tim Urban, so I'm looking forward to checking that out. You should have him on here. I'd love to, yeah. He's based in the US, isn't he? Yeah, he's in New York. New York. He's incredible. Nice. I will reach out to you for an intro if that's right. Absolutely. When I happen to be in New York, that would be awesome to have him on. Fantastic. And I guess final question is any kind of – we talked about how you'd recommend people learn poker, not necessarily make a living from it because there's a lot of valuable lessons to be learned there.

Anything else in terms of sort of experiences and new things to try out that you would recommend for people? Like I'm fishing for recommendations for myself here. Like I want to, you know, this like any activities, any sports, any things that you've done where you think, oh, more people should try this thing. And I didn't really know that this was the thing until I tried it out. Well, yeah. Bouldering, climbing specifically. Yeah.

You know, we evolved to be great climbers. Human beings, our bodies are actually very, very naturally good at it. And even though there's a really steep learning curve, like you'll have forearm tightness and you'll feel like I'll never be able to do this, stick at it for a couple of months because your grip strength will come remarkably quickly. And what I love about it so much is it's kind of like physical chess.

And that it's not just a pure, it's not just like hammering out weights in the gym or it's just like pure brawn or like who can run the fastest. It's, it's,

You have to like think through your body and learn what your body what you know how it moves and it's so dynamic and it's and particularly in bouldering like there'll be different problems that are set and they're literally called bouldering problems. So it's like a puzzle to solve that happens to be physical. So for people who like a bit of intellectual stimulation in their exercise, it's the best.

And particularly if you find a partner who you can go with, who's like roughly a similar level, then you can like challenge each other a little bit. And it's, you'll also learn together. I don't, it's just, it's,

It's been my obsession now for the last couple of years and it's so good. It's so fun. It destroys your hands. My hands are a mess, but it's worth it. Nice. Yeah, we've got a bouldering wall next door. Well, fairly close by to here, which I haven't checked out yet. So that's inspired me to give it a go. Yeah. Well, Liv, thank you so much. Thank you. We'll put links to all of your stuff down in the video description and the show notes wherever people are watching slash listening to this. Any final asks or recommendations for the audience? Just look for the win-wins in life.

And if you have any ideas on how to solve the Moloch problem and make more win-wins, please contact me. Yeah. Amazing. Thank you so much. It's been wonderful. Thank you. All right. So that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast.

Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode. That would be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode. So thanks for watching. Do hit the subscribe button if you aren't already, and I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.