Everything You Need to Know About Moloch with Liv Boeree

Transcript

foreign ation on the Pod today I've got live bori and we are talking about molok the God of unhealthy competition so Liv is a filmmaker speaker and poker Champion she's the thought leader on Game Theory and counter-intuitive thought experiments and has been building a YouTube channel about Bullock which is basically the idea of rivalrous negative some games and the race to the bottom that emerge from them so the idea of Mulla comes from meditations on molak a 2014 blog post from Scott Alexander Malik is the god of negative some games in unhealthy competition Dynamics the god of coordination failure and we talk

in this episode about how we can coordinate better how can we solve coordination failure how can we fight molok and create what Liv calls win-win which is the god of coordination and of positive some games the god of what Molech is not and so live to me is just a really interesting thinker in this space I I think that the fact that she's a poker Champion is just just speaks to her ability to play in game theoretic scenarios to think in gamethreatic scenarios and articulate her way forward in them and as a filmmaker and speaker she has been working on articulating the ideas from meditations on Malik in increasingly accessible ways so meditations on Muller because it's

amazing blog post which we'll have Linked In the show notes but it's 35 pages long and ain't nobody got time for that in the 21st century so Liv has been taking that content and making it accessible to her YouTube channel in the videos that she's been producing about moloch and the beauty Wars which is basically the race that happens on Instagram with all of these Beauty filters that basically people have to use Beauty filters in order to get more likes and follows and eventually it becomes a competitive advantage to use these Beauty filters on beauty uh Beauty Instagram and and it creates this sort of race where people are looking different digitally than they are in their real lives and it makes it changes

the way you you feel about yourself when you look in the mirror and another example is the media Wars the moloch media Wars where because all of these news channels are optimizing for attention all of news and journalism in the 21st century in a media environment driven by Ebola will tend towards clickbait excuse me click bait or outrage and so um Liv has been translating these concepts of coordination failure into helping us all see the coordination failure that exists around us in the digital environment and so I think that that to me is akin to telling a fish that they're in water if you're on Instagram and you're seeing how everyone's living this manufactured

version of their life and that changes the way you feel about your own life in and especially in its most boring moments then I think that that's a public bad if um if if you're in the social media and you find yourself in an argument you're being coerced by the environment in the molec and the media Wars in order to be more argumentative and so I just really enjoyed this conversation with Liv about moloch and the god of unhealthy coordination Dynamics and I think that Liv is creating a public good for the web by creating a YouTube channel that explains these Dynamics in a really high fidelity way to people that that helps them sort of see that they're

efficient water that they're in a person on the internet that is driven by mola and so um I'm just a huge fan of of Live And I'm so happy to have her on the podcast I think that you're really gonna enjoy this episode with with Livery hi Liv how are you I'm great thanks for having me I'm so excited to talk to you I've been a big fan of yours for a long time I'm excited to get into your new YouTube channel your new podcast can you tell us what you've been focused on uh yeah um for the last last year and a half I guess I've been focused on making these like sort of short films explaining this concept of Malik

you know the god of unhealthy competition uh the god of negative some games depending on your definition um and then I've just launched a podcast called win-win which is essentially looking for the the antithesis of mollock um you know if Malik is the god of lose-lose situations competition gone wrong I was thinking what what is the inverse of that what is the antidote to that and you know the name the sort of the working title of win-win as the name of that God came to mind and then I couldn't really think of anything better I just found myself always calling it win-win and I was like you know what that's it's nice and direct so that's like marketing 101 make it nice and

clear uh so uh yeah that's that name is now stuck uh so the podcast is basically um it's it's around the topic of competition as you know in general which is handy when you're doing a podcast you want it to be nice and general so you can have a wide range of guests um and the theme is to sort of explore how competition manifests in different people's lives Industries um different nations cultures Etc uh and to understand you know what what are the common themes when we you know when when we feel like it's doing a good thing for the world versus when it's doing a bad thing for the world so you know in the long run I want to like get like Parallax reviews that help sort of

hive mind a solution to to these molecule situations so um I'm wondering if you could take us back to when you first read Scott Alexander's meditations on molar where were you in your life what was the main lessons that you took from it and kind of how did it how did it hit you yeah um I'm trying to remember exactly when it was already I think it was like 2018 or so he wrote it in 2014 right um and I just it it was honestly like it was just like reading it was bordering on a religious experience reading it like it was just something that like it gave me chills I was like yes this

it's it's such a great piece because it's it's both artistic you know it talks about this poem it's all centers around this poem how by uh Alan Ginsburg but then he like breaks it down and like classic Scott Alexander Scott style of um you know it's extremely efficient and quite dry and entertaining and and it just like it was really rigorous breakdown of what's going on and I don't know it was just like I remember reading and I think I read it immediately again because it's you know it's like it takes about 90 minutes to read and and then my mind just kept coming back to it like once you've seen like this sort of def definition of this this mechanism that creates so many of our problems you can't really unsee it um so

yeah I don't I have I can't remember where I was exactly but I remember thinking like that man this is this is really really relevant and then it wasn't like immediately that I was like okay that's it I've Got to Now make a video version of this but I over the next I was still making other like random Youtube videos at the time and and I still think I'm still kind of playing poker although I was trying to retire um but uh at some point I was like no this is this is what my area I want to focus on I want to try and bring this to life um and make it as like accessible to as many people as possible um because unfortunately you know For Better or Worse people don't want to read 90 minute blogs that much anymore um and so you've got to like do the Mass

Appeal approach of like video and other social media platforms and styles uh so yeah yeah I I think that um I just feel so much kinship with you in uh you saying that meditations on Morlock was like a religious experience for you because I felt the exact same way when I read it but what's funny about that is that it's completely rationalist piece I mean the the whole piece is about Game Theory and the idea that defecting uh from each other creates a Advantage for yourself and so as more and more agents in a game defect from each other that creates a multi-polar trap and this is all game theory and rationalist things but to take that and then conceive it as a kind of like a demon moloch is it it it's It's Kind of a Funny bridge between

a rationalist way of thinking in a very emotive way of thinking and I thought that that was pretty profound and it ties back well because actually molok comes from this old Bible story originally right of um God because there was this like cult that was apparently so obsessed with trying to win Wars that they were willing to sacrifice the most dear thing in the world to them their own children to molokin this like burning bonfire of you know of its Effigy um in the hope that it would like bestow on the military power so they could win Wars so it's like this it's this old Legend of like sacrificing

more and more in order to win at a narrow game and then it was Scott well through the lens of I guess um Alan ginsberg's poem that for you know he then tied it to this like modern rationalist type of lingo and this you know the idea of like economic incentives and and game theoretic uh structures so yeah it's it's it combines the old and the new like it is truly digging on some old like you know there's I'm not a particularly religious person but the Bible clearly's got some wisdom going on there like for it to have persisted as a meme so reliably throughout thousands of years from multiple cultures like um there's clearly some wisdom it's touching on there and it's it's it's

he's found a way to put it into modern day terms with like a lot of intellectual rigor great well you know I I always think that the story of the the this ancient tribe burning their children in order to win Wars is is so crazy and the reaction that you get is so visceral from people like oh that's so profoundly evil why would anyone do that until you realize that every time we fly across the country and we consume carbon that we're selling the future of this planet uh and it's it's that's sort of the lesson of the coordination game of of moloch is that it's almost like there's there's a demon that is influencing our our Behavior there's no other explanation for it unless you want to get into multi-polar traps and all that kind of stuff

right well it's it's it's a two it's a two-pronged problem it's both you know molok problems arise or maybe we should give some specific examples just so it's it's clear to people so um my first molok video uh I just I decided to make it about these Beauty filters on Instagram um because it was one that I had I felt personally quite troubled by um it was it was a I was struggling myself with like deciding whether or not to make this like sacrifice um essentially um so you know I'm sure most people are familiar now like on certain platforms particularly Instagram and Tick Tock uh there are these in very very good you know in the very effective Beauty filters that with one click of a

button will just tweak your face and make you that little bit more um aesthetically pleasing um to the average brain um you know some people are like oh no I prefer the natural it's like short but on on average most human limbic systems are like these like filtered versions more than the original and because the social media world is highly competitive you know at the time I was still like trying to build my Instagram and I was like leaning into sometimes like the hot girl aesthetic and so on I I felt this very strong incentive to like use these filters to make my pictures look objectively hotter um because I noticed that when I used the filters I would get way more likes and comments than if I didn't so I was under the strong incentive to use them

but at the same time not only did it make me you know feel inauthentic to my fans and and to like the wider world I'm putting out a picture that doesn't really you know it's not quite me but it also made me like then like have some sort of degree of self-loathing again because I'm being inauthentic but also just like comparing you know I'll take a picture I love and then I've applied the filter to it and compare it to the original and now I don't like the original picture anymore so it like literally makes you you sacrifice your own um appreciation of your own natural image in a mirror um so it felt so close to home I was like oh this is this is the beauty molec in action um it's a multi it's like this sort of shitty competitive system um combined with a very powerful new

technology um that is creating this like race to the bottom scenario uh so there's sort of two there's I think there's two pronged there's two prongs to the way mollock works is that it's it needs a badly designed system whereby when a certain small percentage of users start adopting some new strategy to get a competitive Advantage it essentially forces everyone else to do the same thing kind of like a you know in a stadium of people um if people at the front stand up it forces everyone else to stand up so that now everyone is standing for the rest of this you know let's it's a loud music concert or something now everyone has to stand whether they want to or not if they want to continue watching but no

one's actually in an objectively better situation than before in fact everyone's worse off than before so that's an example of like a poorly designed system of incentives and then you but you also need this kind of like brain worm of like selfishness to kick-start a monarchy process like if everybody was perfectly enlightened on Instagram or Tick Tock and knew that you know they could see the long-reaching effects that if they do this it will force others to and eventually everyone will do it then it wouldn't get started either so it needs this combination of like um human weakness essentially of like you know wanting to get ahead um but also a poorly design system

whereby when a few people then do that it kind of forces everyone else to if they want to remain competitive so it's like um I think it's important to sort of differentiate those two different bits what I think is so profound from talking to you live is that you have this ability to take this 35 page blog post from Scott Alexander which you know is amazing in itself but to put it in terms that we'll meet people where they are and in the problems that they would have and make the the problem approachable which I think is so important to understand these incentive systems and the race to the bottom and um you know it's almost like you're telling a fish and water that they're in water hey you're surrounded by this Maliki game and and you know Daniel

smackenberg always likes to say that uh a problem that's half under that's that's understood as half addressed or half solved or something like that and so I think that creating that understanding is the public good in itself and it's such important work and that's why I wanted to have you on the podcast and that's why I'm so just excited to talk to you like how do we it seems like a large body of work for you is making this this understandable um and so there's a video on your YouTube which we'll Link in the show notes called molok the beauty Wars that people can check out that is a quite profound way of conveying this thank you yeah and to your point of like making people aware of the problem is like half solving the problem that's uh especially true so the second not it

sounds like I'm now just chilling all my videos but I I don't know please watch them because they put a lot of time into them and I am proud of them um but the second one is about the like sort of a similar issue but scaled up to a much bigger like you know because like the world's not going to end because of beauty filters clearly not um it's just going to make a bunch of mostly just teenagers very unhappy for a while but um the next sort of scaled up version of that is uh this like what's going on in our media um because again they're playing this like attention game they're fighting for our attention which is somewhat of a scarce resource and for various reasons um

well because they are not the way that their business models are set up in the media it's usually either like third party advertisement or subscription but either way they are the thing that they're directly rewarded for is driving engagement um but engagement is only Loosely correlated or sometimes it's actually anti-correlated with truth and accuracy um all that it really does tightly correlate with engagement is some kind of strong emotion and typically it's rage and anger and so that's a large part of why we're seeing newspapers like leaning into like political division even like formally really respectable ones that we're always trying to be as

impartial and like um you know not not appeal to any particular audience they just give the facts etc etc they are increasingly having to lean into these like click-baity tactics these rage-baity tactics um and that's again it's like this kind of race at the bottom like well the New York Times sees the Washington Post do it and then uh they're like well and then the guardian did it too so we kind of have to because if like they're going to get all users etc etc um and again like this is ones particularly worrying me because like so many of these problems that we need to fix you know whether it's climate change um you know deforestation uh figuring out you know like coming together around like future pandemics

which is almost certainly on the horizon we need better you know we need to be more able to trust each other and coordinate and if we have a media system that is literally tearing us apart you know by like bifurcating Society into two where it's like these two warring tribes that think the other side are pure evil there's no way we're going to be able to coordinate so that's another kind of example of a really like molecky um driver uh that then also like amplifies other molec problems so they kind of feed into each other um so that's why the next video is on that which is uh the media Wars um how was that relating oh and oh yes and letting people be aware of the fact that molec is actually the Real Enemy

not you know some particular CEO or some particular politician even though individuals can be more monarchy than others and we should have a system in place to be able to like point out people like hey you're doing this selfish like defecty thing here um ultimately the real nbos is molok is the you know is the sort of incentive ocean that we are swimming in that is misaligned with what's actually good for the whole um and the sooner we can get people to realize that the sooner we can actually try and uh you know we stop being so angry with each other and can start working together again to solve this stuff yeah well again uh mole look the beauty Warriors and molec media Wars are both really profound amazing videos check out the link in the show notes if you want

to watch them um I've got to take Liv and I want to I want to hear your response to it it might be too reductionist but uh I've started to view the culture wars here in the United States as just a manifestation of the media uh the molec media so basically if you've got a system that upregulates conflict then of course the Maga and the leftists I think they're pejoratively called the woke uh by the right people are are going to perpetually be in conflict because you're in a media environment that just up regulates conflict all the time and so is it true reductionist what do you think of the take that the culture wars are a symptom of the molec media um I think it's I mean it's not completely the the

driver of it but it's I would wait or it's certainly over 50 and probably over 90 of it yeah um it's again their business model is directly correlated with engagement and engagement is directly correlated with tribalism we tend to because there was this cool study done on like um uh like the activeness of different emotions and typically we tend to remember and react to things that are negative more than positive and then within the next space of negative emotions so you know like you know you've got sadness disgust uh anger Etc out of those anger and to an extent

discuss but anger in particular is a very active emotion it like triggers that that deep tribalism that makes us want to go out and like defend our Viewpoint defend our tribe Etc so that's why anger is so damn profitable and tribalism um so yeah it's you know the same way as people talk about like the the military-industrial complex we have that we have the rage bait industrial complex um and it's it's not again any particular I mean again some media Outlets are definitely worse at this than others but even then like you need at least two of them to sort of kick start this process but you know to be fighting um so yeah definitely definitely a huge overlap there

this has been called by a few people the race to the bottom of the brain stem so basically yeah yeah up regulate content that keeps you on site more more the best way to do it is to keep people outraged because then you make more money from them and so there's sort of a race between all of the platforms to create the most upregulate the most outragey content and so we're racing to the bottom of the brain stem to our base fight or flight response because that's when we're most profitable um and so in a way awaits it's just just a thing I was thinking about um when I was reading a bit about Bitcoin you know you you could see it uh some people talk about this as like the the informational Commons essentially the public good of

like accuracy and information about the true state of the world is um it's you know you could see it's view it every time like someone writes it like clickbaity headline that is like excessively inflammatory in order to get you know their share reviews you could look at it as either they're polluting the information of Commons the same way like an oil company that uses LAX piping pollutes the water or whatever or you could see it as they are using their their previous you know let's say like the New York Times or some respected newspaper that has like would normally have like a like a 90 trust rating but because they want to do the short-term quick grab an advantage they they go and they like take a token of trust out of this this shared resource of trust uh they extract it and

then they put their crappy they are you know the crappy headline up that's actually in reality only 10 trustworthy so they're that that like Delta between the two things is like their extraction so they are extracting um an unfair you know they're extracting from The Commons of accuracy and leaving this piece of pollution instead um so sorry I was just I like that little analogy yeah well yeah I mean I I think that um you know Bitcoin and a lot of the mission in web 3 is is all about creating public goods and business models for public goods and you can kind of think of the race to the bottom of the brainstem as a as a public bad um it's extracting from the common resources and so you know this leads me

to the next question which is uh you know how do we is there a way to create a more win-win Instagram or a more win-win information environment and to create a race to the bottom of or reverse to the bottom of the brain stem and race to the top of the brainstem to create a media ecosystem that incentivizes the public good or our better angels of our nature whatever's at the top of the brain stem what does win-win look like um so I can't say I have like a a technical solution to it that's way beyond my pay grade um I can describe the aesthetic of win-win a little bit so or like more specifically the mindset of what win-win's like so if Malik is you know as a personification of these like it's

sort of extractive short-sighted I must win this narrow game and it's so focused on the narrow game of like you know getting more users getting more followers than my competitor uh you know or making more profits on this particular thing it's so narrow-minded and focused on that it can't see all of the wider space and so there are all these externalities coming from it's like strategies that it uses um you know the pollution essentially into everything else but it's so mono focused and like I must win it just can't see that so win-win uh is first of all it's able to have that like

clear revision it can go okay what's the actual long-term consequences of what I'm doing what's going on for the whole not only is what's going on for me but what's going on for everybody else if I was to do this what would be to happen if everyone copied my behaviors that would actually be a very bad thing so maybe I shouldn't do this in the first place that's sort of the first step um and if molloch is you know molec strictly relies on like competitive forces at least under my definition of it um that doesn't mean to say that win-win you know even though win-win is extremely you know its main uh tool is coordination and cooperation it's not to say that it's not a win-win is anti-competition winman also likes competition it just has the the wisdom

and Clarity to know when a competitive system you know a sort of zero-sum competitive system is starting to get a little bit too big for its boots um and the externalities are starting to turn you know they're starting to turn negative and so it'll be like in an ideal world it would love actually everyone to play games and compete like it's a very fun-loving dude it's like yeah that's oh you want to play yeah sure I'm gonna win this from you but then um when it sees the games getting a little bit too sketchy it's like okay that's enough of that we need to actually collaborate a little bit so that's kind of like the vibe of what went looks like now in terms of how that um manifests like in a social media Network um first Port of Call would be like okay

how do you rewrite how do you change the algorithm so that people who that we how do we find a way to not lose to like measure Nuance as a piece of like as informationally you know what I mean because right now nuance if if anything like social media values simplicity so it actually values when when you compress something down into like a very narrow measurable metric um so there's like a lot of like complexity reduction information loss so we need to reverse that somehow and reward content or users or whoever who actually try and maximize you know when they talk about something in the real world and

put it into language that actually try and keep and maintain as much of that information as possible now how the hell you do that as a programmer I don't know again Way Beyond My Prayer grade but that's sort of the starting point like another um definition I like to use for molok and win-win is molec is something that like through its stupid actions or short-sightedness or it's malevolence even um per like curtails emergent complexity and that it like puts a cap on it and and then effectively creates destruction or prevents something beautiful new thing from emerging whereas win-win wants to allow emergence another framing is like molok wants to win the short-term finite game in front of it

win-win just wants to keep the game going and it wants to create as many games as possible so that as many people get to keep playing the games and keep the games going for for Infinity it's like this finite infinite game framing as well so again some kind of social media system that uh rewards the people who uplift others and try and encourage more like information you know knowledge creation knowledge sharing Etc that you know isn't done in an extractive way and um I'm losing my Chain of Thought now but yeah that's again that's sort of the direction it needs to go in but how you program that uh I don't have a I don't have a good enough answer for yeah well maybe that's a challenge for

the people out there in the regenerative crypto ecosystem how can we build uh if likes just Channel outrage um and the Sorting algorithm of social media up regulates things that are more outraging in order to create more time on site how do we create an algorithm that up regulates the public good and creates this sort of fractal virtuous cycle where people maybe feel more healthy and more whole when they use it so they come back to it instead it's kind of like the same thing about when you get into this cycle where eating uh and you're eating healthy and you get into this cycle where you feel better because you're eating healthy so you eat more healthy and so you like instead of having like high fructose

corn syrup and in candy which gives you a short-term boost and it makes you feel bad um our information diet if we can move away from the high fructose corn syrup of outrage and attention and into a more healthy direction I think we need the vegetables we need the broccoli of information but ideally like broccoli that tastes you know it's good enough at tricking our our our sort of system one our limbic systems into thinking that this is like oh this is super yummy but actually is incredibly nutritious um so it because part of the problem is that like even though intellectually we probably realize oh well you know I know that these media papers you know these

newspapers are in they're in this game and so I shouldn't I should take everything they say with the people of salt Etc limbic system whatever you want to call it the you know that the old tribal part of us they just haven't caught up fast enough and it's going to take a long time for them to and so that's kind of what these molecule molecules taking advantage of it's that this this old lizard part of us that hasn't um it's very easily corruptable and um it's very easy to hijack and it's the same thing that again in like yeah soda drink companies they're capitalizing on our inability to say no to Sugar especially children's

um gambling companies that are like really you know they don't care about people getting addicted in fact actively like it you know because that's their profit model um same thing they're like strictly extractive um it they give the impression of giving people well you know and they can go oh well people wouldn't if the people didn't want it they wouldn't buy it and it's like well that's not always the case is it um so yeah it's it's it's finding a way to reap you know like minimize reducing minimize information loss because that's the other thing with social media it's like by definition it's dehumanizing you have a conversation with someone about like something you disagree with uh face to face like we'll be able to look at

each other in the eye we might disagree but we're not going to probably like start yelling and swearing at each other and calling each other names but on social media that happens so often and I notice it in myself like I would like oh you [ __ ] idiot blah blah and it's like I'd speak to someone online that I would never speak to them in person and it's not because the content is particularly different it's just that there's there's all this information that we can't now access when you look at someone in the face or like even over a zoom call um because it's just being compressed down to these like the single stream of words um so there's so much Nuance that's lost there so I don't know how we we program back in that Nuance but we've got to figure it out

yeah well that's a challenge for the Builders out there if you're building an information environment that is not only going to be better for the public good but people will adopt it then I think that that's important work and can't wait to see what you do um but I think you know you know in a way uh live what you're doing with your YouTube channel is sort of creating an information environment that's educational um and is is helping people understand this molec problem and that's why I was just sort of sort of enraptured with your content and and the fact that you're doing uh you're doing that I think it is a public good for the space that's creating more understanding of of how we're kind of a fish in water but the water the temperature is being turned up all around us and I'm

wondering where you're going to take the channel um from here so uh what's next good question well definitely more long-form podcast that's going to be so talking of like the social media game my I'm perpetually frustrated that my YouTube channel like for the amount of I think of the quality of content I'm like why isn't it bigger but I yeah part of the YouTube game is regularity like you need to be everyone I've spoken to they're like oh you need to be doing at least two videos a week and it's like well I can't on this type of stuff it's like there's a lot that goes into it and it like takes me at least a month to produce a high quality thing so um

I would say realistically I will not increase the Cadence that much although perhaps the podcast will help um I'm hoping that you know my main goal with this is it's going to inspire people to start creating their own stuff like it's it's nice there's some other channels now that are like making video I saw someone making this like long form video on molok um and like you know these essentially these Network effects when people get inspired like that's what win-win wants when when Love's a good positive Network effect um so seeing that it's like starting to Ripple out into more people um is sort of that's that's winning the game essentially um

does that answer your question oh yeah okay hell yeah well I mean I think that uh and this is just another show for the YouTube channel but uh the fact that we've done a lot of those but but you just have so much respect for your for your audience I can tell by such a great way of expressing what molok is and again uh people aren't going to read the 35 page meditations on Malik paper but they will watch a 20-minute YouTube video that's well produced and I think that actually I don't think I can feel great I know I think I'm going to be doing next is I'm doing the next so did the beauty boards then the media Wars the next one is going to be the AI Wars because arguably well AI is going to be the most powerful

and you know whether you're thinking about it in terms of narrow AI or artificial gender intelligence anything in that Realm is an absurdly powerful technology that could be used for incredible good or incredible bad and we need to make sure that molecu is not the mechanism building this so the next one is going to be about the kind of like how molec is manifesting within the AI space both in narrow but also in this you know the sort of the longer term how is artificial general or even super intelligence built um so that's going to be the next one um and that's again like because incentive structures matter so much there because anything when you're building such a a uniformly usable technology is

intelligence itself you know what is intelligence it's like being better at navigating and achieving your goals across a broad range of domains so in other words anything that it can be used for AI will be used for and that's everything from solving molec amazing to creating factory farms forever throughout the Universe potentially and Extinction is somewhere in the middle in between like that's like a medium case you know so it's like how do we ensure that the the right uh intention is going into it but also just the right incentive structures are like driving the progress uh so that's that's the that's the next one

yeah it all feels existential in a world in which we've got um a division of five billion different agents humans uh who have different resources and different ways of comprehending things uh if you're now introducing AIS that there's a differential of intelligence there and um it's gonna amplify differences even more yeah it's going to make inequality you think it's bad now it's going to be so much worse yeah well um and especially if it's driven by this capitalistic paperclip maximizer sort of environment that we're in and so I think the solving for win-win in AI is is existential yeah well um we only have 15 minutes

left and so I'm wondering if we can start moving towards wrapping up I'm wondering um you know in a world in which you're maximally successful in the next five or ten years what is what does that world look like is it is it more win-win uh what is what is 2020 2033 look like if if you're able to get this message out out there um I mean I think by then I don't know I my my intuition is like in the next 10 years we're gonna know how this plays out so um just the rate of AI development like it doesn't seem like llm's a you know in terms of adding parameters it's not slowing down if anything it seems to be scaling up

um now where the llms are actually the path to AGI is another question but there's so much greatness or Badness that can come even just from like the llms that are being built now so um the pessimist in me says I've succeeded and this sounds very self-absorbed the win-win space of community and thinking will have succeeded um if a we are still here in 2033 20 you know 2035 um but The Optimist in me says that we will have like essentially solved for and scarcity that we don't want

um and again because I don't want to say we've sold for scarcity entirely because like in the like some some degree of scarcity is good if it allows us to have little bits of competition like we technically an Olympic gold medal is a scarce resource right and yet the world is better off for having the Olympics Everybody by and large I mean you get some people who like enter the Olympics whatever um I think the Olympics are great uh so we still have the ability to opt in when we want scarcity we have the the ability to choose you know I would like some scarcity now let's have a competition let's let's battle this one out and see if we can see what emerges from this um so yeah I like if we if we're getting close to unlocking that um in 10 years time then we are

definitely on the right path um and I sort of my next you know from the reading about Bitcoin before this uh I'm actually now really excited to dig in more into like some of the methods of the some of the use cases of blockchain for helping this because it seems like you know like with with you've got like zero knowledge proofs and like these like trustless protocols that's a way to allow people to coordinate who shouldn't who wouldn't normally actually trust each other that's enormous if we can leverage that technology that seems like definitely in the path um and uh yeah like that's why I like what you what you guys are doing because you're you're like enabling like open source

in an Ideal World open sourcing most Technologies which are not dual use Technologies seems like a huge win-win right it's making it available to everybody and if we if you can find a way to like fund that open sourcing so that these projects are not then vulnerable to like if a few people get burnt out and that's that's even more incredible so yeah I love what you guys are doing yeah thanks so much um well uh let me uh I would love to kind of pitch you the the regen Optimist take of crypto and and you tell me where it lands for you and and where it doesn't land so um basically uh moloch is the god of coordination failure and we want to solve coordination problems

things like open source software funding um surveillance technology the race to the bottom of the brain stem AI alignment climate change things like that and yeah so the regen web3 sort of take and and you know it might be hoping it might not be you you tell me is that we've now got a global uh totally transparent uh uncorruptable and programmable substrate for human coordination which is ethereum and smart contracts and stuff like that so we've got a um a more fair uh more transparent and and more accessible substrate for human coordination let's build coordination

games and on top of that let's program our values into our money and if you can program your values into your money there will be people who use it to build giant [ __ ] Ponzi schemes and decentralized casinos because those are their values and then there will be the solar punks who will build things that can fund climate change fund public goods and can solve coordination games and so if we can use the blockchain in order to coordinate and to solve coordination failures that is a big lever for creating more win-win economic games and for for solving molechy type games and so I'm wondering if and how that lands for you and um you know where it kind of smells like [ __ ] to you um

my first thought is it lands very very well nothing jumped out as an obvious [ __ ] um my yeah and belt skepticism monitor always says you just now if it sounds too good to be true it probably is so that too um you know like a huge amount of these issues is like our inability to trust one another um even between good faith actors so we'll always have to agree as you said like bad faith actors people whose values are simply they just want to make a fast Mark or they actively enjoy screwing people over like those people also exist they're even they're even

smaller subset um but even between good faith actors who are trying to do you know like they're not trying to extract for anyone it's still hard to trust someone on the other side of the world to do to honor a contract um or to like you to to when they say something to know that it's actually accurate and that is actually what happened in the past so if we have as you said a substrate that is this like indelible like indelible Ledger essentially that you can look back and go oh that was accurate um that's that's huge that hasn't really ever existed before like the reason why we were able to trust each other in the past and like in small societies is because it was just like we were able to

interact in meat space the dumbbell number was like we were generally like see people's faces and like gossip would work if you notice someone was like repeatedly violating social norms the the like communities gossip Network would actually serve a good job and and like that person would get shunned or kicked out or whatever and so like the incentives were there but when you're dealing with an international Global community of billions of people it's just social norms are not sufficient they can help and to a degree like social media has actually helped scale social norms um but it's still not it's still not enough um and so if we have a like

if we can design the the the stadium as you know going back to that Stadium we could design the actual landscape of the game such that it's not vulnerable to Bad actors or to just like or it has like these like crappy you know it's not like a ball precariously balance on top of a hill and that's why it works and one nudge pushes it down if we can design the landscape so that it's actually like stable and uh we can reliably trust each other that's like solving the I think probably the majority of these Monarch issues so um no I mean what was it it was vitalik who like kind of came up with this infrastructure I guess he built it off the back of the original Bitcoin stuff yeah well I mean yeah we're all standing on the shoulders of giants it was

Satoshi Nakamoto that solved the double spend problem and decentralized cryptographic networks so it's Bitcoin and then vitalik gave us smart contracts the evm the ethereum virtual machine built on top of a blockchain network and then it was actually Virgil Griffith that wrote this blog post called ethereum is a game-changing technology in which he basically took the prisoners dilemma and he was like if you if you make defecting more costly and coordinating more attractive then you change the prisoner's dilemma and that's sort of the the unfolding of the thought here yeah it's beautiful um so it's it's the it's one of the most promising technological solutions I've heard because it it sort of essentially it solves for the need of

you know like Daniel schattenberg often talks about like the the you know the the need for a third attractor and that you know if you've got these like increasingly powerful Technologies um that you know at some point they become so powerful and so democratized that if it falls into the hands of one person it can like collapse Society essentially you know like if nukes were so easy if you could build a 50 Megaton nuke in your garage we wouldn't be around for very long because even though a vast majority people don't want to use them it just takes a few to want to use them to just destroy everything right um so you've got that on one end of the spectrum just like either like chaos hell and Anarchy and then probably some form of collapse and Extinction it seems like the other solution to that

is highly centralized like controlled top-down like okay well we have to surveil everybody and make sure that no one does that and no one can get access to anything and then that world you've got like you know Anarchy and Chaos on one end and probably probable death on the other end you've got like potential tyranny hell forever you know like that's also awful we don't want that so what's the third option that like minimizes both those risks and maximizes the good stuff and it seems to me that like something using blockchain is this like kind of bottom up control mechanism essentially but it's coming from individuals it's not coming from some centralized cabal so that

seems extremely promising um yeah I need to go and just read a bunch on on I should probably I must embarrassingly I've never read like vitalik's white paper I should probably read that um okay but yeah it's it's that feels like that's in the direction of uh of the kind of solutions we need okay well um you know looking forward to building a bridge uh between you and the web3 community anyone you want an intro to let me know and it just is so heartening to me that someone is well studied as you seize that potential um and and you know I hope that the web 3 Community can deliver more win-win uh economic system a more of a race to the top of the bearing stem so I think

that's a challenge to the listeners to to create that world and and to show that it's not just possible in theory but it's actually happening amazing is there anything I didn't ask that you want to say covered all things even at public good was and I wanted to say outer space like a big space nerd and like that feels like it falls into um it's certainly non should be non-rival risk I mean yes getting to spaces is still a bit somewhat rival risk right now but the actual like out there there's so much um and uh it's not exclusive as well um you know and then another one would be uh physics like I'm like a huge physics

stack exchange nerd um so like these like publicly accessible high quality information networks where they're actually like to an extent even anti-rivalrous because they the more people use them the better they get they they get like more of stuff like that and it got me then thinking like what's an example of an anti-rivalist public good that exists in meat space you know that is because all of those things are kind of like I mean I guess outer spaces but um you know a lot of these non-rivalist uh public goods sorry anti-rivals public schools are like intangible sort of relating to information is there something that's in meat space that essentially like creates radical abundance um and so I was like do you have any

idea on that before we read on this stuff well well you know so the first thing I'll say is that my my old man my dad is an astrophysicist uh who studies Stellar winds on a massive stars so um I grew up thinking that space was not cool because I had a bunch of nerdy scientists around but now I look at astronomy pictures and I think they are way cool I mean I think in some ways the Sun and solar energy is a way out of the mullet climate trap and you know that's an example of so much abundance that's so profoundly good for Humanity and the other example that comes to mind for me is just this the secrets of the universe and the origin of the universe that we get from studying space I mean maybe this is this violates your criteria of

it being in need space and not information space um but uh you know just understand fusion and and in the origin of the universe those kind of things feel deeply consequential for the future of humanity so that's that's where my mind goes yeah no I mean it's it kind of Blends between the two but it's uh I mean just more more knowledge that is with the exception of perhaps like inflammation Hazard to knowledge that's the one thing but that's very luckily it's a tiny tiny fraction of of like knowledge face um yeah like that's anything that creates more knowledge that is then available to everybody to create even more knowledge I mean we're like have you read uh David Deutsch's beginning of infinity

I haven't no I should that that's the one I that that's such a beautiful book because it's basically saying like acknowledges the is the ultimate infinite game like we could just you you will probably never know how much we don't know and the more we create the more we'll like figure out but then there's always more and more and more and it's like basically this like infinite game it's really beautiful that from my end that's that's everything amazing well I think that's a really great place to end live I'm so thankful for you and your work if you're listening go subscribe to Liv's YouTube channel and uh hope to uh hope to build a bridge into web three if it to the extent that it helps your work and keep up the the good fight live thank you you too really really nice to chat to you

Kevin likewise all right because love [Music] foreign