152 - Why Can't We Have Nice Things | Liv Boeree

Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. Guys, we have a fantastic guest today. Liv Boree is on the podcast today. She is a game theory expert, a legendary poker player, and an extremely interesting person. Some takeaways for you today. Number one, after this episode, we think you'll be able to answer the question, why can't we have nice things? Important question. And number two, you'll see how cancer and nuclear proliferation are actually the same problem and some of the same problems that infected crypto in 2022 as well. And number three, it'll put into perspective an important theme. What is crypto here to do? A very important theme as we enter 2023. David, I know we've got lots to talk about with Liv. This is a really interesting episode. But what do you want to talk about during the debrief?

I really want to talk about just the subject matter of this episode, Ryan, is at like the basement of the universe. Like it's at the bottom of

The staff

The whole entire thing. And so if you, a listener, do not know the name Moloch, you're about to become very, very familiar with Moloch. And this is something that longtime Bankless listeners will be familiar with. It's a theme that we've had throughout Bankless, but haven't touched on in a while. And if you've never heard the name Moloch before, you are going to be a different person on the other side of this episode. That is the power of Moloch and how crazy this story is. Once you understand Moloch, you can't unsee it. It is a before and after moment in many, many people's lives. We brought many people along this journey of understanding Moloch back in 2020 when we first did our Moloch episode. But that was almost two years ago, perhaps over a few years ago. So we're doing it again for all the new listeners of Bankless. Congrats. This is a before after moment that you are about to go down. And so we're going to talk about how significant in the debrief we're going to talk about how significant this power of Moloch is and what to do about that, Ryan.

And of course, our debrief episode is the show after the show where David and I give our raw and filtered thoughts on the episode that was

And like always, Ryan, I'm extremely excited to have that conversation with you. But if you are not a bankless premium subscriber, you are going to have to subscribe in order to get that premium RSS feed where Ryan and I record right after the interview with Liv, 20 to 30 minutes about our thoughts on the show. Raw, unedited thoughts only for bankless premium subscribers. So there is a link in the show notes to go subscribe to Bankless if you want that. So let's go ahead and get right into our conversation with Liv Borey, game theory poker expert, and also privy to Moloch.

Bankless Nation, I want to introduce you to Liv Bore, who is a former professional poker player, perhaps one of the best in the world. But we think why she is such an amazing poker player is actually because she's a master of game theory, thinking in systems, and understanding the world of complex systems and the human experience. And she is one of the few people in the world teaching the lessons of Moloch, the study of human coordination, and which is why we are having her on Bankless today.

But before we bring Liv on, we want to play a short clip from a video that Liv made about Moloch, the subject matter of today's episode. So here we go.

Hello gorgeous, my name is Mollog.

Moloch.

Now,

you might not have heard of me,

but you've most certainly felt me.

For I am the force behind fortune,

the power behind progress, and the shaper of all success.

And what a success even you

could be

if

you just listen to me.

For I alone know what it takes to win.

To be the most adored

and the most beautiful.

And you do want all those things, don't you?

Yes.

Well, listen close, because there are things you can do to

tweak reality.

Weapons you can use to crush your enemies. And you better use them, because if you don't,

your enemies are going to use them to crush you.

I want to win.

You see, in the end, the world wants winners, not losers. And life, it isn't just a game, it's war!

Alright, Liv, welcome to Bankless.

Thanks for having me.

Really excited to have this conversation, but before we get into the story of what is Moloch, this thing with this weird name, can you explain your journey here? How did you get here? What is it that brought you to Moloch? Was it game theory? Was it just observing in life? How'd you get to the conclusion of Moloch?

Yeah, so

I guess it sort of came about well, I was always a really like pathologically competitive person um from a very young age. Like I just had to win at

everything. I saw everything as a kind of contest. Anything where there was some kind of metric, you know, who got the highest score on an exam, you know, who scored the most goals in the game of netball. You know, throughout my childhood, it was definitely a defining feature that I always like, I really cared about winning.

And maybe that's what led me into, you know, I I certainly maybe fall in love with poker because I think it's hard to certainly to sort of throw yourself fully into poker unless you are a competitive person. It's you know pretty ruthless game in many ways.

And then sort of during poker, you know, you get to see this sort of full gamut of human behavior

around

you know how people behave when they're in a sort of rivalrous situation

that some people would be very good at handling you know competition and that you know they would play.

They'd play a game against their friends. Their friends might bluff them out of a huge amount of money, or you know, they screw up or they get unlucky or something. And some people would be able to just sort of dust it off and then go down the pub with their friends afterwards and talk about it and learn from it. And others

would fall out with their friends.

Or, you know, they'd really take it to heart. And I would notice this sort of this tension within myself too. Like some days I'd be really sort of wise and be like, okay, well, this is a learning experience, and I can improve this way. And oh, my they outplayed me. Good for them. And other days, like that old sort of

Desperate to win child would sort of surface in me, and I would be full of sort of rage at either the situation or myself. And it was just sort of like a generally unhealthy headspace that I would sometimes go into.

And then

beyond that, I would notice how

some people seem to sort of view the world in

very zero sum ways, and others would see it more as a like, you know, positive sum, win win situation. And there were certain games that seemed to have

Well, all games seem to have externalities. You know, when we say a game is is usually we think of a game as a zero something, and technically poker is a zero something, right?

But

the reality is there's always externalities to every single one of these interactions.

And sometimes these externalities are positive and sometimes they're negative.

So

that's sort of one track that led me to it, which will become clearer as to why that's relevant to Moloch. And then meanwhile,

I learnt about a sort of branch of philanthropy known as effective altruism,

which is

kind of like how science in its truest form is the process of like trying to understand the way the world works and be able to predict reality better.

It's less of a body of knowledge, although a lot of people think seem to think of the science these days as this body of knowledge.

Effective altruism to me is like the process of looking at okay, there's so many problems in the world, how do we figure out you know, how do we triage them and so on. And this sort of this resonated quite strongly with the reason why I'd never been particularly interested in charity before, because it was just like.