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

Episode Date: January 9, 2023

✨ DEBRIEF | Unpacking the Episode: https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/liv-boeree  ------ Liv Boeree is a former professional poker player, master of game theory, systems thinker, and keen understander of the world of complex systems and the human experience. She also is one of the few people out there in the world teaching about the lessons of Moloch— the study of human coordination—and is the reason why we wanted to have her on Bankless. In the episode, Liv makes it clear how Moloch is more than an idea. Coordination and competition failures are happening in every aspect of our lives. Is crypto the solution? ------ 📣 Osmosis | Your Gateway into the Cosmos Ecosystem www.osmosis.zone/bankless  ------ 🚀 JOIN BANKLESS PREMIUM: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/subscribe  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/kraken  🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE https://bankless.cc/uniswap  ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  🚁 EARNIFI | CLAIM YOUR UNCLAIMED AIRDROPS https://bankless.cc/earnifi  ------ Topics Covered 0:00 Intro 8:24 Getting to Moloch 14:25 Meditations on Moloch 17:30 Defining Moloch 19:40 Unhealthy Competition or Coordination Failure 25:00 Nuclear Proliferation 26:30 Cancer 27:58 Moloch’s Ancient Analogy 31:18 Centralization 36:10 The Prisoner’s Dilemma 38:50 When Moloch is the Most Dangerous 43:50 How to Slay Moloch 52:10 Capitalism 59:44 Defining Moloch Cont. 1:02:20 Changing the Underlying Systems 1:08:20 Crypto & Coordination 1:15:15 Moloch’s All the Way Down 1:18:15 Moloch Isn’t One Thing 1:20:00 Better System Design 1:27:23 Crypto’s Moloch Problem 1:32:32 Moloch Takeaways 1:34:42 Liv’s Personal Moloch Connection 1:37:02 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Resources: Liv on Twitter https://twitter.com/Liv_Boeree  The Evolution of Trust https://ncase.me/trust/  Meditations on Moloch https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/  The Goddess of Everything Else https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/17/the-goddess-of-everything-else-2/  Moloch - The Beauty Wars https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fifVuhgvQQ8  Ethereum Slayer of Moloch https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/ethereum-slayer-of-moloch-  Previous Bankless Podcast: Slaying Moloch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=903tHM4RA9k  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures 

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 Shaw and 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. 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 live. 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. It's at the bottom of the stack, 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 Molok 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 bank lists. congrats. This is a before after a 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 Subscriber. 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 Live Boree, game theory, poker expert, and also privy to Moloch. But first, we want to take a moment to talk about Cracken, our strategic sponsor for 2023. We've selected Cracken as our strategic sponsor because we need centralized onramps to get our money from the old world into the new world. and we suggest using a centralized exchange that is here for the same reasons we are, because Cracken knows that if you adopt crypto protocols, you adopt crypto values.

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And if not, sign up with Cracken at crackin.com slash bankless. Hey, Bankless Nation, if you're listening to this, it's because you're on the free bankless RSS feed. Did you know that there's an ad-free version of Bankless that comes with the bankless premium subscription? No ads, just straight to the content. just one of many things that a premium subscription gets you. There's also the token report, a monthly bullish, bearish, neutral report on the hottest tokens of the month. And the regular

updates from the token report go into the token Bible, your first stop shop for every token worth investigating in crypto. Bankless premium also gets you a 30% discount to the permissionless conference, which means it basically just pays for itself. There's also the airdrop guide to make sure you don't miss a drop in 2023. But really, the best part about bankless premium is hanging out with me, me, Ryan, and the rest of the Bankless team in the inner circle Discord only for premium members. Want the alpha? Check out Ben the analyst's Dgen Pit, where you can ask him questions about the token report. Got a question? I've got my own Q&A room for any questions that you might have. At Bankless, we have huge things planned for 2023, including a new website with login with

your Ethereum address capabilities, and we're super excited to ship what we are calling Bankless 2.0 Soon TM. So if you want extra help exploring the frontier, subscribe to Bankless Premium. It's under sent today and provides a wealth of knowledge and support on your journey west. I'll see you in the Discord. Bankless Nation, I want to introduce you to Liv, Boree, 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 in 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 Mollock. Mollock. Now, you might not have heard of me, but you've most certainly felt me. For I am the first. 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 too.

tweak reality. Weapons you can use to crush your enemies. Then 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. All right, Liv, welcome to Bankless. Thanks 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 a game theory? Was it just observing in life? How did you get to the conclusion of Moloch? Yeah, so I guess it sort of came about, well, I was always a really pathologically competitive person 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, who got the highest score on an exam, who scored the most goals in the game of netball. 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, 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 in that, you know, they would 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 seem to have, well, all games seem to have externalities. You know, when we say a game 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 learned 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 work.

and be able to predict reality better. It's less of a body of knowledge, although a lot of people 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, there doesn't seem like any real processes to knowing what's a good thing to do versus not. So that then introduced me to this idea of, like, okay, there's, there seem to be a lot of consistent themes with the problems that keep arising in the world where, you know, whether it's environmental degradation or scary exponential technologies that sort of are turning into an arms race or, you know, nuclear warhead proliferation, there seems to be the same kind of process going on, which is somewhat, it's arguably like a game

theoretic process where people are optimizing for a short-term goal at the cost of like the long-term commons, the health of the commons. And so those things sort of simultaneously, I guess poker and learning about, you know, existential risk or, you know, catastrophic risk in civilization moving forward led me into, I don't know, I guess actually then I started reading Placart Codex is the next step. I'm sure many people watching this have read meditations on Molo. Yeah, this is a logical conclusion for people going down their Moloch path. Everyone ends up at that meditation on Moloch blog post. Yeah.

All paths lead back to Scott Alexander. And I read that. And that was honestly borderline spiritual experience. Because it just put into words this thing that I'd sort of sensed was going on in some way or had felt or noticed in like different aspects of my life. And it put a name on it and put it into language that sort of made sense. it put it into sort of game theoretic economic terms. So yeah, that's roughly how I got there. Okay, so Liv, a lot of things I think we're going to get into some more detail, right? The positive

versus zero sum thinking, the externalities related, effective altruism with which of course, I think bankless listeners are mostly familiar with. We could give some more definition behind that. Fortunately, recently in crypto, it's kind of gotten a bad name with somebody else with a three character name, SBF. We could talk about that too. He shall not be bloody named. Yeah, man. Exactly. We've got some existential risk, catastrophic risk, of course, you know, crypto is working on these types of problems, too. But I want to get in your headspace. You said it was a borderline spiritual experience the first time you read Meditations on Moloch. It was incredibly impactful for me, too. And I think you've

called it elsewhere, like one of the most important written pieces you've ever read. Can you describe why? So this is a blog post. We'll, of course, include a link in the show notes for bankless listeners. We highly encourage you to go read this post by Scott Alexander. But can you explain what was going on in your head as you read that? And as that kind of settled in your mind, why was it so important to you? Why was it borderline spiritual? I think what he does so well in it is he actually combines,

where he does many things. So he really takes a, it's very long on the post. It's like, you know, it's not your average. Oh, I'm going to read a blog post. on my commute home for the next 20 minutes. You know, it's like an hour and a half read roughly. It goes very deep. But it takes the reader by the hand and just go through lots and lots of little examples.

He does a very good thing where he leads, he does his explanations by giving examples, examples, examples, and then says, what's the common thread between all of these different scenarios? Oh, it seems to be this. Okay, so that's pointing in this direction and so on. But what I think it does so well is it actually draws on a piece of art. so it's centered around this poem written by Alan Ginsberg in the 60s called Howl, which talks about this thing called Mollock. And, you know, as with often the case with a lot of esoteric poetry,

it's not always that clear exactly what the thing is. And he gives lots and lots of examples. So each line is like a different pointer of what this thing Mollock is. But he never concretely says, oh, therefore Mollock is X. And so what Scott tries to do is almost like a great English teacher is look at all these different lines and use it's almost like parallax to assemble a picture of this thing that seems to cause problems within our society. But again, me trying to reduce it down into a couple of, you know, two minutes of explanation doesn't do it justice. People just need to read it. Yeah, certainly.

And everyone really kind of resonates with Moloch because it's a part of the human experience. and we should probably spend some time to actually start defining this thing. But when people were listening to the clip that we put into the intro, I'm sure they started to like catch the vibe, catch the drift. And this is why everyone has some sort of just like, you said, a spiritual experience when they discover Molok. Once you see Molok, you don't unsee Molok. Like it's a before and after moment of your life.

And it's a little bit of like seeing the matrix, right? Like you can kind of see how it works. And defining what Molok is and why it's so powerful is always interesting. because everyone has their own different words of explaining it. So, Liv, maybe I'll ask that question to you. Like, how do you define Moloch? Yeah, so I would define it as it's a force of game theoretic incentives that can lead agents. I'll use the word agents instead of people because it doesn't have to just be a human-based thing,

but it usually is, that leads agents within a competitive system to sacrifice, more and more of their other values in order to win. So it's kind of like winning for winning's sake, if you would encapsulate it in a mindset. But it's also like the outcomes of it tends to be destruction of the wider ecosystem that is containing that game. So, you know, there's like this sort of short-term game that people optimize for winning, but it comes at the cost of the environment around it,

you know, whether that's an informational environment, a physical environment, health environment, etc. And the outcomes usually of that is it causes a lot of suffering and destruction. Yeah, I'll save the complexity stuff later. But perhaps the most succinct way I like to define it as actually is just like it's the god of unhealthy competition. It's not the god of competition. Competition is a neutral thing. It's a form of interaction just like coordination or cooperation.

And competition can be used for good and it can be used for bad. And Mollock is when competition is used for ill, essentially. So I've heard a similar definition of Moloch being the god of coordination failure, the god of coordination failure. And that sounds similar to what you're saying with unhealthy competition. What is an example of unhealthy competition or coordination failure that people might be able to think upon? Because these words like unhealthy competition, I think are easier to understand when we look at examples. Yes. And that's what Scott does so well. So perhaps the simplest example that comes to mind is this idea of you've got a crowd of people in a football stadium. And, you know, everyone is sitting down watching, you know, they're comfortably sitting in their seats and they've got a decent view just because the way it's set up, you know, there's usually a range so that everyone can somewhat see the pitch.

Everyone's happy. Everyone's happy. but then a few people down the front get really excited and they stand up now the people right behind them can't see anymore so they have a decision like well do I want to continue watching the game or not well yes I do so I'm going to have to stand up too sorry people behind me and now those people have the same thing and so on until the whole thing right ripples back and now everyone is forced to stand up and because it's a loud football game you know no one can just shout and go hey you at the front sit down like the environment doesn't enable everybody to coordinate properly, now everyone is stuck standing for the rest of the game,

or unless a few people at the front sort of do manage to sit down and then it trickles back. But it's such a precarious system, you know, if you sort of map it topographically, it's not like a stable equilibrium. When everyone is sitting down, it's actually a very unstable, a gnash equilibrium, essentially they're in. It's more like a ball that's perched on top of a point. And just a little nudge of a few people near the front can make the whole thing fall down. And now everyone's stuck. No one's gained anything.

No one's got a better view. Once everyone is standing, no one really has a better view than before, but everyone is actually a little bit worse off because now they've got to stand for the rest of the game. So that's one of the most sort of concrete examples, like clear examples, I think, of basically how a system can be poorly designed whereby bad incentives cause it to sort of fall off a cliff, essentially. Perhaps a more salient example, well, when I give in the video that you show that clip from later on in the video, and maybe this doesn't apply so much to bankless listeners because they're all. I don't know what your proportion of them. They're all dudes. Yeah, it seems to be a common thing for me. Like crypto, poker, it's always like 97% dudes or something. But anyway, I'm sure people, you know, just bear with me. So as a girl on Instagram for my sins, you know, I noticed, usually when I post a picture on there, if it's a poster picture where I look good, I just get a lot more likes, you know,

a lot more comments and the algorithm is happier when it's a picture where I look good. And a few years ago, these beauty filters started emerging where with just a click of a button, it would make your face look absolutely incredible. You know, it would just be automatic makeup. It would even do these little tweaks where it, you know, it gives you like almost like a little subtle facelift where, but if you don't see the original picture, you wouldn't even notice it. It's so, so subtle. And because, you know, if your goal as a, you know, say you're a girl on Instagram trying to build her following. as an influencer, it pays to look hot, you have this really strong incentive pressure to use these filters. Because if you don't, well, you know that you, because you don't know that everyone else

is doing it, right? So you're incentivized to sort of, even if you don't want to and you feel like you're misleading your audience and you're even not being integral to yourself, you're incentivized to use them anyway. And it's like this kind of slippery slope. And as these filters get better and better, each time it's like a new little arms race, you know, oh, well, I use this one. Oh, but now Snapchat have just released this one and it's even better if you combine it with that. And it just keeps going and going. And then it sort of ends into this like race to the bottom where everything's becoming progressively more and more artificial, creating this like wave of body dysmorphia and so on.

Same thing applies to, again, female example, but models who, you know, don't want to risk using lip fillers or these little subtle things. So that's another example in sort of woman space. Yeah. And importantly, everyone is unhappy about it. Right. In the first example, everyone is. standing up and everyone in the stadium is like, wouldn't it be so great if we could all together

just sit down? Yes. And I'm sure. All at once. Just do a count down. One, two, three. Just everyone just sit down. Like, but no, you can't do that because as you said, like, stadium's too big.

We can't coordinate. Same thing with women using social media and like terribly psychologically unhealthy beauty filter. It's just like, what if we all stopped? We all agreed. Let's not use them. Which is just not to do it. And we don't have that power because we don't have this coordinating power between all of us.

And so this is why in the crypto world we've called this the god of coordination failure. You call it the god of broken incentives. There's a couple more examples of Molok that I want to bring up. One of the very, very big ones that illustrates why the power of Molok is so incredibly strong is nuclear proliferation. And just the concept of nation-state militaries at large, it would be great if we could invest in infrastructure and education and child mortality and nutrition. And we do invest in those things to some degree.

but how much we invest in military far dwarfs that. Now, why is that true? Well, say, let's start with a blank slate, and we have two agents in this game, and each one's a nation state. Whichever nation state invests more into their military can gobble up the other one, right? Whichever country has the bigger military can just take all the other countries. And so by definition, every single country has to overinvest in security and defense. And then we end up in the state that we are today with like enough nuclear warheads to blow up the world 10 times over and they're all at like, you know, there's just a button away. Like, that's not a good state to be in. And it's also why we can't have nuclear dearmament, because no one wants to be the country without the nuclear weapons. That's a bad state to be in.

You can't be the country without the beauty filter, right? You got, right? Right. Right. You can't, you can't just check out the game if you want, you know, be like, oh, okay, we're going to become radically hippie country. We're just not going to invest in any weapons infrastructure. You're just going to get invaded that way. You're just going to get invaded. that's the trouble, or at least, you know, yes, exactly. And the other example I want to bring up, which illustrates the power of Moloch outside of the human space, because this is not stuck inside the world of humans. It also can exist in cancer, where a cancerous cell can grow,

and it's a system of bad incentives because that cancerous cell wants to grow and grow and grow to the point of killing the hosts that it exists inside of. And all of a sudden, the cancer itself then dies because it grew too much. And so this is something that is baked into just like, nature. It's like at the basement level of the universe, which is why it makes it so like hard to deal with because it exists outside of our ability to control it. That's so crazy, by the way. That's why people get obsessed with Moloch and why we've become so interested in talking about

this and why it's become, I think, part of a mission of crypto to help solve some coordination problems and help solve some Moloch problems. Because look at what we just did. We started with a silly example of football stadiums, right? And then we scale that up to like social media, social problems. And then we scale that up to nuclear proliferation and the destruction of humanity. And now we even see that at the basement layer of nature. Like that's what you were saying earlier, David, is once you see Moloch in one place,

you see it everywhere. And then you become obsessed with this problem of like, how do we slay this beast? And did you hear some of the examples too, you know, comparing Moloch to a cancer, right? It's very similar. And Moloch itself is just, I mean, some people get thrown off by that, I think, a little bit, Liv, because like, what are you guys talking about? Was this a devil? Or is this, like, some kind of, like, ancient god of death and destruction? Like, what is this Molock thing? Can you tell that story a little bit? Where's the analogy to this ancient god coming from? Yeah, so it actually came from, I think it's an old Canaanite Bible story. Well, basically, there was this, supposedly, there was this cult that, again, well, they were so obsessed with winning. they wanted a stronger and stronger army, that they had this God that they would worship, that they believed that if they could sacrifice that which they cared about the most to it,

then it would reward them with military power. And so they would literally sacrifice their babies to it in this like burning effigy. They would throw their children into the fire because they believed that it would then reward them with, yeah, military power. They would defeat their enemies, which is, arguably the most, you know, deranged instantiation of that mindset. It's like, that's one way Scott describes it. It's like throwing more and more and more of your other values under the butt in order to win this one narrow prize, which is where I think it, this concept of what is the

Mollock mindset? Because it's like, kind of like two things that it needs to thrive. It needs a poorly designed competitive system whereby, you know, these bad incentives make it sort of fall off a cliff and go into a race to the bottom, but it also needs a minimum threshold, a minimum number of people within that system to want to win that game in the first place, to have the, to lack the wisdom to realize, actually, do I even want to win this? Or is it really worth sacrificing this other stuff for this one narrow prize? But anyway, yeah, that's where it originates from. That's the first sort of story of it, which is interesting because, you know, I'm not a particularly, I've never read the Bible probably should, but that it's something that's so old, this original concept does speak for

some kind of truth because, you know, civilizations have risen and fallen throughout history. And one of the only ways that information really gets passed down, you know, the lessons that we can learn from the fall of the Bronze Age or the fall of Rome is the myth of poetic stories that got passed down that were so strong and salient that like generations would continue telling them to their story. So I think there's some real wisdom in that. I don't think you need to be a student of the Bible to see that. Yeah, so that's kind of where it originally came from. So it's buried deep in kind of our social systems and even kind of the narratives that we share in past from generation to generation. In fact, I think the fall of civilization, you could say often is due to some sort of, you know,

corruption in the underlying system. And that in itself is a molloc trap. But we also think, like, we're calling this thing a coordination failure as well. I want to go back. to kind of the stadium example where the people in the first row stand up and then everyone else has to stand up after that. This is a coordination problem, but you could imagine if there was somebody on some kind of Megatron loudspeaker saying, hey, everyone, on the count of three, let's all sit down, right? This loud voice booms out over the stadium, one, two, three, and then everyone sits down. That is a possible solution to coordination problems like this. where we have sort of a centralized coordinator. We have one person who has the stadium mic

and has the ability to project this message to the entire stadium, right? And that is a possible solution to Moloch problems, a centralized coordinator. And yet that in and of itself has flaws and has problems and can be prone to corruption. But that is one way we have addressed the Moloch problem that we see everywhere

is you have this centralized coordinator. that image was just coming to mind there. I don't really have a kind of a question or follow up on that, other than to say that that in itself can become a Moloch trap because then you have a problem of what happens if that centralized coordinator also becomes corrupt and starts shouting out the wrong. That's a lot of power to have in one person's hand.

You have the ability to control an entire stadium. I know if you have any reflections on that live, and I don't want to jump the gun and get to solving Moloch yet, but it seems like this coordination failure problem is central to the issue. And we don't have a lot of tools at our disposal to address it, but we do have some. And one of those tools is centralization. Yeah, I think you hit the noun on the head that it is a solution to have this sort of top-down, decentralized, essentially a hierarchy of, you know, one sort of almost omnipowerful agent

telling, forcing all the other agents what to do. But as history has shown us, whenever societies have tried to be too authoritarian, the devils of human nature still end up taking that over. Because, you know, a lot of people often conflate, and actually one of the reasons why I think Scott wrote Meditations on Mollock was because he felt that too many people thought that Alan Ginsberg's poem is about capitalism purely. And he's like, it's touching on something that capitalism is involved, but it seems to be something deeper and more fundamental than that. And he's, in my opinion, absolutely right. Because communism, you know, which is, if capitalism is maximizing out on how much competition there is, allowing competition to sort of decide and market forces to decide how

things are distributed, and communism is the other side of that, right, where you turn competition down to nothing, it still goes wrong and there's still a way for like mollocks to do its bad thing, because humans will still end up trying to optimize for something else. In a communist system, you still need to have these centralized power figures, right? So they have status that they're optimizing for. There's this different type of power that they're going for, which then creates all these awful tyrannical problems. And I don't know if you're familiar with both the vulnerable world hypothesis

posed by Nick Bostrom and then some of the work of Daniel Schmastenberger, who sort of builds on that. he describes how basically there seem to be these two, you know, our society seems to be going in one of two directions, either one towards more centralized, top-down control on probably a global scale, to try and keep a lid on all these little powerful technologies that are becoming more and more democratized,

you know, whether it's the ability to CRISPR some deadly new virus into existence for $10,000 and release it and kill everybody, or whatever the new scary technology is. Or you have the other attraction, which is more like just anarchy and mass decentralization. And both of those end up, you know, the anarchy one is very vulnerable and that eventually some terrible thing will be released that ends up wiping people out. And then the top down one is terrible because that leaves the world very, very vulnerable to

tyranny and authoritarianism. So whatever solution there is needs to be some third attractor where it's almost like, on a different dimension. We have to figure out what a higher dimensional answer is that isn't just this like trade off between these two options. Yeah, and we've actually had Daniel Schmockenberger on our sister podcast with Green Pill and Kevin Milwaukee, not on the bankless podcast. We do hope to get them on one day. And in order to really dive down this question of like, how do we defeat Moloch, how do we solve coordination? First, it's got to be with education, right, because we've got to teach people about this problem. And I kind of want to start this story at the very, very beginning,

which I think starts with the prisoner's dilemma. And so, Liv, can you connect the dots for us between how the prisoner's dilemma relates to Moloch? Because it's really about like short-term versus long-term thinking, right? Mm-hmm. Well, so the standard version of prisoners dilemma, usually that people think of, is the single player one, right? Where it's just this one-time thing where you don't know what the other prisoner's going to do,

but there is a clear dominant strategy in terms. terms of payoff, which is to defect. Both prisoners are incentivized to defect, which then leads, you know, to, I think they end up getting worse outcomes, right? Because of that, because they both end up doing it. But then there's the more realistic version of the prisoner's dilemma, which is an iterated version, whereby you actually know you're going to be playing against this person maybe many, many times. And in that situation, I mean, there's various different sort of ways you can look at the dominant strategy, but there is an incentive for you to cooperate, because if you cooperate, at least in the beginning, then you show to them, look, I'm a cooperative person. We can actually do this

and we'll both do better. Let's keep doing this. And then depending on various factors, sometimes you want to defect when they defect as a like punishment, etc. There's actually a really cool website that I recommend everyone go and play with. It's called the evolution of trust, which talks you through these like iterated prisoners dilemmas. But, you know, putting it into Mollock language, Mollock is the thing that would make you always defect, because Mollock's like, well, what's the short-term win here? How do I gain the most? Oh, I do it by defecting.

So I'm going to do that. And whatever the antimolic is would be the thing, and I do have a name for it, which we can talk about, is whatever the anti-molic thing to do would be to take this long view and zoom out and go, well, okay, but what would happen to the ongoing game if I always choose defects? Things will actually be worse off not only for the other person, but for me in the long run. So that's kind of how it plays into it. Right. And those are all properties of the games that you described are like properties. properties of two people when they have the ability to coordinate. But I want to remind listeners that we're talking about systems that have many, many, many people, N number of people

that cannot coordinate, right? And so really the power of Moloch to me is instantiated in the fact that, like, Moloch rewards the person who defects the most first, as in it is the most enticing for the person who defects the soonest. And so it really is this like race to the bottom thing because like if you would imagine like whoever is standing up in that stadium whoever stands up first momentarily has the best view in the stadium and whoever uses that beauty filter first momentarily is the hottest person on instagram and so it really rewards people to defect quicker than everyone else but then it makes moloch arrive sooner than everything like sooner than not right and so it's really about just like the setting of the stage for when moloch is

is going to come is actually, and this is like this crazy Catch-22, which actually is like kind of ex-extentially, like, intimidating is that the place in which Moloch arrives is when everyone is coordinated. Because when everyone is coordinated, that's when the incentives for defecting are the highest. And which is why Moloch is such like a difficult beast to fight is because as soon as we get to this place, like, hey, we're all coordinated, we're all on the same page, the incentives to a defect in that one moment are at its highest. And I don't know if you've thought about this facet of Moloch live or how you solve this problem. But like, can you just elaborate on what the conditions are for Moloch's arrival and like when he or the god is Moloch is the most

dangerous? Well, I mean, it's at its most dangerous when it incentivizes people to come up with newer and newer ways to get a competitive advantage. And that's, unfortunately, where it ties in with technology. And, you know, we are now in the era of exponential technology, which we were not, I mean, I mean, some, you can always argue that technology's always been on an exponential curve. But, you know, if, if you think of like a thing like, again, like a synthetic pathogen or something like that, it spreads virally, which is, you know, by definition, it's an exponential growth thing.

and if you couple that in a system whereby, maybe that's not such a good example because it's, you know, that's only ever going to be used for bad. Perhaps something more, a better example is like AI, right? Because there are all these different companies now working to be the first to build superintelligence or even a narrow,

it doesn't have to be a broad superintelligence, but even a new, you know, who can create the best text to video AI or any powerful, AI-driven thing. There's such an incentive to be the first one to do it because you're going to get the economic reward or the status or the prestige or whatever it is that you're chasing after. And the more power you can throw into making your technology the better. And the more and more safety measures that you discard, the greater your competitive incentive. And so it just always drives this process faster. So I would say that it's at its most dangerous when it's combined

with some form of exponential technology. Clicade, but like the paperclip maximiser is kind of the ultimate instantiation of it. If anyone really, I'm sure people are familiar with this. It's Eliezer-Yadkowski's thought experiment of like, just, you know, if we build something that is incredibly, incredibly capable at building paper clips as a just arbitrary example,

it will be technically more intelligent. If we build something that is more intelligent than us, it's better at manipulating its environment into making that one thing. So it can do, you know, it can turn atoms of everything around it into paper clips, which includes baby human bodies, the atoms within your body into paper clips and so on. Then that will, if it doesn't also have the wisdom to realize that by doing that, it's going to be a self-terminating process.

Eventually, it's going to run out of atoms and turn into paperclips. Then that's Mollock, basically. It's the ability to drive progress and win without the wisdom to ask itself, should it even be doing that in the first place? Like, what is the long-term after effects of this? Yeah, that kind of answered it. I mean, when you see this too, Moloch is really the reason we can't have nice things, right?

That's the tragedy of it. And when paired with technology, as you're saying, Liv, it makes it even worse than that. It could actually spell the doom of civilization, of humanity. Yes. Right? It could reset us back to the Stone Age if we really get this wrong. But what is kind of the answer to this?

Because you made earlier in our, episode when we were talking about it, you sort of made this distinction that I thought was notable and I wanted to come back to, the difference between healthy competition and unhealthy competition, right? And so, like, one way to slay Moloch is you just somehow, I don't even know if this could be done, but you somehow get rid of all competition. But that's not a good thing, because isn't competition healthy live? And, like, how do we make progress? Or, you know, some people might go back to kind of the idea, I think Ted Kaczynski and Unabomber had this idea of, like, well, let's get rid of all technology. Maybe that's a way for it.

for it. And yet, doesn't technology bring so much good to our lives? Helps us decrease infant mortality. Helps us have the conversation that we're having, connect with others. It's brought so much good to so many people. So we can't just disconnect from technology, can we? And yet technology makes the Molok problem even worse and even more viral. So how do we deal with this? Like a competition, unhealthy competition, do we get rid of technology? Like, do we keep it? How do we start to think about solving Molok traps? Yeah, so it's the quadrillion quad dollar question. I don't have an answer to it, so I'll preface with that.

There is no clear, you know, I don't know what the process looks like, but what I do have is an aesthetic of what the solution is. So if Molek is the god of unhealthy competition, so in other words, of negative-sum games, zero-sum games dressed, they're negative-sum games dressed up as zero-sum games. like win would lose, but in reality, the externality is a negative. I was thinking like, okay, what's the opposite of that? If it's the god of lose, lose, then what's the god of win-win? I'm just going to call it win-win. So what is this thing, what does win-win look like? And how would it, if Molek is this like, you know, I tried to get into sort of the feeling of

how Molek is. When I would have that in myself as a kid when I had to win, it's like this narrow focused, blinkered thing, like, ah, sort of laser focused on winning this one goal. blind to everything else. So win-win, and it's not very fun, it's not very nice and it's not very fun, but it is good at doing what it does. So what's win-win? Well, win-win is like, it likes to play games. It loves playing games, in fact. It's like, oh, you want to play? Yeah, yeah, let's have a game. Oh, I might win, you might win, or we'll see. But it knows, it has the wisdom to sort of ring-fence the size of the game and go, okay, that's how big that zero-sum pocket needs to be so that the externalities are positive. So it's got this.

like wisdom and to slap down mollock essentially when it starts getting a little bit too powerful. So I don't even like to call it the anti-Mollock because that puts it in the same dimension as Mollock, which Win Win is not. It is something of a higher order of emergence, much more potent, much greater, much cooler. And then in terms of it's just like, it's personality, it's just a really good time. It's not like, oh, we must all coordinate and everyone must know. because then that's like kind of like almost like weird communist Stalin vibes and it's not like lay say fair

oh everyone do what they want all the time it wants to maximize choice for people it wants to empower people so that they have more options to do the things that they think are good but it also wants to it wants to maximize people's choice making abilities so not necessarily optionality but like people's ability to make the right decision

so it comes laden with like wisdom but wisdom of how to have fun and party at the same time. The aesthetic your painting is it like kind of this god of like, and again, we're just using the analogy of God, but this god of like wisdom and like freedom and choice? Yes. Progress. Progress, is that it? But not progress for progress's sake.

I think the first words you used were better. Definitely like freedom, choice, but keeping the game going. I'm sure you guys have read finite and infinite games. that really touches on it as well. You know, if you're in a sort of more, and again, there's another formulation of it known as Game A, Game B, which Jordan Hall, and again, Daniel Schmackenberger and some others Jim Rutt talk about.

So Game A is sort of fundamentally built on like this like rivalrous zero sumness, which unfortunately, if you combine that with technology on a limited playing field, which is our earth is self-terminating. Game B is like the upgrade to that is this next thing, which whatever that is, again, is very win-winny. So it will have lots of coordination within it. There will be a most, probably the majority of the stuff that happens in this kind of system will be very cooperative, but it gives space to have small pockets of competition.

Because ultimately, what, okay, now we're getting really sort of philosophical, but like if one thing that Mollock seems to do as an outcome of its processes is that it's a complexity destroyer. And what Win Win Win tends to give rise to is more complexity. So like systems that are richer with more information and more diversity. And that's the key thing. So a purely top-down coordinated thing where everyone is like, you are doing this and you are doing this and you are doing this and there's no flexibility within it.

It's actually a very steady state thing. And that would like create this lock-in for the rest of time. That would be very sad. Because it would permanently curtail the amount of complexity that could arise and emerge within the universe. There's some interesting aesthetics here. It's kind of like contrasting life versus death. I feel like something like life is very organic and it's pushing things forward. It's kind of like reversing the entropy of the universe. It's making these more complex biological systems, right? Whereas death kind of an entropy sort of break all of that down, make things less interesting.

It also seems like Moloch is very narrow in its focus with this idea of the opposite of Moloch, This win-win would be much more broad, much more wise. It would be much more long-term in thinking than kind of this single-minded, narrow game that Molok seems to play. These are some of the aesthetics. I don't know if listeners are getting a picture of kind of the systems that we're talking about or the coordination that we're hoping for. Uniswap is the largest on-chain marketplace for self-custody digital assets.

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That's E-A-R-N-I-F-I. And make sure you never lose anotherirdrop. What else would you add to this aesthetic? And then are there some like more practical examples of this live that we can sort of see playing out? So one thing that Mollock tends to do, or at least the way that Mollock gets into many of our systems, particularly capitalist systems, is that the trouble with, you know, I'm not knocking on capitalism. I think it's still the best system we have thus far. But the problem with it is that it tends to reduce very complex things down into single metrics. So for example, the, biodiversity and richness of the rainforest, which is more than just like, you know, regulating weather patterns and oxygen levels and so on. There's so much going on there. We don't even know. We, you know, we're discovering new species there all the time, right? Even at the rate of species loss we're having. There's so much computational richness within that.

And yet, molecule forces are pushing locals there, because they're just trying to survive, to turn these incredible range of trees into lumber that gets turned into a piece of furniture. So, again, to use sort of Schmackenberger words, it's turning this complex system into something complicated. It's this reduction of value into a single measurable metric. And that's the downside of capitalism, because it's, you know, we have to measure stuff somehow. Markets have to measure, you know, money is great, but it is a very sort of perverse,

bastardized way of encapsulating value in a sort of single. dimension. And when you do that, that process of reduction of value and informational richness is a mollicky thing. So again, win-win is something that doesn't do that, or at least allows that to happen in very constrained ways. You know, like, not all deforestation would necessarily be bad. Like, you know, we still need wood for furniture, right? Let's find a way to turn a barren piece of, you know, useless land into growing forests for, you know, pine trees that we can then cut down and make wood from. Like that would be okay. That would be a way to sustainably continue, you know, to still have the lifestyles that we need and want as humans without decimating this incredibly

rich complex thing that we actually depend on to survive. So again, that's pointing, I realize it's not giving a concrete example of what win-win is, but it's the best I can do right now is to sort of point at, you know, what it's not and to just throw out adjectives and descriptors of what the vibe is of this thing because that's the thing about win-win as well. It is a vibe. What is a vibe? It's like, you know, this vibe you get when you're at a festival. You can't really commodify that, right? It's very hard.

You can try and reduce it down to words and describe it, but you still don't, vibes are vibes because they are this feeling that we have that, like, connects us to something greater and almost like more sacred. That's the direction. And in terms of like what, for example, the crypto community could be doing, again, this is like way beyond my pay grade. I'm not a crypto expert. But what it seems like the technologies of blockchain

and decentralized technologies are good for is a way of building some kind of higher order of collective intelligence. Essentially turning us humans into a network of intelligences where we're like nodes in a larger brain. Anything that can bring the hive mind into existence, but then a hive mind that is wise to the more naturally, the, well, some of the mollicky behaviors that humans tend to fall into. Because again, humans are not,

they're neither good nor evil. We're all individually capable of both. So how do we design some kind of hive mind structure where we maximize the good stuff and minimize the bad stuff? Right. And this is highly similar to the metaphor that Ryan was talking about with a voice over the megaphone at the stadium. You're asking for a new higher order organizational structure for humans to be able to come together and coordinate. And this has been one of the big themes that we've talked about on the bankless podcast. Like once upon a time, religion was the hive mind coordinating nodes on a network where all of a sudden, like everyone's on the same page because we are reading the same book and that one book tells us how to live our lives. And then all of a sudden we come up with nation states in that is another

higher order coordinating thing that I think does the thing that you're talking about win-win does, which is balance order and chaos inside of its domain and allows for competition to arrive, market forces to take over, but under rules, under loss. And it allows for some freedom for people to do exactly what they want so long as it doesn't involve other things like killing people in tax evasion, like stuff like that, right? Yes. And I think that's kind of the call to arms for the crypto spaces. Like, can we do that? And I think live earlier in the podcast, you talked about like a ball that's perched on top of a hill. And what Moloch is, is like the Moloch tends to, that ball can fall off that hill in any direction, right?

And this hill is like optimization, right? You want the ball to be at the very point that the highest peak on that hill because that is humans trying to optimize for something. Yet Moloch, that ball can fall off that hill in any direction. There's infinity number of ways for the ball to fall, but only one way for the ball to stay perched. Right. And that really is just like human effort.

We just try. We just try to figure it out. And there is no magic bullet. It's just like every single case of Moloch rearing its head has its facts and circumstances of like humans kind of need to figure out how to coordinate around that trouble. And sticking with that, it's not that mollocks through humans is the thing that pushes the ball off its perch. But it's also the landscape itself, that topographical shape. The basin that it falls into. Well, the fact that it was designed in the first place in such a silly way, whereby it just takes a little nudge by a, you know, a mollick in.

infected human mind in that moment to do that is also the problem. So it's, we've got to not only sort of change, well, in many ways, level up human nature so that we're less inclined to do this, but we also need to change the landscape itself, change the game to something smarter, whereby we don't need to worry so much about, you know, it's not so vulnerable to these pushes. So did you just say that like a way to define Moloch is actually the nature of the landscape, the optimization of the landscape itself, as in like there's this invisible like plane of existence of like kind of good or bad for lack of a better word. And Moloch is the fact that this landscape is hard to stay away from bad or hard to stay away from bad.

It's easy to be susceptible to bad coordination traps and harder to find peaks on that landscape where everyone's happy. Is that a fair way to find Moloch? He is the landscape. Yes, I think so. It's, you know, and I don't want to sort of broaden the definition of it because then it just does, you know, everything that's bad is Moloch. And I think we need to be careful not to fall into that. But yes, because it is this combination. Because if every person within this crappy landscape, let's say, is actually infinitely wise and has the mental strength to not do the quick selfish thing, you know, it's to resist all the temptations and bad incentives, then the bad outcome wouldn't happen.

Or everyone could be actually really self-interested and selfish all the time. But if the landscape is so well designed where the ball is actually like the local max. is also actually a universal minimum, so actually the only way is up, then that's also not a problem, right? So it's the combination of both, which is why I like to break it down into like mollucy systemic issues and mollic mindset, because those are two directions we can go at to try and fix this thing. We can be designing better landscapes, better systems to take into account the crappy parts of human nature and make it so that those incentives don't work against us. and we can also spread just better like memes to people and be like look be more aware like just

think about are you acting in a mollicky way right now are you are you optimizing for this short-term goal and not thinking about the bigger picture and how it might harm others or even harm yourself in the long run you know i love the name mollock yeah same so live your version of slaying mollock is basically kind of at the individual and education level where we're slaying mollock in the mindset you know of people so we're bringing attention to them that this force exists basically and changing the way they maybe think about this or maybe they behave. But I want to get to kind of the systemic view of Moloch as well, because you mentioned something just now when you were talking about changing the game. And we do have these, I think humans have developed better and

better coordination protocols over time for things. In fact, that's in a way what technology sort of is, is a coordination protocol. Even something like money for all of its faults at one time was a better coordination protocol than the thing that preceded it, which was maybe a barter versus, you know, type of system or maybe a type of system where you have something that I want and I will hit you over the head with my bat until you give that to me, right? So violence. It's better than violence, isn't it? Money in this kind of credit point system. How can we think of changing the game or how do you think of that? David and I often talk on bank lists about embedding some of these, like changing games from win-lose games or negative-sum type games to win-win games by changing our underlying

protocols, right? For instance, one of those we see in maybe some of the social media problems that we have today, right? So we have Twitter profiles that we don't own. We have all sorts of kind of algorithms that are targeted to slurp up and seek out our attention. Can we change the rules of those games? Are there certain things that you can see where it's like humanity stuck in these Moloch traps, we don't even realize it. If we get a mindset reflecting on Moloch, we can start to change the underlying systems. What are some systems in your mind that are kind of ripe for change? And where do we start? I know you're coming out with a video pretty soon on media. And I imagine that's going to tackle social media. Can you talk maybe about that in

this context for a bit? Yeah, well, actually, the video is, it started out tackling social media. I started writing it like a year ago. So this is like part two of the one that you started this podcast off with that one minute clip. Originally it was like, oh man, yeah, social media, these algorithms, they're clearly optimized for, again, they're reducing the human experience down to a single metric of like likes and retweets or, you know, shares. And therefore, it's very ripe for viral, molecule type behaviours. And the more I dug into it, though, because I was like, why are we, basically the video is trying to answer the question of why is everybody's so angry because it seems like everyone's just gone a little bit insane over the last few years.

Totally agree. More, you know, don't get me wrong, the pandemic is obviously very stressful sort of world event on a like global consciousness level, but it seems like there's something even, this was happening before then. People have been going nuts for like the last 10 years at least. And like, why is it in this divisiveness and rage that we're seeing? So that's what the video tries to answer. And it's where I actually ended up going. more because I think people don't think about this sufficiently is that the media, it's kind of got two arms to it. It's got the decentralized kind of bottom up social media, information

generated by lots and lots of people, which is vulnerable to, you know, people optimizing for clickbait or, you know, whatever the most triggering thing of the day is to get likes and retweets. But then it's still got this old, like, legacy top-down stuff from these old centralized companies, you know, the New York Times is, the CNNs, the Fox News, etc., all these old legacy ones, that are trying to still compete and stay relevant in the media space. And so they're also under these crazy incentives to, like, optimize for whatever the just most profitable spin of the day is. And it, unfortunately, seems like out of all the sort of emotions that humans have, fear and rage are the most effective at driving engagement.

Right. More than, I mean, some comedy. can be, but nothing will get you clicking faster than like, oh my God, like there might have been, you know, I'm just thinking of like when the, that missile hit Poland, right? And it was like, oh, God, where is this going to, you know, this might now escalate the Ukraine, Russia conflict even further. And just, if you paid attention to it, you could, like, I swear I I could feel like the excitement within the media of like, oh, man, this is a, you know, not the individual journalists, they're probably scared themselves, but there's like this, there's this force that

wants drama because drama is what pays. And so it's this really fucked incentive model we have whereby the more crazy, shitty things that happen in the world, the richer the media get, at least temporarily. So it's deeply mollicky. That is mollocky. Yeah, so that's, deeply mollock. So in terms of how do we solve that, that's going to be a hard one to do from a systemic level, because you're basically like, how do we decouple media entities profits from divisiveness and drama and scary stuff? That I don't have an answer to, but again, if we can get enough people aware of the fact that just how badly the media are incentivized to stir up, you know, polarisation and so on and drama, then people are going to be less inclined to share and click on that,

or at least we'll have that moment of clarity, be like, oh, this. This isn't good for me. This isn't good for the world. I'm not going to keep giving them my money, essentially. So you're mostly in kind of the mindset game, though. Like step one is really being aware that these forces exist and that this is happening to you. And like the reason you might be mad today is because you've read too much on Twitter. Or the reason you might hate yourself is because you've looked at too many Instagram images and all the filters, right? And that is kind of step one to try to, I guess, detoxify us individually. And if we all do some of that, then maybe we can start to, I don't know, detox collectively.

and figure this out and start to solve this. I don't know, David, what do you think? Do you think crypto has any answers to some of these problems? Like, you know, the problems that Liv was just talking about with the media, for instance. Because it seems like we're incentivizing towards anger and detention, and we're not incentivizing towards truth. And isn't that the thing that we actually want our media to deliver us? Yeah, I've gone back to Liv's personification of the opposite of Moloch, win-win.

So we have Luz-Loo's, which is Moloch, and we got Win-Win, which is like this, in my mind, this whimsical kind of like fairy creature that is very fun to play with and like you get personal growth. It might be a unicorn. Yeah, yeah, yeah, something like that. But it's got a bit of edge.

It's very funny. It has ability to be edgy. It's not like pure. Right. It can play with the darkness too. Right. And so like we have win-win and lose-lose. Clearly, the universe that we live in

has progressed where it was 10 years ago, 100 years ago, a thousand years ago. there is an arc of human progress, which means to say that win-win tends to be winning over lose-lose, as in like, just by the facts and circumstances of like, I'm talking to you guys over my computer, like the internet's working great, there's a supermarket down the store, I'm not scared about where I'm getting my- We're getting better at coordination. There's some hope here. Clearly we know, we don't know how to do it, but over time we are doing it. There is like something about that.

And I think that's really what the tackle, what we're trying to get down to the basement level of here on this podcast is like, why are we winning? Like we don't know why we're winning, but we are. Sometimes it feels like we're losing like nuclear proliferation. It feels like Web 2 as a whole has like lost to Molok. So like we've lost that territory.

Well, I feel like we lost the internet with Web 2 a little bit. Sometimes, yeah, the crypto community feels like we've lost the war of the internet. but Web 3 is our place to like, it's a blank slate, we can get it back. We have more tools of coordination now. And so like, I'm kind of just focused on like, all right, we've been winning. How do we identify how we've been winning and how can we like double down on that? Because we've been doing it. It seems haphazard and accidental.

Exactly. It feels accidental. That's exactly right. And like how do we make it on purpose? Because that's like a big unlock. It's like how do we approach this from a more meta standpoint? I don't know, Liv, if you have any thoughts. on that. Yeah, one thing that's coming up is like, if you look at all the history of,

there's a Wikipedia page of it, listing all the near misses of nuclear war or these potential flashpoints that could have, like, it's unclear. It's not like they were like, oh, was it 50-50 that it was going to be nuclear war? It might have been, each individual one might have only been two or three percent or even one in a thousand. But the point is there was like 11 or 12 of these things. And these small probabilities compound to the point where you're like, it almost seems like We're in kind of a lucky universe that we're even still here in this. You know, we're in the branch of the multiverse where no nuclear war has actually happened. So that can then like, do you know the quantum suicide thought experiment where it's like if you have a gun hooked up to some kind of yes, no quantum event?

Technically, if we live in a multiverse, then you're always going to, you know, and the gun is at your head, you'll only ever find yourself observing a universe where it didn't go off. You won the coin flip essentially. And you can repeat that a trillion times. And even though from, you know, therefore it's like two to the trillion that you would actually have made it. Oh, sorry, one over two to the trillion that you would have made it. But you're always only going to observe yourself in the one where you have made it. So it's like these weird observer selection effects things that make me wonder if like that's where we're always going to find ourselves in the one where we seem like, oh man, we got lucky. Anyway, I think you're touching on something.

So again, back to Scott Alexander, he wrote a beautiful sort of, I don't know if it was intentionally compliment. piece to meditations on Mollock, but it is. It's called the goddess of everything else. Everyone should go read that because it talks on this thing of like... I haven't read that. Yeah, it's great. It's like there seems to always be, you know, the Mollocky thing happens, but then the goddess of everything else, who, by the way, is very win-win. She's just like, ah, yes, well, you did that because you wanted it to happen, but look, here we are.

Here's a positive outcome. She always finds a way for there to be like the next positive outcome and the new game to try make the right choice. So, you know, I don't think the fact that we have been winning, therefore, it isn't evidence that we will therefore make it. You know, on an objective, not that, you know, who knows if there is actually any objectivity, but on an objective level, the prognosis is not looking good. Like, it's hard to see right now while we're in this, like, very vulnerable civilization. And particularly with all the, like, craziness that everyone is actually getting just by spending all their time on, you know, plugged into the, to the current

instantiation of the internet, it doesn't seem like we're heading on a good trajectory. But the fact that we have been winning is very useful in terms of giving us some hope, because it's out of that hope that we will build the structure which will enable us to actually go on and flourish and survive. So, yeah, I don't want to even want to put probabilities on whether we'll end up making it versus not. But the way for us to make it is to believe, that we will, you know what I mean? But it requires the effort. So that's why I want to be careful saying, yes, well, we have been winning, so therefore we'll probably be fine, because then people will not, like what you're trying to do with this podcast, right, is to get people

into action because the time is now. The time is yesterday, but the time is just as good now. And tomorrow, let's get on with it. We only have failure via complacency. Yes. Yes. Also via panic. Sure. That's also the other knife edge we've got to walk. Panic is no good either. Win-win doesn't panic, but win-win certainly isn't complacent. There's something about this Moloch fight that we've been talking about where, like, Molok wins when people choose defect in the prisoner's dilemma, right? The Moloch wins when people break from coordination and they prioritize short-term incentives over long-term incentives.

And one of the big themes that we've talked about on the bankless podcast are this concept of settlement assurances in the crypto space, which is just like confirmation that your transaction went through, right? If you have that assurance, then you can play by those rules. and this relates to things like laws in nation states where if you are given assurance that this law is going to be a law from now and for forever, you can build a business around that truth. And that can allow you to think in the short term. And that's really what part of the role of a nation state does is that they keep things stable. It's coordination technology. Coordination technology, right? Let's have a strong economy that doesn't get too hot or too cold. Let's keep laws the same and hopefully make more clarity and build. more laws so that people can operate around these rules so that we can create a foundation of long-term thinking. We can reduce the need for short-term thinking by creating a country structure and an economic system that allows businesses to not feel like they need to be focused on the next

quarter, but they can actually focus on the next decade. And that can lead them to creating, like, fostering new employees and new businesses and new arms. And all of a sudden, like, we have prosperity, we have greatness. And so that's a great. And so that's a great. thing about a nation state, but also, it is the coordination technology. But also, it is Molok itself, as in, like, the United States nation state is the thing that's participating in nuclear proliferation. It is the thing that is, like, oppressing people with violence and the monopoly over guns. It's like, when you slay Moloch, there's another Moloch behind it. Yes, exactly. That's even bigger and more different. You have to defeat that boss. And then there's another Moloch.

The Molok's never end. It's the infinite battle. Just like the infinite game, this is the infinite battle that we always have to fight. Yes, although I think it's important to differentiate. The United States, nation state is not Moloch. It's not mollock, right. It's power, yes. It's, again, a neutral entity that can be, very powerful entity that can be co-opted for

mollicky reasons or it can be co-opted for win-winning reasons. It can fall into the Moloch trap in the same way, only at a nation-state level rather than an individual or company level. And same with the international community, you know, like what we're seeing, the tensions between Russia and, you know, what Russia's doing to Ukraine and the tension between China and America and so on. Like, it's this rivalrous game that's playing out on a very large scale.

And the stakes are so large that if they actually go to war, it breaks a playing field. Right. You know. Right. So, like, thank you in the United States for producing roads and laws and supply chains. You guys are making my life great. Also, there are thousands of.

nuclear warheads that could end all of that tomorrow. Both of those things, one of is the solution and one of them is the failure of Moloch. You actually touch on a really key thing that it's very important to hammer home. Mollock is not any one individual thing. And the way that Mollock actually wins, or like the thing that would please Mollock if it had a brain enough to be pleased, is if people mistook individual things for it. So, you know, if, Everyone's like, yeah, you're right. Like, because part of the problem with this happening in America that I see is that, like, people, you know, I'm a recent immigrant to the US. I'm stoked to be here.

I think there's so much great stuff going on. And there's so much, like, loathing and shame and hatred of, like, people, like, hating their own country. And I was like, man, like, don't hate your country. Hate the things that hate the force that has made your country do shitty stuff. Yeah. But love the force that has made your country do great things, you know, so give it credit where credit's due. And the way, when people don't see. see the bad force for being Mollock and think it's the actual, the thing that's been corrupted

by Mollock and they blame the thing that's been corrupted, that's when Mollock gets to do its power, basically. A hundred percent agree. And so people fall into this trap all the time, live, don't they? It's just blaming capitalism, for instance, or blaming just nation states or a particular nation or something like this, and not blaming the root force, which is this coordination failure problem and this unhealthy competition problem. It's a game theory.

Well, can I ask? So we've talked a lot about the idea of getting the idea of. this into our heads individually. And then we also talked briefly about systemic. I really feel like systems designers are the ones that we need to rely on to help us out of these types of situations. And by that, I mean, you were talking about the United States just a minute ago. I do feel like the systems designers of the U.S. operating system, that is the Constitution, actually did a fairly good job thinking some of these things through. And that is something that I think Americans and people all over the world should be kind of proud of and should look to as a

success, like the idea of the Bill of Rights, individual rights, and the idea of this kind of balance of powers through three separate branches of governments that one can't go mollicky and take control over the other one. This is a pretty good idea. I feel like sometimes we are all running so fast and in creating our new social apps and our new technologies and even honestly bankless listeners are crypto protocols that we're not thinking about the system design and the externalities that these things might cause. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that, but like imagine if our social media designers, the people who wired up like the Zuckerbergs of the world who

wired up, you know, Facebook and Twitter and all the social apps had looked a little farther had had the foresight to see some of the problems down the road. How might they have designed their systems better? That to me is one way out of this is we have to get better system designers and systems designed that are designed with kind of long-term societal benefit, you know, in place rather than kind of these short-term things. They need to be adaptive because they can't be rigid. Yes. They need to be adaptive as well. Yeah. Do you have any thoughts for us there? Is there like any hope? Is there like a school of thought within game theory, which is just like people thinking about designing social networks or designing technologies or designing social protocols even for the long run and so that we don't screw ourselves

over all the time? In terms of a set of rules, well, you absolutely touch an nail on the head that David would say about adaptability. That flexibility, adaptability is key because if you have, you do the ability to amend those rules if it looks like the landscape is changing in a way where it's now favouring Molykova Win Win Win. This is going to sound super cliched. So we might even want to just not, I don't know, I'll just say it. Some of the best set of rules that I've ever seen that created the closest thing to like a protopia, because I hate the word utopia, it's utopia is bad because again, utopia defines some kind of fixed end state that it's like a goal that you get to.

And then once you're there, everything's done. No, that's actually hell. prototypical is where things are evolving and going and going and there's always option for better and improvement and adaptability again Burning Man and I know there's a bunch of people are going to roll their eyes and I'm like oh geez just one of these people Burning Man was again one of these situations I was like oh wow it like it you know I remember when I went there and I was super skeptical like that everyone's singing its praises how it's like this wonderful thing I was like this is this stupid hippie shit

I got there and I was like, man, humans are rad. Like, this is what humans can do in the right circumstances with the right design. I've never been more entertained in my life. I've never learned more in my life. I've never been more shocked in my life. Never had my, like, paradigms, and I'm not because I just did a bunch of psychedelics. Like, it's truly, I've taken people there. I took my parents there who did nothing.

And they came away, like, I, like, did not know that that was possible. And the thing is, is that it's, based off a set of core principles, like rules, basically, like these cleverly designed starting conditions, kind of like the constitution, which have tried, if they've tried to sort of build a thing out of an abundance mindset instead of a scarcity mindset. So things like everything is, people think it's about bartering. No, it's about gifting. It's like, someone needs something. If I've got it here, yeah, if I've got surplus, yeah, of course, here, just have it. You don't expect anything return. So that's one of the rules of burning men. Implied rules. Gifting.

Implied. You don't have to. Inclient. Social contracts. Yeah. But you ruin the vibe. Well, it's just a, it's a guideline. It's a guideline. Gifting. Bring if you can more than you need so that if someone is in need of something, you can help them out. So it's, there is no bartering. There is no expectation. It's giving something without expectation. You might get signing in return. Great. If not, you've helped someone out. Wonderful. There's still a win-win. the other thing there's like 10 of these principles uh you know it's like radical self-expression don't leave trash you know city stuff like that but i mean real stuff but not important but another key one is decommodification it is there is no sponsorship you are not there

like that is like a cardinal sin there if you were to like slap a coke of you know you're a DJ who wants to be paid and you know DJs perform there for free really big DJs because there is no exchange of money going on. You are not selling a commodity. There's nothing commercial at Burning Man. Nothing whatsoever. Because that is one of the problems with capitalism is, again, it reduces something of value down to a single metric. It's also Moloky.

Because if somebody does it, then we all got to do it. Right. Exactly. Because now the arms race has started. And that's how you get the competitive advantage. And yet, there are still plenty of spaces. People are playing games there, like zero thumb games. Again, it's found a way to, like, there's all kinds of crazy contests.

And so there is something to this idea of having smart guiding principles, like the Constitution or like the, you know, the Burning Man thingies, to do, to, from which a good system will start to emerge. But this is where I don't mean to defer to others to, like, answer this question. But I really recommend you have Jordan Hall, Daniel Schmackenberg, get them on and ask them this same. question because those are the guys who have been thinking about this exact question of like what are the system design process, particularly in crypto that can give rise to the kind of infrastructures that we need.

These are completely novel form of institutions essentially where that we can do this collective intelligence, you know, decision making basically, hive minding, these really tough problems and find easier ways to coordinate and essentially change the landscape in favor of human flourishing instead of badness. So that's what I would say, unfortunately. That's good, Liv. And so, okay, so David and I are coming into this episode. It's the beginning of 2023, right?

And we've had to ask ourselves some serious questions, I think, particularly toward the end of 2022 about crypto. Because here's this technology that we believe in so much that is human empowering. You hold your own private keys. You hold your own assets. Isn't that amazing? The idea of decentralized finance, for instance, no banks. no intermediary. It's just kind of you and the code and the protocol and you can exchange back

and forth. Anybody around the world with the internet access gets access to all of these systems, the best banking system in the world. It's phenomenal. The idea of a Dow is anyone can create a permissionless capital structure, pull it together and create some sort of weird quirky idea, like a burning man, for instance, only online, turn your Discord room into sort of a some collective to accomplish some purpose. It's all magical. And yet what we found in 2022, is guess who took advantage of this? Scammers, fraudsters, people who were playing pump and dump schemes.

SBF. SBF. This is just like Moloch instantiated in a world where we had hoped would be a solution to Moloch. And so we end last year, 2022, and we began 2023, kind of asking ourselves this question

of like, once again for crypto, is how does our industry not fall in these Moloch traps? How do we design better systems so that we can actually go out to the rest of the world and be like, hey, there's something cool here. We have fixed a portion of banking. Why? It's because all of our decentralized finance protocols completely open source. You can audit them. You can see the assets that back them. So there's no possibility for fraud. So anyway, I guess there's some existential crisis, I think, in crypto right now, which is like, we've created these fantastic tools where everyone can do all of these things. but we worry sometimes that we've enabled scammers to just do all of these things and take advantage of us. And, you know, the story is not fully written on that problem yet, but that's where we sit at the beginning of 2023.

Yeah, it seems like, you know, and I don't think crypto should be too hard on itself as a community because every new community and technology will be in. some way vulnerable to this. That's the thing. There are these core facets of human nature, unfortunately, that may, I mean, maybe someday we will evolve out of them, but it ain't happening anytime soon. And the mistake that the crypto community has made, like almost every other community in the past that, you know, runs into some kind of crisis, is that it was two pie in the sky.

It was essentially naive and thinking, like, oh, we've got the answer, just decentralize everything. that is the answer and we don't need to worry about these sort of edge cases or like the psychopaths that will come and co-opt it but the trouble is that there will like what is it the percentage it's like something like one percent of people have these psychopathic traits and no infrastructure will be robust if it doesn't factor in if it doesn't design itself in a way that these one percenters can't push the ball down the hill push the ball off the top of the hill and so I don't know I mean,

crypto will come out of this stronger, provided that people are honest with themselves about, okay, these are the mistakes we made. We were too high in the sky. And, you know, but at the same time, not too hard on themselves, because ultimately it was like, you know, these bad actors that came and did this. But you have the responsibility.

If you're trying to design an entire new financial system, don't delude yourself about human nature because there will always be the psychopaths that will come and try and defect. Unfortunately, you just need to design your infrastructure so that their behavior is construed. trained. And ideally that you design incentive structures as well, where the buy it even plays on there. You know, if you can, like, if you can optimize so that the psychopath's behavior is also

actually then good for the system, even better. I don't know how you come to that, but that's presumably possible too. I'm sure it exists in possibility space, and I'm sure we can therefore come up with it. Liv, I think that's great advice. I think what you're saying is your encouragement to crypto people live in that protopia rather than that utopia, right? And we have to adapt to that. this has been fantastic. And I've got to say, and we have Dave myself, and I'm sure many bankless listeners, we love the way you think. It's very like a crypto-aligned way of thinking, kind of a super rationalist way of thinking, and is tremendously helpful. I think for what we're doing in the space and what we're all trying to do. I guess to kind of close this out, if you could sum up everything

you've learned from Moloch and give us kind of some words for moving forward and sort of the takeaways of this episode, there's one thing you want folks to take away from this episode about Moloch, what would that be? Yeah, one thing that's popping up is the idea of, that's silly but like, Mollock starts at home. Okay, let me rephrase that. Win-win starts at home because let's shift the perspective here. While I agree that the audience listening to this right now

is more empowered than the average audience I would ever speak to, or any of us would speak to, to actually think about this like systems design stuff. it's very, very important. You cannot design a good system if you are not living the win-win mindset and you're not integrity with that in yourself. And that doesn't mean that you're not going to screw up. Like, I do molecule stuff all the time.

But the point is like, I've reduced the lag time with which I notice when I do it. You know, like it's, again, there's no perfection. I'm not talking about become magically. And you're not allowed to build a new system until you yourself is perfectly enlightened. No, I'm not saying that. but this thing that we need to build will emerge. It's going to start emerging by itself out of the people who are like living in integrity and like just trying to imbibe this win-win vibe.

Sounds again very hand-wavy, but a very strong intuition that that is the case. So yeah, just start paying attention to the little micro things where you catch yourself sacrificing stuff in order to win a quick goal and have some faith that this thing will emerge, which I'm confident it will out of this community. That's great advice. I'm just curious as we close for you personally. It sounds like you started in place in your life where you've been stuck in the unhealthy competition zone and you've maybe matured and gotten more wisdom on that account and you're in a place where, you know, it's a more healthy type competition. Was Molok part of that journey or how did you make that

transition personally in kind of your life from somebody who's maybe competitive, which is good, but channeling that competition towards healthy competition rather than unhealthy. Yeah, I just started building the muscle of looking for, you know, even when I busted out of a poker tournament, I was feeling really shitty and like, oh, I screwed up. Or someone who I viewed as a kind of competitor to me in poker, that's for a more like concrete molecule thing, like feeling jealous at someone else's success because I like, you know,

felt like, oh, well, their stars shining brighter so therefore mine's not. You know, that's a really molecule thing, that kind of jealousy when there doesn't even need to be jealousy. Just like building the muscle of going like, okay, but there's probably a way that this, you know, if I'm just not being imaginative enough to see how over the long run, this thing could also benefit me, you know, me busting out this tournament because I played aces wrongly or something like that. Where is, you know, it's almost like pathological optimism. Like, there has to be a win in here somewhere that I can extract if I just make the boundary of the game big enough. And I don't know, it was just something as I got older, it became easier.

You know, I think it generally speaking, it becomes easier for people who have lived more of life and seen the thing that seems like a loss right now. There's usually something positive that can come from this if I, if I just look hard enough. So, yeah, it's just about, it was just practice and getting older, honestly. You know, I'm 38. I'm almost 39. Like, I don't know. Just give it time.

It will come to you. I'm sure somebody needed to hear that after 2022 and some crypto losses maybe in their portfolios as well. That that's a great learning lesson. Pathological optimism. I love that phrase. Liv, thanks so much for hanging out with us and talking all about Moloch. We appreciate you. Oh, can you also tell folks about your YouTube channel where they can catch the newest episode that you're doing on Moloch?

And I think the first one was called Moloch the Beauty Wars. And the next one's going to be about media, I believe. The Media Wars. Yeah, where can people find that? Just go to, if you search Mollock the Beauty Wars and then my name, you'll find my channel, subscribe to my channel. I'm doing my best to get the video out next week. But given history, it's probably going to be a couple of weeks.

But yeah, I'd love. One of the most useful things would be for any ideas that people have of how to fix, you know, how to solve Mollock, just comment, add comments even on the bottom of this, right? Because if we're going to hive minds a solution, that's the way to do it. Nice. That's awesome. We will definitely project that out there to the world. Liv, thank you so much for joining us on Bankless today. We appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

Action items for you guys. We've got a few resources. We've included an action list. The first is the evolution of trust. Liv was talking that during the episode, talking a little bit about game theory, the prisoner's dilemma. Also, read Meditations on Molok. They'll be a link for you. The Goddess of Everything, which I intend to read after this. Watch the video, Molok, the Beauty Awards, and read the Bankless article from way back. Ethereum, Slayer of Moloch, written by my co-host, David. Guys, thanks a lot.

Got to end with this, of course, risk and disclaimers. Crypto is risky. Defi is risky. So is Eith and Bitcoin. You could lose what you put in. We are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone.

But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.