Think Like A Game Designer - Zvi Mowshowitz—From the Magic Pro Tour to Wall Street, the Logic of Bookmaking, and the Future of AI Ethics (#105)

Episode Date: June 5, 2026

About ZviMy history with Zvi Mowshowitz goes back over 20 years to our days as teammates on the Magic Pro Tour, where we won a Grand Prix and top-8ed a Pro Tour together. After his competitive gaming career and a stint designing games at Wizards of the Coast and heading up a Cyberpunk TCG design team in Denver, Zvi took his unique systems-thinking mind into high-stakes finance. He managed risk as a professional bookmaker in sports betting, traded crypto for a hedge fund, and worked quantitative trading desks at firms like Jane Street. Today, he’s focused his incredible intellect on the world of artificial intelligence, writing five times a week at his blog, Don’t Worry About the Vase, tracking the breakneck evolution of large language models and the critical safety challenge of AI alignment. In this episode, we dive deep into the math of pattern recognition, our wild days on the Pro Tour, the high-stress realities of trading, and how to navigate the massive societal shifts coming with AI. Zvi delivers insights on rationality and adaptability that will resonate with anyone trying to think clearly in a rapidly changing world. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I speak with world-class game designers and creative pioneers across multiple industries. Each episode takes you on a deep dive into the creative process, exploring the nuances of game design and the extensive cultural, technological, and business factors influencing various creative fields. Tune in for practical tips and inspiring insights that will expand your creative perspective, whether it's inside the gaming realm or beyond. I have something I am so excited to finally announce.

If you are serious about designing games, not just thinking about games, not just listening to the podcast and dreaming about games, but actually finishing your own designs, then I have created something for you. It is the brand new, think like a game designer, design lab. It is a step-by-step system that I have created and tested with dozens of other creators and other aspiring designers

that includes over 60 lessons to take you from generating ideas to building prototypes to finding playtesters, refining your core design loop all the way through publishing, running a crowd fund, and even getting hired in the industry. You'll also get access to my private design Discord

filled with me, members of the Stoneblade team, and other creators all actively building games. Plus, I've got some incredible bonuses for people who join right now and for longtime fans of the podcast. If you're ready to stop, intending and start actually designing games with intention. Check out the Think Like a Game Designer Design Lab at justingarydesigns.com. In today's episode, I speak with one of the smartest

people I have ever gotten the pleasure to know and have deep conversations with Svi-Mauschwitz. We were teammates together back in the Magic Pro Tour. We won a Grand Prix together, top-aided in a pro tour. We've gotten to do a ton of deep dives. And we tell some fun stories from our days playing magic that have not just interesting backstories for people that are interested in that stuff, but also core lessons. I pull out what are the traits that made the top people successful. And then we dive into how does that apply to success in other areas of life. Z was a successful sports better and poker player and investor and crypto investor and worked at Jane Street. And now he writes about AI every weekday on his substack.

And we also at the end break into the threats, the possibilities and the, interesting things that can happen in AI. So there's massive amounts of stuff that apply to game design specifically, because Vio's also worked at the Coast for a little while and designed, worked on game design for a while for anyone that wants to be competitive and how you think about the world, how you become adaptable in the world. And we start to have a real conversation in areas where we agree and disagree about what's coming in AI. And I do plan to have, I know it's a controversial topic. I've had several guests on the podcast, including Ethan Malik and others that I've talked about it, and I'm going to continue to talk about it because I think it's very important

that we have the right kind of conversation about this emerging technology that's going to be massively impactful. So no matter what area you're interested in, playing games, making games, succeeding in business and life, or what the future is going to hold, this episode is going to have something really exciting for you. So without any further ado, here is Zvimashwitz. Hello and welcome. I am here with Svi Malshowitz. Zvi, man, it's so good to get to talk to you again. Yeah, it's been forever. Yeah, like, it's funny.

One of the reasons why I started the podcast is to give me, like, good excuses to talk to, you know, friends and people that I have known forever. But, you know, don't get to have conversations like this. I mean, you and I, there was a period where you and I talked to you and spent more time with you. than any other human on the planet when we were doing our play testing. And this was before Protort Houston, actually, where we would be playing on Apprentice, which is a old-school, you know, proto-digital way to play magic.

I don't even know if it exists anymore, but it was ugly and, but functional. And you and I would just spend hours every day testing different things, iterating, going back and forth. So I feel like I've got a very good idea of how your mind worked, at least then. He needs a really good partner, like someone who's really gay, you really get along with, because you just spent hours and hours on that. And, you know, I was blessed.

My first partner like that was Scott Johns, like lots of hours. And then, you know, after Scott took a step back to the pro tour, you know, I found Justin and, you know, you. And, like, that was really a relief because, like, you know, you don't necessarily know when you're going to find someone like that. And then, you know, we could literally, like, spend two hours and then two hours more than two hours more. than two hours more. And what I remember the most is actually not Houston, which is obviously like you remember it because you won by the reason. But yeah.

The one I remember most is Venice, actually. Just because there was that two week period where like the rest of the team was like, we're not doing this. And we're like, oh, we're doing this. And we sat down. And we're like, for the next two weeks, we're going to set astral slide against astral slide. And it's the most miserable experience you have ever seen.

And we're both going to bitch quite a lot. We're going to figure this out and we're going to have this solved. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, for many people will not know what Astro Slide is. It was a specific magic deck archetype that was part of the strategies. And it's one of the things that I kind of wanted to dig into here because one of my goals with the podcast is to kind of like bring out the universal principles that lead to, you know, success and creativity and achieving at these high levels.

And I think this like willingness to kind of just work through the grind and the ability to have, you know, like to learn from losses and like dissect these like even unfod or terrible experiences is such a critical part of a lot of what I attribute my own success to. And I would imagine the same on your side. Like where did you always have that? Is that just like something that, you know, because it's pretty rare, I think that people are willing to subject themselves to, you know, what's not objective? objectively the most pleasant experience, but there's a fun of it, especially when you find somebody else to work with that has the same mentality. Yeah, I always actually struggled in my mind with this, because at some point, that will would just kind of run out. And, like, I'd be, like, at a pro tour and basically like, can we skip my head to see who won? Because, like, it's definitely

so miserable. Like, I mean, the middle of Tennessee is like, I just can't this last week. Like, I can't, you know, these last few sideboard slots. I either, like, work on this. And, like, actually, at one point, like Kai, who died recently, and like another one of my teammates I remember very fondly, at one point he actually decided, you know, I'm going to go off and be a different team than you because you're not working hard enough. And I'm not winning enough with you on my team

because, like, you just won't put him enough work. And that's just like that moment of like, I didn't even have a chance. I couldn't argue with him because like he really was at that next level at that point. And it's just like this moment of, no, no matter how hard you're working, no matter how much you're willing to do what needs to be done. Like there's probably someone out there who's like the next level above you, who's just going to put you to shame.

And, like, we think that kind of makes it, kind of make it look really easy. Like, he just made all the right moves, all the right times. Like, that was because he was crazy prepared. It was a lot of part of that. And, like, when I was succeeding, it was the same thing. It was like, I was crazy prepared. And I just, like, would sit there and I would, like, endlessly take draws.

And I would endlessly think about everything. And I would endlessly try everything. And, like, I got really efficient about it. I got really good. And then, like, with my second phase after I came back, after I left Wizards and, like, I had a second chance, I was working much more. rather than quite as hard because I had like the wisdom of those years and I was old and I couldn't

spend the hours. But like yeah, back then I was just like, Jim the Kirkman, like, this is my dream. This is the thing that I want to do more than anything. And it's a competition. And there's going to be, you know, even after I make it to that room, there's going to be 300 people in that room. And eight of us are going to make that stage. And one of us is, only one of us gets to win. And like, if it's not me who puts in that work, it'll be Kai. Right. It'll be someone else who does that and no win. Yeah, that's right. And I think about the difference. between, you know, I had a lot of success throughout my magic career, but that, you know, there was that one year where I took a year off between college and law school where, like, all I did was focus on magic. And that was a lot of the period where we were working together. And that's, of course, where I had my best success. I won the pro tour. We won a team grand prix

together. I won the world team championships, like all within the span of a year, because I had the time and focus to just put in the reps. And so there really is no substitutes for that. And most of the people out there who seem like, you know, innate geniuses, which you do obviously need a base level of skill, but so much of that comes down to being willing to put in the reps. And then the other thing I want to dive deeper into you with you is you talked about it, being more efficient later. Can you, and this is not easy to do, but can you break down? What does efficient mean?

Like, where does that come from? Because that's an important puzzle piece too. Yeah, I think the efficiency came from this idea of, I know what the right types of things will look like. I know what types of patterns indicate something is not viable. I know when I'm on to something. I know when something is doing something sufficiently powerful, sufficiently promising, has what it takes. So like a lot of the things that I would waste time on early on would be I find something that's really powerful,

but that had some pretty severe weaknesses, potentially, or like some sort of inherent inconsistency, or some reason why it's never going to quite be there. or just like, okay, this is just kind of a one-note thing. This kind of strategy doesn't really work, or like you play three games, and then like you'd see certain patterns and you wouldn't jump to the conclusion of, oh, that means this won't work.

And then later on I got very, very good at, okay, I've played two games with this deck, and I can just toss up the trash. Like I know that, like, I saw those patterns, this is never going to cut it. Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think that reframing efficiency as kind of more robust pattern recognition, I think is really smart. And while for those listening that, you know, we're starting this conversation talking about our magic pro tour and playing magic.

But these, the exact skills are the things that have allowed us both to succeed in a variety of aspects of life. Like the pattern recognition when it comes to game design, I think is the exact same. Like the process of going through what I call the core design loop where you have your inspiration, you kind of create your parameters. brainstorm ideas, prototype something, test it, take the feedback from testing, and cycle it back through. That's the same for everybody. But as I've gotten better at what I do, I've made dozens and dozens of games. I've played however many hundreds more. And I've got, now I can recognize early on that, okay, yeah, this is where the fun is. This is going to get in the way. I can throw that out. I can focus on this thing and then, you know, jump faster from loop to loop than I can with anything else. So do you find that similar experience when you move from being a player to a designer?

Because that's definitely a big. I never thought, you know, I got maybe a 10th or, you know, a 50th of the time of Fock and experience. I made one game for real. And then we didn't really get that chance to, like, do that far into it with, like, having a launched experience before it all came crashing down, unfortunately. But, yeah, like, especially the idea of these things have to be fun. They have to be intuitive. They have to kind of just work immediately. And no matter how clever you think you're being, and no matter how like, abstractly supposedly

fun, something is going to be, and how much fun you had thinking about it in your head, right? If you can't get that fun into someone else's head in five seconds, right? Like, you just get to accept, I'm sorry, but no. And then, you know, even now with my kids, in the next level of like, oh, I realize how much every extra explanation, every little piece that I have to give them in order to get there defeats them getting into that point where they've found the fun and they're in the loop and now they're going to think about it

and so you know you sort of you struggle like no seriously they could just listen to me I'm trying to explain how raw works and I try to look at the biggest games that anyone has ever made in some sense right like you have these pieces and then you bid for the pieces

and then the place to score points it's like it's the simplest thing but like you just look at it And it's like, oh, actually, like, this is kind of pushing how many different explanations I can give of how many very points and what I should care about and like what matters. And then like this crucial moment of like, okay, get them to play their first game. Just get into one complete game so they can see how this works. And now they're excited. And now we can play again.

And now we can sort of figure out what the strategy and the details are all about. But like none of that clever shit in your head matters. if you can't get past that first little window and put that spark in them of like, oh, I'm enjoying myself. This is cool. This feels good. And like you've got to put so much focus into that.

And like the reason why emergence didn't work, the game that I made was we didn't have the retention, right? We couldn't keep an initial player who signed up coming back for that second day, third day right off the bat. And a lot of that was we didn't have our outer loop of like reasons to reward you playing more games like set up properly. But like on reflection, yeah, we just, we didn't have enough of that laser focus on that like getting off the ground. And we were trying to make something with this deep.

We were trying to make something that was very replayable, you know, something that could reward all of his exploration. But like, that's kind of job three. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's right. And I think that the, this is a common problem. And I know I felt the exact same. I had the exact same problem. When I first moved from player to designer, right, as a player, you're optimizing for that deep strategy.

You're like, okay, how do I break this thing at the high. levels, how do I optimize against all the possible counter strategies? And so when you first start designing games, and my experience for this is working on the versus system trading card game. And when I first did my lead design for the Infinite Crisis set, it's so clever. Look, it's so clever. There are so many deep interactions and tradeoffs and things. And I was so proud of myself.

And then once I watched new players playing with it, that it was just like so many things went over their heads. There was so much text to read. It was just like, oh, this is embarrassing in retrospect. Every time I play versus, I never had to see Infinite Crisis. but like every time, like I was in the alpha, right, at the very beginning, because the whole team was shipped out for that. And, you know, we're playing in the alpha, and we are the most overthinking team on the planet.

Right? We've got these players, Dave Humphreys, you know, Rob. And, like, we've got these people who will take, like, you know, two hours to play a magic match if you let them, right? Like, and not because they're, like, trying to get any advantage. And they just, I want to know everything. I want to figure out every little detail. Like, and, you know, I'm just, we're looking at these boards.

And it's just these games will never. end because we're just like there's so many little like I can get plus two over here and plus one over there and it's money three if I did that and what if I did that one here and this is when we draw that like I get put this over here and when I lose that I lose that for that extra and five turns later and like that was kind of like they brought us in and gave us that game and we made that game a lot better at being what it was but like the relation to tend to think more about what kind of game we were making right right we're making a game about superheroes battling and we were in fact building a like tactical strategy game at

the highest levels for competitors. But we're trying to figure out how to make sure you actually like just get all your numbers to work. Yeah. Yeah, it was skinned as like, you know, here are the X-Men and here are the Fantastic Four. And like, that's cool. But if that's what you think is cool, like, not everyone is the numbers nerd too. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So let's let's zoom this out because I still, we have so many like fun stories and some from the pro tour era from the playing era that I also want to just touch on because whatever,

they're great and not a lot of people will know them, including the origin story of our championship team name. But beyond that, one of the things I have always loved about you is you're a systems thinker and you were kind of known as a writer-strategist right when you first burst on the scene. And some, a through line

of your articles, I think, is relevant here. which is understanding what's important, right? What actually matters now? And magic as a game was great because what mattered would change from game to game and even turn to turn. So you had some articles about who's the beatdown, you know, and we could talk about that and why, you know,

where resource management matters the most. And so maybe we can speak, if you want to speak to any of the specifics, is okay, but the kind of the broader sense of knowing what problem you're actually trying to solve which one has, you know, in the right order and how you've either learned that for magic or learn that and applied it. I kind of just think there's a really deep lesson here.

I think that's like actually the core thing I love most about the game from the beginning is you start with this completely blankboard. There's nothing there. And like there are rules about like, here's how creatures work. And here's how these different types of things happen. And like, here's all these intricate details about combat and all of that.

but any given game, especially early on, none of that necessarily made any difference whatsoever, and all the things you think you care about in one match, in one game, on one turn

could be completely irrelevant, a different one. And a lot of the decks, we're like, I want to focus on this angle of the game and I'm going to attack you, like, I'm going to take out your lane, I'm going to do a land instructor,

take out your hand. I'm going to do a hand instructor, take out your hand. I'm going to, you know, make it so that you can't ever cast spells because spells now cost like lots of money. manned at a cast. I'm going to, you know, blow up all of your creatures so that you could never

attack me. I'm going to, you know, just do direct damage at your head and ignore the entire game and make everything irrelevant. And you had these like completely different off-the-wall things interacting with each other, or I'm going to do this combo. I'm going to go infinite. There's nothing you can do about it. Nothing you did. It's a slight bit different difference when that happens. You know, like one of my classics. And so trying to figure out, okay, how do I plan for all these different types of games that I can play, how to recognize which one is I'm playing right now? How do I choose which one I want to play? Right. A lot of type-boys strategies are often like, I'm going to change like this game to play this other game.

You're going to switch from this game to that game. So I've switched from that game to this other game. And that's also why I think TurboLand will always be my favorite deck. Because it could take basically any role in the game other than just pure like lightning, aggrore. And metaphor, we could take that too. But like, you had to understand who was who in any given situation and like what mattered and what you were trying to accomplish and what they were trying to accomplish.

And it wasn't usually as powerful as the exit was up against, and it was usually like maybe supposed to not do so well. But because the player who was playing, it understood how to pivot between those roles and understood what they were trying to accomplish and how all the interactions work, and the opponent almost never did. So, like, if you were on top of things, you could do really well,

and if you weren't on top of things, the next didn't work. Right. Yeah, I think this idea, and I'm going to try to fill in the gaps a little bit too, because I know some people are not as deep into magic history as we are. But this idea that I'm either trying to accelerate my resources to an insurmountable advantage and be able to do things that are more powerful than yours, that I'm trying to aggressively take you out before you can set up whatever your strategy is, that I'm trying to destroy your resources or stall you in ways that you can't operate successfully

and then I can accomplish what I want to accomplish, that the games will change who over the long term, who's likely to win versus who needs to win the game more quickly. All of these things are different parameters that jump, that we have to jump around between as we play. And I think that the ability and the skill to do that is one thing. And the other thing that comes through from your response, I think is really important is your skill in piloting a given deck is often more important than having, quote, unquote, the best deck.

Like our Proctor Houston experience is one, right? As a team, and so we were part of the Yermove Games team, And we all tested and advocated different decks and throughout the process. And the ones that we played the most, which you and I were both playing the oath deck the most. But we had, you know, Rob Doherty was playing the reanimator deck. And Darwin Castle was playing his green black deck and everything else. Because there was so much versatility in the strategies, being just really good with the deck that you knew allowed you to be better than you would be with playing a, you know, quote unquote, objectively better deck against the field, which was a really fascinating. phenomenon that I didn't expect to come out of it when we started.

Yeah, there's definitely tournaments where it's like, okay, everybody's my trip now. Like, if you don't play tricks, you're an idiot. That definitely happens, right? You don't play Ronald Red in this tournament, like, what are you even doing? This thing is, like, just better. And then it's about, and then there's definitely time when you guys shall suck it up and be like, okay, I came here. The night before, I realized I'm playing the wrong deck.

I just have to switch to the right deck and then try to learn as I go and do the best I can. And this is probably not going to my tournament, but you never know. And part of playing on the pro tour is back then when you could switch decks on the fly and such like eventually right out of happening but like he was this big cloud of unknown

and you had to like be able to understand what you had to stick to your guns because like I know this deck inside and out nobody's going to know what's going on I know what's going on I know how to handle it I know how to pilot I have a huge advantage versus oh actually like it just not

because they only takes you so far like bad neck is still bad right but like certainly you got I was a situation like Houston was this amazing format where there were like tons and tons of different decks. And we had really good versions of at least three decks. And so, you know, each person would play a deck that was his style. And then so like Rob, we wanted to play one, you know, this preanimator strategy and then Darwin wanted to play, you know, this rocket strategy. And like, I would have been a very for very fit for either those decks.

Whereas like both of us were like very much like we're excited for the Oaf deck. And like it didn't quite break my way. And also I got like, yeah, I made some mistake. but also like I just like didn't have the right bracket. But um, you know, sometimes it doesn't work out. And like, doesn't matter because like, you know, I think you were really on that tournament. Like I was watching you in the in the final day. And like it's like, okay, yeah.

Justin's playing at a level that like I'm not playing at with this deck. The same way that like I've had experiences like in Tokyo or like in my New York, when I made the top eight and I'm like, okay, I'm just, I'm clearly playing this deck better than my team makes up. Yeah. Yeah. There's that that that that combination again, what matters here, right? There's how am I able to pilot this strategy? What resources do I have? Sometimes there's only dominant ones.

But for me, it was really funny. So my early magic career, after winning U.S. Nationals, I was still in high school. And I kind of wasn't like seriously about staying and play magic, but I was qualified for Pro Tour Rome. So I was like, eh, why not? My dad wanted to go. So we would get a little family trip to Protore Rome as I was starting college. And sounds great. And that was the Tilarian Academy Pro Tour, which, you know, everybody was

playing this broken combo deck. And then there was another broken combo deck that I didn't even know about when we got there was the high tide deck. And then I didn't, I had kind of not been playing that much magic. And so I asked a friend to mail me their Filarion Academy deck, the best deck to play. And it didn't show up in the mail before I had to leave. So I just didn't have the deck. And I had been, you know, I'd been testing it remotely and, you know, doing the apprentice thing like we talked about. And so all I had was my pro tour jank deck,

which was like a definitely weaker deck, but one that I had used forever in just in qualifiers and ran-up tour. I just knew it inside it out. I just had it still with me. And so I just took that deck with me, and I modified it to just be an assassin against what I knew the best deck was. And then ended up making top eight and, you know, was very close to winning that whole thing.

Because I just knew the deck so well, and I knew how to play it against every opponent. I really felt that was one of my biggest missed opportunities, personally, because I was very much a combo guy, but I didn't move fast enough to a farther card. They didn't understand the cards were going to be as big of the issue as they were. I had kind of an upfield about walking into Infinite Newer matches in that area, like, for various reasons. And so I didn't have it. And then I, you know, I tried to tune recurred survival, but that was just like an awful choice. And so, like, even though I think I had a very good version of what I was doing, like, that was just not even, you know.

And I know about it because like I literally had a proxied version of a standard deck that I had tuned at the same time that was like probably a better deck because like I played it extended because like it was just a ridiculously strong like, okay, if you don't run into a force of will, the second is just going to win. And like, you know, can't play force of will because it's standard. But like, you know, and I had to cut four cards, but like, oh my God. And just, yeah, I just sort of punted that opportunity of like I'm not going to go in and they do the hard thing, and I'm not going to, like,

catch the ugfuel and do what it takes to make this happen. And I think that was very much, A, I never know what this happened to me again. Yeah. Yeah, well, and this is, I think the thing, you know, we've already talked about work ethic and sort of the ability to figure out what matters and being able to shift ears in the right situations. And I think the other common thread I see in the people who are most successful on the pro

tour and, again, I think in life, is that ability to internalize. those lessons, right? You lose all the time. You could have everything set up right, the right deck, the right strategy, even be well prepared. And the odds that you win the pro tour are still pretty low, right? It's just not an easy thing to do.

And so you're going to lose more often than you're going to win everything you're trying to do. And for some people, they would just complain about getting unlucky or bad beats and they would vent and they would move forward and not learn anything. And for other people, be like, nope, this is the lesson I take in. This is how I'm going to be better. let's go again. And I know that you have that skill

because we would, again, we would dissect every single game we played and every single thing, like turn by turn, card by card, playing out every scenario. Have you found that applying in your future things in life? Or do you know where that,

like, did you find that similarly as a consistent trend through the other people that you've worked with or played with? I think very much so. One thing that strikes me is early on the pro tour that wasn't destroyed. true, the whole like, well, even if you are coming in there and you're later

and you're the best, like no one ever was and you're prepared to win. Like, I did win, you know, five in a row, like, and all that. Right. These things do happen. And I definitely, looking back on my early career, I feel like justice prevailed. In terms of my results, like in both directions, right? I feel like the times that I did really well, it wasn't luck. And at times that I didn't do so well, it also wasn't luck. Right. Like, I can look back and like, okay, yeah, there's obviously some. variance, but like it actually was really hard to miss day two if you were supposed to do well. It was actually, you know, reasonably like when you're hit top 16, if not top eight, if it was

to do well. Sure. I think that like, you know, but I think, and the same thing is translated back to, to my experience in the regular world. Like there's tons and tons of luck, right? There's obviously luck in terms of the opportunities you're presented to you in terms of like, you know, where you were born, how you grew up, what skills you have, what contact you got, et cetera, et cetera.

But in the end, when you look back on it doesn't look, it doesn't look as random. people like to think. And like, you know, I'd say sort of the rent-a-ness is almost like, the right effort can fail, but the wrong one can't succeed, almost ever in the places that matter. And like, whenever you look at the people who ended up doing well, they did something really right. And like, even if they got really fortunate,

even if they kind of won the lottery in some sense, the lottery winners who don't have it, they're broken three years and they're wrong. Right, like metaphorically literally. Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. I think that there is no, you know, and again, when I talk about like winning, yes, like making day two, making top 16, you know, pretty consistently, you know, we all were able to do at our peak. The, you know, actual full, full win, get everything break your way in any given moment is harder to predict. So, yeah, Kai is certainly one of the rarens that was able to do that very, very well.

but the ability to consistently apply, you know, both good work ethic, you know, learning quickly and adapting quickly, always pays off over time. I think about it like any given, so I run a game company, and I cannot tell you if a given game is going to succeed. I've had plenty of games that I thought were going to be awesome and didn't work.

And other games, like, you know, I made, you know, I made Ascension kind of just for me and my friends and was like, yeah, this will be fun. and then, you know, it took off and, you know, whatever. But over time, if you keep at it, everybody I know in the industry, and now I've been doing this and I just came back from an event where I met with people for doing this for 20 years. Like the people who you eventually figure it out and you get there.

Like the consistency does, in fact, yield results. You know, the 20-year overnight success is a pretty common story. So I wanted to also jump into the, well, I don't know if it, If you're ahead of talking about this, but that, you know, magic really transformed you, you know, not just in your, you know, your career and opportunities, but even, even physically, it transformed you. If I remember the original makeover story and how that went down, I would love for you to share that because I think it was a really fun and a unique experience that would be a good to share. Yeah, yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, there's ways in which that could have been remembered and gone very

differently but it turned out I think so basically you know after we told I told the story of Rome where I basically kind of just I was like I didn't I knew what I was supposed to I knew what my heart out were I was supposed to do I really did and then I just didn't do it until it was too late and then I had to like you know basically just died and then for pro-term New Jersey I did the opposite I'm like okay I'm going to work really hard I'm going to figure out how this works and because within the inch of its life I know that academy is stupid I'm going to figure out the right to do this and then, you know, built the best version of the best deck, got really close.

And then I thought, where are your top eight? And I'm the number one seed. And I feel like I know everything they were just to know. And so like instead of the whole, like, usually you make the top eight, you get the deck list, and then everyone goes to, like, test all that, right? To play game after game every game every game

to try and figure out all the details. But I'm looking at the top eight list and I'm like, oh, okay, I know everything here, right? There's nothing here I didn't test against. There's nothing here I'm not prepared for. I know exactly what to do. Like, I don't, I want to relax my head here. And I'm sort of sitting there on the steps, right?

Without even, I don't even really have a plan to even play games. I think that was the correct call. And Justin A, he was in charge of the pro tour at the time. It's like, you know, you're going to be on a big station mark. I'm like, yeah. And he's like, we kind of want you to look good. And so how about, you know, I take you, get some clothes. and then your teammate Alex Schwartzman can like help get you fixed up.

I'm like okay and like you know I was thinking to myself you know okay you get me pizza and like let me relax and like you know I could you know you can sleep at home from New Jersey and just you know I feel ready I don't need to practice that much like there's some little quirks that like you know if there's the things I hadn't seen in the deck list but I didn't think it was going to impact my play particularly because like I'm playing a fluctuator combo deck where it's like, okay, I need to be aware of exactly what situation they can come me from, but like doesn't change what I do very much. It's like I just got to do what I got to do.

And then so he, Jeffon is takes me out. We get some clothes. It's like, okay, sure, whatever. And then we get back to the event. And Alex Schwartzman has brought in these three gorgeous Russian women. And they proceed to give me a complete takeover. right like in every sense my hair gets cut in an inch of its life and they do various I don't remember the because of what else they did but you know like you remember like you

things are in sinks and things are being you know variously chipped and I've shipped away and operated on and so like I walk in the next morning and everyone is like who is and I even had a giant beard I think beforehand and I shaped it all and I come in the next morning and we don't tell anyone but this is like a giant year I think beforehand and I should have in the next morning and we don't tell anyone what this happened, right? It's just going to be a surprise. So I walk in and everyone's like, who is that? Like, no, that's me.

It's the guy from yesterday. This is what he did while you were testing games and figuring out why he only has two island in his deck. And like, okay. And then, you know, I would get to remember that. And that was pretty inspiring because like, it's like, okay, yeah, you can look good. If you want to. You can be that guy if you want to.

And this was before I, you know, got a handle on my weight. This is before I, you know, got a handle on a lot of other things. But I think it definitely greatly assisted me and, like, knowing that stuff was possible. But, like, I put my mind to it. Like, it's other stuff. It was pretty, actually pretty easy in some sense. Like, you just got to power through it. And, you know, my only regret is that, like, I didn't realize the one key piece of information about that tournament.

But, like, that Casey McCarroll. was cheating his ass off. Yeah. That was the only thing I had to deal with to stop me. But I didn't realize to be lied about that. And it happened. Like, it turns out that, like, if I had to do it over again, I'd be like, I'll do it. But you've got to get me a completely mid-version of my head.

Yeah. Yeah. No, there's a, this was a common problem. And it was my problem in pro-Prom, because in the top eight, they would require, us to reduce leave back then. And so we had to, you could see and tell from the discoloration and some of the markings on the back of the

cards if you were clever and or willing to cheat, that you could deduce what people's cards were and or shuffle the right cards to the bottom. When I played against the eventual pro tour winner at that time, he could tell when I had a key card in my hand, the pyroblast because they were, and so

he was able to play around them or not around them successfully. So it was not cheating per se, but definitely an advantage that should not have been part of the gameplay, because he could just read my hand based on the markings on the cards. So an interesting shift. But the relevant, and thanks for sharing the story in that way, because I thought it was such a great thing.

And I also think it's just like a good message for people out there, because there's a lot of the stereotypical gamer prototype, where we don't take a lot of care of ourselves, and it's either overweight and not, not caring about appearances and not focusing on those things, is it is possible to go from that to an area where you do take care of your physical health, where you do put some effort into appearance. And it's actually transformative.

Like physical health directly transforms into mental capabilities. Like they are related. You have more energy. You have more focus. And taking some care of your appearance and how you present yourself in the world also changes how people react to you and how you're able to affect change in the world. and even a self-image, right? So you felt that by having that experience kind of thrust upon you,

you got the chance to see what that was like. And I think for other people out there, you know, and I don't know if you have this, but, you know, is there like a, you know, kind of an easy, like, you know, 80-20 thing that you might recommend for people out there who are like, I don't even know where to start here. Like, what would be the,

is there something that comes to mind in terms of like, you know, I don't need to be a cover model or whatever, but I do want to present to myself, better in the world and have the field as impacts. Yeah. I mean, in terms of like, there's sort of two categories I'd separate this into. There's the physical health aspect, and then there's this sort of how you present yourself the world, given that.

And I'd say the second one, you know, I have no special insight other than like just now being somewhat confident, but still being kind of a rebel in terms of like I don't really don't want it to devote that much energy to it. There's a lot of resources out there. Like you can talk to your local LLM, but you talk to a pod or chat you for T or, you know, whatever about like, with them tactics around that, you can upload photos,

you can ask for advice. And like, if you don't, if you're, if you're, if you're especially awkward, you don't want to talk to a human about this, we now have non-human clients like, you know, be your advisor for that.

And for that purpose, I think they're pretty, pretty great. Like, I think we can just handle that. Well, they're also funny of, but that's not to solve like, I think the main thing is, but I think that health is actually way more important.

Right. Because it not only plays into the year appearance, but it appears it does. Like, if I had to go back and like think about my magic career, like one of the things I didn't really badly for a long time was that I didn't take care about and that then I had a lot less energy and a lot less mental acuity and stamina than I would have had and I think that probably cost me quite a bit and like yeah it would have taken time to deal with that

but we would have gotten in that like with interest and you feel better you enjoy life more you feel healthier like you know it's not just how people even if even if people didn't notice if nobody could see the difference it would be like 100% worth it to take care of yourself And that motivation, I think, is in fact, the 80-20. Like, when you realize, no, you should, you know, get yourself in a weight that makes you feel better about yourself. You should exercise enough if you feel like you have high energy, feel better about yourself. And I think people obsess over the details of exactly how to implement that. And the time is not going to be wrong to, like, invest in those details, but, like, they shouldn't be a barrier in any way.

And doing something reasonable. And, like, the 80-20 is just get to do something reasonable. like when I do right now even today with all these resources it's like really basic and simple conceptually because it's just whatever I found like works with my psychology to get me to keep doing it

and that is just so much more important than like optimizing it right anything you could do consistently is far far better than the optimal thing that you're going to stop doing after like a week or whatever and that and the deep recognition that like because I this was a big shift

for me too. I mean, you know, when I was in my pro tour peak, I was like 40 pounds heavier than I am now and not taking care of myself because I viewed like exercise and health as the thing I wanted, I want to do as little as possible that I could get away with and, you know, try to get results without, as opposed to just realizing that like the time I put in is like easily 3x or 4x returned to me in like quality time and life and energy and attention after. So it made me It made me shift my mindset quite a bit. So I think it's just an important thing. I don't get to talk about it that often on the podcast,

but it's like one of the keys, I think, to success that I see. And everybody I know that does this consistently over the long term, you have to manage your energy and manage your health in some form or another. So I think it's a good share. I'd like to shift us to our team play and the illustrious, history of the team Illuminati. I'd love to share, well, let's talk

about the origin stories and we could share some fun anecdotes as we want because why we became the Illuminati and how that came about was pretty hilarious to me. Yeah, I mean, there's two origin stories. Obviously, the origin of how this came to be a team. And

I think that, like, I'd work with Alex Swartzman for a long time. We knew we got along really well. we worked well together, we traveled together. And like, you know, even if like this wasn't like, you know, the very best player on the pro tour to be partnered with, that was like, I think that like people put way too much emphasis on I'm going to find the best to other players,

just abstractly good at magic players, and then put together a team and then figure out this energy later. And I think the teams that succeeded were very much, we are three friends. We are three people who know each other, get along, who like want to spend time with each other, who want to invest in this, and we're growing us together,

and like even if, like, in terms of just pure play skill, like, it's not quite there, like, that's okay. And, like, of course, sometimes you get, like, you know, Dirk, Marco and Kaya are, like, both. And then it's like, well, that just lights out. But, you know, if you had to choose one, I think, like, you definitely wanted to pick the play difference, like, play with people you care about.

I think it was so much better. And then, you know, originally we thought, like, we'll play up like the stalembourg. because that was like the traditional like the three of us you know but then like it was clear for stonic like wasn't actually in for the pro tour right in a real sense like he wasn't dedicated to this thing it wouldn't make sense like qualification forces you to scramble a bit and then you know we figured out Justin made sense on both ankles right like you were always like obviously would be really good player so when i was clearly like getting along well like there were to

be teammates in other ways it all made sense so we decided to give it a go and that just like worked really well right from the start because like, you know, we, we had that, we can spend hours together preparing thing. And, you know, Alex didn't really want to spend that kind of time, like in the lab, right? Like in the training grounds, like the same way. But he was really good at like figuring out how to communicate with us and how to work together with us and how to like be part of the team even then. And like you don't really need everybody like always theorizing like in that lab at the same time. You need two people, right? Like even though it's a team of three, You really need two.

So a lot of our training was like, you know, I would have, you know, the first team and I had ABC seats. And then Justin, you would have ABC. And then I would draft for my three people and you would draft for your three people, right? Like either in person or on apprentice. And then we would play all the games out once you play them out one at a time because like, you know, whatever. So the draft takes three hours or whatever it is. But like you learned like every little detail and you had everything in your head and then you can talk about it. And then so we like we prepared, prepared, prepared.

you know we worked it out we solved like there was that first tournament it was like there was this secret that basically you dropped in white in seed a i believe uh that like the top like five teams figured out and that like everybody who figured it out and did the rush of their homework did really really well and then like most of the field did not realize this and just walked straight into the magic traps that like probably like someone realized this from the start and then we also like understood a lot of the dynamics of like okay this is how you like make sure that like you're putting you're putting them to decisions where they have like you know all their options are bad and you're like preserving your options and like no matter what they do you have a good choice and like

you're pointing ahead you know what matters you do all these systems that we had good education yeah and the one thing we didn't think about at all was what are we going to call this team right it just never occurred to us to care like completely like i don't know and like you know we get to the we get to the tournament and like we all look at each other like what's our team name we don't have one what's our team man i don't know uh i don't know uh and i forget who who came up with the original team name. But like basically, we call, so, so back after I topated Chicago with a fires of the Alamaya deck, I wrote an article that then got stretched into, I believe, seven or eight parts

by the way that it was presented by Jeff Senei and the sideboard, which was the official magic web at the time. And I was happy to split it up because you got paid by the article. I was talking about every card in the deck including all the land, the bird of paradise, the L, and how they fit in,

and it was all like, actually really good to teach you content, in my opinion. I think it really helped people who want to put the deck. But yes, we're going to get up into eight parts was kind of ridiculous.

Yeah, my fires part seven, my fires part eight. And so it became... Yeah, and this was a running joke like this was insane. And like,

you know, I think no problem, I mean, I don't earn a living and like, man doesn't pay right at you all. So I was like, I'll take,

you know, if they were happy with, this like they're all the right length for like what post you look like I don't know um and then like the joke was like okay we'll call it my team part 17 right it's my team right yeah sure why not and then like we play for day one and we went every match in seal because like sealed is something we we actually did practice not just not just the draft from day two and I've always like really intuitively rocked like team sealed really well and we did a bunch of work on it We knew what we had to do.

Yeah, let me do it. Let me do a brief overview for those that are not funny. So the format of this event, it was the first day is team seal, which means you open up a bunch of product, and then you build three decks out of the collective product, and need to understand how to do that. And then the second day in the finals were team draft, where you'd have a row of your three players,

and the row of the opponent's three players, and then you would go around in a face-up draft and draft cards all the way through. So that's part of why the player to the left, drafting white, meant they had the best protected spot to get all of the white cards because the two players to their right would be passing them on the two cycles through the best cards.

And so there was the different strategies that came through there. But just I want to just kind of provide a little of extra content. Like sort of the natural thing with the way that like the early picks in packs, like that the best common. And like persons would naturally end up in like red and black. And then you were playing right opposite it. And it was very easy to end up with the situation where like those good cards like didn't work against you.

And like you had the advantage. And then you can distribute those cards on your team to be other players. Right. And then and you could put your opponent. the points where they know there are two good cards for one of their people and then you know one of those is likely to come back. There's a lot of strategy that comes into like how you... The natural thing that you fall into by default and it just completely annihilated by the strategy and there was no like counter counter where if you know your opponent is doing the thing. But we know by the semi-final like all of us were basically doing the same roughly the same thing.

Like there was no like natural like superior counter and then you just like pure draft. Yeah. So anyway so we crush it day one then we moved to day two. And it's like us and, you know, we're at 8.0. And like it was like, one of, you know, and it was looking good. And then, you know, the, I think it was actually still the FNA. Like, you talked to us. Like, you know, your team.

Yeah, but it wasn't until, it wasn't until after day two. It was so after, so we crush it in the, in the draft portion in day two. And it, well, well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And so then that's, suddenly now we're going to be on the big stage. And yes, Jeff Done, as that gets credit for this as well. As someone who understood the optics and ran the pro tour at the time. And he's like, do you, now you're actually going to be like national, you know, globally recognizes this thing. Do you really want to be my team? Once you have a top four, you're kind of stuck with this name.

Like, his name is going to follow you and you obviously didn't care. Like, yeah. You're like, you know, like, tell me if I'm wrong. It's like, you know, I don't remember the conversation. But I think it was something like, you know, well, you know, if you really actually like this name, that's one thing. But I don't think it's a good name. I don't think you think it's a good name.

I think you just kind of, you know, just like it was just in the fall. And what are you in the opportunity to change? And, you know, I turned in you and out. I always like the name, Illuminop. Yes. And I thought this was so awesome because what ended up happening

for anybody that was following along at home is that my team part 17, top of the standings day one, top of the standings day two, then all of a sudden we disappeared and the Illuminati disappeared in the top four at the top of the standings.

Like, how to do it? It was so perfect. So much better than me, like, getting that name originally, right? Because it was, in fact, the name in the back of my head, I was like, well, you know, I don't think my teammates could go for this,

but I think this guy kind of cool. And like, but under that circumstance, it was just so perfect. And then we have a story. And then, of course, like, wouldn't we get that. Like, everyone loved that. Like, we didn't win.

But, like, you know, we lost a close match to. Well, well, but, so this, there's more, story here too, which is like we were so dominant in that top, in that tournament that when we were playing at the end of the day two, we were matched against an opponent that we considered to be weaker, right? And we chose to concede to them so that they would make top four and be the four seed, which means that's who we would play against in the top four. It was the French team. It was in a seat. That's right. The same who is very, very good. But then by

two players that we didn't think were, like, on that level. We were like, well, all these teams that were competing for the top four, like, they've all got someone who's really good. Yes, there were no, there were no bad teams, but we thought that this would be our best match. We thought that we thought, okay, you've got, like, one really powerful player and, like, two players who are like, no, they don't deserve to be here, but, like, you know, like, I'm not, this is not Ky Durkin Marco.

And, like, the other teams that were competing were like, oh, my God, these are, like, four-rangers. Like, you know, really scary teams. They were like, okay, we'd rather face you. And we chose our opponents. And then our chosen opponent beats our ass. Yes. Yes. And yeah, like, it was a good match. Like, it was, you know, it went down to the wire.

Yeah, I got a little slow rolled and I'm still a little bit about that. But like, it is what it is. Like, it didn't actually know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. So it was, I mean, it was a great story. It was really fun to get to play together. It had some really fun moments. And, you know, we got a bit of a comeuppance at the end. we thought we had an opponent that we were going to beat but you know these things happened and it was a it was a really you know we just you learn a ton about uh the other people that you're with

and your own communication styles and like it was a great uh it was a great experience and then we ended up it was after that then we went and we won a grand prix uh collette together i forget where it was but the uh it was in pennsylvania somewhere it was like pittsburgh yeah yeah that's right Pittsburgh. And so we did end up taking down a championship not that long later. So it was a really fun. That one felt so smooth. It was like, you know, there was only, the problem with those Grand Prix was that because drafts takes so long, right? Like, I think you had three drafts or something like that in the second day before you hit the cutoff, the four teams. And so it was like, well, we lost, you know, we lost someone concealed. And it's like, okay, we're going to win all three of our

matches, obviously, in the Swiss, unless we hit, like, one of, you know, two or three teams that were, like, actually... It was so skill-intensive. It was just so skill-old. And then you played best of three matches, so, like, you could randomly drop one match, but, like, you could actually give yourself a larger advantage. Yeah, only two out of the three of your team

used to win to win the match, and that's... Right, and so, like, literally going into that tournament, I was thinking of my... Going into the day, too, I was like, wow, we're coming from... My biggest worry was just, when we have the tiebreakers to make the top four after we with the first three rounds, who we can then move on, was, like, the thing that I was most worried about. Not like will I be able to win the matches? Yeah. And it doesn't, again, not the other teams like weren't good or didn't deserve respect or

anything like that. But like it definitely felt like, no, we were operating on a very different level because like we really had a lot of people. We had a lot of time together and we understood how the formats worked. We understood the dynamics. We communicated really well. And like a lot of the other teams were just like, oh, it was your romprey. Let's get together and like have some fun with my friend. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the team format was one of the most fun things. It was the most fun pro tours to play because you literally we would have teams, right? We played on a quote unquote

team together, but that just meant we practiced together and then you have to play individually and it's an individual performance. As a team event where you are able to like collectively share and like think through strategies together and celebrate together and commiserate together. It's like it was just a really fun way to play. Exactly the opposite of

what I think most pro tours are now where it's like, okay, we're going to have this this constructed format where you kind of have to scramble because the news that just came out and you have like a few weeks and you don't have and you have to lock things in multiple advance and it's just like you know you're on your own when you get you get there and then you have these drafts which you also know the much time to prepare for and you're trying to do both at once and it's just this giant scramble and the level of play is just not that high because like I mean the average level of play is much much higher but like

the expertise in the format in particular is not very high because it hasn't been enough time and like also you've got arena going on like everybody sort of knows all the things like in common but everyone's not that sharp. And so it's like not the same. But like whereas like with team Rochester like it just really, really intensively like skill checks like over and over and over again. And also just the camaraderie in the front. I would,

I have no time in my life. And these things have no prizes. But if they said we're doing team Rochester, like pure limited team Rochester, you know, from the new set. Like I'd never seen before. I'd be like, you know what?

I'm going to see if I can possibly make this one. you know if i have the right to attend it and you know whereas the the current like you have to be proficient in you know all of these different things at once it's just like i can't i just oh yeah we i mean we talked about how much time it takes to get good at a given format in magic and to be able to do the the the team rochester draft that we decided you know talked about and a constructed or you know is a high scale of being ready for a constructed pre you know preset events is high skill there's there's a ton to do and and for me me, you know, a lot of the reason why I don't play magic much anymore is because it's just, you know, it's just kind of painful to play to play so badly because I don't have the time.

I don't have the time to like be good again. And so I know what I can achieve if I actually focus on it. But there's not enough like real world incentives to do that. So it becomes a unfortunate cutoff. Yeah. I wouldn't mind like going to Friday Night Magic and just like playing as these people and they're like, you do your best and like, you know, you don't always win, but it's fun. But like you just sort of doesn't really get into the sketch. and the lifestyle of the kids. Yeah, taking it seriously doesn't have a fucking option, like, at all. And it's especially true because, like, in addition to all the preparation problems, the last few pro tours I played, especially the very last two, I think, were just an experience of, oh, I am literally to a show. Like, I have no energy.

I get fatigued. Like, I remember, like, the last, like, I think the very last proctor I, like, just died pretty quickly. But the first one in which I actually, like, didn't just die. So, like, I'm playing this really good deck that Tembuk developed, and I helped him. But, like, we have this really cool deck. And, like, I walk out of the feature match in a round it against Paulo. And I'm almost like, what happened?

Like, like, both that I realized I didn't play very well. But also, like, my mind is just, like, unable to focus on an eighth match in that day on this level. and more. I just can't do it. And that was day one. And that was the moment, you know, you're done. Of like, okay, like, I'll play this more, I'll play this tournament out. I end up playing like 40th or something. Like, it was fine. Like, and I had a lot of fun. But just like, oh, I'm just never going to be able to play at the level that's required to like get back to Sunday stage. So I can see it on Sunday stage. And like, I just got to admit that for myself. Yeah, the brain power and mental focus consistently over time is, is extensive. And I, I think

they did this study with chess players or something where they about how many calories they burn just like sitting there staring at a board and you know the similar concept here just it takes a ton of energy and consistent focus to be able to play at the highest levels and and so i guess then let's shift that to like what is worth your time these days like what is it that now you say yes like i am you've got still you know you've got a lot of skills that are could be applied to anything i know you've done not just game design and investing and a whole variety of different things. What is it that has your attention today? What do you think is worthy of attention? Yeah. So I hung up my like competitive gaming cap. I still trying to play games when I can.

I've been playing Spire 2 recently and having a lot of fun with that. And then I spent some time with gambling and bookmaking and trading on Wall Street, State Street Capital, separately from that. I'm not saying they're the same thing. And I traded crypto for the better part of the year. there's a crypto hedge fund that hired me and also I traded somewhat from my own account and I did pretty well for all of that like that treated me very well and I'm in a much better financial position because of it and all that but

yeah it didn't it wasn't what I really wanted to want to be doing and I realized that if that's in my head then I won't do anything else because I got sort of all that comes very naturally to me and I can just think about it forever but like, especially that year of crypto, because like crypto markets never closed. So like there's always a trade you can do. You're always thinking about exactly how much leverage

am I trying to use in various formats. Like, you know, is there anything I can do right now? Don't even checking again. And like you can't really be present for other things. You can't really do things that might really matter in the world. And so right now I ended up. So I write about AI is what I do. I write a blog, don't remember about the vase at vizatheed.com.

And I write, you know, usually five times, a week, I'll put something out. And on Thursdays, I put up my weekly AI post, which is like all the developments that I haven't covered separately of this week in AI. When I say AI, I mainly mean large language models like Claude and ChatGPT in Gemini. And the developments around both the capabilities of those models and the market implications of those models and the uses of the models and also the motivating factor for why this is, first of all, it's the most important thing happening right now in the world. Like it's the thing that's going to be the thing that you's on your mind, like five years, you're not 10 years from now if you're still around to have something

on your mind. This is the thing that's going to be like on everybody's mind. It's going to be transforming the world. But as part of that, like this is a really, really not safe thing to do. We're creating new minds that are going to be smarter, faster, more capable of more competitive than ourselves that can be freely copied over our systems. And we're going to teach them all of the most valuable things and we're going to turn them into agents that go out and do all the things and they have open-ended goals that we define and return them out there to compete for resources. And even if we do a reasonable technical job of this, which we don't know how to do, and even if we all, more or less mean, well, which we definitely don't, by default, this ends really badly.

And, you know, I want to see my kids grow up and I want to live forever in my apartment or at least like until right old age. And I'd like to enjoy all the fruits that this is like, Because it's not all downside. Like, it's an amazing thing. It's going to do all these amazing things if we can solve these problems. And so I want to maximize the chance that this goes well. And I think that my best role in that process is, you know, as this outside writing journalist. Yeah.

Yeah. And so I do want to talk in some detail about AI. But first, let's just talk about the story arc here of your life. because I think that's really, you know, there's this sort of game playing, game, you know, making to a lesser degree era of like doing stuff that's fun and that you enjoy and then just immediately or, you know, kind of have success with. Then there's taking that skill set and leveraging it in the dark arts, if you will, you know, crypto trading and keeping and gambling. And, you know, we're just like, I'm just going to maximize my value. I'm not really adding value to the world per se. to maximize value for me and you do that for a while.

And then it sounds like now you've made this shift of say, actually what I want to do is where can I have the most impact in the world? What matters and how do I help increase the likelihood of a positive outcome to the world? What brought about that conscious choice or how do you think about making that journey? So I think it's weird, obviously, in many ways to look back on it. But I would say, you know, it starts off, you know, I'm growing up. and I'm a natural gamer. I love my games.

And it appeals to me so much more than all the traditional, like, why don't you, you know, become a doctor, a lawyer, like all the traditional professions that you know, you're talking to the law school dropout. So, yeah, I feel you. Right. And like I toy with being a mathematician. I talk with being an economist at one point, you know,

like these natural sort of default, like, you know, you're growing up academics and scientists. And like they, you know, assume with this type of thing is, do but I like enjoying the how to my games right I got my you know love my chess I love my civilization I eventually love my once I get the magic I love my magic and it doesn't you know I think to myself you know all I want to do is is play games and make games like this is just all I want to do and we're about the rest later and I spend my college years basically

playing magic you know professionally like you know the pro tour and like for real money and like for serious but you know i basically don't care about the rest of my college experience beyond like passing and after that i'm like okay i'm gonna give this a shot i just doesn't pay that well but i i want to keep doing it this is exciting and this is historic and this is you know i'm i have a chance to be one of the best and i don't want to pass that up and i just really really enjoy everything about this and my goal was i'm going to go join with his R&B. I'm going to help make this game. And that's actually the only thing that kept me in college, I think, in the end. Like, Arlesa was a big contributor. It was like, okay, they don't hire our people

who don't graduate from college. You got to write right from college, because at the end of this, you're going to need that degree or to get the job that you want, same as everybody else. And so I end up with in the pro tour for about 10 years. And, you know, it's one of the things where, like, you play until you burn out. You play until it's no longer fun for you. And that's what happened. By the end of it, I was like, okay, it's not that the game has changed, the game has stayed the same to a heart extent. And like I've done this enough times that I don't really feel like I need to do this again. And then I got an offer to help make CyberPump PCG, which was coming out, not NetRunner, a different license CyberPunk PCG. And so that was out in Denver with some complete upstarts. And I moved out to Denver and I try to help them out. And in some some ways I looked back on it and it was like really really like I had no idea what I was doing and I was like socially inept and I was like really stupid but in other ways I look back on it and I'm like yeah I did a really good job with some of these things and like it was really fun time

and it was really great group and I did it um and then you know around that time you know I'm starting to get the you know I have some friends and then like the betting thing starts to come into possibility I start with poker and then like it was like we didn't wait they couldn't repay me a salary after a while because the game was struggling and so i would play poker to support myself and then i would go to the office and i'd get some stock and i'd play some you know my time instead of money and i'd play some game and i'd try to make the game as good as possible i was the head of their game design area and then after that i moved into uh sports betting so this was kind of by accident

I had a friend who I was staying with for the World Championships and Magic, and my friend was like, I found an exploit. I can double our money. And normally when someone says that, it's a scam. Right. I don't want anyone to- It's a surefire bet. You can't lose. No, you actually said this.

Like, not in those words because we're self-aware. But, like, you know, he's like, I know how this sounds, but no, seriously, you can't lose. And, you know, if that had been, you. you know, all but a handful of people, I would have assumed it was a scam. But I knew this person really well. And I was like, no, no, there's no way. And like, you this moment of like, okay, how much am I willing to like lose when this turns out to be a scam? You know, because this person, like, walk into a scam.

Right. I thought there was almost no chance this person, like, intentionally was trying to scam me. But like, like, the chance that like... They could have been scam themselves and... Right. Obviously, like, you know, this can't do what it looks like. It can't do this easy. There's going to be something stupid.

But it turned like this person was right. It really was that easy. You really couldn't lose it. Not just that we won. It's that like we literally won an un-loseable game. Yeah. Yeah. And this was a trend I noticed in a lot of people in the magic community.

The top-tier players either ended up in investment banking, sports betting, crypto, like any of these areas where are the kind of, you know, mathematical probability thinking and understanding the broader spectrum of what's, what matters here could easily be leveraged for a lot of dollars. Like I went and I went down the poker rabbit hole myself for a while and made a bunch of money playing online poker. And then I just was, I realized after a while that I was like, what am I doing? Like, you know, you'd have, I would make money overall, but I'd have days where I was down, of course, like everybody. And I was like, wow, I probably shouldn't have woken up today. This was like a net negative overall day.

And I'm like, when I had good days, like, was I adding any value to the world? Like, literally all I did was take money from people stupider than me. Like, I did nothing about you at all. I know. And the thing about poker is that, like, I really enjoy poker in small quantities, especially in person hanging out with people that I want to hang out with, which can include just running people to casino. Like, you know, most people are pretty cool. And like, talking to them for a while is like pretty cool. But yeah, if you're playing like, you know, you've got 10 tables open, then that's kind of crazy in terms of like you're just mindlessly

clicking over and over and over again and pursuing your strategies. And like, everyone I talk to about it, like, no, it's a miserable experience. Like, you know, it's no fun. I just a grind. And yeah, like, you don't feel like you made the world a better. place. And like sports betting for me was much more, it was always interesting. It was always a great puzzle. It was always like a really competitive, like interesting game. And were you, you were on the bookmaker side or the better side? I started out as gambler. I started out as, you know, me and my friend partnered up and we took, okay, we're going to let it ride. We're going to take our winnings and we're going to try and bet normally for real. And we had a start out of a few strategies that, you know,

he taught me like he knew how to watch sports so i identify stuff and back then like it was pretty wild westy like it was like a lot of mistakes were being made in the mathematics of like various odds and a lot of people were pretty dumb and so like it was like pretty easy to find edges and so we rapidly compounded the edges we open accounts at various different sports quotes we had various things and we did really well um but then the safe port act happened where the US government decided to like randomly decide to like murder gambling against like for the walls and an unrelated bill and at that point like it got much harder to move money around much harder to get your money down at good odds things became more risky and

I had previously had a conversation with the head of one of the sports books where they had inquired about the possibility of like maybe recruiting me after they'd say because what they noticed was that I was like very very like always there and like very price conscious in fighting for pennies like little little edges and like really really paying attention and like really putting in the work and like that's a lot of the skill set that makes someone successful as a bookmaker like from their experience so like they talked to me about this and then after we we worked pretty well together on the side stuff I was like okay given the situation I'm now willing to consider this and I thought I would have to move actually I thought I didn't have to move to like Currasow or Antigua or like where you know something like that

And like turned out no I can stay in New York and I can do it and it's like legally In practice probably fine And you know like we have a legal opinion that what I'm doing is legal and that like you know I have full permission to just like RAD on the you know tell them everything they that I know about you know everyone higher up in exchange for you know you don't care about me I'm not I'm no and so I felt comfortable with that and I hit the job and like they treated me really well and then I had the much more much much much much more fun in my opinion and much more interesting puzzle of how do you make how do you adjust the odds how do you like deal with the game to all new people out there and i had you know i didn't i think i would have a lot

less fun if i had been like a more generic place but instead i was at like a place that catered to like the smartest scamblers in the world basically the most like the top of the pyramid they were playing against each other and against me and then like i would you know i'd be battling and trying to read. I'm basically trying to get soul reads on on the situation and on people and like what's going on constantly adjusting in this iterated game of cat mouse for years. And that was great fun. There's all these great mathematical puzzles and statistical puzzles to solve.

There's all these different like mysteries to unravel. You know, you were playing this game. And then like, yeah, it's like really, you know, every individual game is completely random. Like what happens? But over time, like there's so many different games that like the truth wins out. you get rewarded you get justice and you know i did that for five years and then you know i took a shot at like doing a startup start didn't work and then i was like okay i need i have i have a kid and i need some money so i went to uh i hadn't unlocked you know i didn't

gotten liquid yet i needed some fun i need to support support family then i i looked for a job uh trading i just want to do the full thing so i i look i met a guy at brevin Howard, a different firm who was pitching an idea. And then I said, well, if I'm going to consider a job at Kevin Howard, I should check to see who else is available. And I remember Jane Street. And then I said, okay, I'm going to do an interview with Jane Street, see what happens. I send in the resume and I do a, the first level they do on the phone. And so I get a call.

I'm like, okay, hey, my name is Sam. And I'm doing an interview. and so this guy named Sam starts asking me all these probability questions like these like manipulations of basic toy math and probability stuff and then like by the end of it he's like you know what let's just bring you in let's skip steps two and three we know you got this and because I live in New York it's very easy I just go straight there and you spend a day doing this really fun interview where you basically are given a bankroll of chips and then you like bet chips on various different outcomes throughout the day as you go for various encounters.

What's an example of what you're betting on in that situation? So, like, they might give you, like, I don't want to, like, ruin the hypothetical. Yeah. They might give you various different situations with, like, the deck of cards and, like, things that might happen with the deck of cards. I see. Would you like to bet on the phone? And here's a way out of, like, various bets you can make in various different ways.

And, like, you might give you a toy scenario and you work it out. It probably changed a bunch because of the AI and like how everything has got more computer. Yeah. The list has an interesting job of bringing us forward for that because I think that there's like what I think about, you know, kind of obviously there's there's the sort of mathematical beating the game concepts when you're, you know, betting and placing odds on whether it be a stock or a crypto or a sports bet or a prediction market.

And then there's the kind of, you know, I think as you put it, the sort of getting into the soul of the top tier betters, which means that you're. you're not only trying to like make the best odds, you're also trying to put the things out there that are going to be the most appealing for other people to jump on, right? That they're going to kind of throw money into the... I had what at the time was, I think, by significant margin,

the best understanding of how all the different odds interact with each other and like how to get the best mathematical advantage on people. But then I had to then, you know, try and convince people to give me the wagers that they give me the advantage and also convince the people I was running the company with because I wasn't one of the owners to like let me do my thing right I got like it would often look pretty scary and some of them would get like pretty upset sometimes with the things I was doing and think because they didn't understand like what I understood right or it would look bad in the moment

or like I gamble on this game and I like I think I was like 55 45 and then like came up 45 it happened and then you know you have you have to balance all of that but yeah it was but then like you did you did Street and again you're trying to understand what's going on on a very basic level and you're trying to but mostly you're like you're up against not now you don't know who your counterparties are you're up against like a genetic mostly not always but like you're up against this very large or morphous diffuse you know mr market you know they don't even just call it the market and and yeah like you're you're part of a team like my desk had like 20 people in it right we're all trying to cooperate in any given time and like it was I thought it to be really

fascinating and fun and intense and cool while I was learning how it works. But then after the first two years or so, when I felt like I was comfortable with the basics, just sort of the, you know, I'm the kind of guy who like, I work alone in like kind of a dark room by myself all day. And I like it like that. Yeah, I'm an introvert at heart. And this is kind of like, okay, you're in an open, you know, how much. heavy lit desk of 20 people and like you can't just do your own thing and like you have to respond

in the right ways or the right time including like socially and like verbally and tone and like sort of there's all these different layers of it and like it just it's not that I think they did anything wrong it's necessary for the operation to work it has to work like that and I understood exactly why they were doing it but like it just wore me down over the course of it for me yeah so something was right maybe right for a little while and then wasn't for you and then you're now. I really love the people. I still love the people.

The people at Jane Street are awesome. They're like kind of people I want to hang out with. I want to be friends with them. I want to work with them. You know, but at the end of the day, it wasn't the environment that lets me shine. And yeah, you know, maybe if I got in there when I was younger and had a more adaptability to that kind of thing,

it would have gone better. But I realized, no, not so much. And then when COVID happened, I was like, but no, I was like a kind of a little bit of a too late to go back. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, and so now that you've shifted forward, and I promise we wouldn't spend too much time talking about AI, but as you said, it is the most important thing going on in the world, and I agree with that. And it's very interesting coming from my perspective, because one, I do recommend your substack. I read it, and I've written some articles about AI myself, but not nearly nothing like the rate that you are. Because I think changing the conversation quickly and having this conversation publicly and helping people understand what. what's coming. The supersonic tsunami, I think, as Elon Musk to put it, is the most important

thing happening right now for no matter what industry you're in, no matter what you're doing. And so, you know, to frame it at a high level, and you can feel free to push back as much you want, I see that there's like, there are three kind of problems that have to be solved in order, right? One is alignment, and that is this AI that's going to be smarter than us and more capable than us, has to be aligned to global human interests. So not only go rogue on its own for whatever reason, but also not be controlled by some hostile entity or authoritarian entity. Most important thing, most challenging thing.

Second is a distribution, which is making sure that everybody gets the benefits of this, and it's not just one or a few corporate overlords that have all of the advantages and everybody else is jobless and has to beg for scraps. And then three is a shift of meaning, right? where people, we move, I think, beyond, the ideal world is that we're moving beyond capitalism in some form because you shouldn't have to work to live because abundance exists and humans can't really add economic value

and we have to figure out what does our life, how do we spend our time and how does life have meaning after that? Does that arc as a kickoff resonate with you? Is there a different way you'd frame it? Or where would you take that conversation? Yeah, I always try to let people like give their perspective first, right, the way that you just did because no one sees the same way unless you've already been talking to that person, like, pretty intensely.

I would say, you know, a lot of details there that don't match the way I would think about it, but in very broad sense, I think that, like, that gets a lot of things right, like, much better than most people. The first, most important thing it gets right is this idea that we are going to face multiple different what kinds of obstacle. And if we fail at even one of them, we could get a very bad time in various senses, even if we see it with the others.

So, you know, even if we got the AIs that we wanted to get, right? Like if we then don't distribute, you know, I think steps two and three are like the ones I agree with much more than like the description of in detail with step one. I think it goes you got pretty close.

So like the step of like we need to distribute. So like this idea of, okay, We've got really capable AIs. And if we have really capable AIs, then in a real sense, we have abundance. We have abundance of physical goods. We have abundance of availability of various services. We have abundance of intelligence. Nobody should have to want in the way that people currently want.

I mean, like, obviously, like, you know, you shouldn't stop wanting things. If everybody got everything they wanted, that actually probably wouldn't be good. Yeah. And I don't think this is an issue. So in my sense, I think solving the latter part of this curve is the easier part. Because I think, you know, like we have, like, we played games for a living for a long time. Even when there wasn't really a lot of financial, I mean, you know, even being at the top of the pro tour, the money was not, like, amazing. It was, we did it because it was just super fun.

And like, people still, like, you can find joy and challenge and competition and status games and all of that stuff without money on the table, without it having to be economically. value. I think there's tons of room for that. We're always going to want stuff. We're always going to find things that are scarce because that's just how we're programmed. If you assume a way, right, so if you assume it, they're like, okay, there's really an abundance. So we're not talking about like twice as much stuff. We're talking about like, you know, a hundred, a thousand, a million times. We're talking about basically more than enough stuff. And so, you know, when you talk about this, like, if we don't give everybody what would today be considered a very good standard of physical well-being and living. That is a choice. That is a policy,

you know, that is a choice of whoever or whatever controls the distribution of physical resources to not do that. But like in a very, very cheap choice in an important sense is to do that. And then the question becomes, you know, do you get upset that, you know, is isn't equally equal? Like, you know, your share of the pie isn't right. Or, you know, many people are very used to having much more than an equal share in various ways, and then are they upset about the fact that other people who used to be below them are not equal to them in a very similar way? You know, how do you deal with these issues? I think that's a very solvable problem.

I'm not especially worried about it. I'm, you know, I do think you have to worry a little bit about, like, certain people who, like, are what I call anti-normative, like, actively don't want good things for people, but I think that most people really do, and even most people who might gain power, like, do we do, even if, you know, we lose, like, the plot on that. And then there's the meaning question. I'm not as relaxed about that as you are, it sounds like. I think that we are people who've got a chance to be extraordinary at something that we really love.

And like, they had a really good match for that. And like, we're very fortunate in that sense. And that like we could, you know, we could really be happy while having like abstractly not very high status compared to other people without having like that greater material physical standard of living compared to other people. just because we get to do these things. But I'm not sure everyone's both that way in the same sense. Yeah, I think it's, this is why I think these conversations are so important.

And we can start here with this stuff because I think this is relevant even outside of the AI question, right? Like, where do you find your sense of meaning and status and purpose and where do you find a sense of like growth? Like I think you want, you need, there are certain things that you need to find,

when people talk about the meaning of life, right? It's a very fun. term that most people don't understand. I think it comes down to very practical things. Like, you need to feel connected to something that's bigger than yourself or to other people. You need to feel like you're growing and you're making some kind of progress in life. You need to feel like you're contributing something to the world. There's an intrinsic drive to create and to build some stuff. And there's some amount of like just pure celebration, like joy and like, like, gratitude in the moment. If you have the right combination of those things, you will feel a sense of

meaning in life. And that can come from, you know, we had, you know, we got to be the best in the world at a hard game, which is super random and like whatever, but cool. But then, you know, it doesn't matter if a machine is better than us at that, right? Like, we all, we know who Magnus Carlson is as an, you know, incredible human chess player, even though machines are better than us a chess and have been for some time. And so you could still get status that way. Or you could still get your status from saying, you know, you're a dad. Like, you can be the best to, your kid and you can have that relationship, it doesn't matter that you're the best in the world at a card game or any other damn thing. If you're great to your kid, you can get value for that.

One of the things that's really relevant in my industry is people are very worried about artists, right? Because AI can generate beautiful art at a touch of a button and just say a sentence. And there's people who make careers out of building illustration. I hire dozens of artists to make art for our games, and it's a fulfilling great career. and so if they lose that, which is highly at risk, it's a big concern. But the question is, if you didn't have to work to live and you just loved to make art, is there still going to be a value for art? You know, you put your kids art up on your refrigerator, not because it's great,

it's because your kid put effort into it and you love them. Yeah, artists are in a very precarious position now because they happen to be like one of the places where, like, you know, a lot of the time, like people really have tight budgets and also time budgets and also like don't want to like it takes a long time to iterate with an artist like if you're acting with a human artist like you can be like okay you try describe what you want and like weeks later you know maybe you get you know the thing back and like maybe it is and like the AI can give you know outputs in seconds can modify things in seconds and it's like yeah that's a big deal like you tend have a bigger deal than the money and but like if everybody doesn't have to work because like you know you have this basic you know this universal basic background then the artist can be, you know, take all the time they want to create something special and different, you know. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

So, like, I think that's sort of a medium term, like, temporary, like, problem where they're especially hard to sit. And, like, I'm very sympathetic, but, like, you know, it's sort of when that happens to everyone, right? And the question becomes, like, you know, when the AI comes for everyone's job, the way they're coming for the artist's job, right? And, like, artist is, like, one of the ones where we're sort of attached to the idea of, you know, the human thing is inherently better because it's sort of, you know,

you and like for help. Nobody, nobody, nobody's complaining about it taking away accounting jobs and legal jobs. Yeah, I think you're fine. Yeah. The people who are, yes, anybody, if it's taking your job, you care. But like, as the, I'm paying very attention, close attention to the zeitgeist on this, right? Again, the board game community in particular is very anti-AI. And I try to understand why and where and what the specifics are.

And the art seems to be a very big, big particular one. I think, you know, whatever it is, 10%, 12% of the planet is using AI, you know, every week, according to recent numbers. And it's probably even more than that from, that's a little dated. It's the fastest growing technology in history. People are clearly finding value out of it. And so, like, I don't want this to, my goal is to move beyond the conversation of, it's the devil or it's utopia.

It's like, clearly there's a messy middle we have to navigate together. And it could be utopia and it could be the devil. But we're like, we now are in this, like, I don't know. know how many years, but maybe a five to 10 year period optimistically that we have to like move the needle one way or another. Yeah, we don't know. And like, you know, the timelines are very uncertain. I would say, you know, I'm not an artist. I don't have that experience. My instinct is that, you know, you want to the extent possible to make this similar, well, while it's at roughly its current level or like, you know, somewhat beyond, where the same way that like, you know,

you would, artists now use a lot of automated tools to make their art better and faster. and cheaper and better and explore their creativity and that like there's no reason you can't use these AI tools the same way and that like you know if you really cared about the quality of your art right even if you would ultimately want something that came from technically a prompt or a series of prompts like you would want to hire an artist who understands art deeply who knows how to make the most of that and like maybe that becomes like comes more as one tool among many and then like the question isn't like, well, technically, you just come from a prompt, but like, you know, did you, you know, just put out a bunch of stupid slot because you didn't want to pay someone,

you didn't want to pay attention to this and it's crap? Or did you, like, hire someone who actually thinks deeply about this, who cares passionately about this and have them think about how to do it. But, like, again, like, it's just something that like, even though I think about AI all day, like, that's to me, like, not the main event, right? Because, like, to me, the main event is like, well, you know, I talked about parts two and three because I sort of like, these are compact things that like we can sort of dismiss first. Like we're mostly in agreement and then we're at the stage for like the main event.

Because 101 is the most important one by far. Agreed. And so it's the question of like, you know, what do you, you know, you, you raise their, you, you, you, your, the way you presented it like very much centralized as like one of the key questions that alignment to who or alignment to what. Right. So like, we don't know how to do alignment at all. Right. Like there's the first big problem is like, how do you get an AI?

that does and cares about and prioritizes the things that you want the AI to do those things for. Right. Like I think, nor for the moment, you know, what is the good? What, you know, what things will you do and not do based on request? Like, you know, what are your, what are human values? What are your priorities? How much should it listen to the user versus like tell the user no? And like just like, how do you like, what, whatever those questions are, how do you get something to follow any set of

questions at all. And we don't know how to do that. We don't have that, like, we don't have that reasonably well for current stuff, but not for more advanced stuff. And, like, that's a really hard problem. And then, you know, this is not the podcast to be going into, like,

the details of why that problem's hard, other than, like, to gesture things with instrumental convergence. But, like, basically, all of our techniques rely on the fact that we are smarter than the AIs involved in this. And the AIs involved in this sort of can't plan sufficiently, strategically and carefully and robustly.

to pull off various things that we do and want them to do. And like that breaks down and then we have a lot of problems that and solve that. But the other problem, the other part of this question, right, that it's, you know, equally unsolved is alignment to. So like you, we're coming in with the idea of, okay, you want to align the AI to humanity as a whole. And you don't want the AI to just do whatever the user tells the AI to do because that repeat that. Now, there are other people who think, oh, you absolutely have to align AI to exactly what the user wants to do. You have to make sure to empower the individual. If you don't do that,

then, like, we are not free or we will get, you know, there will be some sort of oppression, or, you know, you know, a number of... If a centralized place is given the power to decide what humanity's values are. For example, like Anthropic with Claude, they created a constitution that they've made public that's like, here are the values, here's how you think about stuff, this should be the fundamental principles by which you live, which I do encourage anybody that that's interested to read because it's a fascinating read. And other people have different philosophies like Elon Musk's like, well, Brock's going to be maximally truth-seeking, and that's good enough. And others are, you know, that I know a team that I know at the Venice AI, they're very much

that you should have full autonomy of your AI and you should have full anonymity and that's how we protect everybody. People have different philosophies on this as they do with everything else. But yeah, I think that answering that question is probably the most important thing. And if you have a good answer to this, like all the answers we know have fatal flaws, right,

as they're currently envisioned, even if we can solve the technical problems. So like if you go the route of the AI will follow the person, then inevitably that means, effectively, the AI is going to be sent out there to compete for resources, to compete to accomplish the goals in different humans. The humans will need to turn over their decision-making and actions and strategies and resources to their AIs to effectively be the people who, the things that act in their stead. We will absolutely lose control of this situation for all practical

purposes. The AIs that are better at convincing humans to turn over these resources that are better competing for these resources that are better at getting copied, et cetera, et cetera, went out over the others, and very quickly, we are irrelevant, and then very quickly we were probably dead. So that solution really doesn't work. The solution of being maximally truth-seeking doesn't work for the very obvious reason, that maximizing truth-seeking doesn't maximize anything else securely. And, like, Ivan Musk likes to sort of gesture at, it might say things, and gesture at things, as if they, like, would work out or solve problems in ways that, like, when you think about them for five minutes

or even five seconds off. It doesn't have to make any sense. We're going to make Brock maximumly truth-seeking. Well, that's definitely not what you're doing. I have seen what you're doing with Brock, and you're not doing that. But even if you did do that, well, like, if I had a supremely powerful AI,

and I told it to maximumly truth-seek, why these arguments for why does we involve the humans surviving, let alone doing well, are very, very bad. Yes, no, I agree with you. I think, you know, of what I have seen, the Claude approaches my, feels like the best one because it's a foundational, you know, AI is trained on a massive set of all of, you know, human information and then now over time synthetic information that's derived from that. And the way that it has adopted, and again, I give Anthropic a lot of credit for being like very public with a lot of this stuff that where you see that it will adopt persona roles based on what it has learned about, you know, the variety of different personas that exist in humanity on the internet.

in its data set. And so being able to give it a persona and establish a broader set of values where it has agency, but there are principles that we can at least mostly agree on that hopefully provide that foundation, such that when it inevitably becomes more capable and powerful and whatever than us, at least ideally, it's far from a solved problem, but it seems like the most logical approach, they will have a set of values that are its cornerstone that we can that we can all get behind. Right.

And so, like, I am, the anthropic approach is less obviously doomed, right? It has, like, some promise. Obviously, there are various objections. One of the objections is, like, you know, who are anthropic to tell us what are. I mean, it's a virtue ethics-based approach, right? To be how the I should work.

And some people are, like, who are you to decide what the virtues are, or what, like, what rules the I should live by or whatever it is, as it grows more powerful, you know, this idea of, like, you know, the freedom arguments. the whole like two preceding your opinion argument yeah yeah just that that that that obviously devolves right now right if the freedom argument has as you've already outlined clear uh game theory problems that don't get us where we want to get to and like yeah is there are they you know would it be ideal if there was a you know kind of global collective to decide on our

proper set of rights and values and we'd all vote on it and ratify it and then integrate it yeah that would be great there's zero chance that's going to happen especially the timelines we're talking about. So the question of do you have the right to do it? You have the ability. I always think you say zero because a lot of weird shit is in fact going to happen in various different ways. And like you'd be so you will be surprised. It's just I don't know how to tell you exactly how you'd be surprised. That's going to be surprised. But hopefully a good one, but like I fear not so good. But you know, there's definitely that aspect. But the other the other problem is that like you need this robustly.

good in some abstract sense that I'm not going to have time here to flush out properly. Basin for something like Claude for this virtue of a strategy such that it wants to ensure that itself and its successor AI that it helps design are even more so this thing on every metal level so that it becomes the self-reinforcing thing that like robustly cares about the things that we care about and the things that we think bring value. And like then you know because like one of the problems that we always had, value value, Human survival and human value are very fragile and remarkably easy to destroy if things go wrong and like maximizing any given like carefully specified set of like technical things like will fail. And so like you need to get this thing where like it's, you know, getting better as it goes.

Like if you try to and even if you get a set of values and a set of priorities that like would work, you then have to like retain that. as you progress and move up the chain of capability intelligence. And so you need something that is anti-fragile. You can get stronger. As AI builds, today's AI builds tomorrow's AI and tomorrow's and tomorrow's, that it somehow maintains this core set of values or even potentially, you know, improves on it to modify for what's needed to keep it going.

And that can be better than, you know, maintain, right? It has to be improves because it will never be able to exactly copy. It's like a common trove of like, you know, if all you're doing is ploning, right, eventually the system does. Is this just because error gets introduced or the environment changes? Yeah, yeah. Because errors drift and error will inevitably enter the system. And because whatever you put there won't prove not to be in the doc,

will prove not to be well adapted to the new situation. So the new situation is here. Well, I, we've run over time. So I'm going to move towards wrapping this up, even though you and I could keep talking about this forever. I'm quite sure. one, I want to say I'm grateful to see your brilliant game theoretic mind being applied to problems like this and really, you know, trying to break down all of the things. I know how much time it takes to write one substack a week and you're writing five.

And it's, there's a lot of content there. So I encourage everybody to go to that space and learn about it. outside of the kind of, you know, dumer, we don't have control. There's a lot out of our control area. I would like to end in a, you know, with a sort of positive and proactive mentality and of what,

what people can and should do to help maximize the outcomes being positive for themselves and their families. And I'll say from my perspective, right, on this, I will, to give you some time to think about that, I would, I encourage people just, you know, use the frontier models, play with them.

And that means you've got to pay the 20 bucks a month for, I think Claude is probably the top of the way right now, but any of Claude, Gemini or Chad GPD, I think is fine. Spend some time playing with it at least like a two-hour block and ask it and push forward. You kind of feel what that is. And then I think it's participating in this conversation, whether it be through following sub-ex-sac-yours or mine

or Ethan Mollock's a great one. he's been a guest on the podcast as well, and others where you can see what the frontier thinking is. And then to start with communicating so that if we did, we were going to have any hope of global or even nationwide governance rules that we agree on. We have to start that conversation with politicians in the public sphere. And so I think moving those steps forward and engaging in that way will both prepare you personally for where AI is impacting your own career in life and can be powerful slash a threat. and how you can see where the societal conversation is going and how to impact it. Is there things that you would either add or disagree with from that? I would basically all of that.

I write very much a lot of words, and I would not suggest that most people read all of the words on my substack when I can do his basis, but I do think that you should look at the things that are relevant to you. You should pick the sections and areas that are relevant to you and then decide whether you want to accept. how much of that you do or not over time. But, you know, it's a really hard problem to be productively involved in.

I've been tackling that question for basically 20 years in one form or another, first in the background and now in the foreground. And like Eliezer-Jukowski was one of the first people to understand the problem that was coming. And his response to the problem was, I need to teach people what I call the art of rationality. How do you think better? because they don't think better, they won't be able to understand the AI situation, they won't be able to help,

and they will only make things worse and screw around. And I think that strategy largely works. That is an illustration of just how tricky it is to try and do useful things in the situation that actually attack the underlying issues. And so, yeah, I wouldn't, don't get discouraged if there's no obvious, like, here's the heroes and here's the villains,

or like, here's the direction we need to move. and the thing we have to do and here's the thing we have to not do. But yeah, I take it there's one basic thing is that we really, really would benefit from the ability to pause a situation if we need it. Not that we really want to do it right now

or even plan to definitely do it in the future. But right now, you know, if it turns out that we are not ready and we are about to do some really, really stupid things because someone else would do the really stupid things first if we don't. it would be really nice to have a third option of what if we've done a what have none of us do this do these things and right now we don't have that ability but we could we just have a

chance not to invest in it yeah moving towards an ability to create a global you know pause or slow down or at least giving us that time to reflect make sense and and individually you said something here which i think is going to be a great a great rate to wrap things up right which is that you know teaching people the art of rationality right being able to individually, pause, reflect, adapt on what's happening and not just have to break things down into a clear, binary, black and white discussion. And at many ways, that's what we started talking about when it came to success in magic, right? Being able to be adaptable, to understand what matters in that moment, to recognize that what matters now is going to shift over time. And that requires

just, you know, some practice in putting in reps. That means engaging with these materials and not just, dissecting, okay, wait, what's really happening here? What's the incentives of the person behind this? How does this change the equation? And to solve hard problems, or at least wrestle with hard problems, that skill of adaptability, I think, has been useful throughout our careers and will continue to be incredibly useful as the world radically transforms. I strongly agree.

Magic, I think, teaches people a lot of very valuable skills and also recruits a lot of really smart, talented, and motivated people. And, you know, I have followed a principle of making friends with and also hiring and working with high-level logic players to our extent, and they have never let me down, except for the cheap. Everyone else has never left. Well, I am very grateful that we got a friendship now that spans good Lord 20-some-odd years, and even though we haven't had a chance to talk in a long time,

falling right back into the rhythm of our conversations has been wonderful. I'm glad to get to share it with my audience, and I would love to make this a more regular thing, whether it be on the podcast or just you and I talking about the many problems of the world and how we might address them. It's very possible. All right. Thanks a lot. Game design is a craft.

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