13. Yul Kwon: “Don't Try to Change Yourself All at Once.” (UPDATE)

23:18Like you're grabbing all the things that you can, trying to throw them overboard onto these rafts that you're supposed to get onto with as much gear as you can collect. And by this time we had kind of figured out we were divided into racial tribes. So I was, you know, with my Asian tribe on this boat, along with all the other tribes fighting for resources. and there's this one guy named cowboy who's like this older gentleman he was essentially cast and fit another stereotype i was the asian nerd and then he was sort of like the i don't know it's a crazy kung fu master type person so cowboy runs up to me and this is the first time we've been able to talk to each other so he's like you you go get that chicken i'm like what are you talking about what chicken and it turns out there was a chicken that had been on the ship that had flown off the ship and was like bombing around in the ocean.

24:01And, you know, in my kind of confused state, I didn't think anything of it. I was like, okay. I jumped off the ship into the water. And then as soon as I hit the water, I had this like moment of clarity. I'm like, what the am I doing? Why did I just jump off the ship? And how am I going to get back on? Like I had no idea. So, you know, I'm now kind of struggling in these like bobbing waves. And I look up and I see all these cameras on me. I'm like, oh my God, I'm going to drown in the ocean. I'm a survivor. So I'm like, all right, well, I guess I better go get that chicken. So then I'm like swimming back to the ship with this chicken in one hand.

24:35And then when I get to the ship, this other guy, cowboy, like reached down and takes the chicken. And I spent most of the time that everyone was getting resources, slowly crawling my way up the side of the ship. And by the time I got back on, I was completely exhausted. I couldn't move. And then as soon as I got on, Jeff Probe says, all right, it's time to get off, get off the ship. Everyone has to get off the ship. And I'm like, oh, no. Oh, this is terrible. So at that point in time, I went looking for the chicken. And I see someone from the white tribe taking my chicken and was running away with my chicken.

25:08And it just occurred to me, like, that entire ordeal was completely for naught. That was probably the closest I got to quitting because I was so exhausted. And I just did not feel physically or mentally well or emotionally. And I always say, like, I don't think I can hack it. But again, going on Survivor itself was another instantiation of this kind of lifelong commitment I've had to putting myself in situations that made me uncomfortable. It was the most frightening thing I could possibly imagine being exposed in front of millions of people. So at that moment, I said, I have to do this. Like, if I quit now, I'm going to revert back to my old ways because I have lost confidence in myself.

25:47So I just kept through it. And fortunately, that was the worst probably day I've had. There are other lots of bad days. I mean, the reality of being on Survivor is it really sucks. There's no food. There's no bathrooms. There's no soap. It was pretty rough. And how many calories do you think you consumed on average on a day on Survivor? Man, I don't know. Not a lot. That season, they did not give us any food. In subsequent seasons, they at least give you a small allotment of rice just to let you subsist. But back then, I think they were saying, you know, there's enough natural food out there that if you can't figure it out, then you probably don't deserve to be here.

26:23So occasionally we would get some fish. For the most part, we lived off of coconuts, and that was pretty much it. What was your plan as you started the game? I had a pretty good sense of how you should play the game. So, you know, one thing that you always see people doing over and over again is acting like a jerk. It just happens every season. And you keep thinking to yourself, like, why do these people act like idiots? And then the answer to that, as I found out, is that if you're in an environment where you're miserable and it's just arduous and you're dirty and you're scratching all these bites, it's hard to kind of keep a lid on your emotions.

27:00But that's one obvious thing. Just generally be a pleasant person. Another lesson learned at a high level is like you don't want to be too much of a leader. You don't want to be the person who's telling people what to do, because generally people don't like being told what to do. And if you happen to be a good leader, then you're a potential threat, right? At the same time, you can't go too far under the radar. So it's that fine line. And at the same time, pulling enough moves that are subtle and in the background, but are visible enough that when you make your case to the jury at the very end, you can build a compelling case.

27:31Did you have a particular set of strategies in mind as you launched into the show? Yeah. So from a game theory perspective, I was always a fan of Robert Axelrod's work around the evolution of cooperation. He was a political scientist. He was really interested in trying to figure out what is the optimal strategy for praying prisoner's dilemma. So for people who don't know what we mean by the prisoner's dilemma, let me just say it's a situation in which there are two players. And if they can cooperate, they'll both be better off. But the private incentives are such that they want to cheat on the other person.

28:05And in the end, that typically leaves both of them worse off. Yeah. So one thing he did back, I think, around 1980 was to host a tournament where he invited some of the most prominent researchers, economists, political scientists, computer scientists, to submit a strategy for playing iterated prisoner's dilemma in the form of a computer program. So he set up a tournament where all of these programs would essentially compete against each other in a round-robin tournament of iterated prisoner's dilemma. And each time they played against each other, it would be something like 200 rounds. There were lots of different strategies that were submitted.

28:43Some were pretty complicated. The thing that ended up winning was one of the simplest programs. I think it only had something like four lines of code. And it was submitted by this mathematical psychologist named Anatole Rappaport. His strategy was something called tit-for-tat. It starts off cooperating. It starts off being nice. And then it just copies whatever the other guy did the last time. So if the other program cooperated, then the next time tit-for-tat would be like, okay, I'm going to cooperate too. If the other program backstabs, then tit-for-tat is like, okay, I'm going to backstab you.

29:18I'm going to get retribution. But then if the other program starts cooperating again, then tit-for-tat would cooperate. So super, super easy program. And tit for tat ended up getting more points over the course of the tournament than any other program by a wide margin. I teach a class to the undergrads that is an economics course for non-econ majors. And one of my lectures is on game theory and in particular on the prisoner's dilemma. And indeed, I try to tell them at the end of the lecture that tit for tat is a pretty good strategy for life. And basically says, start out being kind and giving people the benefit of the doubt when they betray you.

29:52react fiercely and punitively and let them know that it's not okay to betray you, but then give them immediate forgiveness and to repeat. And actually, if you only have a few rules for life, I think that's not the worst set of rules to carry around. So you took this theory that Axelrod had developed so seriously that that became the basis for how you lived your life on the island in this survivor setting, which is about as close in the real world to a game theory setting as we're going to see. Can you give examples of how you played the strategy? We started off as four different ethnic tribes, and then there was a tribe swap-up where we got divided into two tribes that had equal numbers, six to six.

30:35And then it gave everyone the opportunity to mutiny and to defect to the other tribe. And in this case, I had developed an alliance with the two Caucasian people on my tribe, this guy Jonathan and this woman named Candace. And when given the opportunity to defect, the two white people basically backstabbed us by flipping sides and joining the other tribe such that they had this massive numbers advantage, eight to four. At that point in time, it seemed like for the most part, we had virtually no shot of getting farther in the game. What ended up happening was we went on this crazy run of winning challenge after challenge after challenge so that we ended up getting down the numbers from eight to four disadvantage to a five to four disadvantage.

31:15So in terms of tit for tat, first of all, we tried to penalize them for defecting against us. For Candace, it was very clear that there was no signal she was providing that indicated an intent to cooperate. So we just kept on punishing her. Jonathan was still open to the idea of potentially cooperating under certain circumstances. I realized, hey, look, I should continue to work with him. That's from basic game theory. As it turned out, that ended up ultimately sealing the deal. He was eventually able to come back to our tribe, cooperating with me and I would cooperate with him. We got the numbers advantage and then we booted out the rest of the opposing tribe.

31:50So one key element of tit for tat is, as you said, is you need to be able to communicate to your opponents that that is your strategy, both to prevent them from defecting in the beginning and also from letting them know once they've made a mistake that there's a chance for redemption. So did you actually, literally with words, try to communicate that to the people around you, either directly or indirectly? You don't want to tell people that you're using game theory and that you're using this thing called tit for tat, because then that starts freaking people out, right? They're like, oh, no, what's going on?

32:22Like, oh, you're manipulating me. Yeah, I think the general rule of economics, which is that if you're interacting only with economists, you can be very explicit and you can tell them what you're doing. But when you're acting like an economist with non-economists, it's often better to disguise the fact that you're an economist for fear of frightening them, yeah? Yes. At some point, I tried to tell them what my strategy was. And Jonathan, I think, kind of got it. And I think Candace just made her nervous and helped kind of push her over the edge to defect. So lesson learned is, yeah, use game theory, use tit for tat, but don't tell people so explicitly that's what you're doing.

32:59So let me just interrupt the interview here, because the way you will use game theory there was amazing, but we glossed over it so quickly in our conversation that what was neat about it got lost. It wasn't until after the interview when I went back and I sat down with pencil and paper and I worked through the math that I understood exactly how brilliant it was. So let me take a minute to walk you through those calculations more carefully. So to recap the situation, everyone remaining in the game is now in one tribe. They're nine players and they'll be voted off one by one. Two strong alliances have developed.

33:32One has five members, the other has four members. Yule is unfortunately in the smaller of those two alliances, but he does have the hidden immunity idol, which provides its owner with a one-time protection against getting voted off. Without going into all the details, if both alliances hold strong and the dominant alliance plays its cards right, Yule has almost no chance of winning. The alliance with more members will simply vote the people in Yule's alliance off one by one. There's one series of events involving the immunity idol that can save Yule, but it's statistically unlikely. So mathematically, in this scenario, when I compute the chances of Yule's winning, it turns out to be only about 1 in 32, or about 3%.

34:15Then Yule hatches his scheme. As payback to Jonathan's treachery, Yule tells Jonathan that every member of Ewell's alliance will vote for Jonathan in every round. And he tells Jonathan that he, Ewell, has the immunity idol and he'll randomly pass it around within his alliance before every vote. Ewell then walks Jonathan through the math, showing him that if Ewell's alliance follows through on this strategy, Jonathan's probability of surviving the next few rounds isn't very good, well below 50%. But then Ewell makes Jonathan an offer. Come join my alliance. If Jonathan switches alliances, then this new alliance will have the majority and the immunity idol.

34:58Together, they could proceed to wipe out Jonathan's former alliance, giving Jonathan a straight shot to the final five and some reasonable chance of winning the game. In game theoretic terms, Ewell has used a version of what's called the mutually assured destruction strategy on Jonathan. Cooperate with me, or I'll make sure we both go down together. It makes complete sense, in light of this for Jonathan to switch sides. But the real winner from Jonathan switching is Ewell. Now Ewell is guaranteed to make the final five, but he also keeps his hidden immunity idle and doesn't have to share it with anyone, giving him a huge advantage later in the game.

35:34When Jonathan switches, the math gets tricky, but by my calculation, Ewell's chance of winning jumps to about 50-50. So this one brilliant piece of game theory took Ewell's likelihood of winning roughly from 1 in 32 to 50%. With a prize to the winner of$1 million, that's worth almost$500 ,000 in expected value for Yule, plus all the perks of winning. That is what I call economics in action. You're listening to People I Mostly Admire. I'm Steve Levitt. And after this short break, Yule Kwan and I return to talk about his second stint on Survivor.

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38:25I know that you've suffered from migraines your whole life, and that one way that you've gotten respite from them is wearing a mouth guard. But someone told me that they didn't let you bring the mouth guard on the show. so if I don't wear the mouth guard and I grind my teeth at night then I will usually wake up with a migraine I also had this bad tendency to literally chomp down on my tongue which would give me this kind of bloody tongue which was really gross so yeah for me one of the transformative things that allowed me to function in life was having a mouth guard so I got a doctor's note saying no no no I really need this it's like a medical necessity they're like nope no mouth guard so I was wondering I'm gonna get a migraine every day I'm gonna chew up my tongue like I'm not gonna to be any good.

39:09I can't believe you win. I mean, what kind of a person are you who goes into a situation like Survivor knowing that you're going to suffer from migraines every day? I mean, are you crazy? You know, again, it's this thing that I've had my whole life. If there's something that I feel like I can't do, I'm too scared to do it. I feel like I have to force myself to do it. So the first night you go to sleep and then when you wake up in the morning, you have a terrible migraine. What do you do? Well, the really surprising thing was, which completely confounded me, I was so convinced I was going to go and grind my teeth and chew up my tongue, wake up with migraine.

39:45And the first night I woke up, I didn't. I'm like, whoa, this is kind of weird. I feel fine. And then the next night, the same thing happened. I did not get another migraine. I didn't grind my teeth for the entire length of time I was on the island. The other surprising thing was as soon as I came back, I started grinding my teeth again and getting migraines. So you came off the island, you thought, oh my God, I finally solved my problem with grinding migraines. You don't wear your mouth guard, you're back in civilization and you're right back where you started. Right. You know, at the time I didn't really think about it too much because I just thought maybe it was kind of a fluke.

40:21When you're living on an island and you don't have any flashlights or lamps or anything like that, you wake up when the sun comes up and you go to sleep when the sun comes down. So your sleep habits are perfectly aligned with your circadian rhythms. I think another thing is the diet makes a big difference. For migraine sufferers, there are typically a lot of dietary triggers. And in modern society, you're eating so much processed food. I think that actually ends up being a real trigger for me. So I think diet played a big role. What about screens and computing, which dominates modern life? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

40:54So I work in technology and I'm a fan of technology and generally I'm an optimist. But in my normal life, I spend most of my time in front of a screen and I'm kind of squinting and I'm looking at these tiny little things all day. Whereas if you're on an island, you're very rarely straining your eyes to look at just something right in front of you and you're not locked into this one posture all day for hours and hours at a time. I think another thing that's really interesting is when I was on the island, I felt like I was whole in a way that I hadn't felt in a really long time. What I mean by that is we live in such a fast-paced society that you're constantly bombarded by all sorts of different stimuli.

41:31I'm giving a fraction of my attention and myself to this particular issue or this incoming email or to this person. When you're on an island, you don't have any of that. Literally, it's just you and your thoughts. And there was something about that that I found to be really kind of refreshing. When you're on an island, there are concrete, tangible actions you can take in order to address stressors. If you come back here to modern life, there's so many things that you have to deal with, but you can't concretely do anything about. It also becomes overwhelming. The thing that's actually been super interesting for me is I went back on Survivor pretty recently, and it had been like 13 years.

42:08That's the 20th anniversary of the show. The producers decided to do something they'd never done before, which was bring back the winners and have an all-winners competition. And I went back on the island, and I stopped grinding my teeth. Was it a tough choice to go back? Yeah, it was really hard. I honestly never thought I was going to go back. I thought the chances were basically zero. First of all, I have two young kids and I'd also started a new job. But I talked to my wife and she was surprisingly in favor of it. And at the same time, and this is just a coincidence, one of my close friends from the first time I went on Survivor, his name was Jonathan Penner.

42:43He and I became close friends after the show ended, and I became close with his family, including his wife, Stacey, and their two children, Ava and Cooper. He's a fascinating person, incredibly accomplished. He's a writer. He's an actor, a producer. The thing that really drew me to him, though, was he was incredibly devoted to his family. And in 2017, his wife, Stacey, started exhibiting these weird symptoms where she would start stumbling when she was walking. She'd start slurring her speech. She was ultimately diagnosed as having ALS. That's more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease. It's a neurodegenerative disorder that slowly robs you of your ability to control your muscles.

43:21It's a terminal disease. At some point, you are going to die. But the way that it progresses is just a horrifying process and experience. You slowly lose control over your body, while at the same time, you retain all of your sensation. A year after she'd been diagnosed, she'd lost pretty much all of her motor function. She couldn't walk. She was on a ventilator and a feeding tube and eventually got to the point where the only part of her body she could still control were her eyes. And that was how she communicated. An electronic device would track her eyes and she could look at a computer screen and slowly spell out one letter after another.

43:56The other thing that was even more tragic about their situation is that Stacy has a relatively rare form of ALS that's genetic in nature. So each of our two children, Cooper and Ava, have a 50 % chance of inheriting the genetic disorder that causes ALS. It was right when all this was happening that I got the invitation to go back on Survivor. And it occurred to me, maybe I can use this as an opportunity to share Stacey's story, to try to raise awareness and funding for ALS victims. My plan had been, if I did win, I would basically donate the earnings to ALS research. So after I had that realization, it became an easy decision for me to go back on.

44:37So you did go back on, and unfortunately you didn't win, but CBS really did embrace that vision you had about trying to further ALS research. Can you talk about how that worked? They filmed a PSA that aired during one of the episodes where I talked about Stacy and Jonathan to the other competitors. I didn't win, which was a bummer, but I fortunately made it long enough that I got at least some amount of screen time. I had pledged to match the first$50 ,000 in donations just to try to get people to start giving. And it seemed like it was the worst possible time to try to fundraise in the midst of this global pandemic when everyone's freaked out.

45:13But amazingly, people actually gave. We ended up raising over$250 ,000 for ALS Research and to support ALS families. Did it make it worth the exhaustion and the hunger and the obvious physical pain that goes with being a survivor? Yeah, I think so. The one thing you always forget is how hard the darn thing is. For 13 years, you look back with rose-tinted glasses and you just remember all the cool stuff. I will say that the actual experience of going on Survivor was really hard and it was emotionally just draining. But at least making a small difference towards something that could actually help other people, I think that alone was priceless.

45:53That was my 2021 conversation with Yul Kwan. Since I know Yule is always doing interesting things, I asked him what project had him particularly excited lately. Hey, Steve. For the past year, I've been working closely with one of my colleagues at Google, Blaise Aguera-Yarkas, to start a new research team called Paradigms of Intelligence. Blaise was on your podcast last year, of course, so you know him well. But he's the CTO of Tech and Society at Google and one of the leading researchers in AI today. And what we're trying to do is bring together an interdisciplinary group of researchers, including computer scientists and neuroscientists, engineers, philosophers, evolutionary biologists, and others, in an effort to really understand the nature and origins of intelligence.

46:37Right now, a lot of AI research is focused on developing larger and larger foundation models that use increasing amounts of compute and training data. But we're kind of going back to the basics and taking inspiration from the fact that the best example of intelligence we know of today is a human brain, which doesn't use a lot of energy and is kind of slow compared to modern computers, yet is capable of these incredible feats of intelligence that computers have only recently begun to approach. So we're exploring the fundamental building blocks of intelligence and the conditions under which complexity and self-replication, life and ultimately intelligence itself can emerge in both natural as well as potentially digital contexts.

47:17We're also exploring topics like artificial life, the emergence of complex and cooperative behaviors, the predictive social and collective nature of intelligence, cognition and consciousness and lots of other interesting questions that have yet to be solved. If you want to learn more about our team, you can find our GitHub page by googling the words Paradigms of Intelligence in GitHub. Blaze is also writing a new book on AI that describes the conceptual underpinnings of our research. It's going to be published this fall under the name What is Intelligence? But you can find a preview online now by googling the words What is Intelligence in Blaze.

47:50Okay, that's it for me, Steve. I wish you the best, and I'm looking forward to listening to more of your terrific interviews this year. Take care. As always, thanks for listening, and we'll see you back soon.

48:06People I Mostly Admire is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network. All our shows are produced by Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Morgan Levy and mixed by Greg Rippin. Our theme music was composed by Luis Guerra. We can be reached at pima at freakonomics.com. That's P-I-M-A at Freakonomics.com. Thanks for listening.

48:38Oh, hello. Did I lose you? No, I'm laughing. I'm just laughing.

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