#34 - Igor Kurganov - Liv's World Series Poker Win and Fixing Social Media

0:00What's the most stressed you've ever been playing poker? watching you three but fold those tents on day four

0:13cheers a very nice end of the year cheers so are we going to tell people what we're playing for uh yes do you want to explain we're playing for something that was initially called personal assistant time until bill perkins dubbed it slave time and the thing that you stand to win is personal assistant time so because people have different networks we at some point figured it would be more fun to play for time most friends value each other's time roughly equally you would do a favor for a friend you would go and get something you'd pick them up etc right like even we treat time somehow oddly much more equivalent in friendships than we treat money.

0:56So long story short, this is Igor's preamble because he's currently down about five hours to me in backgammon slave minutes. We've been playing each morning. Before we start work each day, we'll sit down, we'll have a coffee and we'll play backgammon and scream at each other for about 20 minutes. It's on you, by the way. We play about two minutes a point, not even that big, but he's down five hours. So I'm five hours down against a person who doesn't even know the rules. Now we can all ourselves figure out whether it was luck or not. It's not boast, I'm just pointing out. You're just that bad.

1:28Or you're just up 80 points or so by sheer luck Holmes. You're going to fold if I double. You're going to pass every time. But you can maximally win a point. I would rather win that point on camera just for the joy of the game. I'll let you catch up a little bit. You can't just play bad. I can play however I want. You're going to lose and it's going to be so... and we'll have to cut the entire episode. This isn't my best game. Why are you so bad at this? Because I was excited. Yes, you made the worst play I've ever seen. You don't get to go back. Diabolical play by you. Absolutely diabolical. Oh, come on.

2:11No mistake, you lost a pip. Six, two, fuck. Ha! Ah, bullshit. Okay. All right, game's good. Two points. So remember when you could have just doubled and picked up a point? So as you can see Igor is a real gracious winner and handles himself with such dignity. I just like to have an opponent that I can spar with rather than one where it just feels like taking children away from the baby. Taking candy away from the baby. Have another drink. Okay, so that was nice. We played a game. What are we talking about today? I don't know. You need to gain my respect again. So what are you going to do for that?

2:56Well, okay. How about I remind you of the fact that I just won a bigger score in poker than you ever did in all your years of playing all these mega high rollers. That's pretty nice. That's a good transition. Stick that in your type. That was very nice. You've done quite well. It was pleasing. Surprising. On top of it, actually, the thing that was particularly fun for me as an observer was that in the first, like you were on the feature table every day. And in the first, I forget if it was a five or four day tournament. Yeah, the first three days I've seen like 18 hands that you were in. And nowadays most hands have the characteristic that, oh, you could check or bet here sometimes.

3:46Both are correct and you should do it with some frequency. so that it's not theoretically unsound to do the certain action here. In any case, you're still sweating, even though it's a perfect player. It's like, what are they going to do? And you not only did the right theoretical decision in 18 hands, but you also just did the perfect decision against exactly the hand that the person had at the time, which was just so fun as a viewer to see, where it was like, you're like, oh no, either could make sense. What's she going to do? Oh yes, she did the right thing. Fuck yeah. It was really, really fun to watch.

4:19Yeah, it was weird. Like the hand against moneymaker, queen, ten suited, where you'd have the mid-pair, turn a flusher, you'd check back, and then you'd just fold against him rivering the straight, or turning the straight. It was amazing. Yeah, it was weird. Because I didn't do any practice or training or studying whatsoever. I have played. No, we saw, because in the last two days, you actually made some errors. So that's where it ends, and that's where you're like, get don't don't get too high on yourself you know but here we can go with the first three days which were awesome as i was saying uh yeah i didn't do any studying whatsoever i in fact i'd only played one and a half tournaments uh the entire year and by one and a half because i played the main event in the summer the world series of poker for about two hours so i don't know if that counts for anything and then like another side event just for a few hours um that's it that's like literally it and I don't know, maybe the secret sauce is I needed to unlearn all the bad habits that I used to have playing.

5:25And I was just trying to play like a very intuitive,

5:31non-GTO, non-game theory optimal style of play. I'm just going with my reads. But I imagine you still try to be sensible in what you imagine that theoretical play looks like. Well, yeah. I mean, it's very hard to forget that. There were some hands which were not sensible, like you had, or not very sensible. You had like pocket fours that you called in a small blind against the cutoff open by Sam Chartier. And then you decided on a board where like, do you really need to start bluffing? And you just bluffed turn and river against him with like an under pair. But you actually got him to fold queens.

6:04So you kind of went against it and it worked out. That was also awesome to see because I was watching it and being like, oh no, no way he's going to fold here. This is like, she's just going to waste so many chips. And then you just get it done. How intense was it for you? So for those who don't know, so this tournament was down in the Bahamas. Igor is waiting for his US visa right now, so he can't travel outside the US. So I went by myself. He went to Vegas to play another tournament instead. And which is unusual for us, because usually we're always together whenever we played poker in the last 10 years.

6:36And so usually have this like, you know, emotional support of one another being around in the evenings and so on. Yeah, and usually I have a piece of you when you play outside of this time, which is really, really, really funny. It's the first time, I think, in the last 10 years where I didn't have a significant chunk of your action, but actual zero. It's really funny. In any case, GG, well done. Thank you. I'll buy you something nice. How stressful was it for you out of interest? It's much more stressful watching than playing. That's what I realize now. like even on the thing is when you're playing you're in a specific mental state the entire time right like you're you you have a fixed amount of time to make any decision it's there's a shot clock running and it's 30 seconds usually so the time that you have like you're one you're very cognizant of how many thoughts you are able to think within those 30 seconds like it was always very apparent to me whether my mind is working at like full capability or not whether I've slept well therefore which foods have which impact etc because like you have 30 seconds it happens thousands of times that you have 30 seconds to think about something so you get very attuned to how well does your mind work within 30 seconds it's not it's just repetition that's why you get so attuned to it and you just like therefore just develop this way of like how you're going to be there like now it's on you now you have to like perform within 30 seconds with your mind and think seven thoughts rather than only five or four and then like do some um waiting of the different factors to come to a decision in any case that's what you do while you're at the table you're busy if you're an onlooker you don't do any of that you're just like oh is it gonna work or is it not gonna work and you're like fully like um there uh yeah just like part of the emotion actually it's the same as um a friend who's a pilot said that if a plane was in dire circumstances probably the person the least stressed is the pilot because the pilot is just they're just so they're just they're they're so busy they're just performing they're just like they have so they know so many things to check and the next thing to do and to just like just do the thing whereas as a passive unlocker you have nothing to do so you have no control you have no control and you're You're just a total slave to your emotions, basically.

9:01So therefore it's much more stressful to watch. And at the mercy of outcomes that you have absolutely no input over. Yeah. That's a very good point. What's the most stressed you've ever been playing poker? Watching you three but fold those tens on day four.

9:21Literally. I've never had as much stress in my poker life as in that moment because I was in Vegas also playing a poker tournament in parallel Nikita was there he actually just walked up to me probably the best tournament player in the world right now well top five top five people debate in any case so he walked up to me randomly at that point and was like hey what's live doing and I was like oh I'm watching her look he's like oh what's she in and I'm like oh she just three bit the tents and he's like and I'm oh she hasn't called what's that and I'm like I don't know and then like we're sitting there observing you whether you're gonna call or not and after the player reshub and I knew that you were gonna fold probably and then you do and I jumped out of my chair while I'm playing a tournament literally jumped out and yelled out Okay, that's enough poker specifics.

10:20What I do want to talk about today that I think is relevant, I mean, I don't know if it's serious, but it's more meaningful, specifically to me at least, and relevant to this pod. The day before the tournament started, I saw some tweet by a guy called Lewis Bollard that was talking about some latest horrific thing with the way pigs are treated on US factory farms. And it got me all bummed out and I couldn't get it out of my head. And then the morning of the day one of this big tournament in Bahamas, I was in the shower and was like, screw it. whatever I end up cashing in this tournament, I'll donate 20 % to whatever the most effective charities are at improving the welfare of animals on factory farms.

11:11And now I'm in a situation where I have to donate$560 ,000. And it's incredible. And it's just kind of wild that there's only been one other occasion where we randomly pre-pledged a very significant amount to charity, which was before the World Series of Poker tag team event where we both were playing it together and we decided to pledge 50 % of whatever we cashed in that. Yeah, because you were allowed to have teams up to four people and we were like, well, we'll just play the two of us but let's put in just like charity as team member three and four. So effectively just like 50 % of the winnings go to them.

11:52And we were like, yeah, let's do it, why not? And then we end up winning that whole tournament. Yeah, so it's two out of two. I don't know, to me that feels kind of significant in some way. Also, another one, I don't know. But Martin Jacobson pledged a percentage prior to playing the final table of the WSOP main event, I believe 2015 or 14, one of the two years. He was the short stack going into the final table, ninth out of nine. And then on like 10 or 12 blinds or something silly. And then he won it. And it ended up being like a massive donation. Yeah, I don't know if I've ever pledged. Like, obviously, we had like rec going and the giving what we can pledge and like other donations come in.

12:36But I don't think I've ever otherwise said... But you're like some smaller ongoing things. Yeah, ongoing things. But I've never like had otherwise a tournament. Like a big pre-pledge on a specific tournament. You know, people always say poker is a zero-sum game. But in reality, that's only true if you sort of have this arbitrary boundary condition around what you define as the game. because in reality every single game that you play if game of tennis chess poker whatever um there are externalities and those externalities can be positive or negative and um you know with a game like tennis usually people end up even though technically one person wins a trophy one doesn't people end up fitter people end up perhaps better having a good time they'll have a good time the audience has a good time so there are always these like over spill effects these externalities and with a game like poker um you can also have a home game usually in a home a home game of poker is basically just pretty clearly a positive sum interaction because like sure someone loses and wins a little bit but the actual thing is that people just had a good time and that's the main effect of it that's why they keep coming back and doing it yeah yeah and like in this instance this charity pledge i mean it's just such a clear example of this zero-sum game actually being a win-win um not to like toot my own horn but i think you know the fact that a lot of the money in that tournament went is now directly going to like a really really important cause that it would never have otherwise gone to and taxes the biggest winner in every poker tournament is always the uh tax yeah it's the irs of the respective countries but yeah um but yeah it's it's uh i I don't know.

14:10It's just cool. And that's the power of games. Yeah, it is cool. It's cool. Why can women's feet be fridges?

14:23Asks Ryan344567. Go fuck yourself. That's not a Twitter name. I'm sorry. It's just I'm asking you that. Are you okay? I just had to justify my question. Wait, sorry. Let's redo this. No, no, no. We're keeping this in. Let's redo this. why are why can women's feet turn into fridges i don't know is this a joke no it's just a observation that many have made and probably have already answered as well but you're a physicist by training so therefore i wonder why is it the case that feet go below the ambient temperature of the room um that is an odd phenomena to observe right usually you would expect that most bodies, surfaces, etc.

15:10end up kind of equilibrating with the heat that is in the system that touches them. I mean, yes, presumably when my feet are cold which I think is what you're alluding to. I always have cold feet. Strange segue for the audience. They are presumably just at room temperature. I don't think they actually defy the laws of physics because no, they can't go colder than whatever the ambient equilibrium temperature is. No, they can. If there's some kind of refrigeration process going on. But I don't think my body's actually doing that. No, it's actually worse because your internal self is creating heat, right?

15:47You're a warm-bodied animal. And it's using that energy to create this refrigeration process in my feet. No, the reason is actually bad. The reason, I believe, is simply sweat. Are you looking this up now? Let's look it up. let's see if i will bet so much that my feet are not actually going below the ambient temperature this is actually an interesting physiological fun okay you don't need to always toot my horn every time you start with a sentence women tend to experience more intensity than men for several reasons women generally have higher core body temperatures but colder extremities due to differences in blood vessel constriction responses their bodies are particularly efficient in protecting core temperature by reducing peripheral blood flow you're protective of your internal self.

16:28Women typically have a higher percentage of body fat relative to muscle mass, your fat. Okay. So you're protective, you're fat. Women's feet are often proportionally smaller relative to body mass. You have tiny feet and people don't like that as well. Hormonal differences play a role. Estrogen can influence blood vessel constriction. Okay. So Claude says that you're overly protective, you're fat and you have tiny feet and that's why you have cold feet.

16:57I just haven't heard anyone make that point. And I'm the only one who harps on about it. I think it's... You sure do. You sure are. I think it's an important observation. Okay. Shibatoshi Nakamoto. Billy M2K. Love Shibatoshi. Yeah. The famous person behind the whole Dogecoin. Except without any Dogecoin himself. I know. Which is very sad. But he's brilliant. But it makes... It's an even better origin story because it makes the whole thing even funnier. it's as if it's nearly like perfectly great yeah i know anyway he asks can you talk about how people prey on insecurity to control others at small scale and how that relates to the larger scale of how media and influencer grifters on social media prey on widespread insecurities to control others for their advantage and how that fucks up the discourse in a dishonest way it's oddly specific question did something happen i think so it sounds like it i'm not sure about the whether it's just I mean you can phrase it as insecurities I kind of don't necessarily always like thinking about it as insecurities because it has a kind of negative connotation to it that I don't think applies to many things that like what's a classic insecurity that people have like people are self-conscious about how they look or something yeah or that they'll say the wrong thing or something like this I mean okay you can call it an insecurity but it's like no it's it's descriptively like true that uh being attractive has advantages and they it's reasonable to worry about that it's like what are you going to tell just stop worrying about it's like no people have like calling it insecurity has this effect of kind of dismissing it in a way of just just stop it and making you feel bad for exactly it's just like people have this like oh it's insecurity just stop it it's like it's not quite that like sometimes you can explain it it's like if someone has an insecurity about not having anything to say or saying the wrong thing or something like this like the way to address it is not to say just stop worrying about it it's like no to take proactive steps to actually consider yourself what would you do in this situation maybe you would say these things maybe you can learn about interesting topics or i don't know something right it has this flavor of just quit it when you call it insecurities or or like you need some deep therapy like talk therapy i think like no just uh look at the thing and try to figure out whether you can improve on it so it's like are people preying on insecurities like maybe it's referring to the whole like immigration thing i mean i i don't think again i again don't think it's an illegitimate concern for people to worry about the dissolution of their culture over time it's a legitimate concern it's like is it a legitimate concern given the current numbers to which it's happening?

19:41I think, no, not yet. But in the ultimate case, and in the like extremified version that some media presents it case, it's like, it's a legitimate concern. I just don't think that's the world we live in right now where this is actually happening in the US. So yeah, you're referring to the discourse which has been over Christmas about, it seems like there's been this big fracturing on a sort of center to right wing Twitter between those who, sorry, X, those who are pro-skilled immigration and those who think that it's just displacing existing American workers. Ugh. What? It's just been some awful plane crash.

20:23Plane crash? Yeah, and it's fucking footage of it on the Jeju flight in South Korea. Wait, in the world just happened? Yeah, ugh. It's horrible. And you see it fucking explode. Aw. It's just awful. Like, I just opened my timeline and it's just like, oh cool I just watched 180 people die social media is not new to this right like the news have been doing this for the longest time just like showing us the horrific events of the last week right here look at that rather than like what's happening in science look at this incredible breakthrough that just happened it's just people are not that interested in it and I think the reason of it is is well one of them is our minds clearly respond really strongly to it observing the plane crash it just sticks in your brain which also speaks to kind of the need desire whatever to which the mind cares to to see it in the first place as well it's it's just this weird dynamic it's really hard to avoid i feel like that's one of the downsides of social media compared to old school media where at least old school media would not they there was some degree of like i don't want to say like moderation in terms of the following video you may find disturbing you know like they gave they they do always give like warnings like that prior so you give you're just given a little bit of a heads up like what i don't like about that it's just like bam it was like right in my face there is a non kind of non-victim classic overprotective way to just say hey these images are well it's just have it have it pixelated and then be like would you like to click and then it's like it's an opt-in as opposed to an opt-out or not even an opt out you're just like there it is too late i don't think what you're saying though is that social media is strictly worse at this than um the news media the legacy media right well i'm about this very i'm not saying that the social media is more negative than the news media no i'm not saying that at all i'm just i'm saying specifically about the bam here's like an uncensored video of something extremely violent great right on your timeline that's all i'm saying yeah yeah it cannot be healthy for a populist to be on you know against their own permission consistently blasted with the most horrific images of war or like plane crashes or like accidents and just general horrific violence with you know on a daily basis and they didn't even like request that you know if you go to like some horrible gore porn website that's your choice you're choosing to do that but this is just like I'm just waking up in the morning and browsing my social media for interesting things.

23:01Oh, bam, there's a woman on fire. And no, I mean, it's not an easy problem to solve because, of course, any automated thing you implement will have false positives. Someone might say in response to that that, well, but you should know of the bad things that are going on, which is true. but then you should probably know of the things that are going on in accordance to their frequency of it occurring within the day with some weighting towards maybe like taking care of the bad things more than the good things more but then still probably it shouldn't be just your entire feed right exactly and and bad things get excessively amplified because they are so emotionally triggering and they like you know that that's gonna get the most engagement it's because it's a shock factor my point on the media though would be that them not showing images or video they're still their text is actually like as bad or worse arguably like they're constantly talking about negative things all the time yes and that's also a problem but it's a different flavor problem and i do still think a description of a text description of you know a plane crash is not as bad as the visual of it like visually like we are ultimately visual creatures you see something that is far as it's going to be far more triggering than hearing a verbal description of it.

24:17And I don't like the word triggering because it sounds, you know, it comes to this connotation, but you have to be selective over what information you receive. And again, it comes back to this idea of like, funny enough, the pilot and the plane, you know, the plane is crashing. The reason why they're calmer is because they actually have agency over the situation. But so many of the problems in the world, most people, in fact, 99 point whatever percent of the world has no agency, cannot affect, they cannot make change over these terrible things. But meanwhile, they're just getting force-fed 24-7, all this stuff, and it literally is making everybody insane.

24:49I agree. That's why one of the classic solutions to getting less angry by the news, et cetera, is to make it all more local. Like the things potentially that people should care more about is what are the issues within your district, within your city? Like what's the crime rate there? What's the schedule of delivery of like various services that happen? All of that stuff, one really affects you day to day significantly. And you actually have a lot of agency over impacting it as well. I think that would make much more sense. The point you make that we are not evolved to it is, I think, right. The reason we respond so strongly probably to this extreme violence is because in the ancestral environment, it would have meant that there is extreme violence happening right around you in your Dunbar number of people.

25:42someone is an extremely violent person. So you should respond really strongly to it and you should really care about it. It's a very different story if they're 10 ,000 miles away doing something else, right? Like that's, yeah, it's an interesting problem. I think localizing things definitely would be helpful just directionally. It's not the solution. It's like, I think one part of it is something like localizing issues. Sam Altman actually tweeted an interesting thing. I wonder what you think about it. He, yesterday or today, tweeted that social media algorithms are the first instance of a misaligned AI at scale.

26:23I mean, I don't know if it's necessarily the first instance, but it's definitely a very major... At scale. He says at scale. At scale. Yeah, I agree with the sentiment. Yes. These algorithms, it is not a mistake to call them AIs. and certainly in terms of the the misalignment um yeah i mean they they these algorithms their goal is to optimize for keeping people on the platform to maximize advertiser revenue that is their objective and that is misaligned to what is actually good for human beings the the users and it but right so so the objection to the point that he makes i think is exactly what you just said is is is it misaligned or is it just aligned to something else like it's misaligned to humanity and what would be technically good for the human sitting at the other end of the device but it's actually really well aligned to exactly the thing you described to maximizing shareholder value right so is it a misaligned ai or is it an aligned ai to the wrong type of value From the perspective of the shareholder, no, it's not misaligned.

27:36It's great. But shareholder is a tiny subset. Usually when we talk about AIs and humanity, we mean humanity at large. Well, but classically there are like two aspects to alignment, right? Like one is the political and the technical problem. Like can you make it do the thing that you want it to do in the first place? Whatever the thing may be, that is a technical problem. And then the other one is given that you can make it do something that you want it to do, what is the thing that you make it do? And that's the political problem. What set of things to choose in the first place? So therefore, it seems like on the alignment question, it's kind of, they succeeded somewhat at technical alignment because it is maximizing shareholder value, but they've chosen the wrong set of political objectives, arguably the wrong set of political objectives by optimizing it towards shareholder value at the cost of various other values, it seems.

28:28And interestingly, actually, I think,

28:34classically, how you value a company, uh it's it's market cap is it's a discounted future cash flow by the amount of years it's away so the earnings that it receives discounted by whatever time factor you want to put on it so you usually value whatever earnings it has in 50 years very very very little like next to nothing and in 20 years they're still valued a bit in two years they're valued a lot interestingly the effect that so one could make the argument that ai algorithms on social media leading to a destruction of teenager society or whatever one could say that oh yeah sure in the short term they spend more more time on the screen but then long term it's going to be bad for them but interestingly actually you get a lot of value from them spending time right now and then in 20 years where now they're heard from it and maybe they now have worse lives can't buy your products anymore that you advertise anymore right you don't care about it anymore but the shareholder also today doesn't even care about the thing in 20 years so oddly actually the kind of like short-term extraction at the cost of long-term value is something that is fundamentally ingrained in the discounted future cash flow algorithm.

30:01And therefore, I think such effects like short-term pain, short-term like joy for long-term pain are exactly the thing it would optimize for if it was aligned to this terrible graph. Right. So, yeah, it is aligned to its creators and misaligned with the people who actually use it. Yeah. Which, again, comes back to the very important distinction, and this is true, again, not just of social media, but of media in general. People think that the news and media that they consume is for them, or at least if they go onto a platform. but actually they're the product right same as like you know you're an animal in a factory farm you might be like oh well i'm fed this and i do that and like things are given to me and therefore like this is for me and it's like no you're like we can see that the animal is very clearly the product but from the animal's perspective it's like i don't know i've given food and yeah my conditions suck but like you know i mean who knows what the animal's actually thinking but you know they're very clearly the product and i don't see people who are like just addictively scrolling to something any differently than frankly like which includes us by the way yeah oh yeah i'm fully addicted yeah it's one of the reasons i think about this so much is because it like i suffered from it so much that's why i harp on about it so much um and good for those you know i know there are plenty of people who feel like they have just a great relationship with their social media they aren't addicted to it they have no problem with their phone time etc good for you but you're minority um and um yeah so what do you think oh shout out to antonio asfandiari who didn't even know of hogtua yeah um impressive not living online he's a poker player um what do you think therefore a truly aligned with humanity social media algorithm could look like i don't know if i If I knew, I would have said something already for sure.

32:10I think Elon's direction of unregretted user minutes is not a bad one. He specifically recently actually said that it should be kind of unregretted user minutes over time. So he pointed at the long term, how do people feel about it? So I think it's the right direction. But the question is, can you actually develop an economic incentive structure that also has everyone pulled towards it? Or will your kind of mission get a bit corrupted by having to make profit or something? The cool thing about something like SpaceX wanting to go to Mars and in the pursuit of that having to develop extremely cheap...

33:00tonnage to orbit actually is what they wanted to develop. It's actually incredibly aligned with a lot of other good stuff, right? It's a thing you can just max out on very easily and in the pursuit of that create so much economic benefit. I'm not sure that unregretted user minutes you can truly maximize to the last point, i.e. what if you can only get to one hour of unregretted user time per day, you know, and five hours, and then basically it always becomes more regretful. Then the company that has a, we care slightly less about the regret part, but we'll get two or three hours. That's where the users are going to go.

33:42They're going to get more likes, they're going to get more content, everything. So it's a difficult thing. I don't know yet what it is. I don't know if it's moderation. Do you have any ideas? I don't know I just have a strong suspicion that you cannot have something that's truly

34:01because what you need to do is overcome the you need to decouple profitability from the limbic system you want to encourage people to be their most higher-minded high consciousness selves when it comes to social media, not only in the way that they, what they put out there, but also the way they consume it. Part of the problem with addiction of all sorts is that people are, by definition, they're less conscious. When you're in that addictive state, the addicted state, you just don't have this, like your higher minded, your higher mind is shut off. You don't have agency over your own conscious experience.

34:41And so you just keep doing the thing because it's like, ah, you know, you are, you're like a zombie effectively. So to overcome that, you need to not activate the limbic system or you need to like and the, you know, this you don't want to be optimizing for the emotional reward centers of the brain. You want to be optimizing for like the intellectual area, the prefrontal cortex, whatever you want to call it. And. But that doesn't that, you know, that tends to therefore mean that people will spend less time online and so on. So I don't see all the while you have like a for-profit advertiser revenue model.