#6 - Cate Hall: Poker, Pandemics, Overcoming Addiction, and Meeting God

32:58And that's where a lot of your money comes from, especially in tournaments where you have a lot of amateur players. They just sort of can't conceive of their preset notions about somebody who looks like something playing a certain way. Have you always been a competitive person?

33:18Yeah. So I would say that competitiveness is one of my defining qualities for most of my life.

33:33To the extent that it sort of dictated a lot of life choices that it shouldn't have, because I just like the feeling of winning and being the best at things so much that I ended up doing things that I didn't care about. So I was sort of optimizing for the feeling of success. I think that that definitely carried over to poker, but I had some sort of change in the last five-ish years, maybe a little longer, where I just started to feel kind of gross about that. and not want to sort of have my personality wrapped up in winning, particularly in zero-sum games. And so have moved pretty far away from that, I think.

34:26Yeah, so was there like a particular light bulb moment where you suddenly felt like, huh, I think I'm done with zero-sum games? Or, yeah, how did that transition? because I went through that myself. And it's one of the reasons I want to, you know, I'm making this podcast because it's like I felt, I was so competitive to the point of like pathologically. So, and again, like so much of my life was revolved around like, what is a game that I know I'm likely to win at and I'm going to do more of so that I feel good. And I've noticed with me, it's been a kind of like slow, more like an erosion or an attrition or, you know, transition into this new, caring more about just like looking for omni-win situations or just cooperative things as opposed to competitive things.

35:13But yeah, I'm curious, how did that come about in you? I think that the seeds were planted some time ago and were sort of germinating, but the proximate cause was largely having a psychotic break five years ago, where I think that that just sort of radically changed my orientation to the world and what I was doing. I basically stopped playing poker overnight when that happened and didn't want to return to it after that because it just felt really stupid to be competing in this kind of meaningless game. Can you talk us through your psychotic break? Like what precipitated this? And what did it feel like?

36:06That's a fun question. I'm not sure that anybody really knows how psychosis works, but yeah, I think I have a number of different sorts of speaking about what I experienced that vary a lot depending on the audience. So I think that the sort of straightforward, acceptable version of it is that I had a manic episode that was initially induced by drug use and that then carried over into sort of a full-blown psychotic manic episode. And that persisted for about three months, basically, the really intense part of it. intermittently for the next year or so but it was extraordinarily disruptive life-altering um yeah it was just a really radical experience and i think honestly a really good experience for me on net so it certainly had its downsides well we'll get we'll get into those perhaps you can sort of talk through what the lead up was in terms of, you know, I remember you were, you know, your drug use had increased significantly.

37:35And I just seem to remember one, the moment where I was like, ooh, I don't think Kate's okay, was when you came to stay at my house, stay with me and Igor. And, you know, you were an atheist. You'd been a, I considered you sort of like, I was, you know, we were both atheists. And we're very interrationality. And you came in and you're like, okay, Liv, just so you know, I'm not an atheist anymore. I met God. And he's got a very male energy and also a weird, wicked, dark sense of humor. So that's the situation. And then you also started then talking about a lot of more other things that made less sense.

38:23that was a very like jarring moment oh I bet what

38:32was it like a particular moment like did you have a particular drug trip or was it like a trip where you were just like oh hey I'm in what does meeting God look like yeah I think it was interesting there was a very clear lead up to it where I'd been experimenting with like particular drugs I'd gotten very into a couple of particular drugs because of the effects that they had on my consciousness and ways in which I felt like they allowed me to experience different parts of my mind that I didn't ordinarily have access to. So there was this period of experimentation of maybe a few months leading up to it where I really had the sense that I was trying to come up with the right recipe for something.

39:23And it got more and more intense. And this is an aspect of the story that I think might sound weird or crazy, depending on your view of what happened. There was a very clear time when reality just broke open for me. and I in the like hour before that happened I was so sure it was going to happen that I like went around taking like photos of everything in my area because I wanted people like recreate it for later experiments I just really felt like something big was about to happen. Were you already high in that moment? No. Oh so you were sober? Yeah. Yeah. And I basically I was doing quite low doses of drugs at that time, like very small.

40:18But I took this combination and a particular sequence and really in a way that no previous drug experience had, and I'd had a lot of drug experiences at that point in my life, it was like I like reality just broke apart for me. What does that mean? Like what does that experientially like does the work did things look completely different? So the first experience that I had I think actually like the explicit God sort of thing didn't come in until maybe a week or two later. The initial experience that I had was basically I was suddenly removed from my body and saw myself from the outside. Then I zoomed out further and saw infinite me's in the same room stretching in all directions and this lit pathway between moments that I was following with my life.

41:26Like a timeline? Like a timeline, yeah. In many worlds? Something like that. That's kind of what it felt like. And then it zoomed out another level and I saw that this was like basically like a crystal lattice in this larger world where there were sort of not like God, God, but sort of Hindu like deities around me. and I remember there were these two wheels that they were turning which had men tied to them writhing in pain and I was so shocked by this and so afraid that I pulled myself out of the experience I think that particular imagery is really interesting to me just because of learning about Buddhism after that and samsara and...

42:31Why, what samsara? Samsara is like this circle of life and reincarnation whereby people are reincarnated over and over and the nature of life is suffering and the point of life is to learn how to escape that cyclical suffering. But you didn't know about that at the time? I had no knowledge of it whatsoever. It seemed like a really important thing to me, but it's not something that I'd ever encountered as far as I know in my life before that. Anyway, I pulled myself out of this basically because I was super afraid. And I remember feeling like there was this river of energy, like psychic sort of energy.

43:19I called it the river of consciousness in my notes after the fact. It was running through my room and wanting to pull me in to this sort of general, unified experience of consciousness. I was really scared by that because I wanted to sort of retain my individual sense of self. And I was afraid that if I sort of gave into that, that I would disappear in some important way. the experience was so categorically different from anything that I had experienced before in my life that there was no chance that I was going to like have that experience and then not try to figure out what was going on with like all of my energy um so I really threw myself into this the one of the initial experiences that I had after that was trying to go back to the river and allowing myself to enter and feeling myself sort of like dissolved in this universal consciousness.

44:20And it was just like incredibly beautiful. And, you know, people talk about like returning to source, returning to home. Really one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. So was the fear not warranted? I think the fear was not warranted. I think that my experience in general with exploring spirituality and like mysticism has been that a lot of things that seem really frightening at first are actually sort of about particular self-concepts and like types of like sense of ego that people have and are reluctant to let go of because they're sort of the self-image that we've built up over the course of our lives.

45:15But in moments where you're able to let go of those things, it really is the most profound, extraordinary experiences I've had in my life. So this was about a week prior to then meeting God. What was meeting God like and how did you know that it was God? And how was it different to the, say, the Hindu gods that you felt like you saw? I think it says something about the way that I experienced this event, that my really strong impulse was to figure out how to replicate it and record it and share it with other people. So the morning after this happened, I went and bought a fancy video camera and recording devices and set up an experimentation space in my house.

46:06and was sort of, I think I filled like 100 notebooks during this time of my life just trying to like record everything that I was thinking and seeing because I really believed that this was a real and like the most important experience I'd ever had. And being able to like have some evidence of that or some ability to transmit it to other people was like the most important thing I could be doing. I think though, you know, sometimes people will profess to like having a belief but will not really act on it. And to me, my obsessive devotion to sort of cataloging this in the months that followed feels like it's a testament to how deeply I believe that this was a real thing that was happening.

47:00On to the God point. Right. I think, so this period of time was five years ago, and it's a bit hard to remember like the precise chronological order in which I had experiences. I have sort of records of things that I experienced that I go back and look at every once in a while. I would say sometime between like three and seven days after I first had this experience, which was followed by subsequent experiences on the next days. That was like the first time that I met God. And to me, meeting God was, it was sort of, And so in recovery programs, which I later joined, people talk about having a God-shaped hole that they're trying to fill with drugs.

48:06And I think that that experience of meeting God, it's always so funny to say those words, but it made that hole in my life visible to me because it was filled for the first time. I just felt complete and safe and loved and all of the things. Just sort of like this power cord of all the beautiful and profound things to feel. And it was like nothing I'd ever felt. it was also tied to this like real sense of a volitional being that was sort of that i was interacting with um and one that as i told you at the time i guess felt like it had a really sort of funny sense of humor how did you get a sense of humor from it did like did it speak words to you did you hear like actual words you could understand or was it just like a feeling I think that I would describe what it was like as akin to hearing words, but sort of just having messages arise in my consciousness more so than like thinking that I was hearing somebody speak to me or something.

49:39there were just like particular types of phrases that would like well up in my consciousness over and over again when I would have these experiences and would feel like they really pointed to something and there was that there was also there are a number of experiences in this vein but one thing that I think people kind of get when I talk about it was this experience of suddenly flashing back to like all these moments in my life long buried in my like personal psyche or whatever where I had like told jokes that nobody had laughed at at the time which is really bizarre like this this like feeling and feeling like an outsider or like not appreciated something like this yeah and this just like deep sense of like no I got it that was funny like I was paying attention and it just really felt like this like caring thing that you know knew me to a really deep extent um obviously those are all things that were like in my consciousness somewhere so take it for what you will but yeah that I think that's like a good little vignette of what the experience was like so I can imagine a lot of people listening to this you know this is probably a very very polarizing conversation for a lot of people yeah I think you know and certainly for me when I heard this sort of five, six years ago.

51:29You know, I'd had a few drug experiences myself, but nothing like that in any way. And I was, you know, I was just like awash in a sea of skepticism and kind of fear, basically, because I was fearful for you, my friend, at the time. I could see you were fundamentally changed and I was concerned as to where this was going to go and, you know, what the logical conclusion of this was going to be. And Having now been through nothing anywhere near that scale, but a few similar things myself, where my own horizons have been a little bit more opened up to this stuff, I personally can almost put different hats on, and I can view it.

52:15In one moment I can be like, well, this is an archetypal manic episode that goes too long, you have too much sleep deprivation, and then it turns into psychosis, and one of the most unifying factors amongst all people who seem to have psychosis is that they meet God or they feel that they are God or some kind of like deity type thing where they see everything, feel everything. It's usually very blissful, but it's also got a lot of fear and then they want to get back to that and so on. So in many ways, it ticks all those classic boxes that a person in a white coat would say. But then I put like my spiritual hat on where I've been there myself and this also ticks all those boxes of like, Like, yep, there is this thing that's sort of out there.

52:56And until you feel it, you've experienced it, it doesn't, you can't possibly envision or like get a taste for it. So I guess my question is, how do you sort of epistemically navigate this? Do you sort of hold it in terms of like different probabilities of what's likely to be true? Or do you think both descriptions are equally true? We have a really poor understanding of what psychosis is, even what we think it is, where it's really a label that we apply to a set of symptoms and behaviors, more so than like a causal mechanism. So I have no compunction about saying that the behaviors and attitudes that I was engaged in at the time fit the definition of a psychotic episode.

53:47I think that if you look at other cultures and places in time, the same set of symptoms would be interpreted in very different ways. and sort of applying the label of a pathology to it can give this sense that we understand the thing that is happening when we really don't, even on a scientific account.

54:23So, yeah, I think that the primary difference between these two sort of ways of describing what happens is that one entertains the possibility that the cause of what you experience is not limited to things that your brain is generating maybe, and the other doesn't. I'm not even convinced that that's a very clean distinction. But it's at least a plausible one. But I think you can't, like, you can look at the same set of facts and call it a spiritual experience or a psychotic episode, depending on what your cultural background is, the, like, spiritual community that you grew up in. And so often when I'm speaking to more rationally minded people, when I don't have some interest in helping them understand what my experience really was, I just use the language of a manic episode and that's totally fine and I don't feel weird about that.

55:32you know, you are a rationalist by training, you know, and by that I mean someone who thinks about things in terms of uncertainties, you know, you're very comfortable with like living in the gray zone, probabilistic thinking, I mean, poker trains you in that, I assume law trains you in that. That seemed to mostly go out the window at the time when we were talking about it. I was like, how certain are you that what you met is God and that it's not just a product of your brain? And what was interesting was, was that you actually were still able to talk about things in rationalist language, which I've, funny enough, had a couple of other friends who've had psychotic breaks, and they were not able to in any way.

56:10They were dead certain about what they were believing in was real. You know, they were awash in hubris and had no granularity or nuance to what they were saying. But you didn't have that. You were able to. You were like, you know, I might be crazy, but this is how it feels. And you were able to sort of, you were still using the language of someone who had like had extensive probabilistic rationality, you know, evidence-based training? So I think it's interesting because I think that there are ways in which rationality helped me. I think there are ways in which rationality really hurt me. There are definitely ways in which it helped.

56:48I think something that felt very obvious to me at the time was that lots of people have experiences that they interpret as talking with God. Most of those people I assumed weren't or were later embarrassed by or attracted what they said. So I didn't expect that there was a reliable correlation between how things felt and what the reality was or what my later view of the reality would be. And it was kind of just like on base rates, you know, there have arguably been zero verified mystical experiences in like a way that a rationalist would accept. You can use different versions of rationalist and different versions of mystical experience there.

57:41But it's like probably this is a thing that people experience a lot and I'm not exceptional. I think that the way that rationality really got me in trouble and extended what turned into a serious drug addiction for a long time was there's a concept of a Pascal mugging. Can you explain that? Yeah, let me see if I can. So I don't really remember what the initial Pascal mugging is, but it's something of the form a man approaches you on the street and says, give me$5. I'll pay you back$10 tomorrow. You say like, no, that's not like the odds aren't good enough. I'm not going to do that. Why would you pay me back?

58:35And he like escalates the price until it's a billion dollars. and the sort of intuition that you're supposed to have is that at some point the payoff for something becomes sufficiently large that it makes sense to take the really small probability of a payoff. I apologize to anybody who actually knows what the true Pascal wager scenario is. I might do a full definition of it anyway. It's definitely good enough. It's something like that. I think that a thought cycle that I got trapped in was something like, it wasn't that hard for me to accept that there was a really low chance that what I was experiencing was like real in the relevant sense that would like justify continuing to explore and sort of do things to my mind that were costly.

59:31But I perceived that the the payoff of being able to do that and being able to document it and being able to translate it to other people was so high that I should just keep trying. And I think that this really kept me trapped for a long time because there were many times where I was sort of on the brink of getting out of this, getting out of the drug use, getting out of the psychosis. and that felt like a really tangible possibility to me. And then I would have this guilt that I was making the wrong decision on expected value terms. I was giving up this opportunity that while remote was incredibly valuable and that was just a selfish thing to do.

1:00:24And that really got me stuck for a period of multiple years. Yeah, because that's the problem of taking an extreme utilitarian view, essentially, right? It can lead you to some really

1:00:45far past what common sense would say. And I remember trying to reason with you at the time, when I was so worried about the amount of drugs you were doing, and seeing, man, you were chasing something that I don't know even is real. I didn't think it was real at all. I still don't know. But what I could definitely see from the outside was what it was doing to your health. Like you were, you know, I was genuinely worried you were going to die. And I remember trying to reason with you in those terms, like, look, if God wants you to give a message, if God is real and is talking through you, do you think he wants you to be running the risk of dying and then not even be able to communicate anyway.

1:01:27Did those types of messaging resonate at the time? I think that it was that type of messaging that was ultimately most productive for me. But that I needed to go through a lot of cycles of abusing drugs to get to that point where I was willing to say, I misunderstood what I was supposed to be doing here. And I think that there's an effect where the longer I had been doing this and sacrificing a lot for it, the more important it felt to me that there'd be some sort of resolution of the situation that was appropriate. That I would come to some realization or that there would be a time that it felt like, okay, I've done the thing.

1:02:21It'd be like a clear end to the story. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, like a nice movie. Yeah. Like a nice package to wrap up. This is it. This is the lesson. But that wasn't coming. No, that wasn't coming. But you did successfully break your addiction. Eventually. What were the methods you tried to break it? And in the end, what was the thing that worked? So, I mean, I tried a bunch of recovery programs in the sense of sort of repeatedly doing AA or NA, things like that. And not infrequently would have some limited success in them and then relapse after a month or two, something like that. I think that going to rehab was really important for me.

1:03:06Just having a lack of physical access to the option to do drugs for 60 days. and really giving my mind time to focus on other things through that. I also think there was just a lot of thinking that I did and a lot of minor sort of blocks in the puzzle or something that made it possible for me to quit. One of them, I think, was the thing that you mentioned, which is realizing that obviously this couldn't be what the plan was and I just need to accept that. Another was coming to the realization that the potential costs of my addiction and continuing to use drugs were not that I would die, which I wasn't really concerned about.

1:04:07I thought if I die, I die, that's fine. But the bad situation was I would just spend all of my money, lose all my friends and family, lose the place where I was living, which became a possibility toward the end, and would basically just have a really shitty life. just like a really boring, unremarkable life where my brain didn't work very well and I wasn't doing interesting things. And that terrified me. So it was actually the fear of mediocrity? Yeah. You were fine with either a dramatically good or a dramatically bad outcome, but mediocrity was the thing that scared you. Yeah, yeah. I wonder if that's your competitive nature.

1:04:51I think so. I think it was also some form of self-loyalty where I felt like I'd been through a lot of really difficult things in life and had a life that I was very proud of and felt very interesting. And it just felt like a disrespectful ending to the life of the person that had put in all of that work so that I would have a good life. Yeah, it's interesting because I want to try and find win-wins in every situation. And what I would like the idea, I'm curious myself, I think it's good that we're deliberately not mentioning the cocktail of drugs that you were using, for example. I don't want to incentivize anyone to go out and do this.

1:05:37But part of me would like to experience what you experienced. But does it have to come with the cost that it came with? Why can't it be? If my philosophy, whether it's true or not, I don't know, but the philosophy I'm choosing to believe in is that this can be a positive sum universe and that there are win-wins in almost every situation and our job is to just figure out how to manifest them and how to think about them and reframe it, et cetera. And your journey, I mean, I'm guessing that you would look back on this and be like, you are glad for the experience, even though in some universes you probably didn't make it, right?

1:06:16But is there a way to have the kind of experience you had without the down? I think yes, for at least some people. I think there's, I guess, a body of thought on this in terms of people who write about psychedelic experiences a lot. Alan Watts is, once you get the call or once you answer the call, hang up. Some people are able to have... What does he mean? I think it's like, once you answer the call of the universe or receive information that the nature of reality is different from what you perceive it to be, hang up the phone. Don't keep trying. Don't keep calling back. Exactly. Don't harass the universe.

1:06:56I think that the nature of my experience was very much just like trying to pry open a door that had been sealed shut. I think that some people are more naturally inclined to that kind of obsessive behavior. I think that a fair amount of that for me was feeling this responsibility for figuring out how to share the experience with other people. where if it were a more common experience, I'd be less inclined to obsess about it. So I actually think that one thing that helped me, now that we're talking about it, was meeting another person in rehab who had very, very similar experiences with the same drugs and who also felt this profound guilt and just realizing that there were other people having the same experiences.

1:07:52made it feel like it was less on me to try to figure stuff out. And that made it easier to walk away from. What's your metaphysics now? Do you still believe in God? I do, yeah. I have sort of like a hierarchy of beliefs in the sense that there are some things that I believe pretty deeply and some things that I believe sort of lightly or like as stories for myself that I don't, you know, take too seriously or wouldn't be surprised to be wrong. I have a very strong belief that there is like a form of reality beyond what we perceive physically that is like really relevant and real and that it's the case that when people talk about having spiritual experiences, they're not speaking metaphorically, which is what I always assumed before I had these experiences on my own.

1:08:55I think below that, there's a level of I interacted with this particular type of God. It's not a very well-defined God in my view. It's definitely not like an omnipotent or omnipresent or whatever God. It's just kind of like a creator who is sort of doing his best or something like that. I think it's sort of, the most similar thing I know of in religion is like Gnosticism and the Demiurge. What are those? And Gnosticism involves kind of like a cascading series of gods from like the one true god that is like ineffable and not perceptible. And it sort of descends through levels of purity and power to the Demiurge, which in at least some versions is like the creator of the world.

1:09:56So it's like, he's not the god. He's just the person who created this particular world, sort of the same way that... So like the simulator. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, if you put it into those terms. Like the video game designer, basically. Right. I think that's a lot closer to what my view of this thing is. And which one did you think, you know, the one you met, which matches up? Was it the original, the OG? No. It was the Demiurge. More like the Demiurge. Wow. More like a guy who's like trying his best and it's like pretty good. Like he had a lot of great ideas, but definitely not perfect.

1:10:32Interesting. Right. Because that's always then, you know, I think one of the strongest arguments against like the classic God is all loving, God is all wise, God is all capable, God is all knowing. And then it's like, okay, why child cancer? Why pedophilia? Why torture? Why are all these awful, awful things in existence if there was this all-knowing, all-wise, all-capable, all-loving God? It just doesn't make any sense. So how do you marry those up? This is further down on the hierarchy of beliefs, which is I have a number of stories for this that seem plausible to me and no real way of sorting between them for thinking about the problem of evil in the world.

1:11:16Um, I, I, it feels interesting to me that anytime you talk about a God or a creator, people really attach to sort of like a pure Christian, you know, the God with all of the things and qualities. And I get why that happens, particularly in our culture. But it's actually like, if you think that somebody created this world, I don't see any reason to believe that that thing also created everything as opposed to there being other beings of spiritual significance, other layers of creation. Like, if anything, this means that there's a layer of creation that we're not perceiving. So why would you assume that there can't be others?

1:12:06And having, like, a single God feels like a very specific case of what God or gods could look like. And I think it gives a misleading impression of what I'm talking about when I talk about encountering God. So you got out of your addiction and you didn't go back into poker and you now lead up, well, I mean, you're best to describe it, but you now work in biosecurity, biotech. How did you get there and why? Yes. A lot of it was being in the right place at the right time and having certain skills that were helpful. So after I got out of rehab, I decided that I wanted to try to do things that were helpful to other people.

1:13:04And I had been involved to some extent in the effective altruism community and knew what that was about. And so we started looking for ways to sort of insinuate myself in that community and figure out how I could be helpful. And initially that was with my law degree. I was doing sort of independent research on a grant looking at ways that law could be used to reduce biorisk. And through that, met a bunch of other people in the community and sort of adjacent communities who are working on biorisk from other perspectives. Can you define biorisk? Biorisk is sort of like a catch-all term for a variety of different types of risks that go through biological systems.

1:13:47So it can mean stuff like everything from state actors developing and deploying biological weapons to stuff that accidentally escapes a lab. arguably it can also cover things like zoonotic disease but it's basically biorisk is a field of study aimed at reducing the risk of a very bad event from some sort of biologically mediated system as opposed to a chemical or some kind of physics accident so why biorisk in particular? because there are so many different threats to the world. There are so many active problems right now where you could have, for example, gone into global health, reducing poverty-related diseases right now, or animal welfare.

1:14:46There's just so many different problems. Why was that particular one, the one that drew you? I think the reason why biorisk is somewhat circumstantial. It happened to be something that I thought that my law degree would be useful for, a set of problems I thought that would be useful for initially. And there was some sort of path dependency where the people that I met were interested in working on this. I do also have like a biochemistry degree and did research for a while. And that's a marginally useful qualification, probably less than you would expect. But I do have some background knowledge, which is not true of a number of other cause areas that are somewhat popular right now.

1:15:35Does any of your poker knowledge come in handy? I think the primary way that poker knowledge comes in handy is just being able to think about risk and reward in ways that are quite counterintuitive to most people but become second nature to poker players. So this comes up a lot in discussions of catastrophic or existential risk, where there'll be a really small probability of something very bad happening that could wipe out a significant proportion of the human race. But that would be so costly that it's worth focusing on that risk and trying to address it, even though it's really unlikely to happen.

1:16:25You know, a lot of pushback people give on anyone who's working on sort of low probability, but potentially bad, you know, very large risks is like, you're being Pascal's mugged, right? They're like, well, aren't you just falling victim to that same thing? You're wasting resources on a thing that's, you know, if you think it's only a one in a thousand chance, okay, sure, it might kill 5 billion people, but the one in a thousand is so small, go do something better with your time and money. Like, what's, what would your argument be against that? With that specific example, that's like a one in a thousand risk of five billion people dying is really, really high.

1:17:01Some people will say why that's high, because to some people that doesn't intuitively seem that way. Right. So a one in one thousand risk of five billion people dying is sort of equivalent in value terms to a 100 percent chance of five million people dying. They're not actually equivalent in many relevant senses, but this is a way that you can think about what the real cost is. It's not incorrect to think about it that way. Yeah, it's at least useful for guiding decision-making to think in these terms. And so if you think that saving 5 million lives is important and valuable and you sort of trust the assumptions that you're relying on in your analysis, it can really easily make sense to do stuff with that kind of probability.

1:17:47Another aspect of this is that I don't think that I'm very susceptible to being mugged in this way relative to some people who take certain forms of long-termism seriously. my experience personally has convinced me that you just have to have a discontinuity in your thinking you have to just be willing to say at some point I'm not willing to take infinitely long odds for an infinite payoff or something you just can't even if there's a good argument for it you just need a rule of thumb to say no I'm not going to double or nothing in the universe Yeah, exactly. And I think that in reality right now, there are plenty of risks that are sufficiently macroscopic that it should be sort of uncontroversial to want to work on them, even if they have this structure of low probability, high value trade-offs.

1:18:54I think in addition to that, My personal view is that most people underestimate the risk of catastrophic biological events and that this is a relatively significant problem, a relatively significant risk, and one that is going to increase pretty dramatically in the coming decade. Why is that? That's just because of democratization of technologies that can have exponential negative effects, basically. As in, like, more people have the ability to create or release some kind of very dangerous virus or something like that because of technology is getting cheaper and it's easier, you know, biosynthesis and so on.

1:19:41Yeah. You'd expect that people would be more concerned about pandemics seeing as we've just had, you know, this very disruptive event over the last few years that has messed up so many people's lives and killed so many people. you'd think people would be more sensitive to wanting to do more pandemic preparedness, but in some ways people are like, oh, we've got it out the way now, which is not how this works. Unfortunately, it means that probably our original predictions were off. So it makes more sense to be putting more effort in to having better responses to it. People sometimes like to think about this question in a vacuum and think, do I think that this is the best use of my money?

1:20:21No, because it's a pretty remote risk. But if you think about government and other spending as sort of directed toward a portfolio of technologies and useful things in the world, there's an enormous amount of money that's spent on stuff that is much less valuable. And most people working in this area are just asking for a little bit of money to be spent on the thing that we've recently demonstrated could really shut down the world. Absolutely, yeah, yeah. And so it's a question of where the money is currently going and where it could go versus should buyers get all of the money or something like that.

1:21:11Right, no one's saying that. Yeah, just a tiny fraction. And yeah, to me, a lot of these existential risks that we face, they kind of almost fall into two categories. You've got the classic ones that you see the movies about, which are an asteroid coming at Earth, or supervolcano, or even aliens, or something like that, where it's like a kind of single external source of threat that we just need to figure out how to defeat. and certainly with something like an asteroid that is a real risk at some point it's just that in my mind that's an easy X risk and then we've got the hard X risks which are the ones where it's actually coming from our own technology or our own sort of internal competitive dynamics where our failure to coordinate is what's causing the problem in the first place it's what's driving this like all progress without the safety for example whether that's in biotech or AI or any other new powerful technology that could be used either for good or for bad.

1:22:19Do you have any inkling of, or any idea of like, the kind of questions we need to be asking ourselves in order to find, to slow these down or to basically put Moloch in a box or constrain it in some way. When it comes to sort of large-scale risks, a lot of these have the form of there are naturally offensive technologies and there are naturally defensive technologies. And part of the goal all the time is to reduce the pace at which offensive technologies are developed in order to let defensive technologies catch up. And I think that there are mechanisms for slowing down the development of the most dangerous things.

1:23:19So an example in the virus context would be efforts to limit access to sequencing technology or synthesis technology, where you can make the audience for those things limited to a certain smaller group of people. And this reduces the proliferation that's really the problem there. I think a lot of the pushback you hear from within the sort of progress forward scientific communities is that, at least the argument that I often hear people make is like, yeah, but you're basically saying that you want to restrict information, you want to keep information more centralized as opposed to letting us democratize it and publish everything.

1:24:10And there is an argument that as a rule of thumb, we shouldn't be withholding information from people. It's a very elitist thing to do. Who gets to decide what information is safe to be disseminated versus not? There's an awful lot of power, right? What would you say to that? I think it's just extremely true that you want to limit access to certain types of information. A really good example of this that's come up recently is USAID's Deep Vision program, which aims to go out into the wild, collect a ton of novel viruses that haven't been seen before, characterize them in a lab to see which ones are very likely to spread efficiently between humans and very likely to be fatal.

1:24:59Then publish a rank-ordered list of the ones that have highest pandemic potential openly on the web, the sequences for those things. And that describes me as like, or that feels to me like the argument ad absurdum of open access to information. Like that is so clearly a bad idea. Because you're essentially just like publishing the instruction manual of how to build weapons of math destruction on the internet, which any terrorist cell or any bad actor or any psychopath or anyone can just get hold of. Exactly.

1:25:39So we've talked a lot about Moloch and all the bad things. But to finish up, I want to talk about Win-Win because Moloch is the god of lose-lose situations, destructive competition. What's the opposite of that? It's win-win, the god of positive sum, games that make the world a better place. In any of your spiritual experiences, have you met anything that resembles that? The thing that feels closest for me to that concept is this sort of spiritual concept

1:26:24it's like the concept of a bodhisattva, which is basically that we're all responsible for helping one another spiritually improve in life. And that is like the primary purpose of a moral being's life is to aid other people in achieving sort of higher states of consciousness. And I think that sort of, that reflects sort of a belief that one's well-being cannot be separated from the well-being of others. That concept is also reflected in a lot of other places in spiritual traditions. And I think that that recognition that advantaging ourselves at the cost of other people really isn't winning really doesn't feel like winning um is an important one beautiful there we go thank you so much for listening or watching whatever platform you're on and huge thank you to Kate for opening up about what must be such a difficult topic.

1:27:48Please give her a follow. Twitter is her most useful, most commonly used platform. And of course, please like, subscribe, share, scream from the rooftops, however you feel to talk about the Win Win podcast. Make sure you catch the next one. There are some really exciting guests coming up in the next few episodes. So I love how this is starting to get the ball rolling. We got a podcast going. I'm going to stop talking now. Bye.