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Jim talks with Liv Boeree—science communicator, former professional poker player, and host of the Win-Win Podcast—about consciousness, egregores, multipolar traps, and the ethics of factory farming.

They discuss the nature of personal identity across sleep, the teleportation machine thought experiment, consciousness as a self-aware story-threading entity, the “attention as cursor of consciousness” framing, Jim’s memory-competition theory of attention, Gerald Edelman and Daniel Dennett as proponents of competitive models, the Telepathy Tapes podcast and nonverbal autistic children, Donald Hoffman’s view that consciousness is foundational, panpsychism and the “radio tuner” model, Liv’s poker premonition story and a $1,700,000 tournament win, two flavors of consciousness and psychedelics as a way of dialing into different frequencies, poker as spanning pure luck to pure skill, the data revolution in poker and the rise of game-theory robots, poker as an egregore and the idea that “the game is playing me,” probability at micro vs. macro scales, egregores defined as beings in meme space, Moloch as the personification of multipolar traps, Instagram face filters as a micro Moloch example, the Moloch mechanism of individually rational but collectively destructive action, Scott Alexander’s “Meditations on Moloch,” the breakfast cereal Moloch as a case study, the three interlocked layers of the AI multipolar trap, Marc Andreessen’s techno-accelerationism and its blind spots, introducing “Norma” as the second negative attractor state representing centralization and authoritarianism, Moloch and Norma feeding into each other, psychopaths as first movers in Molochian races, the obligate psychopath concept, Elinor Ostrom’s work on managing the commons, zero-knowledge proofs as a win-win third path, Descartes’ philosophical origin of Western indifference to animal suffering, expanding the moral circle, the conditions of factory-farmed pigs and the economics of gestation crates, the health and environmental consequences of factory farming, cultivated meat as the win-win solution, and much more.

• Episode Transcript
• The Win-Win Podcast, with Liv Boeree
• “Meditations on Moloch,” by Scott Alexander
• Currents 090 with BJ Campbell and Patrick Ryan
• “AI 2027,” by Daniel Kokotajlo et al.
• Governing the Commons, by Elinor Ostrom

Liv Boeree is one of the UK’s most successful professional poker players, winning multiple titles during her professional career, including a European Poker Tour Championship and World Series of Poker bracelet. Originally trained in astrophysics, she has hosted various popular science TV shows, and now works as an artist and researcher specializing in the intersection of game theory, technology and risk. She is a co-founder of Raising for Effective Giving (REG), an advisory organization that fundraises for the most globally impactful causes, and an ambassador to Longview Philanthropy. Her most recent project is the Win-Win Podcast, which explores how people and society can develop a healthier relationship with the forces of competition.

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Jim talks with John Krakauer—professor of neurology and neuroscience, director of the Center for Study of Motor Learning and Brain Repair at Johns Hopkins, and external faculty at SFI—about his 2017 paper “Neuroscience Needs Behavior: Correcting a Reductionist Bias.”

They discuss defining behavior as ecologically valid goal-directed action within an animal’s umwelt, behavioral decomposition being epistemically prior to neural investigation, bipedal running and Sherrington’s spinalized cat experiments as illustrations of that decomposition, what a satisfying neural explanation should actually look like, emergence and neuroscientists’ resistance to it, the concept of explanatory autonomy and the “wings don’t fly, birds do” framing, downward causality and the traffic jam analogy, Sherrington’s own epistemic humility about understanding thought, whether consciousness will eventually be explained the way life was or remain permanently fuzzy, the three traditions of studying the nervous system and their persistent tensions, the problem of double-dipping with coarse-grained behavioral language in neural data, “filler verbs” like “involves” and “underlies” that add surplus meaning to a correlation without doing extra explanatory work, everyday pseudo-explanations like dopamine for unhappiness and oxytocin for love, the identity fallacy, LLMs as scientific sparring partners and critical reviewers, Krakauer’s vertigo at the current moment and the possibility of retiring if AI generates better intuitions, interpretable AI as a new subject for neuroscience and psychology, Jim’s own artificial consciousness project building a rudimentary white-tailed deer, distinguishing consciousness from cognition and sentience, separating the machinery of consciousness from its contents, Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” and echolocation as conscious content, multiple realizability and its being pervasive and fatal to naive reductionism, the mereological fallacy and mirror neurons as ground zero for multiple fallacies, Marr’s three levels and the direction of the scientific project from behavioral goal to algorithm to neural implementation, the bradykinesia paper finding that Parkinson’s patients move slowly because they want to move more slowly, the C. elegans connectome and the limits of that knowledge, the Jonas and Kording microprocessor paper, and much more.

• Episode Transcript
• “Neuroscience Needs Behavior: Correcting a Reductionist Bias”, by John Krakauer
• “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, by Thomas Nagel
• “Why Don’t We Move Faster?”, by Pietro Mazzoni, Anna Hristova, and John Krakauer
• “Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?”, by Eric Jonas and Konrad Kording

John Krakauer is currently John C. Malone Professor, Professor of Neurology, Neuroscience, and Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, and Director of the Brain, Learning, Animation, and Movement Lab at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He is also an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute and Director of the Centre for Restorative Neurotechnology at The Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown. His areas of research interest include experimental and computational studies of motor control and motor learning, long-term skill learning and its relation to higher cognitive processes, prediction and mechanisms of motor recovery after stroke, new neuro-rehabilitation approaches including immersive XR gaming with generative AI, robotics and invasive CNS stimulation, and philosophy of mind. He is slowly working on a new book on the mind, intelligence, and AI for Princeton University Press.

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Jim talks with Jeff Giesea, entrepreneur, writer, and founder of the Boyd Institute, about his essay “Dionysian Futurism” and the broader question of what’s missing from our visions of the future. They discuss Nietzsche’s Apollo/Dionysus framework from The Birth of Tragedy, the critique that techno-optimist futures are lifeless and sterile, Jim’s extension of that critique to Game B and adjacent social change spaces, the distinction between positive Dionysian energy and mere degeneracy, Jim’s concept of decadence as wire-heading on dopamine traps and gambling apps, generational decline in conviviality, Gen Z statistics on less sex and fewer dates, the structural economic pressures of student debt and housing unaffordability, the shift in college freshman values away from meaningful philosophy of life toward financial success, the dinner party versus restaurant ratio and what’s been lost, the vanished culture of Georgetown dinner salons and political hostesses like Pamela Harriman, the trade-off between women entering the workforce and the loss of socially maintained conviviality infrastructure, the call to bring back the host or hostess curating eight to twelve people around a topic, Jeff’s “The Humanities Revolution Has Already Begun” essay and the Kairos Project’s decentralized open-source great-books discussion groups, Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition and its relevance to AI and what it means to be human, the tent-revival quality of the new bottom-up humanities movement, Homer and the bards as evidence that great books were never meant only for scholars, Substack as Renaissance Florence, self-gatekeeping around the humanities and the call to read great books at any phase of life, Jim’s return to the Iliad and Odyssey and current reading of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, audiobooks and the opportunity to produce better audio versions of copyright-free great works, Foucault as a poisoner of two generations of scholars, the woke turn in university humanities departments and Jacob Savage’s essay “The Lost Generation,” three drivers of the humanities revolution in pushback against woke academia, digital technology, and AI, AI as a tool for reading difficult books versus the risk of delegating critical thinking, Pirsig’s concept of quality as a North Star for deciding when to use AI, taste as the Silicon Valley word for quality, Jeff’s “goddamn Boomers” trilogy on the Boomer reckoning and the long Boomer farewell, the Boomer paradox of holding society together while holding it back, the gerontocracy problem of spending six dollars on old people for every one dollar on young people, entitlement spending flowing to the wealthiest demographic, Social Security couples at the top receiving over a hundred thousand dollars a year, California’s real estate tax caps and their effect on schools, the political power of older voters and the absence of an AARP for young people, Gen X’s failure to produce a presidential contender, Don Draper in Mad Men as a hinge figure between Greatest Generation and Boomer values, Boomer narcissism versus Gen X grandiosity, Jim’s reframe of the core Boomer failing as hyper-individualism rather than narcissism, and much more.

• Episode Transcript
• “Dionysian Futurism,” by Jeff Giesea
• The Boyd Institute
• Jeff Giesea (Twitter)
• “The Lost Generation,” by Jacob Savage
• “The Boomer Reckoning No One’s Ready For,” by Jeff Giesea
• “Boomer Caregiving Will Wreck Our Politics,” by Jeff Giesea
• “The Long Boomer Farewell,” by Jeff Giesea
• “The Broligarchy Will Either Save the World or Destroy It,” by Jeff Giesea

Jeff Giesea is an entrepreneur, investor, and writer. A Stanford graduate, he has built several successful businesses and recently founded the Boyd Institute, a policy lab for America’s future. You can read his essays on his Substack.