Liv Boeree is a World Series of Poker and European Poker Tour champion, and the only female player in history to win both a WSOP bracelet and an EPT event. Liv’s story is super interesting, because she actually has a degree in astrophysics and combined her science background and passion for games to get into the world of poker and win all these championships.These days Liv spends her time as a science communicator and games specialist, and focuses on educating others about how to apply scientific rational thinking techniques and things like game theory to the decisions we make in our everyday lives. Navigating through decisions in life can be a pretty difficult sometimes, but the single thing this conversation taught me is that, there’s a lot of principles we can steal from poker (like thinking processes and resilience strategies) to help us along the journey. In the conversation we talk about a whole bunch of things and by the end of the episode you’ll learn:

• Game Theory: How lessons from poker can help you build resilience, and make better decisions for your life.
• Effective Altruism: How humans can become better philanthropists by using logic and reason to figure out the most high expected value thing we can do to solve the worlds most pressing problems.
• Safe AI Development – Why AI is the most high-stakes creation by humans to date and what their implications are for our future.

Enjoy!

00:00 Intro
04:34 Game show
17:58 Risk taking
24:20 Poker as a career nowadays
33:20 Building psychological resilience
37:50 Men vs women in poker
43:03 How much are people making from professional poker?
46:00 Winning the European Poker Tour
49:13 Getting into the focus mindset
52:52 Approach to energy healing
1:02:19 Relationship with money after winning the tournament
1:06:31 Effective Altruism
1:12:24 Positive sum philosophy
1:14:20 Poker with partners
1:20:40 Quitting poker
1:26:46 Interest in AI
1:37:32 Actions people can take
1:39:00 Moloch: Unhealthy competition
1:44:46 Thoughts on social media
1:57:40 The infinite game
2:01:19 Exploring the unexplainable
2:06:25 Books recommendation
2:08:19 Things to try out