Welcome! I’m Liv I spent over decade at the poker tables trying to figure out how we humans make decisions under pressure. After many wins and losses, I realized the games we play at the table are just tiny, controlled versions of the much scarier games we’re playing with our planet and our future.
I’ve since traded the poker table for the podcast mic, where I spend my time hunting Moloch: that nasty monster of misaligned incentives that prevents us from coordinating to solve our problems.
Whether I’m researching the Nine Planetary Boundaries, discussing the true nature of alignment, or making deranged short films about AI, my mission is the same: helping us find the “positive-sum” exits to the many traps we’ve set for ourselves.
I live in Austin, TX, with a blue-tongued skink called Frank, a sexually frustrated tortoise named Winston, and my wonderful husband Igor (hopefully not frustrated).
I grew up in rural Kent and spent most of my childhood obsessed with space and heavy metal in equal measure. Naturally, this led me to the University of Manchester, which offered access to both the UK’s biggest radio telescope AND the loudest rock bars. In between playing lead guitar in my band Dissonance, I earned a First Class degree in Astrophysics. I assumed my future involved more telescopes, guitars and equations, but the laws of probability had other plans in mind.
In 2005, while looking for a way to pay off my student debt, I started going on TV gameshows. One particular show had a cryptic ad looking for people “willing to use skill and deception to win £100,000”. I applied, got accepted as one of five contestants on what turned out to be a poker bootcamp. That was my first time playing poker. I didn’t win that particular show in the end, but poker quickly became my new obsession. To me, it wasn’t mere gambling; it was a beautiful, brutal laboratory for psychology, game theory and philosophy.
That accidental discovery turned into a career of my dreams. I traveled the world as a member of Team PokerStars Pro, won a European Poker Tour championship in San Remo, a World Series of Poker bracelet, and numerous other scores. I also met my now husband (and won that bracelet with him). Blessed stuff.
That said, in 2014 I started to get itchy feet. After all, poker is the ultimate zero-sum game: my win is another’s loss. Was that really all I wanted from life?
I wasn’t the only poker player thinking about this. So me and three other players co-founded Raising for Effective Giving (REG), a fundraising movement to encourage the poker community to donate to highly cost-effective, impactful but comparatively neglected causes (like farm animal welfare, deworming of kids in Africa and AI safety… which believe it or not no one was really thinking about back then, despite it obviously going to be a big thing in the future). REG raised over $12 million to these kinds of causes, so massive kudos to the poker community for their generosity.
Eventually, the puzzle of solving global systemic problems like biosecurity, AI arms races and environmental destruction outcompeted the puzzle of the cards, and in 2019 I officially “retired” from pro poker to work full time on them. My particular obsession today is finding Win-Wins and solving Moloch traps—those race-to-the-bottom dynamics that drive everything from the climate crisis to the AI arms race.
If you’d like to understand why, please go check out the rest of my work. It’s an all hands-on-deck situation!