meta_pixel
Tapesearch Logo
Log in
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

6 | Liv Boeree on Poker, Aliens, and Thinking in Probabilities

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll

Physics, Science

4.74.7K Ratings

🗓️ 23 July 2018

⏱️ 70 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Poker, like life, is a game of incomplete information. To do well in such a game, we have to think in terms of probabilities, unpredictable strategies, and Bayesian inference. These are ideas that play a central role in physics and rationality as well as in poker, which makes Liv Boeree such a great person to talk about them. Liv is a professional poker player who studied physics as a university student, and maintains an active interest in science generally and astrophysics in particular. We talk about poker, probability, the likelihood that aliens exist elsewhere in the universe, and how to be rational when it comes to charitable giving. [smart_track_player url="http://traffic.libsyn.com/seancarroll/liv-boeree.mp3" social_gplus="false" social_linkedin="true" social_email="true" hashtag="mindscapepodcast" ] Liv Boeree earned a First Class Honours degree in Physics from the University of Manchester, before becoming a professional poker player. She has won well over $3 million on the poker circuit, including taking First Place at the 2010 European Poker Tour Main Event in San Remo, Italy. She is the co-founder of the charity organization Raising for Effective Giving, which has raised millions of dollars (largely from fellow poker players) for good causes. Home page Wikipedia page TEDx talk on probabilities Vox article on the Fermi paradox Raising for Effective Giving Twitter Download Episode

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

0:03.0

I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

0:05.0

Before jumping into today's episode, let me just talk about some meta commentary, the

0:09.7

State of the Podcast.

0:11.6

As we all know, this is a new project for me.

0:13.9

We're all learning what's going on.

0:15.7

I'm having fun.

0:16.7

I hope that you're having fun.

0:18.5

But we're still propagating the podcast out there in different ways.

0:22.7

I certainly appreciate any efforts that you folks make to get the word out through Twitter

0:28.0

or recommending it to your friends.

0:30.1

iTunes reviews or make me just as happy as any other podcaster.

0:34.9

Some of you might know that Libsyn, the host that I use for the actual podcast episodes,

0:40.9

has an automatic thing, well they will put the podcast on YouTube.

0:45.5

It's just a still image.

0:46.7

It's not really a video.

0:47.8

It's just the Mindscape banner logo there, but the audio is the same on YouTube as you would

0:53.3

get on the podcast.

0:54.8

So for those of you listening to it, if for whatever reason you would like to watch it

0:59.8

on YouTube, go ahead.

1:01.8

There's no video there.

1:03.3

There probably never will be any video.

...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Sean Carroll, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Sean Carroll and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.

Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.