#31 - Kristian Rönn - Escaping The Moloch Trap

How do we escape Moloch’s trap for good?

In this special Burning Man edition of Win-Win, Liv forgoes the usual purple chairs for dusty playa to chat with Kristian Rönn. Kristian is the CEO and co-founder of Normative, a platform for helping industries strive for net zero emissions.

With intellectual roots in Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute and his own mission to create positive-sum solutions to climate change, Kristian has just launched a new book - The Darwinian Trap - and in this conversation, Liv and Kristian examine solutions to the short-term thinking and cost externalisation that traditional markets often produce. A conversation full of evolutionary biology, game theory and economics as they examine solutions to the world’s deadliest demon.

Chapters

(01:42)-The Darwinian Trap
(03:42)-Why Is Coordination So Hard?
(07:19)-Unstable Equilibriums: The Butterfly Effect of Game Theory
(13:55)-Natural Selection: Capitalism's Ace In The Hole
(20:16)-How Can A Market Model Anything At All?
(22:10)-Betting On Our Values
(27:29)-What Problems Do Reputational Markets Solve?
(32:56)-Centralized Mechanisms for Overcoming The Darwinian Trap
(35:16)-The Risks of Over-Centralization
(39:46)-The Burning Man Model
(43:00)-Mixed Economies
(45:53)-Killing The Incentives or Kill The Organism?
(50:59)-The Miracle of Evolutionary Success
(54:03)-Finding Hope 
(56:21)-Spreading Awareness To Defeat Moloch
(59:58)-Why Burning Man?

Links

♾️ Kristian’s New Book
♾️ Kristian’s Bio
♾️ Liv’s TED talk on Moloch
♾️ Reputational Markets
♾️ Episode Transcript

Credits

♾️  Hosted and Produced by Liv Boeree
♾️  Post-Production by Ryan Kessler

The Win-Win Podcast:

Poker champion Liv Boeree takes to the interview chair to tease apart the complexities of one of the most fundamental parts of human nature: competition. Liv is joined by top philosophers, gamers, artists, technologists, CEOs, scientists, athletes and more to understand how competition manifests in their world, and how to change seemingly win-lose games into Win-Wins.

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