kevin-zollman-2020-11-10.mp3

[00:00:00] But I think it actually looks like a game called the prisoner's dilemma, or sometimes called social dilemmas, because the situation that's best for all of us features an incentive to defect or to be a free rider, that is. Well, if everyone else is wearing the mask, if I don't wear mine or I wear it badly, it's not a big deal. I'm probably not going to get infected. Maybe I'll infect someone else, but probably not. And so I have an incentive to sort of deviate a little bit and then but I'm not special. Everyone has that incentive. And so everyone has an incentive to free ride a little on everyone else. And so that's exactly where you really need something like social norms or something to help make it so that people cooperate.

[00:00:51] What's up, everybody? Welcome to the artists Data Science podcast, the only self development podcast for Data scientists. You're going to learn from and be inspired by the people, ideas and conversations that'll encourage creativity and innovation in yourself so that you can do the same for others. I also host open office hours. You can register to attend by going to Italy dot com forward. Slash a d. S o h. I look forward to seeing you all there. Let's ride this beat out into another awesome episode. And don't forget to subscribe to the show and leave a five star review. Our guest today is a game theorist, philosopher and author who studies the evolution of language and the mathematics of social behavior.

[00:02:00] He's earned a bachelor's in philosophy from Kansas State University, as well as a master's and Ph.D. in philosophy from the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine. He's a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University with the primary research focus on game theory, agent based modeling and the philosophy of science. And today, he's here to talk to us about the mathematical study of human strategy known as game theory. So please help me in welcoming our guest today, author of The Game Theory Guide to Parenting, Dr. Kevin Zollman. Dr. Zollman, thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to be here today. I really appreciate you coming on to the show.

[00:02:47] Oh, thank you very much for having me on. I'm looking forward to it.

[00:02:50] Same here. I'm really, really interested in digging into game theory. It's something that's always been kind of elusive to me and something that I've never really kind of understood. So I'm looking forward to learning more about it. Before we get into there, let's learn more about you. So where did you grow up and what was it like there?

[00:03:10] So I grew up in Manhattan, Kansas. There is such a place. So it's where Kansas State University is. My parents are both professors or my father's retired now, but my parents were both professors at Kansas State. My father worked in physics and my mother was in science education. So it's a sort of small Midwestern college town there, sort of, you know, lots of them between the US and Canada. And growing up there was, I think, pretty usual for that. It's a smaller town, but it's still very vibrant and very intellectual and which was a fun place to be.

[00:03:41] Lots of my friends, professors were parent or sorry, parents were professors. And and so it was it was it was a lot of fun to grow up there. I was in interacting with my family. I was a smart kid. I had you know, I was lucky to have professors who were parents, but I was also sort of a little bit of a rebel and difficult to deal with. And so my parents and I would oftentimes butt heads. I didn't want to work as hard at school as I should and things like that.

[00:04:08] So so it was it was a fun but eventful and occasionally stressful childhood, I think, where you kind of expected to go into academia with two parents who are professors.

[00:04:20] You know, it's interesting. My parents were very good. They never pushed me to go into academia. They were always very much of the form. You know, you should find out what you love and don't, you know, with a mind to making a living at it. But but I never felt pressured to to go in their footsteps. But of course, it's the family business, you know, it's what I knew. And so it always felt very natural to me to be in academia. So while I never felt like pressure from my parents to do it, it just every every time that I sort of thought about it, I just thought, well, this seems like a good life. Like my parents, my parents were comfortable financially, never rich, but never poor either. And and, you know, had had had a lot of freedom in what they did. And so that was what really attracted me to it.

[00:05:05] And when you were in high school, what did you think that your future was going to look like?

[00:05:10] It's hard to say. I was a rebellious teenager, and so I was always trying to find ways to get into trouble. But I think that my plan was originally to be a computer programmer. I really enjoyed computer programing and this was the mid 90s. So it was the time when that was the first dotcom bubble was sort of in in the bubble was going. And it was an exciting time. So I taught myself programing and I really enjoyed doing that. And that was really my plan until until I got to college was to do computer programing. And then sort of at the last minute, I fell in love with philosophy. I took a class in high school that was on political philosophy, sort of the philosophy of government and what government owes to people.

[00:05:52] And I got really excited by that. And I ended up going to the State University on a debate scholarship. I was a competitive debater. And so I went there because it was a very good debate team. But I also got incredibly lucky because it was it's a wonderful philosophy department there. I didn't go for that. I sort of lucked, lucked into it. But but as soon as I got there, I just got interfaced with a bunch of really great professors who were really excited and engaged. And so that just got me going in philosophy.

[00:06:22] What programing language are you really into back then?

[00:06:25] Back then I was learning C and C++. Those were the kind of big ones, you know, I think I got started with Pascal or something like that, but C and C++ were C++. I think it just really come out. And so that was the big one. So I sort of I learned that initially. I then later have learned a couple of others because actually I still do programing for my job. And so, you know, I learned in graduate school I sort of shifted. At Java, since it was familiar, but also a little bit better for what I'm doing, what I was doing, and now I sort of you know, I'm one of these people who I'm not good at any programing language, but I know a bunch like a passable at a bunch of them. So I use a simulation platform called Net Logo. I do some programing and I still use Java a little bit. I use Mathematica, which is really good for certain things. So I sort of dabble in a bunch of different things.

[00:07:18] How does that make its way into the work that you do? Is it to run simulations and stuff like that?

[00:07:22] Yeah, it's simulations that a lot of it. So a lot of the work that I do because I'm dealing with with trying to analyze social behavior and especially how social behavior changes over time. You can prove some things mathematically, but a lot of times you have to run simulations and I'm a better simulator than I am mathematician anyway. And so I end up doing a lot of simulations and also some hybrid things where I'll do some math to solve some parts of it, but then also use simulations to solve other parts of it. And so, like Mathematica is a nice tool that I use because it can help do both. It can sort of solve some equations, both numerically. But a lot of what I'm doing is basically set up a social circle kind of model of a social circumstance, let it run ten thousand times and then do statistics on those runs to sort of try and get a handle on what what is the evolution look like?

[00:08:16] Because we can't just we can't go back and look at it. So we have to simulate it. Or what would it be like to have a group of scientists, you know, do the same scientific study a thousand different ways, you know? And so that way we can sort of do studies that really aren't possible to do in real human populations because we can't repeat an experiment in certain settings.

[00:08:37] And I think you might just be a data scientist.

[00:08:41] Yeah, I might be. I might be. You know, my statistical knowledge is not great because one of the virtues of of simulations is you can just get as big a sample as you need.

[00:08:54] And so, you know, if I find that I don't like my error bars, I have the the the the the the I'm able to go back and just say, well, run more simulations until those airports get smaller. So some of my friends who do empirical science are always annoyed at me. They're like, where your error bars? And I say, you can't see them because I ran it so many times.

[00:09:14] I'd love to get into more work, more like the game theory aspect of it. So let's start at the top here. Like what is a game and what do any theories about them anyways?

[00:09:26] Yeah, this is one of the real big sources of confusion because game theory, you know, when you hear it first you think, oh, of games like maybe chess or checkers or poker or maybe a video game. And indeed game theory is about all of those things. But to go to a game theorist, a game is really any social interaction at all. So any time you have two people or more often times a lot more who depend on one another in some way. So that is I care about what you're going to do and you care about what I'm going to do in some way. That's a game for a game theorist. So things that we don't think of as games or that we think we would be trivializing his games like war or politics or interpersonal relationships like a marriage or relationship between parents and children. All of these things are games in the game theoretic sense. And we don't mean that to trivialize it or make it seem silly. We just think that it turns out that there's actually commonalities between tabletop games that we play for fun and and real world interactions and that you can actually learn from from moving back and forth between what artists I would love to hear from.

[00:10:33] You feel free to send me an email to the artists of Data Science at Gmail dot com. Let me know what you love about the show. Let me know what you don't love about the show and let me know what you would like to see in the future. I absolutely would love to hear from you. I've also got open office hours that I will be hosting and you can register like going to Bitly dot com forward, slash a d s o h. I look forward to hearing from you all and look forward to seeing you in the office hours. Let's get back to the episode.

[00:11:13] When I first heard the term game theory, it conjures up some idea of like deception and things like that. Do you get that a lot from people and is that true? Is that not true?

[00:11:24] Yeah, it's very common because people think of game theory. Is this hyper competitive? You're trying to beat the other person and that's again, to connect it with like that's what you're doing and that's what you're doing in poker. And also the early days of game theory, we're really focused on that.

[00:11:39] They were focused on games where my success is your failure and vice versa. But modern game theory is is is far more expansive. It does deal with deception. But it also deals with honesty. It does deal with fighting and and and and competition, but it also deals with cooperation and and division of labor and and trust and all of these different things. So while game theory sort of got started in that sort of darker, competitive example, people now use game theory to study how animals cooperate with one another, how humans cooperate with one another, how we can, why it is we're honest with one another when we are and all of these things. So in the end, actually, game theory is about both the light and the dark of human interaction. And a lot of times game theory is about that gray area in between where we cooperate some, but maybe not as much as we should, or where we're honest to a certain extent, but maybe not as honest as we could be. And game theory helps us to understand why often we find ourselves in that gray area between the good and the bad.

[00:12:42] And you actually used to play quite a bit of poker yourself. Do you still play?

[00:12:45] I do. I do. The pandemic has has stopped it because I like to play in person and that's, I don't think, safe right now. But I'm looking forward to the opportunity of going back. I love playing poker. It's a it's a great game and and it has a lot of game theory. And in fact, it's what got me interested in game theory to begin with. I started playing poker as an undergraduate, started studying the game theory of the game. And then my advisor, Bruce Glenmore, is a philosophy professor, said, hey, by the way, philosophers do that use game theory to do philosophy. And that that was the that was the light bulb going off moment. That's when I was like, oh, now this is what I need to do.

[00:13:20] That's pretty interesting. Yeah, I seem to attract poker players onto my show. And I just interviewed Annie Duke a couple of weeks ago. She wrote Taking Bets. And how did she does so well known poker player.

[00:13:32] Oh, yeah, yeah. She's she's great. Actually, she and I are friends. We've we've chatted before and she's yeah. She's she's very, very smart. Knows a lot of game theory. I mean, she learned some of it from playing poker but has learned a lot since then. I mean, she was she's done graduate work in in areas related to game theory. So she knows a lot of it and applies it to a lot of different different things, both in her poker career but also in her career now of writing about decision making from audiences.

[00:14:00] So speaking of social interactions and speaking of pandemics, we're in a really, really interesting scenario where we're having to wear masks and some people are not wearing masks. Like how does game theory figure into into this new world that we have with this new situation? Can we make masks going into a game?

[00:14:18] Yeah, it is a game. And in particular, at least the best science that we have now suggests that it's a particularly difficult game, which is I wear a mask not principally for my own benefit, but for the benefit of those around me. And that's exactly the situation that game theorists know cause a bunch of problems, because if I'm doing something for your benefit, I have an incentive to not be always perfect about it, because it's because I'm not going to be the one that that that that experience is the bad side of it. And and similarly for other people. And what what is going on with masks is a big topic in game theory called a social norm.

[00:14:56] So the idea here is that when we have situations where we can cooperate for mutual benefit, that is if we all wear masks, we're cooperating, we're helping one another. We have to create systems to incentivize people to to not freeload, to not be a free rider, to not say not always wear their mask or not wear a good mask or not wear properly. And so our systems, like the things that have been around for a long time, like driving on the road or or not lying to one another, are being kind to one another on the street.

[00:15:27] We have we have all sorts of systems of like explicit and sometimes subtle ways of punishing one another for not doing what they should what people should be doing. Sometimes it's the law, like if you if you drive wrong, you'll go to jail or get a ticket or whatever. But sometimes it's just social sanction, like AIs being rude. So, you know, I'm going to not talk to him or I'm going to be I'm going to ignore him or something like that.

[00:15:50] The problem with masks is, you know, all of a sudden we needed to have the social norm, but we don't have those systems in place. We don't have that expectation that other people wear masks. And so figuring out how to change our social norms to get people to wear masks is really, really tricky.

[00:16:06] It's a really brilliant games. There is Christina Gary, who has spent a lot of her time studying how social norms evolve and how they change. And she uses game theory in order to try and understand how social norms change.

[00:16:20] And it's it's tricky because you they're very hard to get started precisely because I am I have to expect that everybody else is going to obey the norm before I want to obey the norm and so does everyone else. And so you've got this real chicken and egg problem, which is how do you get people to obey the norm if the norm doesn't already exist? And so Beharie has looked at norms in developing countries and all around the world trying to see how you can get them going. And they're. They require a lot of concerted effort, in particular, you have to get people to expect that everyone else is going to obey the norm. And so that's what has made swearing really difficult. I think in some parts of the US especially, is that if you look around and no one else is wearing a mask, it's very hard to get it started. You know, it once it's going, it'll keep itself going, but you've got to get it started. And that's that's the hard thing.

[00:17:13] So within context, like game three, there's these ideas of zero sum game, positive sum game. What type of a game would mask wearing be classified?

[00:17:23] As I would say, it's a positive sum game. So it's a situation where we can for a game to be a zero sum game, it needs to be that if one person wins, someone else loses. But what's happening with masks is we can all stand to benefit. If we all wear masks, we will all be better off than if none of us wear masks. So the possibility for cooperation is there. But I think it actually looks like a game called the prisoner's dilemma or sometimes called social dilemmas, because the situation that's best for all of us features an incentive to defect or to be a free rider, that is. Well, if everyone else is wearing the mask, if I don't wear mine or I wear it badly, it's not a big deal. I'm probably not going to get infected. Maybe I'll infect someone else, but probably not. And so I have an incentive to sort of deviate a little bit and then but I'm not special. Everyone has that incentive. And so everyone has an incentive to free ride a little on everyone else. And so that's exactly where you really need something like social norms or something to help make it so that people cooperate because they have an incentive to to shirk on their responsibilities.

[00:18:31] Prisoner's dilemma is a quite a famous game theory. Concentrate is one that I think comes up through the Google game theory. Do you mind talking to us about the framework for this game and kind of talking to us about what the optimal strategy for that would be?

[00:18:49] Absolutely. The prisoner's dilemma is one of these great stories in game theory, because it's a sort of cute story. But then when you start to think about it, it turns out that it's a metaphor for a huge number of social interactions. The basic story is familiar to anybody who watches like cop procedural shows on TV.

[00:19:06] The idea is you've got to prisoners are two suspects in a crime. The police take them and take them into separate rooms to interview them. And they say, we think that you committed this crime and your options are you can either stay silent or you can confess. And the police tell them, look, we've got you dead to rights on some minor crime. Say it's jaywalking. You're definitely you're definitely going to get a ticket for jaywalking no matter what. You don't have to confess or anything. We've got it. But we think you did something much more serious. We think that you committed a robbery or something like that. So here's the deal we're going to offer you. If you confess to the robbery, we'll let you off for the jaywalking. Right. We'll we'll give you we'll give you a pass on that. You won't get a ticket. But if you confess to the to the robbery, well, now it depends on what the other person does. If the other person also confesses you're going to jail for the robbery, we don't need your testimony. But if you confess and the other guy stays silent, you get off scot free, because now we need your testimony to convict the other guy. We'll let you off and you won't go to jail and you won't even get a ticket for jaywalking if you stay silent. On the other hand, you're definitely getting a ticket for jaywalking. And it depends on what the other guy does. If he also stays silent, nobody goes to jail for robbery, but you both get a ticket for jaywalking.

[00:20:23] But if the other guy confesses, well, now you're you're you're you're ruined, right? Because now you're going to get the ticket for jaywalking and you're and you're also going to go up for robbery.

[00:20:31] So here's the here's why it's an interesting case is that each prisoner can reason this way. They can say, well, look, if the other guy stays silent, then I should confess because I'll get out of the jaywalking charge. And I don't care. It doesn't I can confess to robbery because they'll need my testimony. So I might as well confess and then I can get off scot free if the other guy if the other guy confesses. So suppose that the other guy is definitely confessing. Well, in that case, I should confess to I'm going to jail for robbery. Either way, I might as well confess and get off on the jaywalking charge. So each prisoner reasons that no matter what the other one does, I do better by confessing. And so each of them confesses and then they both end up worse off than if they just kept their mouths shut, because if they had just kept their mouth shut, they would have just gotten a ticket for jaywalking. So it's one of these situations where there's a conflict between what's in my individual self interest and what's good for the both of us to do so. What's good for both of us to do is both keep silent. But if we both keep silent, we each have an incentive to say, well, why don't I just confess? And then I get off of the jaywalking charge, too.

[00:21:40] And so the reason that I say it's like a metaphor for a lot of other things is there are lots of circumstances like that. Mask wearing is one that we just talked about. Where. Well, if everyone else. As a mask, I can kind of get away with not doing it, and so maybe I should just not wear a mask. Pollution is another great example where it's like, well, look, if everybody else drives a fuel efficient car that doesn't really pollute the environment very much, I can get away with driving a gas guzzler. So why don't I just do that? And on and on and on. There are so many interactions that look like this. If you hear terms like free rider problem or tragedy of the Commons, these are all examples of prisoner's dilemma or prisoner prisoner's dilemma like situations. And so that's why game theorists love this game. It's not because they care about procedurals or anything like that, but what they care about is that it provides this nice metaphor for a common problem that we all face. If you've been at work and you've had a coworker who shirks their responsibilities and always leaves leaves stuff for you to do because they're lazy, that's a prisoner's dilemma.

[00:22:40] And so it's something that we're all super familiar with and we're engaged in these type of games. What's like the best thing to do? Like should I always just assumed that the other person is going to be like honest, not honest, but he's going to take my well-being into account and take his well-being to Kellogg. How do we how do we play this game optimally?

[00:23:01] Yeah. And the big question that game theorists ask, you've already hit on one of them, which is, are you really are you in a circumstance where you're really selfish or not? Because if you're if the prisoners the prisoner is in the story that I described, I'm assuming they don't care about each other at all.

[00:23:16] So they're like, I don't care if he goes to jail for one hundred years. If I can if I can get off for a jaywalking ticket by confessing, I'll do it. But if the prisoners care about one another, if they're genuinely like, you know, they're altruistic in the sense of game theory, they care about what happens to the other person, then maybe you don't have to worry about the circumstance because altruistic prisoners may well keep us violent.

[00:23:37] Another another situation, another wrinkle that's important is whether you're playing the game once or you're playing it repeatedly. So if I'm interacting with somebody that I'm never going to see again, then the temptation to defect is higher. But if I'm going to play with somebody that I'm going to play with again tomorrow and again the day after that and again the day after that and after that and after that, now I have to worry. Well, if I take advantage of them today, then they'll take advantage of me tomorrow and we'll end up in this really bad setting. Whereas if I cooperate today, maybe that can get them to cooperate tomorrow and then the day after and the day after. And so the other really important thing is that in prisoner's dilemma like situations, if you can make it so that people interact repeatedly, you can make it so that they cooperate, even if they don't really care about one another intrinsically, so they can look like they're altruistic, even though in a certain sense they're not altruistic. And this is part of what makes that mask wearing example hard. If we're in an office where we're interacting with the same people over and over and over again, it's much easier to get us to cooperate. But if we're at the corner store where we're bumping into people that will probably never see again, or if we do, we won't even recognize them, that makes cooperation more difficult. So you want to try and create circumstance. If you're trying to get people to cooperate, you want to try and create circumstances where they can interact repeatedly with the same people and recognize that they're interacting with the same people.

[00:25:01] Are you familiar with this concept of an engagement pod? It's, um. Well, if you're not just for everybody listening. So I'm I'm part of this this group of Data science influencers on LinkedIn. We have a group chat and in this group chat, we will share our most recent post and ask people to give us some engagement to help get the traction on the post. And I was thinking I was like, hey, this could kind of be like a game theory kind of situation. Right? Because I will I've noticed that some people's behavior is they'll post something, but they'll never like anybody else's post or like I will consistently like somebody post. But then I notice that person doesn't like mine, so I just never like their post. Does that would that qualify as kind of like a game theory type of.

[00:25:46] Absolutely. And that's a great example of a prisoner's dilemma, which is, you know, if if you and I are only going to interact once, you know, so I'm going to post something on Twitter and I and you're going to post one thing where he is going to post one thing and we say to one another, well, we'll each like each other's posts. Well, maybe I think no, I don't want to do that, because if he likes my posts, that gives me, you know, engagement. But then if I like his, then I give him engagement back. And so now I'm he's going to have just as much engagement as me if we're vying for the same audience. You're improving my audience and I'm improving yours. So then I would say, well, I'll let him like my post, but I'm not going to like his right because that's going to be better. I'll get more of the larger share of the audience. But those engagement pods are going to work precisely because you're not just posting once, you're posting many times. And so the strategy you describe is exactly the strategy and the repeated prisoner's dilemma. If you see that you're liking someone else's post but they're not liking yours, then you can say, OK, that's it, I'm not liking yours anymore. I'm not giving you engagement if you won't give me engagement.

[00:26:47] And that can be in the long term. Harm to both of you, and so that's precisely why paying attention to these things and making them repeated can be better if people are trying to create these kind of engagement pods. One of the things game theorists know is it's important to make it smaller rather than bigger, because the bigger it is, the more the easier it is to sneak under the radar and kind of and kind of cheat. And you want to create that opportunity for accountability. You want it to be that people can keep track of. Oh, I see that that person regularly likes my post. And so I'm in a regularly like theirs. And so paying attention to and keeping track of the game here is called this reputation, which is it's sort of a slight change of the way we normally use that word. But just keeping track of what somebody has done in the past, you want to make it possible for people to do that. So if you have a big group or a or a setting where people are regularly not online to you, maybe you don't know whether they were not paying attention or something. But if you can if you can create a situation where you can have a good reputation system, you can keep it going.

[00:27:51] I really enjoy the names for some of these strategies and prisoner's dilemma, like there's the tit for tat. That's pretty self-explanatory. I help you. You help me. But the other one I thought was really interesting, I thought was a funny name like the Grim Reaper, a grim trigger. Or if you do me wrong once, I'm done wrong forever.

[00:28:08] Yeah, yeah, yeah. PhD and they you know, they've given lots of names to these different kinds of strategies. And Grim Trigger is a really important one. It's a very I don't know what's the right word.

[00:28:20] It's very it's very harsh because it's we cooperate until you stop cooperating and then you're dead to me. So in the engagement pot analogy, it's so long as you like my posts, I'll keep liking yours. But the minute you miss one of my posts, I never like another post that you do again. It's a good strategy, except it doesn't do well with mistakes. And so that's why a lot of times game theorists don't recommend the people do it. Because suppose that I just didn't see your post or I thought I liked it, but my I lost my Internet connection. The like didn't get posted or something like that. Will Grimm trigger? That's it. I'm dead to you now because I made that mistake, whereas something like tit for tat where it's well you you do what I did to you in the last round. That gives me an opportunity to get back in your good graces so I can say, yep, I made a mistake. I didn't like one of your posts. You should not like one of mine. But then your next post, I like that and then we can get it restarted again. So Grim Trigger is is interesting and theoretically really interesting, but it has this downside if if if there's a chance that somebody can make a mistake or miss something.

[00:29:23] We talked about a couple of instances where humans play or use game theory that's massacring poker engagement. But how do animals use this stuff?

[00:29:33] Yeah, this is one of my favorite things about game theory is that it shows how like how big these kinds of interactions go everywhere. So Prisoner's dilemma is a great example. It shows up in the animal kingdom all the time because animals have an opportunity to cooperate with one another. One of my favorite examples is actually very, very simple. Life forms called a slime mold. So slime molds are these individual bacteria that just live by themselves in the soil. They just go around and don't do much. But then when food gets scarce, they come together and they form a kind of collective. So there they live sort of individual lives for a while and then they form this collective. And then the collective moves around as a as a kind of group. That's why it's called slime mold.

[00:30:18] And then when it reproduces, it creates a stalk and the folks up at the top of the stalk reproduce. But the people that are inside the stock, it don't. So it's a kind of situation where they're playing a prisoner's dilemma because somebody's got to be in the stock, but everybody's got an incentive to cheat and climb up to the top and get away with it. And so there's a lot of questions about like how how do they cooperate? How do they manage to cooperate like this? There are other examples like vampire bats. They feed one another. So if a vampire bat goes out and and and doesn't get a meal, then when they come back to the cave, it can beg for food from other vampire bats. And the other vampire bats will give it food. So animals cooperate all the time in settings where it seems like they shouldn't. And so it's a big topic of game theory to try and figure out why. But it's not just cooperation. There are lots of other interactions, like animals are honest to one another. So sometimes predators and prey will communicate with one another or competitors who are competing over mates or territory will communicate with one another in situations where it seems like they shouldn't. Why would they want to be honest? Why would they communicate? But they do anyway. And so that's a big topic that I've been involved in, is trying to figure out how honesty can happen in settings where animals seem to have an incentive to be dishonest. But but sometimes they're not. And on and on and on. So it's one of these things that's really exciting because for every social interaction that you can find in humans, there's some analogy, some similar setting that comes up with animals. And and you can sort of analyze them with some of. The same tools you can kind of look at it the same way, and there are people that are doing, you know, market analysis of the ways that animals trade resources or plants trade resources with one another.

[00:31:59] And it's really exciting to sort of see that what we think of as human interaction, these really sophisticated, thoughtful interactions turn out to have analogies or similar similar circumstances in the animal kingdom or even in the mind bogglingly fascinating.

[00:32:15] I think that's that's super, super interesting. I wonder if just playing games is just a fact of being alive. It seems to be baked into into our DNA and non-verbal communications with with animals. And they're still playing games. You do a lot of research on language as well. Right. And yeah, that's about how to game theory apply to languages.

[00:32:40] So talking to one another is another example of a game, especially when we're worried about circumstances where we might have an incentive to be dishonest or at least not fully honest. So, for instance, you know, you and I are talking right now. This is a game because, you know, I'm communicating things to you.

[00:32:59] You're asking questions of me. And presumably we both stand to benefit. Right. I'm enjoying talking to you. You're enjoying talking to me. So we're happy to keep this thing going. But there are lots of circumstances where you might think that that's not always the case. So if I'm you know, if I'm being suppose that I'm being interviewed by the police, potentially because I committed a crime, well, then maybe I don't want to be honest to them. I might want to lie to them.

[00:33:23] Or maybe in circumstances where you have two competitors in a marketplace talking to one another, they might have an incentive to deceive one another or even more mundane circumstances, like it's a job interview. And maybe I want to misrepresent myself by saying I got a fancier degree than I really did or I have more experience than I really did.

[00:33:45] So in those sorts of settings, we have to ask, like what? What's going on? If you expect that people might have an incentive to be deceptive, it might be that they just are deceptive. Right. So there just might be circumstances where people are deceptive, but sometimes they're not. And that's where the game theory really kicks in, is when you see circumstances where at least at the first level, you sort of think it looks like, know job seekers ought to just lie about their level of experience, but they don't. Why don't they? What is stopping them from doing it? And that's where you have to start asking these questions about, like, is it that there are altruistic, that they care about one another, or is it that there's some system in place that would punish them for lying or they would get in trouble? Or perhaps like what? The prisoner's dilemma? Maybe it's a repeated thing where they're going to interact over and over and over again, or there are lots of different possibilities. And that's one of the things that game theorists to study language are really interested in doing, which is figuring out in circumstances where one person has an incentive to lie but doesn't. Why aren't they? What's going on?

[00:34:45] What is it about the circumstance that prevents just kind of a weird question, just come into my head like, do you have to know that you are in a game to be playing a game like situation, talking about with the with the job interview, like it could be between me and the person interviewing me. But I'm also playing a game with everybody else who's looking for that job. Yep. Yep.

[00:35:06] Everyone who's involved and this is one of the things that like is is is really interesting about the modern approach or a modern approach to game theory. The original way that game theory was first developed in the forties and fifties assumed that you had to know everything. You knew that you were playing a game, you knew what your strategies were. You knew who everyone else was. Right. You knew who all the other players were. So in this case, you knew who all the other people were being interviewed, et cetera, et cetera. The more a modern approach to the game theory that actually borrows from the study of animals and plants and things like this says, well, look, it might be that you are just sort of going through life, trying different things out, kind of experimenting, trying new strategies, seeing how they work, looking at what other people do, imitating them if they do well, these sorts of things. But that that's sort of what we sometimes call low rationality, trial and error learning may actually mimic the super sophisticated reasoning that the game theory was originally designed around. So one of the things that we figured out is that animals can oftentimes engage in the very same behavior that the super high rationality game theory would predict. But it's because of natural selection, because evolution has forced them through a kind of experimental process to end up mimicking what an incredibly rational, super smart person would do. And so that's a big part of the more modern approach or a more I shouldn't say the. But a more modern approach to game theory is, is to think about low rationality, game theory and the ways in which things like simple trial and error learning might end up mimicking super sophisticated reasoning, even though no one is ever really doing that sophisticated reasoning.

[00:36:48] And another popular concept that comes up when you Google game theory is this idea or concept of the Nash equilibrium, what the heck is this thing fit into the framework?

[00:37:02] It's a very funny concept, but it's supercritical. So it's developed by John Nash. It's named after. It's named after him. And and he was really he wasn't exactly the discoverer, but he really sort of proved how how important this thing was. The basic idea, there are lots of ways to describe it. The way I like to describe it is to think of it as as what game theorists call a self enforcing agreement. So something is a Nash equilibrium. If we all agree to do it, then none of us have any reason to deviate from what we agreed. Right. So you can think about it. If we all get together and we say, look, I'm going to you know, we've got the collective project and we all agree to how we're going to divide it up. If we all want the project to succeed, then chances are we'll follow through on the part that we've been assigned because we want the project to succeed. But so that's a Nash equilibrium because we each have an incentive to follow through on what we promise to do. But if we're in like one of those prisoner's dilemma situations where I could get away with shirking something, then maybe it's not an equilibrium. So if you have a bunch of strangers who say, agree to wear a mask, well, now maybe depending on depending on what they think about the circumstance, they might have an incentive not to. And so it's not a self enforcing agreement. So that's the basic idea is if we all agreed to do it, would we still be following our incentives to follow through on what we promised? Or would we have an incentive to to sneak away and do something different than what we promised? And if and if we have an incentive to sneak away, then it's not a Nash equilibrium.

[00:38:35] But if we don't, then it is an equilibrium because it's self enforcing the ideas. We just make an agreement. We don't have to have any punishments because everybody wants to do it. One of the great classic examples that AI uses is, is deciding which side of the road to drive on. Right. So if I'm in a country, if we all say we drive on the right hand side of the road here, that's a self enforcing agreement. No one has any incentive to suddenly start driving on the left. You don't need a law. You don't need the police like you. Just be stupid to drive on the wrong side of the road. You're going to run into somebody. So if we all agree to drive on the right hand side of the road, that agreement is self enforced. We expect that everyone will follow it, given that we agreed to it. And the same thing is true with the left. If we all agree to drive on the left like they do in England or Japan or whatever, then, you know, we'll all do that too. So that's an example of the situation where the Nash equilibrium just kind of enforces itself. You don't you don't see a lot of tickets for driving on the wrong side of the road because nobody has an incentive to do it because it just it's the right thing to do.

[00:39:35] I used to play a lot of ultimate Frisbee and ultimate Frisbee like this game where you don't really have a ref. It's the gentlemen's game, gentlemen's rules. So everybody is kind of enforcing the rules together. And I guess that that kind of would that be a Nash equilibrium type of situation where we're all.

[00:39:52] Yeah, so long as you that's probably a Nash equilibrium precisely because it's repeated. So probably because you're playing with the same people over and over again, you have an incentive to sort of follow the rules on your own. But if you were playing a new team that you wouldn't that you were never going to see again, well, then maybe you'd be a little bit worried that they wouldn't follow the rules because what incentive do they have now, even within the game? There's a little bit of reputed interaction, because if I cheat at the very beginning, well, then I know you're going to cheat later. So so, you know, there even maybe within a game you can enforce it. But that's exactly it's a Nash equilibrium because you have that repeated interaction where if I cheat now, I run the risk that you'll cheat on me tomorrow or in the next play or in the next game or whatever. And so then that risk of you cheating on me in the future makes it so that I don't want to cheat today.

[00:40:44] So what does fairness mean? Game theorist?

[00:40:47] That's a really interesting topic. And it's one of the things that game theory has shown is that this idea, this very basic idea of fairness is actually super complicated. And it's one of those things where it's a game. Theorists who study fairness have discovered that there are actually lots of different concepts of fairness and there are lots of different ways to define it. One of the ways that I like to define it, because I think that this really gets that one of the core notions when we think about fairness is what's called N.V. freeness. So the idea is if suppose we have something to divide up, we've got some bunch of resources. We get, say, my wife and I, we get a windfall, somebody gives us a bunch of books and we have to decide, like, OK, who's going to get which books? So we sort them into two different piles. My wife gets one pile, I get the other pile. That situation is envy free. If I look at my own pile and I say, no, no, I'm happy with this pile. I don't want the pile my wife has. And if she looks at her pile and says the same thing about. Neither of us envies the others pile, so that's why it's called envy free, so that's the that's an idea of fair division, is the idea that nobody looks over and says, oh, I'd rather have have theirs. You might think about this in in like a company. Right. So if you have several team members, each of whom gets paid maybe different amounts and each of whom has different responsibilities, if nobody would want to switch jobs with the other one, then you have an envy free situation because nobody says I'd rather be in that person's circumstances. Right. And I mean, switch jobs doesn't just mean switch salaries.

[00:42:23] It means I get all the responsibilities and all of the all of the the difficult things that come with the job as well as the good ones. So that's a sense of of of fairness. One other story about envy free that I use. When I was in graduate school, I lived in this apartment and it had one really big bedroom that had a private bathroom and then a smaller bedroom that had that only had the public bathroom for for the apartment. I mean, not public, but for the whole apartment.

[00:42:49] And, you know, we've tried to find a situation where I ended up with a bigger room, but I also ended up paying more in rent. And it was a good it was a fair allocation because my roommate didn't want the bigger room and the additional rent and I didn't want to take the smaller room and the the less rent. So neither of us envied the other person circumstance. So that's another example of envy free. So game theorist would call that fair. And so that's the thing that's nice about that. That envy free distribution's is precisely that. While it's not always perfect in a certain sense, nobody can claim that they that they wish that they had something else. And so that's one of the real senses of fairness, is that nobody's jealous of someone else. So it has a sense of of what we mean by fairness. And it's a little bit better than just exact equality, because if if it's, you know, what's a good example? One problem with, like, exact equality is suppose we have a cake that's Harp chocolate and half vanilla. If I love chocolate and my wife loves vanilla, the best way to divide the cake is to cut it so that she gets all the vanilla and I get all the chocolate. That's not exact equality. We don't have identical pieces of cake, but I am happier with my peace than she is with hers and vice versa. So that's one of the. That's why that's why game theorists like N.V. freeness above literally exact equality, because you can sometimes find circumstances where I actually we don't have the same thing, but I would rather have what I have and she would rather have what she has that makes us better off.

[00:44:30] And so is actually a better notion of fairness than something like exactly what I remember reading that example in your book, Game Theory, your parents or it was talking about the cake cake scenario. What can a game theory teach us about our own sense of fairness and morality and equality?

[00:44:52] This is one of the things another exciting development in game theory is sometimes called experimental or behavioral. Game theory is where we take these these sort of simple stories that game theories tell like the prisoner's dilemma or like other other simple games. And then we have people play them, real people play them.

[00:45:10] So we oftentimes it's undergraduates or maybe people on Amazon, Mechanical Turk, we have them play these simple games with one another, but allows us to manipulate the games just a little bit to sort of see, well, what makes people respond differently for fairness. One of the classic games is called the Ultimatum Game. So the ultimatum game works like this. Suppose I have. I'm just given one hundred dollars, so now I have one hundred dollars and now I can offer to split that money with you any way I want so I can offer to say keep ninety nine and give one dollar to you or I can keep fifty and give fifty to you or whatever. It's my choice. I offer it to you and then you only have two options. You can either accept what I offer to you or reject if you accept it done. I keep what I offered, what I kept for myself and you get what I offered to you. If you reject it, we both get nothing. So I get nothing. You get nothing. One thing is that if you were completely selfish, didn't care about fairness and only cared about the amount of money that you got, you would accept any offer.

[00:46:11] So if I kept ninety nine dollars and offered you one, you'd say, well, one dollar is better than zero dollars, so I'll take it. All right. But that's not what real people do. And probably the listeners are already like, I would never do that. Right, because we care about parents, because we care about being treated fairly. And so if I say I'm keeping ninety nine dollars and I'm only giving you one, your first reaction is going to be that jerk. That's unfair. I'm gladly going to pay a dollar to punish him for his unfairness. And so you'll say, you'll say I'll reject it, I won't take the dollar and then. And then you take away ninety nine dollars for me and that's the really robust fine. We find it all over the world, there are people that have gone into developing societies in societies that have been largely kept out out of market interactions, and it's not absolutely everywhere that this happens, but it's almost everywhere.

[00:47:03] It's like nearly universal that people that people refuse when they get really unfair offers. And so this is one of those things that can show us that we really do care about fairness. Human beings really care about fairness. And we are willing to sacrifice things if we feel like we're being treated unfairly.

[00:47:20] And that's just one example. There are lots of examples of circumstances where they take these really super simple games that seem almost trivial. But then they're but then they're able to use it as a kind of test board to understand how we view fairness and how we view equality and how we view being trustworthy or trusting someone else. And on and on and on. So for almost any moral concept that we have, there are some game out there that helps to really make it clear when that moral concept applies and under what circumstances.

[00:47:50] Let's talk about came through in the context of a game that we both enjoy poker. James Bond has this quote about poker. You play the hand, you play the man across from you.

[00:48:01] So how the game theorist respond to that quote, I think a game theorist would say it's like you should do both. Like it's half right and half wrong, which is you definitely need to think about the other person. Any time that you you play poker by just looking at your own hand, you're making a mistake. Right. And any poker player will tell you, you can't just say, oh, I've got a pair, so I'm good. You have to think about what the other person has and how they respond. So definitely it's right. You play the other person, you have to think about what hand do they have, how are they going to play it? And in particular, how will they respond to what I do? So there's a common joke that I'm sure you've heard before. Poker players always say, like, if somebody never folds, don't try to bluff them. Right. Because it doesn't do any good. And and it's and so that's that's the truth in the James Bond saying you got to think about how the other person playing because the best thing for you to do depends on how they're going to respond. Don't bluff somebody who always calls, but you can't totally ignore your own hand either, because you know that if they call you, you you have to have a better hand than them. Like, you can't just you know, it's not enough to know what they have. You also have to beat them, at least in some circumstances. And so a game theorist would say you have to take all of that into account. You have to think about what you have, what they have, what they think you have, what and if you want to get really sophisticated, what you think they think, you think, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And and so you have to always be engaged in both play your cards, but also the person never getting to a leveling war with a with a pool.

[00:49:35] Right.

[00:49:36] Yeah, right. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. No, it's it's it's you know, and this is what's really important. Game theory always says, you know, you have to think about what is the other person doing and what are their incentives and what are they thinking about. Because if you're not if you're if you're if you misunderstand what they're doing because you think that they have a different set of incentives, then then you can you can make a bunch of mistakes.

[00:49:58] I was playing poker one time and a guy made a big, big giant bet. And it was sort of obvious that he had a very good hand trips or something like that. And some other guy very quickly, immediately calls him and turns over him. That's obviously worse, but could conceivably draw to beat the hand. So so it was a hand that was not currently best, but could potentially be best. But it wasn't it wasn't a smart bet. It was unlikely to win. And everyone sort of said why you do that. It wasn't a smart that he said, no, I know I'm behind. I know that this play is a losing money play, but that guy's a good player and I just want to piss him off. And so I called in the hopes that I get lucky so that I'll piss him off.

[00:50:40] And that's exactly a situation where you got to think about what's the other person doing. That guy didn't care about money. He wasn't playing to play money. He was playing out of spite. And so if you think if you assume that somebody else is just playing for money, you'll sometimes make a mistake because sometimes people are playing for Spike. And so figuring out that's the where you got to play the other person. And that's why it's really important to think not just what are their hands and those sorts of things, but why are they here? Are they interested in money or are they interested in something else?

[00:51:11] So is losing ever a winning strategy?

[00:51:15] That's an interesting question. And to a certain extent, yes, in a certain extent, no. I mean, if if what you care about is money that you shouldn't shouldn't try and lose money in the long run. But there are certainly circumstances where losing a little bit now might help you in the long run. So classic, classic old poker saying is you can share a sheep many times, but kill them only once. And so if you're playing with somebody and you think if I if I beat them every single time, eventually they'll stop playing with me, maybe I should occasionally lose intentionally to keep them around.

[00:51:46] That's a sort of circumstance. It might be good to lose now in terms of your long run also in poker, I mean, one of the things that poker really, really emphasizes when you when you learn it, I think it's a more broader lesson, is that sometimes your best option is to give up. Right. So sometimes you have a hand, it's a bad hand. You're never going to succeeded in bluffing the other person. So your only option is to fold. And that can feel to a lot of novice poker players, like, you know, you're giving up, don't give up, you push hard or something like that. But but good poker players realize you fold a lot. You have to fold a lot to be a good poker player. And so that's a case where, you know, game theory. I think one of the things I really like about game theory is it really does force you to think about the options that are in front of you. It doesn't do you any good to think about what your plan could have been or the last hand or whatever. Here are your options. This is the hand you have and here are your options. And all of those options may be bad, but you should still choose the best among the bad options. And so that's also a circumstance where losing can be your best play because you'd rather lose a little than lose a lot. And if those are your only options, well, then that's what you should do.

[00:52:55] How can we use everything we've just been talking about to negotiate better job offers?

[00:53:03] That's that's a really tricky situation. I think the most important thing is that people sometimes think about job offers in these zero sum terms. So the idea is like, well, everything I get is a loss for my employer. And so I'm like battling them, you know, to pay for one of us to win and the other one losing. And you sometimes there are politicians who will always talk in these like somebody when somebody loses terms. But that's not really how job offers work. In fact, it's exactly the opposite that the the company doesn't have to employ you. They're employing you because they think you are going to give the company value. And so they're happy to give you money in exchange for your labor, which they think will benefit their company. And so you want to figure out how it is. You can find those kinds of cooperative situations where you both win. One of the most important things is to try and think about what it is you really want and what it is that you can ask for. That's relatively easy for the company to do something that that is is important to you, but may not cost the company very much so.

[00:54:09] And this is something that it's hard to give general advice because it depends very much on the individual person in the individual company. Some people maybe want flexible work hours and that's super important to them. So focus on that or some other people maybe don't care about flexible work hours, but they just want a really nice office or really nice a cubicle space or something like that. So focus on that. Think about what it is that you really care about and also try to find those things that are easy for the company to do. Some companies are flush with cash, so giving you a bunch of money is easy. One of the things that I learned when I first got my job was that the university at the time was doing financially really well, but they were worried about long term commitments. So I was able to get them to give me a substantial amount of money up front, but not in salary. They didn't want to give me a lot of salary because they didn't want to tie their hands later, but they were flush with cash at the time, so they were happy to give me.

[00:55:02] In academia, it's not quite a bonus, but it's something kind of like a signing bonus. And so similarly, if you can learn about the company and learn what their setting is, maybe they're flush with cash so you can get a big signing bonus and get a little less salary. Maybe they're not flush with cash, but they're anticipating a big investment coming down the road. So don't ask for the big signing bonus. Ask for a promise of a bigger raise or commitment to larger payment later or so. Finding those things that are cheap for the other person. But important to you are one of the principal things in in negotiating that you want to do. And that's again where like that James Bond saying you want to play the other person, not just play your hand. Don't just think about what you want. Think about what the other person can give you and what's easy for them to give you and what's what's hard for them to give you and focus on finding those circumstances where you can get the things that are easy that you want, of course.

[00:55:55] But make sure that really, really appreciate that. It was one of the hardest things, I think, for me to kind of wrap my head around the concept of that games are just iterated, keep on playing them over and over again. And once I was able to kind of wrap my head around that, I don't know why it was so hard for me to wrap my head around that. Then I started to see everything kind of as a game. Yeah. So there's one game that I would like you to help me settle to debate with my wife. Should we always clean dishes right after we use them, or is there any justification for letting them sit in the sink?

[00:56:29] Yeah, boy, this this is this is a hot topic of discussion in my my household, too. Maybe I can't let my wife listen to this podcast. So it's a complicated decision and it's actually a really difficult one. There's actually been some game theory that's been applied to it. There is some people that have done some mathematical analysis. There's another funny one of. Even the toilet seat up and puts it down, but, you know, there are a couple of the questions that you want to ask. The first is how much labor is it to do dishes? And in particular, how does that relate to how many dishes you have? And I think actually it depends a little bit on how you do dishes. So, you know, some people like fill up the sink with water and then do the dishes by hand in like a sink full of water. In that case, you might want to let them accumulate because filling the sink with water and putting soap in that, that's what you think of as like a single amount of effort that you always have to do. And so you'd rather only do it once rather than say twice or three times if you're. But if but on the other hand, there's this added complexity with dishes. The longer you leave food on them, the more work you have to do when you ultimately clean them.

[00:57:32] So then there's that that other ballot. So it's actually a really tricky thing. Depends on a bunch of different things. I'm going to focus. I just want to say one other thing, which is sort of the more game theoretic thing. This is the big conflict in my house, which is there's also you have to think about how how the other person reacts. So the one of the reasons why it's a conflict in my house is that when I leave dishes in the sink, my wife thinks that I'm affecting in the prisoner's dilemma that as I'm leaving the dishes for her to do and she doesn't like that. And so, as you might imagine. So that's another circumstances that you have to think about. How is the other person going to react? So one thing that happens, and I think romantic partnerships, roommate agreements a lot oftentimes is that one person who's a little cleaner will feel taken advantage of by the person who's let's clean, because the idea is that like, well, I'll just take advantage of the fact that they always want to be doing the dishes are always want the dishes done. And so I'll leave my dishes and then they'll just do them. And so that's another thing we're thinking about.

[00:58:30] This sense of fairness in this notion of fairness can really help you to understand where the conflict is coming from, because it can feel very unfair for one person to always be doing the dishes. And so thinking about not just like what's good in terms of like maximizing the efficiency of the dishwashing process, but also thinking about what will be perceived as fair and what will the other person think is fair is also really important. So it's I think it's one of those things like with with a job offer. There's no one answer necessarily. But you just want to think about like, well, what do both sides think of as fair? What's the utility of the difficulty of doing the dishes if you let them sit? And what are the costs associated with letting them sit? Like, is one party going to be really upset because they're constantly looking at dirty dishes and they hate that or can't both be OK in terms of in terms of watch? So I know it's sort of not satisfying answer because I didn't say, like, this is the right way to do it. But one of the things that game theory like game theory is one of those things where it's like garbage in, garbage out.

[00:59:27] You know, if you if you if you model it as a game but you miss something, then you're not going to do any good. So you have to actually think through all of these things. What game theory helps you to do is it helps to ask what are the things you need to think about? What are your options and what are the what are the payoffs to various people of the different options and thinking critically about both? What are what do you think about it? But also what is the other person think about it? Is fairness relevant to them? Do they think that there's a fairness issue here is, you know what? What are the things that give them benefit but cost like staring at dirty dishes, getting all of those sort of lined up really helps you to understand what's the what's the right solution?

[01:00:08] I guess that's because people are people, right? We're all kind of unique. We all have differences in what we like, what we don't like, and we're not always rational.

[01:00:18] Yeah, we're not. And one of the things is that that term, oftentimes, Rasche, that term rational gets thrown around in ways that can sometimes be really subtle. So, for instance, sometimes people say, oh, you're being irrational because you're not, you know, like the story of a poker player who's trying to spite the other person, say, oh, you're not being rational. A game theorist wouldn't say that, say no, he's being perfectly rational. He's just cares about something other than money. He cares about spiting somebody. Right. And so similarly, you know, when you run into somebody who say, you know, is, you know, working at a job where they're not getting paid as much as they could, are they being irrational? Maybe, but maybe not. You know, maybe they're maybe they they like something else about the job or they don't care about money as much as you. And so this is one of those things where game theory is really helps you to think through this. You need to think not just about what does the other person would I do the same thing if I were in their shoes? But you need to think about, well, what do they want? What is their value system? How do they care about these things? And and they're only being irrational if they're not doing what's best, given what they care about. So the poker player who's spiting who's they're losing money, but he's enjoying spiting everyone else. He's not being irrational necessarily. He's just playing a slightly different game than everyone else. He's not trying to win. He's trying to piss off other people. And well, I would certainly judge judge him for that and say maybe maybe play a different game like. That's a rude thing to do. I wouldn't call him irrational, I would just call him mean or unpleasant, but not necessarily irrational.

[01:01:56] Can we can two people, multiple people be playing the exact same game, but then different rewards? It almost sounds like that game theory account for that.

[01:02:07] Exactly. And that's exactly what's going on, is that it can and sometimes I think this is where we make real mistakes is that we think about, well, what would I do if I was in this circumstance? But that's not you can't predict what somebody is going to do if you think what would you do in their circumstance? Because they aren't you and maybe they care about different things. And so you have to think, what what would somebody who has his values do in that circumstance? And so, yeah, of course, the guy who's playing despite everyone else, I wouldn't do that because I don't want to spite everyone else. But that's not going to predict what he's going to do, because that is what he's trying to do. He is trying to spite everyone else.

[01:02:43] And so one of the things that's really important in game theory is that when you think about what somebody is going to do, you can't take your own value system over and just just try and model him as like you in his circumstance. You actually have to think about. No, no. What would it be like to have those values, to care about those things, to want to do those things? And that's it's a it's a very different way of thinking and we're not very good at it as human beings, in fact. And so it's one of the things that game theory can help you do. It can sort of help help you work through thinking about things from another person's perspective, by thinking about what they value. First for a game theorist would say that's the first thing you've got to do, is figure out what they value because you can't make any predictions about what they're going to do until you know what they want.

[01:03:28] That must make it really, really interesting. When you're running, your simulation is like having to make that part of that simulation. That's that's really interesting. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So you coauthored the book A Game Theorist Guide for Parenting, but you're not a parent. How did you how did you pull that one off?

[01:03:48] Yeah, it's it's it's a funny thing to write a book about parenting and not be a parent. Thankfully, my coauthor has lots of kids. We used to joke, has enough for both of us. So so there's some real real parenting advice in there. It just sort of happened by then. I've been doing some writing about game theory for popular audiences, and it was interviewed by a writer for The Wall Street Journal who is writing a piece about, well, maybe game theory could be applied for parenting. And so the piece came out and then I got contacted by the press Scientific American's book press and ask if I wanted to write a book on it. And I wrote back and I said I'd love to, but I'm not a parent. And thankfully, my editor had worked with Paul Raeburn, who's this really incredible science writer who had written several books about the science of parenting from a psychology and sociology standpoints. But he was already really engaged with the science of parenting. And so she, our editor, Amanda Moon, put Paul and I together and and we hit it off right away.

[01:04:50] It was clear that it was just we both we both we both really enjoy talking to one another. We liked the topic. And so we wrote the book together really actually very quickly. And, you know, there are lots of stories in there. You know, Paul, tell stories about his kids, both some stories from before we wrote. But he sort of experimented on them while we were writing. And I also tell stories about when I was a kid, you know, so that's the other thing. When people say, well, you know, how could how could you write about parenting when you don't have kids? I say, well, you know, but I was a kid. A difficult one sometimes, too. And so you'll you'll see throughout the book that each chapter starts with a story and some of those stories about Paul's kids and some of the stories about me as a kid and how I interacted with my parents. And we use those stories to sort of motivate thinking about things from a game theoretic perspective.

[01:05:36] Last question before I jump to a quick lightning round here. All right. Is one hundred years in the future, it is the year two thousand one hundred twenty twenty one twenty. What do you want to be remembered for a man?

[01:05:50] Is there always hard? I mean, I love my research and I would love to be remembered for for my research, you know, but most people forget most philosophers and most scientists. So I that's that's maybe something that that I'd love for, but maybe wouldn't happen. I do hope if I if I get remembered for anything, actually, I really do hope as somebody who, you know, convinced others that there is interesting stuff in game theory and mathematical models of social behavior.

[01:06:17] I mean, and whether that's other academics to people in science or people in philosophy who come to it, or it's just people like listeners to your podcast. I really do. I love this. And I find it so exciting and fun to think about and talk about. And I hope that I can convince at least some other people that this is something that's fun to think about in a fun way to approach the world, because I love it. And we talked about this with animals already. I love it when I see something where I'm like, oh, these look like two very different things, but it turns out they're the same. You've got the slime mold and you've got pollution by humans and you're like, how could this have anything to do with one another? And then you see how they're the same. And that light bulb for me just makes me love the field. And so if I could bring that to other people and if I could be remembered for having brought that to other people, that I would be perfectly happy with my life.

[01:07:05] I absolutely love those moments, too. And when things on the surface don't look the same way, they actually are the same in your enthusiasm and your passion for Game three really shines through and then the energy you present when you're talking about it. So I definitely think that that you're well on your way to helping people get interested in it. And all the data scientists that are listening read up on game theory just a little bit. It is super fascinating. I really enjoyed going through your book and going through your research and just brushing up on game three to prep for the interview. So that's great. Let's jump into a random round here, OK? What are you currently most excited about or currently exploring?

[01:07:44] So right now I'm writing a book mostly for kind of academic audiences that's using the tools of game theory and simulation to study how we reason in groups.

[01:07:54] So the the working title is Network Epistemology, and it's about how our social networks, both the formal ones like Twitter or Facebook, but also the kind of informal just friendship networks influence how we learn and how we learn about the world. And so where we learn from one another, we're influenced by one another. So I'm really excited by that topic because it's a super contemporary topic. Everyone's worried about fake news and and polarization and all of these different phenomena that we think might be made worse by online social networks. But of course, they're very old phenomena. And so trying to understand how the way we interact influences these various things, that's it's really exciting to me because it's using the tools that I love to use, but to study things that are really important and also on everyone's mind at the moment.

[01:08:43] Will that be for a popular audience or is that mostly for a scientific audience? Oops, sorry I lost you there for a sec. Oh yeah, you're back. I was curious, will that be for a popular audience or for a scientific audience?

[01:08:57] It's probably it's more scientific. I mean, I'm trying to write it in a way that that it will be a little dry for popular audiences because it's a little bit more like communicating the results.

[01:09:06] But I don't think it would be totally impenetrable. So the hope is that people could read it. But I don't think the game theorists guide to parenting. I wrote that to be kind of fun, like it's meant to be a light fun read that you can do. And this book that I'm writing now is it I'm having fun, but I don't know that the reader would have as much fun and definitely be interested in checking that out.

[01:09:26] I got a book on my bookshelf that I haven't yet gotten into. It's called Connected Methinks by Nicholas Christakis. And it's about that same kind of thing how our social networks influence us. Yeah, if you were to write a fiction, but what would it be about? What would the title be?

[01:09:42] Oh, that's tricky. I don't know. I really love science fiction, so I think I would want to write something on the science fiction genre just because that's what I like reading it. I enjoy it. And in part what I like about science fiction is the same kind of thing I like about game theory is that it allows you to kind of look at the world, our actual world, but in a different through a different lens, because you're reading about like an alien species or a distant future or whatever. But still you can sort of say, oh, I see that commonality, but that's not AIs. So it'd be something in science fiction, probably. But boy, I don't know. I'm not sure what I would write about. I've never I've never, never really tried my hand at fiction. And I really have so much respect for people that do it because I know it's so hard to keep the pacing right and all of these different things. And and so I don't know. I'd be scared to do it, I think. What's your favorite sci fi movie? Oh, that's a good question. What is my favorite sci fi? There's an old movie that I really liked called Dark City.

[01:10:37] It was there was a it came out and I think the late nineties, maybe it's there was a whole series of these like false reality shows like the Truman or movies. So The Truman Show, The Matrix, a bunch of these came out and Dark City was not the most popular one of those, but I really liked it. I liked its esthetic. And I also liked liked the the I always liked those false reality kinds of things where it's like you're discovering that you're living in a reality that's very different than you thought. So that's that's definitely one of my favorite. Of course, I love the original Blade Runner. I think anyone who likes science fiction has to love the original Blade Runner. And again, I really like the esthetic, but I also like the, again, the same kinds of questions about like what's the nature of humanity and and what does it mean to be human? But also questions about like, well, if you weren't human, would you even know it? I really kind of like those those those deep skeptical or those deep existential questions that come up in science fiction.

[01:11:36] What's your take on the simulation theory?

[01:11:39] This is a good one. I mean, it's an old question for philosophers. You know, I've been Descartes the five hundred years ago. Maybe more raise the possibility that we were. Being deceived by an evil demon and and, you know, it's I think it's an interesting idea. I definitely am not convinced that we are. I think that there are a lot of people that sort of think that there's evidence that we are and I'm skeptical of that. And one of the things that philosophers have pointed out when they've studied this problem is there are versions of it which are meaningful, which we can test for and which we can try and figure out. But there are versions of it where we would never know if we were. We could never test if we if if if we were in it. And so, you know, these are the questions that are sort of like better left unasked kinds of things. So, you know, it's possible that we're living in a simulation and that we'd never know it. But then what good what good is it to ask then if we can't even answer it? And so, you know, the philosophers philosophical schools school that I'm a part of really sort of says like it's important to ask important questions, but some questions feel important, but actually don't matter. And it's better to not ask those. And so so that's I think that versions of the simulation hypothesis are interesting and worth thinking about. But some are probably just like not not not worth our time.

[01:12:55] So even if I am a simulation, OK, fine, I'm here. I still have to live this simulated life, which the school philosophy you refer to does have a name or is it just.

[01:13:06] Yeah, yeah. I mean, so it's sort of a combination of two different things. There's one called American pragmatism.

[01:13:11] So it was originally invented at the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century in the US. So it's a very American as opposed to sort of European philosophical school. And you see pragmatism already. Right? You want to ask questions that that matter and that are relevant to everyday life. And so that's something that I think of is really important. And then the other school that I'm really influenced by is called logical positivism. And that one was developed in especially in Austria and Germany right before World War two, and then was sort of brought to the US because a bunch of those intellectuals fled from Hitler and so came to the United States. And they're different in subtle ways, but also very similar. They they, in fact, got started by criticizing other philosophers for asking what they called pseudo questions.

[01:13:59] And the idea is a pseudo question is a question that seems like it's a real question. But then when you start to unpack it, it turns out there's nothing there. It feels like a real question, but it actually isn't. And so that's the sort of shared peace between the American pragmatists and the logical positivist was this idea that, like, you know, it just because it feels like you have a question doesn't necessarily mean you have one. And so you should focus on why does it matter and what difference does it make?

[01:14:27] I'll definitely have to dig into those and find out more about those. Let's do just a couple more here. What song differently have on repeat?

[01:14:35] Oh, that's that's a weird one. I don't actually I listen to Pandora, so I just whatever Pandora plays for me is and I've managed to train it to play me things that I really like. So I don't know that I have anything on on repeat, you know. Yeah. I don't know.

[01:14:52] Let's head to a random question generator. Do a couple from here. OK, all right. So here we go. We've got a random question generator here. And first question up is what makes you cry?

[01:15:03] Oh, man. I mean, what that you know, it's it's always sad to see when we have it is so common in our society right now where we can't we have the opportunity to for common ground, but we miss it. And that's actually one of the things that I think is, you know, I mean, this connects with game theory, but it's really big. But it's like I think that, you know, especially in the US right now, but it seems to be almost everywhere that this this you know, the the the rise of sort of this idea of everything is a competition where it's like this side wins and the other side loses is, I think, really detrimental because they're as human beings, we have so many opportunities to cooperate and to help one another and to do well together that the more that we see the world in this like competitive, competitive way where I've got to win at your expense or vice versa, I just think that it's it's it's both a shame, like from a kind of game theory perspective, but it's also just emotionally a shame. It's really unfortunate because it really, I think is just it's not what human beings are good at. We're good at cooperating.

[01:16:07] And so it's a shame when we don't take advantage of what's the story behind one of your scarves.

[01:16:13] Oh, let's see what's a good one. So I have one on my arm that's from my cat. So I had standing. It was my first apartment in graduate school. I had a little balcony that overlooked a school. And and so I walked out on the balcony. I was holding and petting my cat and then kind of unexpectedly some I still to this day don't know what it is, but some incredibly loud noise came out of around the school. I guess maybe they were doing construction or something. My cat just panicked and just sinks her claws into my arm and. Cuts it open, I really probably should have gone to the the emergency room and got stitches, but I was too proud or whatever, and so I've got this one on my on my upper left arm. That's that's from my from my cat. And she was a sweet cat. So that makes her sound like really mean. But it was just she just got terrified.

[01:17:05] I mean, how can people connect with you where they find you online.

[01:17:09] Yeah. So they can find me on Twitter. I'm at Kevin's Zalmen. I'm pretty active on Twitter. I have a very esoteric philosophy, a sense of humor. So hopefully people can can, can, can enjoy it. But also, I, I try and I try and talk about like the game theory of current events. So we're recording this really close to the US election. And so I have a bunch of tweets about the game theory surrounding the U.S. election. That's a great way to find me. I also have a website, Kevin Zalmen Dotcom, where I have all of both stuff I've done for popular audiences, interviews and things like that, but also my academic work. So if people really want to dig into it, they can find links to all of my papers that I've written and summaries of the research I'm doing. And so that's that's a great, great place. If you really if you really find yourself with a lot of time, that's a good place to look at.

[01:17:56] Thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to come on the show. I really appreciate you being here. Great. Thank you for the opportunity. It's been a wonderful conversation with.