Game Theory for Parents and Other Humans with Kevin Zollman

PsyDactic welcomes The Game Theorist's Guide to Parenting co-author, Kevin Zollman who discusses game theory as the science of strategic thinking. We explore how mathematical models like the Prisoner’s Dilemma and mechanism design can be used to manage family dynamics by creating win-win solutions rather than competitive, zero-sum outcomes. The conversation highlights practical techniques such as "I cut, you pick" for fairness, the importance of making credible threats that parents are actually willing to execute, and ways to make honesty more profitable than lying through strategic questioning. While children may be impulsive and at times difficult to predict, applying game theory helps parents influence behavior by understanding their children's incentives and fostering a predictable environment built on reciprocity and trust.

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References and readings (when available) are posted at the end of each episode transcript, located at psydactic.buzzsprout.com.  All opinions expressed in this podcast are exclusively those of the person speaking and should not be confused with the opinions of anyone else.  We reserve the right to be wrong.  Nothing in this podcast should be treated as individual medical advice.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:05

Welcome to Psyctic. Today is Saturday, December 27th, 2025, and I am your host, Dr. O'Leary, a second-year child and adolescent psychiatry fellow in the National Capital Region. This is a podcast about psychiatry, neuroscience, psychology, and today, game theory. I originally started this podcast as a way to study for my boards when I was a psychiatry resident, but it's far outgrown those breaches. I produce this podcast alone, occasionally with the help of some AI, but everything I present here is my responsibility, and nothing should be considered the opinion of anyone else or any institution, including the US Federal Government, the Department of Defense, the Defense Health Agency, my neighbors, or the International Fantasy Gaming Society. I take full responsibility for the content. And the content I have today is a bit of a change from things I've produced before. Recently I was poking around the Hopkins Natural Philosophy Forum on YouTube, because that's how I spend my free time, and I recognized someone's face. Is that you, Kevin? Kevin Zoman and I went to high school when extremely baggy pants and chains were a thing. I'm not sure if they still are. On YouTube he was giving a talk about game theory, and I remembered that Kevin had co-authored a book a few years earlier about how game theory could be applied to parenting. And I had that book and thoroughly enjoyed reading it. This all seemed to fit rather nicely with what I'm doing for much of my day now as well, which often includes helping parents come up with creative ways to manage their previously unmanageable children. Kevin kindly agreed to let me interview him for this show, which I did on December 12th. But I'll quit flapping my lips now and let Kevin introduce himself. Hello, Kevin. Welcome to Sideactic. It's a pleasure to have you here.

SPEAKER_00 2:09

Ah, thank you. Thank you very much for having me. Nice to see you again.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

Now I I need to mention that uh you and I went to high school together, and I can't really say that we were kindred spirits back then, like we didn't hang out a whole lot, but uh also there's been a lot of water under the bridge, so I'm sure that you know we're very different people now. Through some sort of circuitous route, I ended up becoming a psychiatrist. But uh you, Kevin, you are uh the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Philosophy and Social and Decision Sciences in the Department of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University, and also the director of the Institute for Complex Social Dynamics. Um, what what do all those words mean?

SPEAKER_00 2:48

Yeah, right. So my principal appointment is in a philosophy department. So I'm a professor of philosophy. Herbert Simon is a very famous uh polymath, really, is the way to describe him at Carnegie Mellon. He won a Nobel Prize in economics, but is also known in engineering and education and decision sciences and philosophy for an incredible wide variety of work. When he retired, uh, we named a professorship after him. So that's why I'm the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Philosophy. I'm the second one. Teddy Seidenfeld was the first one. And then I also am the head of this Institute for Complex Social Dynamics, which is an institute dedicated to studying large-scale social phenomena and how the dynamics of many different people interacting with different goals and desires and beliefs might come to make at least some kind of predictable pattern. So we study things like misinformation and polarization. We study how groups make good decisions and how they make bad decisions. We study how information flows through groups and why they form in certain ways that they do. So that's that's what the institute does. That's a big institute. It has 35 members all across Carnegie Mellon dedicated to studying this from many different perspectives.

SPEAKER_01 4:02

Yeah, that sounds like a lot of things.

SPEAKER_00 4:03

It's a lot of things.

SPEAKER_01 4:04

You must have like colleagues in all sorts of different fields, you know, you're collaborating with in order to do this, I imagine. And did you ever in high school think that, oh, I'm going to become a professor of philosophy?

SPEAKER_00 4:16

No, not philosophy. Um, you know, both my parents uh were professors, they're both retired now. So I think being a professor, it wasn't my plan in high school, but I don't think I would have thought it was an insane outcome. You know, my plan originally, well, I had lots of plans, but my plan originally was to go to college and study computer science. This is the thing I was sort of first interested in. And I took a couple of classes in computer science, but I also really always had a love for, you know, very, very deep ideas. I was a debater in high school and interacted with philosophy that way and was also a debater in college, and so eventually became interested in philosophy and sort of shifted from computer science over into philosophy. So that's kind of what got me, what got me interested. I was very lucky. I went to the I went to Kansas State University, which is the university in the town that we grew up in, and it turned out to be an incredible philosophy department. Uh, I didn't choose it for that reason, but I just got really, really lucky. Very supportive faculty who are very engaged in in philosophy. And several of them took me under their wing, and the rest is history.

SPEAKER_01 5:21

Awesome. I'm bringing you on my podcast because you study game theory and you also uh co-authored a book. The book is about game theory for parents. So it's the game theorist guide to parenting: how the science of strategic thinking can help you deal with the toughest negotiators you know, your kids. And as a parent, I definitely relate to that. Um you co-authored this book with uh Paul Rayburn, and unfortunately, he can't be here. Uh he passed away in 2024. But from what I was reading, Paul left behind a pretty impressive legacy. So he was originally, I think, a journalist, uh both a writer and then an editor with the Associated Press and with Business Week. Uh, he was a lover of science, and at least part of his career was dedicated, it seemed, to efforts to improve science communication, especially journalistic communication of science. Um, he wrote books about science and modern agriculture, space exploration. But then in 2004, Paul wrote a deeply personal memoir about his struggles as a father. So he had two kids who were living with serious mental illness, and that book is about dealing with that as a parent, as a father. But then after that, he wrote more about parenting. He wrote uh a book about fatherhood called Do Fathers Matter? Uh, what the science is telling us about the parent we've overlooked. And then he co-authored a book, The Game Theorist's Guide to Parenting with you. I imagine that, like for Paul, the works in his later life were something, something very personal to him. Tell me about how you met Paul and then decided to write this book.

SPEAKER_00 6:51

Yeah, it was it was a bizarre story. Let me tell you that. It's especially bizarre that I would be involved in this project because I don't have any kids. So for me to write a parenting book, Paul uh has five kids, and so we used to joke that he had enough for both of us, and you know, so we could sort of share them share them. Two and a half kids on average is five. Um, so the way we actually got put together by our editor, Amanda Moon. So Amanda had edited Paul's previous book, Do Fathers Matter? And it had just come out, was really doing well. It's a really wonderful book, very thoughtful and very scientifically focused, but also very personal. And I thought I really I love that combination, and I thought it was a wonderful book. I had done an interview with a journalist from the Wall Street Journal about how game theory might be relevant to parenting, and that that sort of came about by accident. And it ran on a Sunday, and Amanda, the editor, loved it, called the journalist who wrote it and asked her if she would be interested in writing a book on the topic. And she said no, that that wasn't right for her, but said, I interviewed this guy. He was great, you should talk to him. And so Amanda sent me an email, and I wrote back and said, I'd love to do it. I really, science communication, I think, is super valuable. It's an area I've wanted to grow into, but I have two problems. I've never written for popular audiences before, and I don't have any kids. So a parenting book for popular audiences seems like a bit of a stretch. And Amanda said, No problem. I've got just the guy for you to collaborate with. And so uh Paul and Amanda and I got on the phone together while I was on vacation with my family in Texas, and uh we had a two-hour-long conversation and just hit it off great. After that, we, you know, worked up a proposal and signed contracts, and I came out to see Paul several times in New York City for us to work together, and it was great. And I I mean I cannot say enough good things, both about Paul and Amanda. They were such wonderful collaborators on this project. Paul taught me so much about writing for popular audiences, about parenting. You know, we shared stories. The book has a lot of stories about his kids. We've mostly used stories about me being a pain to my parents as my stories that I brought to it. And it was great. And Paul was just amazing. He had no experience with game theory before, but I gave him, you know, he would run ideas by me, and then I would send him scientific papers and he would read them and he'd come back to me and he'd say, you know, I didn't understand all the math, I didn't understand all the details, but here's the sense I got out of it. Is that right? And I would be, yeah, that's exactly right. Like he it was amazing his ability to process science, distill it to what important point he needed to make in the in the book, and then make it. I I was just uh constantly in awe of his ability to do that.

SPEAKER_01 9:35

Part of me thinks all scientists need someone like that in their life who can actually communicate to the public the things that uh they're nerding out about. Um, yeah. In a way that people can actually understand.

SPEAKER_00 9:46

Yeah. And, you know, it, I mean, of course, it's always a balance. You never want to mislead people, you never want to make things out to be more than they are. Um, and you know, scientists always have thousands of little caveats, but there's a real art to, you know, distilling something important, pulling it out, and sort of finding ways to acknowledge the limitations, but without making it all about that. And and he was just incredible at that.

SPEAKER_01 10:08

Well, I'm glad you guys got together. It has benefited all of us. I actually read your book the first time, around the time it first came out. And I had already two kids who were uh a little bit older and then an infant son.

SPEAKER_02 10:21

Oh, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:22

And I remember actually intentionally doing some of the things in the book. But we'll get to that in a minute. Uh uh first I want to ask you what really is game theory?

SPEAKER_00 10:33

I like to call it the science of strategic thinking. It's uh mathematical theory, although the insights we don't need to talk about a lot of math to understand them, that was originally developed to understand games, as the name suggested, things like chess and poker and backgammon and those sorts of things, but very quickly grew into a theory to understand any kind of uh behavior where people are interacting, but they have necessarily different goals, but that depend on one another. So everything from why do we decide to drive on the right side of the road to investments in the stock market to questions about like who will cook dinner are game theory-like questions. And so game theory has sort of uh spread all across the sciences to study everything from nuclear arms agreements between US and the USSR all the way down into biology where it gets applied to animals, grass, bacteria. And so it's something that's found everywhere anytime you've got organisms interacting in a way, uh, and that interaction matters to how well they do.

SPEAKER_01 11:42

If it's a mathematical theory and it can be applied so broadly, what what does it kind of spit out as far as the answers are concerned? Yeah. What are the um what are the things that it's trying to maybe maximize or minimize or any other thing?

SPEAKER_00 11:54

Yeah. And that's a big part of that's a big part of what it's trying to do. So it if you give it a certain kind of situation, so you sort of say, here's a situation that people are engaging in, it will make predictions about what you should expect those people to do. Maybe not the exact first time that they come across it, because maybe they don't understand the situation, but once they get familiar with the situation, it sort of predicts this is what we think people are going to do. And so it can be used for a lot of different things. You can just predict. So you can sort of say, ah, I want to know. Like if we get two people together and they're gonna face this kind of situation, what do I expect? Who's gonna cook dinner? Or is nuclear proliferation gonna be uh reduced or whatever? It can also be used to design the situation. So the idea here is if I have a particular outcome that I want, like I want both countries to get rid of their nuclear weapons, then I have to think about how do I design the situation that they face so that that's the outcome that would be predicted. And that latter part of game theory is called mechanism design, where the idea is you're designing a mechanism. Here it's a kind of social situation, to in order to achieve the outcome that you want. And companies use this all the time because they think about how can we get the most out of our workers? Mechanism design says how do you pay them in order to get them to work the hardest or to get them to make the best use of their time. Uh, and it also gets used like in auction design. So the government uses it when it's like auctioning off the TV radio spectrum in order to try and maximize the money they make from that, or when they're selling bonds or whatever. So that that's another way that it's sort of like almost like a policy tool to try and understand how we should design a system to get what we want out of it.

SPEAKER_01 13:35

Just thinking as a parent, designing a system to get what I want out of it is exactly what I want to do. So that's gonna that's gonna become important a little bit later on when we discussed this. Uh but I wanted to ask you about different kinds of games that there are. So I remember you talking about things like zero sum games versus not zero sum games. And what's the difference?

SPEAKER_00 13:56

So a zero sum game is uh kind of exactly what it sounds like. It's a situation where if one person wins, someone else has to lose. Classic example of a zero-sum game is poker, right? You're at the poker table. If somebody's winning money, somebody else has to be losing money, and that's the way the game works. Zero sum games are the kind of fundamental competitive game, right? There's there's no mutual success, there's no mutual failure. There's just one person wins and another person loses. That was the early days of studying game theory focused on those, but game theorists have largely moved away from it because a vast majority of our social interactions actually aren't zero-sum games, that we can succeed together or we can fail together. And so understanding that most situations are not zero-sum games is sort of one of the fundamental insights, I think, of game theory. Once you move beyond zero-sum games to what we call mixed motive games, these are games where sometimes both people can do well together, and sometimes both people can fail. So the example I gave earlier of like deciding which side of the road to drive on, that's not a zero-sum game, right? We can both win by not crashing into each other, and that's exactly what we want to do. And those are the games where you oftentimes want to try and figure out what are those win-win solutions and how can we design a game to get people to those win-win solutions. Because if you use zero-sum reasoning uh to think about a game that's not a zero-sum game, you can make all sorts of terrible decisions because you end up trying to hurt the other person when it doesn't do you any good. It's cutting off your nose to spite your face.

SPEAKER_01 15:29

In a way, you it can help you to cooperate better, I guess, to cooperate more efficiently in ways where everybody gets the a maximum amount of something that they want.

SPEAKER_00 15:38

Exactly. Exactly. And that's and that's the big thing that game theory always tries to focus on is if you want to get people to cooperate with each other, you need to make it so that it's within their own desires, that you don't want to make it so that most people have to sacrifice all the time. Because in the reality, as humans, of course, we make sacrifices for one another, but by default, that's a hard thing to do. I mean, you feel it in your gut when you're doing something that you don't want to do for somebody else's benefit. So the ideal situation is when we can make it so that everyone benefits everybody else and also benefits themselves. Like those are the ideal situations that you're sort of always trying to create when you can, uh, so that what's good for the group is also what's good for the individual.

SPEAKER_01 16:18

Thinking as a parent, playing games with with other people, playing games with my kids, I have to think about their developmental age. Like how how how much of a rational actor are they? Um, how much are they just, you know, you can think of them like the behaviorists did as a little machine that I have trained to do things in a certain way and is very predictable, but not very rational. One of the talks you were given, you said game theory is actually proven that there's really no one size fits all strategy to dealing with an opponent who's not very sophisticated. Yeah. And that's a lot of kids. So how irrational can an agent be before game theory sort of degenerates into something that's just kind of random statistically.

SPEAKER_00 16:56

Yeah. Um, so they they can't be absolutely totally random because if it if it is just truly like I'm flipping a coin to decide what to do, there's kind of nothing you can do about that. There's nothing game theory really can tell you very much. Just like manage the randomness the best you can. However, as I mentioned, game theory does get applied to lots of things that we don't think of as particularly rational, like bacteria or grass or birds, in an area called evolutionary game theory. And evolutionary game theory focuses more on this kind of, you know, learning or evolutionary dynamic where you try something out at random, you see how it does, and then if it does well, maybe you do it more often. And so if you're trying to understand how somebody's gonna behave in a strategic situation, in the very first time they play it, especially if they're a young kid who doesn't really understand and can't think through and can't anticipate, yeah, they're gonna behave approximately randomly. But as they get that situation, as they get more familiar with that situation, they do it again and again and again, then what starts to happen is they start to learn, oh, it's gone well when I do this, and it's gone poorly when I do that. And so then they end up mimicking what like a fully rational, thoughtful, super intelligent being would have done. But they get there through trial and error learning. And it turns out that there's a lot of study of this, that learning of the, you know, the old school reinforcement learning that the behaviorists cared about, or even more modern forms of learning, end up mimicking hyper-rational behavior a large part of the time. Not absolutely always, but a really remarkably substantial part of the time.

SPEAKER_01 18:31

And and I imagine that you know that there are people out there who argue that humans are only mimicking rational behavior themselves anyway. Like, how do you really know the rational agent? Um that's that's this uh talk for another day. Um another thing about games that is is important, I think, especially for parenting, is that there are different strategies you might take if you're playing a one-off game where you know you're doing this once, and you so you need to design the game to what's the optimal strategy for if you're only doing it once. But most of the games that parents are playing with their kids, and by that I mean the strategies they're using to raise them, um, are not one-off. Uh they happen again and again and again. So there is what you like you said, this learning process happening. How are strategies different between those two types of games?

SPEAKER_00 19:16

Yeah, so once kids get a little bit more sophisticated, they don't actually have to be particularly old, but you know, maybe four or five or something like that. You can start getting them to think about not just what's good for them right now, but what's good for them in a longer time frame. Of course, a five-year-old is not going to be thinking about how decisions today influence, you know, when they're 18, but they certainly can think about how a decision right now might influence something that happens to them in an hour or two hours or three hours. This is when you start teaching kids to think about like engaging in self-sacrifice now for the future. Once they're capable of thinking that way, then you can start teaching them all sorts of strategies about kindness, for instance, being nice to somebody else now, because then they'll be nice to you in the future and why that can be beneficial to them, forming agreements. So it's like, okay, I'll agree to let my brother play with the toy for a little bit in exchange for him letting me play with his toy, and these sorts of things. So once kids start having a framework that they can start thinking about doing something that feels like a little bit of a loss today, but in order to gain something tomorrow, that enables them to start thinking about things like reciprocity, things like fairness, things like what we call altruism. So that's doing something that hurts you now to benefit somebody else, but with the hope that in the future they'll do something that benefits you. So all of these become possible. And it and that opens up a huge array of different possibilities. So game theory has shown that a lot of things that are sort of catastrophes uh when two people are only interacting once can actually become really mutually beneficial if you allow them to act repeatedly, because then they can form agreements. I'll be nice to you so long as you're nice to me. That works great if we're going to interact again. If we're not gonna interact again, the threat of me being mean to you in the future holds no force because you know you'll never see me again.

SPEAKER_01 21:10

And I think one of the classic examples of that is the prisoner's dilemma and whether or not you're doing it like one time or you might have to play this game again. Can you explain what the prisoner's dilemma is and like maybe how what you just said applies to that?

SPEAKER_00 21:24

Absolutely. So the prisoner's dilemma is like the most famous game in game theory. I always like to start by saying it's not the only game in game theory, but it is what it is definitely the most famous. So the story is straight out of like a cop TV show. So you've got two people who are suspected of committing some very serious crime, say like murder. They're both arrested, they're put into separate rooms, and they're interviewed by separate police officers. And the police officers say to them, All right, we've got you on theft, some minor crime. We can definitely send you away for one year in jail on theft. No questions asked. That's just gonna happen. But we think you've committed a murder with the guy. That we've got in the other room. So we're going to offer you a deal. You can either stay silent and not say anything, or you can confess to the murder. If you confess to the murder, we'll make you a deal. We're going to let you offer the theft charge. You won't go to jail for theft. If you confess to the murder and the other guy stays silent, well, then we're going to need your testimony against him. And so you get off scot-free. No theft, no murder. If on the other hand you both confess to the murder, we don't need your testimony, so you're both going to jail for murder. If you stay silent and the other guy confesses, well, now you're in trouble because you're going to jail for murder. And you're also going to jail for theft because you didn't confess, so you we've already got you on that too. And then lastly, if you both stay silent, well, we we can't convict you on the murder, so you'll both only go to jail for theft, uh, you know, maybe for one year. Okay, so that's the basic story. And both prisoners are being told the same thing, or being offered the same deal at the same time. And the reasoning of the prisoner's dilemma is if all you care about is minimizing your time in jail, that's the only thing you care about, and that's a critical assumption, then what you ought to do is confess because you can't control what the other guy does. He's gonna do what he's gonna do. And if whatever happens, if you confess, at least you get off for the theft charge. So if he's gonna confess, you're going to jail for murder no matter what. So at least you can get a little bit less time by confessing. If he stays silent, all the better. Now you get off scot-free and you don't have to go to jail for theft. So the idea is that if all you care about is minimizing your jail time and you're never gonna see the other guy again, then the best thing for you to do is defect and confess. Same for the other guy. And so then you both end up going to jail for murder, which is worse, right? Obviously, than if you had stayed both stayed silent and uh and gone to jail for theft. So that's the standard story. It hits a kind of conflict between what's good for the people to collectively versus what's good for them individually. So it's a kind of parable for all sorts of things that we've that we face today, like pollution or traffic or uh overfishing or all of these different kinds of problems where you have a bunch of people who pursuing their own self-interest end up making everyone worse off. The thing that that game theorists have shown is that it's there's no solution if we're just gonna interact once and if all we care about is our jail time. So we don't care about the other person at all. It's just that's what's gonna happen. But if we interact repeatedly, now we can create an agreement, which is I'm gonna stay silent so long as you stay silent as well. And then if that, if we're interacting repeatedly, if we're playing this game over and over and over again, now the threat of me confessing on you while you or your you confessing on me keeps me silent. So that's where taking a game that we only play once and making it so that we play it repeatedly can really benefit one another. This was put into practice with the negotiation of the strategic arms reduction treaties between the US and the USSR in the 1970s and 80s. The idea was if we just signed one agreement that said, I'm gonna get rid of half my nuclear weapons, each side has an incentive to say, yeah, sure, I'll do that, and then not do it, right? And they both realize this, so neither does, and we end up where we started. So what they did was they created a framework where we say, I'm gonna get rid of one or a very small number of nuclear weapons, and then you do the same, and then we'll inspect. And then if if the other side has definitely gotten rid of their nuclear weapons, then I'll get rid of a few more, and they'll get rid of a few more, and then we inspect. And so they took what was a one-shot game, getting rid of half our nuclear weapons, and turned it into a bunch of little tiny games that were repeated over time. So each side could say, I'll keep doing it so long as you keep doing it. And that changed what was a kind of tragedy into something that allowed for mutual benefit and mutual cooperation.

SPEAKER_01 25:52

Also, much harder to cheat on that game over time, right? Exactly. It's a lot of energy to keep up a ruse, you know. Exactly. Exactly. Yep, yep. And and it also reminds me about uh this idea of I think it's common knowledge. I was recently listening to a book by Stephen Pinker, when everyone knows that everyone knows. Um so he he discussed concepts like, well, I know that she knows, and or I know that she knows that I know, or I know that she knows that I know that she knows. And this has an infinite digress, right? But the the fact that you have that kind of information is important, right? In the prisoner's dilemma, if you know that they're getting the same deal as you, yeah, that that that might change your strategy than if like you're not sure and things like that. Like if absolutely or if you you know what they would do if you can predict the strategy of your opponent, right?

SPEAKER_00 26:42

Absolutely. And and common knowledge is something that we talk about a lot in game theory. It's not always strictly needed, although um it can be helpful in getting people to reason through these processes, but exactly what you say, like it works, and we use it and we try and get it about certain kinds of features. Like you want to know the game that you're playing, so to speak. It's important that I know that we're playing this game and that I know that you know. Because if you the danger is if you think we're playing a totally different game, you might do something that I can't predict because I don't, I I thought we were playing chess and you thought we were playing checkers, and then you do something, and I'm like, well, I wouldn't have predicted you did that, but that's because you think we're playing a different game. And so in game theory, especially a lot of the times when we've designed a mechanism that we think will produce the outcomes that we want, we go to enormous effort to make sure that not only does everybody know this is the game we're playing, but everybody knows that everybody knows that this is the game that we're playing, and and on and on and on. And so, like putting everybody in the same room and and watching, you know, I can see that you're watching the same thing that I am helps to build that kind of common knowledge. As I said, it's not always strictly speaking necessary, but when you can get it, it's usually helpful in terms of getting people to do the thing you want them to do in a particular game.

SPEAKER_01 27:54

You've mentioned that game theory doesn't work if you're uh have a random opponent. If your opponent is just like randomly doing things, that doesn't work. But there is a strategy in game theory where you might want to just do some random things, right? Yeah, if if if you're trying to win a game, using a strategy that is in any way predictable might actually be a problem. And so throwing in a little bit of randomness there might be helpful. Can you explain why that yeah?

SPEAKER_00 28:20

Absolutely. And it's most notable, I think, in poker. So in poker, it's I think just generally agreed on by serious professional poker players that you just need to be a little bit random. And the reason you need to be a little bit random is that if you're too predictable, people can figure out what your cards are by observing your play. They can sort of say, ah, he played in exactly this way. He would only play in that way if he had this particular kind of card. So now I know what cards he has. And so you have to you have to be random. And that's what bluffing is to a certain extent, right? You don't bluff every time, right? That's bad poker. I know enough poker to know. Bluffing every time is a bad idea. But you don't want to never bluff either. That's a bad idea. And so the best thing to do is bluff with some randomness, right? So um, I don't mean flipping a qu a fair coin and bluffing half the time, but you know, with some probability. And there are various tricks that people have suggested for figuring out when to bluff, like looking at the second hand on your watch or bluffing every time somebody goes to the bathroom or whatever, you know. But there's the idea is to try and introduce some kind of randomness. This is really common in zero-sum games that you need to be unpredictable, because if you're predictable, then somebody else can take advantage of that predictability, and that ends up and that ends up harming you. Sometimes randomness can be useful even in situations where it's not a zero-sum game, because what randomness can get you is access to sort of fair outcomes that you couldn't get otherwise. So parents are gonna be super familiar with this, right? Your daughter's got a softball game and your son's got a piano recital on the same night. You've got to go to one of them. You can't go to both. So you got to decide. And what do you do? You flip a coin. And why is flipping a coin fair? Well, before you flip the coin, each of them has an equal chance of your time. And so as a result, there's a sense in which the outcome is fair. It's not fair once the coin's flipped and you have to go to one versus the other. But the idea is that each had a fair chance or something like that. And the idea of randomness as also being a way that we can kind of introduce fairness in situations that are otherwise kind of unfair is another way that randomization can be valuable in in games because it makes people feel more fairly treated.

SPEAKER_01 30:28

Let's run with that example you gave between having two kids and you need to decide which you know which one's event to go to. Randomness could decide, but what if one kid values your presence way more than the other? Yeah. Um, so then then how do how do your strategies change uh in in that case?

SPEAKER_00 30:46

This is a tricky problem. And this is one thing that game theorists have studied a lot of, which is you know, how do we figure out a mechanism that can get it so that the person who wants it most gets it, but that the other person doesn't feel harmed by it. And one of the ones that we talk about in the book that I absolutely love is auctions. So auctions are as popular as they are precisely because they're a mechanism to make sure that you allocate some good, in this case your time, to the person who wants it most. Now, critical to this assumption is the assumption that the two kids have equal amounts of money. So it only works if you pay them exactly the same uh allowance, that they don't have outside employment or something, but let's start with that assumption. And and then you can say, okay, here's what I'm gonna do. Like each of you can bid an amount of your allowance to get me to come to your thing, and then the person who pays more will be the person who wants it more. Now that might feel really cruel and a bit, you know, maybe a bit like I'm selling my time to my kids. So maybe you could also do it with something that isn't money, right? Auctions don't have to be money, right? So it could be, okay, each of you is going to bid which of the other's chores they're gonna do in order to compensate them for my not coming. So the daughter can say, okay, I'll I'll clean the bathroom instead of my brother cleaning the bathroom. And the brother can say, okay, I'll do three of her chores. You know, I'll mow the yard. Maybe that's three times worse or something. And so you could use that too. It doesn't have to be money, and it doesn't have to be that you keep the money either. It's it's just anything that sort of forces them to give up something in exchange for the thing that they want, is a way to figure out who wants the thing more. And especially if they're sort of compensating each other, that can create a sense of kind of fairness. The one downside, and it's a little bit of a downside, is you know, bidding up, which is also a common thing. So if your son doesn't care, he doesn't really like the piano anyway, but he's seeing that his sister really wants you to come to her recital, he could pretend that he really wants to and get her to do more of his chores. So that's one of the dangers of like if they're compensating each other, they have an incentive to sort of bid each other up, where if they're compensating you, the parent, they don't necessarily have that problem.

SPEAKER_01 32:59

Yeah, absolutely. And and kids uh are way more devious than you know you'd ever imagine. Um I have uh you know, parents who come in all the time telling me all the ways in which their kids have deceived them. Um in order to get the things that they want. And a lot of times it's pretty ingenious and it's difficult as a parent to come up with I think strategies because kids, by their nature, introduce some randomness into it. Yeah, uh, they're harder to predict than adults. Um, they sometimes just make very impulsive decisions. And so we have to be prepared that, you know, no matter how optimal our design is, uh, there could be an element of randomness there that we just have to deal with.

SPEAKER_00 33:37

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, one thing, you know, when we wrote the book, we were very cautious that there's so many parenting books out there that are like this one trick will solve all your problems. And I think we say that like very tongue in cheek in the introduction, and then we're like, no, of course not. Like that's ridiculous, right? We're gonna give you a set of tools. Those tools will be useful in some contexts and not others. If people are behaving entirely, impulsively, entirely from emotion, game theory isn't completely non-applicable, but it's not as helpful because you know, it does oftentimes rely on some rational planning or some rational thinking. But also it can help to teach those skills, you know. So if somebody really screws up because they acted impulsively, uh, then you can sit down and say, okay, well, you acted impulsively. Let's talk about maybe what it would have been a smarter thing to do. And and so hopefully, you know, playing some of these games with your kids, even though they won't always lead to the outcome that exactly game theory predicts, can be a useful opportunity to talk about how to engage in self-control or how to think through what went wrong and maybe make better decisions the next time.

SPEAKER_01 34:39

One of the games that I really related to when I first read the book and think about a lot in different ways, different iterations. Uh, and it's about fairness because kids are all like, it's not fair, it's not fair. Um they're often, and they have different versions of fair. One fairness could be like, it's not fair that you got to go first, but it's it's also you didn't, it's not fair that you got more. Um, and and so to get them to think about fairness a little bit more uh deeply, you can play this game called I cut you pick.

SPEAKER_02 35:08

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:09

And can you explain what that means?

SPEAKER_00 35:11

Absolutely. And and it's one of these things that I think a lot of parents are familiar about, but in a super narrow context. So the the name I cut you pick comes from uh the basic problem. You've got a piece of cake and you want to divide it between your kids, or you have a cookie, one cookie, and and you want them to divide it between themselves. And so the idea is that if you have two kids, one kid cuts the cake in half, and then the other chooses which piece they want. And the reason that this is actually a super powerful tool is that the first kid is strongly incentivized to make it as fair as possible. Because uh because the other, if they make one piece bigger than the other, well then the other one's gonna choose the bigger piece. So you want to make sort of as fair a cut as possible. Paul Raven, my my co-author, told this great story of his parents used this trick, but he knew that his younger sibling had a shakier hand than him. So he would always make his younger sibling make the cut because they would always end up making the cut not quite exactly fair, so that he would get the bigger piece, which is a which is a uh you know, a failure mode.

SPEAKER_01 36:13

I was definitely thinking about ways like there's also the you cut I pick. Um either of those strategies, like it's a different I cut you pick versus you cut I pick. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 36:23

Absolutely. And with when you have three people, the strategies become incredibly complicated. There's actually a whole literature about how do you do this for three and four and five people, but for two people, it's really simple. And and the thing that's nice about it is that that strategy works great for cake, works great for cookies and things like that, but it works great for lots of other things too. So you can do it with time, for instance. So if you have kids only have an hour that they're allowed to uh uh watch TV and they're arguing about what they're gonna watch, you can say, okay, one of you decide one person gets the first 20 minutes, another person gets the later 40 minutes. And then the other one gets to decide do you want less time, but right now, or do you want more time and later? And you can do it with all sorts of things. You can do it with chores. So if you have a long list of chores, have one kid take the list and put it into two piles, and then the other kid chooses which pile of chores do I want to do. Parents can do it with each other too. In fact, I think it's an incredibly powerful tool for two parents to divide the tasks of parenting or the tasks of household tasks. My wife and I have done it repeatedly for, you know, okay, you know, we have friends coming over and there are these six things that need to get done before they get here. One of us says, okay, here's the three things, and here's another three things. Which one do you want to do? And then each person is happy with their choice because the first person said, I've divided into a uh two collections where I'd be happy to do either one, and then the second person gets to choose the one that they want.

SPEAKER_01 37:45

Another big conundrum of parenting is follow-through. Uh, because it's easy to think in the moment like, okay, uh, I don't have much time, but you'll receive this punishment if you don't do this. Yeah, and then like the follow-through is often difficult. Or you promise to do something that you maybe your four-year-old would think, oh no, we're you're threatened that we won't go to the movie if I don't. But then your eight-year-old would be like, but you want to go to the movie, so you want to go to the movie. There's no way we're not going to the movies. Yep. So that's that's an empty threat. So, how can game theory uh inform things like threats? Um, and then and then talk about a little bit about the doomsday machine.

SPEAKER_00 38:22

If you have yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So game theorists have worried about this. We call these incredible threats, but it not incredible in the sense of amazing, but incredible in the sense of not being credible. And uh incredible threats are really, really super important because the problem is that if you have a threat that you don't want to follow through on when the time comes, once the kids get old enough that they start thinking about it, they can start predicting that you're not gonna do it, right? We all know that joke of dad threatens to turn the car around on the way to vacation, but dad needs that vacation too. And so kids are like, he's not gonna actually turn the car around, so they'll keep doing whatever they're doing. And so one of the things that is really important is that you have to design threats either that aren't incredible, so that is threats that you do want to follow through on. So for instance, instead of threatening to end the family vacation, threaten to take the kids to the movie that you want to see, right? Because that's a threat that you definitely want to follow through on. You're like, oh great, I get to see the movie, I get to see the you know, World War II documentary while the kids are bored, uh, but they know I'll follow through because they know I love World War II documentaries. Or the other way is to make the threat basically self-enforcing. So there's nothing that you can do that uh that can prevent it. There aren't a lot of great examples of this in parenting, but one of the examples I love to illustrate it is from the movie Doctor Strangelove and the Doomsday Machine, which was actually a real suggestion, which is really uh terrifying. I mean, the guy who suggested kind of acknowledged it probably wouldn't work, but nonetheless, he really did suggest it. In Doctor Strange Love, the US and the USSR uh recognize that there's this problem about nuclear second strike, which is if I am deterring your nuclear attack by saying I'll attack you, that's a kind of incredible threat. If you've already launched all your nuclear weapons at me, and my choice is just do I blow up the whole earth or not, you kind of have to be spiteful to want to do that. Like, why not just, well, I'm dead either way, so why follow through? And so the Russians decide to build a doomsday machine. This is an automatic sort of what we would today call artificial intelligence system, that as soon as the weapons start arriving, they're going to launch a counterattack with no human intervention required. So there's no risk of somebody saying, Well, I don't want to destroy the whole world because the AI is going to do it for them. Um, and the joke in Doctor Strangelove is they haven't told the US that this exists yet. And there's this great line uh where where the Americans say, you idiot, it only works if you tell somebody about it. And the the Russian uh uh representative says, Yeah, but the premier loves surprises or something like that. It's really a great game theory movie in general. Um in that case, they sort of outsource their decision to an AI. You might outsource your decision to somebody else, right? So you might say, Yeah, it's right, I won't cancel the vacation, but uh, but your mom, who doesn't even want to go on this vacation, will, right? And I've given her the passwords to like to cancel the flights or whatever. You know, so that that's one way of doing it, sort of outsourcing it to somebody else who does want to carry carry it out. You can sometimes do this with siblings. So you can sort of say, like, look, if you do this thing that you're not allowed to do, I'm gonna let your sibling steal one of your toys for a day or something like that, right? And the sibling is like, Hey, I get an extra toy. Um, so that's another way create some jealousy there, though. It creates some jealousy, yeah. I'm not saying it's always necessarily a good idea. And and you can cause all sorts of sibling conflicts. So maybe, you know, so these aren't, you know, the the non the this second way of of solving the incredible threats is probably not great for parents. It does work for doomsday machines and it works for businesses because they outsource their decisions, they they form contracts, things like that. So uh the first way of coming up with punishments that you want to follow through on is a pretty effective way with parents because then kids aren't worried that you're gonna you're you're not gonna follow through.

SPEAKER_01 42:08

I did set up somewhat of a doomsday machine for my son um for certain behaviors in school in school. Uh he is really into taekwondo, so he he recently got his provisional black belt. So I could kind of outsource to his to Master Lee um the potential of Master Lee knowing what's going on, like in school, right? I can be like because they talk in there about you know that it's not just them being good at taekwondo, but the whole their whole lifestyle, right? Yeah, they have the values that there's a and I'd be like, what would Master Lee say about the values if I told him this? And so kind of being like if if you continue to do this, then I'm gonna tell, you know, yeah, Master Lee and outsource sort of like shame.

SPEAKER_00 42:49

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's certainly right. And I think the old it probably doesn't happen so much anymore, but the old school, like mom saying, wait till your dad gets home and I'm gonna tell him what you did was another version of that. Like, yeah, you know I'm too much of a softie, I won't want to punish you, but your dad, you know, the jerk maybe even likes it or whatever, you know. Hopefully, parents aren't doing that so much anymore. But you know, that that's exactly the kind of strategy, right? You know, finding some way to make the threat credible by outsourcing it to another person, another mechanism, like the doomsday machine or something like that. Another way of doing it too, if you're what if you're worried about screen time, but you have a hard time enforcing it, is using one of those parental tools where you can set it like, ah, I I click this button and it limits your screen time to 30 minutes tomorrow. I can't even undo it. The the app won't let me. That's another way of sort of creating a credible threat. Like, yeah, it's right, tomorrow I won't want to limit your screen time either because I won't want to have to deal with you, but I've already clicked the button on the app. There's nothing I can do to stop it.

SPEAKER_01 43:45

Wow, that there should be an app like that if there's not.

SPEAKER_00 43:48

Yeah, I bet there is because I think there is the doomsday app. I think there is just even to control yourself. Like you can set your phone that it won't let you use it for more than 30 minutes tomorrow. And every day you can change what tomorrow is going. Be, but you can't change what today is.

SPEAKER_01 44:01

Yeah, the pre-commitment. That's great. Tell me about lying and cheating, because it seems like cheaters will always win. And this is kind of in evolutionary theory too. Like the one of the big arguments against group selection is the cheater always wins. Yeah. But we know that like in certain situations, that may not be the case. How can you keep your kids from lying maybe more? More, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:27

I mean, the cr the big insight from evolutionary game theory that has spent a lot of time trying to study this is basically trying to come up with increasingly sophisticated ways to make lying unprofitable in a certain sense, to make it so that it's just not worth the cost of doing it. So the classic way of doing it, and one of the most important, is you have to try and think about how do I impose a cost on lying. The way most of us think about doing it is by punishing lying. That's the standard thing. If I catch my kid lying, then you know I'll ground them or they'll have to go without TV or whatever it is, you know, we'll we'll find some punishment. And then by punishing them, that deters them or discourages them from lying. And indeed, that's an effective strategy. One of the problems with that strategy, though, is it requires that you catch lying. And so if the chance of being caught is sufficiently low, then it's a difficult strategy to say, well, I'll punish you. So if you know the kid, kid says they don't have any homework, you might catch them if they get bad grades. But if they don't get bad grades or the teacher doesn't call home, you really have no way of knowing. You have no way of verifying whether it's true or not. So the other ways of trying to make lying more costly, non-profitable in a certain sense, is to try and figure out ways to add cost to sending the signal, that is, to saying that you don't have homework. So one way of doing that is to make lying more complicated. So one of the things that parents often do is they ask lots of detailed questions, right? So you say, oh, I'm going to study at Susie's house. What are you going to study? What homework are you going to do? Which books are you taking, right? How long are you going to be there? How much time are you going to spend on different courses, right? If they already have a plan, easy peasy, no problem. They'll just rattle off the plan. Oh, we're doing this homework and we're going to use these books and here's what it is. But if they haven't, now there's there's a cost, right? Not just a cognitive cost of like trying to come up with what the answer is, but now there's the cost of now they could trip up. They could say that say they could contradict themselves, or you know, parents also know the trick of asking your kid and then asking Susie, you know, and and seeing if it lines up. So that it that does two things. First, it means that you can catch lying more frequently. But second, if you if you develop a reputation for doing it, it also just reduces the trivial lying. Because now it's like, uh, you know, if I'm gonna lie, I gotta, I gotta plan my story with Susie in advance, and it's just not even worth it, right? So that's another way of like imposing costs. And what you want to try and do is figure out a way to impose a cost on lying that isn't a cost on telling the truth. So that's why asking details is such an incredible strategy, because details are easy, no cost at all when it's true, but incredibly difficult when it's a lie. Other ways of doing it too is uh by imposing a cost by sort of putting a cap on how often a certain kind of thing can happen. So you can say the kid, like, you know, it's fine, one night a week if you tell me you don't have homework, no problem. But if you tell me three nights a week that you don't have homework, now we're gonna start saying, even if you don't have homework, you got to spend an hour studying. That's what my parents did with me when I kept lying about having homework in middle school. Um, they're like, no problem, don't have homework, doesn't matter. You still have to sit at your desk, you gotta go go back over your homework or go or read some more of the textbook. Or if you don't have anything, problem with having professors as parents, we'll give you something to read. And and that, and what they figured out, that strategy was that basically took away the benefit of lying, right? So now if I if I lie and say I don't have homework, I'm still gonna be studying you know, an hour every night. So I might as well just tell them the truth that I do have homework and do the homework then. And so that's another thing.

SPEAKER_01 48:00

Unless you like what your parents give you more than your homework. To be fair.

SPEAKER_00 48:04

And there were a few times that was true because I I was always one of those people that like there were some things I love to study and some things I absolutely hated to study. But you know, so like those are other strategies. So there are lots of different strategies, but the basic big picture is what you want to try and do is find a way to impose a cost on lying, if you can, that doesn't impose a huge cost on telling the truth. And by doing that, you know, you can you can make honesty in a certain sense, you know, what we call profitable. And and hopefully that establishes patterns with kids that they generally become honest. The last way, and the way that I think that everyone gets mad at me when I tell these stories, because they're like, oh, my kid should just always be honest with me. I mean, anybody who's really had a kid knows that you can say that all you want, but that doesn't make it true. But you can also talk to your kid about the value of honesty, and in particular, about the value of honesty in repeated interactions. That's what the little boy the cried wolf parable is all about, right? The danger of lying is that in the future you won't be believed. And making that real for your kids by sort of saying, like, okay, look, if I catch you lying, here's going to be the consequences, following through on those consequences, and then reminding the kid that those consequences are there because they were dishonest also helps to uh internalize this idea that honesty has value because you want to be somebody who's believed. That's an important feature of who we are, and it's something that is uh good for us in the future. And that's another way, like showing them that the cost of lying comes from being disbelieved, but you have to make it concrete because of course kids don't always understand that, you know.

SPEAKER_01 49:32

Yeah, exactly. Um, we struggled with this, like in grade school, we knew everything the teacher would communicate if there were any issues statement at home. And we had, you know, we have a child who has neurodevelopmental uh disorder. And so uh having you know access to the information that day as to what's going on and being able to like intervene was very important. So in middle school, we just found out the teachers were so overwhelmed they would never communicate with us anything, and then we would find out about it like weeks later. Yeah. So then we came up with this idea that okay, my uh child's gonna carry a book to school and the teachers are gonna sign it every day and then make a comment about their behaviors. That gave us information, but it also created all these incentives for our kids. So he could either not get it signed because he knew that the information might be bad, um or try to cheat, maybe sign it himself. I don't think that's happened yet. But so we had to come up with all sorts of rule, uh different ways, like okay, if you get them all signed, you get this. Even if some of the information is bad, there's still a reward for getting any information, all of the information to us. And and so we it it got really complicated. It seemed like an easy idea until like the game theory started. The game started right.

SPEAKER_00 50:48

Yeah, yeah, and and exactly the phenomenon you're describing is a super interesting question of like, okay, now I now I now I have this situation where it's like I'm going to school with the book. I know that it's gonna be bad. They're gonna write down that I was bad today because I I knew it, I did it, right? Uh and so now I have to say which is worse, not getting it signed or or getting it signed. This is there's this area called strategic disclosure in game theory, which studies exactly this, usually in the context of companies. So the idea is you get a company, company gets some really terrible information, like their sales are awful. Do they disclose that they have awful sales or do they keep it quiet? And one of the things that this theory has shown, actually, is that you don't have to worry about it. You can say, it's no problem, you cannot have it signed. Just know that if it's not signed, I'm gonna presume it's the worst. Right? So having it signed and it being bad, but not the worst, is better than not having it signed. And so the way that you create an incentive to make sure that it gets signed every day is you say, It's no problem if it's not signed, but just know I'm gonna assume that you chose not to have it signed. Now that's great so long as the teacher is always gonna follow through. Now, if the teacher sometimes doesn't sign, now you're punishing your kid for something the teacher didn't do. So now what's the trick there? Now this becomes more difficult, right? So now uh the game theory becomes much more complicated. But what you can do, if you have some sense of how often the teacher sort of doesn't do their job, you can say to the kid, you have so many passes of it not getting signed, right? So if it doesn't get signed today, no problem. I won't even presume the worst. But if it doesn't get signed two days in a row, now the second day, I am going to presume the worst because I don't think your teacher is gonna be that bad or whatever. And so, and so long as you and the teacher are on the same page, like, okay, I really need you to make sure that you do this at least once every other day, or whatever, then that creates at least an incentive. It does allow them to squeeze by a little bit, right? So if the teacher's done it four days in a row, they can say, Oh, I got a freebie. But that may be the best you can do. And in fact, this is in game theory sometimes says, sometimes you have to deal with uh the best you can do. In in this is what's sometimes called information rent. It's a terrible name that doesn't really explain what it's about. But the point is that anytime there's asymmetric information, your kid knows something that you don't, which which uh is often the case. Sometimes you just have to acknowledge that I'm never gonna be able to make this perfect. There, the kid is gonna sometimes get away with a few things. Your goal is to try and like minimize that, but you're never gonna do it completely. What game theorists call the second best solution. You just have to be okay with it being the second best solution.

SPEAKER_01 53:28

In my job, of course, I deal with lots of kids who have had difficult early childhoods, abuse, neglect, you know, things like that. And so their models of the world are very different than ours. And sometimes we refer to them as maladaptive. And I try not to do that too much now because now I try to think of them as well, they were adaptive for a different game. For a different environment. And now that they're in this environment, you know, people don't just suddenly change. The things are um more difficult, especially as you're older, uh, to change your model.

SPEAKER_00 53:57

So I saw when I was doing the research for the parenting book, I saw a very interesting discussion of the marsh, the famous marshmallow test. Um, you know, where the the the test is, you know, you give a kid a marshmallow, you say, uh, if you don't eat this marshmallow in five minutes, we'll come back and we'll give you two marshmallows. And it's supposed to be super predictive of like everything we want for our kids. Like if they pass the test at a certain age, then they're gonna be like happy and famous and wealthy and all of those things. But then one of the analyses of these that I read that that I found really helpful was like, look, the things also that tend to predict how kids do on this is things about their home life. Like, is their home life really stable? Do they have adults that they can trust? And so, look, if I put a marshmallow in front of you and say, if it's still here in five minutes, I'll give you two. If you don't believe me, you're not gonna just sit there and wait. You're gonna be like, what why the hell should I wait? He's probably not gonna give me two anyway. He's a liar. So, and most adults are liars or whatever. And so this idea that like it's about, it's always about like denying benefits now for benefits in the future. It can be about that, but it can also be about do I believe that that's the situation that I'm in? And that can be indicative of all sorts of things that aren't about like some intrinsic uh uh cognitive ability. And so that's why to connect back with what we were saying before, this game theorists care about this common knowledge stuff. You want to think about how the person views the interaction themselves. And so if the kid thinks, ah, I'm in a situation where no matter what I do, I'm gonna get punished, well then why are they gonna bother following the rules? Because if they were gonna get punished no matter what, right? Or if I'm in a situation where that promise reward is never gonna come anyway, what incentive do I have to do the thing? And so, you know, that's a learned behavior and it's a behavior that hopefully they can unlearn. But but also you have to, exactly what you said, you have to understand it's not wrong. It's optimally responding to uh an a bad environment. And when you change the environment, they might eventually change, but they may not realize that they've changed the environment, right? If they don't trust adults, an adult telling them you should trust me is not going to work. They'll have to learn that they can trust adults. You know, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 56:02

I'm glad you brought up the marshmallow experiment because it's one of those things that vastly oversimplifies very complex things and becomes almost like uh a myth, yeah, mythologically like true. Um where it was always a vast oversimplification, and these tests may be very sensitive. It's like a test we give somebody, it's super sensitive for uh for finding kids who like don't trust that you're going to do it. But the reasons that they don't could be uh innumerable, it's a very degenerate type uh process. And so um, I'm glad you brought that up. Maybe last thing, but something completely out of left field, is that I've I've recently become involved in like projects that incorporate tabletop role-playing games uh uh in in therapy for kids. Um so uh, you know, these games they sort of ask kids to uh assume an alternate identity, it's in a kind of an alternate universe, but it's you know, like the rules, they still have gravity and stuff, right? Um but then they have to imagine like what would they do or not do? What would other characters do, and a lot of times involves them um in scenarios where they need to problem solve, but often in groups. Uh do you know of any like work that's been done maybe applying game theory to things like Dungeons and Dragons or these other role-playing games?

SPEAKER_00 57:20

I've not heard of it ever uh being directly applied, but I'll bet, I'll bet it has been, and I just haven't come across it. I mean, game theory has been applied to everything. Sports is really common, so I'm guessing you know, it's not that far. And certainly there's lots of ways in which it can be incredibly relevant. I mean, I do know the reverse. I do know that there are like Dungeons and Dragons campaigns that are built around prisoner's dilemmas or that are built around around other games. So that definitely is game theory has made its way in. Certainly, game theory is gonna be relevant. And one of the values of role-playing games in particular, I think, is that good game theory reasoning always involves thinking about what does the other person care about, what are their options, and and and then using that to predict what they're gonna do. And absolutely critically is that what do you care about? And one of the mistakes that we make, even adults, all the time, is that we presume the other person cares about the same things that we do. We don't make the mistake that kids make of saying, oh, he's gonna choose chocolate ice cream because I like chocolate ice cream. But we oftentimes make equally ridiculous errors by assuming that everybody cares about our jobs as much as we do, or everybody cares about our family as much as we do, or everybody else cares about media that we consume as much as we do. And so by doing role-playing games, by having people inhabit someone else and think about what would this person do in this situation, or putting them in strategic situations where they have to reason about what other people care about and what they're going to do in order to make a decision is super helpful because that's a skill that kids develop over time, but we as adults need to keep developing over time, and we oftentimes can be quite bad at, you know. It's sort of remarkable sometimes when you know we go to a store or something and we have a salesperson try and sell us something and we say, no, no, look, I don't really care about how fast this car drives. And then the salesman keeps trying to tell you about how fast the car drives. Like, I told you I don't care about that. Like, why do you why do you keep bringing it up? And and so I think that that's you know, role-playing games are a great uh opportunity for that because now I'm playing someone else. I have to think about what they care about. I have to think about what decision they would make. And that develops that skill of inhabiting another mind and thinking it through. And then if I'm also having to do it for other people, then perfect, all the better.

SPEAKER_01 59:33

Kevin, it has been great speaking with you. Probably in the future you might receive some emails from me asking about like, hey, how what would game theory say about this?

SPEAKER_00 59:42

Always happy to talk about game theory. It's it's it's the thing that I care about the most almost.

SPEAKER_01 59:48

Obviously.