Kelly is a neuroscientist and physicist who's held positions in research at MIT Berkeley University College of London and the AI companyDeepMind.

Her work focuses on really uncovering the core principles of intelligence by developing these cutting edge brain computer interfaces that investigate the biological roots of human agency andidentity.

This isdeep,powerful, really groundbreakingwork.

And in her new book Playing withReality, how games have shaped ourworld.

Kelly explores how games from ancient rituals to modern video games have the power to reveal deep truths about human nature while also providing just a safe space for us to experiment with different identities and moral frameworks and ways ofbeing.

And through her research on agency and brain-based computerinterfaces, Kelly has gained really fascinating insights into how games engage our minds and shape our behavior in powerful ways ways that might really surprise youactually.

But as she'll share in ourconversation, many of the prevailing models in game theory andeconomics, they're also based on flawed assumptions about human nature that prioritized competition over collaboration and really reinforced bringing the worst of ourselves to our relationships and theworld.

And by embracing a more holistic and cooperative approach to gamedesign, Kelly believes that we can create a world where everyone can thrive and flourish in a sustainableway.

So join me for this mind-expanding exploration of the surprising ways that games can really help us transcend ourlimitations, cultivate greater wisdom and compassion and create a more harmonious and equitable world forall.

So excited to share this conversation withyou.

I'm Jonathan Fields and this is Good LifeProject.

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The recent book is got a lot of really interesting stuff and also just you and your work ingeneral.

I was actually recentlyreading, I think it was a 2019 piece in wire that you had written about a couple of women whose mom was diagnosed with fatal familial insomnia and kind of following her journey along as her mom passed I guess in her 50s from really rapidly from this genetic disease and she found that she had the gene for it and you're sort of following along in the journey of how her and her husband completely remade their lives to devote themselves to trying to find acure.

One of the things I found so interesting about that entire piece was actually your choice to dive into it and write it in the middle of theirstory.

So often we want to wait untillike, how's itends?

Like what's happening here and you'relike, there's something happening here rightnow.

We have no idea where this is going to go but I want to immerse myself in this story rightnow.

I was curious about that just from your standpoint as a scientist as astoryteller.

Yeah, that's such a greatquestion.

I think it's I mean it's such a beautiful story and it's so resonant for so many of us were like faced with some major crisis in our lives and the call to either change our lives or pretend it's not happening and continue the status quo comes up and I think of them as this incredible total heroes who took up the call to change and are changing the world on the basis ofthat.

I think that's actually true of a lot ofscience.

A lot of scientists are driven not just by kind of idle curiosity but like my parents at Alzheimer or you know something really intimate happened to them and they are interested in pursuing some kind of cure or otherwise and so I think that's a story that isn't told a ton about scientists and so that was one thing that was really compelling to me and yeah just the bravery of a lot of people don't even want to get tested for disease they might have because they they would just prefer to and that's totallyfine.

It's like nothing wrong with that but not only did she seek that knowledge but she's trying to figure out how to combat it not just for herself but for her you know fellow sufferers and I think it's just an amazing she's an amazing human and I was really pleased to share that story withpeople.

Yeah it was such a powerful story yeah it's funny as we're recording this literally a piece came out I think it was near times today or over the weekend about APOE4 sort of like a genetic SNP where if you have this a layella I guess you know like the homozygous version of it it's your likelihood of Alzheimer's dementia just goes up dramatically and they're now trying to designate it as a cause not just as a sign of this and there was a line in that article that really resonated with something you wrote in the 2019 piece which is there is a doctor who said if you're not symptomatic do not get tested because there's kind of his mind there's nothing you can do so the only thing that happens from that moment forward if you know is suffering and you you sort of like made a similar point in this one article about this one condition and yet that's such a controversial statement I think and notion and not just about those like there are other like markers for different things and I wonder if you've thought about that sort of like more generalized across differentthings.

Yeah I think it's really a personal choice I think some people are desperate to have knowledge about their bodies and even if it it's not really actionable they still want to know one of the problems with that is that there's a lot of kind of predatory marketing out there they're like well you might have this thing and we can probably fix it with this supplement or something so I think maybe that's one downside is like you have all of this information that you can't really act on and then you know maybe you're hoping that you can do something about it and then some people yeah I mean it makes sense if if it's just going to cause you suffering I think for some people like for Sonya she said like it would cause me much more suffering not to know I think it's yeah it's just personal dependent yeah just the question hanging over you exactly so as you describe so often people go into science and I feel like it's not just science but anyone who goes into a field creates a professional devotion where it's driven in large part by one or a series of burning questions very often it starts in a very personal way for them I'm curious whether they're like your career path has a more personal origin story as well yeah definitely I'm a neuroscientist and my my father was a pediatric neurologist so I spent my childhood hanging out the hospital a lot and seeing other kids and the sort of spectrum of neurological illness is as huge you have kids that looked just like me but they happen to have seizures and you had like profoundly disabled kids and there's a lot of suffering there's like there's not much you can do for a lot of these neurological conditions and I remember talking to you know other doctors on the floor and wondering what to do with my life and maybe I could help become a doctor or something and they said don't become a doctor because all that's going to do is you're going to if you're a neurologist you see a kid you diagnose the disease they have and then you say we don't have medicine for it so they said you know if you're if you're going to want to help these neurological patients go into neuroscience and learn about come up with new techniques and new treatments so I went to grad school for neuroscience and my second year in grad school my one of my best friends from childhood lost both legs and an arm to an ied in Afghanistan that kind of set me on a path to studying agency and brain machine interfaces so kind of popularized by things like neural ink but basically you train in person or an animal to control a computer with their brain and this is a really kind of understudied area agency so when my friend was in that explosion basically he told me you know he had he had spent years training for this deployment and he told me that the moment the explosion happened he had this profound no bubbling up like he was at the peak of his physical and mental abilities he was you know young and this thing happened and it was just like this no ripping out from the center of his being so losing our agency is really really devastating and you can think about even if you're like using a mouse and it's kind of glitchy and buggy like even that's pretty infuriating so losing your sort of ability to move whether through injury or illness or otherwise just is a psychologically devastating for people and so being able to restore it in some way whether through technology or or otherwise is I think really important holy grail for a lot of neural technologists that's kind of what's driven my work yeah I mean that makes a lot of sense the whole idea of um it's really brain machine interfaces I feel like we're we're in this moment now where I'm sure for years there's been a ton of research going on behind the scenes and now with the popularization of AI now all these conversations are coming out into the public and I wonder what that's like for you having worked on these things and research and been doing this for years now all the sudden it's like wow this is part of the zeitgeist and you're like I've been doing this for for a really long time now that's a funny question yeah I think probably the first real brain machine interface was published in like 2002 or so so it's been around for quite a while but I think seeing the state of technology it's definitely improved a lot and I'm a lot more optimistic about it than you know five ten years ago we just have much more exciting electronics and other ways of reading brain activity it actually worries me somewhat that there's so many businesses getting into it because there's obviously like a lot of business interest in getting some little handle on what's going on in people's mind and it's not like these things can read anyone's mind but there's certainly issues and I think one of the actually most tragic things is that business is fail and so there's a couple stories of businesses that had chips in patients and now those patients are stuck with these like and then the business failed now these patients are stuck with these chips in their heads and they're not doing anything and they're probably just like infection risk right it's kind of the wild west and so there's a lot of amazing development and I think there's a lot of ethical dilemmas as well yeah no that makes no sense if and I get the sense that a lot of this is not going to be resolved tomorrow you know this is like what that we're still in the really early days of all of this but with so much more popular focus on that I would imagine there's more there's probably a lot more business interest in it there's probably a lot more potential investment flowing into the space which like you described can be good and bad you know it's like it brings different motivations into the field which can accelerate certain things but also you know bring different pressures to bear exactly curious with your friend also who you were talking about you know one of the different areas that you've sort of looked at is chronic pain and the notion of unlearning those recently talking to Sean Mackey who's ahead of a lot of the pain research at Stanford and we're talking about this this notion of chronic pain and how oftentimes you know the stimulus that led to pain originally gets resolved or healed they're like it's no longer putting it in but our brain doesn't get that signal and their brain sort of like the circuitry is turned on and it just stays on even though the original insult or stimulus is long gone so I'm curious sort of like on in the work that you've done or the insights of the take that you have on the notion of quote unlearning this circuitry or rewiring it differently yeah that's exactly right so I think I kind of realized this where my dad has chronic back pain pain and he had all kinds of surgeries on his spinal cord to kind of ablate all the neurons that carry pain signals up to his brain and so he's got no pain bearing neurons in his in his parts of his spinal cord and yet he still experiences pain and so that indicates that yeah exactly like you say it's got to be somehow just in his like it represented somehow in his brain itself like not in the not in the injury or not in the the spinal cord so basically your brain has just kind of like memorized that your body's in pain and the one great optimistic thing about all of neuroscience research is that brains learn I think that's like the most profound and wonderful thing because what can be learned can be unlearned and so there's this adage in neuroscience that neurons that fire together wire together and the converse of that is that if neurons fire asynchronously then they tend to kind of unwire from each other and so there's all these new tools for stimulating activity in neurons these days so you can like flash lights or pass current through the brain through the skull and cause neurons to activate and so the hope would be that maybe there's ways of activating sets of neurons that causes them to kind of decouple from each other and unlearn those pain associations that they've learned from years ofinjury.

Yeah I mean that would be prettyamazing.

It almost feels like part of the challenge there also is trying to figure out like for any given pain experience where does that reside in the brain like where should we be looking as we're testing ideas to try and like rewire or unwire this and I have to imagine that that's just wildlycomplex.

Yes and no I think the nice thing about the brain is that there are you know it is kind of chaotic and everything connects to everything but there are also specific areas like in the cortex that map to different body parts and others that kind of process limbic experience ofpain.

So there are ways of isolating those areas and but it is very complicatedyes.

Yeah which kind of brings us you know like these different ideas and topics and just the worth that you're doing to the new book playing with reality you know because which is really it's a fascinating look at the role of games different types of games different like notions and philosophies embedded in games in the way that we understand ourselves in the world around us and to a certain extent create the world around us and part of what you're talking about like I wonder if in no small part you're doing the worth that you're doing and so many scientists you know people who live in the question are doing the worth that they're doing because in some way they've told the story of this work as being some sort of a game to themselves that keeps them invested init.

Yeah I think that's a beautiful way of putting it I think in many ways research has become gamified especially in I would say especially in AI right now where a lot of companies are creating AI programs that can literally play games and then they're racing against each other or there's like a protein folding competition where they benchmark how well they can computationally predict protein folding in order to accelerate biomedical research but I think there's been a lot of acceleration of scientific research exactly for the reason you're saying that people kind of see it as a game and we're finding ways of kind of gamifying the fields that we're studying in order to make it easier to make like benchmark progress and measure our results against each other and compare results because I think one big issue in science is that it's you know done by these independent teams and their data is proprietary and people aren't sharing things so if everyone's if you think about chess like the beauty of chess is that nobody really has a advantage over anyone else like it's just the board and you're both playing on the same board so if everyone's kind of got the same goal like let's say protein folding solving protein folding then people can make progress towards those goals and then I think the kind of more philosophical question is like whether we are taking a kind of game like approach in our research like is the individual scientist seeing their work as though it were a game and I think that's some of the most powerful science is when people are sort of playful and they try out different things and you know it's a real thing of beauty to see something so creative where you're like where did that come from and to some people I think are very just kind of creative and playful but yeah no that makes so much sense I mean you open the book really talking about the notion of like how really how certain types of games are held like the certain ideas of games especially historically are used to teach divine truths are understanding of the world of the universe around us concept of is it Lila or Lila yeah and like the cosmic play of creation to really just help us on you know live in a game world they're playing this state but then have that transfer to our understanding of whatever we would consider reality yeah there's this beautiful quote from the anthropologist David Graber which is that the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently and I just love that because it really underscores and he's talking about it in the context of like how unbelievably varied a lot of human societies were like we think of it as like oh things are the way they are and they can't be different and for a lot of human history people were constantly remaking their societies and I think the most successful scientists or the most successful business people or the most successful people are people who are constantly remaking themselves and playing with what works and what doesn't work and exploring these different ideas in in playful ways and we'll be right back after word from oursponsors.

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When we use the word play here or games are there sort of a universal set of defining characteristics of what makes for agame?

I think one nice definition of a game is that it is a system furnished with a goal where you have to follow certain rules to achieve thatgoal.

So for example golf the goal would be to put a ball in the hole but you can't just like pick the ball up and walk it over and put it in thehole.

You have to hit it with this metal stick and until you get it into the hole and then something like you know dice would be similar where if you're trying to get a certain number I don't know seven with your dice you can't just like plop them on the the table with your hands you have to roll themrandomized.

So this goes for gambling for video games and yeah it can extend to all kinds of metaphorical games aswell.

So you've got certain qualities certain rules of the game and I guess and then there are certain types of games it's interesting relating back to what you're describing earlier like in the context of scientists researching aquestion.

On the one hand it's amazing because now you have like a whole team sometimes like multiple teams hundreds of people in organization all resource and all driving towards the same question you know tackling different pieces of a different parts of it but then you've got other organizations and other labs and as you were describing very often you know like in the in the world of research there's an incredible amount of silo and going on even within the same university people could be walking working on out like parts of the same problems but everyone's kind of on the one hand they're trying to keep all the information that would help them quote win the game available to everyone on their team that matters but at the same time protect it from everyone outside of that because there's a certain not just bragging rights but literally career defining asset like resource allocations and notoriety and all these things that happened when you're the one who quote wins and it brings up the notion you write about this of the zero sum game take me into this and sort of like what your take is on this the good the bad the ugly that yeah that's a really profound point that information is power in games and if you're playing poker you're trying to protect your cards and protect your emotions not let anyone see what you're thinking and the whole point of the game is to to see one another really and this is true of a fair amount of games where the point is to hide what information you have and you can even look at something like an eBay auction as a game where you don't want to let on how much you want the thing so you try to bid at the last minute or you know you play all these little it's like the last 30 minutes all of a sudden the price just skyrocket exactly yeah so you're trying to like hide how much you want the thing so you're protecting again your information so game theory is a branch of mathematics that came out of john von Neumann and Oscar Morgan Stern wanting to kind of accematize human behavior they wanted to like understand why humans make the choices they do and so they wrote a book where they define all of these characteristics of games we now hear about like zero sum game where like a game like chess where you're only one person can win and then there's like positive sum games where multiple people can win and it makes sense to cooperate with with one another and and then there's negative sum games where everybody loses in some way so game theory focuses a lot on zero sum games or in the early days it did these can have kind of kind of tragic consequences in that it can inspire competitiveness and so on so there's this newer branch of game theory called reverse game theory or mechanism design where people look at how do we design a game to get the behavior we want players to exhibit so if we want players to be truthful rather than hide their information or lie to each other what mechanics of the game can we invent to do that this has been a really powerful way of designing new markets and designing new voting systems where you get better behaviors from players there's a famous board designer named Reiner Kniesia who says when he designs a game the first thing he thinks about is what is the scoring system because a scoring system is going to dictate how the players behave so yeah you basically go backwards from how do people get points how do people win to figure out how to design the game to get the behaviors you want and so I think this has a lot of promise for games in our society because it turns out that games and game design has been incredibly influential in the design of a lot of our technologies so the way ads are served to us the way we're matched on dating apps yeah new markets are designed they're all being informed by game theory and so they're all being designed by business but well they're not all but they're most of them being designed by business interests so we're kind of being subtly and not so subtly having our behaviors manipulated by these games were moving in and this is something I talk about a fair amount in the book like so to kind of bring awareness to it because so a game like monopoly right you play even if you are a socialist at heart you have to play it like a greedy capitalist it's the rules of the game like you were talking about earlier yeah so you you are pretty much out of alignment with your actual principles in a order to win the game and it's important that we know what games were really moving in to see where our principles are maybe being subtly and not subtly compromised yeah I mean it's so interesting right because I feel like so much of life has been set up as that zero some game where like that you like somebody wins and somebody loses it's not a game where it's like hey ten of us start and it's a lot of fun and at the end we all feel good about it or we all win we all were part of like solving the big problem or creating the big thing and yet then you look at you know other things like you know popped into my mind randomly habitat for humanity we're like a ton of people volunteer and you show up and like one person is swinging a hammer and one person is using a drill and everyone is working towards like the ultimate thing here is hey let's build a home for somebody in need so it's like you know that feels like a game where it's not a zero some game and yet you get people lining up to want to participate in that which is fascinating to me yeah philosopherT.

Nguyen says he writes about games a lot and he says that games are in a way you're cooperating to compete so like you're playing chess you're competing with your friend but you're also both there voluntarily you both want to be there you're it's really a cooperative technology even though it feels like you're competing in the moment and neuroscience has basically validated this in that like being social in any way is a reward like interacting with each other helping each other out so yeah there's this unfortunate I think that the sort of zero some metaphor has really percolated into a ton of well it's like kind of in a lot of the field of economics and it's on a lot of our mental models of how the world works and it's like a lot of business interests kind of operate in that way and the truth is that it's like humans don't work like that we take a lot of reward from playing on its own we don't really care about winning that much it's an unfortunate bias I think Heather McGee has that beautiful book the some of us where she talks about how white Americans believing that the world kind of is a zero some race have like voted against their self interest and you know tried to block black Americans from getting the things that they have the things that white Americans have and sort of cutting off their own noses despite their face I'm so curious also you know how much of the zero some mentality is is learned because it doesn't seem seems like in our most natural state like yeah if you look at toddlers playing I wonder if you know and like they're playing a game together the building blocks whatever they may be doing if you see more of this you know like co-opitation collaboration type of thing we're like let's just play you know like and then we're going to knock the thing down to the end so nobody really wins whereas like at some points something gets sort of like learned into us that says no no no no that's not how you quote win at life that society yet like business at whatever it may be and you know similar to like we're talking about unlearning pain like there's this ethos that says if life is a game somebody wins somebody loses and at some point that gets drilled into many of us and that part of our job is to unlearn that yeah I completely agree with that there's a economist aerial Rubenstein who talks about exactly this where he's a brilliant mathematician and he brilliant game theorist and he worries that teaching students about game theory will kind of corrupt their minds he calls them the victims of game theory because if you teach people the kind of maximally selfish perfect solution to a game theoretic scenario it's often like actually globally the worst the worst possible outcome so for example in the prisoner's dilemma two prisoners who have done a crime together and collaborated on this crime and you take them separately into rooms and you say if you both confess you both get one year of jail if you deny and the other person confesses they get three years of jail and you get off scot free if you both deny then you both get two two years of jail so it's globally optimal for both of them to confess because then they both each get one year but they both will deny because if they know that if even then they'll get they'll both get two years each this is needlessly needlessly involved I think but basically the idea is the global optimal solution to this would for them to both confess and but they both deny the crime so they both get two years because they're trying to get the personally optimal solution which is that they would get zero years and the other person get three years so out of selfishness they do much worse than they should and so if you test like a naive person on this like almost everybody cooperates because they're like yeah we both like in a kind of laboratory scenario of this if you test people they cooperate if you teach them game theory and they tell them the optimal solution is to defect to deny the crime then they start to deny the crime so they actually change their behaviors based on what they think is the game theoretic optimum this is actually really tragic because often the game theoretic optimum is like super selfish and pretty pretty terrible so there's this idea that like you know a bad model of an atom can't hurt the atom like there it doesn't matter if you have the wrong model of subatomic particle a bad model of a human is really problematic because people learn and so if they think that they're supposed to behave a certain way they will and they can behave in in pretty bad ways and and game theory is it's a model of a it's a mathematical equation it's like a selfish perfectly optimizing mathematical equation it's not actually a model of people and so we're kind of setting up these economic systems where we're incentivizing the selfish behaviors that aren't actually aligned with how humans behave because we're actually naturally very cooperative and want to be honest and all kinds of things so it's really quite tragic that is being co-opted as like the like basis for so many of our economic and technological systems yeah I mean and you write about this also you know if there's a physiological like you know like an neurochemical loop that happens in the body that just keeps reinforcing this over and over like you know once you gamify things then dopamine enters the equation in a very different way take me into that circuitry a little bit so you can understand like how that reward circuitry really just ingrains this mentality so dopamine it's kind of misunderstood people a lot of people think it's it's a pleasure molecule and really it's kind of a wanting molecule so it increases for example when we we know that we're about to get a reward so in the 90s we'll frame shults this uh German neuro physiologist did these experiments in monkeys where they would train monkeys to like push a lever to get some juice after a light was flashed and so in the beginning of these experiments in the early days the monkey would kind of didn't know what he was doing didn't know that he needed to suppress a lever and would occasionally accidentally press a lever and get some surprise juice and the dopamine neurons would light up so this was like oh I got this thing I wanted and then as the animal learned that they had control and that the light qu meant that they were about to get reward if they push the lever their dopamine neurons started to light up to the light reward itself or to the light qu itself so suddenly the the light was setting off this cascade of dopamine like motivation for the reward so dopamine codes for basically anything we want so likefood,water,money,socialization, whatever people want dopamine and codes drugs and a lot of drugs are very potent dopamine activators and actually another thing is games like solving puzzles and and learning things so all of these things drive the same circuitry and it's also how we learn games we learn this prediction of oh we're gonna win if we do this and so it's learning games will drive this wanting circuitry so yeah games can be just as addictive as any other substance and even people have known this for like thousands of years I think there was like ancient Hindu texts that likened diced to drugs so if you think about it they're basically this system of ideas that the brain invented to serve itself free pleasure you know you're learning in this little like system and you're getting things right and so you're getting rewarded for getting things right so it's the brain tickling itself basically there's a great story from Herodotus the Greek historian about the the Lydians people who lived around his time and he claimed that they had an 18 year famine and to survive the famine they would alternate between eating one day and playing games the next because playing games was kind of like would take the edge off the hunger basically and you know who knows if that's true but you can kind of see that that you know you would want to distract yourself if if you were starving and games are really really absorbing yeah I mean I think probably everybody has experienced that you know you say yes to a game and probably I would imagine this is even more present sort of like you know in like massive online games these days where either I'm sure people listening to this or you have a kid or a relative or someone like that where like you know they go into their room and at six o'clock at night and if you knock on the door at you know 10 o'clock the next morning they may still be playing yeah you know and have absolutely no sense of time it's so immersive and absorbing that it really draws you in and I went imagine part of what it's happening there is what you're describing it's like if there's a if the game has been designed so that there's almost like an endless amount of seeming novelty an endless amount of rewards like every time you like you or your team members like achieve something within the game you get that little dopamine hit and it's you're describing it's not even that you have to like knock off the thing or achieve the thing it's like the anticipation of it being about to happen that alone releases dopamine and it gives you pleasure and then that motivates you to keep doing it and to keep going more and to keep pulling you deeper into it I could imagine you know on the one hand could be fantastic you know if depending on what the the overall intention of the game was but also kind of brutal by pulling people out of the world and round them and almost like adicting them to this alternate reality to the you know to the detriment of their own lives and the people around them yeah I think that's absolutely true I think the for a long time there's been sort of moral outrage outrage about video games and their violence but I think the real danger is the games are quite addicting and increasingly so I mean this is like companies are really perfecting the technology of like digital addiction and gamification yeah I think it's on one hand really promising and really exciting and I think it's something you know maybe like 10 years ago everyone was talking about gamification and that it was going to revolutionize work and everyone was going to have fun at work and you could learn things and it would be totally joyful and you wouldn't like nothing would be unfun ever again and I think that really hasn't come to pass like I think what's happened is companies have pasted these sort of shallow addicting surfaces on their products I mean like Reddit is very gamified where you get upvoted and you get points and you get badges and things Twitter all these social media platforms are very gamified and you can feel like you have a score based on how many followers you have so companies have definitely embraced this I think too in many ways are detriment and I don't mean this to say that gamification is never going to work because I think it's going to be brilliant for education I think it's going to be revolutionary for a lot of things but what we have right now isn't really gamification it's like adictification no that makes sense I mean I wonder if part of part of it makes it I hate to use the word good or bad but like positive healthy constructive outcome versus negative like destructive dysfunctional outcome is whether the the ultimate the thing that you're striving for is status versus knowledge you know I think so many games are built around status and I like it there's not get it like we all have a human impulse towards status like we're kind of wired that way yeah but at the end of the day like to what end nobody really cares it doesn't go in your tombstone and if it does it says nothing about like the way that you lived your life and whether it was a good life or not whereas like you know if the if the goal of a game if if you're using all this game theory at the end goal is like let's get smarter let's get collectively more compassionate let's it you know it seems like it's what's being gamified like what behaviors are we gamifying and and to what end please a huge role in whether all of these theories and ideas and tools and structures are actually like positive or negative does that make sense yeah I love that idea and I I absolutely agree in the book I I suggest that we've used game theory as this foundation for a lot of economics and it's it doesn't make sense as a model of humans for a lot of reasons and one of them is that it has like very static angles a game theoretic agent wants in the model it's going to want like the thing it wants in all different conditions so for example like it's going to want to wear flip flops whether it's winter or summer it's hardwired to want the one thing it wants and humans don't work like that at all we are like we learn what we want sometimes we get what we want and then we learn that that's not actually what we want and we change what we want or we want flip flops in the summer and boots in the winter we also don't want things at the cost of certain principles so like we don't want to wear flip flops even if it means that like we have to throw a bag of puppies off a train like we have limits on the things we want and so yeah I suggest that a better model of humans is is a one of kind of as learners we're groping through our systems and trying to figure out what it is we want and how to get it in ways that we accord with our values yeah that makes so much sense and we'll be right back after word from our sponsors good life project is sponsored by air doctor so did you know that American spend an average of90% of their time indoors and that indoor air that we breathe is two to five times more polluted than outdoor air and in some cases actually up to a hundred times more polluted according to the EPA that's why I've been such a huge fan of air doctor for three years now I guess it filters out99.99% of dangerous contaminants 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with bank of america gives your operation access to exclusive digital tools award-winning insights and business solutions so powerful you'll make every move matter visit bank of america dot com slash banking for business to learn more what would you like the power to do bank of america in a copyright 2024 this season of the talking transitions podcast focuses on the energy sector brought to you by e y and foresight climate and energy we look at the main considerations and hurdles the shift to a sustainable society is facing including financing infrastructure empowering consumers and security of supply we also delve into exciting new aspects of the energy transition like the budding hydrogen economy and the use of i i listen to talking transitions wherever you get your podcasts part of what you're describing also and you talk about the saying yeah it's like the rational fools um like element in the book is this notion that we're like somewhat predictable we always kind of on the same but also that we largely will always choose self interest and like you were describing earlier you know who really look at it like in our most natural states we tend not to and society really flourishes when we're like interdependent not you know completely independent and self interest driven and there's there's all this research now also that shows you know like one of the best one of the most powerful ways to actually like feel like you're living a good meaningful purposeful like a live life is to be generous a lot of traditional like an alchemy would be like like but that's not rational like in a world where there are you know like there's a limitation on resources like human beings won't operate that way and in fact oftentimes if without external influence we will and we feel so much better when we do it's like what if we gamified that that's great yeah yeah i think that's absolutely right i think there's a great juxtaposition of these two sort of philosophies in the work of Garrett harden versus Eleanor Ostrom so Garrett harden in 1968 wrote this famous article called the tragedy of the commons where he uses game theory to kind of imagine what would happen if you had a bunch of like herds people sharing a common and if they were all rational they would all want to keep as much of their cattle on the commons as possible so they would all just like collect tons and tons of cattle and then ruin the the common grazing land because they were being like rationally selfish and then he goes on to argue from that point which is completely theoretical and like completely mathematical and not in any ways like rounded in real human data he goes on to argue he turns out he he's like a huge racist and he's like arguing for immigration control and sterilization like forced sterilization all kinds of really shady stuff and it was an incredibly influential piece but it had no bearing in reality and so this economist Eleanor Ostrom around the same time was writing her grad dissertation and went on to do all of her her research on this question of like what do real humans do when they have to share common pool resources like they have to share a well they have to share garden of some kind and buy in large most humans do really well at finding sustainable ways of of sharing these common resources and not always but and obviously we're not always doing it perfectly because the world is in you know there's some some climate issues and so on but it was really amazing to see like the huge diversity of ways people really genuinely work together to make sustainable their common resources and I think that's a really great example of like of game theory kind of causing us to come to these like repugnant conclusions when the reality of humans is that we're not selfish and we like working together and we're cooperative and we are socially oriented and all kinds of nice things so yeah I totally agree with that it begs a question now in my mind and and this is like guaranteed somebody's gonna be thinking this right now you like that old quote but it only takes one bad apple so like if you have a game where the rules are based on benevolence and sort of like collective elevation that's awesome for everybody who buys into it but what about that one person who shows up they see the way that they get the rules are written they kind of see the way that they can manipulate this to their own extreme personal gain how do we handle that yeah it's a great question I wish I had a better answer I think one idea is and this is kind of speculation and wishful thinking but the hope would be that as you've kind of gestured towards like if we can find the right game rules where people are incentivized to collaborate and cooperate and deeply maybe penalized for not can we design better games where people win by cooperating but this is a great question and I think you know game theory was also used for a lot of the sort of nuclear diplomacy strategizing to current day and it gave us policies like mutually assured destruction which basically the idea is that if you know two countries have huge nuclear arsenals they need to develop capabilities so that if one of the countries launched a nuclear strike on the other one the one that was attacked would attack back and destroy so that both countries would basically be destroyed so your the idea is that you're like maintaining peace by threatening the other countries and to be fair like we haven't had a nuclear war so that's that's promising but actually one of the interesting footnotes in history is that this is not necessarily a rational way for countries to behave because you know if one country attacked your country is it really kind of morally okay to then just like completely destroy their country if like if that basically is going to end up ending life on earth or something like that's not the most rational thing to do so there was a in 1983 the the economist Thomas Shelling organized a simulation game about what would happen in nuclear war and he invited 200 top US politicians and military officers and they played through you know what happens if Russia strikes us here what happens if you know do we have the capabilities for this or that and I think it was like a three-week simulation of all kinds of different contingencies and it ended up scaring the pants off everybody like the outcomes were horrifying in these game simulations it was like either wiping life off the face of the earth or you know the best case scenario was like it would kill 500,000 people if it was a very limited nuclear war and then like another 500 million people would die of radiation poisoning so this game simulation ended up scaring enough American politicians that the Reagan administration then was moved to open like sweeping arms controlled negotiations with the Soviets so I think this is an example of like a game experience which is in many ways like a very intimate thing where you're like seeing kind of firsthand like what we're using this rhetoric we're using this like we're gonna beat the Soviets rhetoric what would that actually look like thinking through that in the form of a game was incredibly powerful for people and so I think game theory can take us to these again like kind of morally reprehensible places but then game design can maybe get us out of them yeah I mean that's fascinating you know it's sort of like taking that phrase well let's play this out to the extreme in that scenario it's like well before we actually go too far down this road like what if we really really really play this out and maybe on the one hand like one outcomes like oh this is awesome let's keep on keeping on but it sounds like in that scenario rather than having to actually live it and experience horrific horrific outcomes like you spend three weeks intensively with 200 minds in a room and being like oh wow like this is something that we can never let happen we need to actually start making different decisions and figure out a different approach to this largely because you did this simulation it compresses amount of time and it gave you insights that change your reality change the way that you behave like from that moment forward I wonder how much we do that just on a really micro scale like any given individual all day every day so for starters I think probably even for adults who like aren't playing games in their their lives now the games that we played as children like really profoundly influenced our filters the way we solve problems the way we think and so I think there's actually a lot of like previously game doubt things from our past that are dictating a lot of the way we see the world and the way we're interacting with people and then there's I mean there's also really very cute examples of like you know there's been this resurgence of Dungeons and Dragons so a lot more people are playing these kind of role-playing games people are discovering like new gender identities new aspects of their personality I started playing it with some friends and we just played for a couple weeks and then we all realized like we picked characters that were basically ourselves but gnomes or whatever so we kind of rejiggered our our characters to try to get out of our ourselves a bit because part of the beauty of games is that you can pretend to be whoever the character you're playing is you can be completely outside of yourself and hopefully like explore new aspects of your personality or act in ways that you wouldn't normally act I think and this is like extremely powerful like I think a lot of us feel very imprisoned in our identities like I am this I am shy I act like this I am a scientist I am whatever we are we tend to kind of cling to those identities really strongly and I think games encourage us in this really fun way to play with that and step outside that and experience what it would be like to be someone else yeah and you know like you talk about this also like you sort of like under this notion of exploring moral geometry you know sort of like we walk through the world in a very particular way within assumed identity and like this is who we are this is how we show up this is what we say yes to this so we say no to this is what we believe in what we don't believe in and what you're describing is like we have this amazing opportunity when we step into a game especially and it's been amazing to see the resurgence of role playing games over the last decade or so I'm like old school board games like people sit around a table and play for hours sometimes days and weeks and I do wonder if a lot of that is what you're saying it's like we're so locked into these this sense of like this is how I show up in the real world but wouldn't it be cool to have a place where I can experiment and the stakes weren't like my career or like life and death health or like you know like my closest friends and partner in relationships where I don't want to take a social risk where I don't want to take a career risk I don't want to do this but I really do want to kind of play with my sense of identity and see what's possible and it's almost like a a lower stakes way for us to step into a different role and run experiments in a way that really even though they're unfolding in the in the game we're all they're really teaching us about ourselves I love that like exactly that's exactly right it's you're running experiments different simulations on your life and I think that's what play evolved to be it's basically a space of safe exploration like first of all play is ancient like most animals play almost all mammals play so it's this really old evolutionary tactic and it's almost impossible to like get animals to not play they just play and so it's actually kind of hard to study because you can't like have a control group where you don't have play animals but as far as we can tell it seems to be this the purpose of play in animals is that it's this place for safe exploration where you're like practicing hunting with but you're just doing it with like ball of yarn for kitten or like you're wrestling with your litter mates as a wolf and then like and when you're an adult you're going to need to hunt in your own you're going to need to wrestle on your own so at that point what you learned in play will kind of come to bear but the play is kind of exploring social relationships and your body and then humans took this to a mental realm where exploring ideas we're exploring our identities and what's kind of beautiful is that even though for a lot of animals they don't play as much as adults like humans are still super playful as adults and it's like this really deep kind of mammalian instinct and I love to see that people are embracing it again or more thesedays.

Now I love that too and the notion of those sort of like the role playing games also brings up something else I want to ask you about which is you we talked about the idea of a zero-something game where like there's a winner there's a loser and how that's like so often drilled into so many aspects of life as we become adults and then you share this concept of mechanism design as like an alternative approach what if we could all just engage in this thing in a way where we're collaborating and we're cooperating and share this probably some friendly competition and all that but at the end of the day like we can all actually participate in something amazing I've also heard this phrase infinite games where the notion is like not to start like get to the end of the game and be a winner or not even to get to any game but like how do we step into or create a game that's just so awesome like the goal is I don't ever want this toend.

Yeah tell me a little bit more about thisidea.

Yeah it's a beautifulidea.

Winning is just to get to play more and I mean evolution is that life is that and actually yeah a lot of amazing biology has come out of of modeling life as like this iterated game between animals and I don't have like necessarily deep insights beyond the fact that that's it's a beautiful idea that some games are like just meant to be played forever but I think it's a really important kind of guiding principle for you know playing to win is this extremely short-sighted thing where we might burn bridges to win we might act in ways we're not proud of to win like so for example the game Mafia where you're basically like lying to your friends and like hiding who's the Mafia in the in thegame.

I've like seen so many people get super offended playing that game and you know we wouldn't normally lie to our friends like the game is encouraging us to to behave in ways that we don't necessarily want to in our real lives it's kind of outside of who we are we have to like pretend to be something but for an infinite game you would have to like really inhabit yourself like you would have to not your like game identity would have to not be separate from your real identity and that's a really interesting condition for a game and I think you know in the more practical sense like there might start to be like actual kind of like endless video games in a way there already are these massive online yeah universes so we might get more like that and it might be you know the content is automatically generated by AI and stuff like that but I think of it as more of this like this beautiful metaphor for like how do we design systems where we're not like raising the environment or raising our relationships with people in order to win and rather our finding ways of engaging with each other in a sustainableway.

Hmm now I love that and that actually sounds like a really good place for us to come full circle as well so I was wrapped with the same question this container of good life project if I offer up the phrase to live a good life what comesup.

We touch on this that identity I think is a common thread in wisdom traditions that identity is or misidentification is kind of the root of suffering and I think play is a really powerful way of playing with that and breaking that so when we are suffering or struggling we can get to these kind of like contracted states where we're really banging our head against the wall trying to heal or trying to have thingschange.

I think I ex what you know I recently after the pandemic started playing a lot more games and realizing that like there was just not enough joy in my life there was not enough fun and games were a really great way for me to reconnect with that kind of childlike sense of creativity and for me I think just kind of breaking out of that structure of who I think I am and getting silly with it for once has been pretty powerful forme.

Thankyou. Okay before you leave if you'd love this episode safe but you'll also love the conversation we have with Miriael about becoming undistracted the Find a LinkedIn Nerves episode in the shownotes.

This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me Jonathan Fields editing helped by Alejandro Ramirez Chris DeFra Carter crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Del for her research on thisepisode.