Good Life Project - How to Tap the Power of Games to Live a Better Life | Kelly Clancy

Episode Date: June 17, 2024

What if the games we play reveal deeper truths about human nature and society? In this mind-expanding conversation, neuroscientist Kelly Clancy, author of Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World explores the profound role of games and game theory in understanding ourselves and actively shaping reality itself.Get ready to rethink what constitutes "winning" and embrace an "infinite game" philosophy focused on mutual flourishing over ego-driven conquests.You can find Kelly at: Website | Episode TranscriptIf you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the conversations we had with Nir Eyal about becoming indistractable.Check out our offerings & partners: Join My New Writing Project: Awake at the WheelVisit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The games that we played as children really profoundly influenced our filters, the way we solve problems, the way we think. There's actually a lot of previously gamed out things from our past that are dictating a lot of the way we see the world and the way we're interacting with people. 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 and experience what it would be like to be someone else. I think 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 playful ways. So have you ever wondered what our lives might be like if we approach them more like games? If we saw challenges as opportunities for playful exploration instead of these stressful obstacles? If we embrace our

childlike sense of curiosity and engage with the world through a lens of creativity and joy? Well, my guest today is Kelly Clancy, and she is about to take us on a mind-expanding journey that will reshape how we view reality itself. Kelly is a neuroscientist and physicist who's held positions in research at MIT, Berkeley, University College of London, and the AI company DeepMind. 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 and identity. This is deep, powerful, really groundbreaking work. And in her new book, Playing with Reality,

How Games Have Shaped Our World, 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 of being. And through her research on agency and brain-based computer interfaces, Kelly has gained really fascinating insights into how games engage our minds and shape our behavior in powerful ways, ways that might really surprise you actually. But as she'll share in our conversation, many of the prevailing models in game theory and economics, they're also based on flawed assumptions about human nature that prioritize competition over collaboration and really reinforce bringing the

worst of ourselves to our relationships and the world. And by embracing a more holistic and cooperative approach to game design, Kelly believes that we can create a world where everyone can thrive and flourish in a sustainable way. So join me for this mind-expanding exploration of the surprising ways that games can really help us transcend our limitations, cultivate greater wisdom and compassion, and create a more harmonious and equitable world for all. So excited to share this conversation with you.

I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman.

I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die.

Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. The recent book has got a lot of really interesting stuff and also just you and your work in general. I was actually recently reading, I think it was a 2019 piece in her 50s from really rapidly from this genetic disease.

And then 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 remake their lives to devote themselves to trying to find a cure. 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 their story. You know, so often we want to wait until like, how's it end? Like what's happening here? And you're like, there's something happening here right now.

We have no idea where this is going to go, but I want to immerse myself in this story right now. And I was curious about that just from your standpoint as a scientist, as a storyteller. Yeah, that's such a great question. I think it's, I mean, it's such a beautiful story and it's so resonant for so many of us. We're 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 of that. I think that's actually true of a lot of science. A lot of scientists

are driven not just by kind of idle curiosity, but like my parents had Alzheimer's or 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 a disease they might have because they would just prefer to, and that's totally fine. It's 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 fellow sufferers. And I think it's just an amazing, she's an amazing human. And I was really pleased to share that story with people.

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 the New York Times today or over the weekend, about APOE4, sort of like a genetic snip, where if you have this allele, or I guess the homozygous version of it, 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 was 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 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, you know, like there are other like markers for different things.

And I wonder if you've thought about that sort of like more generalized across different things. 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'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 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 it's just going to cause you suffering. I think for some people, like for Sonia, she said, like, it would cause me much more suffering not to know. I think it's, yeah, it's just person dependent. Yeah. Just the question hanging over you.

Exactly. So as you described, 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 your career path has a more personal origin story as well. Yeah, definitely. I'm a neuroscientist and my father was a pediatric neurologist. So I spent my childhood hanging out at the hospital a lot and seeing other kids. And the sort of spectrum of neurological illness is huge. You have kids that looked just like me, but they happen to have seizures.

And you had profoundly disabled kids. And there's a lot of suffering. 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 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, 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 Neuralink, but basically you train a 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 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 ability to move, whether through injury or illness or otherwise, just is psychologically devastating for people. And so being able to restore it in some way, whether through technology or otherwise, is, I think, really important holy grail for a lot of neurotechnologists. That's kind of what's driven

my work. Yeah, I mean, that makes a lot of sense. The. That's kind of what's driven my work. Yeah, I mean, that makes a lot of sense. The whole idea of brain-machine interfaces, I feel like 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 researched and been doing this for years. And now all of a sudden it's like, wow, this is part of the zeitgeist. And you're like, I've been doing this 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, 10 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 businesses fail. And so there's a couple stories of businesses that had chips in patients, and now those patients are stuck with these, 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. 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 so much sense. I get the sense that a lot of this is not going to be resolved tomorrow. You know, this is like that we're still in the really early days of all of this, but

with so much more popular focus on it, 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. It's like it brings different motivations into the field, which like you described can be good and bad. It's like it brings different motivations into the field, which can accelerate certain things, but also, you know, bring different pressures to bear. 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. I was recently talking to Sean Mackey, who's a head of a lot of the pain research at Stanford. And we were talking about 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 our 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 in the work that you've done or the insights

or 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 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, like represented somehow in his brain itself, not in the injury or not in 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 canire 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 of injury. Yeah, I mean, that would be pretty amazing. 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 wildly complex. 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

of pain. So there are ways of isolating those areas, but it is very complicated, yes. Yeah. Which kind of brings us, you know, like these different ideas and topics and just the work 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 and the world around us, and to a certain extent, create the world around us. And part of what you're talking about, I wonder if in no small part, you're doing the work that you're doing. And so many scientists, people who live in the question, are doing the work that they're doing because in some

way they've told the story of this work as being some sort of game to themselves that keeps them invested in it. 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 benchmark progress and measure our results against each other and compare results. Because I think one big issue in science is that it's done by these independent teams and their data is proprietary and people aren't sharing things. So if you think about chess, the beauty of chess is that nobody really has an advantage over anyone else. 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 whether we are taking a kind of game-like approach in our research. 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 with it.

Yeah, no, that makes so much sense. I mean, you opened the book really talking about the notion of like how, really how certain types of games or how like certain ideas of games, especially historically are used to teach divine truths, our 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 live in a game world or play in 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 Graeber, 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 how unbelievably varied a lot of human societies were.

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 playful ways. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.

Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him!

Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. When we use the word play here, or games, are there sort of a universal set of defining characteristics of what makes for a game. 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 that goal. 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 the hole. You have to hit it with this metal stick until you get it into the hole. And then something like 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 plop them on the table with your hands. You have to roll them randomized. So this goes for gambling,

for video games, and yeah, it can extend to all kinds of metaphorical games as well. 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 were describing earlier, like in the context of scientists researching a question. On the one hand, it's amazing because now you'll have like a whole team, sometimes like multiple teams, hundreds of people in organization, all resourced and all driving towards the same question, you know, tackling different pieces of it, 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 siloing going on,

even within the same university, people could be could be working on 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. Yeah, that's a really profound point,

that information is power in games. And 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 deceive 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 skyrockets for everything. 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 Morgenstern wanting to kind of axiomatize 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 one another. 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 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 Rainer Kniesia who says when he designs a game, the first thing he thinks about is what is the scoring system? Because the 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. 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 we're 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 are pretty much out of alignment with your actual principles in order to win the game. And it's important that we know what games we're 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 sum game where like, like somebody wins and somebody loses. It's not a game where it's like, Hey, 10 of us start and it's a lot of fun. And at the end, we all feel good about it, or we all win, or we all were part of like solving the big problem

or creating the big thing. And yet, then you look at other things popped into my mind randomly, Habitat for Humanity, where a ton of people volunteer and you show up and one person is swinging a hammer and one person is using a drill and everyone is working towards 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 sum game. And yet you get people lining up to want to participate in that, which is fascinating to me. Yeah. Philosopher T. 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. 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 the sort of zero sum 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 in 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 Sum of Us, where she talks about how white Americans believing that the world kind of is a zero-sum 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 nose to spite their face. is learned because it doesn't seem, it seems like in our most natural state, like if you look at toddlers playing, I wonder if, and like they're playing a game together, they're building blocks, whatever they may be doing. If you see more of this, you know, like coopetition, collaboration type of thing, we're like, let's just play, you know,

like, and then we're going to knock the thing down at the end, so nobody really wins. Whereas like at some point, something gets sort of like learned into us that says no no no that's not how you quote win at life at society at like business at whatever it may be and you know similar to like we were 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 an

economist, Ariel Rubenstein, who talks about exactly this, where he's a brilliant mathematician and he's a 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 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 – and then they'll both get two years each. This is needlessly involved, I think. But basically the idea is the global optimal solution to this would for them to both confess. 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 would 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 you 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. This is actually

really tragic because often the game theoretic optimum is like super selfish and pretty terrible. So there's this idea that like, you know, a bad model of an atom can't hurt the atom. Like 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 pretty bad ways. 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 these 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 it's being co-opted as like the basis for so many of our economic and technological systems. Yeah. I mean, and you write about this also, you know, there's a physiological, like, you know, like a 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 we can understand, like, how that reward circuitry really just ingrains this mentality. So dopamine, it's kind of misunderstood. A lot of people think it's a pleasure molecule, and really it's kind of a wanting molecule. So it increases, for example, when we know that we're about to get a reward. So in the 90s, Wolfram Schultz, this German neurophysiologist,

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 press 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 cue meant that they were about to get reward if they pushed the lever, their dopamine neurons started to light up to the light reward itself or to the light cue itself.

So suddenly the light was setting off this cascade of dopamine motivation for the reward. So dopamine codes for basically anything we want. So like food, water, money, socialization, whatever people want, dopamine encodes drugs. And a lot of drugs are very potent dopamine activators. And actually, another thing is games, like solving puzzles 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 going to win if we do this. And so 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 dice 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 Lydians, the 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, you know, you would want to distract yourself if, if you were starving and games are really, really absorbing. Yeah. I mean, and 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 it's 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, you know, and have absolutely no sense of time. It's so immersive

and absorbing that it really draws you in. And I imagine part of what is 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 and endless amount of rewards, like every time you or your team members achieve something within the game, you get that little dopamine hit. And as you're describing, it's not even that you have to 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. depending on what the overall intention of the game was, but also kind of brutal by pulling people out of the world around them and almost like addicting them to this alternate reality to the detriment of their own lives

and the people around them. Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. I think that for a long time, there's been sort of moral 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, 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 nothing would be unfun ever again. And I think that really hasn't come to pass. 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 to, in many ways, our 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 addictification. Now that makes sense. I mean, I wonder if part of what 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 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 look at those and I get it. Like we all have a human impulse towards status. Like we're, 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 on 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 you're using all this game theory and the end goal is like let's get smarter let's get collectively more compassionate let's hit you know it seems like it's what's being gamified like what behaviors are we gamifying and and to what end plays a huge role in whether all of these theories and ideas

and tools and structures are actually positive or negative. Does that make sense? Yeah, I love that idea. And I absolutely agree. In the book, I suggest that we've used game theory as this foundation for a lot of economics. And 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 end goals. 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 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 we don't want to wear flip-flops even if it means that we have to throw a bag of puppies off a train. We have limits on the things we want. And so, yeah, I suggest that a better model of humans is 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 a word from our sponsors. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot.

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Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. 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 and we always come around the same but also that we largely will always choose self-interest and like you were describing earlier if we 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 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 alive life is to actually feel like you're living a good, meaningful, purposeful, alive life is to be generous. A lot of traditional economic theory would be like, but that's not rational. In a world where there's a limitation on resources, human beings won't operate that way. And in fact, oftentimes, 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 Hardin versus Eleanor

Ostrom. So Garrett Hardin 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 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 grounded in real human data. He goes on to argue, he turns out 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 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 a garden of some kind. By and large, most humans do really well at finding sustainable ways 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 game theory kind of causing us to come to these 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 this is like guaranteed somebody's going to be thinking this right now. You're like that old quote, but it only takes one bad apple.

So 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 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 um attacked would attack back and destroy so that both countries would basically be destroyed so you're 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 economist thomas schelling 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 either wiping life off the face of the earth, or the best case scenario was it would kill 500,000 people if it was a very limited nuclear war, and then 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 control 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 going to 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, what if we really, really, really play this out? And maybe on the one hand, one outcome is like, ooh, 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, you spend three weeks intensively with 200 minds in a room and being like, oh wow, 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, a compressed amount of time, and it gave you

insights that changed your reality, changed the way that you behave 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 aren't playing games in their lives now, the games that we played as children really profoundly influence our filters the way we solve problems the way we think and so i think there's actually a lot of like previously gamed out 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 so a lot more people are playing these kind of role-playing games.

People are discovering new gender identities, new aspects of their personality. I started playing it with some friends, and we played for a couple weeks, and then we all realized 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 selves 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, 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 know, sort of like under this notion of, you know, like exploring moral geometry, you know, it's sort of like we walk through the world in a very particular way with an assumed identity and like, this is who we are, this is how we show up, this is what we say yes to, this is what 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. And 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 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 could experiment and the stakes weren't like my career or like life and death health or like my closest friends and partner in relationships where I don't wanna take a social risk, where I don't wanna take a career risk,

I don't wanna do this. But I really 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 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 game world, they're really teaching us about ourselves.

I love that. Like, 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. First of all, play is ancient. 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 a kitten or like you're wrestling with your litter mates as a wolf. And then like when you're an adult, you're going to need to hunt on 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. We're 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 these days. No, 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, we talked about the idea of a zero-sum game where 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 shared 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 sure, there's 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 sort of 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 to end yeah tell me a little bit more about this idea yeah it's a beautiful idea

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 game. I've like seen so many people get super offended playing that game.

And we wouldn't normally lie to our friends. The game is encouraging us 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 pretend to be something. But for an infinite game, you would have to really inhabit yourself. Your 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 in the more practical sense, there might start to be actual endless video games. In a way, there already are these massive online 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 just 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 are finding ways of engaging with each other in a sustainable way. Now, I love that. And that actually sounds like a

really good place for us to come full circle as well. So I always wrap with the same question, this container of good life project. If I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? We touched 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 things change. I think I, 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 stricture of who I think I am and getting silly with it for once has been pretty powerful for me. Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, has been pretty powerful for me. Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Alejandro Ramirez, Christopher Carter, Crafted Air Theme Music, and special thanks to Shelley Adele for her research on this episode.

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