Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll.

Long time listeners will know that we've talked about game theory before on the podcast.

Usually in the context of literally playing games, we've had no less than two different podcasts

about playing poker or realizing that there are lessons from poker that you can apply more widely.

And in fact, I think both times we noted that John Funnoiman, who is the father of game theory,

invented it in order to analyze his local poker game.

We also talked to Frank Lance, who is a game designer about game theory.

But the wonderful thing about game theory is that it applies much more broadly than that.

It's a lesson in strategic interactions between agents with different interests.

So that's obviously a hugely broad kind of conceptual framework in which to think about a

whole bunch of different issues. So today we're going to be talking to Kalano Conner,

who is a philosopher of science. She has quite a broad portfolio in terms of research

interests. But one of the things she's done, she's written a couple of books on applying game

theory to both biological evolution, thinking about what species of all, how they interact with each

other, whose predator, whose prey, how they fill different niches and so forth.

And also one applying game theory to human behavior. Why do human beings treat each other

in different ways? And in particular, can we understand the origin of certain inequities in society

in game theoretic terms? Now this is very difficult thing to do, right? Because when you have an

inequity in society, when one group is discriminated against or picked on, another group is privileged and

has more wealth or resources or power or whatever, there's probably a whole host of reasons why

and people will debate them. But game theory sort of presents an interesting new twist on this kind

of problem. Imagine that you're a kid and you have a sibling and your mom says to the two of you

...