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

You might have noticed that human beings tend to have this thing that happens where one person will interact with another person, bumping into them, talking to them, perhaps exchanging goods or services, or maybe just exchanging pleasantries, who knows? Very often, one is tempted to say

always, you can judge how well such interactions went from the point of view of person A or person

B. If you wanted to try to quantify it, you could assign points or value to how well you did on the basis of the choices you made during the interaction.

Indeed, you could think of it as kind of a game where there was a score, even if the score is not completely manifest and quantitative, we have a

feeling that, oh, that interaction went well, or this other interaction didn't. And, you know,

it's not just human beings that we're talking about here. Animals interact with each other.

In a more broad sense, if you want to be forgiving about the term, species interact with each other.

Plants interact with each other. Maybe even single-celled organisms, maybe even genes in your body

interact with each other. Maybe companies or countries interact with each other and also have a

feeling of reward or preference that they can quantify and say, yes,

that interaction went well, maybe even I won that interaction or I lost that interaction.

There should be a theory, some sort of general principles that enabled us to talk about

all of these games all at once. I mean, of course there is. You read the title of the podcast.

You know what we're talking about here. The idea is game theory. Game theory has a interesting reputation out there in academic

circles widely. Many people swear by it. They use it all the time. They develop it. They prove

theorems. You know, it goes back to the mid-20th century, Oscar Morganstern and John von Neumann and others,

...