Oh, wow, oh, oh, wow, oh, wow, oh, man.

Like, you know, like me.

And so, oh, James Fodor.

In this podcast, I discuss a wide variety of topics in both the natural and social sciences,

exploring the many fascinating scientific discoveries that help us better understand the world around us.

This is episode number five, and the topic for today is corporate conspiracies.

So in this episode, I'm going to examine the issue of corporate conspiracy theories,

particularly the alleged suppression by the drug companies of the cure for cancer,

and the alleged sabotage by oil companies of the electric car.

And you may not think that this is really a science

issue so much as a political issue, but actually economic analysis and game theory can provide

us with important insights into the true incentives and constraints that these firms actually

face and can therefore yield very important insights that helps to understand how probable

these conspiracies are to occur. And so that's what I'm going to focus on in this podcast.

So first I'm going to talk about the suppression of the cure for cancer, then I'm going to move on to

the suppression of the electric car, and I'll conclude with a more general game theoretic analysis

of sort of grand conspiracy theories. Okay, suppression of the cure for cancer. The conspiracy argument

here is that drug companies have already found a cure for cancer, but are deliberately covering it

up in order to make higher profits off of expensive

cancer treatments. Now, what I want to focus on here is whether or not it would actually be

in the interest of drug companies to do this, and whether or not it would be possible for them

to do this even if they wanted to. So, first of all, I'm going to set up the situation. So suppose that

...