Hi everybody, this is Gadsad. There are a lot of things that are pissing me off these days.

Let's start with a new analysis of the preemptive strike on Iran to dismantle its nuclear program.

And so here what I'd like to do is talk a few minutes about game theory.

So for those of you who are not familiar with game theory,

it's a field in applied economics, if you'd like,

where you try to study optimal behavior in various situations.

So the classic example of game theory would be the

prisoner's dilemma, right? You catch two prisoners, you separate them as the cops do, and then you

each one you ask to either confess or not. They could confess or not. Therefore, there are four possible outcomes.

Prisoner A can confess or not. Prisoner B can confess or not. So there are two-by-two matrix of

payoffs. And then depending on those payoffs, there is some optimal behavior. The prison

dilemma arises because, of course, each prisoner thinks the ideal

situation is for me not to confess and for the other guy to confess. And then by both doing

so, then that results in a suboptimal outcome. So anyways, there's an endless number of

situations that could be modeled via game theory. One of the original guys to develop

game theory was one of my heroes in that, intellectual heroes in that he was a true polymath.

I think I mentioned him recently on my most recent appearance on Joe Rogan's show, John von Neumann.

I was actually looking for one of his biographies in my

personal library to show it to you, but I can't find it because I have so many books.

Any case, John von Neumann was an unbelievable guy, a true polymath. Now, at the time of World War II,

the classic example of a game theoretic situation, which effectively led to the development of game theory as a applied mathematics discipline, applied economics discipline. By the way, you see game theory also being used in evolutionary biology, evolutionary game theory.

So John Maynard Smith would be a perfect example of someone who utilized game theory

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