Hey everyone, it's Tristan Harris.

And I'm Aza Raskin. Welcome everyone to your undivided attention.

So Tristan, today I think is actually one of our favorite episodes because we're diving really deep into a way of seeing the world that feels very obvious, that feels sort of

like you're naive if you don't adopt it, but that is causing the deadening of a world.

And that is game theory.

Yeah, I mean, and the simple way to boil that down is the logic that you've heard of this

podcast before around AI and social media.

Well, if I don't do it, they will. You know, if I don't

race for that attention and hijack people's psychological vulnerabilities to build social media

doom-scrolling machines, then I'm just going to lose to the other company that will. If I'm a

movie studio and I don't release Spider-Man 7 while the other guy is releasing Batman 10, I'm just

going to lose the game of building

successful movies. If I don't build the advanced AI as fast as possible and take all the

shortcuts, even though taking shortcuts is bad for humanity, well, then I'll just lose and they'll win.

And cooperation, therefore, is for suckers. And this logic, you know, feels inescapable. It feels like it's a fundamental law

of human nature. But this episode with our guest, Sonia Amadai, is about why it's not actually

a fundamental law. It's a specific way of looking at the world, a way of looking that was

invented by humans. We sort of call this the game theory dilemma,

which is to say that if I adopt game theory and you don't, you lose.

So game theory was actually invented in the 1940s

by one of the greatest mathematicians and physicists of all time,

John von Neumann, and he was trying to understand how do you formalize how you win parlor games like chess and poker.

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