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My name is Mark Rubin, and I'm a dream weaver. I hope these widgets help you weave your dreams into reality. Game theory as it applies to what I've been doing in my life and story I didn't tell you on this series is about gangs I used to play in high school scavenger hunts, I used to put on these elaborate scavenger hunts for my friends, where I would create complex situations across the town where I lived, where people, they would get clues, and they would read the clue. And then they would jump in the car and they would go somewhere in the back then there was like payphones to pay phone would ring because I timed it so that there was another group somewhere else that call that phone and then they had to read a message to the person. And inside the phonebook, there was like a note on a certain page. And I don't know all kinds of stuff. And I used to plan these elaborate scavenger hunts for people to play with a model of game theory. And I just looked this up, I had never looked this up before a definition of game theory. Game theory is a branch of mathematics and economics that studies decision making. In situations where the outcome depends not only on one's own decisions, but on the decisions of others, involves understanding strategies, predicting opponent's moves, figuring out the best course of action or potential choices of others. And game theory is used in various fields like economics, political science, psychology, biology, to analyze competitive situations where the outcome is affected by the actions of different participants. And I will add, this is every interaction with another human being, every every interaction with every person is based on these ideas of game theory is is it worth it? Or is it not? Or how does it help me later? Or how does it hurt me now are all the combinations of all the things that people are doing to try to maximize their positions in different ways? I mentioned I was doing these scavenger hunts. When I was a kid, I was probably 16, and 17. But I 15 1617. And I was doing it to learn. I didn't know about game theory, back then, like the concept of game theory. But I have a model of human behavior that I utilize, that takes into account my own decision making, how I decide based on inspiration, motivation, manipulation, balanced against time, effort, and risk. And I also have models of decisions that I've made on flowcharts, in my mind, with branches, and on these branches of flowcharts, I have probabilities that are based on an assessment of of which branches I think would be more likely, on a scale of one to 10 to provide a result, that would be in the direction of good decision making, the way I do it is, I don't need to be right. But I try to basically create situations that over time, I'm more right than wrong. So any individual decision may be bad or may, it may not work out the way I imagined. But what I try to do is cross functional and connect these decisions through a series of steps that are linked in different ways so that if one branch goes wrong, I can keep going down a different branch and learn. So based on the models of decisions I've made in the disastrous things that have occurred in different situations are because other people didn't behave the way I imagined they would. And this is game theory, this is learning about the game theory of human behavior. And just as a reflection of, of the areas that are most wrong for me, is it falls into two categories. One is overconfidence in the facts, meaning believing that I know what like what the elements of the decision making matrix are. And that is a lesson of perspective. Is that is easy to believe that I have the full perspective, especially with my way of okay, but the reality is, I don't know much and nobody does. And this is especially true. When assessing the motives of other people. motives are hard to guess to begin with, unless you ask a person like why why the why questions? Why did you even even ask them why they do something? They don't even know why. Or they don't even give you the straight answer or like, they probably don't even know why they just it's just whatever. You know, most people seem to be propelled by a pursuit of pleasure more than anything else. So and that could be entertainment. It could be sex could be drugs, alcohol, the relaxation, and most often than not just the reduction in anxiety. So put that in that in that category. Most people that I know pursued things that reduce their anxiety or increase their pleasure, before any other criteria, or any other thing. And I've never really operated that way because I play the long game. And know that those those pursuits are temporary. So I'm going for like the lifetime of good vibes, not just an hour. So that's like an aspect of this decision making matrix where I've been wrong, is not having the perspective of another person and not weighing that as as much as as it deserves to be weighed. Another area where I'm wrong is self awareness is that my assessment of other people's behavior is based on some degree of like, rational thought that like somehow, deep down in the primitive limbic area of the brain, there is some kind of logic, okay, that logic will prevail eventually. And where I've been the most wrong is people that are insecure, and make decisions based on ego, instead of logic, which is a way in other way in terms of pleasure seeking behavior to reduce anxiety, because they feel bad about themselves, if they were wrong, these kinds of things. It's like assessing someone else's degree of self confidence, anxiety, ego, alpha maleness, these kinds of things that are foreign for me to grasp in terms of decision making areas, I've been wrong about people. And that to some people not being perceived as wrong at any cost is more valuable than like, millions of dollars, or relationships, and these kinds of things. And so like that, like a very hard thing to model for me, because it's not in my psychology. And then the third area of this that I've been the most wrong is trusting people that were not trustworthy. I've learned a lot about that, in the last few years. And in order for someone to be trustworthy. To me, there's four components. There's dependable actions. There's reliable words, there's strength in a skill. And there's an agreement on shared values and principles, which is called integrity to the shared values and principles. And the situations that I've been in where this this fell apart is just not defining what the values and principles were in advance. And then everyone has a story about what was said and agree and like, whatever. I just think, like, studying game theory, and studying how people decide how I decide who everybody decides, what's the basis of this, of these decisions? And how can we improve the chances of success because most people want things to work out, except the people that have stolen from me over the years in different ways. They didn't want to work out, they were like a one and done scenario. A good example, I was building a cabin in West Virginia, premium cabin. And I've been dreaming about this cabin since I was 15. And my cabin builder, stole my money, and then disappeared and then went to jail. And he did this to 30 other people and then he died. And now the money's gone, and I have no cap and I have a driveway. That was an example of like, I believe that that was going to happen. I invested in it happening. I met this guy four times on the site, in the permit office, everything and it was a complete con job. And so like I'm wrong even with like this model of game theory, even with this understanding of human behavior and my own behavior, we are messy creatures, human beings. I think game theory has a lot of statistics. And I only have my own experiences, which is not a big enough statistical model to cover all human behavior in every possible condition. So I'm often wrong. But I'm not surprised when I just added to the list. So what's coming up in the next couple episodes of this series is the games that I am creating, based on my models to create the world I imagine the world will people live in harmony with the rest of nature. And that's coming up next.