403. The Power of Games w/ Kelly Clancy

Welcome to episode 403 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. In today's episode, I'm excited to introduce you to Kelly Clancy, author of Playing with Reality. Ready?

Let's get started.

You are listening to the Brainy Business podcast, where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello. Hello, everyone.

My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. In today's conversation, I am joined by Kelly Clancy, author of Playing With Reality. Kelly is a neuroscientist and physicist who has held research positions at MIT, Berkeley University College London and the AI company DeepMind. Her research focuses on uncovering the principles of intelligence, and she has invented novel brain computer interfaces to investigate the biological underpinnings of agency. Her essays on neuroscience and AI have appeared in Wired, Harper's and the New Yorker. Kelly's book Playing with Reality, which just came out this week, explores the roles games have had in human culture and why they have an enduring hold over us. She says we do not play the game of life. The game of life is what makes us. By examining our relationship with games throughout history, we can better understand the beliefs of people long past and more clearly see our own. This was a fascinating book and a really interesting topic that I can't wait to share with you today. Really quickly, before we get into the conversation, I want to be sure you know that there are links for everything in the show notes, including my top related past episodes and books, a timestamp summary of the episode, and more. It's all within the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com 403now. Let's jump right in. Kelly Clancy, welcome to the Brainy Business podcast.

Thank you so much for having me.

Yes, delighted to be chatting with you about fun and games today. Right, that's. We're here to chat about games, which is very delightful for everyone who does not yet know you. Can you share a little bit about your background and the work that you do?

Yeah, I'm a neuroscientist and I study the biology of intelligence. And I'm also the author of Playing with Reality, a book about the history of games and how they've contributed to modern thought.

How did you find yourself in the space of games?

Yeah, so I worked at DeepMind for a couple years, which is a company that made its name solving some of the hardest games in the world like Go and Starcraft 2. And when I started working there, my friends, you know, in academia, all asked me what is, why is DeepMind spending all this time and effort and energy solving games? Like, what's the point? And it turns out that there's this long history of training AI on games and then even farther back than that sort of games contributing to scientific thought. So the more I kind of looked into answering the question, the more fascinated I got with what games have contributed to how we see the world. And so, yeah, that's, that's how I ended up there.

Interesting.

And so I love throughout your book. So I'm curious, how long have you been spending doing the research into the kind of history of games to bring it in together for the book? Because the, I mean, the stories are so, so vast. There's just so much to be learning as you go. I'm curious, you know, how did, you know, get into that? How long have you been looking into that history?

Yeah, in a way, I think I've been gathering these stories forever in a way, right? Yeah, because I, you know, everyone plays games as kids and I played with my sisters. I was awful at games and they kicked my butt and everything. And so I kind of, I kind of hated games, but also found them really fascinating. And you know, some people are just effortlessly amazing at them. So I, I always had this kind of like love, hate relationship with games. And I think that's kind of true of society at large where we on one hand think of them as being very trivial, but then also when you actually look into it, they're incredibly foundational. All of economics is based on games really. So there's a lot of really rich history there and there was things that you kind of brush up against in your life. I lived in Central Asia for a couple years and the kids there play with, they played kind of like a dice like game with knuckle bones, like with sheep, like ankle bones. And it felt like a really kind of like, wow, I bet you people have been playing that game forever. And then I looked into it and there's evidence that people have been playing that game for like 7,000 years. So it's older than written language. So games are just this like really deep thing in us. And even in animals, you know, pretty much most animals play, certainly most mammals play. So this is like this evolutionarily ancient drive to play. So it's basically just everywhere you look because it's, it's a, it's a much more kind of important aspect of our lives than we give it credit for. I think.

Yeah, I think all through that I was like, oh, I want to ask about this and I'm going to follow up and ask about this and then.

I'm going to ask about this.

So let's see. This happens to me all the time. I want to talk about all the things with that. How do you define a game?

Great question. That's important for that. Yeah, yeah. So a game kind of can be roughly defined as a system where you are trying to achieve some goal, but to achieve that goal you have to have certain restrictions on what you can do. So for example, in golfing you want to put a ball in a hole, but you can't just like pick up the ball and put it in the hole with your hand. You have to use this funny stick and have all these little rules. So it's basically like a system furnished with a goal with restrictions on how you can achieve that goal.

Right.

And I really enjoyed in reading through the, through the book and different games and whatnot, but this understanding of how quickly we can adapt and, and adopt the rules of whatever the game is. Like where you talk about Monopoly. Right. And so people, once you give them the rules and they will undercut their family for, you know, colorful sheets of paper that mean nothing but it's. And then you like go about the rest of your day and you can leave it behind because that was, you know, how the game worked.

Right.

And how. So as we look at, as you said, you know, games came before even written language. And they're such a part of us. What does it say about us that we can like jump in and out of different rules and be adapting, adopting, you know, what does this help us to learn about ourselves and other people?

Yeah, so this is a really critical aspect of games. And I think like Plato thought this was. Plato thought games were really crucial education because they basically taught kids how to follow rules. And so that would mean that hopefully when they grew up to be adults, they would be law abiding citizens. So he thought of games as being this really important civic education. And when I started writing this book, I thought it would just be a history of ways that games had influenced our scientific ideas. And I thought of games as interesting but largely harmless. But in many ways games play us. So there's a board game designer named Reiner Kinesia and he says the first thing he does when designing a game is to figure out the scoring system because how you reward the player will dictate how they'll behave on the other side of this, games have been really intellectually influential, and game design is everywhere in our world today. It dictates how we interact on social media, on dating apps, how ads are served to us. It dictates the design of new markets. The problem here is that, like, as you mentioned, games work by, like, the player fits their behaviors to the rules of the game. So if you're playing Monopoly, you have to play like a capitalist. So even if you, the actual person, are like a socialist or anarchist or whatever you are, if you want to win at Monopoly, you have to be a ruthless, as you say, like, undercut your own children. So in neuroscience, we call this behavioral shaping. So there's a saying in neuroscience that with the right rewards, you can teach a fish to ride a bicycle. And, you know, Monopoly is just like a parlor game, and people can, like, not get involved if they don't want to. But given that there's all of these games in our society and systems at large, we're playing games that we don't necessarily see as games and don't necessarily know about. So our behaviors can be kind of influenced and shaped by things we don't know about. And maybe we're being kind of rewarded for displaying behaviors we don't actually value. So the game kind of warps what we want and warps what we're willing to do to get those things. I think kind of the danger of games isn't necessarily that they are. You know, people talk about video game violence and things. I think the real danger of games is that they kind of can encourage us to abandon our values in order to win. And that's because they are playing with our. Our dopamine system, basically. So our dopamine system is this learning system in our brain that I think it's. People often call dopamine the pleasure molecule, but it's really more like the wanting molecule. It. It works to kind of motivate us, and we need certain levels to be motivated enough to do things and not, you know, it can't be so low that we're not doing anything. But it's. It's this really incredible flexible system because it kind of learns. You can learn to be motivated to pursue an abstract reward. So in animals, the dopamine system codes for things like food, water, sex, relationships, social things in humans and, and in some, like monkeys and intelligent animals, we can start to learn signifiers of those things. So we can learn about money. We can learn about status symbols like fancy clothes and things like things that aren't actually immediately rewarding, but maybe have the, the sense of reward or like even you know, doing a long term project like agriculture where you have to be motivated over months for, to kind of follow through on your actions. So the dopamine system can kind of draw out your motivation and it can keep you motivated based on these signifiers. And games really tap into that because games are. It's basically like your brain is tickling itself. It's like the brain is hacking itself to give you these signifiers of reward without really truly rewarding you. I mean winning can be a reward, but it's kind of a social construct in a way. So anyway, games play with this reward system in our brain and can kind of push us to be seeking out things that we're not actually particularly interested in. And this is why they're powerful and this is also why they're dangerous.

I was thinking about like with gamification is a thing that companies, you know, are looking at a lot these days and some of that incentive and reward as you, you know, you were talking about, as we know that there are rules that we're looking to play and we may inadvertently be incentivizing the wrong things. I made a note to link to my episode on the Cobra effect as far as where we, there's the loophole of something where we go, people find the loophole and they get incentivized for very interesting things that the designer potentially doesn't anticipate or see because you know, you get blinded and don't realize some of what you're. You're setting up. Even with the best of intentions, you know, this can come about. So for a company that maybe, you know, how do they go about looking to, to realize that perhaps they've set up uh, maybe it's an incentive structure or something in their culture that is rewarding kind of the wrong behaviors. Uh, do you have any thoughts on how that kind of comes into play for them?

Yeah, that's a great question. So I worked, you know, when I worked at DeepMind, it was part of Google. It still is. And Google has this famous sort of emergent phenomenon called the Google graveyard where products are launched and then they are rather quickly decommissioned. Because the reason this is is that Google employees are promoted for launching products and not for maintaining them. So you get this emergent behavior because of how they're rewarding employees. I think one way to look at this is through the lens of game design or mechanism design. And the idea here is that designing games is basically thinking at a Systems level. And actually, like, a surprising number of the biggest names in tech got their start making games. So, like, one of Bill Gates earliest programs played tic tac toe. Sundar Pichai's like, as a young man, wrote like a chess engine. Marc Benioff, when he was younger, before he was, you know, doing Salesforce, used to sell games to Atari. So he made Crypt of the Undead and King Arthur's Heir. So people can get really good at thinking at the systems level by designing games. And how do you design a particular dynamic. How do you get. How do you elicit a particular behavior from your players? This formal field is called mechanism design. And economists use this to design like, new marketplaces, new voting systems, you know, and. And this happens all the time, right? Like a new technology comes along, for example, like organ transplants, where suddenly you're. We're able to now give people other people's organs, but we don't want to exchange money for them because that is weird and icky. So, so people had to design like a new marketplace where rather than trading money for organs, they're like trading organs for organs. So, like, you know, I want to donate my organ to my dad, but we're not a match. But I am a match with your friend who you want to donate an organ to, and you're a match with my dad. So anyway, there's like these really interesting new marketplaces like, that can be designed using these tools. The idea is like, how do we invent new systems where people exhibit the behaviors we want? So it's kind of like, it's also known as, like, reverse game theory. And the hope here is that, like, we can design systems where, you know, a lot of games, people can win by lying or cheating. And that kind of sucks. Like, nobody wants to be part of a game where people are winning in those ways. So the idea is that we're trying to design games where everyone can win by being honest.

Yes, we do want that. I was going to start to say something, you know, go on. But no, that's very important. We want to have everyone win by being honest. Yes, that sounds good. So as we consider within an organization and seeing like, let's say they discover, like you giving the example there of Google, that, okay, we, we're. We. We're clearly incentivizing the wrong thing, right? Because we're investing a lot of money to develop things that then go to the graveyard and we never see and think of again. And that's not help. Like, there's some value in that.

Right.

Of being innovative and iterating on things. And the. You could argue that the right things continue and you let things kind of go before they just cost you tons and tons of money. And if they decide, okay, we, something's off here, do you have any recommendation for people to be able to find, you know, where maybe they've gone wrong and how they can look to incentivize something else without, say, like demotivating a whole team?

Yeah, yeah, I think you could probably think about how to incentivize different strategies. You know, everyone's playing games via different strategies. And you have some people who are natural kind of cooperators. You have other people who are maybe natural innovators. You have some people who like to maintain things. So you have all these different personality types. I think it's often the case that, yeah, what you find is that you have some behavior like the Google graveyard where you're basically getting your. It emerges because people are not properly incentivized to do what needs to be done to not have a graveyard to maintain projects. So you just find like alternate systems, alternate incentive systems. And I think, because I think it's like, on one hand you don't want to demotivate people from innovating, but you also don't want to demotivate people from the necessary work of like, maintenance and cleanup and sweeping up tech debt and all these kinds of things. So. And I think this is partly a kind of maybe like an institutional culture issue where a lot of certainly tech companies where I have most of my experience are really focused on innovation and that's great, but this needs to be balanced with rewarding, less sexy work of maintenance and things like that for sure.

Right. Because we, we need people to be doing those things for our companies to be successful and to have that, you know, you need that baseline to be able to have the, the money and the resources to do the, the fun stuff too.

Yeah. And the nice thing is that like, a lot of people are, you know, like, people have these natural proclivities towards these different things. Like, some people do want to have these, like, big ideas. And I think, I think for a long time I always kind of chuckled at business books where they're like, how to be a leader. Because not everyone can be a leader. Like, and, you know, not everyone wants to be a leader, but we can't just have a country full of everyone wanting to be leaders. Like, there have to be people who are solid workers and like, do cool, solid, clever work. So finding ways that like, we're rewarding people for. For doing that and not just like being showy. I guess.

Definitely. And I mean, just even, you know, research showing people. There are some people that are naturally going to be great managers of people. And it's, you know, you know, somewhere in that like, 7 out of 10 are not gonna ever be that. And. And even saying, I think it, you know, it's like one in 10 that is destined really great manager. And there's another two or three that could be trained, but they're not necessarily the people that are as good at doing the job. Like, do they have to actually know how to do the job? Or can you rise up enough without having to then oversee people when they're, you know, someone who is not going to be as good as at managing people? You can have a really great coach who is not a great player in, you know, if we are looking at sports, but they can really understand the game and be able to see how they can help to build up and just see the strategy in a different way when they're not out there physically playing the game. And so I do think that's a really fascinating aspect of which I actually wanted to ask you a little bit about sports because you don't really talk a ton about sports, sports and the game in that. So I'm curious what your thoughts are about how that kind of ties in with game and what you talk about in the book and whatnot.

Yeah, that's a great question. I think I partly know less about sports because I'm a nerd, but I think of sports as. So there's a lot of interesting research by anthropologists who think of sports as being this really physical conditioning for, you know, it's. You're practicing the bodily movements necessary for war. Raiding, hunting, wrestling. In. In like Mesoamerica. In ancient Mesoamerica, there was this really amazing ball game that like, I think the Olmec, Maya and Aztec all played this for thousands of years. And it was like a really brutal game involving this really heavy rubber ball and they had to hit it with their hips through this hoop. And they used this game in lieu of war so they would solve territorial disputes and people would rise through the ranks of leadership by being really good at this game. And this was true. I think anthropologists also believe this is true of lacrosse, where lacrosse was used as a proxy for war among the six nations of the Iroquois. So really, sports was this outlet for solving disputes. And you can see this also in the animal kingdom, where, for example, deer have antlers and for a really long time, nobody knew why deer had antlers. They're just this weird, costly ornamentation. They don't. They're not like, sharp enough to kill other deer. They're kind of weird. And then people started studying it through the lens of game theory and realized that deer are wrestling each other to mate with their antlers. And the point is not to kill each other because then that, like, collapses the whole herd. The point is just to kind of like, have these harmless displays of strength, to kind of work out a hierarchy and work out, like, who's going to mate with who and stuff. So physical games I think of as being more practice for or replacement for things like war for conflicts. It's like a much less bloody way of working out conflicts and games I think of as being this more mental realm where so both are practice, but one is kind of practice in a physical realm and one is practice in a more mental realm. And I think the physical realm is very important. But this is more of a kind of book about ideas, so.

Yeah, definitely, yeah. And I mean, just to see all these aspects of how we develop. And I do love that throughout the book. I very much enjoy when it's this great mix of almost this like National Geographic or like Discovery Channel where I. I'm learning about different species of insects and then like, what humans are doing and then this thing over here. And it's. So it's all sorts of. Of different facts and things that are interesting as you go. And like. And like you said, long histories of things with people and then we're learning about our brains and then we're learning this other thing and it's. It's just a fun journey. I know I never know what the next page will bring to me, so. And I find those to be fascinating. So thank you.

I'm glad.

I am curious a little bit into your thoughts about. And this may be to where you say, I have no thoughts on that. And that's okay. So, you know, last year, maybe longer, I didn't. Okay, I didn't watch squid game so that everyone is aware that that's not my jam. But I did watch some of it, just kind of know what was going on, but I didn't really watch that.

And then there.

But there's interesting stuff, I think, with like reality TV. So you talk about like SimCity in the book and we think about how, like you're saying, in building these different economies and societies and markets and things. And I believe that a lot of this comes up in today's reality television or some of the games that people play in Survivor or now there's, you know, Deal or no Deal island and all these things. My personal favorite is a show called the Circle, which, if you haven't seen it, it's amazing.

Oh, I may have seen like an episode.

I find that show to be fascinating. They have just as the like little aside to the world because so it's a Netflix show. And what they have is people are put into their own little social network and they live in an apartment, each on their own, though they're, I guess technically in the same building. And the only way they can interact with the other players is through chat, like text messaging. Essentially most of it is done with the whole group, but they can decide if they want to play as themselves or if they want to play as a catfish. And they pick like one photo and have their description of who they are. And then they're having to like play games to try to figure out who they like and who they're going to align with. Even where it's only via text and someone may be lying to you, but you don't know it. Are you telling the truth? And they have to rank each other and then the top two people become influencers and can k block someone from their network and maybe someone else comes in. It's amazing. It's one of my favorite things. So the question with all of it is what are your thoughts just on all of these kind of reality shows and how it's maybe, you know, if it ties in on some like, new era of what, you know, game and society or something along those lines.

Yeah, so I haven't seen the Circle, but it's actually. Or I mean, I think I've seen one episode. But what you've described really kind of reminds me of it didn't make it into the book, but in Renaissance Venice there was this amazing period of carnival and it ended up like it was basically this time when people kind of anything goes. Went anything goes. And people would like dress up in costumes so they would be masked the whole time. Nobody knew who each other were. So like the poor people could hang out with the rich people and vice versa. People would dance and be like drunk and you could just like anything goes. And it started out like around the Easter period. And then it kind of just like everyone liked it so much it got longer and longer. So at some point it was like a six month thing. Everyone was gambling, everyone was partying and everyone was wearing masks and you had to wear A particular kind of mask. Like there was these particular characters you could be and you had to display their behaviors. You had to act like the fool or you had to act like the lady or whatever. So what this sounds like is basically like a modern day carnival and I love that. But I think this goes to show this really other, like this beautiful aspect of games we haven't really talked about, which is like you get to try on different personalities. Like you get to try on being someone else in a game. So for example, like in something like Dungeons and Dragons you can be a completely different species and act in a totally different way than you normally would act. And there's something really great about this because like there's been this resurgence in Dungeons and Dragons and like, apparently a lot of people playing it will learn like new aspects about themselves. They'll some people have like discovered new gender identities by playing like role playing, different genders. So there's something really beautiful about how experiential games are. And there's this, it's like a very intimate experience. Like when you play a game, if you say, for example, if you're playing a video game, you often refer to the character as like I or the avatar is like me I. And when you read a novel, you're never like, oh, me, the character in the novel, you're like Clarissa, the character in the novel. So there's something really, really powerful and experiential about playing a game that other media doesn't provide. And I think part of that is because games are this exploration of like agency, where if you're like reading a novel, you're just watching a character make decisions. But if you're playing a game, you're making decisions within the game. And you can make the decisions as you normally would, or you can make the decisions as, you know, whoever you're role playing. And there's something really powerful about making these choices. And one I think really powerful anecdote about that is in 1983, Thomas Schelling, this political scientist economist, organized a giant simulation game, like a nuclear war simulation game for like the top 200 military officials and like politicians. And they workshopped like, okay, if the Soviets were to hit us, how would we hit them back? You know, what would happen if a nuclear war escalated? And all of the outcomes were so horrifying. Like the best possible outcome was like 500 million people died. And then like another 500 million people would die from radiation poisoning. So the outcome of just playing these games was so powerful that the Reagan administration like Totally toned down their nuclear rhetoric and they opened up really sweeping arms control negotiations for the first time with the Soviets. So I think there's something really amazing about like, immersing yourself in a game and like being someone else and being like, you know, it's one thing to be this like, blustering politician and then you actually, like, see what, you know, you play through what could happen in if like a nuclear war happened and, you know, get humbled and you're like, okay, let's, let's pull back. So I think that's the beautiful thing about games, is that you get to role play as people in a harmless way. And maybe the circle, it sounds like it could be, maybe everyone knows that they're being played, I guess so they're not necessarily breaking any hearts or whatever.

But yeah, yeah, it is an interesting. They. How quickly in the circle, just because you mentioned this at the end and not that it's the, the point of that other piece, but how quickly people forget, I'm tricking you, and I know I'm tricking you, but I fully believe that you are being honest and you're on my team and you believe me and that I hear what you're saying and I don't. I'm not gonna fully believe it, but I am sure that you are buying absolutely everything I'm saying and forget that to be skeptical about how you trust in what a great job I'm doing playing the game. And when they lose the tone of a message, right, they're messaging with emojis and stuff, but that they can't. You don't hear the person's voice. You don't have any interaction in that way. So you're just having to take it at word value and one picture, right? To say that's who they say they are and that must be who they are. So it's, it's really fascinating. But all of what you were saying, I think it's really important that piece of understanding of looking at tolerance and having a safe space to see what can happen if, right. Because it's easy to get stuck in our own moment of, oh, I'm gonna whatever the thing is, right. And feel like you want to retaliate if something happens to you and maybe escalate sometimes and just to prove a point or something and to know that, you know, one of the lessons I think is important in, in some of the, you know, game theory talk being that we don't like when someone else isn't playing fair and we will often harm Ourselves to teach that person a lesson and. And to show that, you know, it's. And. And you still feel like you won, right? I won. By helping you lose or contributing to your loss in a way that can feel really good and knowing that that's part of our nature when there are all these aspects where things can. Just. The consequences can be so dire if we get it wrong. And so having that space, like you said, you know, with the military leaders to say, okay, you're saying this, but do you actually see what that means?

Let's take.

Play this out as if it happened. And then you can realize, oh, we should actually exercise some additional caution here. And even just like you're saying, tolerance of others, of, you know, if someone, you know, some. This person's not like me. You know, knowing our hurting tribalistic nature, if we say, well, if they're not like you, but I want you to be in the game and you are this type of person now, right. Whether it's a different class system or you're living somewhere else, and it can be in a, you know, fictitious place or whatever it happens to be. But as you take on that role, to have the understanding and it's. It really does help you to walk in that other person's shoes in a way that hopefully can translate beyond the game when it's a positive lesson.

Yeah, absolutely agree. Yeah. I really like what you're saying about it being a safe space. Like, I think that's exactly what play is. It's like, it's a safe space to explore what would happen if. And for, like, kittens, they're playing. And the hallmark of animal play is that they retract their claws. They don't bite too hard. Same with kids. Like, they're wrestling, but they're not really trying to hurt each other. They're just trying to see, like, what happens if I, like, roll onto my belly. Like, how do I get out of that? Like, what if I'm. What if I'm pinned by you? How do I get out of this? So it's really just this, like, you know, this agreement to kind of, like, we're gonna kind of compete. But really, we're just. We're. We're not gonna hurt each other, and we're gonna explore what these different scenarios could, you know, because, you know, you look at also, you know, you go to a dog park and you see a Great Dane playing with, like, a Chihuahua, and they're being really sweet and gentle, and it's maybe. Yeah, it's. It's Kind of amazing how there's just like universal play language for so many animals.

I love that. Well, as everyone is considering, like you said, you know, as children, you know, we are naturally wired for play and it helps to. To learn new things. It can help us to be really tolerant of others. It can help us to expand intelligence and be able to have better conversations. There are lots of amazing things can motivate us. It can motivate teams. We can do a lot with. With games and with play. So though it feels like, you know, business is a world of no fun, right? We can't have fun.

We're no.

No games allowed. How might you encourage people to think about it a little bit differently when it comes to the value of games as adults and in our companies?

Yeah, I think the first aspect of this is, like, maybe a less fun aspect, which is that, like so much of what we talk about in business and economics comes from games. Like the idea of expected value, your odds, systems, incentives. All of these ideas are borrowed from, like, studying betting in, like, Renaissance era. And then game theory, which is the kind of basis of modern economics, came from thinking about games and how to play games. So games are. The games have provided this incredible mathematical language for us to express things we don't know, things we're uncertain about. And that is really powerful for things like science for business. So that's a kind of theoretical reason that games are interesting. And then I think also, you know, so much of business is creating new things, creating new marketplaces, so we're having to design totally new systems all the time. And so game design is the perfect field for thinking about how do we make systems that work and where players are incentivized in the right ways. I love this quote from the anthropologist David Graeber, which is that the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it's something we make and could just as easily make differently. And he was talking about that in the context of there was all these different social contracts among, like, early humans, like we. There was so many different kinds of societies and people would often like. There's a lot of play in the way people design their societies. The way people, like, for example, Carnival is a great example where for some months of the year, the social order doesn't matter and everyone gets to just be someone else, play something else, try new things. And so bringing that spirit of kind of playfulness and flexibility into workspaces, I think is a incredible way to, like, an incredible innovation engine, really. And yeah, as you mentioned, I think we can use games to think about how to negotiate better, how to strategize better. And these ideas have been around for thousands of years. Like, in medieval times, knights were required to learn chess because they thought of it as like a mirror. And you can learn about yourself by playing chess and that like today, lots of business leaders learn poker so they can read people better. Henry Kissinger said that Western policymakers who deal with China should learn to play GO because it would help them kind of understand their, like, philosophy. So there's lots to learn about life and about how to navigate it through playing games. But I think you can also take a step back and say, not only how do we play these games better, but are we playing the games we want to be playing and how do we build better games? And so that's where the game design questions come in. And learning how to structure a game, learning about mechanism design and how to build systems where, yeah, more, more players can, can win.

I love that. And I definitely, for those listening, knowing, I loved, loved, loved the sections about the, you know, some of that history in probability and betting and of course, all the stuff on the like that was more in depth on economics and whatnot, to which I restrained myself from having the entire conversation be about that because everyone can go read about it themselves in your book, Playing with Reality and knowing. It's so just delightful as we're learning this history and understanding kind of this evolution of games. So for everyone who is now so excited to learn more and connect and get their own copies, in addition to, you know, links, we'll put in the show notes. What's the best way for people to connect with you and to learn more?

Probably just Twitter. Kelly B. Clancy.

Perfect. Well, we will definitely link to that in the show notes, as I said, as well as, you know, links for the book and whatnot. And thanks again for coming on and I guess playing the game of podcasting here today, it was delightful to chat with you.

Yeah, such a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Thank you again to Kelly Clancy for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today's conversation? For me, I'm guessing it might not surprise the longtime listener to know that I really loved the aspects of dopamine and how it impacts the way we learn and about how technology ties in, specifically how games have been foundational in the creation of AI and machine learning, that teaching computers to play games and understand the motivation to win, probability theory and so much more has allowed technology to move forward and what we learn about our own intelligence and paths to learning by teaching a machine to make.

These sorts of decisions. It's just super cool stuff.

This book was full of fascinating stories, insights and history. We barely scratched the surface on it today in the conversation. So if you like this too, I really recommend you pick up the book and check it out. And to make it easy to do just that, there is a link for you in the show Notes to get your copy of Playing With Reality as well as my other top related books and past episodes, ways to connect with Kelly and more. It's all waiting for you in the app you're listening to and atthe brainy business.com 403 and thank you again to Kelly Clancy for joining me on the show today. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me Tuesday for another Brainy episode of the Brainy Business Podcast.

It's going to be a lot of fun.

You don't want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me. And remember to be thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.