Robert Axelrod

And inconveniently, for anyone hoping for a clean slate, memory travels too.

Political scientist Robert Axelrod, now distinguished university professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, famously explored what happens when the prisoner's dilemma becomes an iterated game.

His work on the evolution of cooperation showed why the prospect of meeting again can fundamentally change the incentives to cooperate.

Defect today and your opponent gets another move tomorrow.

When it comes to economics, I'm going to go back even further to two books that I read in college.

The first one is a book called The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod, and it is this amazing book on game theory.

It's actually a book we've talked about on a earlier episode because Yul Kwon, one of my guests, had used that book-

Oh, right

Yes, there are very strong evolutionary arguments for our entire moral compass.

So in other words, the tit-for-tat strategy, do unto yourself what you'd want others to do unto thee, Actually, Robert Axelrod at University of Michigan ran a iterative prisoner's dilemma game where it showed that out of a million different strategies, the one that is maximal and most evolutionarily stable is that one.

So I didn't need to read it in a particular parasha in the Torah for me to be, it exists whether we ascribe a godly feature to it or not.

Okay.