Episode Details

Why does every dominant strategy eventually fail? From ancient wheat farmers to modern basketball, the pattern repeats: the tactics that win today exhaust the conditions that made them successful tomorrow. We trace the 8,000-year history of figuring this out—and meet the person now reversing their own revolution. 0:00 - The Wheat Farmer's Dilemma 3:15 - Monoculture and Collapse 5:00 - Crop Rotation: How Farmers Escaped the Trap 7:45 - Historical Examples (Romans, Medieval Europe) 9:30 - Basketball's Three-Point Revolution 12:00 - Daryl Morey's Ironic Shift 14:30 - Why Dominant Strategies Self-Destruct --- Sources & further reading: • John Maynard Smith & George R. Price — "The Logic of Animal Conflict" (Nature 246, 1973): https://www.nature.com/articles/246015a0 • Barry Sinervo & Curtis Lively — "The Rock-Paper-Scissors Game and the Evolution of Alternative Male Strategies" (Nature 380, 1996): https://www.nature.com/articles/380240a0 • Charles Goodhart — "Problems of Monetary Management: The U.K. Experience" (1975): https://www.scribd.com/document/323563200/Goodhart • Donald T. Campbell — "Assessing the Impact of Planned Social Change" (Evaluation and Program Planning 2:1, 1979) • Sanford J. Grossman & Joseph Stiglitz — "On the Impossibility of Informationally Efficient Markets" (American Economic Review 70:3, 1980): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grossman-Stiglitz_Paradox • John Maynard Smith — Evolution and the Theory of Games (Cambridge University Press, 1982) • Nigel Howard — Paradoxes of Rationality: Theory of Metagames and Political Behavior (MIT Press, 1971) • Richard Garfield — "Metagames" (The Duelist #5, 1995): https://nosygamer.blogspot.com/2012/01/richard-garfields-ideas-on-metagaming.html • David Sirlin — Playing to Win: Becoming the Champion: https://www.sirlin.net/ptw • Leigh Van Valen — "A New Evolutionary Law" (Evolutionary Theory 1, 1973): https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13752-021-00391-w • PWL Capital — "The Passive vs Active Fund Monitor Year-End 2025": https://pwlcapital.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/YearEnd2025_The-Passive-vs-Active-Fund-Monitor_en.pdf • Fadeaway World — "3-Point FG Attempts Per Era": https://fadeawayworld.net/3-point-fg-attempts-per-era-from-3-5-80s-to-35-8-2020s-attempts-per-game • SI — "Sixers President Thinks NBA Has a Three-Point Problem": https://www.si.com/nba/76ers/onsi/news/sixers-president-thinks-the-nba-has-a-three-point-problem-01kkc7fhjcv9 • ESPN — "How the Meta Has Evolved at the League of Legends World Championship": https://www.espn.com/gaming/story/_/id/29906442/how-meta-evolved-league-legends-world-championship • Liquipedia — "Metagame (StarCraft)": https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/Metagame • Science (2026) — "Genetics of Biological Rock-Paper-Scissors": https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adw8265 • arXiv — "The Effects of MLB's Ban on Infield Shifts": https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.15075 This podcast episode was fully generated by AI — research, script, voices, and production. Built with Claude, Piper TTS, and automated pipeline tooling.