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Hello and welcome to Lead Wisely by Wondertour.

This week we are looking at Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning Part One, the latest in the
long running Tom Cruise action series.

And we're gonna start right off with a tough question about leadership.

Drew, why is everybody in this movie lying?

Why are they wearing masks?

Why are they backstabbing each other?

mutually assured destruction all over the place?

Why is everybody lying in this movie?

Well, Brian, as we always do on Wondertour, we're going to talk about how these crazy
amped up movies relate to our everyday situations that we might find ourselves in.

So while this might be an example where we see this world where an AI called the entity is
trying to take over and enslave humans or destroy humans or something like that,

general idea here is that it's an espionage movie.

There's many different factions that are all vying for information so that they can take
control.

Each one of them believes that if they have better information, then they can make the
right decision, take better action.

almost every single party, in the end, they want to have control.

They want to take over the entity and leverage it as a new super weapon in order to exert
their will on humanity.

And this, while it's a little bit of a crazy situation, this isn't that uncommon of
something for us to run into in the world just at a much lower stakes table.

we're starting with this episode of series on game theory.

So many people know what game theory is.

Game theory is basically a way of modeling a situation that you're in so that you're able
to make an informed decision that's often based on math and statistical models that will

help us to really understand what the different outcomes could potentially be based on
what we choose to do in the situation.

Going into Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning, what we find is all these different factions
have all these different reasons to do what they're doing.

Everybody has different pieces of the whole puzzle, but they're found in what we call in
game theory.

And I think is basically the simplest possible game theory model to understand if you're
new to game theory, you can skip ahead if you're not, but I think...

Prisoner's Dilemma, which is one of the suite of models.

There's not a fixed number of models in game theory.

They're ever developing, but there are kind of like classic use case models that we find
that they're patterns that exist over and over and over again in the world around us.

And the Prisoner's Dilemma in the simplest form is just you have two prisoners and

each one has the choice to either cooperate or throw the other one under the bus.

If they choose to cooperate, then both of them will go free.

If one of them throws the other one under the bus and the other one tries to cooperate,
then only one of them wins.

Or if they both try to throw the other one under the bus, then neither of them wins.

And it's a lose lose situation for the prisoners.

issue is that You know there's not a lot of trust so maybe one prisoner's like yeah I'm
gonna go in front of the

warden or the DA or whatever.

And I'm going to say that, you know, you're innocent.

And if you just tell them I'm innocent, then we're good to go.

But the problem is where's the trust that when that person actually does go in front of
the warden, that that's what they're actually going to say.

And so what we normally see, and this is where the prisoner's dilemma is this rich problem
for humans to solve is that more often than not,

You know, one person tries to screw the other person over and thus very little value is
realized out of the situation because both, both basically backstab the other and then

both parties lose.

And doesn't it kind of feel like this prisoner's dilemma situation is kind of like this AI
situation with the entity that we find ourselves in in this movie, Brian.

Yeah.

if we think about game theory as a way of, as a framework for dealing with imperfect
information, right?

You you mentioned trust and we certainly don't have that at beginning of this movie.

The beginning of this movie, the second scene where they're in the boardroom with all the
intelligence directors, they're sort of explicitly saying like, all the countries, even

the ones that used to be allies are not talking to each other about this.

So everybody's in it for themselves and everybody is mistrusting each other and just
trying to win on their sort of unilateral.

and so you end up with sort of this mutually insured destruction situation, right?

Where everybody's, know, everybody's terrified and therefore, you know, grasping for as
much leverage as they can get.

and in the framework of this silly movie, it's because there's this mysterious AI entity
that none of them can control, collectively, or none of them can really, none of them can

trust, none of them can understand.

And it's sort of a proxy for.

problem that we always have as humans of we can't see what's going on inside of other
people's heads.

And we need to, we need to plan our own actions based on what we think they're going to
do.

And so the prisoner's dilemma is the default behavior is to assume that they're going to
act selfishly.

And so we act selfishly.

And the more people do that, the more that becomes the natural way of behaving.

in this movie, at the beginning of this movie, everybody in the world, except maybe Ethan
Hunt's team.

is acting selfishly is assuming the worst of everyone else and is trying to take care of
only themselves.

and we have this very dramatic standoff among the world powers.

And we have this power play where everybody is desperately going after the MacGuffin,
which turns out to be a little magical key that can unlock the power to controlling this

entity.

So it's a fun setup for a movie.

but like you said, it's also a real thing where we are all.

in this world of not trusting anyone to collaborate, not trusting anyone to be interested
in collective benefit.

so everybody's out for individual benefit.

Everybody's out for being on the winning side.

And so going back to our original question, so they're all lying to each other.

They're all hiding information from each other.

They're all assuming that each other is lying to them.

And we get a whole bunch of people wearing masks and a whole bunch of people backstabbing
each other and a whole bunch of people sneaking in and out of places and...

trying to arrange shooting at each other, which is the action movie standard fare.

Yeah, hence this modified prisoners dilemma that we find ourselves in where every single
party cannot trust the other parties and they are going to go with the backstabbing

option.

Like you said, thus they must put on masks and they must do the whole charade in order to
try to get the upper hand.

The sad part, though, is that, and I know this is very idealistic, if

the parties who had some sort of a shared interest, which clearly some of these parties
have a shared interest.

mean, all of the parties that aren't Gabriel have a shared interest in Gabriel not getting
the thing, right?

Him and the entity.

So if they all just cooperated, It's like if everybody just put their chips in, it's very
likely that they'd be able to overcome the opposition.

But because they don't trust each other.

They instead go with the backstab.

Right.

Well, and I think that the framing device of making it an AI that's the enemy is an
exaggerated version of that, you know, we can't figure out what's going on in other

people's heads and so we don't trust them, right?

Like the AI is by definition unknowable and by definition superior and it's...

taken away all of our technological tools.

And so we can't trust the facts that we have in the world around us.

And we can't trust the cameras and we can't trust the traffic lights and we can't trust
the satellites.

Like all of these things are, you know, that we had come to rely on as structure.

It's an amped up version, like you said, of a counterparty that you can't have insight
into their motivations or you don't trust their motivations.

And so therefore you have to act selfishly.

Seems like the prudent thing to do.

And so we have, like I said, everybody in the movie with the possible exception of our
hero and his crew are acting out of selfishness and fear, which is one of our leadership

lessons that we keep circling back to, right?

That's rarely the basis for our magnanimous leadership role.

Yeah.

But how do we navigate this prisoner's dilemma, And that practically, you know, whatever
prisoner's dilemma, similar situation you might find in your own life.

Heck, it could literally be the AI arms race in the world at large where companies,
instead of collaborating in order to put in place safe AI, everybody is kind of trying to

take advantage of the situation and quickly get ahead in terms of technology, which puts
the actual world and society at risk.

You know, Brian, as we move forward, let's talk about what solutions we have to some of
these prisoners dilemmas.

But first, the intro.

Hi, I'm Brian Nutwell And we are on a journey to lead wisely, to become better leaders by
touring fantastic worlds and inspiring lore by going on a wonder tour.

We connect leadership concepts to story context because it sticks to our brains better.

You can find out more at wondertourpodcast.com or on YouTube by looking up Lead Wisely,
all one word.

You know what else you could find on wondertourpodcast.com Our fabulous new merch, which
you would look very good walking around in.

We guarantee it.

Saying it right now.

All right.

So let's talk about our prisoner's dilemma so at the simple level?

What is the solution to the prisoner's dilemma?

Yeah, and we're going to break this down a little bit further, but I think at the simplest
level, in order to break through a prisoner's dilemma, there has to be actual trust

because there's no way that you're going to be able to have the parties go into the kind
of blind submission of are they going to backstab or are they going to cooperate and have

everybody choose cooperate, in which case we get the full benefit of the situation unless
there's some level of trust.

Right, and we see over and over again in this movie that we haven't established that.

It's been broken in a lot of different ways, both between the main characters and between
all of the ancillary parties.

Like you said, this is sort of a multi-sided problem.

So let's talk about what's our mountaintop scene for this movie?

What is the scene that best exemplifies this sort of prisoner's dilemma, insoluble
standoff, lack of trust, you know, where does that come to a head in the Mission

Impossible?

so one of the reasons I think I thought to pick this movie to start off our game theory
series was because of this specific scene.

And while this is not necessarily going to be using the same model of the prisoner's
dilemma, there are elements of it built in.

It's another model, as many of these game theory models are, that is revolving around
trust between the parties.

So let's talk about the moment and then we'll talk about the model.

So the moment...

that I'm thinking of here is when they all get to Venice and they show up to this club,
it's insinuated, I think, that the White Widow character like owns or operates this club

or like this is her hangout or something like that.

And so you get these different parties all coming in.

You get our heroes, the IMF team, you get the White Widow, of course, you have Gabriel,
who represents the entity.

And then finally you have the United States.

military political guys, right, who are also showing up late.

and I love it.

White Widow kind of lays out the situation she's like look so the MacGuffin the key that
we have in this situation here's my problem I'm trying to sell this to other people but

you know, she has her half of the key or whatever.

She's like, if I sell this to any of the parties, then that party is going to be eternally
grateful to me.

But every other party is going to try to kill me immediately for what I have just done.

You I will not be safe.

And it's it's basically the crux of the second half of the movie here.

is like, okay, well, if we do one thing with the key, then what are all of the secondary
tertiary effects that are going to happen as a result of moving the key from person A to

person B?

And you kind of have this like bouncing around of the key and then you see the effects as
they bounce the key.

Right, it's, I can't trust anybody to behave in, you know, on my behalf, know, to act on
my behalf.

I can't trust anybody to take care of me, but I also need to be on the winning side,
right?

I also need to pick the right person that's gonna win so that the other people will all be
crushed so that I will not be murdered as a result, right?

So being a bit player in this scene, even a relatively powerful one, is kind of a terrible
situation to be in.

And so we kind of see this, you know, there.

we can see everyone is acting almost entirely out of fear, with two exceptions.

We have the Gabriel character, who is apparently aligned with this mysterious entity, who
doesn't appear to be acting out of fear.

He's acting some combination of malice and having nothing to lose, right?

So he's a great archetypal bad guy because he's really, there's no levers to play on him.

He doesn't want anything other than to win, right?

He's completely amoral character.

And then...

Contrasted to that is our hero, Ethan and his team.

Ethan is the only person in the room that has people that he actually likes around him and
people that he actually trusts to your point.

And the thing that I love about it is that everybody else in the scene is viewing that as
a weakness, right?

Their lens on how you approach the situation is, you've got two people who hear who you
care about and you can't protect both of them.

And so therefore you're going to lose.

They don't view it as like, wow, you've got a team and I'm here by myself.

They view it as, you've got weaknesses because I've got ways to hurt you.

and that is, illustrative, right?

that's the situation you find yourself in is, know, if you don't want to trust people
because you don't want to be exposed to being double crossed or to losing something you

like, or if you're viewing other people's attachments as just levers to get them to move
in the direction you want.

That's what these situations do to us.

That's what fear does to us.

Yeah, and so the model that we're gonna map this to in game theory, and again, it's not a
perfect mapping, but we're trying to, as we start off this series, and hopefully if you

continue to listen, you'll see how we do it throughout the different episodes that we go
through in movies.

But when you're talking game theory, it's never a perfect example, right?

That's not what a model is.

A model is not, this is my situation exactly, and so I can just figure out how to make a
decision.

It's just a way to look at the situation so that I can understand the potential outcomes
and have a more educated approach to the decision that I'm going to make.

So the model that we want to look at here is called the Mexican standoff.

So in a Mexican standoff in game theory, you have three or more parties who are all
basically have weapons pointed at each other at the same time, classic Western movie

scenario that you might find yourself in.

And the thing is somebody has to shoot first.

If you shoot first, there is a small advantage in shooting first, right?

Because you have a slightly faster reaction time.

But the problem is that if you shoot first, then you are immediately going to be the ire
of everybody else in that situation.

And this is...

Yeah.

shooting until somebody shoots first.

And so you're alive for the moment, right?

Do you take your advantage or do you try to live in this uncomfortable stasis?

Yeah, it's a classic Cold War situation, right?

Like we are at a nuclear war and you're sitting there.

like if anybody presses the button, then they're immediately going to get blown to kingdom
come.

But.

Exactly, exactly.

So the Mexican standoff is, think, really appropriate here because it's another trust
based model where it's like, how do you navigate that situation?

It seems like there's no winning.

And basically that's what White Widow is proposing at this point is like.

really how do I win because sure I can get the hundred million dollars from selling the
key which will give me enough money to run away for a time but do I really think that I'm

going to escape all of the enemies that I'm going to create and as any antihero slash
villain does she's lumping everybody else in with her right assuming everybody else has

the same ulterior motives the same selfish motives

She's like, yeah, and so for you as well.

if you do anything, then everybody's also gonna turn on you.

Right, right, absolutely.

Yeah.

And that's, you know, you see the world as you see yourself.

Like this is a classic thing.

And if you see the world as if everybody's going to try to murder each other, you might be
pragmatic or you might be, you know, switching to the dark side.

One of the two.

Brian, to what you were saying, how do we navigate this?

Because in the traditional Mexican standoff, you might just have the simplest version of
the model with three people all pointing guns at each other.

But in this situation, what Ethan's recognizing is it's not that simple of a situation.

And what the other party is trying to tell him is like, no, I have guns pointed at a
hostage and you have to do what I want you to do.

Mm-hmm.

he's saying is what you don't realize is that, what you're calling a liability, I'm
calling a team.

Right.

Right.

And the answer as it so often is in these movies, go back to our Fast and Furious things
or our trusty band of rebels at Star Wars or whatever, The answer is that having people

around you that you do actually trust allows you to force multiply, allows you to be in
more than one place at a time, allows you to have multiple skill sets that you can

leverage, have a diversity of thought, but also just gives you independent actors, That
it's not your job to tell them what to do.

It's not your job to control them.

Nobody else in this movie has friends.

Nobody else in this movie has allies.

A couple of them have loyal subordinates.

But that's about it.

So Ethan's team as it's portrayed here is the only one that are, and we'll talk a lot more
about this in the next episode, but they're the only ones that are.

empowered to act independently and trusting each other to have the same end goal, where
everyone else is pretty much out for themselves or some subset thereof.

Yeah.

And so when you find yourself in a Mexican standoff, well, again, many different
scenarios, the model is helpful to understand what options you might have at your

disposal.

What I'm normally looking to do in order to diffuse the situation is to figure out, what
is the unorthodox way to approach this?

What is the way in which, like you said, Brian, we can build trust with people or I can
leverage trust from somebody in the situation.

that maybe it isn't assumed that there is trust

how do you flip the script on the, assume everybody's going to betray me.

Right.

And when you frame the question that way, it's not that complicated of question.

Like how do you flip the the script on, I assume everybody is going to betray me is
somebody has to be the first one to not act that way.

Somebody has to be the first one to demonstrate trust.

Somebody has to be the first one to demonstrate forgiveness.

Somebody has to be the first one to demonstrate forbearance.

Right.

it's.

It's obvious and nobody wants to do it because it feels like weakness.

feels like losing.

feels like missing an opportunity to win.

It feels like everybody else is going to gang up on me.

But if you could put yourself in a position to demonstrate that and start to build
alliances, start to build coalitions, start to sort of turn down the temperature of how

these interactions are going to go.

Then you absolutely do have the potential to defuse the standoff.

a classic, business story that many of you may have read in the last 20 years from the
automotive industry.

Alan Mullally was previously the president of Boeing and was tapped to become the new CEO
of Ford Motor Company at a time when they had been losing money for two years in a row and

were bleeding market share and were their products were not terribly well regarded.

and they were quite

struggling despite the economy doing okay.

And Alan did a lot of things well, but one of the things that he did was he had this one
Ford mantra of bringing the team together and wanting everybody to be on the same side.

And what he encountered when he came into the organization was a really cutthroat business
environment, especially for the executives.

It was all about getting ahead.

was all about turning other people down.

It was all about never showing any weakness.

It was all about, you know, hitting your metrics and protecting your people and, hoarding
your resources.

So you have a lot of people that were highly skilled that were working really, really hard
that were very committed to their jobs, but it wasn't adding up into a successful company.

was adding up into losing money and pointing fingers at each other.

And so he started this weekly executive team meeting where he was pulling everybody into
the meeting and asking how things were going and talking about their problems and talking

about the finances.

And he had this meeting for months after he took over with all of his top vice presidents
and executives.

And everybody came into the meeting like everything's fine.

Our thing is going fine.

Everything's on schedule.

We're meeting our budgets.

We're meeting our sales targets.

Everything's fine.

Everything's fine.

Everything's fine.

And the company's losing money out of her fist.

So this goes on for months.

And finally, he comes into the meeting after like three months of this meeting and he
says, all right, I want to status report everybody doing.

And one of his lieutenants is like, I some bad news.

We're going to miss the production date on the new Ford Edge or whatever the model was.

we, ran into some problems and we're to to go rework some things and it's going to slip by
a couple of months and we're not going to be able to launch the co-product on time.

We're not going to make as much money right away as we thought we were going to.

It's going to, hit our forecasts.

And this is like, this is not something you do in this context because this person is
showing weakness and everybody's ready to like, you know, you failed us.

You're we're going to tear them down.

And Alan's like, thank you.

Thank you for sharing your challenges with us.

What can we do to help?

Like, what do you need?

so that we can get back on track, right?

Not how dare you, not you're fired, I'm going to go get the next guy.

Not, you know, everybody tear into him.

I'm going to give resources to a different project because you can't hold your end of the
bargain.

like, we're on the same team.

We all want this to succeed.

What do you need?

Right.

And modeling that behavior over and over again in those moments, turned that company
around, turned that company from unprofitable to profitable.

turned them into looking forward to the point where they were able to set themselves up,
but they were the only one of the American automakers that didn't take a government loan

and go bankrupt during the recession of 2008, 2009.

They were a much stronger company as a result of many actions that many people took.

But from the very top, modeling trust and collaboration as a way out of the finger
pointing game was absolutely successful at the highest level in a...

not, you know, AI taking over the world, but fairly high stakes environment.

Well, Brian, I love this one because actually I heard this one.

I was a co-op at Ford in 2014, right at the end of the Alan Mulally era.

But that was the first time I heard this story.

I think it's great because I'm sure a lot of the community works or has worked in an
environment where this is the case, where it's like, why we keep asking the questions.

Why do I have to keep going in and reporting that everything's good?

Why do I always go in and say, yeah,

the metrics are good and then I have to go back afterwards and like clean everything up
and make it look nice.

And hopefully I can just, by the time they actually find out, maybe I'll get it back on
track versus just sharing the actual state of the situation and building true trust I will

be transparent with you.

You can be transparent and helpful with me.

And it is a bit of a Mexican standoff as we talked about in the mountaintop part of this
episode.

because In this meeting that Mulally sets up, you have all of these different executives
who all see themselves in this hyper competitive environment and they're thinking to

themselves, I need to look good.

I need to do the best.

You my division needs to be better than everybody else's division.

But in reality, what Mr.

Mulally wants them to do is to change the culture.

He's not trying to reward them for showing a good PowerPoint slide, right?

He's trying to reward them for changing the culture into something that is customer
centric.

It is something that is cognizant of the actual value delivered to the customer, And so in
this situation, it's not the first person that shoots.

It's the first person that just puts the gun down.

and just says like, hey, maybe I shouldn't be holding this gun anymore.

I know everybody thinks that this is the thing to do, but maybe I am going to be the first
one to put it down.

Yeah.

I'm just going to back away, but yeah.

The whole point is, to take a collection of competitive individuals and turn them into a
team.

Right.

We have one goal.

We have the same goal.

We have different roles to get there.

but we absolutely have shared goals, right?

Even in this situation, even when it's a bunch of, know, bunch of nefarious government
representatives and underworld baddies, right?

They kind of all have the same goal.

let's not have the AI take over the world.

let's not have the global order collapse.

Let's not let the one supremely amoral person in the room be the person in charge.

Like, that would be a good idea.

We all should agree on that, right?

Find the common ground, find the basis for, like, we all basically want the same thing at
some super high level, and then let's derive...

some actions of trust that we can take from that, at least at the first step.

Now it's not that simple and it doesn't happen quickly.

And I think our next step is that we're going to spend a lot of time talking about the
tactics of developing trust.

But at the high level, the unlock is the same, game theory is a solution to the problem of
imperfect information.

It's also a solution to the problem of lack of trust.

I'm going to do the thing that is pragmatically the most likely to succeed.

But game theory doesn't mean that you have to assume everybody else is nefarious.

It doesn't mean you have to assume everybody else is selfish, right?

A way to maximize your chances of success is to have everybody pulling on the same rope.

These things are not mutually incompatible.

And so think that's really important to remember when you're trying to game out the
scenarios, like you should assume people will behave inconsistent ways that they have

behaved in the past.

But you should also assume that intrinsic motivations can be aligned, that you can get
people to be on the same team for real, to recognize their shared goals and to act in ways

that encourage those shared goals, even when they have different skills and techniques and
viewpoints.

Yeah, the most value for the most people in the situation is created by cooperation.

thus rather than trying to figure out a way to scam the system, like is the human nature,
it seems like, and just like, at least get out with your own hide.

It's better to flip the situation upside down, right?

Like we always talk about on wonder tour, flip the script and try to figure out what is
the way that I can approach this situation.

where maybe we can actually build trust and cooperation where previously there was none.

And that is what we're going to talk about in the next episode because that is Ethan
Hunt's superpower.

Excellent.

All right.

I'm looking forward to that, but I think that's all for this episode.

Thank you to every one of you for joining us on our journey to become better leaders, to
lead wisely.

In our next episode, we're going to come back.

We'll wrap up our discussion of Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning.

And we hope you'll join us for that one.

But in the meantime, just remember, as always, character is destiny.