WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.859 Okay, let's unpack this. I want you to mentally 00:00:02.859 --> 00:00:06.339 travel back in time with me. It's October 12th, 00:00:06.339 --> 00:00:11.199 2009. Can you picture where you were? Because 00:00:11.199 --> 00:00:13.480 the mood of the world at that specific moment 00:00:13.480 --> 00:00:18.190 was, well, it was heavy. To put it mildly. Heavy 00:00:18.190 --> 00:00:20.250 is a very polite way of putting it. I mean, we 00:00:20.250 --> 00:00:22.530 were barely a year past the collapse of Lehman 00:00:22.530 --> 00:00:25.949 Brothers. The global financial crisis had just 00:00:25.949 --> 00:00:28.109 finished, you know, tearing through the world 00:00:28.109 --> 00:00:30.449 economy like a hurricane. People were losing 00:00:30.449 --> 00:00:32.850 their homes. Their retirement funds were just 00:00:32.850 --> 00:00:35.229 evaporating. Absolutely. And there was this. 00:00:35.710 --> 00:00:39.310 palpable sense of anger and betrayal in the air. 00:00:39.509 --> 00:00:42.189 Exactly. The trust was gone. I mean, for 30 years, 00:00:42.210 --> 00:00:43.869 we'd all been told that the markets were efficient, 00:00:44.009 --> 00:00:45.850 that they were self -correcting. Right. The invisible 00:00:45.850 --> 00:00:48.109 hand had it all sorted. That the smartest guys 00:00:48.109 --> 00:00:50.590 in the room, the ones with the incredibly complex 00:00:50.590 --> 00:00:52.750 mathematical models had everything under control. 00:00:53.369 --> 00:00:56.340 And then just poof. It all melted down. It really 00:00:56.340 --> 00:00:59.020 was a genuine crisis of faith. You had the entire 00:00:59.020 --> 00:01:01.340 free market dogma just collapsing on one side. 00:01:01.460 --> 00:01:04.799 But the alternative, I mean, these massive government 00:01:04.799 --> 00:01:08.000 bailouts, the state stepping in to save the very 00:01:08.000 --> 00:01:11.500 banks that caused the problem, that didn't feel 00:01:11.500 --> 00:01:13.700 like a victory to anyone either. No, not at all. 00:01:13.739 --> 00:01:16.459 It felt like we were trapped between two completely 00:01:16.459 --> 00:01:20.599 broken options. This ruthless crashing marmot 00:01:20.599 --> 00:01:24.159 or the clumsy heavy handed state. You're either 00:01:24.159 --> 00:01:26.719 going to get run over by the market. Or smothered 00:01:26.719 --> 00:01:28.920 by the government. That was the choice. And right 00:01:28.920 --> 00:01:31.760 in the middle of this huge global existential 00:01:31.760 --> 00:01:34.700 hangover, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences 00:01:34.700 --> 00:01:36.879 steps up to the microphone. They're about to 00:01:36.879 --> 00:01:39.140 announce the winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize 00:01:39.140 --> 00:01:41.480 in Economic Sciences. And you have to understand, 00:01:41.519 --> 00:01:44.239 this is usually the Super Bowl for a very, very 00:01:44.239 --> 00:01:46.760 specific type of person. Right. It's a coronation 00:01:46.760 --> 00:01:49.359 for the academic elite. Totally. And the betting 00:01:49.359 --> 00:01:51.859 markets. And yes, of course, economists bet on 00:01:51.859 --> 00:01:54.379 this stuff. We're all favoring the usual suspects. 00:01:54.579 --> 00:01:56.980 Someone from Chicago. Chicago, maybe MIT. Almost 00:01:56.980 --> 00:01:59.099 certainly a man, almost certainly someone who 00:01:59.099 --> 00:02:02.299 deals in high level abstract mathematics. You 00:02:02.299 --> 00:02:05.159 know, someone who models the entire world as 00:02:05.159 --> 00:02:07.239 a series of equations. So the committee steps 00:02:07.239 --> 00:02:09.800 up. There's this global press conference. They 00:02:09.800 --> 00:02:13.280 clear their throat and they read the name. Eleanor 00:02:13.280 --> 00:02:16.020 Ostrom. And the collective reaction from the 00:02:16.020 --> 00:02:19.840 economics world. It wasn't applause. It was just 00:02:19.840 --> 00:02:24.409 silence. followed by, I imagine, the sound of 00:02:24.409 --> 00:02:26.949 thousands of keyboards frantically Googling, 00:02:27.069 --> 00:02:30.750 who is Eleanor Ostrom? It was a genuine shock 00:02:30.750 --> 00:02:32.909 to the system. And not just because she was a 00:02:32.909 --> 00:02:34.969 woman, though. Let's be very, very clear. Yeah, 00:02:35.009 --> 00:02:37.189 that was a huge deal in itself. It was massive. 00:02:37.270 --> 00:02:39.689 She was the first woman to ever win the prize 00:02:39.689 --> 00:02:42.650 in its entire history. That was a headline on 00:02:42.650 --> 00:02:45.389 its own. But the deeper shock, the one that really 00:02:45.389 --> 00:02:47.849 rattled the cages of the profession, was that 00:02:47.849 --> 00:02:50.469 she wasn't even... you know technically an economist 00:02:50.469 --> 00:02:53.229 right she was a political scientist her phd wasn't 00:02:53.229 --> 00:02:55.189 an econ she didn't teach at the london school 00:02:55.189 --> 00:02:57.689 of economics or harvard or princeton no she was 00:02:57.689 --> 00:03:00.150 at indiana university indiana university and 00:03:00.150 --> 00:03:02.729 her work it wasn't about interest rates or derivatives 00:03:02.729 --> 00:03:05.370 or stock market fluctuations it was about well 00:03:05.370 --> 00:03:08.050 it was about farmers and irrigation ditches and 00:03:08.050 --> 00:03:12.210 fisheries and uh police departments in the midwest 00:03:12.210 --> 00:03:14.590 things that mainstream economics just did not 00:03:14.590 --> 00:03:17.110 consider to be economics and that is exactly 00:03:17.110 --> 00:03:20.330 why this story is so incredible by choosing her 00:03:20.330 --> 00:03:23.629 especially in that moment in 2009 the committee 00:03:23.629 --> 00:03:25.509 was making a radical statement they were basically 00:03:25.509 --> 00:03:27.909 acknowledging that the dominant theories had 00:03:27.909 --> 00:03:29.969 failed they were they were saying the emperor 00:03:29.969 --> 00:03:34.180 has no clothes Eleanor Ostrom Lynn, as everyone 00:03:34.180 --> 00:03:37.340 called her, had spent her entire life fundamentally 00:03:37.340 --> 00:03:41.259 dismantling the dogma that ruled economics. She 00:03:41.259 --> 00:03:43.419 looked at the accepted wisdom that said humans 00:03:43.419 --> 00:03:46.979 are just selfish, rational egoists who will destroy 00:03:46.979 --> 00:03:48.900 everything they touch unless they're controlled. 00:03:49.099 --> 00:03:52.419 And she said, actually, I have data that says 00:03:52.419 --> 00:03:54.379 otherwise. She didn't just say it. She went out 00:03:54.379 --> 00:03:56.020 and proved it. She went out into the real world, 00:03:56.060 --> 00:03:59.340 you know. muddy boots and all that and watched 00:03:59.340 --> 00:04:01.639 how actual people behave when they have to share 00:04:01.639 --> 00:04:03.860 something. And what she found gave us what we 00:04:03.860 --> 00:04:06.460 now call Ostrom's Law, which is one of the wittiest 00:04:06.460 --> 00:04:08.240 concepts we're going to discuss today. It's this 00:04:08.240 --> 00:04:11.020 idea that, well, reality is stranger and often 00:04:11.020 --> 00:04:14.000 a lot better than theory. I love that. It's the 00:04:14.000 --> 00:04:16.899 ultimate underdog story of academia, isn't it? 00:04:16.920 --> 00:04:19.399 It really is. You have this woman who was told 00:04:19.399 --> 00:04:21.699 she couldn't even study economics because of 00:04:21.699 --> 00:04:23.680 her high school math grades. We'll get to that. 00:04:23.779 --> 00:04:26.060 It's an infuriating story. And she comes back 00:04:26.060 --> 00:04:29.079 decades later to completely revolutionize the 00:04:29.079 --> 00:04:31.360 field and prove that the smartest guys in the 00:04:31.360 --> 00:04:33.639 room were looking at the world through a keyhole. 00:04:33.800 --> 00:04:36.199 So the mission for this deep dive is pretty clear. 00:04:36.500 --> 00:04:40.319 We are going to explore how one woman took down 00:04:40.319 --> 00:04:43.519 the tragedy of the commons. A theory that a lot 00:04:43.519 --> 00:04:46.470 of us just sort of accept as truth. We're going 00:04:46.470 --> 00:04:49.089 to learn why your local homeowners association, 00:04:49.410 --> 00:04:51.930 as annoying as they can be, might actually be 00:04:51.930 --> 00:04:54.449 onto something deep and primal about human nature. 00:04:54.610 --> 00:04:56.910 And we're going to unpack her eight design principles, 00:04:57.250 --> 00:04:59.610 which are essentially the cheat codes for human 00:04:59.610 --> 00:05:02.129 cooperation. And we're drawing from a huge stack 00:05:02.129 --> 00:05:05.730 of sources here. Extensive biographies, her seminal 00:05:05.730 --> 00:05:08.930 book, Governing the Commons, and accounts of 00:05:08.930 --> 00:05:11.009 the legendary workshop she built at Indiana. 00:05:11.209 --> 00:05:13.930 It's a fantastic story. It is. But before she 00:05:13.930 --> 00:05:16.050 was a Nobel laureate. She was just a kid in Los 00:05:16.050 --> 00:05:18.870 Angeles. Now I read the bio and I see born in 00:05:18.870 --> 00:05:21.269 Los Angeles, grew up in Beverly Hills, and I 00:05:21.269 --> 00:05:24.389 immediately picture, you know, the movie Clueless. 00:05:24.430 --> 00:05:27.389 Right. Mansions, convertibles, ridiculous wealth. 00:05:27.629 --> 00:05:29.529 Exactly. But that wasn't her life at all, was 00:05:29.529 --> 00:05:32.730 it? Not even close. She was born Eleanor Claire 00:05:32.730 --> 00:05:37.029 Awan in 1933. And while the zip code said Beverly 00:05:37.029 --> 00:05:40.519 Hills, her reality was... post -depression survival 00:05:40.519 --> 00:05:43.740 she always described herself as a poor kid in 00:05:43.740 --> 00:05:45.740 a rich kid's school her parents were artists 00:05:45.740 --> 00:05:48.819 right which sounds very romantic but in the 1930s 00:05:48.819 --> 00:05:51.379 that usually means financially unstable that's 00:05:51.379 --> 00:05:53.459 a good way to put it her mother was a musician 00:05:53.459 --> 00:05:55.980 and her father was a set designer for the opera 00:05:55.980 --> 00:05:58.920 but they separated when she was quite young and 00:05:58.920 --> 00:06:00.819 the separation it didn't just split her time 00:06:00.819 --> 00:06:03.199 between two houses it really split her identity 00:06:03.199 --> 00:06:06.399 how so well She lived with her mother who was 00:06:06.399 --> 00:06:09.199 Protestant in a very, very modest house on the 00:06:09.199 --> 00:06:11.240 edge of the district. But then she spent her 00:06:11.240 --> 00:06:13.480 weekends with her father's family who were Jewish. 00:06:13.680 --> 00:06:16.860 Wow. That a fascinating duality to grow up with, 00:06:16.939 --> 00:06:19.800 especially in the 1930s and 40s. It was. And 00:06:19.800 --> 00:06:21.639 she talked about this later in life. She said 00:06:21.639 --> 00:06:24.240 she never felt like she fully belonged in either 00:06:24.240 --> 00:06:26.779 world. She was always the odd one out. Exactly. 00:06:27.379 --> 00:06:30.560 At school, she was the poor kid among the children 00:06:30.560 --> 00:06:33.939 of movie stars. At home during the week, she 00:06:33.939 --> 00:06:36.560 was the Protestant girl. On the weekends, she 00:06:36.560 --> 00:06:38.860 was the Jewish daughter. She said this gave her 00:06:38.860 --> 00:06:41.740 an outsider's perspective from the very beginning. 00:06:42.060 --> 00:06:44.939 She learned to observe systems. She had to. She 00:06:44.939 --> 00:06:47.300 learned to watch how rules worked because she 00:06:47.300 --> 00:06:49.459 was always slightly on the margins of them. She 00:06:49.459 --> 00:06:53.019 wasn't an insider anywhere. And she had to hustle. 00:06:53.319 --> 00:06:55.699 There's this detail in her biography that I just 00:06:55.699 --> 00:06:58.660 love. She swam competitively in high school. 00:06:59.629 --> 00:07:01.870 But it wasn't just for the glory of the sport. 00:07:02.009 --> 00:07:04.490 No, no, and it was entirely practical. She figured 00:07:04.490 --> 00:07:06.290 out that if she got her water safety instructor 00:07:06.290 --> 00:07:08.850 certification, she could teach swimming lessons. 00:07:09.250 --> 00:07:11.509 And that paid well. And teaching swimming paid 00:07:11.509 --> 00:07:14.230 real money. That money was her ticket to college. 00:07:14.410 --> 00:07:16.870 Her mother, you know, didn't actually see the 00:07:16.870 --> 00:07:19.189 point of her going to university. Yeah, the prevailing 00:07:19.189 --> 00:07:21.569 attitude for a girl in her position at the time 00:07:21.569 --> 00:07:25.389 was, you graduate high school, you get a steady 00:07:25.389 --> 00:07:27.689 job as a secretary or something, you find a husband, 00:07:27.910 --> 00:07:31.410 end of story. But she clearly had this engine 00:07:31.410 --> 00:07:34.170 in her, this intellectual hunger. She wanted 00:07:34.170 --> 00:07:36.050 to know how the world worked. Oh, absolutely. 00:07:36.589 --> 00:07:39.050 However, she hit a wall in high school that I 00:07:39.050 --> 00:07:43.689 think is maybe the most infuriating and revealing 00:07:43.689 --> 00:07:46.089 part of her entire story. We have to talk about 00:07:46.089 --> 00:07:48.149 the trigonometry incident. This is the moment 00:07:48.149 --> 00:07:50.550 that nearly derailed her entire intellectual 00:07:50.550 --> 00:07:54.089 trajectory. It's just maddening. So set the scene. 00:07:54.290 --> 00:07:56.899 Okay, so... She's in high school, Beverly Hills 00:07:56.899 --> 00:07:59.540 High. She likes math. She's good at it. She wants 00:07:59.540 --> 00:08:01.819 to take trigonometry. Which is a pretty standard 00:08:01.819 --> 00:08:04.540 prerequisite for any serious science or economics 00:08:04.540 --> 00:08:07.180 degree later on. It's the gateway. So she goes 00:08:07.180 --> 00:08:09.199 to the administration and they look at her transcript. 00:08:09.459 --> 00:08:11.779 Now, her grades in algebra and geometry were 00:08:11.779 --> 00:08:14.079 good. They were fine. But they weren't, you know, 00:08:14.100 --> 00:08:16.439 straight A's, top of the class. And in the late 00:08:16.439 --> 00:08:19.019 1940s, if you were a girl, good just wasn't good 00:08:19.019 --> 00:08:21.379 enough, was it? Not for something like advanced 00:08:21.379 --> 00:08:24.689 math. The policy, whether it was written down 00:08:24.689 --> 00:08:27.610 or just understood, was that girls were generally 00:08:27.610 --> 00:08:30.730 discouraged from taking it unless they were undeniable 00:08:30.730 --> 00:08:33.350 off -the -charts geniuses. So they just told 00:08:33.350 --> 00:08:36.090 her no? They just said no. They gatekept her 00:08:36.090 --> 00:08:38.429 out of trigonometry? A simple administrative 00:08:38.429 --> 00:08:41.789 decision? It makes my blood boil. Just some bureaucrat 00:08:41.789 --> 00:08:43.769 in an office saying, eh, you don't need that. 00:08:43.830 --> 00:08:46.139 That's for the boys. And the consequences of 00:08:46.139 --> 00:08:49.279 that one decision were massive. Because she didn't 00:08:49.279 --> 00:08:51.639 take trig in high school, she couldn't take calculus 00:08:51.639 --> 00:08:54.700 as an undergraduate at UCLA. Right. And because 00:08:54.700 --> 00:08:57.440 she didn't have calculus on her transcript, the 00:08:57.440 --> 00:09:01.039 door to the hard sciences and, crucially, to 00:09:01.039 --> 00:09:03.700 the entire field of mainstream economics was 00:09:03.700 --> 00:09:07.100 slammed shut in her face before she even started. 00:09:07.259 --> 00:09:09.159 Let's think about the irony of that. The woman 00:09:09.159 --> 00:09:10.960 who would eventually win the Nobel Prize in economics 00:09:10.960 --> 00:09:13.679 was told she wasn't allowed to learn the basic 00:09:13.679 --> 00:09:16.179 math required to even enter the field. It's staggering. 00:09:16.299 --> 00:09:18.840 It's an incredible story of institutional blindness. 00:09:19.299 --> 00:09:21.659 But, and this is where we really see her resilience, 00:09:21.899 --> 00:09:25.059 she didn't just give up on learning. She pivoted. 00:09:25.120 --> 00:09:27.299 She joined the debate team. She joined the debate 00:09:27.299 --> 00:09:30.779 team. And she credits debate as her real education. 00:09:31.179 --> 00:09:34.080 Why debate? What did that give her that math 00:09:34.080 --> 00:09:36.980 didn't? Debate forces you to look at public policy 00:09:36.980 --> 00:09:40.240 from all sides. If the topic is, say, should 00:09:40.240 --> 00:09:42.860 we build a dam on this river? You have to be 00:09:42.860 --> 00:09:45.960 ready to argue yes and no with equal conviction 00:09:45.960 --> 00:09:48.500 and with quality evidence. You have to understand 00:09:48.500 --> 00:09:51.700 both arguments inside and out. Exactly. It taught 00:09:51.700 --> 00:09:54.820 her that there is rarely one single right answer 00:09:54.820 --> 00:09:57.379 in human affairs. There are always tradeoffs. 00:09:57.460 --> 00:09:59.360 There are always competing interests and values. 00:09:59.779 --> 00:10:02.299 It moved her thinking away from a kind of black 00:10:02.299 --> 00:10:04.750 and white mathematical logic and toward understanding 00:10:04.750 --> 00:10:07.710 the messy complexity of human rules and arguments. 00:10:08.029 --> 00:10:09.889 It's training for looking at the gray areas, 00:10:10.049 --> 00:10:11.850 which is exactly where she ended up living her 00:10:11.850 --> 00:10:14.029 entire professional life. It's the perfect training. 00:10:14.289 --> 00:10:17.110 So she graduates high school in 1951. She gets 00:10:17.110 --> 00:10:19.970 herself to UCLA. She absolutely grinds through 00:10:19.970 --> 00:10:21.669 her BA in three years. While working multiple 00:10:21.669 --> 00:10:24.590 jobs. Right. Working at a dime store, working 00:10:24.590 --> 00:10:27.029 at the library, teaching swimming lessons the 00:10:27.029 --> 00:10:30.129 whole time. She graduates with honors and she 00:10:30.129 --> 00:10:32.570 thinks, OK, now I'm ready. I want to get a Ph 00:10:32.570 --> 00:10:36.070 .D. in economics. She applies to UCLA's own economics 00:10:36.070 --> 00:10:39.830 Ph .D. program. And the ghost of the trigonometry 00:10:39.830 --> 00:10:42.269 incident comes right back to haunt her. They 00:10:42.269 --> 00:10:43.809 look at the transcript. They look at the transcript. 00:10:43.889 --> 00:10:46.750 No calculus, automatic rejection. They didn't 00:10:46.750 --> 00:10:49.110 care about her honors degree, her reasoning skills, 00:10:49.389 --> 00:10:51.470 her work ethic. They just looked for the math 00:10:51.470 --> 00:10:53.799 credits and she didn't have them. That was the 00:10:53.799 --> 00:10:55.740 box you had to check. And she couldn't check 00:10:55.740 --> 00:10:58.240 it. So she literally walked down the hall to 00:10:58.240 --> 00:11:00.580 the political science department. And this is 00:11:00.580 --> 00:11:02.720 the great twist of fate in her story. Because 00:11:02.720 --> 00:11:04.379 they saw something different. They saw something 00:11:04.379 --> 00:11:06.990 different. Political science in the 1960s was, 00:11:07.090 --> 00:11:09.830 frankly, a bit more open -minded than economics. 00:11:10.090 --> 00:11:12.690 They were interested in institutions. How do 00:11:12.690 --> 00:11:14.950 governments actually work? How are rules made 00:11:14.950 --> 00:11:17.230 and enforced in the real world? They looked at 00:11:17.230 --> 00:11:19.490 her debate background, her incredible logic, 00:11:19.549 --> 00:11:22.549 her honors thesis, and they said, come on in. 00:11:22.710 --> 00:11:25.470 It makes you wonder if she had been accepted 00:11:25.470 --> 00:11:28.110 into the economics program. She might have been 00:11:28.110 --> 00:11:30.980 molded into just another model builder. She would 00:11:30.980 --> 00:11:32.740 have been trained to think in exactly the same 00:11:32.740 --> 00:11:35.360 way as the people she eventually disproved. Being 00:11:35.360 --> 00:11:38.179 forced into political science gave her the freedom 00:11:38.179 --> 00:11:40.759 to look at the world differently. It did. And 00:11:40.759 --> 00:11:42.500 she didn't just stay in the ivory tower after 00:11:42.500 --> 00:11:44.980 that either. Before starting her Ph .D., she 00:11:44.980 --> 00:11:47.580 got these jobs in the real world. She worked 00:11:47.580 --> 00:11:49.740 as an export clerk. Learned shorthand, I read. 00:11:49.919 --> 00:11:52.539 Right. And then she was an assistant personnel 00:11:52.539 --> 00:11:55.460 manager in a firm that had never hired a woman 00:11:55.460 --> 00:11:58.539 for anything other than secretarial work. She 00:11:58.539 --> 00:12:00.659 was constantly pushing boundaries. And what did 00:12:00.659 --> 00:12:03.179 that teach her? It taught her about the invisible 00:12:03.179 --> 00:12:06.720 rules of organizations. She saw how a hierarchy 00:12:06.720 --> 00:12:08.879 actually functions day to day, which is often 00:12:08.879 --> 00:12:11.259 very, very different from what the official organizational 00:12:11.259 --> 00:12:14.100 chart says. The gap between theory and practice. 00:12:14.419 --> 00:12:17.279 Exactly. That distinction between the rules on 00:12:17.279 --> 00:12:20.379 paper and the rules in use became the absolute 00:12:20.379 --> 00:12:23.200 central theme of all of her research. So she 00:12:23.200 --> 00:12:27.159 gets her PhD in 1965. And she enters the academic 00:12:27.159 --> 00:12:30.899 arena. Right. As a very specific, very powerful 00:12:30.899 --> 00:12:33.919 theory is taking over the world. We need to introduce 00:12:33.919 --> 00:12:36.860 the villain of the story or at least the intellectual 00:12:36.860 --> 00:12:39.879 antagonist. Yes. The tragedy of the commons. 00:12:40.039 --> 00:12:41.919 I feel like it's one of those phrases everyone 00:12:41.919 --> 00:12:44.100 has heard, but few people really know where it 00:12:44.100 --> 00:12:47.649 comes from or just how. Well, how profoundly 00:12:47.649 --> 00:12:50.090 depressing it actually is. It was popularized 00:12:50.090 --> 00:12:52.850 by a biologist named Garrett Hardin in a hugely 00:12:52.850 --> 00:12:55.970 influential 1968 article in the journal Science. 00:12:56.330 --> 00:12:59.529 The core concept is older, but Hardin's metaphor 00:12:59.529 --> 00:13:02.210 is what made it so incredibly sticky. He asked 00:13:02.210 --> 00:13:04.309 us to imagine a pasture, right? The commons, 00:13:04.309 --> 00:13:06.889 it's open to everyone. Exactly. So you're a herdsman. 00:13:06.929 --> 00:13:09.490 You have a cow grazing on this shared land. And 00:13:09.490 --> 00:13:13.090 you are a rational economic actor. In classic 00:13:13.090 --> 00:13:15.090 economics, that means you want to maximize your 00:13:15.090 --> 00:13:17.490 own personal profit. So you look at the pasture 00:13:17.490 --> 00:13:19.610 and you think to yourself, if I add one more 00:13:19.610 --> 00:13:21.850 cow to my herd, what happens? Well, the benefit 00:13:21.850 --> 00:13:23.970 is obvious. I get a whole extra cow to sell at 00:13:23.970 --> 00:13:25.789 the market. The benefit to me is, you know, 100 00:13:25.789 --> 00:13:28.779 % of that cow's value. Exactly. You get all the 00:13:28.779 --> 00:13:30.940 milk, all the meat, all the profit. The benefit 00:13:30.940 --> 00:13:33.899 is entirely yours. That's a positive utility 00:13:33.899 --> 00:13:36.320 of plus one for you. But there's a cost. There 00:13:36.320 --> 00:13:38.860 is a cost. Adding that extra cow puts a little 00:13:38.860 --> 00:13:41.940 more strain on the grass. The pasture gets a 00:13:41.940 --> 00:13:44.080 little bit more degraded, a little bit overgrazed. 00:13:44.139 --> 00:13:47.299 However, that cost is shared by everyone who 00:13:47.299 --> 00:13:50.840 uses the pasture. So if there are, say, a hundred 00:13:50.840 --> 00:13:53.659 herdsmen using the field. You only suffer one. 00:13:54.190 --> 00:13:56.970 one hundredth of the damage. The cost is socialized, 00:13:56.990 --> 00:13:59.409 but the benefit is privatized. So the math is 00:13:59.409 --> 00:14:01.710 a complete no brainer. I get 100 percent of the 00:14:01.710 --> 00:14:03.950 gain and I only take one percent of the cost. 00:14:04.110 --> 00:14:06.110 I would be an economic idiot not to add the extra 00:14:06.110 --> 00:14:07.929 cow. Correct. And so would your neighbor and 00:14:07.929 --> 00:14:10.370 the neighbor after that. Each person acting perfectly 00:14:10.370 --> 00:14:12.409 rationally and in their own self -interest adds 00:14:12.409 --> 00:14:14.750 another cow and another and another. Until the 00:14:14.750 --> 00:14:16.950 pasture is a muddy wasteland and all the cows 00:14:16.950 --> 00:14:20.090 starve. That's the tragedy. Hardin's famous line 00:14:20.090 --> 00:14:23.720 is freedom in a commons brings ruin to all. He 00:14:23.720 --> 00:14:26.179 believed that human beings are locked into this 00:14:26.179 --> 00:14:28.899 remorseless system where we are compelled by 00:14:28.899 --> 00:14:31.460 our own selfishness to destroy the very resources 00:14:31.460 --> 00:14:34.360 we depend on. We are helpless captives of this 00:14:34.360 --> 00:14:37.480 logic. It's such a bleak, deterministic view 00:14:37.480 --> 00:14:40.100 of humanity. It basically says we can't have 00:14:40.100 --> 00:14:42.500 nice things because we'll just break them. And 00:14:42.500 --> 00:14:44.659 the policy implications that flowed from this 00:14:44.659 --> 00:14:48.500 idea were absolutely massive because. If you 00:14:48.500 --> 00:14:50.779 believe this tragedy is inevitable, like a law 00:14:50.779 --> 00:14:52.879 of physics. Then you only have two choices to 00:14:52.879 --> 00:14:55.919 stop it. Exactly. The binary choice. Solution 00:14:55.919 --> 00:14:58.820 A is what we call Leviathan. The state. Big government. 00:14:59.000 --> 00:15:01.320 The state. A central government comes in with 00:15:01.320 --> 00:15:04.019 an iron fist. It puts up fences. It hires police. 00:15:04.299 --> 00:15:07.000 It issues a limited number of permits. It regulates 00:15:07.000 --> 00:15:09.460 the pasture from the top down. If you add an 00:15:09.460 --> 00:15:11.720 extra cow without permission, you go to jail. 00:15:11.919 --> 00:15:13.759 Okay, so that's one option. What's solution B? 00:15:14.259 --> 00:15:16.639 Privatization. The market. You take the commons, 00:15:16.639 --> 00:15:19.039 you chop it up into a grid of little square parcels, 00:15:19.039 --> 00:15:21.279 and you give one to each herdsman as their private 00:15:21.279 --> 00:15:24.360 property. And the logic there is that if I own 00:15:24.360 --> 00:15:26.919 my little plot of land, I won't overgraze it 00:15:26.919 --> 00:15:28.559 because I'm the only one who suffers the consequences. 00:15:28.980 --> 00:15:31.529 Precisely. The costs are no longer socialized. 00:15:31.549 --> 00:15:34.169 If I ruin my land, it's my problem alone. So 00:15:34.169 --> 00:15:37.289 for decades, this was the entire dogma. You either 00:15:37.289 --> 00:15:39.529 need big government to regulate us or you need 00:15:39.529 --> 00:15:42.029 big markets to incentivize us. There was no third 00:15:42.029 --> 00:15:44.750 option. None. And this wasn't just some abstract 00:15:44.750 --> 00:15:47.850 academic theory. This shaped Cold War policy. 00:15:48.269 --> 00:15:50.990 The West pushed privatization across the globe. 00:15:51.129 --> 00:15:54.389 The East pushed state control. But both sides 00:15:54.389 --> 00:15:56.690 fundamentally agreed that the commons, the idea 00:15:56.690 --> 00:15:58.289 of people just sharing stuff and figuring it 00:15:58.289 --> 00:16:00.909 out for themselves, was a primitive relic of 00:16:00.909 --> 00:16:03.649 the past, doomed to fail. And then comes Eleanor 00:16:03.649 --> 00:16:06.830 Ostrom. She looks at this elegant, perfect, mathematically 00:16:06.830 --> 00:16:10.149 sound model of the tragedy, and she asks a very 00:16:10.149 --> 00:16:13.490 simple but very dangerous question. Is this actually 00:16:13.490 --> 00:16:15.769 true? Does this actually happen? She called this 00:16:15.769 --> 00:16:19.029 binary thinking the panacea trap. The idea that 00:16:19.029 --> 00:16:22.090 there is one magic pill, either the state or 00:16:22.090 --> 00:16:24.809 the market, for every single problem in the world. 00:16:25.210 --> 00:16:27.929 She was an empiricist at heart. She didn't care 00:16:27.929 --> 00:16:30.330 if the model was beautiful and elegant on paper. 00:16:30.509 --> 00:16:32.490 She wanted to know if it matched the data from 00:16:32.490 --> 00:16:34.830 the real world. So she started doing detective 00:16:34.830 --> 00:16:37.029 work. That's the perfect way to put it. And let's 00:16:37.029 --> 00:16:39.330 talk about her first big case, the one that formed 00:16:39.330 --> 00:16:42.830 her entire PhD. The water wars of Los Angeles. 00:16:42.990 --> 00:16:45.370 This was the subject of her dissertation published 00:16:45.370 --> 00:16:49.629 in 1965. And it was the perfect real world laboratory. 00:16:49.870 --> 00:16:52.710 In the 1950s, Southern California was booming. 00:16:53.110 --> 00:16:55.590 And in the area known as the West Basin. This 00:16:55.590 --> 00:16:57.830 is what, near the coast? Yeah, you've got cities 00:16:57.830 --> 00:16:59.970 like Inglewood, Manhattan Beach, El Segundo. 00:17:00.190 --> 00:17:02.730 You also have big industrial players like oil 00:17:02.730 --> 00:17:05.210 refineries and you have farmers. And they are 00:17:05.210 --> 00:17:07.490 all pumping massive amounts of water from the 00:17:07.490 --> 00:17:09.750 same underground aquifer. And they were pumping 00:17:09.750 --> 00:17:12.059 it dry. Right? It was a classic commons problem. 00:17:12.200 --> 00:17:14.240 It was a textbook tragedy of the commons in the 00:17:14.240 --> 00:17:17.140 making. They were pumping it so fast that the 00:17:17.140 --> 00:17:19.720 water level in the aquifer dropped below sea 00:17:19.720 --> 00:17:21.920 level. Which means? Salt water from the Pacific 00:17:21.920 --> 00:17:24.480 Ocean started seeping in, contaminating the fresh 00:17:24.480 --> 00:17:27.460 water. They were literally poisoning their own 00:17:27.460 --> 00:17:30.680 well. It was a slow motion disaster. Now, according 00:17:30.680 --> 00:17:33.079 to Garrett Hardin and the tragedy theory, these 00:17:33.079 --> 00:17:35.339 people should have just kept pumping until the 00:17:35.339 --> 00:17:37.660 water was completely gone and unusable. Yeah. 00:17:37.720 --> 00:17:40.140 They should have been trapped. In their selfishness. 00:17:40.259 --> 00:17:42.839 Exactly. Or they should have waited for the state 00:17:42.839 --> 00:17:45.160 of California to come in from Sacramento and 00:17:45.160 --> 00:17:47.680 take over the whole system, dictate who gets 00:17:47.680 --> 00:17:50.400 what. But that's not what happened. That is not 00:17:50.400 --> 00:17:54.059 what happened. Ostrom, through meticulous fieldwork, 00:17:54.200 --> 00:17:57.599 observed that these people who were fierce competitors 00:17:57.599 --> 00:18:01.109 suing each other over water rights. started talking 00:18:01.109 --> 00:18:03.289 to each other. They communicated. They formed 00:18:03.289 --> 00:18:05.670 a voluntary association. They started gathering 00:18:05.670 --> 00:18:08.230 their own data on water levels. They actually 00:18:08.230 --> 00:18:10.670 went to court, not to destroy each other, but 00:18:10.670 --> 00:18:13.390 to get a judge to ratify an agreement they had 00:18:13.390 --> 00:18:15.630 worked out amongst themselves. So they created 00:18:15.630 --> 00:18:18.130 their own solution. Yeah. A solution that wasn't 00:18:18.130 --> 00:18:20.599 the state and it wasn't privatization. It was 00:18:20.599 --> 00:18:23.160 something else entirely. They agreed to collectively 00:18:23.160 --> 00:18:26.160 limit their own pumping. They set up a water 00:18:26.160 --> 00:18:29.059 master, an official paid by them, to monitor 00:18:29.059 --> 00:18:32.019 usage. And get this, they voluntarily agreed 00:18:32.019 --> 00:18:34.940 to pay a tax on every gallon of water they pumped. 00:18:35.160 --> 00:18:37.940 They taxed themselves. That does not sound like 00:18:37.940 --> 00:18:40.519 the behavior of selfish, rational egoists. Not 00:18:40.519 --> 00:18:43.019 at all. And the money from that tax was used 00:18:43.019 --> 00:18:45.559 to buy imported water from the Colorado River 00:18:45.559 --> 00:18:48.769 to actively replenish the basin. They weren't 00:18:48.769 --> 00:18:51.869 just extracting, they were stewarding. They created 00:18:51.869 --> 00:18:54.930 what Ostrom called a polycentric system. Okay, 00:18:54.970 --> 00:18:57.190 that's a key Ostrom word, polycentricity. It 00:18:57.190 --> 00:18:59.150 sounds like a geometry term. Break it down for 00:18:59.150 --> 00:19:02.309 us. Poly just means many, and centric means centers. 00:19:02.750 --> 00:19:06.269 So instead of one big boss at the top, the state 00:19:06.269 --> 00:19:08.890 telling everyone what to do, you have many overlapping 00:19:08.890 --> 00:19:11.029 centers of decision making. So in this case? 00:19:11.150 --> 00:19:12.970 You had the local water board, you had the city 00:19:12.970 --> 00:19:15.230 councils, you had the private water companies, 00:19:15.549 --> 00:19:17.589 you had the court system acting as a referee. 00:19:18.150 --> 00:19:20.390 They're all formally independent of each other, 00:19:20.490 --> 00:19:22.869 but they overlap and interact and negotiate. 00:19:23.170 --> 00:19:25.329 To an economist who likes clean hierarchical 00:19:25.329 --> 00:19:27.450 charts, that probably sounds like an absolute 00:19:27.450 --> 00:19:30.430 mess. It looks chaotic. And that was the mainstream 00:19:30.430 --> 00:19:33.450 criticism for years. It's too messy. It's redundant. 00:19:33.670 --> 00:19:36.440 You have too many cooks in the kitchen. But Ostrom 00:19:36.440 --> 00:19:38.920 found the opposite. She found that the messiness 00:19:38.920 --> 00:19:41.220 was actually a strength. It created resilience. 00:19:41.619 --> 00:19:44.259 If one part of the system failed, another part 00:19:44.259 --> 00:19:46.619 could step in. It allowed for experimentation. 00:19:47.099 --> 00:19:49.960 It allowed the rules to be tailored to the specific 00:19:49.960 --> 00:19:53.420 local geology and politics rather than a clumsy 00:19:53.420 --> 00:19:56.680 one size fits all rule handed down from the state 00:19:56.680 --> 00:19:59.000 capitol. So she proves it works in L .A. with 00:19:59.000 --> 00:20:01.930 this incredibly detailed case study. But her 00:20:01.930 --> 00:20:03.990 critics probably said, OK, sure, that works in 00:20:03.990 --> 00:20:06.069 California where people have lawyers and money 00:20:06.069 --> 00:20:08.470 and access to courts. But what about the rest 00:20:08.470 --> 00:20:10.569 of the world? What about poor farmers in developing 00:20:10.569 --> 00:20:13.130 countries? And that was a very fair challenge. 00:20:13.170 --> 00:20:15.230 And it's the challenge that pushed her to go 00:20:15.230 --> 00:20:17.630 global. She realized she couldn't build a whole 00:20:17.630 --> 00:20:20.710 theory on just one case. She needed a massive 00:20:20.710 --> 00:20:23.849 data set of how people manage commons all over 00:20:23.849 --> 00:20:26.109 the planet. So she and her colleagues at the 00:20:26.109 --> 00:20:28.970 workshop in Indiana started collecting case studies 00:20:28.970 --> 00:20:32.160 from... Well, everywhere. We're talking about 00:20:32.160 --> 00:20:35.180 high altitude irrigation systems in Nepal, community 00:20:35.180 --> 00:20:38.480 managed forests in Japan, mountain meadows in 00:20:38.480 --> 00:20:40.339 Switzerland that have been shared for centuries. 00:20:40.880 --> 00:20:43.640 Fisheries in Turkey and Nova Scotia. She became 00:20:43.640 --> 00:20:46.460 a global collector of common pool resources and 00:20:46.460 --> 00:20:49.000 she found the same pattern over and over and 00:20:49.000 --> 00:20:51.200 over again. OK, let's unpack this a bit because 00:20:51.200 --> 00:20:53.769 this is amazing. She basically realized that 00:20:53.769 --> 00:20:57.049 Swiss villagers and Indonesian fishermen had 00:20:57.049 --> 00:20:59.349 figured out something that Nobel -winning economists 00:20:59.349 --> 00:21:02.230 hadn't. That's exactly right. Take the Swiss 00:21:02.230 --> 00:21:04.369 village of Turbil. She wrote about them extensively. 00:21:04.730 --> 00:21:06.970 They have been managing their alpine grazing 00:21:06.970 --> 00:21:10.910 lands and forests communally since the year 1224. 00:21:11.230 --> 00:21:14.069 Wait, say that again. 1224. 1224. That's nearly 00:21:14.069 --> 00:21:16.809 800 years of successful, sustainable sharing. 00:21:16.990 --> 00:21:19.230 If the tragedy of the commons was a universal 00:21:19.230 --> 00:21:22.539 law like gravity, Those pastures should have 00:21:22.539 --> 00:21:24.400 been a desert centuries ago. They should have 00:21:24.400 --> 00:21:27.000 been destroyed by the 1300s, but they weren't. 00:21:27.000 --> 00:21:29.440 And Ostrom asked, why? How did they do it? And 00:21:29.440 --> 00:21:32.109 what was the answer? They had rules, not rules 00:21:32.109 --> 00:21:34.150 imposed by the king of Switzerland, but rules 00:21:34.150 --> 00:21:36.670 they developed themselves. For the grazing lands, 00:21:37.009 --> 00:21:39.769 they had the wintering rule. The wintery rule. 00:21:39.950 --> 00:21:42.690 The rule was simple and brilliant. You can only 00:21:42.690 --> 00:21:45.410 send as many cows up to the shared alpine pasture 00:21:45.410 --> 00:21:48.569 in the summer as you can personally feed over 00:21:48.569 --> 00:21:51.109 the winter with hay that you grew yourself on 00:21:51.109 --> 00:21:53.609 your own private land. Oh, that is genius. It 00:21:53.609 --> 00:21:56.609 naturally caps the total herd size. It links 00:21:56.609 --> 00:21:58.549 the use of the public commons to your private 00:21:58.549 --> 00:22:01.509 capacity. Precisely. And it was enforced not 00:22:01.509 --> 00:22:03.650 by a policeman, but by the villagers themselves. 00:22:03.789 --> 00:22:06.130 They had a cow official, which is a real job 00:22:06.130 --> 00:22:08.569 title, who would count the herds going up the 00:22:08.569 --> 00:22:10.690 mountain. If you tried to cheat, you paid a hefty 00:22:10.690 --> 00:22:13.789 fine directly to the community. So Ostrom looks 00:22:13.789 --> 00:22:15.490 at Turble. She looks at the Japanese forests. 00:22:15.589 --> 00:22:18.170 She looks at the L .A. water basin. And she has 00:22:18.170 --> 00:22:21.390 this profound realization. Humans are not trapped. 00:22:22.009 --> 00:22:24.819 We are not helpless. we are capable of creating 00:22:24.819 --> 00:22:27.519 our own rules to govern ourselves. Exactly. She 00:22:27.519 --> 00:22:29.579 moved the entire conversation from it's impossible 00:22:29.579 --> 00:22:32.400 to, okay, it's possible, but how does it work? 00:22:32.519 --> 00:22:34.240 What are the common ingredients for success? 00:22:34.660 --> 00:22:37.640 And this leads us to the absolute core of her 00:22:37.640 --> 00:22:41.700 intellectual legacy. In 1990, she publishes her 00:22:41.700 --> 00:22:45.099 magnum opus, Governing the Commons. And in it, 00:22:45.119 --> 00:22:48.599 she lays out what she calls the eight design 00:22:48.599 --> 00:22:51.619 principles. This is the meat of the theory. And 00:22:51.619 --> 00:22:53.980 I just want to say these aren't rigid laws. She's 00:22:53.980 --> 00:22:56.259 very clear about that. They're design principles 00:22:56.259 --> 00:22:58.980 that she observed over and over again in successful, 00:22:59.119 --> 00:23:01.380 long, enduring systems. It's a toolkit. It's 00:23:01.380 --> 00:23:03.079 a toolkit. And if you're listening to this and 00:23:03.079 --> 00:23:05.759 you run a team or you're part of a crypto DAO 00:23:05.759 --> 00:23:07.740 or you manage a community garden or you're just 00:23:07.740 --> 00:23:09.900 in a messy house with three roommates, get a 00:23:09.900 --> 00:23:12.460 pen. These are the eight traits that successful 00:23:12.460 --> 00:23:15.039 groups share. Let's walk through them. Principle 00:23:15.039 --> 00:23:17.730 number one. Clearly defined boundaries. This 00:23:17.730 --> 00:23:20.029 sounds so obvious, but it's where most efforts 00:23:20.029 --> 00:23:22.390 fail. You need to know exactly who is allowed 00:23:22.390 --> 00:23:24.950 to use the resource and who is not. And you also 00:23:24.950 --> 00:23:26.950 need to know the physical boundaries of the resource 00:23:26.950 --> 00:23:29.890 itself. Is it this lake or does it include the 00:23:29.890 --> 00:23:32.329 stream leading into it? So a commons doesn't 00:23:32.329 --> 00:23:35.650 actually mean open to absolutely everyone. No, 00:23:35.650 --> 00:23:38.329 that is a huge and persistent misconception. 00:23:38.950 --> 00:23:41.829 That's an open access free for all, which does 00:23:41.829 --> 00:23:45.230 lead to tragedy. A successful commons is a club. 00:23:45.759 --> 00:23:48.500 It has members. It has an inside and an outside. 00:23:48.779 --> 00:23:50.619 You have to be able to say no to outsiders. You 00:23:50.619 --> 00:23:52.599 must be able to exclude people. If you let the 00:23:52.599 --> 00:23:55.460 entire world fish in your small lake, the lake 00:23:55.460 --> 00:23:58.019 will die. You need a fence, whether it's a physical 00:23:58.019 --> 00:24:00.180 fence or a legal one, like a membership list. 00:24:00.420 --> 00:24:02.720 Okay, so exclusivity matters. Principle number 00:24:02.720 --> 00:24:06.279 two, congruence with local conditions. The rules 00:24:06.279 --> 00:24:08.720 you make have to match the reality on the ground. 00:24:09.230 --> 00:24:11.390 A rule that works for a slow -growing lobster 00:24:11.390 --> 00:24:14.569 fishery in Nova Scotia will destroy a fast -growing 00:24:14.569 --> 00:24:17.809 tilapia fishery in Indonesia. So no copy -pasting. 00:24:17.930 --> 00:24:20.329 No copy -pasting. The rule about when you can 00:24:20.329 --> 00:24:22.509 harvest or what tools you're allowed to use need 00:24:22.509 --> 00:24:24.750 to fit the local biology, the local culture, 00:24:24.869 --> 00:24:27.490 and the local labor market. This is the ultimate 00:24:27.490 --> 00:24:30.049 anti -bureaucrat principle. You can't just have 00:24:30.049 --> 00:24:31.910 someone in the capital city writing one size 00:24:31.910 --> 00:24:34.490 fits all laws for the entire country. Exactly. 00:24:35.130 --> 00:24:37.990 Ostrom found again and again that top -down rules 00:24:37.990 --> 00:24:40.329 from a distant government usually fail because 00:24:40.329 --> 00:24:43.529 they ignore critical local knowledge. The farmers 00:24:43.529 --> 00:24:45.589 know the land better than the regulators do. 00:24:45.789 --> 00:24:48.190 Which flows perfectly into principle number three, 00:24:48.329 --> 00:24:51.289 collective choice arrangements. This is basically... 00:24:52.319 --> 00:24:54.859 democracy at the resource level, the people who 00:24:54.859 --> 00:24:57.440 have to live by the rules should have a say in 00:24:57.440 --> 00:24:59.720 making and modifying the rules. Why is this so 00:24:59.720 --> 00:25:02.480 important? It's all about buy -in. If some distant 00:25:02.480 --> 00:25:04.660 government agency sends me a letter that says 00:25:04.660 --> 00:25:06.900 I can't catch fish on Tuesdays anymore, I'm going 00:25:06.900 --> 00:25:08.900 to be annoyed and I'll probably try to cheat 00:25:08.900 --> 00:25:10.880 if I can get away with it. You see it as an imposition. 00:25:11.259 --> 00:25:13.660 Of course. But if I was in the community meeting 00:25:13.660 --> 00:25:16.299 where we all looked at the data and decided together 00:25:16.299 --> 00:25:18.920 to ban fishing on Tuesdays to let the young fish 00:25:18.920 --> 00:25:22.579 grow, I understand why. I own that rule. I helped 00:25:22.579 --> 00:25:25.000 make it. I'm much more likely to follow it and 00:25:25.000 --> 00:25:26.880 to make sure my neighbors follow it, too. It 00:25:26.880 --> 00:25:29.180 changes the dynamic from grudging compliance 00:25:29.180 --> 00:25:33.180 to active commitment, which leads to principle 00:25:33.180 --> 00:25:36.640 number four, monitoring. This is the big one. 00:25:36.680 --> 00:25:38.920 This is the enforcement question. How do you 00:25:38.920 --> 00:25:41.500 stop the free riders? In the Leviathan model, 00:25:41.740 --> 00:25:44.880 you hire a policeman. But policemen are expensive, 00:25:45.240 --> 00:25:47.599 they don't know the local context, and they can 00:25:47.599 --> 00:25:50.799 be bribed. So what's Ostrom's solution? Ostrom 00:25:50.799 --> 00:25:53.400 found that in successful commons, the monitors 00:25:53.400 --> 00:25:56.759 are the users themselves, or people who are directly 00:25:56.759 --> 00:25:59.279 accountable to the users. The neighbor watching 00:25:59.279 --> 00:26:01.500 the neighbor. Yes. It's mutual accountability. 00:26:02.200 --> 00:26:04.319 In the irrigation system she studied in the Philippines, 00:26:04.640 --> 00:26:07.339 the farmers literally take turns walking the 00:26:07.339 --> 00:26:09.579 canals to make sure no one is stealing water. 00:26:09.900 --> 00:26:12.579 Or sometimes the monitoring is built right into 00:26:12.579 --> 00:26:15.079 the system itself. If I take too much water upstream, 00:26:15.420 --> 00:26:17.619 your water pressure downstream drops, and you 00:26:17.619 --> 00:26:20.339 know immediately who to talk to. But what happens 00:26:20.339 --> 00:26:22.579 when you catch someone cheating? That brings 00:26:22.579 --> 00:26:25.440 us to principle number five, graduated sanctions. 00:26:26.269 --> 00:26:29.029 This is pure psychological genius. If someone 00:26:29.029 --> 00:26:30.869 breaks a rule, you don't throw them in jail. 00:26:31.049 --> 00:26:33.369 You don't find them a million dollars on the 00:26:33.369 --> 00:26:35.150 first offense. Because maybe it was an honest 00:26:35.150 --> 00:26:38.170 mistake. Exactly. Maybe I forgot. Maybe my family 00:26:38.170 --> 00:26:40.809 was desperate. The first punishment is usually 00:26:40.809 --> 00:26:44.170 very low cost. It might just be a warning. Or 00:26:44.170 --> 00:26:46.730 a little bit of social shame. Hey Bob, everyone 00:26:46.730 --> 00:26:49.410 saw you take too many fish yesterday. Cut it 00:26:49.410 --> 00:26:51.890 out. It's designed to preserve social peace. 00:26:52.049 --> 00:26:54.589 But the sanctions are graduated. They are graduated. 00:26:54.609 --> 00:26:57.349 If I do it again, the fine gets bigger. If I 00:26:57.349 --> 00:26:59.450 keep doing it, the community might suspend my 00:26:59.450 --> 00:27:01.809 fishing rights for a week. If I'm a persistent, 00:27:02.069 --> 00:27:04.490 unrepentant rule breaker, eventually they kick 00:27:04.490 --> 00:27:07.230 me out of the commons entirely. But the system 00:27:07.230 --> 00:27:09.930 is designed to correct behavior and reintegrate 00:27:09.930 --> 00:27:13.069 people, not just punish them. Okay. Principle 00:27:13.069 --> 00:27:16.049 number six. Conflict resolution mechanisms. People 00:27:16.049 --> 00:27:18.170 are going to fight. It's human nature. My cow 00:27:18.170 --> 00:27:20.109 wanders onto your land. I think you took too 00:27:20.109 --> 00:27:22.390 much water. You need a way to solve these arguments 00:27:22.390 --> 00:27:25.109 that is cheap, fast and seen as legitimate by 00:27:25.109 --> 00:27:27.210 the community. So now the Supreme Court. Right. 00:27:27.549 --> 00:27:30.890 If every little dispute over a cow or a parking 00:27:30.890 --> 00:27:33.009 spot requires you to hire a lawyer and spend 00:27:33.009 --> 00:27:35.950 three years in court, the system will collapse 00:27:35.950 --> 00:27:38.359 under its own weight. You need a local council, 00:27:38.599 --> 00:27:41.640 a weekly meeting, a group of respected elders, 00:27:41.819 --> 00:27:44.819 some kind of local accessible arena where you 00:27:44.819 --> 00:27:47.740 can go to get a quick, fair decision. That makes 00:27:47.740 --> 00:27:50.940 sense. Principle number seven, minimal recognition 00:27:50.940 --> 00:27:53.960 of rights to organize. This is about the relationship 00:27:53.960 --> 00:27:56.460 with the bigger government. The state doesn't 00:27:56.460 --> 00:27:58.680 have to run the commons, but it has to let it 00:27:58.680 --> 00:28:01.460 exist. The central government needs to recognize 00:28:01.460 --> 00:28:03.839 the right of the locals to make their own rules. 00:28:04.099 --> 00:28:06.859 If the state comes in and says, your little local 00:28:06.859 --> 00:28:09.299 fishing association is illegal and your rules 00:28:09.299 --> 00:28:11.519 don't count. You're doomed. The whole system 00:28:11.519 --> 00:28:14.279 fails. So the government has to respect the local 00:28:14.279 --> 00:28:17.200 autonomy, at least to a minimal degree. And finally, 00:28:17.299 --> 00:28:20.559 principle number eight. This is for the really 00:28:20.559 --> 00:28:23.500 big, complex systems. You can't manage a massive 00:28:23.500 --> 00:28:26.019 river basin that crosses five states with a single 00:28:26.019 --> 00:28:28.000 town council meeting. It's too big, so you need 00:28:28.000 --> 00:28:30.640 layers of governance. Like Russian dolls. Exactly 00:28:30.640 --> 00:28:34.599 like Russian dolls. Small groups of farmers manage 00:28:34.599 --> 00:28:37.819 their local irrigation ditches. Those small groups 00:28:37.819 --> 00:28:40.099 send representatives to a regional canal board. 00:28:40.420 --> 00:28:42.920 Those regional boards send representatives to 00:28:42.920 --> 00:28:45.690 a basin -wide council. You build the governance 00:28:45.690 --> 00:28:48.109 from the bottom up. It creates a system that's 00:28:48.109 --> 00:28:51.230 robust and can manage complexity. And it's resilient. 00:28:51.390 --> 00:28:54.789 If one local group fails, the whole river doesn't 00:28:54.789 --> 00:28:56.730 collapse. When you laid them all out like that, 00:28:56.869 --> 00:28:59.089 it seems so. I don't know. It seems like common 00:28:59.089 --> 00:29:01.769 sense. But it was revolutionary because it relied 00:29:01.769 --> 00:29:05.089 on trust, on face -to -face communication, and 00:29:05.089 --> 00:29:08.140 it treated people as active. intelligent problem 00:29:08.140 --> 00:29:10.980 solvers, not just passive resource users. It 00:29:10.980 --> 00:29:13.400 was a paradigm shift. Now, Ostrom didn't build 00:29:13.400 --> 00:29:15.839 this entire theory in a vacuum. We have to talk 00:29:15.839 --> 00:29:18.099 about her partner in crime. Vincent Ostrom, her 00:29:18.099 --> 00:29:20.119 husband, her collaborator, and her chief intellectual 00:29:20.119 --> 00:29:22.799 sparring partner. They met at UCLA, right, where 00:29:22.799 --> 00:29:25.420 she was a student. Yes, in a postgraduate seminar 00:29:25.420 --> 00:29:28.400 on political theory. He was an associate professor, 00:29:28.599 --> 00:29:32.000 and he was 14 years older than her. They fell 00:29:32.000 --> 00:29:36.339 in love, married in 1963, and in 1965 they moved 00:29:36.339 --> 00:29:38.640 to Indiana University together, where they would 00:29:38.640 --> 00:29:40.559 spend the rest of their careers. And their relationship 00:29:40.559 --> 00:29:43.819 wasn't just domestic. They coined a special phrase 00:29:43.819 --> 00:29:46.000 for their dynamic, didn't they? They did. They 00:29:46.000 --> 00:29:49.019 called it love and contestation. Love and contestation. 00:29:49.019 --> 00:29:52.230 Yeah. That sounds intense. It was. They dedicated 00:29:52.230 --> 00:29:54.990 books to each other using that exact phrase. 00:29:55.230 --> 00:29:57.829 They genuinely believe that the highest form 00:29:57.829 --> 00:30:00.589 of respect you can show for someone's ideas is 00:30:00.589 --> 00:30:02.589 to challenge them, to argue with them, to push 00:30:02.589 --> 00:30:05.009 them. They would have these fierce, loud arguments 00:30:05.009 --> 00:30:07.410 about constitutional theory and federalism over 00:30:07.410 --> 00:30:09.650 the dinner table. They sharpened each other's 00:30:09.650 --> 00:30:11.809 minds like two knives. And there's a personal 00:30:11.809 --> 00:30:14.509 aspect here that Lynn was very open about later 00:30:14.509 --> 00:30:17.269 in life. They made a conscious decision not to 00:30:17.269 --> 00:30:19.579 have children. No, they didn't. And she said 00:30:19.579 --> 00:30:21.339 explicitly that this gave her a different kind 00:30:21.339 --> 00:30:23.599 of freedom. She wasn't worried about saving for 00:30:23.599 --> 00:30:26.000 college funds for kids. She wasn't worried about 00:30:26.000 --> 00:30:28.319 maximizing her salary to buy a bigger house. 00:30:28.559 --> 00:30:30.460 And this allowed them to pour their personal 00:30:30.460 --> 00:30:33.539 resources, both their time and their money, into 00:30:33.539 --> 00:30:35.339 their work. Into their intellectual children. 00:30:35.440 --> 00:30:37.700 And the greatest of those was the workshop. The 00:30:37.700 --> 00:30:40.220 workshop in political theory and policy analysis 00:30:40.220 --> 00:30:43.039 founded in 1973. And you have to pay attention 00:30:43.039 --> 00:30:45.740 to that name. It wasn't a center or an institute. 00:30:45.900 --> 00:30:48.099 No, it was a workshop. Like a carpenter's shop 00:30:48.099 --> 00:30:52.039 or an artisan's studio. The metaphor was absolutely 00:30:52.039 --> 00:30:55.259 deliberate. A workshop is a place where you make 00:30:55.259 --> 00:30:57.859 things. where you learn a craft by doing it. 00:30:57.960 --> 00:31:00.359 It wasn't a place where the great professor stood 00:31:00.359 --> 00:31:02.579 at a podium and lectured down to the students. 00:31:02.779 --> 00:31:04.660 It was a place where students and professors 00:31:04.660 --> 00:31:07.519 worked side by side on real problems. And it 00:31:07.519 --> 00:31:09.940 was incredibly interdisciplinary, which was rare 00:31:09.940 --> 00:31:13.259 for the time. Radical for its time. In most universities, 00:31:13.359 --> 00:31:16.160 even today, the economists don't talk to the 00:31:16.160 --> 00:31:19.339 sociologists and the political scientists definitely 00:31:19.339 --> 00:31:22.220 don't talk to the ecologists. The departments 00:31:22.220 --> 00:31:24.559 are silos. But at the workshop. They were all 00:31:24.559 --> 00:31:26.900 in the same room. They realized you couldn't 00:31:26.900 --> 00:31:29.559 possibly understand a fishery just by looking 00:31:29.559 --> 00:31:31.900 at the economics. You needed to understand the 00:31:31.900 --> 00:31:34.400 biology of the fish, the ecology of the ocean, 00:31:34.500 --> 00:31:36.119 and the culture of the fishermen. You needed 00:31:36.119 --> 00:31:38.599 all the pieces. And they did some fascinating 00:31:38.599 --> 00:31:41.319 experiments there to test their theories in a 00:31:41.319 --> 00:31:44.309 controlled setting. Yes. They were pioneers in 00:31:44.309 --> 00:31:46.650 what's called experimental economics. They would 00:31:46.650 --> 00:31:49.309 bring students into a computer lab and simulate 00:31:49.309 --> 00:31:52.089 a commons. They'd say, OK, you all have access 00:31:52.089 --> 00:31:54.849 to this shared digital resource. You can harvest 00:31:54.849 --> 00:31:57.230 from it. How much do you want to take? And what 00:31:57.230 --> 00:31:59.170 happened to those first experiments? When the 00:31:59.170 --> 00:32:02.049 students were isolated in their cubicles, forbidden 00:32:02.049 --> 00:32:04.509 from talking to each other, they acted exactly 00:32:04.509 --> 00:32:06.670 like the tragedy of the commons predicted they 00:32:06.670 --> 00:32:09.130 would. They overharvested. They were greedy. 00:32:09.309 --> 00:32:12.069 They destroyed the resource in just a few rounds. 00:32:12.089 --> 00:32:15.569 So the model held up in a vacuum. In a social 00:32:15.569 --> 00:32:18.269 vacuum, yes. Yeah. But then they changed one 00:32:18.269 --> 00:32:20.650 variable. They let them talk. They let the students 00:32:20.650 --> 00:32:22.910 stand up and talk to each other for just a few 00:32:22.910 --> 00:32:25.450 minutes before the round started. No binding 00:32:25.450 --> 00:32:28.210 contracts, no police, just what they called cheap 00:32:28.210 --> 00:32:31.069 talk. They could make promises, they could strategize, 00:32:31.150 --> 00:32:32.690 they could look each other in the eye. And the 00:32:32.690 --> 00:32:34.910 results just completely flipped. Completely flipped. 00:32:35.049 --> 00:32:38.390 The cooperation rates skyrocketed. The sustainability 00:32:38.390 --> 00:32:41.670 of the resource went way up. On average, their 00:32:41.670 --> 00:32:44.029 collective returns doubled. Just from talking. 00:32:44.440 --> 00:32:47.700 It proved that humans are social animals. We 00:32:47.700 --> 00:32:50.339 use language, reputation, and the threat of social 00:32:50.339 --> 00:32:53.839 shame to build trust and enforce norms. The classic 00:32:53.839 --> 00:32:56.680 rational egoist model failed because it assumed 00:32:56.680 --> 00:32:59.079 we were all sociopaths living in silent bubbles. 00:32:59.819 --> 00:33:02.140 Ostrom proved that, actually, we are neighbors. 00:33:02.599 --> 00:33:05.740 This brings us to the famous Ostrom's Law. It's 00:33:05.740 --> 00:33:07.799 a bit of an academic inside joke, but it sums 00:33:07.799 --> 00:33:10.380 up her entire philosophy so perfectly. What is 00:33:10.380 --> 00:33:12.569 it? A resource arrangement that works in practice 00:33:12.569 --> 00:33:15.910 can work in theory. I love that. It's the ultimate 00:33:15.910 --> 00:33:19.490 understated burn on ivory tower academics. Hey, 00:33:19.569 --> 00:33:21.710 I know your fancy math says this is impossible, 00:33:22.029 --> 00:33:24.069 but these farmers have been doing it successfully 00:33:24.069 --> 00:33:27.650 for 300 years. So maybe, just maybe, your math 00:33:27.650 --> 00:33:29.950 is wrong. It's a powerful assertion that reality 00:33:29.950 --> 00:33:32.630 is the ultimate authority, not the elegance of 00:33:32.630 --> 00:33:35.930 your model. And finally, in 2009, the ultimate 00:33:35.930 --> 00:33:37.869 authority in economics, the Nobel Committee, 00:33:38.109 --> 00:33:41.740 agreed with her. She wins the prize. She shares 00:33:41.740 --> 00:33:44.119 it with another institutional economist, Oliver 00:33:44.119 --> 00:33:47.220 Williamson. And in true Ostrom fashion, she does 00:33:47.220 --> 00:33:49.359 something incredible with the prize money we're 00:33:49.359 --> 00:33:53.380 talking about. Roughly $1 .4 million. She donated 00:33:53.380 --> 00:33:55.839 her entire share to the workshop, every single 00:33:55.839 --> 00:33:57.839 cent. That's incredible. She wanted to ensure 00:33:57.839 --> 00:33:59.720 that the research would continue, that students 00:33:59.720 --> 00:34:01.740 from developing nations could get funding to 00:34:01.740 --> 00:34:04.500 come to Indiana and learn these methods. She 00:34:04.500 --> 00:34:06.779 wasn't building a personal fortune. She was building 00:34:06.779 --> 00:34:09.250 an intellectual lineage. The prize was for the 00:34:09.250 --> 00:34:11.670 work, not for her. Exactly. But the end of her 00:34:11.670 --> 00:34:14.389 story comes tragically fast after that incredible 00:34:14.389 --> 00:34:17.969 peak. It does. In October 2011, just two years 00:34:17.969 --> 00:34:20.409 after winning the Nobel, she was diagnosed with 00:34:20.409 --> 00:34:23.420 pancreatic cancer. It's a brutal, fast -moving 00:34:23.420 --> 00:34:25.300 diagnosis. But she didn't retire. She didn't 00:34:25.300 --> 00:34:27.699 stop. She refused to stop working. She told her 00:34:27.699 --> 00:34:30.300 friends she felt she had so much work left to 00:34:30.300 --> 00:34:33.119 do, so little time. She gave the prestigious 00:34:33.119 --> 00:34:37.360 Hayek lecture a major academic address just 11 00:34:37.360 --> 00:34:39.699 weeks before she died. And there's this detail 00:34:39.699 --> 00:34:44.050 that is just, it's heartbreaking. But also so 00:34:44.050 --> 00:34:46.769 inspiring. Yeah. Right up to the very end. On 00:34:46.769 --> 00:34:48.650 the day before she passed away, she was in her 00:34:48.650 --> 00:34:51.030 hospital bed sending emails to her co -authors 00:34:51.030 --> 00:34:53.030 about papers they were working on. She was checking 00:34:53.030 --> 00:34:55.170 the edits. She was checking citations, making 00:34:55.170 --> 00:34:57.590 sure the arguments were tight. And on the very 00:34:57.590 --> 00:35:01.510 day she died, June 12, 2012, her final article, 00:35:01.690 --> 00:35:04.190 an essay called Green from the Glass Roots, was 00:35:04.190 --> 00:35:06.949 published online. She worked until her absolute 00:35:06.949 --> 00:35:09.300 last breath. And what happened to Vincent? Vincent 00:35:09.300 --> 00:35:12.380 died just 17 days later. He was 92 and also had 00:35:12.380 --> 00:35:14.840 cancer complications. It was as if they couldn't 00:35:14.840 --> 00:35:16.739 exist without each other. It was the end of an 00:35:16.739 --> 00:35:19.000 era for the workshop and for the entire field 00:35:19.000 --> 00:35:21.739 they helped create. So let's zoom out. We've 00:35:21.739 --> 00:35:23.920 covered a lot of ground here. History, economics, 00:35:24.360 --> 00:35:27.880 water rights, Swiss cows. But we are recording 00:35:27.880 --> 00:35:32.139 this in 2026. Why does Eleanor Ostrom still matter 00:35:32.139 --> 00:35:34.619 so much to the person listening to this right 00:35:34.619 --> 00:35:37.179 now? Because the commons isn't just about... 00:35:37.340 --> 00:35:40.000 grass and water and fish anymore. We are living 00:35:40.000 --> 00:35:42.780 in the age of the digital commons. You're talking 00:35:42.780 --> 00:35:45.599 about the Internet. Think about it. Open source 00:35:45.599 --> 00:35:48.800 software like Linux, Creative Commons licensing, 00:35:49.159 --> 00:35:53.119 Wikipedia, the vast global repository of knowledge 00:35:53.119 --> 00:35:56.039 that is the Web. This is a massive common pool 00:35:56.039 --> 00:35:58.059 resource. And it suffers from the same kinds 00:35:58.059 --> 00:36:00.460 of threats as the old pasture. Exactly. It suffers 00:36:00.460 --> 00:36:02.239 from pollution in the form of misinformation, 00:36:02.420 --> 00:36:05.159 spam and online toxicity. And it suffers from 00:36:05.159 --> 00:36:07.760 overuse and congestion. And we see the same old 00:36:07.760 --> 00:36:10.179 binary choice being argued today, don't we? Some 00:36:10.179 --> 00:36:12.139 people want the government to step in and regulate 00:36:12.139 --> 00:36:14.500 the internet like utility. That's the Leviathan 00:36:14.500 --> 00:36:16.500 solution. And other people want to put everything 00:36:16.500 --> 00:36:19.019 behind a paywall, privatize all the data. The 00:36:19.019 --> 00:36:21.619 privatization solution. Ostrom's work offers 00:36:21.619 --> 00:36:24.219 the crucial third way for the digital age. Just 00:36:24.219 --> 00:36:26.840 look at Wikipedia. It is a classic Ostrom system. 00:36:27.239 --> 00:36:29.739 Let's check the principles. Does it work? Number 00:36:29.739 --> 00:36:33.679 one, clearly defined boundaries. Yes. There are 00:36:33.679 --> 00:36:36.119 different user levels. There are editors and 00:36:36.119 --> 00:36:38.460 administrators with special rights. Not just 00:36:38.460 --> 00:36:41.019 anyone can go in and change the front page or 00:36:41.019 --> 00:36:43.559 delete a major article. There's a boundary between 00:36:43.559 --> 00:36:46.239 a casual reader and a trusted contributor. Okay. 00:36:46.539 --> 00:36:51.019 Number four, monitoring. Constantly. The users 00:36:51.019 --> 00:36:53.760 monitor each other. If I go in and vandalize 00:36:53.760 --> 00:36:56.579 a page, a software bot or a human editor will 00:36:56.579 --> 00:36:59.119 likely spot it and fix it within seconds. It's 00:36:59.119 --> 00:37:01.320 a system of mutual surveillance for the common 00:37:01.320 --> 00:37:04.650 good. Number five. Graduated sanctions. Absolutely. 00:37:04.869 --> 00:37:07.130 First, you get a polite warning on your user 00:37:07.130 --> 00:37:10.329 talk page. Then maybe a temporary 24 -hour ban. 00:37:10.489 --> 00:37:12.489 If you keep it up, you get a permanent ban. It 00:37:12.489 --> 00:37:15.190 fits the model perfectly. So Wikipedia works 00:37:15.190 --> 00:37:17.389 not because of government force or a profit motive, 00:37:17.510 --> 00:37:20.150 but because of community governance. It is one 00:37:20.150 --> 00:37:22.889 of the greatest examples of a large -scale self 00:37:22.889 --> 00:37:25.650 -governing commons in human history. It's Ostrom's 00:37:25.650 --> 00:37:28.690 principles in action. That is a powerful reframing. 00:37:28.690 --> 00:37:30.650 We aren't just scrolling through content. We 00:37:30.650 --> 00:37:32.530 are commoners grazing on the digital pasture. 00:37:32.960 --> 00:37:35.079 And we have a shared responsibility to keep it 00:37:35.079 --> 00:37:37.800 healthy. And beyond the Internet, of course, 00:37:37.880 --> 00:37:40.639 there is the biggest commons of all, the Earth's 00:37:40.639 --> 00:37:43.949 atmosphere. Climate change is the ultimate planet 00:37:43.949 --> 00:37:46.829 -sized tragedy of the commons. And Ostrom had 00:37:46.829 --> 00:37:48.389 thoughts on this, too, right before she died. 00:37:48.489 --> 00:37:51.469 She did. She was very engaged in this. And she 00:37:51.469 --> 00:37:55.469 argued that waiting for a single, massive, top 00:37:55.469 --> 00:37:58.590 -down global treaty, a kind of a global leviathan, 00:37:58.750 --> 00:38:02.429 is probably a mistake. Why? It's too slow. It's 00:38:02.429 --> 00:38:04.909 too easy for one country to veto it. And it's 00:38:04.909 --> 00:38:08.170 incredibly hard to monitor and enforce. She advocated 00:38:08.170 --> 00:38:11.179 for a polycentric approach to climate change. 00:38:11.320 --> 00:38:13.639 Meaning what exactly? Many centers. Meaning we 00:38:13.639 --> 00:38:16.099 need action at every single level, all at once, 00:38:16.199 --> 00:38:17.800 without waiting for permission from the top. 00:38:17.920 --> 00:38:20.760 Cities, states, individual corporations, neighborhood 00:38:20.760 --> 00:38:23.699 groups, international agreements. If your town 00:38:23.699 --> 00:38:25.900 decides to install solar panels on all municipal 00:38:25.900 --> 00:38:28.699 buildings, that matters. If your company voluntarily 00:38:28.699 --> 00:38:31.420 reduces its emissions, that matters. You don't 00:38:31.420 --> 00:38:33.059 have to wait for the UN to solve it for you. 00:38:33.139 --> 00:38:36.030 Right. If you build a thousand small, local and 00:38:36.030 --> 00:38:38.550 regional solutions, they start to stack up and 00:38:38.550 --> 00:38:41.469 create momentum. It's messier, but it's more 00:38:41.469 --> 00:38:43.710 resilient and much faster than waiting for one 00:38:43.710 --> 00:38:45.730 perfect global solution that may never come. 00:38:45.849 --> 00:38:48.070 It's empowering. It puts the agency back in our 00:38:48.070 --> 00:38:49.550 hands. We don't have to just sit back and wait 00:38:49.550 --> 00:38:52.230 for a savior. That is the core message of Eleanor 00:38:52.230 --> 00:38:55.050 Ostrom's entire life and work. We are not helpless. 00:38:55.130 --> 00:38:57.289 We are not trapped by our own selfishness. We 00:38:57.289 --> 00:39:00.070 are capable of solving our own problems, of building 00:39:00.070 --> 00:39:02.349 our own institutions, and of working together 00:39:02.349 --> 00:39:04.789 to govern the resources we share. So here is 00:39:04.789 --> 00:39:07.269 a final thought to leave you with. Ostrom showed 00:39:07.269 --> 00:39:09.889 again and again that communication, honest, often 00:39:09.889 --> 00:39:12.829 face -to -face communication, is the secret sauce 00:39:12.829 --> 00:39:16.989 that stops the tragedy. It builds trust. In an 00:39:16.989 --> 00:39:18.750 age where we are more digitally connected than 00:39:18.750 --> 00:39:21.289 ever, but perhaps less truly communicative than 00:39:21.289 --> 00:39:23.829 ever, an age where we hide behind avatars and 00:39:23.829 --> 00:39:26.269 shout at each other in comment sections, are 00:39:26.269 --> 00:39:28.590 we losing that human superpower? That is the 00:39:28.590 --> 00:39:31.650 billion -dollar question, isn't it? Are we building 00:39:31.650 --> 00:39:34.469 a digital commons that fosters trust and cooperation, 00:39:34.869 --> 00:39:37.590 or are we accidentally designing a system that 00:39:37.590 --> 00:39:40.210 encourages the very tragedy Ostrom showed us 00:39:40.210 --> 00:39:42.690 how to avoid because we've forgotten how to actually 00:39:42.690 --> 00:39:44.630 talk to each other? The tools are there. Her 00:39:44.630 --> 00:39:47.070 principles are there. It's up to us to use them. 00:39:47.269 --> 00:39:50.130 Well said. Thanks for diving deep with us today. 00:39:50.210 --> 00:39:50.869 This was fascinating.