33. Bryan Bruns: Applied sociology, 2x2 games, and how to transform tragedy into win-win

Bryan Bruns is an independent consultant sociologist, working mainly on water irrigation systems in southeast Asia. He also publishes academic papers about game theory. In this conversation, we talk about how he became a consultant sociologist, what that even means, how to learn foreign languages, his work on 2x2 games, how to transform a social dilemma into a win-win situation, and much more.

BJKS Podcast is a podcast about neuroscience, psychology, and anything vaguely related, hosted by Benjamin James Kuper-Smith. New episodes every Friday. You can find the podcast on all podcasting platforms (e.g., Spotify, Apple/Google Podcasts, etc.).

Timestamps
0:00:05: How Bryan became a consultant sociologist, working in southeast Asia on water management
0:21:31: How to learn foreign languages
0:31:35: But what does a consultant sociologist actually do? And what makes you good at it?
0:49:36: Why not be a "regular" academic (instead of doing applied work)?
0:54:32: Elinor Ostrom and the commons
1:09:09: 2x2 games and the Prisoner's Dilemma
1:16:34: Names for games
1:38:30: From tragedy to win-win
1:50:10: Asymmetric games
1:58:06: Implementing game theoretic ideas in the real world with real people
2:02:20: Reading recommendations for game theory

Podcast links

Bryan's links

Ben's links


References
Balliet, Parks & Joireman (2009). Social value orientation and cooperation in social dilemmas: A meta-analysis. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations.
Binmore (2007). Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction Oxford University Press.
Bruns (2015). Names for games: locating 2×2 games. Games.
Bruns (2018). From Tragedy to Win-Win Transforming Social Dilemmas in Commons. Georgetown Law Center, Washington DC, USA.
Bruns & Meinzen-Dick (2000). Negotiating water rights.
Hardin (1958). The tragedy of the commons. Science.
Hare (2017). Survival of the friendliest: Homo sapiens evolved via selection for prosociality. Annual review of psychology.
Munroe (2015). Thing explainer: complicated stuff in simple words. Hachette UK.
Murphy, Ackermann & Handgraaf (2011). Measuring social value orientation. Judgment and Decision making.
Nowak & Highfield (2011). Supercooperators: Altruism, evolution, and why we need each other to succeed. Simon and Schuster.
Ostrom (1990). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press.
Ostrom, Gardner & Walker (1994). Rules, games, and common-pool resources. University of Michigan Press.
Rapoport, Guyer & Gordon (1976). The 2x2 game. University of Michigan Press.
Robinson & Goforth (2005). The topology of the 2x2 games: a new periodic table (Vol. 3). Psychology Press.
Tufte, E. (2001). The visual display of quantitative information.

"Mr condom": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechai_Viravaidya

  • [This is an automated transcript that contains many errors]

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: [00:00:00] You know, as I mentioned before we started recording, I'm quite curious what it, what the job title of consultants sociologist means, what exactly that entails? Um, yeah, on a, on a day-to-day level and yeah, what, what basically what you do in your job. Can we maybe start from a kinda biographical perspective, kind of how you got into this job?

    So, I dunno what, for you, the, the first significant point in this kind of trajectory is, but, um, yeah, basically how, how, how does one get to be a consultant, sociologist, or how did you 

    Bryan Bruns: Yeah. In my case, kind of in college as an undergraduate, I ended up majoring in anthropology and was kind of interested if there might be some way to work, you know, overseas, in other countries and what have you.

    Um, [00:01:00] and um, anthropology was in part just a way to be able to explore lots of different issues. There's a great quote from Clyde Kol that anthropology is an intellectual poaching license. If the people are doing it and you're studying it, you can say it's anthropology. And that was US anthropology where, okay, there's cultural socio anthropology, but also getting some archeology, physical anthropology, and even some linguistics for field by field approach.

    Like that kind of study. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So physical anthropology as opposed to non 

    Bryan Bruns: physical 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: anthropology, 

    Bryan Bruns: biological anthropology, studying evolution bodies, bones, you know, how we're put together that side of things. Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: And physical is more, 

    Bryan Bruns: no, that's the physical anthropology. Oh, that is the 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: physical. Oh, okay. Sorry.

    Bryan Bruns: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm. And then archeology and simple terms is kind of, you know, prehistoric, you know, when we don't have written records. And what you can figure out from that [00:02:00]again, tends to be very open-minded to figure out what you need to figure, you know, understand things. So you know, if looking at pollen to figure out what kind of plants we're around is necessary, then you people study up on pollen or learning, I can't remember what, you know, 17th century French trappers in Indiana wrote their journals.

    Then okay, somebody has to figure out how to read those journals. So interdisciplinary in simple terms, you know, it's being ready to be pragmatic about, okay, what kind of knowledge, what kind of skills would help learn about stuff? And so then decided to, or I was interested in becoming a Peace Corps volunteer.

    And that seemed like a good way you USP score where you kind go overseas or go to another country and work for a couple of years. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Mm-hmm. 

    Bryan Bruns: There. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So can you slightly elaborate what that is to to, I mean, I'm, I've heard the term but I'm not [00:03:00] entirely sure what Yeah. What they do. So is it to establish peace in a region or, 

    Bryan Bruns: yeah.

    Um, it's usually some kind of work a lot of people end up, um, as teachers and, you know, teaching English. Uh, and that's what I thought I'd probably end up doing is, you know, teaching English in some francophone country. But as it happened, there was a program in Thailand where they were experimenting with taking liberal arts undergrads and giving them some technical skills either in kind of.

    Laboratory, you know, hospital laboratory kind of work or in agriculture. And so I, you know, applied for that and got into that program. And then we were assigned to work, uh, with a non-government organization in Thailand, which had done, uh, a lot of pioneering work in, uh, family planning, uh, making, um, birth control information, education available at a much wider scale.

    Um, [00:04:00] mic Vi who, you know, part of what he did was desensitized discussion. So he became known as Mr. Condom 'cause he would have, uh, these public events and competitions, people blowing up condoms to, you know, say it's okay to talk about this and addressing population. And, you know, one person can be remarkable.

    'cause in that sense, he did it again like a couple decades later with HIV. Again, took something that was very sensitive. People were, you know, not wanting to talk about it or so on. And he said, you know, this is important as a country. We need to address this. We need to be open. So he was, you know, somebody who pioneered and made a lot of difference.

    But in our case, his organization was interested in expanding from the work on. Population, um, birth control, family planning into development work. And so that's where they were interested in having a set of volunteers come work for them. And it was [00:05:00] initially defined in terms of agriculture, vegetable gardening, raising small animals, what have you.

    But what ended up working in was a project helping villagers build rainwater, cisterns rainwater storage tanks. Because Northeast Thailand has a long dry season and the way the geology works, um, they're um, the shallow wells often dry up and the deeper wells are often salty. So people can have to go a much longer way and maybe take water from ponds and things that are not so clean.

    So they were actually quite interested if you could take water from the rooftop and store it and use it into the dry season. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Mm-hmm. 

    Bryan Bruns: And so working on that and deciding, yes, this international development is something I'd like to do more of, and talking to people as a social scientist became pretty clear if I wanted to, you know, pursue a career, the thing to do was to go back and get a PhD that if you're an engineer, maybe [00:06:00] an undergraduate degree or a master's is enough.

    But you know, for anthropology and their social science PhD would make a big difference. And so I ended up flying to grad schools and as part of that, ended up in sociology. Um, because that's what was available at Cornell. Once upon a time, they had a strong applied anthropology program and they closed that down and they very much said, if you're interested in applied work, take a look at rural sociology.

    And that's where I ended up for my graduate school. Then part of what went on was that the person I chose as my advisor had been while working for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia and Southeast Asia on. Some projects to look at opportunities to promote increased involvement of communities in managing local, natural resources in particular, either irrigation or forestry.

    He'd spent a couple of years doing that. [00:07:00] Came back to grad school, came back to his teaching, and because of that he didn't have a lot of advisees. And one of the issues is, okay, is there somebody who's gonna, you know, pay attention and I'm not competing with, you know, lots and lots of other grad students for time and he had a good reputation as an advisor or so on.

    And as part of that, decided, okay, even though what I'd worked on before was, you know, village water supply and such that, okay, irrigation is also interesting in terms of sociology, people working together, collective action. And it's pragmatically important for farmers. It helps them grow crops and earn money.

    And therefore said, okay, this seems worth, you know, um, choosing as something to focus on. And so that's what kind of led me to an interest in irrigation and ended up with a kind of cohort of several other people, you know, in the same graduate program who also did PhDs in other places, [00:08:00] Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, our research on those countries on looking at irrigation.

    And so I decided to go back and do more research, do my, uh, PhD research in Thailand and wanted to. Look at kind of small scale, locally managed farmer managed irrigation, courtesy of some, a grant from my advisor. Had a chance to go take a kind of preview look a year ahead to see is there enough to actually look at in northeast Thailand where I'd been as a Peace Corps volunteer.

    'cause there was a bunch of stuff written up about Northern Thailand. So it was clear, okay, there are people who researched it. I could have gone there, but Northeast was not, there wasn't much information. But you know, I went over for like, yeah, six weeks I guess, and looked around and okay, yeah, there seemed to be enough there.

    Some of my old colleagues from the work before, you know, one [00:09:00] of them helped loan me a motorcycle and what have you. So I could go around and look and talk to farmers, talk to people in government and yes, this looks feasible. And then put together a proposal. Got. Funding from uh, one kind of Fulbright grant, one that's actually also accessible to master's students and what have you.

    But that supported me getting out in the field and so went over to Con Canyon University in northeast Thailand, which had support from the Ford Foundation where my advisor had worked before, and the person managing it, Fran Corten, had done really pioneering, pioneering work, especially in the Philippines, helping get government agencies to kind of open up and be ready to work with university researchers, in some cases, non-government organizations at okay, again, what can we do to work together with local communities, take advantage of their knowledge.

    [00:10:00] And come up with projects that, you know are more helpful to them. So, I mean, the simple classic story of this is, uh, you know, the other case of sometimes the irrigation agency would come in with good intentions. Oh, we're gonna build a little dam, or we on the river there. And villagers would say, you know, we remember what the floods are like, and what you're doing is not gonna work.

    But the engineers would be, think they had a handle on it and you know, what do they know? And then a year or two later, the thing would wash out. And some of, some of these were clear examples of why, okay, you know, engineering knowledge is useful. But combining that with local knowledge and then the people who are gonna be using the system, if you involve them in the planning, they feel more committed, you can draw on their information, work with them of how would this actually be used.

    And then the dissertation research in particular was kind of comparing what the Royal Irrigation [00:11:00]Department in Thailand was doing with a very kind of conventional engineering approach versus a much more innovative project supported by a New Zealand project, which came up with both, uh, design for irrigation weirs and ways of planning and building that which were much more suited to enhancing what communities had already been doing.

    So they'd already been doing. Building simple weirs out of either earth or some cases, logs and rocks and what have you. And you could use, you know. Concrete, concrete block and engineering stuff to build something that would last longer, maybe be able to raise water higher or send it farther. But the New Zealand project had a way you could often do that at the site people were already using.

    You could have local community labor. You didn't have to necessarily bring in an outside contractor. And so the community could understand what they were doing and [00:12:00] again, fit it with their interests. And so the research kind of was comparing these two and saying with an appropriate approach, it was possible to enhance indigenous irrigation.

    And again, we had the contrast with the other project, with a fairly conservative design approach, which I'll spare you a bunch of the technical details. But basically they ended up, uh, building something that was much more expensive, but because of limited information design, you don't have great detailed information about rainfall and so on.

    They ended up being quite conservative and so they had to make a big size and were not able to raise the water as high. So literally the project, the New Zealand project approach could build a weir that was more effective for only five or 10% of what the conventional design projects were. You know, so it made a big difference.

    And ultimately, or, well, not ultimately, it [00:13:00] happened while I was involved in my PhD research. The. Thai government ministry material ended up taking up that design and trying to do it on a much wider scale, which had good, there are places that worked, also had a classic problem of, you know, trying to do a one size fits all and it doesn't always fit.

    Uh, so, uh, yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Um, have a question. So earlier you mentioned, I guess, at the beginning of your graduate school that you went to Northeastern to see whether there was enough there. 

    Bryan Bruns: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Um, is what you said. What exactly did you mean by that? Was it to see whether, I don't know, it can be improved or the Yeah.

    Bryan Bruns: It was popular. A motorcycle or of, is there even irrigation or is it just rain fed? So that was the simplest part of, you know, going out, looking at the long streams. Are there places people are diverting water from streams into the field? I mean, you know, the basic thing which, you know, um, I take for granted, but, you know, in a [00:14:00] tropical climate, you know, you often, and with a monsoon in the dry season, if you can have more water, you can grow a second crop, which is very profitable for farmers.

    Even in the wet season, you can have dry spells, you know, a week or two, and all of a sudden that damages the tr crop, especially if it's rice. So being able to get some extra water to the crop, or get more water than just for rainfall into the fields and stored in the fields, lets your agriculture be much more productive.

    Then in the dry season, people from these weirs could also grow vegetables around the weirs, which in terms of nutrition and sometimes also sewing or exchanging vegetables with neighbors was good and the weirs would, um, cause more of the water to go into the groundwater and also in many cases raise the groundwater level so that wells would keep on yielding water further into the dry season.

    So it had [00:15:00] multiple benefits. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. And um, another thing that just came up was how do you deal in this kind of context with the kind of local effects of saying, okay, we've got, uh, we can store more water for the dry season, whatever, and you know, downstream people not having enough water, whatever. So how do you deal with this kind of local versus global effects or how do you think about that in this such a context?

    Bryan Bruns: In a sense, that's what ended up working on a lot later on and coed a book on negotiating water rights and such. And like I was mentioning in Northern Thailand. And that's was already an issue and became an increasingly big issue. There were projects that helped, um, hill tribes, which lived, you know, up in higher elevations to start growing cabbage in other vegetables.

    And that led to conflicts downstream in northeast Thailand. It was actually kind of interesting and the kind of stuff that at least excites me of. Combining the social and technical stuff [00:16:00] together and that given the northeast Thailand has relatively gentle topography, undulating or whatever, and most of the rain falls and rains in a monsoon season over, you know, two or three months.

    Usually in concentrated storms. It was actually a kind of feast or famine situation. When there was rain, there was lots of rain and most of the places I was working then, you know, if you went for, you know, a week or two after the rainstorm, the streams would pretty much dry up as opposed to like Northern Thailand.

    And in the dry season where you had down mountains and aquifers and base flow in the streams, that would continue through the dry season and therefore you have that kind of potential for upstream downstream conflict or people needing to work out. Okay. Are we gonna have some rules, some way to share this water?

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Um, actually a, a much more general question right [00:17:00] now is just, were you specifically interested in Southeast Asian, Thailand, these things? I mean it seems like it was, from what you described, it was partly kind of coincidence that the Peace Corps wants to do something in Thailand or did you specifically look for things that were in Southeast Asia?

    Bryan Bruns: Um, I was interested in Thailand, but I could have easily ended up in some other country. There was a job teaching English up in the mountains in Morocco, which I thought about seriously and decided actually not to, uh, go for that one. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, but I mean, I guess also in your, on your website you have this nice, uh, you know, map of the different countries we've been to and I mean, there, there are some African countries in there, but as far as I can tell, it's, it's basically, what is it, 

    Bryan Bruns: mostly Southeast 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Asia countries also in, in Africa or Middle East and yeah, the rest is Southeast Asia.

    Um, so was that more of a consequence of you, you know, starting in Thailand and then 

    Bryan Bruns: Yeah, well as part of doing my dissertation research, I ended up [00:18:00] getting married to someone with TI from Thailand and then I got the offer of a job in Indonesia. So we went there and first daughter was born in Indonesia.

    And then after that, deciding what to do next, decided to, um, go live in, um, Northern Thailand in Chiang Mai, near where my wife was from. And to have that kind of stability and base for her and for our children. I mean, the other choice could have been a kind of nomadic, expatriate lifestyle where you're two years or four or five years here and then you go to somewhere else and somewhere after that.

    And yeah, my wife didn't totally reject that, but. The kind of decision we made was to instead have something being based in North northern Thailand, and I was the one who traveled and therefore ended up more doing short term, uh, assignments to go for a couple of weeks, up to a month or two at most, rather than taking long [00:19:00] assignments.

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, that was one question I, I had and wrote down before is. Yeah, I was curious like do you have a specific place where you live or not? Because I also noticed that a lot of the, on your cv, like a lot of the jobs were, yeah, one or two months, a lot of them. And I thought like, how are you then there the entire time?

    Or is it kind of thing you can do remotely or, I mean, I guess I'm assuming not, but yeah. Is it, 

    Bryan Bruns: yeah, no, it's usually, how 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: does that kind of job work in terms of moving and living? Yeah, 

    Bryan Bruns: usually going and working somewhere, especially for what I do, which usually involves going out to the field, looking at things in the field together with farmers and often together with engineers and other people from the government agency and understanding a lot of it's trying to understand what's already happening in terms of irrigation and how any kind of project can build on that.

    And that's where the kind of sociology, anthropology, understanding local people's views of things, how they're already organizing and managing things and how to connect that up with, [00:20:00] you know, what might be improved through a development project. Uh, yeah, so the old style, sometimes you'd go do the assignment somewhere and then go and, you know, write up for a week or two in Manila, the Asian Development Bank headquarters or whatever.

    And then over time as the internet got better and whatever, a bit less of that. But still my work usually required travel. Occasionally I get something that, you know, was more okay analysis, look at literature and try and pull together some ideas. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay, so it is actually very much then au you have kind of, I guess in your, you mentioned like one home base almost and then, I dunno, a few times a year or something, you go out for a few weeks or whatever and 

    Bryan Bruns: Yeah.

    Or you know, when I was mainly doing it, it was more than a few times a year. It was often a total, you know, 120 to 150, 180 days a year. So up to half the days in the year could be most months. But I also made a deliberate choice, [00:21:00] or part of the choice of going to be based in Chiang Mai was to do something where I would also have time to be home with family.

    Also have time as a family to go back to the US and visit, you know, my family, my relatives, and have time to attend professional conferences and write up papers to prevent it present at conferences. So I ended up with this mix of, rather than just being applied, also doing things on an academic side. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: It sounds like a lot of airplanes.

    Bryan Bruns: Yep. Yep. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Uh, but actually, so about the kind of practicalities of doing this work and you know, especially incorporating the. Knowledge, you know, I mean working with the people who actually live there. So when you go to Thailand the first time, and especially if you're talking to people in rural villages and these things, I'm assuming you have to speak the language very well, or is there someone from the group who speaks language or like how did it work the first time?

    'cause I'm assuming, I dunno anything about Thai as a language, but I'm assuming it's not something you pick up in two weeks. [00:22:00] So how does that work? 

    Bryan Bruns: Yeah, I mean Thai, I had learned as a Peace Corps volunteer and then I had more courses at Cornell. And then, you know, just from using it, learned even more doing my research, including Northeastern Thai, which is basically the same as Lao.

    You know, it's a dialect of, or it can be seen as a dialect of Thai compared to central Thai. So yeah, I was talking to people in their local language. When I went to Indonesia, part of the deal was very much to learn Indonesian. Though in that case, Indonesian is kind of the national language, which is a kind of simplified, standardized form, which other people learn as a second language as opposed to Javanese or Sudanese or whatever.

    So people are used to speaking it as a non-native speaker, whatever. So those assignments I was very much using. [00:23:00] Local language and went back and did a bunch more work, Indonesia, but then started to get other work in other countries where I did not speak the local language. Um, you know, Bangladesh was one of the first ones and started to feel that, okay, working through other people, translating things, I felt good enough about what was going on and how we were doing it.

    Including simple techniques like your basic workshop technique of, okay, you get people together, you have some questions, you divide into breakout groups and people discuss it in the breakout group and then come back and present and have a plenary discussion. But that gives away, okay, those breakout groups can be totally in the local language, what people are comfortable with.

    And then you can have some mix of, you know, part of that then gets translated through to English. And in some places their farmers just present English. So the breakout group [00:24:00] may, you know, they have a big flip chart and they may have their points written up in English in some cases, or it's written up in local language, but then gives a short enough set of points that someone can translate and you know, you have a basis for communication.

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay. But you learned the, the first time when you went there with a Peace Corps, you learned that fast enough or were you then also with other people who spoke it better than you or? 

    Bryan Bruns: In, let's see, peace Corps, we had about six weeks of language training, which kind of gave a start a basis and then, you know, went out to work in the field and the advice was to work on first getting down the national language, central Thai, and then maybe after six months or so start working on Lao local language.

    And I kind of followed that, but because my counterparts, the people I was working with had very little English in that [00:25:00] case, you know, it was kind of sink or swim. I had strong every incentive to learn and it was like immersion. Whereas other volunteers who were teachers, you know, they were both spending their days time teaching English and their colleagues and students often wanted to practice English with them.

    So they often learned enough Thai to go to the market and function there. But unlike those of us working in agriculture or health, didn't have to learn the tie just to function every day and therefore end up with a much higher level of fluency. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay. I didn't expect that six weeks would be enough to even, it 

    Bryan Bruns: was historic.

    It was an immersion approach actually. The, the teacher comes into class and starts talking in, in talk. No English. This is a red block, this is a blue block. This is a green block. Give me the green block. And you're sitting there figuring out, [00:26:00] well, okay, the, there's one word that's different and the color's different.

    So it's very much oriented to using however few words you have, being able to use those. And that's very different from a lot of the academic approaches to language training. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, yeah. Definitely 

    Bryan Bruns: called Silent Way. It's the technique. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Is that, uh, as a, as a, not about Thai specifically, but as a meta question, what would you suggest if someone wants to learn a new language?

    Is, is that the best approach or, 

    Bryan Bruns: for most people it's much better. And many years later, I actually went to Mexico and did a kind of, just a one week, you know, immersion kind of approach training in Spanish. And, you know, after the end of the week I could do some basic things to get around town and, you know, navigate and so on.

    That for a lot of people it's much quicker and it's just reinforced. 'cause every time you, if you learn a new vocabulary word, you can order something different at the restaurant. [00:27:00] You don't have to have the same meal. Um, there are a few people, it just does not work at all. And, you know, we had one of those, or, you know, in our Peace Corps program and okay.

    It was better for that person. Just to go back to a more conventional, okay, here's the sentence to memorize and, you know, translate it word by word. So, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: okay. It's weird, like, when it comes to language learning, I've, in some sense I feel like I've never really learned a foreign language. But then again, I grew up speaking German and English bilingually.

    And I did live in France, in, in Paris for a year, and I had like Latin in school, but somehow it still feels like I've, I've never actually, you know, gotten to the stage where I felt comfortable in a language I didn't. At home. 

    Bryan Bruns: Yeah, yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Um, but it's this weird thing, you know, where I, I, I feel like I've never learned a language, but then, you know, it's also kind of weird to say that if you speak two languages at a native level, [00:28:00] but Yeah, but I've never actually had, I guess, I guess when I went to Paris, I had a, that I'd speak much English there with you.

    So that was, uh, I guess a bit of an immersion thing anyway. 

    Bryan Bruns: And the other thing in Thailand, you know, people were very appreciative of whatever tie you could speak. So that gave a lot of positive reinforcement. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay. But that's, it's not so funny when you mentioned earlier that, that the teachers had the problem, that people wanted to learn English from them.

    I, I lived for, for almost half year in Sweden, and that was the exact same thing that I was, um, especially if you, if you speak ancient German, learning Swedish isn't that difficult. It's kind of in between the two. I mean, a very simplified way. 

    Bryan Bruns: Correct. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So we really wanted to learn and, you know, started learning vocabulary and wanted to speak with people.

    But then basically like I was, you know, walking in a lab doing a research project there, and everyone outside of the lab I met was really excited to learn to improve their English. So they always, and of course in Sweden, they already [00:29:00] speak very good English anyway. But it came to the stage where after about a month I just gave up because everyone wants to speak English with me.

    No one had any interest in teaching me any Swedish. Um, but you didn't have that in Thailand, I guess. Yes. 

    Bryan Bruns: No, from when I was working and my day-to-day coworkers, you know, you know, they learned some English in school, you know, so carefully and slowly, yes, they could communicate, but they were, Thailand was never colonized.

    So the people teaching English in Thai schools were usually not fluent, able to speak fluently. I mean, that's changed and gotten a lot better since then. And also, you know, TV and what have you also made a big difference? Yeah, difference. But at the time was not there. The other thing in terms of language, in case it's interesting, is also fairly early, an early consulting assignment.

    Once I came back from Indonesia and started doing short term work, went to Vietnam and was kind of enthusiastic, oh, well learn some Vietnamese, and found somebody to [00:30:00] come for an hour in the morning and teach me, and, okay, I did that. But it took a fair amount of effort and you know, most of my attention was on what I was doing for my work and functioning through that, which we had an interpreter, and then I discovered I was in central Vietnam.

    Vietnam is a tonal language, like Thai. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay, yeah. 

    Bryan Bruns: Ma, ma, ma, ma, ma, you know, all these are different words, mean different things. But it turned out that basically in Vietnam there are two standard dialects, either. Northern Dialect Hanoi or South Ho Chi Minh City Saigon and Central Vietnam has its own dialect.

    But I was told basically, even if I learned that perfectly, people would just assume I'm speaking wrong. You know, that I would've had to in sense, go back and really learn, you know, the Northern Vietnamese dialect or something. And again, I kind of discovered, yes, I can function. I felt I can do a confident and [00:31:00]responsible, ethical, professional level of work, uh, going through translators, interpreters, and colleagues and what have you.

    And given this kind of assignments I was taking, but you know, learning the language along the way was not feasible. And as I started to work in more countries, you know, it was just, you know, it was neat when I was in Cambodia and all of a sudden it turned out there were a group of people who spoke a dialect of Malay and therefore my Indonesian, I could communicate with them and that was okay.

    Yeah. Fun and a different experience. But 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah. One thing I'm still slightly confused by though is what exactly, so when you, you know, you say you work on these water irrigation systems or. Something along those lines, at least in most cases. Um, what exactly do you do because, um, you know, some of the stuff you described earlier sounds to me more like the work I would imagine, uh, some sort of mechanical engineer might do or something, you know, working on building the [00:32:00] infrastructure or figuring out what might work there or, you know, where to put it in these things that that doesn't sound, at least to someone who doesn't know much about sociology, like what a sociologist would do.

    Um, so I'm just curious what exactly. Kind of in this, uh, in the, in the description you gave of roughly what you do, what exactly do you do in that 

    Bryan Bruns: context? Yeah. Okay. Um, so a lot of it's framed in terms of international development projects that a government, like in Indonesia or Sri Lanka or whatever, is borrowing money from the World Bank, Asian Development Bank or some other source, and putting that together with some of their own funds and has a project where they're going to be going out to build, or in many cases to try and rehabilitate or improve irrigation systems.

    And so at kind of different phases in that project cycle, they can. [00:33:00] You know, some of the things I've, we worked on either, you know, you have an early, early phase where you're trying to identify is there a potential for a project there. So it's a kind of reconnaissance. So I went out to, um, Eastern Indonesia one time and you know, was visiting a bunch of irrigation systems and talking to irrigation officials and getting a sense of, you know, oh, is there enough there?

    Um, and, you know, would they be interested in the kind of project that the Asian Development bank would be interested in supporting? And so I spent about, I guess a couple weeks of doing that on my own. And then the person who was the project office officer came and we met up and then had some more high level discussions.

    So that was a very early. Uh, stage. Then there's actual project design, and that involves, okay, finding sites and making plans for the project itself of okay, how much, what areas are gonna be included, what are gonna be the procedures and approaches [00:34:00] and principles. And maybe doing a couple of specific examples of, you know, detailed design for one or two irrigation schemes to get some experience and, you know, show, okay, how could we make this work in this context?

    Um, and so I've worked both directly on that kind of project, um, planning, project, design activity, but you also have teams coming from the funding organization once there's a plan for that project, a proposal to come in and assess that, you know, how does this look? Does it make sense? Does it comply with different guidelines in terms of, uh, their environmental guidelines, social guidelines, um, things are people, and a lot of what I got involved with, again, was a wave of interest of, okay, trying to build irrigation systems just as a technical enterprise, you know, by the eng, primarily by the engineers.

    Turned [00:35:00] out. Often not to deliver the results that we're hoped for in terms of how much area got irrigated, how many benefits were far below what had been projected. So what went on in the eighties and nineties was an attempt to say, wait a minute. We need to pay much more attention to how these projects are gonna be operated and maintained.

    And as part of that, much more attention to involving the farmers, the communities in that operation maintenance process, as well as using, you know, getting them involved in designing, you know, identifying, you know, what areas are priority and you know, how do we do this? And also, again, just detailed decisions of, you know, an engineer there with a topographic survey says, okay, the canal should go here.

    If he doesn't have information about property boundaries, he may put the whole canal on your land. And you wanna say, wait a minute, can it be over on the border with my neighbor? And in many, many cases, from a technical and [00:36:00] financial point of view, that's quite feasible. You're just moving at a few meters and you know, yes, the water will go that way and the cost is the same or not much different, but you need to have the procedures to get that information into the planning process.

    And so the kind of pioneering projects that had gone on the Philippines that I worked on in my dissertation work had shown some of this was feasible initially with small scale irrigation systems and then trying to say, well, some of this can be applied to larger systems. And that's where it got attention from the World Bank as in Development bank, to say, okay, yeah, this looks like a better way to do things that will, in pragmatic terms, you know, have more benefit, you know, more rice, more crops for farmers, more income for farmers and work desert project, that what happens afterwards will be more like what was hoped for.

    Um, and so a lot of it was, okay, how can we do that through better identification projects, better planning of projects, better [00:37:00] assessment of teams. And other times I was also working on implementation of projects and including developing the skills that if we're gonna have people who go out and act as facilitators, working with communities to help get them involved, help them think about how do we organize an official water user association?

    And how to have that connected to what they've already been doing in many cases, which often didn't happen unless you paid attention to that, uh, was a key part of where what I was doing and the people I was working with were trying to make a difference. And then at times you also had project evaluation.

    Okay. How well did this work compared to the plans? I was much more interested in working on finding design implementation where you can make a difference directly rather than evaluation of which, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah, 

    Bryan Bruns: too often can be a sad story of what went wrong and maybe can we pull some lessons out of that, which [00:38:00] is worthwhile work and necessary.

    But I got much more, had much more enthusiasm for things where you can be in there and, you know, learning right away. Okay, let's see what's working better and, you know, do more of that and so on. So that was most of my work and most of the work concerned irrigation. I ended up doing bits and pieces of various other things, rural roads, rural telecommunications, microfinance, um, and such.

    But a lot of it was irrigation and water user associations. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay. I'm, I'm curious kind of now from a quite practical perspective, um, I mean, I don't think I'm gonna be doing this job, uh, 'cause I think I have something else planned, but I'm curious, like who, uh, let's say there's someone listening who thinks, oh, this, this sounds interesting.

    Uh, potentially for, for who is this a good job and for whom isn't? Sorry, for whom is this a good job and for whom [00:39:00] isn't this a good job? Like, what kind of person, if that question makes sense, um, would, uh, really flourish in this kind of job? And for whom might this be? Yeah, very difficult 

    Bryan Bruns: since the basic starting point and perspective that kind of in part was there and led, made at attract anthropology attractive to me, but also got reinforced, is trying to understand how people see their world, their own perspective on things.

    You know, ethno, ethnographic view of things as opposed to, you know, using engineering or someone or health or some outside knowledge and coming in and kind of saying, well of course this is how you have to build the bridge. And I'm much more, well, wait a minute, how have people already been crossing the river?

    And if we're in Bangladesh and people are building these little bamboo bridges, that shows something about where they've been able to get together to [00:40:00] build those and keep them functioning and work together as a community. And okay, maybe you wanna do some kind of more permanent bridge, but you probably want it informed by, you know, understanding.

    So that basic perspective of being interested in learning from people in other places, other cultures though, you know, plenty of anthropologists work in their own culture and even within companies and what have you. But that kind of perspective, um. And a readiness to work together with other people to learn from them with respect, work in teams, work in interdisciplinary ways.

    So part of what for me was exciting about irrigation is combining the social and technical, you know, I enjoy that part of it, of learning. Okay, you know, this is what goes on with rainfall and understanding floods and how often you get floods and these days. Okay, how that's changing with climate change or what's going on with groundwater.

    And well, wait a minute, what [00:41:00] about arsenic? And, okay, if that's dangerous, how do you understand the danger and how can communities learn about that? So for me, that was, you know. A really attractive part of the work and therefore helped me work as part of teams where I am working together with engineers, econom, economists, agronomists, hydrologists, other specialists to put together a project.

    Um, we're also in a changing world, so the kind of classic role of expert and especially international expert coming in with a very different level of knowledge and skills than the local people. You know, these days things are much more mixed and, you know, in many cases, you know, now you go to a country and, you know, especially as you get up in the, you know, middle and senior ranks of a government agency, you know, okay, those people may have gone to Cornell or [00:42:00] you know, whatever university.

    So, um. It becomes a matter of having more specialized expertise to still have something to offer. You know, that I worked on this project in China about almost 20 years ago. We had an international dam specialist from England, and it's cast limestone topography, which is particularly challenging 'cause the water can dissolve and create channels and the limestone and so on.

    And it was clear the engineers there really liked having somebody come in and say, okay, you know, this is what, you know, we did and this place I worked and this other place I worked, and okay, most of these engineers are from Guang Cho and okay, they can read international literature so on. But the chance to, you know, be working together with somebody of, okay, how are we gonna build these dams and, you know, make them safe and make them work.

    They really felt that was enriched by [00:43:00] having that counterpart, um, kind of thing. So having some kind of expertise to offer, but being ready to learn and work together as part of a team. And because again, levels of skills arising, you know, proportionally, there are not as many of necessarily those kind of opportunities.

    Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Mm-hmm. I mean, it's, yeah. Yeah, I was just thinking that it's, it's. Um, it sounds almost as if part of like a large part of your, your job or your role is kind of coordinating different people or helping them kind of work together. You know, the experts from different areas, the locals and these kind of things.

    So almost like someone who's trying to, you know, make sure everyone gets heard. Um, everyone's, um, is, is, uh, used or whatever in the project. So it, it almost seems like it's a, a very connective or connecting kind of role. 

    Bryan Bruns: And as I went on in my career, you know, I, in a sense, [00:44:00] I progressively moved farther back from the deck direct implementation.

    So, you know, as a Peace Corps volunteer, I was going around to individual households and okay, we wanna have a meeting tomorrow night, you know, could you come to our meeting? And then, you know, at the meeting and with my counterpart. But you know, it's just, um, the two of us, okay, we have this idea we can loan you some money to build a rainwater system.

    Um, in later projects, it was okay if we're designing a project that could be loaning people, okay. You know, how would this project work? What kind of procedures do we want to have in this project? We may be training the people who would be facilitators and then later projects. It was working with people who were planning the training, organizing the training of trainers, supervising, assessing how well the facilitators worked, or assessing how well the training of trainers work.

    So you're kind of in a more specialized [00:45:00] and higher level role and saying, okay, you know, here's some techniques from different sources that can be useful in this kind of occasion. And so, yeah, you get more distant from the hands-on stuff though I kept going back to part of it 'cause I really like having the connection on the ground and also either in project planning or in many cases it was very useful to get out in the field and see what's ha happening or used to talk about management by wandering around that, even if you're the CEO or the top boss can be very useful to go walk around the factory floor or you know, meet some ordinary customers or whatever.

    And so I used to think of it as consulting by wandering around. Part of it was just getting out and talking to a whole range of people, including, you know, government officials and whatever in a way in which senior bureaucrats, many of them. Don't have the time and opportunity to do. And any of them also don't have [00:46:00] the inclination to do though.

    Some, some do. It's not, you know, some magic that's unique to me. But, you know, can you learn a lot of good stuff and very useful things? 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: That's a very boring question. But how does this work financially? Because it seems to me, you know, you have lots of small jobs, occasion, or I guess it seems like you had quite a lot of jobs and it, it, there wasn't, I dunno, it just occurred to me like in terms of, especially if you are, well I guess you were living in, um, Southeast Asia, but especially if you're living right now, I think right now you're living the US right?

    Yeah. So where I guess you have a, where cost of livings are higher than in the countries you are working in. Um, so how exactly does this work out? And especially a lot of this seems, or some of it at least seems to be also for non-profit organizations and these kind of things. Um, 

    Bryan Bruns: yeah, I mean part of it, the reality is I might have been interested in working for nonprofits, but there.

    [00:47:00] Even just irrigation projects in general, often more expensive than most nonprofits are involved in. So yeah, the consulting opportunities tended to be more associated with larger projects in the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and um, African Development Bank organizations like that. Uh, so. That certainly was an influence in terms of what kind of opportunities were available and what I could take in terms of making it work financially.

    It was also a deliberate strategy to go live in Northern Thailand where costs of living were relatively low. The, there were international schools 'cause it had a stepson and. Eventually two daughters. But the international schools in Chiang Mai were much more affordable than in, you know, Bangkok or Jakarta.

    I mean, Jakarta had an excellent international school. You know, you could have lovely expatriate housing, but they wanted you to pay, sometimes pay your rent a year in advance. So you can [00:48:00] also get kind of in this financial trap where you feel you have to keep that money coming in. And that could sometimes be challenging if you're running into professional questions of, well, wait a minute, there's something that's not right here and I should be giving the professional proper advice.

    And I made a deliberate choice to try and keep acting in a way that I was more independent and not trapped somewhere of, oh, if I'm supposed to be closing my eyes to some degree of corruption or poor planning. Because otherwise, you know, I've signed this lease on a house for a year and my kids are in an expensive international school.

    It's, you know, 10,000, 15,000 a year or whatever. Uh, you know, so I made a deliberate choice of something that I kept more independence. It was also a choice that let my wife be in place. She could have a. Career and the standard advice I give to people on the occasion I get kind of question [00:49:00] is if someone is in a relationship, if you have one spouse who can have a steady regular salary type job, and the other one is doing the, you know, short term or consulting work where income is up and down and so on, that can be a good strategy to make things work as well as keeping basic costs low, like in living in Chiang Mai.

    So okay, we could go visit the US and pay for plane tickets and what have you, but if the money wasn't coming in then okay. That wasn't a necessity. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Okay. Okay. I mean, maybe this is a kind of stupid question, um, but, or in some sense, I guess you've maybe already answered it, but like, one question I had is kind of, yeah, I mean, I kind of, yeah, I mean in, uh, I wrote down why not be a regular in hashtags academic, um, but I guess you, you never even planned to, right?

    I mean, I guess for me the question was I read, you know, I, I got to know about you through the papers you [00:50:00] wrote. So for me it was, you know, oh guess someone's writing papers and then. Huh, he's doing this in a different way. But I guess you, you went that real way and you also published papers. It's more that way round rather than the other, or, yeah.

    Bryan Bruns: Part of that was generational. I kind of went to college during the baby bust where enrollments were declining and all these universities had ramped up to produce lots of PhDs with the idea there were gonna be teaching jobs for those PhDs. Mm-hmm. So even as an undergrad, it was very clear, you know, there was not a great job market out there on the one hand.

    And on the other hand, I was more interested in applied work if I'd been maybe. 10 years previous, I probably would've gotten pulled into academic work and then might've done applied work on the side or whatever. But especially when I was in grad school and after grad school, you know, there were not lots and lots of teaching jobs out there.

    [00:51:00] There were a lot of frustrated people, you know, not finding teaching jobs or, you know, a year here, a year there and, uh, what have you. So that was part of the kind of professional job market that was there. And then when I was kind of making my decisions after or towards the end of the time working in Indonesia, okay, you know, where do I wanna be going with my life?

    Part of the choice of working freelance short-term assignments was this would give me a chance to stay involved on a more academic side of things. So the work with the Ford Foundation, you know, they, we were working with universities and very interested in writing things up in a research perspective and sharing those ideas.

    And at the end of that, I got the grant for six months. Time from the Ford Foundation to write up several papers based on what I'd been doing. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Mm-hmm. Okay. 

    Bryan Bruns: And the [00:52:00] idea that, okay, I could go off to international conferences. And so in, what was it, 1993, I guess it was, uh, you know, I went off to Norway and I didn't know where I was going.

    I was going to whatever or whatever. And I didn't realize I was going north of the Arctic Circle, midnight Sun and what have you. Um, you know, but it was neat as a professional conference. And that's where I first met, um, Eleanor Ostrom and her husband Vincent Ostrom, who she won the Nobel Prize for, among other things, this research that helped document how communities had been able to work together successfully to govern, uh, commons.

    And her major book was actually already out by that point. And I'd been reading work she'd done before and it was the sense of yes, these are people I'm interested in as colleagues and I would like not just to be working, you know, in a day-to-day salaried thing, or even [00:53:00] just in an engineering company or primarily engineering company where they wanna have you spend your time doing things.

    Either bring their, more, them more money. And they usually are not particularly supportive of trying to publish or let alone take off time off and do something academic. So that was kind of a deliberate choice of I wanted to combine both and. I think it was, yeah. After that conference, I went back to Washington and was staying with a grad school friend of mine.

    And we both kind of had this interest in not just water, but particularly the question of water rights. And so we said, well, okay, maybe the next conference we could organize a panel, a session of papers on water rights. And we did that and people were interested in that. And then, well, maybe we could turn this into a book.

    Let's talk to, we knew some people at Ford Foundation and they were interested in that. But on an [00:54:00]academic timescale, these things take longer. So a couple years later, the second conference is another conference of the International Association for Con Commons, and we were still working on the book. So we had another session which gave us more papers and a more diverse group of papers.

    And so that turned out, turned into this book on negotiating water rights. And that also kind of, you know, affirmed Okay. Doing this parallel, both practitioner and, you know, researcher approach to a career. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Um, so I'd like to start moving towards talking about more game theistic things. 

    Bryan Bruns: Sure, sure. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Um, so you mentioned Eleanor Ostrom.

    So as I mentioned before we started recording, I'm kind of, you know, an outsider to game theory in the sense that I come from psychology and neuroscience and I've. Read her name and quite a few times, and she's referenced of course, and lots of things I've read and every time I've, I circle the name and say I should read stuff like the, the governing the [00:55:00] Commons or that's the most famous work.

    Right. Um, but I've never actually done this, so I don't think I've actually, I might have read one paper where she was middle author, but not much more than that. So could you, so who is she? Or was she, um, what did she do? Yeah. Can you maybe like briefly outline the commons and governance, because I guess those are things we're gonna talk a bit more about then later.

    Bryan Bruns: Yeah. In simple terms, she, working with a bunch of colleagues, synthesized a whole lot of research that showed lots of examples of how communities could govern themselves and govern local natural resources, irrigation systems, forests, fisheries. Rangeland for grazing. And um, you know, the key insight of know, wait a minute, these are, people have often looked at separate cases or whatever, but you can look at across these and see this capability [00:56:00] for local.

    Governance and then saying, well, okay, is there a best way to manage, you know, an irrigation system? And the reality was incredible diversity in terms of the kind of rules, the way things, people did things even in fairly similar geographic conditions. And so the kind of shift and part of what she is recognized for and you know, got the Nobel Prize for was then to shift this level.

    Okay. It's not that there's one best way to manage your fishery or your intro fishery, but these design principles, some things that if you address these issues, it'll work better. Do you have, uh, clear boundaries? Are the resource users involved in decision? Is there some kind of proportionality between what people contribute to taking care of the resource or building in their use [00:57:00] system and the benefits they get?

    Do you have some ways to resolve disputes? And those probably start out with graduated sanctions. Simple warnings of, well wait a minute, that's not really the way we do things here. But if somebody. It doesn't get the message at that point. There can be teeth later on. So this set of design principles that helped understand how people could successfully go govern commons.

    And then the classic way, I'll go ahead and include this. A lot of this is talked about is a debate with Garrett Harden and the idea of tragedy of the commons, that out of concern about population growth and so on. He painted this picture as if, okay, individual incentives, um, each person is better off just looking at if you assume each person is just looking at, you know, what's good for me?

    And, you know, okay, we share a pasture or an irrigation or whatever, and I am. And this is the tricky [00:58:00]assumption that gets kind of slipped in. And then the neuroscience and social psychology and everybody else can, you know, unpack this. Um, but if I were only thinking about me only caring about number one, then well, I'd like to get as much as I can outta this pasture.

    And it turns out that if you think it through in that kind of case, I'm better off putting as many sheep, sheep as possible in the pasture. 'cause if I add a sheep, I get all the benefits of that sheep. Even if it's starting to get overgrazing. You know, the loss in the degradation of the pasture or the forest or the fisheries is spread over lots of people.

    And so this is where you get this tragedy of the commons logic. If I only care about my benefit, okay, I'll emit, you know, use fossil fuels and spew the CO2 off into the atmosphere. And you know, all the pain, the suffering is spread out. But I get the immediate benefits. And so this tragedy of the [00:59:00] commons, or the game theory equivalent is what's talked about as prisoner's dilemma, which we can go through the story if you think that's useful.

    But the underlying logic is just like. Polluting or littering, it's, I would like it if everybody else obeys the rules and doesn't throw their trash around, but for me, I'd like to be able to throw my trash around. That's what's easiest for me. So you have this social dilemma, the conflict between what's best for my immediate self-interest, especially if I don't care about other people.

    Um, and what would be collectively, everybody would be collectively better if everybody played by the rules. And the challenge of how to organize that cooperation, which is what Eleanor Ostrom's work, then challenge this and says no, if Hardin and others said, the only answer is either to have the government come in and have orders and laws and penalties and fines, [01:00:00] or to divide up everything up into private property.

    So, okay, you've got your pasture and I've got mine, and if I manage mine better, I get the benefits. And to say there's a whole, you know, a third answer, a third way to govern things together as commons. And in many cases, given the resource and how it's organized, dividing it up may be difficult or impossible.

    It may be hard to exclude, you know, especially, you know, water moves, fish moves, the atmosphere moves around. Um, these tend to be shared so that. Privatizing it may not work very well. And you know what? A lot of my professional work has been about trying to have top-down control through a government agency.

    Irrigation, fisheries, forestry, even, you know, with the kind of current state-of-the-art technical knowledge often ends up with very poor results in part just 'cause simply there's so, you know, it's so hard for one relatively small government [01:01:00] agency to have the degree of control to impose the kind of rules that technically they might want to, to control.

    You know, who harvests fish or who takes water outta the irrigation canal. You know, you're not gonna have a policeman stationed by the canal all night, every night. Whereas the community has people who can be monitoring each other and therefore that's a key part of their effectiveness is having users monitoring the resource and having users think a rule is fair.

    Uh, and 'cause they've been involved in, you know, designing the rule or adjusting the rule to say is water gets scarcer in the dry season, then that's when we are more careful about, you know, how we manage it and more strict. So that's okay. That's at least part of an answer. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. And maybe, um, I was just also wondering, whilst do we explaining this, why I haven't actually gotten around to reading this, maybe it is [01:02:00] because in psychology it's much more, you know, about one or two people interacting, making it simple and not about, you know, large groups of people, which you can't really test in a lab.

    So maybe, and maybe that's why, but, um. 

    Bryan Bruns: Well, but I mean, part of the research she did, that book is, or that's pulled together in a book Rules games and common pool resources with Gardner and Walker. You know, she did lab experiments. Yeah, I think, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah. 

    Bryan Bruns: One of the key things, you know, she was not, I think not the only person who, who's looking at this, but you know, one of the people who helped make very clear that this model from classic game theory that assumes okay, people can't communicate, but everybody knows all the information and so on, and they're gonna get caught in this trap of a social dilemma where cooperation, everybody be better off with cooperation, but following self-interest.

    They're [01:03:00] not. Um, that in an experimental model, if you just let people talk to each other, you know, they don't have any ability to punish or whatever, they can solve the social dilemma, the prisoner's dilemma. For themselves in many cases if they're repeatedly interacting. So even in a very controlled, you know, two person experimental mode, it basically shows there's some, you know, in a sense, some flaws in the assumptions that got built in or smuggled in, in not just Garrett Harden, but a lot of the economic models which assume that everybody else is a shortsighted, selfish opportunist.

    And instead there's a whole bunch research, which you're probably quite familiar with that 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: some of 

    Bryan Bruns: it, most people are ready to cooperate. They're conditional cooperators, they're as long, and they'll start out trying to cooperate, and you can prove this in the lab. If the other people keep on asking [01:04:00] things selfish and nasty, then people, okay, I need to be careful and protect myself.

    But in many cases, the cooperators do better, especially 'cause even this prisoner's dilemma or tragedy commons game, if you play it repeatedly, even the mathematical logic says cooperating is at least a stable equilibrium solution. And if I maybe care about what happens to you and think it's better if we both do well in this game, this is even better.

    And this gets into maybe some of what you're doing. I mean, you can put people under FMRI and see what's going on in their brain and something that if. They see the other person is also getting benefits and something lights up. You know, that we have this kind of empathy and caring about other people as part of how our brains work.

    You know, we can, we have a whole range of capabilities and then as you may be familiar, there are a whole bunch of arguments building on that, that evolutionary, [01:05:00] from an evolutionary point of view, a key advantage of humans arguably has been our ability to cooperate using language and the whole set of skills which, you know, social psychologists and others are still opening up and figuring out to say, you know, that groups that we're able to cooperate better, did better, had more kids spread farther.

    And that's can be a whole lot of what we are as a species. We also had to learn to deal with. Yes, there can be people who will lie and cheat and it's not all nice and happy. We have to be cope able to cope even the competition within our groups and that unfortunately our ability to bind together within a group can sometimes then be very adversarial towards others and dehumanizing and that can bring out horrible results.

    If we stop treating other people like they're human or conversely you, we again do much better if we [01:06:00]extend our circle of care more broadly. And if we wanna. Survive, climate change, lots of other things. You know, we're gonna be, it would make a whole lot, that could happen a lot better and a lot faster if we realize we're all in this together just like we are right now with COVID.

    You know, it doesn't help that the US has a high vaccination rate if there are all these other places that are not vaccinated and we have a chance for variants to evolve that even when you put it in nice, tight, rigorous game theory models, it becomes clear, in many cases, cooperation is by far the best strategy.

    And that you can change situations, you can make situations which made cooperation better, which is part of where the topology of two by two game stuff that I got excited about comes in. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, I think it's always tricky to talk about this, especially this like, um. How, I [01:07:00] guess some of the attitudes changed over time.

    At first it was, you know, the prison s dilemma, people were only defect. And then there was this, I guess, uh, back, not backlash, but strong, but you know, um, a lot of people came around and said like, well actually if you do these experimental tests, people don't do it. And, you know, showing various three different ways in which corporation actually is beneficial.

    Um, but I think what's still interesting is that, you know, a lot of situations are exactly the way Harden described them, right? I mean, if you look at fisheries or whatever where people just completely exploit the oceans or whatever and take out as much as they can, you know, there are still lots and or enough situations in which that, I think.

    Put it this way, and it's maybe not the norm, especially maybe if you have interpersonal, um, interactions, but I think there are enough situations in which it's, 

    Bryan Bruns: yeah, or it's, it's a lot of the research is, you know, looking at, you know, under what conditions does that become a prob problem and where does it make a difference?

    And that, you know, on the high seas, if [01:08:00] nobody's looking and nobody's controlling, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah. 

    Bryan Bruns: People may do things that wipe out a fisheries and then trying to understand, well wait a minute, if we have satellites and we can keep track of these ships, does that make a difference? Sometimes yes. Sometimes people turn off their transponders.

    And particularly again, this monitoring that, you know, which kind of activities you can detect makes a huge difference in terms of what kind of rules and regulations are feasible. And so a lot of it is okay figuring out that part and what kind of rules people will accept as reasonable and fair, which is, you know, some of what we're still arguing about in terms of global warming of, wait a minute, there are a bunch of countries that got rich and put a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere as part of that.

    Yeah. So other countries say, well, wait a minute, in terms of who should help. Solve this problem. Maybe the people who made a bigger part of the problem should take a [01:09:00] bigger role in the solution and, you know, you get different. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, I'd, I'd like to ask a more about that later, those kind of questions. Okay, sure.

    But maybe first, uh, you already mentioned two by two games we've mentioned at the Prison dilemma, these things maybe to be a bit more systematic. Um, what are two by two games and why are they interesting? 

    Bryan Bruns: Okay. And please help me if I'm not clear enough. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay, I'll try. 

    Bryan Bruns: So it's in a sense a simple mathematical model where if you have two people and two choices, you know, I can either cooperate or I can defect.

    And you look at what's the payoff, what do I get, what do I get? If we cooperate, what do you get? If we cooperate? If you cooperate. And I don't, what happens to me. And so there's some very nice games where, you know, I look at my choices and whatever you do, [01:10:00] I'm better off choosing to cooperate and you're better off choosing to cooperate.

    And so those are easy to solve and maybe they're easy to solve 'cause people spend a bunch of time coming up with. Norms, rules, laws, social institutions, which say, thou shalt not steal. And if thou you steal, you'll be punished. That we've structured those games to lead people to win-win. But there's only a small proportion of games which are naturally so happy.

    And in a sense, the most or particularly difficult game is this prisoner's dilemma situation where, you know, I look at, okay, you're gonna flute if you pollute, I'm better off fluting too. Or tossing the beer can beside the road, or you know, whatever the example, if you don't pollute, what's better for me?

    Oh, it's still easier for me to keep on polluting. Well, wait a minute, that means whatever you do, I pollute. And [01:11:00] you look at it from your point of view and you follow the same logic, which is to say we both keep on. Polluting and you know, we keep on driving our internal combustion engines and sending off our, you know, CO2 in the atmosphere.

    And for a long time that wasn't a problem. And now it's very clear that it is a huge problem. And you know, we've gotten ourselves in a trap. Now we can agree. And in hindsight we can agree it would've been better decades ago to say, wait a minute, let's decarbonize, let's not use as much coal. Let's find, you know, ways to change things so we don't get this global warming, which messes up our weather systems and everything else.

    So it's a simple little model, which just having two people and two choices and looking at their payoffs, you can capture what can be the essence of a great big problem, [01:12:00] including something like global warming or people sharing an irrigation system or fisheries. And it can be a problem like polluting something that's bad happening or it can be contributing to make something better together, like building an irrigation system.

    But again, this temptation to free ride, you know, well, maybe I don't work as hard and you know, I show up late and you know, can I get you to do most of the work? And again, especially if you start out with this idea that people are gonna be selfish or that the logical, scientifically rigorous way to analyze this is to kind of work on this worst case first, as if everybody's totally selfish and totally opportunistic.

    And if we can solve that, then we can solve the easier ones. Ends up leading you down to this logic as if you start anticipating people are gonna be nasty and untrustworthy. And there's some research [01:13:00] as you may know, that, you know, you test these little games and people have been trained in economics are not as nice, not as cooperative, you know, they've, right.

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, yeah. 

    Bryan Bruns: You know, they've drunk the Kool-Aid, they've built that into their beliefs and expectations, and they do worse than other people who are ready to cooperate under conditions that are rewarding for repeated cooperation. Um, and so these simple little models make a distinction and you could see the difference.

    And then part of that gets into this prisoner's dilemma model where it turns out to always be best to not cooperate is only one possible model. And an alternative goes back to a classic story from the social philosopher French Rousseau and the stag hunt that if we. Both go out and hunt together. We can do much better.

    We can get a stag, but we're out there and there's this rabbit right there. And I could [01:14:00] get to this rabbit and I could go home and I got the rabbit for sure. And maybe I'm not totally sure whether you're even showing up to do the hunt together, in which case my time is wasted. And that's a different kind of problem.

    And often trust can be a much bigger part of it. 'cause if I'm sure you're coop will cooperate, then the logical thing is to cooperate stag hunt, that's a stable solution, a Nash equilibrium. But getting the rabbit not cooperating in that case is also an equilibrium. But again, it's one that's, you know, we're both worse off.

    It's inferior, but it's a different kind of problem than prisoner's dilemma. I don't have this temptation, you know, if I'm sure you're gonna cooperate, then the best thing is for me to cooperate too. There's no temptation to free ride or defect. So those are different kinds of problems and [01:15:00] when you put the numbers on them, you know you have different numbers and you can then.

    If you can change the payoff, like having a rule, thou shalt not steal, you know, either a moral norm or you know, policemen will put you in jail or whatever. You can change the incentives and make, or you just have better education understanding of, yeah, this is a stag hunt. If we both show up, we can do a lot better together.

    If we both understand that it's that kind of situation that if we all decarbonize and shift to electric vehicles, we're actually gonna all gonna be much better off. And then you try and reinforce that, that actually there may be advantages to being the first one who, decarbonize is not one where my incentives are to hold back and wait and see if you're gonna really do it.

    There are actually reasons, as long as we can get a critical mass, get enough people, we're sure we're gonna do this, like has [01:16:00] now happened with solar energy and wind, that these technologies are cheaper, solar and wind are cheaper than the operating costs for fossil, for coal powered fire plants. That you know that it's not, that is not a tragedy to the commons situation.

    It's one where the best strategy, certainly if others cooperate, is to decarbonize. Arguably. And this, we've now for that reached the point where regardless of what other people do, it arguably is better to, you know, choose a technology that loots less. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Yeah. I mean the, so there's the, the two pages of yours that I've read, uh, are the names for games locating two by two games, and then from Tragedy to Win-Win, transforming Social Dynamics in Commons.

    Um, so maybe just first two about the names for games. 

    Bryan Bruns: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Um, what exactly was the goal of the paper? Was it to, um, well, yeah, maybe can you summarize it? This might be [01:17:00] easier than if I, if I try. 

    Bryan Bruns: Okay. Um, yeah, basically I, uh, mentioned Eleanor Ostrom earlier and I decided, and I guess it was my early fifties, so 2007, 2008, but I'd be interested in doing a kind of sabbatical or reverse sabbatical, you know, whereas an academic might go out and do something practical.

    I went from being a practitioner back to a university, Indiana University, and was a visiting scholar for a year, and I had done a paper about government aid to irrigation systems and used one of these little two by two models, Samaritans Dilemma, which it looks at a situation that, okay, if I help you, you know, give you a scholarship for your, you know, if you're still in grad school or whatever.

    That may be great. You may think this is very nice, but you may decide, well, [01:18:00] okay, since I've got the scholarship, I don't have to be a teaching assistant. I don't have to work as hard, and I might think that's not what I intended. Um, and so it's a model of where helping someone might result in them making less effort.

    And I applied this model to governments helping irrigation systems. So two organizations rather than two individuals. And James Buchanan, another person who won a Nobel Prize had two versions of this kind of model, and they differed by just changing two of the payoffs. And so I had this idea, there's something you could do with this.

    And I'd had a one game theory course as an undergrad and one in grad school, as well as some courses that introduced me to, um, Manser Olsen Logic of Collective Action and the set of ideas that have been talking about somewhat. So, um, let's see. [01:19:00] Okay, sorry, I need to get oriented where 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Take time. 

    Bryan Bruns: Talking about going back and going to, so 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: why the two by two ga?

    Like why, so you have this like periods period table, right? And like, 

    Bryan Bruns: yeah. So, so the general thing as going back for this kind of sabbatical visiting scholar was to understand institutional design. How we can arrange ways to work together better and to learn more about the theory and so on. And one part of it was this idea that these game theory models might be a way to do it.

    And that swapping the payoff ranks could be a systematic way to think about changes between different models or how can you solve some of these problems. And so I, I'd done one paper and wanted to look at this further and was then playing around and one of the other visiting scholars helped me, you know, follow through some of the math more clearly of there are only so [01:20:00] many possible games if you're just saying there are four outcomes and we're only concerned, you know, which of these is best, which is second best, which is worse, second worst, 1, 2, 3, 4.

    So there are only four numbers. And basically it turns out that if you look at games where both people are facing the same set of choices, there are only 12 possible games. And I was fumbling my way through some of that and seeing, oh, there's some different kinds of games and I never read about these games where our incentives lead us to second best.

    Not as opposed to bridging a dilemma where we end up second works. Yeah. But something that's okay. Maybe good enough. Okay. So this is interesting and is there some way, some kind of graphics or visualization to show this? And I was playing around with stuff in Excel and then courtesy of OpenStack university libraries, uh, you know, basically found a couple of [01:21:00] books, um, one by anal vore and mm-hmm.

    Melvin Geier and Gordon, which was kind of a classic book on the two by two games back in the seventies. They kind of synthesized a whole bunch of research, including in psychology and lab experiments and game theory, um, from economics and international relations and other sources to take a systematic, much more systematic look at.

    Okay. What are turns out that there, again, only 12 symmetric games and that if you look at the games where different people have different payoffs, but they rank them 1, 2, 3, 4, their only, um. Depending on how you think about it, 78 or 144 possibilities. Basically they're 12 symmetric games and then they're asymmetric games where you have different payoffs and you know, there's 66 of those.

    And then if you swap roles, you get 66 more and [01:22:00] that adds up to 144. So this is like manageable. This is the way to think about it. And then there was this book, the Topology of two by two games where, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah, 

    Bryan Bruns: you know, kind of game theory have been going on for 50 years. But, uh, David Robinson, David Goforth looked at it in a different way, a different paradigm.

    Most people had been concentrating on, okay, what strategy, how do I choose strategies? Or if I mix the percentage of time I play each strategy, you know, how can I do best and can we find some great solution? Like the founders of game Theory had found for zero sum games, you know, they found, okay, you can calculate this so that you can control, you know, whatever the other person does, I can determine my outcome.

    So this was like a great powerful general solution. And then in the early fifties, John Nash came up with Nash Librium. What I've been talking about [01:23:00] is kind of a trap, but more generally, that's something that's stable. It turns out that whatever you do, my choice, this is my best choice. Or at least as long as you keep doing what you've chosen and I do what I've chosen, I can't make things better by myself.

    And that this was a pretty powerful general solution concept. And ever since a lot of game theorists are pursuing their holy grail is to find some more solution concepts that are that powerful. And, um, so, but, um, Robinson Goforth looked at it instead of, let's look at the payoffs and what happens if you.

    Change the ranking of these payoffs and change one game into another. And thinking about it, they thought about, you know, is there some way we can show this visually? Can we put it on some kind of surface? And first they did it just for the symmetric games and [01:24:00] found something that initially was a bit kind of weird, awkward, but okay, it's, what's it, flying Hexagon or whatever.

    Okay. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. I, I printed it out as a, as a a four and then cut it out and tried to glue it together and it kind of works, but it looks a bit weird. Yeah, 

    Bryan Bruns: yeah, yeah. But, um, they, as they got into it, they all of a sudden rise there. It all comes together in this lovely logic. And when you look at the asymmetric games too, you can come up with what they talk about as a periodic table for social science.

    'cause again, as long as you strictly rank the games that are only 144 possibilities, that's it. It's like, there are only so many elements. You know, it's a manageable number. And they found a way. You can show how they're connected to each other by changing the ranking of payoffs. You can turn a prisoner's dilemma into a stag hunt by swapping the top two payoffs.

    And people had known that, but again, nobody, they hadn't looked at it [01:25:00] systematically. And Robinson Goforth followed the logic and all of a sudden things. Fit together very nicely. And like the periodic table of the elements, you have these patterns that show up, you know, different parts of the table have different shared properties.

    And I can go into more details if you want, but just to say, you know, it shows elegant patterns of how these games are related to each other and how you can change one game to another. And so that's what I kind of got excited by. And initially it was, well at least, you know, I'm sure other people are gonna do lots of stuff with this, but I can try and do some graphics.

    'cause I'd already been fiddling around with Excel of how can we put games and show a neighboring game. And so for me, this was a neat challenge and the way they'd done it for me was hard to follow. 'cause they'd done these, uh, little kind of diagrams with like. You know, triangles or, you know, dots and lines connecting to each other.

    And that was not intuitive for me. [01:26:00] It was like, okay, maybe some people that's great, but for me, I do much better to see the payoffs, the numbers in there. So I'm gonna try and come up with something. And so for a bunch of my time, I just, I enjoyed fiddling with the visualization and I thought if I can just make this more available, then other people will come up and run with it.

    But they didn't. Um, so, okay, I should at least try and write this up more. Well, first I spent a couple of years on that and then so I'm, I need to keep, earn some money. I really need to be self-disciplined. Set this aside for a while, but then in 2013 or so, I kind of, okay, let's go back at it. And worked on the names for games article.

    And in that, initially a lot of it was just, okay, let's show the visualization. But as I got into it, realized you could come up with a naming scheme that 'cause okay, 144 games or even 78 is a lot of things to [01:27:00]remember and more than people wanna deal with if you have to. Okay. You could have, well, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: it was really a lot to remember.

    Bryan Bruns: Yeah, yeah. Um, and to say, well wait a minute. Actually the 66 or you know, 132 are just combining payoffs from these 12 symmetric games. Yeah. So this gives us, you can use them like coordinates, you know, like a number line Cartesian grafts to say we're combining this and this and it makes this other game.

    And okay, this seems something that I thought could be useful. And again, I thought, okay, you'll build a better master trip or whatever, put it out there and people will use it. And that one actually worked on it and revised it and finally got it published. And again, it didn't particularly take off. So no.

    Yet back in 2018, uh, yeah, a few people found it, but whatever decided I'll have another [01:28:00] go at this and take some of my time. And that led to another round of more recent papers, uh, which are available on the internet, but in the process of getting published. So there's one on transforming climate dilemmas, which is part of why I keep bringing up climate change examples.

    And another one of what happens if you simplify these games by making ties saying, well, some of these outcomes, I really don't care which one, you know, we set them equal and turns out you can come up with some three archetypal games and then show how they turn into other games, which is at least intellectually neat and co-authoring that with Christian Kovich and that paper is accepted.

    Um, just in the process of okay, needs to go through proofreading and should come out later this year. And then the paper or the presentation I think you saw online about diagnosing social [01:29:00] dilemmas. Again, people often talk about a free rider problem. Oh yeah, I'm better off, you know, seeing if I can kind of do less, take advantage of other people and that that's often not clearly distinguishing.

    There can be different kinds of free rider situations, some of which you just end up second worst, some of which are like this game of chicken that if we both defect, you know, the story for chicken is two cars going at each other and. They're going at each other, and if nobody swerves, they both crash.

    And you know, they could both die, that's disastrous. But if one swerves the other wins, or if both swerves, then you know, nobody wins. Nobody gets the best outcome, but they both are alive. So it's a different model. And if a problem, like global warming is potentially disastrous, then prisoner's dilemma is not the model.

    It's not just this is in inefficient. We could be somewhat better off, you know, why don't [01:30:00] we stop littering or whatever. It's, you know, we're destroying our planet, our ecosystem, our children's future, and the future for everybody else on the planet. Um, this may, we may need to think about this as a different kind of problem.

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I find the, what I found fun about your names for games paper is that the, uh, I feel like the, the periodic table is something you can spend so much time looking at. Uh, there's just so much like, just information in there in terms of, yeah. How the, I mean, especially I guess for, for me as someone who also wants to run experiments with people, like what I've found, I mean, I think I, I, I don't actually remember like whether.

    And like how I found what in this case, because you know, I've never taken a game theory course or anything. This is just me googling stuff and then randomly finding different things. Um, so I dunno whether I found yours or the Robinson and go forth first. But, um, what's really interesting [01:31:00] to me is just when I saw this suddenly it's like, oh yeah, there's so much more than just prison cinema or prison cinema stack and chicken.

    That's basically the only three that I talked about. And yeah, for me it's really fascinating to, yeah, to think about like how you can do experiments with the other games that are completely not even understudied, but unstudied, um, right now. And, um. I spent a good amount of time just like looking at the, at the periodic table and going like, yeah, just like exploring it and that kind of stuff.

    So 

    Bryan Bruns: Great, great. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Um, it might not have taken off, but I think the people who have seen it find it very fascinating. 

    Bryan Bruns: Good. That's the idea. And I keep trying to find, okay. Yeah. There are better ways to convey it that convey some of what I did earlier. I think can sometimes is trying to be too much. I was inspired by Edward Tufty or my interpretation of his ideas, which is to make things very dense with information and realizing that, [01:32:00] uh, build people an easier bridge to get into this.

    You know, a way to get started is what I've tried to do more of recently. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. I guess it's a difficult trade off, right? Because in some sense I like having this thing where I'm, I'm sure there's still entire like, categories of thought I haven't even noticed yet. But yeah, I guess if this is the first time you see the concept of two by two games, it's probably a bit overwhelming, but.

    Bryan Bruns: Yeah, so the paper, one of the papers I'm working on now, trying to frame it in terms of, okay, escaping from prisoner's Dilemma, if you can change the ranking of two of the outcomes, what game does that change into? So that's why you can start in one place and kind of work your way out there and is relevant to, again, people trying to cooperate, okay, you know, how do we solve this?

    And okay, yes, we could cooperate, but right now you're still tempted to not cooperate, so we need to [01:33:00] change something to deal with that. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Mm-hmm. Um, actually one thing I saw just, uh, a few minutes before we started recording, um, that you've been posting on Twitter, what is Cards for Cooperation? I mean, you've kind of been like posting about like these individual games occasionally and writing a haiku about it.

    Yes. 

    Bryan Bruns: Yeah. At point I got into kind of coming up with cards as a way of showing a lot of the information about these games. And then kind of late last year decided to try putting the cards up. I kind of got, I did that for a while and then, uh, fortunately kind of left that and maybe should come back to it.

    Still a few together. Yeah. Yeah. I got interested, um. Let's see. Oh, just a second. Cartoonist. Randall Monroe. Yeah, this is just audio, but the cartoonist XKCD people may know about. Yeah, yeah. And he has a thing [01:34:00] explainer and complicated stuff and simple words, and my cousin gave it to me, and since I've been, again, how can we get these ideas across better?

    I found that very useful, which is part of what led me to, okay, let's try haiku, let's try some simple words as ways of explaining some of these ideas. So I kind of did it for a couple months worth, but worth, um, then again, kind of got caught up in other things. Yeah, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah. Um, by the way, just, uh, as a specific, uh, very specific question.

    Now, is there like a standard naming convention for these games? Because the really weird thing is I've, I've written this, um, uh, some manuscript and, um, I've been listing all the, the, the 12 symmetric two by two games, and then I said something like, you know, he had that. Just, you know, explaining and what the logic is and just in one figure, [01:35:00] basically like what the, in one table, what the order of payoffs is, and then what the games are called.

    And I had this naming convention. I said, these names are taken from Robertson and go forth. And then I looked, and actually they're not the names from this, so I thought, oh, I probably took it from you. And then I looked at yours. And I don't use that naming convention either, so I'm really confused now. Um, uh, I guess there seems to be a few different ways in which people have named these things.

    Do you know whether there's like a standard? 

    Bryan Bruns: Um, no. I mean that's what in a sense the 2015 paper is about is, is 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: trying to establish, okay. Yeah. 

    Bryan Bruns: Yeah. Um, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean some of them are obviously, um, common, have common names, but a lot of them don't. Yeah. 

    Bryan Bruns: Yeah. And to say that if you start from the 12 symmetric games, that gives you an efficient way to give a unique name to the rest of the games.

    And that actually extends to games with ties, which is part of what the 2015 paper does. Um, but the proposal is this is [01:36:00] something that can work, you know, to be immodest about it. Like scientific names for species or just like naming conventions in biology or whatever for, you know. Or, um, you know, whatever.

    At least if we have some kind of standard name that's better than having 3, 4, 5 different names. Or at least to have a realize that when somebody's writing an article about chicken and somebody else is talking about Hawk Dove and somebody else is writing about snow drift, these are actually, in terms of the models, the same game.

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. That took me a bit to figure out. 

    Bryan Bruns: Yeah. And the current paper, I'm trying to do some more things that would make some of that more accessible. Basically. Have something, go ahead. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I'd like to make one suggestion. Sure. And we stick with hawk dove rather than chicken because I've, I once wanted to look at, um, losses and gains, um, in different economic gains.

    And, uh, if you Google lost gain chicken, you find a lot of other poetry industry. [01:37:00] It's not, it's uh, it's with Hawk Dove you find specifically. The economic game. But if you put chicken in, you just find a lot about chickens. 

    Bryan Bruns: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So that would be one, one, uh, change I would suggest to use haw dub rather than chicken just for search engine friendliness.

    Bryan Bruns: Okay. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, in theory if some of this caught on the search engines could learn the synonyms and be smarter about it, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: right. '

    Bryan Bruns: cause they would start to say, okay, these are the same name or similar names. And part of it is, as you know, game theory goes off in these different fields so that, you know, chicken has this kind of much deeper history back to the fifties of early game theory.

    But when the evolutionary biologists got into it, yes. You know, they thought Hawk dove was very relevant to the situations they were trying to analyze. But again, they use [01:38:00] hawk dove in multiple ways. Sometimes they use it for this specific set of, you know, payoffs for four outcomes, and sometimes they're much more talking about any kind of aggressive strategy, not necessarily one specific payoff structure.

    So it's, you know, the proposal is something that if people find useful okay. At least it makes it easier to talk to each other and know we're talking about the same thing. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Um, okay. So, so I'd like to talk a bit about the, the. Paper. Paper. I mean, I guess it's like a, a preprint on your website or something.

    The From tragedy to Win-Win. Okay. Transforming social dilemmas and commons. Um, there was one, maybe we can start with one sentence I read that I found kind of interesting and that I, I think alludes to different interests in different disciplines. 

    Bryan Bruns: Okay. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So, um, on page three, you wrote from the point of view of some game theory [01:39:00] researchers solutions that come from structural changes and payoffs may seem obvious, uninteresting and or trivial.

    However, in terms of social dilemmas, in real life, changing payoffs is often central to solutions. 

    Bryan Bruns: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: And this is something that I find quite interesting because I think, especially as someone who's interested in psychology, I think a lot of, you know, what we do is completely irrelevant to economists.

    Economists and, you know, every discipline has their different kind of thing they're interested in and therefore different things that seem boring or trivial. Um, so I'm just curious, can you kind of maybe elaborate a bit on that and maybe why for you in particular, um, this is something that's interesting.

    Bryan Bruns: Yeah. Um, so, and one example, you know, there a whole set of these games. One fourth of the fourth of the games actually have a win-win outcome that we can both get what we like best. Um, and another fourth of those are [01:40:00] situations where our. Each of us has a dominant strategy. Whatever you do, regardless of what you do, I have a choice that's better for me.

    And those dominant strategies can lead us to win-win. Okay. Um, and yeah, for a lot of game theorists, it's like, you know, these are not interesting. Uh, we need to, or I need to say, I want to continue the session. Sorry. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay. 

    Bryan Bruns: So I clicked. I hope that keeps us going. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Yeah. 

    Bryan Bruns: Okay. Um, so to repeat, um, I have a dominant strategy.

    Regardless of what you do, it's better for me to do. And you have a dominant strategy and in nine of these games, that leads us to get both getting win-win. However, one of those games, the one way down in the corner, which I call Concord Classic Game Theory Logic, um, that's there. And these games are like utterly boring, you know, [01:41:00] for, you know, mathematical game theory of, you know, well this is so obvious, you know, why would anybody worry about that?

    Um, but in terms of social science, you know, if we've set up norms and institutions so that we can both get what we want, whether it's through working together, trading, whatever, that's success, that's us, arranging our world how we'd like it. So that's the essence of what we're trying to do, either in a psychological.

    You know, two people working together or whatever context, doing something and sorting through their problems and trying to arrange things, including being concerned about what's fair and, you know, set it up so they wanna keep on cooperating. However, that Concord game, uh, turns out that when you look at it more carefully and you think about maybe different people, there are different types of people who think about things differently.

    If some people are much more concerned [01:42:00] about doing better than the other person, I'm mainly concerned about, I wanna do better than you. I don't care if I get the best as long as I beat you. That kind of rivalry, relative advantage, this game, which, uh, Robinson Goforth calls no conflict. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So just briefly, why did you call it Concord if they call it no conflict?

    Bryan Bruns: Um, well part of that was actually just a very technical reason. I was trying to come up with these names so they could be abbreviated and, um, I was already using no conflict and using NC and using n as part of the abbreviation. So I needed a game that was like that but didn't what I'm gonna get to. It turns out it's not a game completely of no.

    Where there's never any conflict that if you have a okay pro self actor like. Some kind of [01:43:00]businessman who might get elected to high electoral elected office in some country who always thinks if they're negotiating a deal, somebody's going to come out ahead. Somebody's gonna be the winner. If they see the world that way, then in this Concord game, especially if, you know, I think like that and I think, oh yeah, you're one of those, you know, nice cooperative types, so I know what you're gonna do.

    Then my move is not to cooperate. I take the other choice 'cause then I get my second best and I do better than you. You are down there in your second worst. I get a three, you get a two. So this can be talked about in colloquial terms of terms of fight. You're my cousin and we've always fought about things and whatever happens, I gotta come 'em out ahead.

    Or in more psychological terms, max stiff. If my interest is seeing to do [01:44:00] better than you and as much better than you as possible, again, this game, then that kind, that type of actor is gonna behave differently and not the way classic game theory predicts. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: And I mean from in, in psychology, I think, uh, this is, I think it's, it's easy to think about this in terms of social value orientation is a 

    Bryan Bruns: concept.

    Yes, precisely. Precisely. That's what they're trying to measure. Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, exactly. And what's interesting is that, I mean, to be fair this, I mean, in social value orientation you call this competitive where you just care about maximizing the difference between you and someone else. 

    Bryan Bruns: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean they're rare, but they exist.

    Bryan Bruns: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Um, you know, most people are kind of a joint gain maximizer or inequality minimizer. Um, but yeah, they definitely, there's definitely at least a few out there. 

    Bryan Bruns: Yeah. And I'll just kind of give two answers. One, apologies if I get slightly political, but certainly looks to me [01:45:00] like the previous president of the US was one of these people he looks at who's gonna come out ahead and whether he looks at the US and NATO or the US with China, you know, he's not looking for win-win.

    Uh, he is looking, can I beat them? And, and is particularly upset if it would be the other way round that, oh, somebody else is gonna do better out of the deal. And you can parse that more carefully in terms of social value orientation if you want, but clearly you know what's going on in that kind of person's.

    Mine, the way they look at a situation, including something really important like trade deals with China or the World Trade Organization or nato and working together for defense and protecting peace. All of a sudden they have a different lens and therefore they can make very different decisions. And it's not just a particular individual, [01:46:00] one of the leading theories of international relations realists, who, these people who think they're being very hard-nosed.

    And yes, let's assume everybody else is just out for number one and it's international anarchy and you have to look out for yourself and nobody else is gonna look out for you. They basically assume that countries pursue relative advantage, that, you know, if we were gonna enter a trade deal, you and me, or your country and my country, it was better for me, but a whole lot better for you then wait a minute, no, uh, that's not a deal I'd want because, you know, I'm gonna end up getting left behind if I'm mainly concerned competitively with my relative advantage.

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. And not, and to maybe make this a bit more, make this seem a bit more reasonable. It's, it's, I mean, to some extent, of course it seems somewhat unreasonable if someone. If there's a clear win-win situation and you choose the one in which you win and the other gets less than you, but I, you [01:47:00] know, a lot of humans are, you know, one of those strong, at least in Western society drives, is to have this kind of equality, um, and equity, which between, or at least, um, in terms of that, you know, if you put in the same amount of effort, you should get the same amount out.

    So yeah, I mean there's, I think like in most people, they don't want, if you have, let's say a trader between two countries for one country to do much better than the other, even if, uh, it's actually the best outcome for both. So it's not, yeah, it's a pretty normal and human reaction to those kind of situations.

    Bryan Bruns: Yeah. And that can result in missing a lot of opportunities. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, 

    Bryan Bruns: exactly. If ultimately you would be much better off making those trade deals with many other countries and would actually, you'd end up a whole lot better than you would have, and you both end up much better. So, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: but then the, I guess what the, um, to get back to the, the paper and the general idea of changing the payoffs, I guess the [01:48:00] idea is then that depending on which game you have.

    You know, strategies lead to different outcomes of course. Um, but also in terms of quality, I mean, I think one thing that's kind of, you know, the obvious thing is that if you create a situation that's win-win, um, or something like the, the Concord game, where okay, even if one person tries to, you know, um, get more than I do, they get three, I get two.

    It's not, you know, it's not the worst outcome in the world. It's not both get one or something. Right. Um, one thing I just realized was, I mean, I have this periodic system of yours still open on the table here. Interestingly, like, like in some situations like deadlock, um, it's actually second best outcome if that happens, right?

    Yeah. Yeah. So it really depends on the situation. Um, 

    Bryan Bruns: yeah. Compromise can often be what's feasible. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. But do you, so, so for, but I mean, I guess in general, on average, assuming that most people are, aren't this competitive [01:49:00] type, but kind of go, I just wanna make worst case scenario to the individualists, they wanna make, they wanna maximize their own payoff in the irrespective of someone else's.

    I guess the goal is then to. I mean, is, is the whole idea of institutions and social norms and these kind of things to then basically in your periodic system move to the bottom left Where, where the win-win situations are? Is that kind of the 

    Bryan Bruns: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: What, what, what a lot of human work is basically. 

    Bryan Bruns: Yeah.

    Yeah. And including that, there are a bunch of situations where the equilibrium is unequal. One person does better than the other, and the person who doesn't do as well may be unhappy about that unsatisfied and you know, may not be interested in playing that game or wants to change things. And that, in a sense, this gives you a map, which then shows what is the [01:50:00] potential to change this into a win-win situation is one of the things I find exciting.

    And also that compared to a whole lot of game theory, the bulk of the research tends to be done on symmetric situations where we both have the same choices. And even the stuff that gets into ability to punish, you know, I can impose a penalty on you, but you can impose a penalty on me and whatever. And the simple point the table makes is actually most of the games are asymmetric.

    A majority of the games have an equilibrium outcome that is. Unequal, you know, one person does better than the other. But because partially just kind of tradition and because people think, oh, let's look at the symmetric ones. They're easier mathematically, more tractable, or let's work on those first, or whatever.

    Vast. The goal bulk of the work in all different branches of game theory has been on symmetric [01:51:00]games. Not completely. There is, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: but almost. Right. I mean, yeah. At least the stuff that I've read is, I mean, maybe because I also then look for prisma, whatever, but I'd say almost everything I've read has been symmetric.

    Bryan Bruns: Yeah. There, there's a bit of work in including both laboratory particularly, uh, experimental games laboratory kind of stuff with asymmetric games, including public goods games, and including some specific irrigation games, which, you know, okay, some people are upstream or some downstream, which, you know, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: ah Right.

    Bryan Bruns: Links to some of what I've been interested in, and there's a nice paper or plea for asymmetric games out there. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. As there, I mean, so one thing that's, there's two ways in which you can have an asymmetric game, right? There's the one in which you know the lot, the ones that aren't on the diagonal in yours, so where basically.

    The players play different games, um, in that sense. Um, but there's of course also the situation where both play prison dilemma, but one person just always gets one point more [01:52:00] than the other, right? You have, you, you can also be asymmetric in that sense, so you know, 

    Bryan Bruns: oh yeah, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah. Let's say this is Euros, right?

    I get 4, 3, 2, 1. Outcomes. You get 5, 4, 3, 2. Um, uh, so you have these like two different, at least at least two different ways, like in which you can have these kind of as asymmetries in the Yeah. I mean, one thing I also find interesting, and this is only really something I realized actually through looking at your, your, your periodic table, is that I think maybe the most interesting games actually are somes that some games that I'm not sure I've seen, studied at all, gonna have a specific look for it.

    But I find these cyclical games the most interesting pro potentially. I don't know, I've been thinking about this only very recently, but it seems to me, so these cyclical games are ones where you don't have a, uh, an EQU equilibrium and in Yeah, in all cases, both players make different amounts on the outcome, right?

    If both corporate, maybe [01:53:00] one makes four, the other one makes one or something, whatever, it's never, um, they never make the same. But I find it really interesting there is that if you have humans who have this kind of, um, at least most people have this kind of inequality aversion and want to make as much as the other, then.

    That's a really complicated thing to bear in mind. You know, I got this much this time, you got that much this time. And, and it seems to me that with those kind of games that with a single game you can probably pretty, you can replicate a lot of real life situations, I think quite well. Um, where people have to kind of, you know, you can't do in the prison dilemma.

    Like, okay, I defected, you cooperated, so the next time we reverse the roles in that case, you have to really cycle through these games to kind of reach this, or you can alternate I guess between options. But yeah, I just found those really interesting. Yeah. 

    Bryan Bruns: Yeah, I mean part of that is, you know, gets factor classic stuff.

    Um, Rawls Theory of Justice. Will people tolerate some degree of inequality [01:54:00] if, um, they feel they're better off as a society? You know, he talks about a veil of ignorance. If you don't know what place you would get in the society and a society with some degree of competition, inequality would actually be much better off than one where everybody gets the same result.

    Would you accept this up to some point or whatever. And in a sense, you know, that little endless game in the corner is an example of, you know, okay, rather than just cycling around or rather than playing a mixed strategy, which does much worse, would I say, okay, yeah, you're gonna get a four and I'm gonna get a three, but at least you know it's stable and we're not continuing to fight about it or whatever.

    Or do I say. Wait a minute, can we change the game and turn it into an anticipation game, which is, could be win-win for both of us. And then as you mentioned before, again, these four payoffs are very crude, oversimplification of life [01:55:00] where, you know, of course pay payoffs have, can have all kinds of value.

    And what is usually important to me may be a minor thing for you. And all that can factor into, you know, how people behave. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, yeah. But it's really interesting to me like this where you said like one person gets four, the other gets three. I mean, the interesting thing there is that that is of course almost the optimum, right?

    I mean, for one person it is for the other, it's, it's the second best option. But in this case in particular, you know, and this is one game I'm looking at right now, it's, it's the joint maximum, but it's always in favor of one person. Um, so actually I'd be really, I mean, again, I, this particular part I've only really been thinking about since like two days ago.

    Um, but I'm really curious like how people would behave in these games if people would accept that. Basically in this game, they're always like, even though the total between the four outcomes are equal, the best outcome for both is just them always making what less or whether they're gonna actually start cycling through this [01:56:00] thing.

    End up in this really weird dynamics. Yeah. 

    Bryan Bruns: And to link it to larger questions in the US we're now having a bunch of conversations about, you know, structural racism. Um, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah, 

    Bryan Bruns: white supremacy, the game is rigged. The extent to which, you know, people are deprived of opportunities and that then has long-term consequences, including across generations back to a heritage of, you know, slavery and other very unequal institutions so that people are born into a world that is not one of equal opportunities.

    And to what extent do people accept this and okay, I'll make do with what I can. Or they say, wait a minute, this is, this is not right. This is not fair. And again, one of the things Ellen Ostrom kept emphasizing, you know, people can change the rules. We can get together and change the game. We're not prisoners.

    Uh, you know, we can find games that are better [01:57:00] to play. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. And I think from a, um, I guess we're oscillating now between real world applications and, and being a scientist. Um, I think these games are, yeah, I think there's still a lot to get out of these two by two games in terms of clarifying certain real life situations.

    Um, so yeah, I'm interested. I haven't really thought of anything specific to do with it yet, but I think I will. 

    Bryan Bruns: Yeah. And if you do with some of this background end up looking at Eleanor Ostrom's governing commons coming from awareness of game theory, you'll see where she's clearly drawing on that kind of conceptual clarification to get a lot of traction in what she's analyzing while still trying to do justice to the richness and complexity of all these real world situations and how messy they are and how diverse they are.

    But to be able to pull out some kinds of generalizations like, you know, the importance of [01:58:00] monitoring, the importance of some kind of fairness, proportionality between what you put in and what you get out. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Um, maybe as a kind of last topic, I'm, I think you alluded to this earlier. I mean, one thing that I was, that I asked myself when I read, I think this last paper from Tragedy to Win-Win was, um, okay, so we have the, all these ideas about how we can create institutions or social norms or whatever to change which game we're playing, but you of course then, you know, you have to implement this in the real world with real people.

    And how does, what basically, how does one do this? Is it a kind of trial and error or something? Or, because you know, there's this kind of, it seems to me there's a kind of. Trade off between the accuracy or effect theoretical effectiveness of a su some sort of suggestion and the complexity it inherently has.

    So, you know, you might have some [01:59:00] sort of way in which you can say, okay, we've got this great way in which we can look at this water system and you know, we've, we've found the perfect solution for this whole thing. But then people just don't understand it. The actual people who have to use it because it's far too complicated and complex.

    People don't trust it in these kind of things. So how does, um, I dunno whether you've, how much you've had to or had to, how much you have, um, dealt with these kind of real life applications. But I'm curious like how, yeah. Do you know how people go about. Implementing these things in a way that 

    Bryan Bruns: people, yeah, and a lot of it's that, you know, these are systems that have evolved, they've been customized, they've been crafted to fit a particular place and time and define some way of, okay, we divide the water, we take a log and we make little notches.

    So it looks like each person is getting an equitable amount. But even though from the engineering point, if you're over in this section and you all are getting [02:00:00] 60% of the water, and therefore we do a wider notch, technically we're not actually dividing the water exactly fairly, but it's much more important that this makes it very visible and you know, people are then willing to buy into it and say, okay, this is good.

    So you're finding some solution in the particular context in this Nepali irrigation villages, if somebody didn't pay his fees, evidently the committee goes in and takes their brass cooking pots, which are valuable and keeps them until the fee is paid. You know, people find something in the local context and as a global society and all of levels within that.

    We've been through this kind of process trying to figure. About how to deal with COVID amidst a whole lot of uncertainty of, okay, do we establish norms about wearing masks and when [02:01:00] and who should wear masks and keep distance. And how much difference does that make? And you know, are these norms worth following?

    And some people come from very different points of view, and how do we cope with those people? And then a vaccine comes along and that changes what's possible. But again, we still have a lot of uncertainty. So a whole bunch of fumbling around and finding kind of what's feasible, what degree of restriction will people accept.

    And you know, it turns out that maybe sometimes they're willing to accept much more. You know, article in the Economist is reading, you know, that there a bunch of British who'd be willing to stay, keep on lockdown with a lot more restrictions than one might think of. Whereas certainly in the US there are a whole bunch of people who have gotten very politically polarized and ideological about, you know, not wanting to do things even though it looks like it's hugely [02:02:00] risky.

    So it's not that, yeah. You know, it's not common knowledge. The payoffs aren't totally clear. Instead, where there's a lot of uncertainty and debate and we're trying to sort out what is feasible, what are people willing to go along with, and how do we make this work as a community, large or small? Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Um, maybe as a, as a final question, uh, for, I'm just curious now for, for stuff to read more about these things.

    So maybe first is there, do you know what there is about people acting, um, specifically way of actors where you are uncertain what the other person's interests are and what their positions are? Um, in relation to game theory? Um, do you know whether there's 

    Bryan Bruns: Yeah. Well, especially the more mathematical and, you know, economists, mathematicians, there's a whole bunch of analysis of having private information is how they, for [02:03:00] formalize it.

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Oh, right. Oh 

    yeah, 

    Bryan Bruns: of course. Yeah. But I know something that you don't know. And then a bunch of it gets used in terms of Ian models of decision making. If I learn some additional information, like from how you make a move or what you propose to make an agreement about, you know, I can then update. What I'm doing and the question, to what extent those kind of mathematical models relate to stuff that's probably much more interesting for you.

    You know, our brains are clearly not sitting there, you know, putting this in formulas and doing algebra calculations. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Well, there's actually quite a lot about the BA brain. 

    Bryan Bruns: Okay. Yeah. We're using other kinds of heuristics, you know, ways we go about learning and what's enough to convince us, oh I, you know, I guess I need to change how I think about this.

    You know, this learning, this makes a difference. I guess I looks like I really can trust him, you know, from noticing this, or, you know, and so [02:04:00] that's what gets fascinating. And again, it brings together the kind of stuff you're talking about, neuroscience, the social psychology of, okay, how am I assessing out other people?

    You know, the evolutionary thing of, okay, you know, I try this and it doesn't work. Try something else. All these different directions come together. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So on the kind of maybe wider game theory topic, so what, what should I read? Obviously Lin Ostrom's governing the comments, that seems like an obvious choice.

    Bryan Bruns: Yeah. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I dunno mean there's, there's so much, but. 

    Bryan Bruns: Yeah, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I'm just curious. 

    Bryan Bruns: Like for, for evolutionary game theory, I will still send you to Michael Noac and super cooperators. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Mm-hmm. 

    Bryan Bruns: Even though that it's a bit old and he made some bad decisions about accepting funding from Jeffrey Epstein. But in terms of the scientific work, um, he's done a lot of neat stuff and particularly looking at course, okay, when cooperation is [02:05:00] feasible, what does that mean?

    And how can we explore that in ways that are quite rigorous in terms of, you know, simulation agent-based models, but have practical implications of how do I identify other people who are ready to cooperate, or if I can identify other cooperators, how can we work together? And then he had a co-author who made that, especially, you know, for kind of people you're aiming this podcast at, uh, relatively accessible.

    Um, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah. Yeah. That's a good book. 

    Bryan Bruns: Yeah. Yeah, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I like that too. 

    Bryan Bruns: I might send you something later, later. I'm not having off the top. I mean, there's a bunch of stuff in terms of the kind of evolutionary psychology literature, um, survival friendliest, and couple books by Rick or Bregman that are. Not so much Bregman.

    Um, and 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I think I know that one. 

    Bryan Bruns: Oh, okay. Sorry, I'm not gonna be able to pull this off the top of my head. Um, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: no problem. [02:06:00] 

    Bryan Bruns: Uh, but yeah, you know, the research that people are much more willing to cooperate than has sometimes been assumed and also some digging into a bunch of the research of these, some of these classic experiments of setting up a prison and turns out that they're pretty bogus and people rigg things in ways that got the results they thought they were gonna get.

    Yeah. Rather than Stanford 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: prison experiment that's 

    Bryan Bruns: doing science that was open to and replicable and what have you. And again, comes up with a much more positive view of humans and what their capacities are to cooperate, to care about others, to work together and why that may be a huge part of our evolutionary history is developing this capacity to cooperate with language and norms and everything else.

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay, cool. Yeah, it seems like I have a lot more to read. 

    Bryan Bruns: Oh, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: which is, which [02:07:00] is always fun. And also always like, oh, there's so much. Yeah, 

    Bryan Bruns: yeah, yeah. If you want classic game theory, Ken Benmore has, what is it? It's a little book or whatever that's um, yeah. Game theory, a very short introduction. So if you wanna 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Oh, right.

    That's from the, there's like Oxford, very small books one, right? Yeah, 

    Bryan Bruns: yeah, yeah. So in just get a a, a peak or a short introduction to that perspective, that's, uh, a nice place to work and yeah. Nice place to start. Um, the CRO and Partner have a book, um, media at Grand Central from 2013, which is a nice overview of a bunch of relatively recent game theory work, so, 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: okay, cool.

    Yeah, I mean, uh, yeah, I always, I always put the references of the stuff we [02:08:00] discussed in the description of the podcast so people can 

    Bryan Bruns: Okay, good. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Get it there quickly and see search might search everything. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. If anything comes up, you can, you can mail me and then I'll put it in there too.

    Bryan Bruns: Okay, good. 

    Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay, cool.