MINE: How the Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives

The Next Big Idea

Next Big Idea Club

Self-improvement, Arts, Books, Society & Culture, Education

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 2 June 2021

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ownership is simple, right? Something is either yours or it isn’t. Case closed. But who owns the space behind your airplane seat, the results of the DNA you took online, the Netflix password you got from your cousin’s roommate? The jury's still out, according to law professors Michael Heller and James Salzman. That’s because ownership isn’t binary or static: it’s a storytelling exercise, and we rely on just six stories to claim everything we own. In this revelatory conversation, Michael and James explain how those stories work, how you can use them to your advantage, and why they might be key to dismantling income inequality and arresting climate change.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Rufus Griskin and this is the next big idea.
0:10.6	Today by the rules of ownership are just stories we tell ourselves, stories that control
0:16.4	our lives.
0:28.9	Here's one of those stories.
0:30.8	It's about a man named William Meredith who lives outside of Louisville, Kentucky.
0:35.4	William loves his family, cherishes his privacy, and keeps a shotgun handy in case he ever
0:40.6	has to defend either of them, which he did one summer evening back in 2015.
0:47.7	He was in his house mining his own business when his daughters came in from the backyard
0:51.9	and started talking in unison the way kids do.
0:54.6	The dad, they said, there's a drone out there flying over everybody's yard.
1:00.7	William went out to have a look, and sure enough, there was a drone hovering a few hundred
1:05.7	feet away.
1:06.7	You know, I wanted to see if it was going to stay there and it did, and then I reacted.
1:10.2	He went back inside, loaded up his shotgun, and waited for the drone to fly over his fence.
1:16.0	And when it did, William shot it down, an $1800 drone
1:23.8	felled with a dollar's worth of bird shot.
1:26.4	A few minutes later, the drone's owner marched up to William's house shouting, are you the
1:30.9	son of a bitch that shot my drone?
1:33.1	And William, who keeps his go-tie neatly trimmed and a pistol on his hip, told him, if you
1:38.3	cross that sidewalk, it's going to be another shooting.
1:41.4	The guy kept his distance, but he didn't leave.
1:44.4	He called the cops who ended up arresting William for criminal mischief.
	...

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