 All right, everybody. Good to be talking with you all. So I wanted to talk about something that came up a couple of days ago in conversation. And it's basically this, which is what is outside of the patent, but is also the part of what we are proxying for, which is this thing called know-how. And often when you look at it, when you see patent license, you'll see that there's the license of the patent, which is this right not to get sued. And then there's this other somewhat incoate right called know-how, which is, and lawyers can get irritated by this partly because it's not really clear what it is or what body of law gives rise to it as a right, but we know that if you don't have it, then you're missing something. So to me this is a fascinating metaphysical category. And in fact, if anyone else here draws a lot of their ideas from literary theory, there's this idea of the supplement from post-structuralism, which is the thing that is extra to the thing that you want, which is actually intrinsically part of the thing you want. Like whenever you try to describe something and then say, well, that other stuff is like the extra is a supplement, the extra stuff always winds up being the thing that when you're missing it, you're like, oh, damn, we don't actually have the thing anymore. And this is, I think, partly how it works with patents and know-how. So I thought I'd take a quick detour through this conversation that we sort of have had the other day about the difference between your centralized and your decentralized innovation systems. You've got your Bell Labs' and your other maybe your alphabets today of large institutions that allow you to have different divisions of people that are working either in isolation or in concert, but where it's very efficient to aggregate different knowledges across different company divisions. And one of the things that I love about this, and if you know the book, The Idea Factory About Bell Labs, which I recommend to folks, one of my favorite bits in that was about the story of fiber optics and how the aggregation doesn't just work synchronously. At the same time, it works asynchronously. So you can have somebody who does material science research in 1930 and then puts it on the shelf and has a perfectly great career. And then in 1960, somebody was like, hey, whatever happened with that glass you were bending. And then when it's time for the race for fiber optics to happen, they can draw on that in a certain way. And this other book that I totally recommend to people, if you're into the specific story of the fiber optics race to innovate, which is called City of Light by Jeff Hect, goes into incredible detail about the different groups that were racing for fiber optics, which included STL, which is in England, which is run by this guy Charles Cowell, and then Bell Labs, and then Corning up in upstate New York, which is doing just the glass. And part of my, and it's far too much detail to get into, but part of what I take from this is that you had Bell, which was not necessarily the front runner, but which had the ability to aggregate across disciplines in a way that allowed them to get patents. And so Corning got a patent, but then really Bell wound up getting one of the broadest and most useful patents to extract run from this area, even though part of the heroic narrative of this book, City of Light, is that Charles Cowell really got everywhere first. And partly because he was aggregating with groups like Corning and others and the British Post Office, that you had a sort of disaggregated group and it versus an aggregated centralized group competing, and so you had this particular outcome. And that to me is super interesting, especially because the current system that we have now in Silicon Valley is sort of YC or like a multitude of startups, which rise in many, many or most of which fall pretty quickly. And then their IP goes sort of somewhere, but in some ways it's like phantom IP because it's either held by, you either have a company that's defunct, but more likely you have a company that is aqua hired and then the product is shut down. And so then the patent assets go to some larger company that sort of doesn't care or at worst uses them to troll or uses them or sells them off to a troll. And so being about like the life cycle of the patents that get created all these different startups, they are often not very usable. And what's worse than know how that should travel with them really becomes unusable because you don't know how to find these people. And so that was sort of a long windup to get to the thing that I wanted to get to, which is like, what about the know how? Because we have this disaggregated system where know how is getting dispersed and Juan had pointed out the other day, well, if everybody's on GitHub, it's super easy in the software space because you just sort of like get blame somebody or you can just like summon them and we have ways. But then in like biotech where I've worked a little bit in other areas, it's often pretty hard to put signals out there into the world to summon the know how that you know. And it's also hard because it is locked up by different layers of agreements that function in complicated ways. So you might have a person that's like, Stanford professor does a startup, leaves a startup, goes to the Broad Institute, leaves a Broad Institute, goes and works at Google for a few years. And then at different points in their career, they both are under different layers of NDA and then also non sort of non no conflict agreements where they're not supposed to help competitors. Then they have sort of like legacy rights that follow them around based on their obligations to these companies that often don't even exist anymore. And that I think is actually what the reality of it is. So here's just a brief thing that I just pulled this from the internet, but it's like, what is know how? And it's like, it's all of the stuff that's not in the patent, right? So which is sort of interesting because as the patent lawyers in the room know you have like enablement and best mode and like all these things that are encouraging to say like put all the stuff in the patent so that it is a public instruction manual for how to make the invention. Then everybody else knows like, well, all this other stuff. What is the best way to manufacture it? How do you manufacture it cheaply? My favorite of these, I think which is the most fascinating and in my experience the most true is negative information, right? All the things you tried and failed and why they failed, which could be like a gigantic subterranean cost center. And if you can just tell somebody here's the 80 things we tried and here's why we thought they didn't work. Sometimes you were wrong and you don't want to overly discourage people but that trove of negative information is like tremendously valuable and often lives in the head or the inventor's notebook of one or several people. And then this also sort of abuts onto trade secrets which is like all the things you keep secret. So you might like have a particular say needle that's part of a surgical process but the method of milling the needle might be kept secret. So you often hold back some of your like your best material in my experience. And so all of this creates I think this proxy problem which is like how do you find the person who knows and how do you get the person who knows to help you? And if they can't or won't help you because of all these other constraints that now exist how can you find a proxy that is not the patent but is the know-how? Like is there a body of stuff which could be the know-how? Because it should be something that could be turned into substance and something that can be fungible. So for me this is a problem this is a lot of stuff I've just discussed which is like okay you have this in some sense if you look at the patent system as a series of rights to sue it's only useful to the extent that those smoke signals about who's to sue gets you to the know-how because the patent is useful as instructions like I said but you really wanna hire the advisor. This is always in my experience which is like the patent is partly a way to find the advisor that you need to move your thinking forward and the money that you pay the advisor is like trivial compared to the amount that you need to license the patent but the patent is like a very efficient giant record keeping system for all of your inventors which is like a perverse way to think about it because it's like awfully expensive phone directory but it's basically if you're looking for know-how you reverse engineer it out of the patent system. And so that's the challenge is like how can we get more directly at the know-how or if we can use the patent system as metadata to find know-how like what are the ways we can do that and so I obviously don't have solutions to this but my thinking was, I was talking about this last night with Megan and she was like oh that's like maybe it should be an NFT, I don't know about that but I think the idea is like you have a payload and that payload is both like know-how which can be written down or kept embodied in some forms and then also a series of social graph or relationships which has to do with like the inventor and the inventors and who was responsible for what is that you can probably, is that there's probably ways to use blockchain to embody these still sort of intangible substrates on top of the patent system that can get you to know-how much quicker than patent lawsuits and I was sort of joking the other day that like if you really want to find the inventor just like have a billion dollar lawsuit and like some, that'll smoke them out of the woodwork because somebody will pay them $1,000 an hour to say like whatever it is they want them to say but that's not an efficient way to do it so it'd be much better to pay them to actually do some work with you and so I think viewed from this perspective I think I have lots of questions for the more for the folks who are on the technical tokenizing side of things to figure out how can we get it drawing more of a line around this payload of know-how especially because it's a lot of dynamic evolving relationships and get a network that has better signal for finding it and then a mechanism for pricing it because it's usually priced with a patent license like you have a patent license and it's like some of the money is for the patent and some of the money is for know-how which often doesn't expire and so it's a complicated one that goes here so anyway so this is my idea and in my experience it really is the value which is like you wind up with all sorts of perverse situations where the thing you actually want the know-how is very cheap but finding it is very expensive or removing a blocker from being prevented from accessing the know-how is very cumbersome so to all of you who are working on this I throw this out there as a challenge