 As we grasp the victory, there is a chance of an evil tune growing. In principle, the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. Little knowledge is a dangerous thing. You read a few lines, ready to blow up the world, chop heads off, destroy authority. Revolutions are never bloodless. This brief reign of terror will purge the land of all corruption. This Congress refuses to grant any of my proposals on independence, even so much as the courtesy of open the door to God, what in hell are you waiting for? Good afternoon, I'm Michael Malice, and let that be your welcome for the next hour. I am very jazzed for our first show here on Gas Digital. One of the questions I've always been asked about politics and prolifer theory is what is your stance on intellectual property? Things like trademarks, copyrights, so on and so forth. And I never answer those questions because I have no idea about it. And being an author, I clearly have a vested interest in the subject, and just because I have a vested interest doesn't mean I have the correct interest. Just like real estate people might have a vested interest in having the government control their rents doesn't mean they're on the right side of morality. So, I brought here, as my guest, Stefan Kinsella, who is the world's preeminent political philosopher when it comes to anti-intellectual property, which means abolishing trademarks, abolishing copyrights, abolishing, is there a third one? Yeah, trade secret and patent. Yes, so you think none of these things, you're a fellow anarchist, you think none of these things should be protected by law. Of course, whenever people hear about this, they think it's absolutely bonkers and makes no sense, because we've all been taught that piracy is stealing. Yes. And that certainly is where my gut is leading. So, what's the elevator pitch for abolishing intellectual property? Well, I have a vested interest in it, too, because I'm a patent attorney, and so if we abolished it, I wouldn't have a job, although we probably have a phase out period. I'd have a lot of work for 20 years cleaning up all the transitional issues. The elevator pitch idea is that property rights are control over scarce resources. There are property rights that allow us to decide who uses things that we could have conflict over. So, they're conflict avoidance mechanisms. Meaning like if someone has their house as their property, their car or their dog. Their horse, yeah. And so, the property rights says who can own this thing that people could have a fight over otherwise. If we don't want to have fights over it, we want to have property rules. So, that's what property rules are for. There are a response to the fact of scarcity in the world. And patent and copyright, which are the two big ones that are bad, basically come in and say that someone can't compete with you, they can't copy your book. And what that means is the copyright law prevents you from using your own property the way you see fit, right? And patent law prevents you from using your own factory as you see fit. So, it basically gives a control to someone else. It creates scarcity where there is none. Information is what IP tries to protect, patent and copyright law. Information is not a scarce resource. So, any number of people can use the same idea at the same time without conflict. So, you don't need conflict avoidance rules. So, when you try to establish these rules, you necessarily cause conflict. Well, let's see how it applies to my own life personally. I spent eight months writing Dear Reader, my North Korea book. A lot of hard work. You're not going to deny that. Just because I work hard, something doesn't mean I have some kind of right to it necessarily. Because you could work hard and be wasteful and be pointless. I'm sure you're not going to deny I've produced something that is a value. Obviously, people are buying it, so there's a value of it. The point is, so you're saying that I write my book, I put it out, and the next second anyone can take it and copy it, and I'm not going to see a cent for it. Well, first of all, that can happen now, right? Because we have digital technology. People can copy your book right now without your permission. Sure, but I mean it's easy to shoot them down. It's kind of easy. I mean there's a whole, you know, there's the torrents, there's all over the web. Right, but those are closed very frequently by governments. They are, but people can get around it. They're going to increasingly be able to get around it. But hold on, just because someone is... I know I'm begging the question here. Just because it's easy to steal something doesn't mean it's not stealing. That's not relevant. So you use the word they can take it. Now the word take usually refers to a physical thing. Like if someone takes my glasses, I don't have them anymore. And the reason I don't want you to take my glasses is because then I wouldn't have them. I wouldn't be able to use them. If you could reach out and just touch my glasses and have a copy in your hands, it wouldn't really bother me. But it's like... But your glasses aren't really unique, right? They're fungible. There's other glasses that are like that ever in the world. My book is, or anyone's book, is unique. It's a product of someone's creative expression. It is unique. But you see people keep changing the standards for why you should have a copyright or a patent. First it's, I had to put my labor into it. And when you shoot that down by saying, well, you don't really own your labor. Even in physics, if you push against the wall, you're not performing work because you're not moving a mass through a distance, right? You're just doing nothing. You waste your effort on something that is a product no one wants to buy. You've expended labor, but you haven't created any wealth. And by the same token, if you do create wealth by making a product that people want to buy, you've made the world better off, you've made yourself better off, that doesn't necessarily mean you have a property right in the right to receive a stream of income from your customers. You don't own your customers. People say that a new pizza restaurant moves in next door to mine and starts stealing my customers. It's not really stealing, but they misuse this metaphor. They said they take your idea. They're not taking your idea. They're copying your book, let's say. You still have your book. You still have the right to sell your book. So they didn't take anything that you own. And then the response would be, well, they took the profits I could have made. So then you get to the point, well, do you own future potential profits? Because profits is just the money you could have made from potential future customers. But who owns that money? Your potential future customers. You don't own that money. I mean, there's a lot of things that are kind of triggering my mind along the way. The most obvious one where it doesn't apply just to me is, what would be the consequences market-wise if this were put into place? Because there'd be very little incentive for someone to write a book. Well, and we can talk about that, but you've got to realize then now you switch to another thing about incentives. So people think that the purpose of property rights and the purpose of law is to provide the incentives. And of course that leads to all these special interest laws that we have where we say, well, we need to tweak this tax this way or we need to have this subsidy here to incentivize or disincentivize the following. Now, libertarians believe the purpose of property rights and the purpose of law is to do justice to protect people's rights. It's not to incentivize the right things. I don't think that's universally the libertarian perspective on rights at all. It's my libertarian perspective, but I think it's the Rothbardian perspective. I think it's the solid anarcho-capitalist, properitarian perspective. But you just said it was about to resolve disputes and now you're saying it's to provide justice. Those are separate things. I think libertarianism is compatible with consequentialism. That is, you look at the consequences and the reasons for these rules, but it doesn't mean it's to provide incentives in a natural sense. But when you're selling a good on the market or a service, you have to think, how can I make a profit on this good? Because we know from economics profit is in a way unnatural, right? Because profit is a deviation from the natural rate of interest. And as soon as you make a profit, you're going to send a signal through the price system and through your activities to the market and you're going to tell people, hey, this guy is doing something that satisfies consumer welfare. So come in and compete with him, right? So profit is always being pushed down by competition. So profit is an unnatural thing. So you always have to think, how can I make a profit? And once I make it, how am I going to keep making a profit knowing that I'm going to attract competitors? Now that's the case for any line of business, right? What you're doing here or a pizza restaurant or a steel factory or whatever, there are certain types of industries and activities where the concern might be, it's easier for someone to compete with me because what I'm selling is just a book copy and it's easy to copy that or it's like a new tweak to an iPhone design, which is a patentable invention. And my competitor can just easily copy that. That's the idea that it's easy to do all this. Of course, it's not that easy. I can get to it in a second, but people think it's just too easy to compete. So the calculus you go through as an entrepreneur is, well, if I want to spend time writing a novel, when I start selling the novel, someone can just knock me off right away. It's too easy to compete with me. And therefore we need the government to come in and raise the barriers to competition by having monopoly privilege laws, which is what copyright and patent do. So you have libertarians who are in favor of the property rights system because they see using the word monopoly a little unfairly because every, like for example, if I'm selling my home, I have a monopoly on my home, right? But that word monopoly has a negative connotation, especially in a libertarian context. So I think that's kind of not really using that term in a fair way. You could argue that, I mean, of course monopoly just means you have a legally privileged monopoly over a certain industry where you can charge above market prices, right? Which is exactly the argument for copyright, is that you can sell your book for a higher price than you could if you had everyone competing with you. You could sell your iPhone for a higher price than if everyone could copy your design right away. But the reason I don't think it's unfair is if you look back in, first of all, the patent system we have now originated in the 1623 English Act called the Statute of Monopolies. So these were monopoly, this arose from the practice of the king granting monopoly privileges to people. I'm going to give you the right to sell sheepskin in this town. That has nothing to do with innovation. They would give someone one of these patent means open. So it was an open grant to everyone in the world saying, no one can do this except for this guy, right? Pirates had that, Sir Francis Drake had that. They had the right to be the only ones who could do various things and sometimes it would be an inventor. When this practice got out of hand, the parliament limited it with the Statute of Monopoly 1623 and they limited it only to inventions. So it came out of the word monopoly was used by the people who promoted it in the beginning. Thomas Jefferson, so the U.S. Constitution in 1789 has a provision which allows the Congress to pass patent and copyright law, okay? Jefferson was corresponding with Madison during the drafting of the Bill of Rights in 1790 or so and he proposed an article, it would have been one of the Bill of Rights, saying that the monopolies that Congress can grant for patent and copyright should be limited to X years and it was ignored, it wasn't done. I wish it had been done because otherwise copyright was around 14 years in the beginning and now it's over 100. But the point is even Jefferson was using the word monopoly in the beginning. But again, I feel using a word that has a negative connotation that did not have a negative connotation at the time. Oh, I think monopolies did have a negative connotation. So what happened was the free market economists in the 1800s started getting alarmed at this fairly new institutionalized practice of granting patents, like in the U.S. and then in Europe, which was really institutionalized around the time of the Constitution in America. And so they started having an uprising against this practice of granting monopoly privileges, they called it. And so the response to the entrenched, by the entrenched interest at the time, they started saying, it's not a monopoly privilege, it's a, what do you call it? It's a property right. And they said, well it doesn't look like a property right. They said, well it's an intellectual property right, because it comes from your brain. So the term intellectual property was an invention of the people, the entrenched interest defending this, what had been called a monopoly privilege quite before. So it's a euphemism. It is, it's definitely, yeah. And you even have some IP advocates, some libertarians even, a lot of objectives, like Adam Mossoff and Richard Epstein, they'll say things like, it's a natural right. It's like, well, why does it expire in X years? Right, right. You know, why does it have to be a creature of legislation? Because these things would not exist without legislation, unlike other natural property rights we have, which are looked at. That's not necessarily true, because if you had some kind of anarchist system, you would very easily be able to have a covenant where no one's allowed to do this within the community. You could argue that, but I would argue that's just a contract in that case. Sure. It's not a general, I mean, it's a little bit into the legal weeds, but in the law we have the term, in rem and in personum, right? It's a property that's good against the world. So you own your car or your house against someone even in France, even though it's protected by the New York legal system or the American legal system. But if you own a right to a property right, I'm sorry, a patent or a copyright, it's only protected within that jurisdiction. Someone could be doing the same invention or copying your book in another country without you even knowing it and they're not violating your property rights. They're not infringing on it at all. You don't even know they're doing it. One of the issues in the news is that China violates our IP all the time and the government is limited about it. Technically that's legally incorrect. They don't violate it. Well, okay, so there's two aspects to it. There are treaties that China is party to and they don't enforce them 100%. Of course, neither do we. We don't stop all infringement. China is a little bit more lax about allowing counterfeiting to go on. So in that sense, they're allowing some of their citizens to violate copyright, which is Chinese copyright law and it's not a violation. But I think what Trump is talking about is cases that are not covered by Chinese law. So they're just saying that they're copying American ideas, which in the free market we call competition or learning from each other. Okay, so these patents and monopolies came out of what's the Britain and the US, right? Yeah, and Europe had aversion to it. What I'm saying is these were actually the same places where innovation reached its peak. Correct. So what do you think is going to face harmful to innovation? Well, there's, well, that's another argument that advocates use. They'll say that, well, look at the rise of the West and that we had the copyright and patent law and so they're making the correlation causation mistake because you could make any number of claims. You could say imperialism or trade barriers or tariffs or causes too because we've had all those. Or you could, a war every 10 years Congress in 1789 puts in the copyright and patent clause because we had this traditional sort of growing use of copyright and patent from the British system. They gave Congress the power to do it because they figured we might need to do it. They said it was to encourage the promotion of creative works, right? So it would have a specifically utilitarian motive in mind, right? They would do this. We've had 200 plus years since then to prove it. And time and time again over the last, say, seven or so decades Congress has commissioned a study for its Michael up some great economists. They'll come in and do a study. They can never show that it encourages or incentivizes, let's say the case of patents that incentivizes innovation. Almost every study you see, they throw their hands up they say it's a great idea to have all companies making a new smartphone or something like that or the big companies acquire all the patents. But I don't understand how if I'm a drug company, I'm sure this is a question you get all the time. If I'm a drug company and it obviously creating a new drug is a huge tedious process and very labor is very technical. The idea that I'm putting in seven years of work with these very expensive scientists and all this experimenting and then on that, but you have to first step back in the fundamental way to look at it, I think is the function of the government to make sure that some dreamt up possible industry or product can be can be successfully made is that the job of government to lower the costs of competition that someone might face, right? Because even if the government comes in and starts subsidizing the pharmaceutical companies, there's still going to be some day they're not going to make some drugs. So there's always some drugs on the margin. And the other thing, if you look historically, a lot of European countries, which were the leaders in pharmaceutical like Italy and Switzerland didn't have patents at all in pharmaceuticals for like over 50 or 100 years and they were still some of the leaders in these areas. So there's empirical evidence. So how do those companies come together? Right. You're the, you invent, you discovered this drug. I'm going to undercut you at, you know, whatever the next day. Why wouldn't I, I mean, it just seems like the profits are going to be much, much lower. Let me give a little example. Have you ever seen in a drug store that you have Tylenol sitting next to bargain brand or CVS, acetaminophen. And there is about $5 versus $2. Okay. So that's part of it. Sure. So people will pay more for brand name and reputation. So that's part of it. So the idea that just because someone can copy your formula right away doesn't mean that you're instantly going to have equal competition. The other thing is you have to realize that we have this FDA process in the U.S. which slows down the rate of innovation greatly as to the cost. Which slows down the development of drugs, hampers them. Plus these companies are taxed out the wazoo, employment taxes and there's inflation, there's tariffs, minimum wage. These are the things that if you've got these things out of the way would reduce their cost. But so the federal government comes in and hampers the pharmaceutical innovators. And then to make up for that it gives them a patent and a helium balloon or the other and it's like it's supposed to bounce out. And not only that, as part of the FDA process during this examination process, it takes seven or eight years, a long time. These companies have to reveal their secrets. They're made public documents. So by the time they finally get their approval, let's say it's five years later, all their competitors, they've been knowing for five years what the foreign law was going to be. So if you were to go to the regulatory agency, you would have a longer natural sort of monopoly to sell your product before people could compete. So there's something parallel here with which people might not know about which is kosher food. So the FDA is what guarantees that the food you're eating or drugs is safe, right? However, under Jewish law the food has to be held to a much higher standard. It's a biblical standard. They still have these certifying companies, which would hold the drug companies to a higher standard. And at the same time, they would allow those drug companies to keep their formula secret so that you would not be able to compete. Because then if you want to deconstruct that drug, that's still going to have a huge startup cost anyway. So effectively it will keep the cost high enough that they would make a profit under this model, correct? Absolutely. It's a genes book against intellectual monopoly. It's an empirical attack on all the arguments for IP. And it's online at against monopoly.org. They just go through systematically all the myths about why we need eye patent. And they went into this as economists assuming they were going to show why patent and copyright work. And they came up with empirical studies showing all the myths so that's one of the... But my point is even if you believe that we do need patents for the pharmaceutical industry, let's have it for the pharmaceutical industry. But right now we have it for software, we have it for mouse traps, we have it for the way your iPhone curves around the outside corners. We have it for so many things which is trivial and then you have the patent trolls arise. Look, you also have perverse 12, 15 years ago when... Yes, sir. And there's a drug called Cipro which is one of the cures for this. And there was only one company that had the U.S. patent on that and the FDA regulatory approval for that. And they didn't have enough to go around because they didn't anticipate this great need for it and no one else could come in and compete and make it because of the patent and the FDA and so I think it's the Commerce Department, whichever department has control over this, FTC I believe threatened to do what the federal government has the right to do which is to grant a compulsory license because technically these are... So technically patents are grants by the federal government and the government can take them away because they grant them. It's just a monopoly privilege which the Supreme Court just recognized by the way about two property rights. These are just federal grants of privilege. And I was glad to see the Supreme Court recognize that. Do you remember the vote? Was it 5-4? I think it was higher than that. It was like 6-3. So it was really good. In any case, a compulsory license is the federal government has the right to grant a license to some third parties without them having to get permission from the patent holder. The government can grant it instead. Now they have a statutory scheme where then they'll pay a fair market. It's like taking laws you're supposed to give fair market value. So they'll make the guy pay royalty back to the patent holder but they can't stop it. So they threaten to do that. They threaten to do that right. You earn back your Social Security like 20 months or something crazy and anything after that is just absolutely money that you would not pay into the system. I don't know that number but it sounds plausible. Speaking of the formula, there was a moment where you had an interview with Robert Wenzell which you're going to play after right now where let's play the clip. Let's start with the formula that's just precise. You know a formula, right? You are aware of a formula. It's in your head. I'm not aware of the formula. I know the formula. Yeah, you know it but you don't have it. You know it. It's knowledge. I certainly do have it. Does it have a location? Really? Is location necessary for scarcity? I have the formula and nobody will complain. I thought it was on the paper. I put it there also but that's just two places. The same information in two places? Yeah. Well, that's amazing. Maybe we could put it in a million places. Yeah, but it's not there now. So is it scarce or not when it's just in two places? Well, information is not scarce. So who else has it besides me then if it's not scarce? Who else can use it, function? Look it. Who in the world besides me can act on that if I'm the only one that has a formula? No one, only you. So is it scarce or not scarce? Is it super abundant everywhere? It's not a scarce resource. It's not a scarce means of action. It's not scarce? Who else has it, Stefan? What? No one has it. Right. It's not? What's the formula, Stefan? So what was going through your head when he's just yelling at you that he's got you by the balls and what's the formula? I mean, over time I've learned to handle interviews and debates but different ways, right? That was one of two or three I did that kind of got out of hand. It was crazy, but it was so crazy. It was almost funny. My friend Jesse said, described it as you were trolling yourself. But he was a guy that you would think was a fellow traveler because he's sort of a Rothbardian, Mazzizian, Libertarian. But he started going bonkers when Jeff Tucker and I then at the Mises Institute were kept attacking intellectual property and he started going after us and so he decided to have a debate and he brings up some point about he's got a formula for making money off of Google ads or something like that and he said, tell me what the formula is and he said, so, aha! That's valid. Wait, let's go back to for me personally, if you're saying do you think it's, since Libertarians regard monopoly as immoral, right? And using the government to get special privileges immoral, right? Is it immoral for me to get profits from Kindle sales in my book? Absolutely not. Let me look, let me, I didn't expect such a hostile interview. Hostile? No, I'm joking. The dog was 11. You are welcome. No, so here's, let me give one example that might explain this. Imagine that there's no copyright, okay? And you're J.K. Rowling, right? The author of Harry Potter and she was just some welfare mom writing her novels on the subway every day, something like that in London. And so she finally writes Harry Potter number one for 99 cents on Kindle. And all of a sudden she's got a million, 10 million fans around the world. She's like, oh, this is a runaway hit. And she's got, we know she had six other books in her head, right? So let's say she writes book number two, but she says she writes a note to her fans. I've got another book ready to go as soon as I get $5 subscription commitments from everyone. Which is kind of what I did with the Kickstarter five book. Exactly. And that, that's emerged to Kickstarter whatever. So she does that 10 million people give her $5, she's got $50 million. I mean, that's not little money. Then now in a world without copyright and then she could do that seven more times, right? So we're talking she's half a half a billionaire already just even with people knocking your book off. And then let's say someone wants to make a movie. Well, three companies can start making a movie on the same year we'll get more of her fans come see the movie. So we'll give her 10% of the profits, right? And so she could make money that way. So let me build on this because one of the things that is clearly government at its worst is character law, which is like Superman was invented in like 1935 by Simon Schuster DC Comics, I think has the copyright and the copyright was supposed to expire after like 75 years after the characters created. Now you can have pop culture. Now you have these huge corporations who have a lot of money invested in Superman, Spider-Man, Batman, and so on and so forth and they lobby Congress and every year Congress extends this over and over. Mickey Mouse should have been a long time ago copyright law and the point similar to what you were just making if these characters were in public domain after 75 years or 50 years, you would have three Superman movies passed. I know, but maybe one government would have been made. That's fair. I've actually got a bunch of blog posts about various comic book trademark and copyright battles, which are crazy. You probably know some of them but Captain Marvel from DC who people erroneously call Shazam because he would say Shazam to invoke his powers but there was a gap when he was born so back in the 40s they invented Captain Marvel as a competitive Superman. He's the guy with the red clothes and the lightning bolt and he's a kid Billy Batson and he says the word Shazam, he gets the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the power of Atlas, the something of Zeus, invulnerability of Achilles and speed of Mercury, right? And then there was Mary Marvel, his sister and then there was this crippled boy, Freddie Freeman and what's fascinating is that makes him one of the few characters who can't say his own name because when he says Shazam he turns back when he says Captain Marvel he turns back to Freddie Freeman. This character at one point was more popular than Superman and they were being published weekly Arch enemies Dr. Savanna whatever Mr. Mind who's this evil worm might be my favorite comic book super villain of all time. Black Adam too, right? Black Adam, yeah, which is I changed your name to Black Adam and now I banish you it's like I don't think that's how names work anyway and Black Adam is going to be played by, is it The Rock? I think The Rock is going to be playing him in the upcoming Shazam movie. So that was Fawcett comics F-A-W-C-E-T-T. Fawcett went out of business, DC bought the rights to all the Fawcett characters in the interim. But I believe they went out of business because of a suit which in a sense it was but it's not literally the same character is inspired by. Ripoff means stealing but it's as a copy or inspiration. It's clearly inspired by it. No one would confuse the two. There's no confusion. In the interim Marvel starts publishing a character named Captain Marvel. Marvel I think at first, right? It may have been. Or they changed Marvel later. And because Marvel had that book's Captain Marvel, DC could use the character. But they couldn't call the comic book itself Captain Marvel comics. They called the comic book Shazam and now I think they even call the character Shazam to get rid of all these comics. Yeah, there's a movie coming up. I think they're calling it Shazam. They call him Shazam, I believe. I believe. But that's just one example. There's other examples. There's another example. Every two years or something like that. Because even these characters no one cares about, they don't want to lose the copyright on them. Yeah, I've read that too. And then there's some arcane issue with Super Boy. So this is what's fascinating. Okay, so Superman was created in 1935. In 1950s, they started creating in more fun comics, number 101, they started having Super Boy, the adventures of Superman when he was a boy. And he later joined the Legion of Super Heroes and he had his own complete different world. He had Lana Lang as his girlfriend. Pete Ross was his best buddy. He had Beppo the super monkey. His parents were living on a farm in Kansas, a small village and so on and so forth. And they sued the creators of Simon and Schuster because they said Super Boy is a different character from Superman. And the argument for that can easily be made because conceptually, even though it's the same person, like Eisenhower in World War II is a very different person than Eisenhower as the president. He's a different character in some versions of the comic. He's actually not the same. No, he's literally the same because then they had multiple earths so there's different parallel universes. The whole point is he grows up to be Superman. Then there was a lawsuit, so for a long time DC couldn't reprint comic books that had Super Boy in them but they could print new issues with a different version of a Super Boy character. And now I think there's like six versions of Super Boy. Well, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there was this complicated thing that Marvel licensed some of its characters to different companies like Sony has one and Warner Brothers has another. So that's why it took a while for Spider-Man to be incorporated into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And it's one reason my son even knows a lot but that's because he's read more than me but the inhumans are rising and the mutants are going down because the mutants were licensed to one company and the inhumans weren't. So in the comics the inhumans are being played up and there's more inhumans being created all the time than inhumans, right? It's the same idea but they're trying to get around one of these licensing agreements and of course none of this would exist without copyright. This isn't easy, look, in my view if you understand that just the studies on it and how patent has to limit innovation I really believe that patent law is one of the worst things the government does and probably imposes damage to the human race on the order of a trillion dollars a year in terms of lost wealth because of lost innovation and of course that's lost lives and lost, we might have been living in a justice world by now if we hadn't been hampering innovation the last 200 centuries. Well, I do have a car that turns into a briefcase. Okay, good. What's the formula? It's the formula, Stefan, gotcha by the balls. Copyright law I think does less tangible damage but it's even worse in a way because it lasts a lot longer it lasts over 100 years now in most cases. Life of the author plus like 70 years and it also gives the government an excuse to limit freedom on the internet in the name of stopping piracy and it also heavily distorts culture what we're talking about is an example of that it heavily distorts culture I mean you were asking earlier how would someone do this why would someone do that? Look there's industries that are not that protected by copyright or patent like the perfume ministry or the fashion industry. I know actually a friend of mine was a project a acquaintance of mine was a project runway winner and she went with Tim Gunn to Lobby Congress and copyright applied to clothing and I'm like this is not only is this just completely insane on its face but how you would apply this when the whole point of fashion is to draw inspiration from other aspects of fashion is bizarre. Well not only that the high fashion industry benefits from knockoffs because you know a year later the high fashion stuff that's from Chanel and these guys which is extremely expensive starts appearing at Walmart and you know a target things like that. So you're a devil worse product fan? Sure. Well you know she gives the whole speech about how innovation happens. Yes, about the colors and you don't realize how it permeates through culture but then you know because people can go buy for 30 bucks off the rack somewhere the people with money they want something new to show that they have status and so the fashion industry can pay their producers to come up with a new thing for the next season. It helps so it doesn't hurt them at all to be knocked off but there's one funny thing is that there's no copywriter patent exactly on fashion but there is trademark and so I believe the reason where like a Louis Vuitton bag or Chanel bag they have the big C symbol or the Gucci symbol or the Louis Vuitton logo all over their purses which is kind of weird if you think about it. If you buy a Mercedes car you don't see the Mercedes emblem all over the car. You don't see any signs into trademark. Well I thought the whole point of that you know seriousness is that if you're spending spending this much money in a bag those kind of people tend to be ostentatious and you want to make sure I want to make sure other people know that I have a Louis Vuitton bag. Yeah so they're going to have the logo on it but it doesn't have to be plastered all over so much. They do it so that they can stop trademark and so then of course you'll have government officials go down to the docks in Turkey and raid all these things. So in your world the model for book publishing would be the publishing houses basically go away and Kickstarter would be the model for how books are produced. It's hard to predict. I think something would change. I think it would go more like that and it's hard to imagine what would have happened 50 years ago before we had the technology and the internet that we have now that makes that more conceivable. Because let me argue for your play angels advocate I guess which is what I'm agreeing with the person I'm talking to my agent sends it to an agent at each house that agent looks at it says you know what I want to produce this book he goes to his marketing team whatever the team is called they run the numbers and they say this based on their projection of future sales they say okay we're going to offer him $200,000 for this book and hopefully more than one person is interested more than one house is interested and you have a bidding war and they go back to my agent. Now what they're basically doing is what a Kickstarter would do. They're trying to use the tea leaves to say okay this is what we think we can make a safe investment whereas here it's like I'm asking individuals to actually make that investment and I don't have to guess because as long as I have enough of an audience to promote my Kickstarter or whatever the program is I will immediately have that cash up front and I will have and this is one of the reasons I did my Kickstarter for my book on North Korea because the book was so expensive it's going to work so I needed to know that there was enough of an audience to be able to produce it and at the same time I'm talking myself into your idea people will want to contribute to a Kickstarter as opposed to editors because you want to be the one who's like I was there first I was the one who saw something special in this project and you have bragging rights with your friends which sounds like a joke but it's not because we all like to be the one who sees the next trend and is actually the one that you know not only that you can make more I think per sale as an author if you go more direct like that I mean yes that's 100% true and the way I look at it I published several books all nonfiction so far you know we all have that novel in us right but I've got a bunch they're on my hard drive but most most authors of nonfiction don't make much money they're not doing it for money either they're doing it for reputation or to get an idea out there they break even off that your advance right has been earned right and for fiction because let me just explain to the readers an advance is short for advance on sales yes so if you are let's suppose earning by your contract with the publisher a dollar per copy and you got a $200,000 advance the first 200,000 copies that are sold you're not up to that point you're not getting anything which means they're expecting so very few books reach the point of making money right they make it from concerts that they're making I mean you got the big stars they used to make a lot of money but a lot of people don't make much money if you remember Prince had a sleeve shaved into his beard for a while because he had been locked into this the way I look at it was the printing press I thought it's because he was talking to Kanye I don't know I don't think there's a time overlap there with the church the government they control what could be printed they control dissemination of ideas to the people the printing press emerges the government the church and the government freak out so they give a monopoly like in England to the stationers company it's for like a hundred years they have monopoly over printing so if you're an author you got to go through them you're not doing it for money but they could control what you're going to say what the people get to read etc. the statue of Anne in 1709 which is where copyright comes from so the statue of Anne gave a copyright to the authors instead of to the publishing house but as a practical matter authors still had to go back to the publishing companies you couldn't publish a book on your own in 1710 right so you had to go to the publishing companies so this model arose where the publishing companies had the control over artists and the same thing happened later with musicians and that's until the internet broke the monopoly and it was supported by copyright the whole time and it really wasn't for the benefit of most artists or most authors so I do think the model would be totally different now I do agree that it's harder to make a profit selling a book if people can knock you off more easily but that's really because of technology not because of lack of copyright law yeah copyright law can slow down a little bit piracy but it's going to happen anyway because he went after me on Twitter and said I wasn't funny and I should stick to doing what I like and apparently that's staying at a jail Martin Screlly no I do first of all do you think he deserves to be in jail I don't think he's in jail for the patent issue I didn't follow the other issue with the jail for sound like some kind of fraud on investors or something but a lot of times that's legal double talking they just want to lynch somebody explain the Martin Screlly story and how this would apply in your but what he was infamous for was he bought the patent rights to some AIDS drug life-saving it was okay you know some life-saving drug and where only I think only one company had the patent to or it gets complicated I actually don't know if that was a patent case it might have been a case where the drug was patented but then the patent expired but then the owner of that patent had the maintaining FDA license like a patent license sometimes okay it was one or the other I believe he just bought the FDA rights okay and using those FDA rights which gives you the right to sell something or whatever the free market price will bear he realized I'm the only manufacturer he raised the price by like 10 thousand percent or something right and everyone raised a ruckus about it so I mean to me he didn't do anything wrong he's usually it that's like criticizing someone who gets checked I mean you're just feeding at the trough so you're saying you can't don't hate the player hate the game yeah I think look if you could expect people to be moral and to not take advantage of government advantages like this then we wouldn't have any reason to oppose the law in the first place like the government passed a welfare law and no one would take it I wouldn't care from what I remember though he was trying to make the case that by raising the price he's just as simple as rent sneaking he had a monopoly he exploited it he might have been clearing the market he might have been legitimately realizing that given the fact that I have a monopoly I'm the only seller it's being priced too low and most of those sales are being done via insurance companies which is distorted by the government healthcare system in the first place so this is all intertwined with the government almost every problem you can have is a layer of regulatory controls a monopoly privilege in terms of patents to fix the problem I mean this is what means is called the problem of government intervention is that controls breed controls once you have one control it causes problems people try to get around it you have to have more regulations to stop the people from evading taxes are getting around this okay so we got a couple more things that I want to cover before we wrap there and I brought a toy helicopter yes and I gave it to Hans Hermann Hoppe and we took a picture together and he was very delighted yeah and there's this got some controversy online yeah because first of all people thought well Hans Hermann Hoppe doesn't know what this is a reference to right and I want I haven't spoken about this yet and I'm telling everyone now first of all he most sure did because Hans Hermann Hoppe handed the helicopter I go this way so what the references for people who are not we're not in the know and I talk about this in my forthcoming book in the same way that Che Guevara for the left is this symbol that has been divorced from the reality he's a symbol of hope and you know fighting oppression and all this other stuff even though he's really just a horrible murderist villain in Chile when Pinochet had a military coup and was at 74 starting to implement all their communist ideas and the thing with the commies is it's not just that they start taking your property it's that they start having the secret police and start killing people arbitrarily and you have all these sorts of genocides which are almost I think which are actually inevitable and universal so Pinochet had a military coup he killed I think like 400 people some small number and he was in Chicago and he had free market in the authoritarian context but what he was most famous for humorously on such on the internet is he took a bunch of these commies up in helicopters and threw them into the ocean so there's a little meme that says you can run you can't run you can't hide you will get a helicopter ride and very often you know Hans Herman Hoppe in his book at one point refers to when you have these private commies you become Hoppe flying these helicopters and throwing communists into the ocean so I took a photo with Hoppe with the helicopter gave it to him as a present then later you you know took a photo with him with the helicopter and huge meltdown on the internet yeah and let's just be clear so Hans had nothing to do with the memes right there there's a couple of meme sites on Facebook where people think it's funny or they they're being so reprehensibly egregious I'll just read quote retweet it with a helicopter about you yeah it's become a meme right and Hans is aware of the meme because he reads the internet but I don't he had nothing to do with it so when you gave him the helicopter I think he thought it was funny oh yeah he left he saw me you say look at this picture and then I was with Hans later Hoppe later that night and I said it's like look we libertarians still hate communists and you know I'm not saying we should be Pinochet throwing people out of a helicopter but it's someone made a meme and it was kind of funny it's called having a sense of humor I got into it with a prominent libertarian whose name I won't mention who like myself is Jewish and I said okay you're Jewish he's like yeah I'm like do you know any Holocaust jokes and he's like are you fine with that he's like yeah and he's like but I'm not fine with these helicopter jokes because the Nazis are all dead but this is something that's going on now so it's like wait a minute the bigger concern to America isn't the neo-nazis it's the Pinochet people like where are these helicopters I mean if anything the libertarians are the ones who are scared the black government helicopters to begin with and the whole you know Alex Jones crew yeah no I totally I mean if someone just says hey you're a fascist and I've been advocating against all forms of socialism my whole life what are you supposed to say I mean quote me find something I did well you took a picture with a plastic helicopter which is the universal simple effect it's not the swastika it's a helicopter yeah which I got I mean I think I got the I asked you where you got it from because I wanted to came out yeah so I went to came out and I got like this you threw out the hundred army helicopters and threw away yeah and I just had one little helicopter that we give those those toys to children who would need I mean I guess they're going to boycott k-mort now for selling helicopters so we're wrapping running out of time but there's something I want to talk about on your personal level we were getting ready to do the show I was DMing with you and you just had cancer yeah so what I find fascinating is this is something that a lot of people are going to go through at some point in their life yeah and just the pathos of it like how did you find out and like your dad yeah married I mean this is just let's talk through it so I think the more people talk about things like this the easier it is for people who are going to hear that word they're not going to have that meltdown although they will have the meltdown I'm sure well I can quickly summarize you don't have to be quick just so okay so about two years ago I had another health issue which scared me but then I kind of got over it and so now this time my doctor says that other issue life-threatening or possibly okay yes but that's fine now you're transitioning going from one to the other yeah I just had my you know when you turn 50 you're supposed to take your colonoscopy right as a man or a woman and it was like let's have colon cancer now I mean whatever the next thing is I'm a guest of that phase of life where things are happening right but my point is having this first scare it made me so you know if you do your annual physicals your blood work comes in and you know you see how much your cholesterol is and your doctor fusses at you and all that you're from Louisiana yeah so you're gonna have a high cholesterol yeah carfish has a lot of cholesterol in it we especially suck the heads yeah a lot of fat in there but should I say is that a myth isn't eating fat that does not necessarily base your cholesterol yeah it probably doesn't come from that although here's shrimp has a lot but I don't know if the cholesterol comes from eating right right just like fat being fat doesn't come from eating fat right so I don't know doctors still say that though right yeah cut down on your cholesterol intake I'm like okay so should I switch to a Louisiana accent oh please no I'm serious come on let's do a little bit well you go down to the bayou much yeah you go piece of tails of them crawfish and stuck them heads oh my god that's so racist anyway I've tried all my life to watch that accent but I didn't know when I have a when I have a Miller lighter you know it comes out the red stripe yeah red stripe yeah now so my PSA levels is one of the blood tests and that's your prostate specific antigen that's a number that is some antigen produced by your prostate is which is a thing men have down around your urethra right which and as you get older it gets bigger and so the PSA level goes up naturally over time but if it goes up too far it's a warning sign that you might have prostate cancer which is fairly common yeah and a lot of men die with prostate cancer which I've learned in the last but they don't die from it okay so it's fairly common as you get older like if you find out you have prostate cancer when you're 75 or 80 they might tell you well unless it's aggressively growing just oh so this is one of those so this is actually in terms of cancers to have this is one of the good ones it's not going to like not like pancreatic with a month later you're gone if you get it when you know it's not it's not usually fast growing is my understanding yeah I think it can be in some cases but if you're younger like me in my early 50s and you get it it's more of a concern because it could grow over time and finally you can spread to the lymph nodes in your pelvis and get bone cancer and all it's it's something you want to watch or do something about and the typical procedure is what's called a radical prostatectomy they go in and they remove the prostate and everything's got to be radical with you my god can you be moderate can you be moderate about one thing I actually didn't do that I guess was anti-radical in this case and it's it's a routine procedure but it's fairly horrendous in its complications you can be impotent and incontinent for life oh wow and it's a pretty high percentage of it if my understanding although good doctors say that the risk is pretty low but it's pretty bad even in even the best case you have to have a catheter for like four to six weeks for your regrowth it's pretty horrendous but they can cure it okay so it's sort of the breast cancer for for men except of course it doesn't get the attention of breast cancer does right because we're just guys right we're supposed to be cold-minded and dire and we're gonna yeah we're gonna have the lower naturalized than anyway yeah to some cost so I found out about this new procedure fairly new it's been around I don't know wait so you how did you get diagnosed so so my my urologist said go do a go do a prostate biopsy wait was he was he saying he was worried about something the PSA levels high so he said you might have prostate cancer so I'm sorry you're going so fast okay to hear a medical professional tell you to your face you might have prostate cancer well yes what was your emotional response to that well I thought it was he said there's a low chance so okay so at the time I was like so I said I'll get the radical I'll get I'll get the prostate biopsy which is they knock you out they go up your rectum and they they poke a needle a dozen or so times it's like a core sample and they take a bunch of core samples and then they analyze them and they see if any of them are are are cancerous okay so you were you still were you worried at this point no okay but then he called me one day did you tell your wife yes you took me because they have to knock you out I mean what was her reaction just routine routine routine follow-up of when your PSA goes up you go okay so she wasn't did you tell your son yeah okay yeah but then the results of the biopsy came back how much longer maybe four or five days okay were you like antsy the whole time no okay see okay you're cool as a cucumber yes okay because I didn't know anything but prostate cancer at the time anyway but I think I still wouldn't have been too worried okay because because of my first scare I'm just not that worried anymore okay so he called me like on a Friday and he said look two of the samples came back cancerous you have a Gleason scores he did this over the phone yeah he's like he said you're going to have to come see me next week and we're going to talk about options but but it's just weird just over the phone he found out on Friday he called me on Friday so I guess that would be better than be like call us come in next week I can't tell you why well I think they have a procedure for dealing he said here's a book 101 questions on prostate cancer yeah he said go get this book and read it before you come see me I think he was trying to make his I like he's like I have to see you next week I can't tell you why this hasn't for no complete unrelated reason read this book about so you have cancer and are going to die well it's kind of funny he was like look I don't be too worried about it try to have a good weekend said I'm not worried you really worried no not really are you an atheist yeah okay I don't think that's why I'm just just but so I read the book and the book mentioned all these various procedures which are all horrific they put radioactive splinters or seeds into your thing and he said and but they didn't mention this laser thing which I'll tell you about in a second because it was fairly new so I never would have anyway so I saw the guy the next week and we talked and he gave me options right and he and you still weren't upset well I started getting upset when I read the book and I realized what the what like I realized that you could probably take it out with this process so you weren't scared for your life though at any point no because I figured I could at the worst case get the surgery okay take it out okay but I was very worried about the going through the surgery and the possible consequence sure I mean you don't want to be incontinent for life of course and so then it was time to have my colonoscopy which I'd put off for a couple years because I had that other problem sure so I asked my you know they go up your rectum again for that right and I asked my my my my you're all I said can I have my colonoscopy or do I have to wait a while he says now you can have it I'm like all right so let's see my colonoscopy my my GNI doctor for the colonoscopy which came out fine by the way so but when I was in his office I was leaving and he shares a reception room with another doctor and it's called prostate laser prostate laser center I'm like what the hell is that so I went to the receptionist and she gave me a brochure and I went home and read it does it give you like electric sperm no anyway and so I watched his website I had a meeting with him and I learned about it and what what there's about four or five doctors in the U.S. that do this thing is called laser prostate laser surgery and what they do is you instead of getting a prostate biopsy blood is impoverished is your prostate that you get an MRI in a really advanced MRI machine is called a 3T there's only so many around they have high resolution right and the MRI looks at your prostate and they can see the cancer and they can see where it is and what the shape is and how many lesions there are things like that so I did that and I met this guy and I decided to do that what they do is if you're a candidate which I was you go into an MRI machine for almost three hours and they put a probe up you and there's a laser on the tip and they use the MRI to position the laser exactly next to the lesion and then they turn it on and they burn it on the inside is it going through your you read through or through your colon no they go through your rectum right okay just a few inches up to the prostate and they stick it's just a probe about the size of your finger and there's a little hole in the middle or a little cannular thing it's very small. Are you awake while this happening? You're awake because it's complicated but I was awake but I was today I was kind of it wasn't too horrible it was painful because they have to poke you about a dozen times to find the right spot right and when they do that they burn it and for about five minutes but then they do that about eight times so they get. Can you smell the burn? No it's interior. I mean the smoke's coming out. No there's no smoke it's a laser it's a laser. I don't know about lasers in the rectum. Okay so you know it's a fiber optic it's a fiber optic and it's a bright light it's about 15 watt light at the end it's like the little burning air is shaped like a grape. Okay okay. But it's all on the inside of your body. You can feel it though I didn't know you had nerves up in there but you do and I was like I was starting to burn. He says 30 more seconds and then he'd do it again. Right. But they're doing this with the MRI on live it's bizarre and so at the end you go meet him and he shows you here's the picture here's before and after here was your cancer and now it's my urologist is skeptical because he says oh they don't have long-term data because they've only been doing this five years. Wow. And it's not covered by insurance it's extremely expensive. I mean is it six figures? Five. But it's up there you know. Wow. But it's worth it to me to avoid a lifetime of you know whatever. Of course. But anyway so you know so that's what I went so as far as I can tell I'm cancer free and I walked out the same day. Walked or limped? Well I walked. I mean if you've got burned up your butt I mean it's not that bad. Really? No I had a catheter for a couple days now that's not fun. But it's not as bad as you think. You know what sounding is? Yes. So I was talking to my yes I figured out I found out what sounding is I could not believe it. Some people do this for fun. Yes. I had to learn this on New Year's Day because this is what happens when you have gay friends and they teach you terms that you're not supposed to know. Well okay so since you brought it up you had the surgery in the afternoon and so usually anyway it was only two days and then I'm back to normal. How wide is a catheter? It's like a pen? Oh no. There are big ones they're different sizes but I'd say it's about the size of the urine stream. Okay. Okay maybe like the lead in a pencil? Bigger? No about the size of your urine. I'd say maybe not quarter of an inch but maybe an eighth of an inch. Okay. Maybe a little bit more than an eighth of an inch. I was surprised do we want to get graphic? Yes we do. You are welcome. It doesn't hurt that much to go in for the male but when they go so they go through the penis and then they have to go into the bladder and there's what they call a sphincter that stops your blood. Yeah yeah yeah. Go through the sphincter can hurt if you tighten up so that part hurts it's not as terrible as it sounds really. Yeah. Although I some people wouldn't do it for fun. They actually put like this look at a toothpaste of like super glue but it's really this numbing Benzacanus. I don't know what the hell it is and they squirt that into you and it numbs you up and that doesn't hurt. I was surprised it didn't hurt. Wait but are you confident during these couple of days when you have it in or you're just peeing automatically not thinking about it? You have a bag strapped to your leg attached to this tube so. But do you have bladder control? No. There's a little balloon that inflates on the inside about the size of a walnut and that's what anchors it in and keeps it falling out. Okay. And there's on the top of that balloon there's some openings where the urine goes through. So whenever your bladder gets urine it just starts trickling out. Do you feel it trickling out? No. But you're going to feel the bag get heavier. So you're thinking like any water because you just want it as less as possible? No. I was afraid I would be dehydrated or something? No. I was afraid I would be there's a word they use but it means retention. Okay. And if you have retention the reason they leave the catheter in for a couple of days after is because for the reason for the catheter during the surgery is because you're cooling your urethra during the laser surgery. The only other interview where I've discussed urethra as this much was with Tom Woods. I hate to do it but I just learned about all this myself. But I mean doesn't it hurt more to take it out than putting it in? No. Okay. Good good because you go into the sphincter to go in and that hurts. Okay. Taking out didn't hurt. But was it a it was a relief? It was a relief. Did you have bladder control back immediately? Yes. Yes. And also my understanding is there's no downside because if it doesn't work let's say the cancer comes back or it's not really gone I can still go get the other surgery later. It doesn't. It's out the money. Yeah. You're just out the money. Okay. Wow. That's. So it was a learning and now listen I'm not recommending this because I could be wrong and maybe my urologist will say I'm crazy. So I'm not giving I don't want to get medical advice. I do think guys should be aware my understanding is that isn't that also a patent thing? The MRI machines? I don't know. They must be. Are you kidding? It's like very expensive. But they're expensive anyway. I mean it's like I think they I was asking the center where they had this machine. It's like a one point something million dollars there's no way that patent isn't involved with an MRI machine. It's got to be. Yeah. Of course. And so now there's one there's one good thing in the in the patent statute in the U.S. There is I think this was done in the 80s or 90s. There was an exemption made for medical procedure patents. In other words doctors can't patent medical procedures. Okay. So they some doctor couldn't get couldn't come up with a new way to operate and then get a patent and prevent other doctors doing it unless they pay them a license. They can't they can't stop that which is good. They can patent their little devices but they can't patent procedures at least. All right. So this is my first guest on gas and talking about patents and urethra which is going to be a big theme on the show in the coming weeks. I will see you all next week. You are welcome.