 Okay, hey there. Hey, this is my podcast and I Have a Ash Navabi. Is that the right way to say it? Yep. Okay, so we were talking online And I was gonna answer you and then I quite often if I take the time to answer I'll post I'll do a blog post about it because then other people can read it too So I figure we just chat So you had an interesting question. I thought you know tell Where are you? What's your are you a student or where are you? Yeah? I'm a master's student in economics at George Mason University. Ah, got it. Okay. Oh, do you know Dan Roth Daniel Rothschild? Yeah, I just met him in math camp Over the summer. Okay. Okay. All right, cool. Yeah. He's a he's a buddy of mine. Yeah, I see you guys interact on Facebook sometimes. Yeah, we were important. We were we went to pork fest to together this year So did you get a chance to read the blog post I sent you? Yes, I did and it clarified things Let's just go through it then so once you read your question and then I'll I'll tell you what my approach would be and you Tell me if that makes sense or if you have any other questions about it. All right, so the exact question I Said was I'm having a conceptual problem distinguishing Intellectual property and tangible property and against intellectual property your book You said that an IP right gives an IP owner quote invariably transfer Partial ownership of tangible property from its natural owner to innovators inventors and artists and close But doesn't this apply to every property rights if I own attractive land Why can't we say that if I ban you riding across it with your dirt bike? Then I am claiming ownership over your dirt bike, right and it's a good question and I think it's it's it's based upon several sort of presumptions which Are built into the way we commonly talk about property rights in today's society and even among libertarians So let me let me just kind of systematically tell you my approach to that that issue and the post I gave you were about a similar argument that's made which is that When I point out that the problem with intellectual property is that it limits what people can do with their own already existing property The common retort is always but every property right does that in other words your property right in your face or in your nose Prevents what I can do with my fist for example So so they end up trying to twist it back on you say that all property rights or limits on other people's property rights And so then I guess the argument is So what's wrong with limiting property rights? But by that argument you could justify anything you could justify, you know, someone is attacking someone with no cause and The victim complains and you say well how what are you complaining about no property rights are absolute or something like that? I mean you there's just no end to where you could take that so you end up invoking property rights as An excuse to limit property rights. It just makes no sense There's one aspect of intellectual property that actually does make sense and that is the conceptual And this is something most people don't understand that aren't specialists a patent right for example Doesn't give you the right to make the invention that you have a patent on it only gives you the right to stop other people from making the invention so for example if I patent a Someone has let's say someone has a patent on a four-legged stool Okay, so they they are the only one Who has the right to make that stool or they can prevent other people from making a four-legged stool? And you come up with the bright idea of making a three-legged stool. Okay. Now. Let's suppose their patent is a stool having a Plurality of legs something like that. So that's their patent. It's a broad patent Now you come up with a patent for a three-legged stool because it's more stable And you know it doesn't rock back and forth if one leg is different than the other or whatever You might be able to get a patent on the three-legged stool But you wouldn't be able to make the stool because that might infringe the first patent. Okay So the point is an IP right doesn't really give you the right to do something It gives you the right to stop other people from doing things and in a sense I think that's what regular property rights are too For example if I say I own the right to a handgun it doesn't mean I can do whatever I want with the handgun It means that I I am the one who has the right to control it I am the one who has the right to give permission or to deny permission from other people I can loan someone my gun. I can sell someone my gun. I can give someone my gun Or I can prevent them from using my gun. So in a sense property rights are like a negative right It's just I'm the one who can prevent other people from crossing that boundary Um, it's not an absolute right to do whatever you want with it Now the way libertarians put this usually is they'll say you have the right to use your property In any way that you want so long as you don't harm someone else They'll they'll they'll put that sort of limitation on it and that's functionally the same thing But in reality you never had a right to use your fist to punch me in the nose You never had a right to use your gun to shoot me You never had a right to use your motorcycle to ride on my property because The right to the motorcycle is simply a right really in abstract form It's a it's a right to prevent other people from using that motorcycle But that so that right that negative right would never have given you a right to cross over my land in the first place So that's like legally how I would conceive of that in the first place Is this is this related to the notion of estoppel? No, it's got nothing to do with estoppel Estoppel is more like just a way to justify the libertarian rights framework that we have So that's a total this is more just analytical like analyzing what rights are Um another aspect of that type of analysis is sort of the Rothbardian combined with St. Mises and Hoppe the recognition that Um number one all rights are property rights right Rothbard points this out nothing's of liberty but He doesn't dwell too much on what that means and this is If you unpack that with reference to Mises his praxeology and Hoppe's political theory What that really means is that all rights are property rights and all property rights are property rights to control A contestable scarce resource. I mean that is what property rights are But because if you think about it all property rights or an assignment of an exclusive right to use or My negative way of the right to prevent other people from using something that there could be conflict over And they're potentially enforceable that is backed up by force So all these things are bound up in the physical world We use physical force may be backed up by the legal system or the community or even yourself in terms of self defense or self you know action that Protects your your the resource you want to use um, so All enforcement of rights is physical force. They're always aimed at a real conflict The real conflict is always a physical squabble over some real thing So property rights just are a right to a physical resource So when it comes to intellectual property What I think I I think it's literally impossible to own an idea for example or a recipe or information It's not just that I oppose it morally It's not just that I think the the legal system is unjustified or socialistic It is that it literally is not what it claims to be it is not a No legal system in the world can actually grant property rights in ideas Because all property rights are rights to scarce resources So it's basically a disguised way of reassigning property rights and existing things that can be the subject of property rights So just as a crude example if you want to copyright in your novel What that really means is that the law is granting you illegally recognized right in some of my money Yeah, right because you can go to court and the court will use physical force Against my physical body to compel me To pay you some money or to compel me not to print on my paper some story So really It amounts to a reassignment of rights Now you could say well all property rights are just the ownership of some resource by an owner And therefore intellectual property is no different And that is true. It's just that the property rights are not assigned in a just way So the libertarian view is we have a set of basically three and exactly three and only three Rules for determining who the owner of a resource is and this is where a stopo might come into it If you wanted to go to a justification or argumentation ethics or consequentialism Or or intuitionism whatever your approach is or you know utilitarianism The basic set of libertarian rules is number one the idea of Well in a way, there's four because I was going to say original appropriation, which is if there's an unowned resource Then the person who is the first one to start using it and put a borders around it basically To establish a connection between them and the thing by mixing their labor with it For example, you might say that person has a better claim than anyone else Okay, unless The one of the other two things happen, which is contract or or retribution or rectification Yet sort of the parallel to that rule is self ownership. That is body ownership You also have a presumptive right to control your body That's not really original appropriation because your body wasn't like lying around unowned and you homesteaded it So there's a different basis in my view for your ownership of your body But so you could say that libertarianism has four rules. Number one is body ownership presumptive body ownership Everyone owns their body Because they have a better claim to the body than others because you have direct direct control of your body That's sort of the hobby and analysis But in terms of external resources that were unowned we have three rules one is original like locky and original appropriation So the first owner the first user has a better claim than others unless you As the owner transfer ownership to someone else By a rental agreement or a contract or a sale or a gift or a donation Something like that. So basically you you can transfer ownership to someone else And then that person would be the best owner of the thing With regard to the rest of the world because from the rest of the world's point of view This person has a No one else is an earlier user of the thing the only person who's an earlier user would be you But you contractually gave it to them So you don't have a claim against them either because of your particular contract And then the third case would be a case of like if you harm someone in some kind of crime or tort Then you owe them compensation rectification or restitution In such a case someone might have a claim on some of your resources In compensation for the harm you had done them But using those three rules you can identify the owner of any scarce resource in the world And in the motorcycle case in the land case You can't just say Uh The owner of the motorcycle has a complaint against the land owner because he can't use his motorcycle to ride on the land because The question is what's the disputed resource in this case? The disputed resource would be the land right because the motorcycle owner wants to ride it on the land So now we have a dispute between Two possible people over the ownership of this land who gets to use the land It's irrelevant that there's a motorcycle involved. I mean you might want to walk on my land with your body You might want to shoot cannonballs into my land with from your from your land, you know with your with your artillery Um, you want to use my land in some way you want to alter the physical integrity of my land in some way I don't want you to so we have a conflict over a scarce resource Which is what property rights always are about and so the libertarian approach is to consult those three principles Who was the first owner of the land who acquired it by contract or and does anyone owe anyone? Rectification for some kind of tort they've committed. Okay. Now in the example you gave I'm assuming that the land owner hasn't harmed the motorcycle owner. He hasn't committed any tort against him He hasn't stolen anything from him. He hasn't invaded his his property borders in some kind of way So he doesn't owe him any kind of recompense He didn't have a contract with him. He didn't say I give you the land. So there's no contract So then the question comes back to Who has the better title to the land and presumably if I'm the owner of the land I either was the first homesteader of the land or I acquired it by contract from someone else So the question is answered by resort to those principles. So I'm the owner of the land and so That's the libertarian approach the only other approach would be some deviation from those rules Which is what socialism always does Basically socialism always ends up endorsing a rule Um that the current owner of a resource Um is the the three rules I mentioned plus another rule Um unless we the the democratic majority or unless the dictator Decided to take this from the the existing owner, which is theft. We just call that theft Um, and so I think there's no conflict between property rights and the two blog posts I sent you Um is an attempt to explain why there's not a conflict between Uh why property rights are not limits on property rights property rights actually are the assignment of the right to decide who gets to use Um a given resource. Anyway, that's my attempt to explain that issue That was very good. Um Uh Does that persuade you do you do you agree with that? Does it make sense? No, I yeah, I wanted to percent uh agree with that. Um To me it was just when I was reading your book It was unclear where you were going with that passage and I understand now that you said, uh a property right is um Somebody asked it's it's conflict over scarce resource. So we have to understand. What is the resource being? conflicted over and in the case of The motorcycle and the land it was the piece of land and in the case of ip It's usually some scarce resource Yeah, it's it's either the the body or the warehouse or the material of the person who's being limited by the ip law Exactly and and in terms of libertarian theory my view is that um The nature of conflict and the nature of disputes is what helps to identify what the resource is because if You don't have a question unless there's a conflict and when there's a conflict Then there are two people who want to use something In an incompatible way, right? They have a dispute about it and that very that very dispute usually highlights the the nature of the thing That's in question and helps to identify its boundaries And what the resource is and in this case I would say it was the land. It wasn't the motorcycle. Yeah It's excellent um All right, was there anything else? um Are you reading this as part of your part of your economic studies is just for just for libertarian fun or what? It's what led me to read it again right now. Um, so one of the classes I was taking this semester is uh, Course called economic systems design. Okay, which is uh, about matching theory and auction theory and um my term paper for that class is uh Is uh, I'm writing a paper on designing a market For trade secrets in a world without intellectual property. Okay So the the mechanism I came up with is uh, Someone comes up with a secret idea They're an inventor and they go to an auctioneer Who evaluates the idea and then when once they evaluate the idea they uh, They they have uh, they try to entice other firms to bid on this idea by uh giving just a hint of what the idea is Uh um Uh Let me mention one other thing. You know, I have some comments on that. Um You might also look if you go to c4sif.org on my resources page. Yeah, I've got a couple of pieces by rodrick long um Like his original like 1995 or so article The case against intellectual property and then he's got another one Which is explicitly titled like owning ideas means owning people And he makes the point in both of those. Uh, he makes a similar point that I did in tom palmer does too in the article I cite Um that ip basically is a reassignment of rights. It means all having property rights in other people It's similar to what rothbard's argument was in his defamation when he argued against defamation and liable and slander law In his art in his chapter in um ethics of liberty uh on knowledge true and false where he points out that If you own your reputation Right, which is what liable and slander and defamation law protect Uh and which randians for example are in favor of reputation rights It basically means owning what other people think because your reputation is what other people think about you So you you in effect have a property right in other people's brains Right An ip law has a similar uh logic to it to really grant ip you have to basically have rights in other people's bodies um And that's literally true. I mean there are cases where people have been Prevented from singing a song or There's been a threat to someone who has a tattoo that has a copyright on the tattoo like on their face Like there's a potential threat. They might have to get the tattoo taken off their face All kind of crazy things like this. So it doesn't just affect tangible resources, which is bad enough Um, but on your question about the trade secret issue, um Well in economics You should maybe look into you probably read some bomb buvork and others There is there is a heavy reliance by economists on legal presumptions they assume some legal background usually the existing legal order or something like our legal order Um And they don't always justify it and that's fine But they take for granted lots of things they take for granted the nature of contract for example They take for granted that there are contracts that are enforceable And sometimes they take for granted intellectual property, right? And the trade secret case if you assume there's no intellectual property We're talking a contractual world Then you need to be real careful about what you think of what you mean by contract and for that I would have I would highly recommend you read Rothbard's um Contract theory and my I have a longer article laboratory on that the libertarian view of contract is not that it's binding promises It's just an alienation of transferable title to owned resources. That's all contract is Uh, and that does have some implications for theory And how you integrate it with legal theory And also if you were practicing IP lawyer, you would you would actually Have some awareness of the actual ways people do the trade secret thing right now because even now under today's law There is trade secret law, but if the if the secret becomes public you're still screwed Right and the law doesn't even protect that once it gets public. It's not a trade secret anymore It's not a secret. It's got to be a secret to be a trade secret Um, and so there are techniques that people actually do use right now that are similar to what you're talking about I don't know all the details You'll have someone approach a company and they want to show a little bit of what they have But they can't show too much because you might get it might get quote unquote stolen Which I think is the wrong word, but you know what I mean But yeah, you could imagine creative ways that you could do this so if you have a an idea Is it more of an entrepreneurial idea or an economic idea or a Techno technological idea or what so this is uh, I'm just trying to imagine a world where uh, right now people they patent their Their inventions or get a patent pending thing and then they they license their idea Yes corporations. Well, if there is no such thing as patents Let alone patent pending and you do invent something. How do you still make money off of it? My solution was you have a trusted auctioneer who evaluates Inventions. Yeah, and then that auctioneer then goes and Gets the firms interested into bid And there are problems because he's he's got a lot of power. Yeah, he's got a lot of options to cheat the the inventor to like just sell his idea Just to one corporation as opposed to putting it up for auction, right? They still think if you put something up for auction, you're likely to get a higher price So there's the countervailing. So is the idea that that um All you're giving to the winner is the the right to be first to market basically and you you assume it's going to become public pretty soon anyway, well the The way I set it out would be the uh The identities of everyone involved in the auction would be anonymous Yeah, so uh, no one knows who the inventor is and no one knows who all the other firms bidding are So in that sense, um, no, but I mean what what are you selling them? Actually, what do they get if they win the auction they get they get they get the invention They get the actual invention they get information an information dump for me get the information, but uh By making the auction anonymous And the inventor doesn't know who got the invention So they can't go around to other firms trying to sell their invention Because if they do and they try to sell to the firm that they Sold it to already then that firm can complain and then they could Damage the reputation. Well, and you could imagine a con you could have a contract if you're going to do it that way You could have contracts to let in other words the the seller of the information is agree is going to agree to sign a nondisclosure Agreement or some kind of contract where they obligate themselves Not to reveal it to anyone else either and if they do they could be sued for sure. Yeah um But again, this is that's presupposing Other legal systems, etc If even if you don't assume that they did sign a nondisclosure agreement. Okay. Yeah, you could do it with reputation I don't see any reason why you would need to rely only on that but um, but since you brought it up I've also been confused on on nondisclosure agreements. You said before it has nothing to do with ip Can you can you go into detail why well? I what I've said is that The contracts some some opponents of intellectual property Imagine that you could have some kind of agreement between the seller and buyer of a product That that basically creates a type of intellectual property I don't know if they're talking about a nondisclosure agreement or some other type of agreement They're really talking about a non-copy agreement Not necessarily a nondisclosure agreement because in most cases the The information that constitutes the proprietary design or or aspect of the ideal object You could call it it's public. Anyway, so for example, if I if I sell you my novel Your first one. You're not my only customer. I've got millions of customers or thousands So the book is out there in the public So a nondisclosure agreement wouldn't make any sense because the There's nothing for me to keep secret if you sell me a book What you want me to do is a promise not to copy it Or maybe promise not to sell it to anyone else Like even the same book you make Like no no resales of them. I don't know or if you sell me a car That has an innovative, uh, you know fuel injector design You want me to promise not to reverse engineer the car and or promise not to copy the car and or promise not to make Make cars that are too similar to that or something like that So it's just a contractual limitation on what I can do going forward. It's not a nondisclosure agreement because again, uh, the The the the information is going to be widely available to others. So the argument that ip advocates make is that Even though the information is public like the the the plot of the novel or the text of the novel Or the or the or the the the design used in the fuel injector of the car Even though it's publicly known No one no one in the world can copy it without the permission of the inventor or the author because The the the the originator of the of the idea sold it to a limited number of people And every one of them he sold it to on the condition that they couldn't copy it Yeah, and therefore No one else that got the information out there got it in a legitimate way So they couldn't use the information Either but that's the fallacy in the argument right there is is that the argument Uh makes the assumption that information is ownable if information is not ownable Then this contractual scheme could only bind the the limited number of initial people Um that the objects the physical objects embodying the design were sold to the the the buyers of the book Or even the people who downloaded the book if they agreed on amazon they clicked the box and they said I agree not to copy this Okay, arguably they're bound by contract and if they copy it they could be sued for contract breach But the problem is Third parties are not bound by contract Um And once the information becomes public People who have access to or are aware of that information or free to use that information To guide their own actions with respect to their own resources Uh, there's no contractual Privity we call it. There's no contractual tie whatsoever between those third parties and the owner Um, I'm sorry the the inventor or the author at all So that the that's the flaw in that argument in in my view rockboard makes that makes that mistake in The chapter where he talks about he rejects patent But then he says something like copyright could work because You know, I sell you a book But I reserve the right to copy Or I sell you a mousetrap, but I I give you the right to use the mousetrap But I reserve the right to copy so you don't have the right to copy And therefore No one else who observes the mousetrap could get the right to copy because you didn't have to give it to them So it's a bizarre argument that in in in effect rest upon the presumption that information is ownable Which is what ip says so it's a it's totally question begging It's it's it's just assuming information is ownable to prove that information is ownable. Yeah so you're saying um Just a strict non disclosure agreement that uh, you and I agreed to discuss A certain idea on the condition that neither of us outside of this context will reveal the the the In the specifics of the discussion to anyone else. Yeah, that's enforceable in court. Absolutely. I see no problem But enforceable simply means that Um, the contract ish. There's I could there's a retribution. There's a there's Because all property rights are rights and scarce resources all contracts are just the exercise of ownership of a resource By an owner of his ownership of a resource um All contracts are ultimately about assigning title to property in those resources so The right way to understand a non disclosure agreement is It's really a conditional transfer of title. It's it's basically me saying um Like a preliminary statement just a statement like my intention is To keep this secret my intention is to respect your confidence if I don't Then I owe you a million dollars or something like that. So it's really the whole contract is really a transfer of title to money Uh conditional it's a conditional future transfer of title to uncertain Uncertainly existing money in the future based upon a condition that you Uh Violated a confidence or something like that. Um, that's the right way to look at it in the in the law in economics literature By the way, there's something similar. It's called the efficient breach theory. You might want to look that up. Um, which Is from a different basis, but it basically says the same thing and it's it's this idea that We shouldn't have allow punitive damage awards or we shouldn't We should basically allow people to breach contracts if they're willing to pay the Damages to the other party because then everyone's better off. Yeah um Something like that would apply to the Rothbardian theory, I believe because it's really always always about Except I think in the Rothbardian theory in libertarian theory you would permit punitive Clauses The efficient breach theory is used by law and economics types. Basically if I'm remembering this right to say that, um Clauses and contracts so contract contracts often have Damage clauses because you want certainty. You don't really want to just throw it to the court to the judge and just Assume he'll come up with a damage for breach of contract. You want to specify? Okay, if you breach the contract, here's how we're going to compute the damages Okay, so people careful lawyers will sometimes do that However Sometimes they'll say you owe me 10 times or three times The following metric And the courts will say well, that's that's looking punitive. You're actually trying to punish them And they distinguish between criminal civil and criminal law civil law is about damages and property rights criminal law is about punishment and if you allow private people to put a punitive Damages award in their contract. You're letting them have a criminal aspect to their thing And that's not permitted and the and the uh the efficient breach theory I think is one of the arguments used Against that in my view you can contract for whatever you want Like if you know if you sell me if you tell me a secret And I agree to pay you 10 million dollars if I breach the secret even though it's a trivial thing Then I owe you 10 million dollars It's a it's an enforceable contract because I own the I own the money I have the right to give it to you for whatever reason I want. I can give it to you as a gift I can give it to you in exchange for something of similar value or I can give it to you in exchange for Whatever any condition I want I can I can say I can we can gamble I can say I hereby give you 10 million dollars Tomorrow if it rains In South Africa, I mean whatever I want as long as it's definable and and it's it's it's um It's a meaningful communication that that that uh That we can understand whether the condition was triggered or not then it should be it should be enforceable But what the other thing I was going to say is there are different types of um, so you were trying to use this trade secret idea to emulate A little bit of what's done now with say patent licensing See with patent licensing though You I could license it to five or ten different people like a non-exclusive license And you're kind of simple simpler model You're you're imagining a one-off kind of thing, but there could be different type of trade secrets. They're you what you could say is um I'm going to license this to to only five people Right, maybe I'll license to you this year. Maybe make sure I'll license someone else or whatever But for me to license it the second time it's got to still say secret So part of the bargain would be we're going to have an auction whoever wins Um gets a data dump from me. I tell them how to do a b and c And then I make a contract with them and I promise not to Reveal it to anyone else except the people that I have the right to And you promise to keep it secret. That's where the nda would come into play That's why companies use non-disclosure agreements. They use them in part to keep the trade secrets secret So if it's a type of um secret that is not going to be um Revealed by the sale of the product and some secrets are like some secrets are processes Like it's how you make the product and so you don't necessarily when you when you sell the product that comes out of that process You don't always reveal to the world the nature of the trade secret Some things you do some things if you sell, you know, the new apple I watch Uh, or you sell the iphone for example You can't have a trade secret in the idea of a touchscreen and a rectangular shaped phone because that's a parent In the device that you're selling to everyone So you couldn't keep that a trade secret anyway some things you could if they have a special technique for making the iphone And they want to keep that secret That's fine And they could license that to other people contractually and they could license it to multiple Multiple people as long as they have a good agreements and relationships with with all those people and everyone keeps a secret The more people you license it to of course the higher the likelihood is you're going to finally have a defector Yeah, but in any case, um There are things you can play with and and and and and in analyzing how trade secret or similar Arrangements could work in an ip free world. I think it's an interesting topic Thank you. Um, yeah, there's uh Lots of issues to explore um For me the biggest issue is just uh, how do you trust the auctioneer to To keep the secret I don't know if that would be a if you imagine this is a viable business model Then you would have auctioneers that would emerge in the market that have reputations. Yes for sure, but I'm looking at Like real world auctioneers. That's that's basically Sotheby's and Christie's right and they basically Oligopolize the market as oh, that's what you mean, right? So Stuff I read on on traditional auctions auctioneers tend to The biggest barrier to entry is just reputation. It takes a long time to go the trustworthy reputation Well, you know, there's there's something similar that actually happens right now It's it's like a software escrow. You heard about that. So for example, um I'm trying to think of a I've done this a few times in my past and I'm trying to remember a real world context So let's say some company has software Now the software is protected by copyright, but quite often they'll keep some of it secret It's got trade secret aspects to it. Okay The source code is not revealed only the executable if I'm remembering exactly right in any case Let's say I need a loan Or I need So I'm a company I sell software. I need a loan One of my assets is my software my trade secret in the software So the company giving me a loan Has that as collateral Which means if I default on the loan they can seize these assets, but If I go bankrupt, you know, all the employees might run off and there's going to be no one left around who could Explain to them what the software secret was so Sometimes the the lender will insist that I put that software in escrow I don't want to give it to the I don't want to give it to my lender my creditor because I don't want them to have the information They don't they don't have the right to have the information unless I default on my on my loan So there are there are there are agents out there They're just google software escrow and you can actually give this code to an escrow agent And they hold it in confidence and with with a contract specifying that You you keep this secret And you destroy it, you know after 10 years if I if if if the If I call you and tell you look the deal's over just destroy the information. They destroy it or they'll return it to me or whatever, but If like a judge Tells them the company has defaulted on their loan Or they're bankrupt or something like that then you can release it to the creditor So there are actually software escrow and similar type of escrow Agencies and institutions that exist right now and this is an actual actual business And and there there's a It's like a normal market people. Yeah Yeah, it's pretty rare because you have to have a rare set of circumstances to afford this and to do it But it's It's not that rare. It happens the closest thing I could think of to a real world version of this is Those storage wars type situations You've seen that tv show storage wars. No it's uh It's abandoned storage lockers And people have auctions over these So it's the tv show is just uh They they go up to this storage locker and there's a padlock on it and then the owner Of the storage warehouse chops off the padlock and opens the door Either slightly or all the way and doesn't turn in any of the lights on And then a whole bunch of people gather around and then all they can do is look from the outside What's inside and it's usually just a bunch of boxes and shadows And then and then just from the shadows Then they just start bidding and then sometimes the bids are just like a couple hundred bucks sometimes they go up to a thousand bucks That's interesting. Yeah. Oh, there's well, I guess you could do something similar safety deposit boxes too that are unclaimed or something Yeah, I could see something like that Actually in the law at least in the civil law like if you look in Louisiana civil law There's a doctrine called sale of a hope which I Which mystified me when I loved it. It's such a sale of a hope. You can sell a hope It's like a chance. You can sell a chance at something So for example if I if I think and I if I'm remembering right this would be covered by that So I own a locker which the contents of which are unknown. No one knows what it is And I'm selling it to you. I'm saying Uh, I'm gonna sell you whatever's in this locker $4,000 So you're buying a hope in a sense, right? And I'm selling you a hope that's that's the way the law classifies that Right. It's kind of kind of interesting. Um, it's got Why does it have a special name or I don't I don't remember why it arose? Uh, if you look in the Louisiana civil code, it might give uh, there might be some examples as to why There's another doctrine in the in sales in civil law. It's called sale of sale by lump So for example, if I want to sell you my truck load of turnips I don't really know how many turnips are in the truck I mean, I can sell you, you know 14 000 turnips or I could just say I'm selling you the turnips in the truck the lump of turnips in the truck truck is what you're getting So that's sale by lump. That's another separate, uh legal doctrine for that particular circumstance The sale of the hope I can't remember offhand the examples, but it's an interesting thing And it probably would cover something like that It's got to do with things in the in the future that you don't know what's going to happen Which is basically what all future contracts are. They're all Alliatory as they say in the civil law. They're all Based upon the future and uncertain anyway It's far field, but anyway, um anything else Uh, I think that covers everything. Thank you so much. All right. Cool. Well, good luck at school and we'll chat later For sure. Thanks a lot. Thanks, man