So whenever you record, it's recording now to the cloud. I love zoom because of course of the cloud. Yeah. So we're talking about your hair, your is it emo? Well, what style is it emo or what? Because I'm so out of it.  All right. It's not emo. No, no, I don't even know what emo means anymore because what I thought it meant was whatever. But some could argue it is. I just, is that scotch?  Is it really? OK. Yeah, it's called American malt. It's made by liars in England, so it tastes like bourbon, but it's just with it's just refreshing this way. What's it going to say? No, no, Mr. Cancel at 11 a.m. No, it is Friday, though. It is Friday, but actually, I'm going to I'm probably going to look like I have a hangover because I stayed up till I started writing a blog post at 11 last night. Oh, I thought it would take me or a little article thought it'd take me 30 minutes.  Well, so I decided to take a two hour walk and then I came home and crashed. So like I'm that is worse than me because I've the latest latest I've set up on Clubhouse is 5 a.m. So you beat me by 45 minutes. So congrats, sir. Well, I was trying to get an article. So I have a concrete tangible result at least. So yeah, was it was just wasted?  Does it does?  Very cool. It's called a church warden. A church. Oh, yeah. That's why people people can hear my dogs barking a lot because I sit out here on my balcony. Nice show, Michelle, the world. Yeah, I just call them Gandalf pipes because that's what I think of. Well, it's called a church like candy. It's called that because if you if you're like a scholar reading a big book, this goes behind the book sort of so that it doesn't interfere with your studying a book or something. I love it. Yeah, I'm on my balcony right now. So just it's a pretty day. I'm going to enjoy it. Oh, man, look at that. And there's Louis Louis von Mises can sell on my poodle. And my my other two. Anyway, wow. That is quite the poodle name. It's fancy enough, but it's humble at the same time. Well, my wife calls him King Louis, but I call him Louis von Mises and that's on his that's on his tag. So very great, very great. So you're in Houston, right? Yeah. Yeah. And I think we had first met in Houston when I was helping out with the monopoly on violence documentary. Oh, that's right. Yeah, Chris and I hunted you down and we were going to go for a ride. Yeah. Did we go to my club, the bar club or something? Yes, we did. I remember. Yeah, I was I just saw. I just saw Pete at Mises and Auburn about a week ago. Oh, cool. Yeah, I haven't kept up with him in in a hot minute. I think I'd message him Merry Christmas or something, but that was that was it. I I've been kind of abandoning my my liver pods as of late. It's just been everything. Or what? Coin. Oh, Bitcoin. OK. Yeah. But I mean, I guess we can talk about this later. But it's funny. I was actually in your neck of the woods last night as well because I went to the Houston Bitcoin Meetup, which was the first one. Oh, damn, I would have gone. I would have gone. Is there like a page or something? I think they're setting that up like it was the first one, but they're going to do this on a monthly basis. And we also do them in Austin. In fact, the one in Austin in April is going to be insane. Like you'll have American Hodel and a bunch of like all your favorite Twitter people come to the bidets meet up at Unchained Capital. Because a lot is going on that weekend because Ray Dalio was giving a speech at A&M and there's just it's just give me fun. So if you're not busy that weekend, you should make it out. But if you are, then I think Mike Kin and I will also be in Houston for that meet up. Yeah, I was actually hanging out with Anthony Semeroff, who's a Scottish Libertarian. He does a Scottish podcast. Yeah, yeah, we were out last night. We're actually going skiing this weekend. We're going tomorrow. We're going to tell you ride skiing. Well, we're going to go to Denver and hang out a day in Denver and meet Libertarians in Denver. Then and then Sunday, we're going to tell you ride skiing. I love it. I've been snowboarding like over 10 years, I think. And I was going to go on a trip with some bit coiners, but I went to a safe sats. I still haven't bought my flight tickets to Bitcoin, Miami, nor have I paid for like the living situation with that and BitBlock boom. So I don't know, I already have a busy year as it is.  But yeah, you've been you've been making the rounds, as they say, cringe. I can't believe I just said that. But I enjoyed your conversation with Alex Vetsky as a recent and I wanted to cover some of the some similar topics. But before all that, just like it's it's very refreshing to, if you know, find some of my my parents' age and or older, younger, kind of give or take, but to be like not only into Bitcoin, but like libertarianism. So I'm just I'd like to know how you came to find yourself there and and then ultimately how you stumbled into your profession. Like, why was intellectual property like patent law you're calling like? That's interesting. Yeah, I probably should not have been a patent lawyer. I mean, I'm good at it and a big money at it. I don't really hate it. It came to be dredge work at a certain point. So I diversified and changed what I changed it up. But because I started hating the system, it's a little bit weird to do it, although you still need people like me to do it. Sorry, I just want to make sure we are recording. Yep. OK, cool. Yep. And so I was I was I'm from Louisiana, rural Louisiana. And I was always sort of from the south, I mean, from from the from the country. So I kind of didn't fit in. You know, I was like the bookworm kind of kid. So I went to private Catholic schools across parish lines because I just didn't go to the public schools where I was. And so I didn't it was weird. Like I was kind of I didn't realize till later, but I was a little bit alienated because when I went to school, I had to leave right away. I had a long commute for like 12 years. So I wasn't really part of the community at school, but I didn't know all the kids near my home because I didn't go to school with them. So and plus I was adopted. And so I think that made me sort of ripe for Rand when I started reading her like in high school, someone told me to read it. I'd library and told me to read it at a Catholic high school. And was she adopted? No, but she she knew I was kind of bookish. And so she told me to read. No, I mean, I'm Rand was I'm Rand adopted. No, but she adopted her name. She changed her name like I did. My first name was Farrell, Wayne, Dwaran, the Cajun name.  Yeah, my birth, my birth brother tracked me down when I was living in Philadelphia. When I was 30 years old, she finally tracked me down. And she told me she was going to give up trying to find me when I turned 30. So she finally found me when I was a month away from my birthday. And she told me she gave me a weird name on purpose because she was having doubts when she gave me after adoption. She thought giving me a weird name might help her find me easier. Of course, he didn't because my name was changed right away by my my my legal parents. So. But anyway. But I think that because I was sort of I was smart and sort of had to do everything on my own and I was came I didn't come from money.   A lot of people do, you know, I'm Irish or I'm Jewish or I'm.  I think that kind of rands individualism appealed to me in the fountain head.  So I think Atlas shrugged is much better of a libertarian novel, but that fountain head is not. I don't know why it got me to be individual. I guess because it's got this weird narcissistic individualist strain. But anyway, I became libertarian then because of that. And so I was interested in it, but I also wanted to get a real job. So I was practical and I like technology and computers. So I studied electrical engineering in college, which I loved. And I was really good at it. But I felt like it wasn't enough for me because I was always arguing and writing unlike engineers. And so I went to law school to argue and to learn the stuff you don't learn in engineering. Engineers are just like face down, like focused on the task. Right. Like how do you describe?  And that's good. And they they don't, you know, like I tested because I was I had good grades in high school and on the on the ACT.  Like I never took a single English class, although I love that stuff, you know? So I never took any of this stuff. But I was most engineers. A lot of them are not good at communication or writing and speaking. So but the ones that are can do well in law school because they're really they're smarter than most lawyers. Engineering is harder. See what I mean about the dogs? No, it's good. Yeah. So there when a dog walks by, they start barking. Anyway. This is a little long winded, but you asked. But so I I went to I went to law school because I thought I could make more money and I wanted to stay in school longer as kind of recession. And I just I like learning the kind of the verbal mode of reasoning.  You don't get any of that in engineering. And so I kind of like that. And I but because I could write and speak well, unlike most engineers, because like the chancellor of the law school tried to dissuade me from going, he said, you can go to law school with an engineering degree. But they have a tough time, which I I found out was bullshit, because I did better than almost everyone in law school. Because yeah, law school is law school is analytical. It's problem solving, just like engineering. It's just as verbal instead of instead of mathematical. So as long as you can communicate. So when I got out, I started doing oil and gas law, which was because I needed to get a job and I moved to Houston because Louisiana is like a you know, it's like a barren wasteland.  And oil and gas law, it didn't even occur to me to do patent law. Now it's natural. If you have a technology to undergrad, everyone says do patent law because only patent only technology, only engineers can be patent lawyers, basically. I didn't realize that at the time. So I switched to double E so I could move to Philly with my wife. And that's just to like legally protect the technological creation, right? Like, is that where that connection is? Well, the connection is that so to practice law, you have to pass the bar in a given state. So I passed I passed the bar in Texas and Louisiana because I was doing Louisiana and Texas oil and gas law in Houston. That's why they recruited me. They recruit people from LSU because we know Louisiana law, which is a different legal system because it's civil law. All the other states are common law. So Louisiana is actually in demand in some states that need Louisiana civil law. So I was recruited in Houston to do oil and gas law. So I needed to know Louisiana and Texas law. So I took both bars. And then when I moved to Philadelphia, I took the Pennsylvania bar. But to do patent law, you have to pass the patent bar. But to take the patent bar, you have to have a technical degree. And the reason is to do patents, you have to understand technology. You have to talk to engineers and understand their inventions. And most lawyers can't do that because they're they're either dumbasses or they don't have any technical. That's that's one reason a lot of people major in English or history or they go to law schools because they're bad at math. You know what I mean? That's why they do it. Exactly. You know what I'm talking about. It's true. So the the small percent of lawyers like probably probably three percent, five percent that are engineers. They're the ones who can do patent law if they want to. Yeah, although it bores a lot of even them. So it's kind of a we have a natural supply cap on how many people can be or want to be patent lawyers. So I did that and I was really good at it. And I liked it. But the whole time I was developing my my libertarian theories and I was at roughly the same time I passed the patent bar in 1994. I came to the conclusion as a libertarian that the copyright system is total bullshit, you know. And I was afraid to say it out loud too much because I thought it would hurt my career. Like you have this young associate at a big law firm representing big clients. Like I represented Intel. I did work for Intel and UPS and General Electric, you know, companies like that. I thought that they would find out about it and, you know, it's sort of like these libertarians that think they're a threat to the state and like they think the FBI has a file on them because they think they're important.  My clients didn't care if you successfully move a lot of money. I heard someone. I think it was like free radio or something in New Hampshire. They finally got caught because they're moving just like ten million dollars or something. So yeah, but then they don't care what your views are. It's just you're breaking their laws. Yeah, good point. So I did patent law and I still do it. I'm kind of semi retired now. I worked a few hours a week and. It's been good for my career, although I kind of wish I studied international law in London for a master's degree after law school and I really like that. I've written some books on it, but I never I did a little bit of it when I did oil and gas law, but then I switched to patents and the international stuff kind of went away. That would have been a good career too. And so so would have been probably something like tax law. Because that's really creative and you could help companies avoid taxes legally. And. Maybe corporate law would have been a good field to go into, like in mergers and acquisitions and securities and oil and gas load would have been good to stay in because that field fell apart in the 90s. But it came back in the 2000s and there was a shortage of oil and gas lawyers because everyone had left. So I maybe should have stayed in that because I really liked it. But patent law worked out for me, made me mobile. The good thing about it was it's a national field because it's federal law. It's patent and copyright or federal law. So it doesn't really matter what state you're licensed in or where you're from. No one cares. So I could and I wanted to move to Philly. So that allowed me to break into the Philly market, which is really hard because up up north, those Yankees are really they're they're kind of assholes compared to the South.  You know what I mean? Yeah. Everyone's from somewhere else here.  Oh, you know.  And that's what I fit. So they didn't care what law school I went to. They didn't care where I was from. They care about my grades, anything. They just wanted that. So it made me geographically mobile. So that's kind of my story of where I ended up and. And in the in the whole time, I was developing this sort of this application or this hobby of libertarian theory and writing because I enjoyed it and I enjoyed gradually developing kind of coming up with insights on different areas when I saw a need to elaborate or to develop theory in certain areas like property theory and rights theory and contract theory and causation and responsibility and punishment theory and intellectual property and I kind of get sick of talking about IP, but not really because like my favorite stuff that I that I work on is really like epistemology and methodology and economics and law and rights and basics of libertarian theory. But having to do IP and everyone asked me for that because I'm like I'm one of the rare ones who understands IP law and deep libertarian theory, like I'm probably the only one. Like I'm probably the only one and and because almost every patent lawyer is either anti intellectual or their status, you know. So like I know I know personally maybe one patent lawyer who agrees with me, but he keeps it private. That's it. And there's two or three others that are kind of anti IP, but they're not not really for the right reasons, you know, they're kind of lefties. So that's about it. And they don't even practice it. You know, they're just like some law professor who who got the patent bar, but he never did it. And then most most libertarians are not patent attorneys, of course. So so I have a unique niche, but but doing it has forced me to clarify thinking about property, which has really improved my understanding and ability to understand under to explain the basic the bases of libertarian property theory and even some economic things like Misa linking Misa's praxeology into into libertarian and legal philosophy or political philosophy. And yeah, so and so people say, like, I've probably given 150 or 300 speeches or interviews on IP. And someone yesterday said, like the Anthony Samaroff said, do you get tired of it?  I don't know if you get tired of it. It's just like a juggler juggles every night for a living. You know, it's just I don't mind teaching something that I know. I don't get bored of it at all. I mean, so no, I guess the answer is no. I sometimes wonder why people want to interview me on their podcast for exactly the same thing I said in the same way two weeks ago where they could just replay that episode. But I guess they want it on their show. So I don't care. We'll reach into guilty. Yeah, exactly. So I don't care. I always say yes to anything. Yeah. No, it's amazing that you're able to just find niches just in the perfect niche way, like mechanical engineering and law and then, you know, property law and IP and just libertarianism.  Uh, well, it's a market for myself. And so patent law. So what's interesting about patent law? I have like a love hate thing with it because it's been good to me, but, um, and by the way, libertarians always ask me about the hypocrisy thing and that's a complicated thing. I have to go into boring aspects of what the practice is like, which they don't understand. But I have always steered my career in a way that what I do, I believe is innocuous or good. Like I've always refused to represent the client that's using patents in an aggressive way. I've represented clients who have defended themselves from a patent lawsuit, sometimes by counter suing with the patent, but I regard that as self-defense. So that's not illegitimate. And I also help clients obtain patents, which is analogous to selling guns or bullets to someone, um, which they can use for good or for evil, right? And so I sell bullets to people and quite often they just stockpile them to use defensively. But if they turn around and use them offensively, it's kind of not my decision and I don't help them do that. So I've tried to keep my hands clean ethically, um, although in an ideal world, my career would be abolished. Um, there would be no, no patent lawyers and I would be happy with that. Um, but, um, what I'm going to say, go ahead. Oh, no, I was just going to say, like, you have to use the current constructs that you're forced to by the state, but you have to find the loopholes to use it against, uh, you know, coercion and evil or like whatever. Yeah, like not the garbage, but like you need to use them at your advantage to protect people and their property. You know, you disagree with, with the constructs. You have to take advantage of where you can. Yeah. The state's threatening to prosecute you and jail you for, for smoking or for using cocaine, then you need to hire a defense attorney and then a free war in a free world that defense attorney wouldn't have that, that, that job wouldn't exist. So he's a waste on society because of the law, but given that the law exists, you need him. Um, and he does something good. He helps defend people from the state, although he, his living depends upon the state's evil laws existing, right? So it's the same thing with an oncologist.  If he, if he succeeds, if he had his wishes, cancer would be abolished. He would be out of a job, but that's just the way of the world sometimes. But what I was going to say is like this country is so large and spet and rich and highly technical that patent law, I don't know, there's 50, 60,000 patent lawyers in the country. They are so hyper specialized, which shows the division of labor so that I specialize not only in electrical engineering stuff like computer software and heart and computer hardware, but I've sub specialized within of that. I, I only do laser patents, like patents on fiber optic semiconductor laser technology. That's it. That's such a narrow, narrow niche. There may be, I don't know, there may be 10 attorneys in the country who can do that, you know, because they understand the physics and the law and the practice and the business and the tech and the way to talk to engineers and physicists and PhDs. So it's like a miracle that we're such a rich society that we have such a specialization division of labor, but it's in a field that shouldn't exist.  Yeah, I mean, it's like. It's the same thing with Uber, right? Or like one of those unicorn companies that probably shouldn't exist because like the fiat money and just how easy it is to get like cheap credit. But then if you have something like Uber, whether or not it comes from funny money like that, it disrupts like a legacy model of like the taxi system and it just is a net good and then you have competition that comes out of it like with Lyft or whatever. And you just have this abundance that pleases the market. And it turns out to be like a net good. But then it's like, again, what that happened without fiat money? Well, I kind of wonder if Bitcoin would happen without fiat money. I think eventually it would, but it might not. Oh, well, like we need it with like inflation and everything. It's like fiat money definitely helps. But because Bitcoin is already here, it is like the medium. It's like the vessel for absorbing real value because people are going to look at the bottom market or equities or whatever. And people are just going to lose faith in it.  And it's just signals like these markets are fake. Like they're bunk and like we need that inflation. Because if that inflation isn't going to go into these vehicles, they're eventually going to go into Bitcoin because like that's what people are going to trust. Like you can't really debate like digital finite scarcity. I imagine that if we had had a hundred percent reserve gold standard in the world all these years, then the argument for Bitcoin would be radically diminished. Like it would be a slight improvement, but it wouldn't be a radical improvement, right? Yeah. Because it's solving a lot of problems that a hundred percent gold reserve standard would also solve. It would basically just be cheaper to transport and easier to store. I mean, but it wouldn't have many other advantages over gold. Well, I mean, not everyone in the world, no matter where they are in the world, would be able to verify the supply of gold in their room, though. Yeah, I guess it's got several radical about it. It would eventually, I think it would eventually emerge, but it might not emerge for another 15 years, you know, instead of instead of in 2009. Yeah, man. OK, so back to the like the patent lasers and everything like, when you do what you do, what does that really entail? OK, so patent law, patent law, well, intellectual property is the broad term, right? Intellectual property is a type of law that cover that includes just like we call it an umbrella term. It covers copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets and other things like entertainment law and licensing and those kind of negotiations. But patent law itself is kind of divided into two types. One is IP or patent litigation and one is patent prosecution.   They enforce patents like they sue people for patent infringement or they defend people who are being sued for patents. And I played a role in that like support on those teams because they usually need registered patent attorneys to help them because the litigators, if they're not patent lawyers themselves, they don't quite understand the technology and the patents as well as we do. So we cooperate with them and that can be very lucrative. But it's like it's like plaintiff's law. It can be hit or miss. You can make a lot or you can make a little, you know. And then there's prosecution, which is the which is what I do, which is you and prosecution is a weird word. It doesn't mean like the state prosecuting for a crime. It's a word we use to mean the process of working with the patent office to get a patent. So it means I get hired by a company to talk to their engineers who think they've come up with some new invention and I get them to explain it to me. And that takes work to understand how to speak engineer language because they don't usually know how to. They don't they don't know how to talk to lawyers and they don't know to talk. They don't know how to answer the right question. So you get good at because we're engineers, too. They trust us more than regular lawyers.  So I feel like I have to like I'm remiss with Ben, the carman who works on a Bitcoin Scala or just like an implementation of like Bitcoin code and does like DLCs which I think you might be interested in because it's like permissionless betting or whatever. But it's like I feel like I'm in that same position because I am trying to abstract all of the Cody language. So like any retard off the street can like understand it.  Yeah, it's just not like writing a technical report. There's a certain skill you have to communicate it, but you have to know the technology, but you have to simplify it enough for the reader to understand it. So the process is almost cookie cutter on the same. And so some people get bored by it, but every invention is unique. So if you're like me and you have a certain kind of nerd mind. You find it interesting because every invention is a new challenge. But you get the process down so that you get efficient at it. So you might be able to do a patent in 10, 15, 20 hours, which takes someone else 40 or 50 hours. And you usually charge a flat fee so you can make a pretty good hourly rate in effect, you know, hundreds, hundreds of hundreds of dollars per hour. So the process is you meet with the engineer. You ask him questions he doesn't want to answer. Like you'll say he'll say, oh, I got this new chip. This new semiconductor design, and it's on a silicon chip and it's designed this way and the capacitance is this and all this. And then when you write the patent, you want it to be as broad as possible so that it covers people that come up with alternate designs to get around it. So I'll say something like I'll say, well, could could you use a different substrate? And instead of answering the question, which is exactly what I said, could you use another substrate? He will say, no, you wouldn't want to do that. So I'll say, could you use gallium arsenide? He'll say, no, you wouldn't want to do that. I said, I didn't ask you if you'd want to. I said, could you and he'll say, oh, yeah, you could, but it would be more expensive. I said, patent law is not about expensive. I'm talking about it like these people cannot just give you yes or no answer because they know too much about what they're already doing. Yeah, they're focused on the way they're going to build it. And that's all they think about. And I'm like, I liked it. I like you to give me a narrow example of a working model. That's fine. But I want to broaden it to cover possible ways you could change it. And you've got to think outside the box and you've got to forget about practicality for a second. So I've gotten good at doing that.  So you need to broaden what it is that they create because that seems counterproductive in protecting what they create. No, so you're making it open for like the rest of the market. No, it's very arcane. So a typical patent. So so I'll explain a second. So so they explain the invention to you, I get an idea.  But but when I send them a draft a week later, they read and they go, God, damn, you were listening.  And anyway, so I'll write the description. The patent has a description of the invention. The patent is basically what we call a patent bargain. The government says we will give you a monopoly on this claimed invention if you disclose in writing to the world what it is. So the trade is not it's not they're not trying to encourage innovation. They're trying to encourage disclosure. So they're trying to say instead of keeping your invention secret as a trade secret, we want you to reveal to the world your ideas that they can't use for 17 years. But at least they can read it and learn about it.  That's the idea to open source it in a way. Correct. You have to reveal it to the world. You have to you have to reveal it in writing. You have to reveal a working model. It's you have to enable someone to do it and you have to give the best mode. Like if you have three ways of doing it and you think one's the best, you have you can't hide the best way. You have to reveal the best mode. You don't have to say which one it is. You can you can disclose all three all three embodiments, but you have to disclose the best one in your mind. Or if you fail to do any of those things, the patent can be validated later on. But anyway, so I write the patent and then I think I give them to approve it and I file it and then the an examiner of the patent office does a search of trying to find similar things in the prior art. And then he sends me back a report saying, I think it's fine. I'm going to allow it, which is rare on the first go. Or he'll say it's got these problems, these semantic problems or these or these or I found some some previous inventions, which are too similar. And he'll reject it. And sometimes you have to abandon it and give up, in which case the company just wasted $15,000. And they know they can do that sometimes. It's a numbers game. So like 15% of their patents, they're going to waste, they're going to they're going to go abandoned.   So I never represent independent inventors because they're not big boys. They don't wear big boy panties. I represent big corporations that know it's a numbers game and I deal with professional in-house counsel and I call them up and I say, OK, I got the first nine, but this 10th one is not going to go through. We should we should bail it here instead of wasting more money on it. And they say fine, drop it. So that's what I like to do. But anyway, that's called prosecution. So I go back and forth to the patent office. It takes about two years usually. And then finally, a patent issues. And now it's an enforceable document. Now in the patent, you have the description and you have drawings that illustrated and you have a set of things called claims. They're numbered from one to like 20 or whatever. And the claims are always a sentence which says what is claimed is colon. And then number one, it says. I claim number one. And apparatus comprising the following elements, A, B, C, and D. So the reason I ask them to broaden it is because it's like peeling an onion. The first claim is broad and the second is narrow. And everyone gets confused about this because it's arcane, but it's the opposite of what you think. So if a claim is broad, that means it covers. Like let's say you have a let's say you invent a stool. No one knows how to sit down, right? They sit down on the ground and someone comes up with a stool which I would define as a seating device comprising a substantially horizontal seat member physically connected to at least three leg members. That's how you describe it of substantially equal length, something like that. So now you have a claim that defines an object in the world that has these elements. It has a seat and three legs. Now if later someone invents a chair, which is a stool with a back and with four legs, let's say, that still is an infringement of my patent because a chair has a seat and it has three legs. You see? It still has three legs and it still has a seat. So the fact that it has a fourth leg and a back doesn't mean that it doesn't infringe my patent.  Just don't call it a stool. No, it doesn't matter what you call it, but they couldn't make it because it would still be a stool. So they couldn't make their chair and I couldn't make a chair because it would infringe their patent. So what would happen is they would cross-license to each other usually. Yeah, but the broadness just is what protects you. So the broadness is done because if I have a patent on, let's say someone invents a chair and I claim it as a stool, like I say someone invents a chair and I say, well, my first claim is going to be a seat platform with three legs. Okay, that would cover my chair and it would cover anyone making a chair or a stool. But let's say later on someone fights my, like I sue someone making a stool. I'm sorry, I sue someone making a chair for violating my stool patent claim. And they, in litigation, they defend themselves by finding prior art showing a stool. So the prior art would say there's a stool that was known already. So the patent office should not have granted my claim one on a stool because it was already known. So my second claim would be the seating device of claim one further comprising a back. So claim two would be a chair. So the reason you have, you start with a broad claim and you go narrower and narrower by adding more elements is because in litigation if your top claim gets struck out because if the broader it is, the more things it covers, but that also means the more prior art that reads on it. So the more likely it is to get struck down in litigation. So you want to have a set of onion skin type claims or nested rushing dog type claims. Like the first one is, it's a funnel. And so like if, so I would accuse the guy selling the chair, I would accuse him of violating my claim one because it is a stool, but I would also accuse him of violating claim two, which is a chair. So if in litigation he finds prior art that shows a stool, he might get claim one struck down, but claim one claim two would survive. And he would still be infringing claim two. So that's the reason if he tells me about a chair, I don't want to claim just a chair. I want to claim the stool because it might cover a stool. And it might not be prior art. So anyway, that's, and that's what most people's eyes glaze over at this stuff. I just told you, which is very inside baseball, patent lawyer.  No, it makes sense.  So you have enough reasons to sue people if you want to protect your invention. Like it makes total sense. But, but everyone, everyone gets confused. Like they confuse what a patent right is and what prior art is. So it's the opposite of copyright. So if you write a novel, you, the copyright gives you the right to publish it because you are the author of that novel. And it gives you the right to stop people from copying it. But if someone else happened to write the exact same novel on their own, they would have an own, their own independent copyright in their novel. But you would be able to publish yours because you wrote it. Now that never happens. But so we're distinguishing patents versus copyrights. So copyright is for artistic original works. So they does give you the right to do it on like patents, but you never need the right to do it because no one ever comes up with the same novel. But in patents, people could come up with the same invention because usually inventions come when their time has come. Like, you know, the light bulb, Edison wasn't the only guy doing the light bulb. The light bulb would have come, would have come around eventually anyway. Like lots of inventions. It's just the first guy to come to the patent office. It's called the race to the patent office. He wins. But the point is, if you have a patent, like the stool example, like I give the example, some guy patents a stool and then some guy patents an improvement called the chair. The guy that patents the improvement, he can't make the chair because the patent doesn't give him the right to make the chair. It only gives him the right to exclude people, to stop people from making the chair. Okay. So that's the first thing you can make an invention. No, you can make the patent for the invention without making the actual invention. And yeah, in fact, in the original patent system, you had to make a working model and submit it to the patent office, but they abolished that decades ago. So now all you have to do is write it down. So the only requirement is a written description. You just have to write it. You can, so that's why patent lawyers like this, so this, this in-chain Craig Wright company, they have 1500 patents pending on blockchain type technology. I know what they do.  They go, okay. There might be something they're working on. There might be something they're brainstorming. Or they just might, they might just have a conversation and say, hey, you know what we could do? You could have, you could carry over the checksum zero on the register. And that might be a more efficient way to calculate the hash thing. And they'll say, yeah, that sounds good. And the patent lawyer's in the corner with a, with a dictaphone recording it. And he goes home and writes, he writes up a paragraph and he sends it to them. They go, that sounds good. And then he just writes it up into a document. They file it. Send it. It's called constructive reduction to practice. So instead of reducing it to practice, which means making a working model, the day that you file the patent application is called a constructive reduction to practice. Now the patent office has the, they maintain, they reserve the right to demand that you submit a working model if they want to. Like if they don't think it works, like it's a perpetual motion machine or something. But I've never, they've never done that to me in the hundreds of patents I've done. They never do that anymore. So all you have to do is come up with ideas and write them down on paper. And that's an invention. And you never have to make it. You never have to practice it. You never have to prove that it works. But once you get it issued, the language is murky and you can threaten to sue people and they don't know what it means. And so they pay you a license fee of $100,000 rather than spend half a million to defend it and maybe even lose in court. You know what I mean? So it's just the whole thing's a, the whole thing's a complete extortion racket. But are you on both sides of that process? No, like I said, I have never, I have never represented someone using their patents aggressively. I have, it was in the beginning, it was by luck. Like I was at law firms that they would say, we need you to help on this case. And I would help on the case. And it was a patent lawsuit. And it was, I was always the defendant. So I always felt morally okay about it. And later on, I started having more choice. And I always just turned down the, I said, no, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna help someone. Use a patent to bully someone. I just refuse to. But like, what would the process be if I just have one of these like mental masturbations of an idea that I wanted to patent? Like, what would that process be? Would I just like race to my local patent office? Or like, would I need a lawyer like you to like look at it, verify it and get it approved? And then you don't need to race to the office. And then I get my hundred grand. You don't need to, no, okay. So you don't need to race because it's rare that someone's doing the same thing. So you could take your time, usually. There are two ways you could do it. You could do it yourself or you could pay someone. So the three, like the three main types of IP is, is like copyright trademark and patent copyright. It's automatic. So you don't need a lawyer. And if you want to register it, which is optional, you just send it to the copyright office. You can do it for 75 bucks or 20 bucks. I forgot the fee. So anyone can do that on their own. You don't need a lawyer for that. Trademarks are a little bit more difficult. Some people do it on their own. You usually hire a lawyer, but it's not that expensive, like a grand or two. What's the difference with trademarks and copyright? Copyright covers artistic creations, like paintings, movies, music, novels, poems, and also software code because that's a writing. But it's called original works, a creative work that you can write down on some medium so you can store it somewhere. Like singing a song is not a copyright because it's just, it's an action that disappears when you're done. But if you record it, the recording is a copyright. Or if you write down a novel, like if you have an idea of a novel in your head, there's no copyright. But as soon as you write it down, you have a copyright automatically. Trademark, you have to file. Well, you have a trademark by common law as soon as you start using a mark in commerce. Like if you start selling a product with a name or if you have a name on your business, you have a common law trademark. But that's precarious because there's a federal system. So it's better to file a registration. Common law is like you said, like it's commerce based law, right? No, common law was, they're all commerce based, but common law was what arose in the common law. So it was, so that means it's state based. Every state has their own trademark system. But in the 50s, the federal government enacted the Lanham Act and they preempted the field mostly. See, it's a little, so this is where constitutional law and legality come into it. This is US centric, of course, which I hate, but that's the system I know and that's one that dominates the world. So the constitution has a copyright clause, which says Congress has the power to enact copyright and patent law. Copyright protects artistic works, patent protects inventions. But it didn't say Congress could regulate trademarks, which was a state law field, state law common law. So what they did was, they finally passed the patent act called the Lanham Act in the 50s and they used the interstate commerce clause, which was not meant to be a grant of power, but the federal government has used it as a grant of power. So what they said was, if there's any kind of commerce that crosses state lines, then the federal trademark law applies.  So you still have state trademark systems, which are common law and they have their own statutes. So you can register a mark in Texas and you can register it federally, but most people just do federally. So to register a trademark federally, which is the name of a product or the name of a company, it's called a mark, like Coca-Cola. You could do that on your own, although most people would hire a lawyer because they just know what they're doing.  You can read a book called Patent Yourself or Do It Yourself. There's a couple of companies that publish those books and if you read them, you can figure it out. It's not rocket science. Well, actually it is rocket science in some cases, but there are some rocket scientists out there. So what you do is, if you wanted to do it on the cheap, you would write like a technical document, like three, four, five, 10, 20-page technical document, like a report describing your invention. Or a white paper. And like a white paper, but you would preferably have some drawings in it which illustrate it. And you would have at least one claim. And the claim could be half-assed, as long as it's a claim, like number one, a method or an apparatus having the following elements or steps, period. And then you could file that for only like $75, I think, as what's called a provisional patent. And then within one year, you could file a regular patent based on it. So what some people do is, if they don't have a lot of money, they just file their own provisional patent. They just do it themselves. So they spend $100, you know. The problem is usually they miss something and it's half-assed and shoddy. And then within a year, did they start approaching companies to maybe license it or build it? Or they test the market then? And if they think their product might work or someone might want to buy it, they might just sell the provisional patent to like a big company and they walk away with the royalties. That's rare, but you can do that. And then they take it over and then they hire a patent lawyer to finish it up and do a regular patent. But you have one year before it expires. So the better way would be to file a regular patent from the start. And that costs, if you hire a lawyer, it would cost, let's say between $8,000 and $20,000 depending upon the quality of the lawyer or the law firm and how complicated your invention is.  So the patent law until about 2011 under Obama, it was changed. The U.S. system used to be a first to invent system. Everyone, every other country in the world has a first to file. The U.S. had a first to invent, which meant if two people file patents on the same rough idea, you would have what's called an interference proceeding at the patent office where you would determine which one we get, because only one person could get a patent on the same idea. They both have to be independent inventors, but they both could have independently invented it. But then the question is, which one gets the patent? And it used to be, it wasn't the guy who filed first. It was the guy who invented it first. So if I filed first, but the other guy filed three months later, but he could prove by his lab notebooks that he had invented it or conceived of it two years before. And I only conceived of it a year before he would win. Now, that was changed in 2011, I believe it was, with the America and Vensack under Obama. And we went to the system the rest of the world uses, which is the first to file. So now whoever files first gets it if there's a conflict. So interference proceedings have been abolished now. So it's just whoever files first wins. And under that old system, your patent would last for 20 years from the date you filed it. So you'd file it on day one. It would take about three years to get it issued. And then you'd have about 17 years left of your term. But under the new system, it's just, it's just, wait, I'm sorry, I have it backwards. It used to be 17 years from the date of issuance, no matter what. So you'd file it three years later, you'd issue, you'd have 17 years. Now the current system is, it's 20 years from the date of filing. So if you get it issued in one year, you have 19 years of term left. If it takes you five years to prosecute it, you have 15 years left. Unless it's a pharmaceutical, and the FDA is the reason that it delays you being able to put your product on the market. So you can add on to your patent term a certain number of years due to the federal drug administration's delays. So you have one federal agency that imposes costs on pharmaceutical companies and imposes delays and requires them to reveal their secrets while they're getting this approval process. So that by the time they release their pharmaceutical on the market, number one, they've incurred tons of cost. Number two is taking them time. Number three, their patent is shorter. And number four, their competitors are ready to compete. And so they complain that they need a patent to protect them from competition. So the government has introduced this FDA system which impedes the market and then gives them a patent which impedes the market to make up for the cost they imposed on them in the first place. So the whole thing is a sick twisted game of one federal, it's like Mises said controls, re-controls. So if you have one government intervention that causes problems, the government's got to have another government intervention to fix that problem. Yeah. You know.   And they face competition because the FDA makes them reveal their secrets while during the process. So instead of having the government which causes this problem in the first place, solve the problem by having another system, the patent system which causes its own problems.  And they're like, well, you don't want to have drugs going out there that are not approved by the government.  You know what I mean? It's like these people... Speaking of drugs, you got the... You got the COOFAX, didn't you? I did. I'm getting the second one tomorrow. And how do you feel? I'm a bootlicker. I'm a wife-licker, man. My wife said to get it. My doctor said to get it. So I didn't have to research it. It makes the decision easy. Oh, I felt fine. I had a sore arm for three or four days. I had the Moderna one. My son got the Pfizer this week. Yeah. Look, I wasn't afraid of COVID, but I'm not afraid of the vaccine either. That's my attitude, you know?  I agree. Where are you? Are you getting it? You're too young to get it so far, right?  He got it somehow in Houston because he's at Texas Children's Hospital. He's still 17. So he somehow got on a list. Yeah.  But let's put it that way. That is a violation of my property. Oh, absolutely. I totally agree with that, of course. And everyone's different. You probably don't need it, to be honest, you know? No, I don't. You're young and healthy. That's like the point.  And I'm also kind of weirded out that, like you'll hear interesting edge cases of people getting it and they're sick for days or like they get Bell's policy, like half their face paralyzes or something.  Well, I'm afraid that, like, I'm traveling tomorrow. I've been traveling a lot the last few months. And like a buddy of mine came from Ecuador to go with me skiing in February. And he had to get the PCR test to come here. And then he had to get one to go back home. I'm just afraid, like, if I want to go to Europe next year or something, or I'm going to Turkey in September, you know, I don't know. I mean, if it's too much of a hassle, I might not go, if it's too risky there. Hell, I might want to go there to sell some Bitcoin for $100,000, you know. They're buying it for $100,000 now. I mean, if it's in Turkey and you're going in September, it might be like double that. It might be, but what I'm thinking is, you know, you might basically need to prove you're vaccinated to start traveling.  I'm not going to impede my lifestyle just to make a stand on principle. I'd rather just pay the price and do what you need to do to live your life, you know. And I mean, I probably cave and do the same thing, but it's just like as libertarians of all people is just so anti-freedom like what we believe is like, you know, we can already say that the state's already already won and we're doomed, but I think Bitcoin helps turn that around.  Yeah, I'm hoping that it's temporary though. I hope this goes away and we get back to roughly normal, but they've established a precedent which is dangerous. But so, I mean, have you ever taken the flu vaccine and other vaccines? Yeah. Okay, so you're not an anti-vaxxer. So to me, when you take those, you're trusting the medical establishment already. So, you know, if they say this is safe. Watching this up is already a problem, probably. It probably is, but I mean, I mean, so do you think COVID is real? Yeah, my dad got it. But the thing is like. They say he got it, right?  I mean, he, he tested for, he had all the symptoms and, but here's the thing. What's really messed up about it is that because like what you were saying about the Mises thing, like controls, you know, get controls or whatever, it's because like there needs to be more of an open, like free market solution to this. And I feel like regulations make everything worse and they go into shock and decisions are just made more irresponsibly. And because we're burdened by all these decisions of like, whether or not to wear a mask or not, or anything that might negatively just affect the entire process because of some arbitrary rule that's like the experts at the CDC made that, that impedes on actually figuring out what the root of the problem is. And so like what happened with my dad is that he got COVID, but then after he got COVID, he basically got like pneumonia because when he was a kid, back 40, some odd years ago, whatever, he got pneumonia.  And so it's just because there's so many controls, it prevents decisions to be made and just like innovation.  I don't really know what's going on. Yeah, I think that's reasonable. I mean, look, my view is I think there probably is COVID. I think it's probably worse than the flu. I really don't know.  You know, they keep telling us not to trust the medical establishment, but I don't really know if I trust them either. You know, they have all these opinions and you know, they're giving out opinions that is basically advice to other people as to what to do with their bodies, which is, you know, I wouldn't be so cavalier and cocksure about this. I don't give people advice about this. I don't pretend to be an expert. I think it's a little bit irresponsible to run around doing that. Now they say it's irresponsible for the medical profession and the government to be doing it and maybe they're right, but I don't really trust...  I'll tell you that. I mean, libertarians have enough problems. You know, I tolerate my people because that's what you got to get to talk to people that have half a brain on politics, but they're not always the most reliable neighbors, if you know what I mean. So I suspect that there's something to it. I suspect that there is a vaccine that does something. I also suspect that the tests that detect COVID and they detect the antibodies are probably way more flawed than they admit. Yeah. Like lots of false positives, lots of false negatives and probably the vaccine is less effective than they say, but if they just have to pretend like it worked because they put so much in it and then that lets them say that the threat's over, let's go back to normal, that's fine with me. To be honest, my first opinion on this was a little bit Darwinian. Like my view was like, listen, the reason we are a successful species in race is because evolution has occasionally weeded out. You know, it's cold to herd. That's what happened. So the weak die in times of hardship and pestilence and pandemics and the ones that survive have the stronger genes and so the human race is stronger and stronger and stronger.  I mean, if it's swept over the world and killed 5% of the population, it would be horrible. But number one, I don't know if that's going to happen. I don't know if you can stop it because we live together, we're interconnected. And it would strengthen the species. I'm not a eugenicist or anything, but as a factual matter, it's not the end of life on the earth.  So I just thought we should have done nothing and let people that are really vulnerable just stay inside. I mean, I always thought that was the right approach, but that's not the approach society took for some reason they panicked this time. Well, yeah, and especially if you have experts making arbitrary decisions based on whatever, it's just like intervening and playing God with people's lives. Well, not only that, we've totally short circuited we short circuited for your market. So like now the government's paying for everything. It's like, when did this? And now everyone's saying, well, the US shouldn't be so stingy with their, they should give it to the rest of the world. So we're supposed to inoculate all seven billion people in the world. And people say, well, yeah, because it's in America's interest for other countries to be inoculated because if we don't kill it around the world, it's going to come back here.  I mean, why do we, why does the one country in the world that wastes its citizens' money on bombing the rest of the world have to also give them the vaccine? It's like, let them get through. I was going to say it's the same excuse for like the war on terrorism or the war on drugs. And like you, the first point that I thought is like, you hit it is like the whole economic part of it and having creative destruction and having boom and bust when they're meant to and not have them carry on because of stimulus.  And it's not favoring the market. So are you, let me ask you, are you pumped about, which of the, which of the main works are you, or do you like, like, uh, Saifanine Namoose's book and, you know, Vijay Boyapatti has got this Bill's case from Bitcoin coming out. Oh, is he doing another one? Or is he just turning it into a book? He's turning it into a book. And, uh, I think he's almost done. I think it's going to be great. I think it's going to be very influential and seminal because that his article already was, so he beefed it up and turned it into a little, a little monograph, you know, like it deserves that because so much happened in two years or three years since he wrote that piece. And I've been re listening to it just because on Clubhouse, I recommended it to people all the time because if they just ask like simple questions to where I just get impatient and I just feel like it's stupid. I'm just like, I can't talk to you until you read this piece. Come back to me when you're done. You have like DM that link to people as well. What I kind of like about Bitcoin is it's an area I'm like an amateur on. And so when I, I'm always like, you know, an audience member kind of guy, except when I talk about property theory and stuff. But, you know, over these years, I've always been like one of the, the one of the speakers and one of the experts on libertarian theory. So I'm always on stage.  I think so. Yeah. I go to Clubhouse and I hear these guys that are these cocksure so-called experts and they usually are. They know a lot more than me about technology. The tech. Well, I don't think there really is an expert. Like there are people that like in your case, like you have a niche and like you're specialized in what you do and people have that in Bitcoin. But, you know, I don't really think I have like a special speciality in Bitcoin because Bitcoin forces you to be like a Renaissance man. But as long as you understand the principles of sound money, whether or not that was like Satoshi's vision, I think it's highly debatable that it was, if you look at what was in the, you know, Chancellor on Brink for a second bill of her banks, that message in the Genesis block, like fixing money, I do think will, if not fix the world in everything, it's just because you have the realignment of incentives that prevents all the corruption of having a monopoly over the money supply. I mean, that fixes so much and you don't need to understand all the principles of sound money. But if it just becomes a default, people will live it and realize what works best. Just because like that's how markets work and innovation works. Yeah, I think that actually Bitcoin is in a way teaching people Austrian economics because most of the people were that. So it's been great. And so you have these people that have never read much economics and they're reading like safe. Because Austrian economics is the default of human nature. Well, but people don't know that. So in the economics profession in the mainstream world, that's considered a crank odd thing. But now, so people are reading like Sabanines book and things like that and big VJ stuff. And they're hearing Austrian economics presented these economics and they just think, oh, OK, that's what economics is. So it's sort of a way to surreptitiously introduce Austrian economics and even libertarianism to the world because we have this, you know, we're criticizing the state and the wars and the drug war and the Federal Reserve and all this kind of stuff.  And one of these guys was just, he was like, they should talk too.  And I thought he was being sarcastic or joking, but I just raised my hand and said, I was a big pointer. That's not this. Yeah. Yeah. Hardcore one. I forgot his name. And I said, I think, I think Bitcoin Tina was on and he and I are kind of friends and I texted him behind the scenes. I said, why did the guy say that? Is he serious? He goes, ask him. So I raised my hand and Bitcoin Tina let me on. And I said, hey, just curious.  And he goes, well, because he doesn't understand money and all this kind of stuff. And he goes, he goes, why do you think it's so good? I said, I didn't say anything. I just asked you a question, man. I honestly haven't even read the whole book because I already know Austrian economics, you know, and already know Bitcoin. I read through it and what I read, it seemed pretty sound to me, but I wasn't defending it. I was just asking you a simple question. Why do you say that? And of course he just said, well, he's bad on money. The history of money or something. I'm like, I want to say what, but I was just curious what he meant or I was really curious if he was serious, but he was serious. So I had not heard much criticism safe. That's why I was surprised. I heard one lady told me she thinks he's overrated, which okay, that's fine, maybe, but he's the only solid systematic thing out there so far. So maybe someone else would do something better someday, but I doubt it because he knows Austrian economics pretty well. I can just speculate where I think that guy was coming from, but there's a lot of people. I tend to agree with this that nothing beats sound money and how sound money came to be, but there was still an element of barter because there's a book like the 5,000 years of debt. And I think that was very much present. And maybe he thinks that argument is stronger than like Opie will collected heirlooms and then those gain value and then they use those as medium of exchange and then it became a unit of account. But I think that debt was always there as well and people did favors for each other and at some point they had to repay or something. But I don't think that one outweighed the other or one happened and one didn't. But again, this is just like my speculation. I've heard other people say that economies have been relying on debt and I tend to agree with that. I haven't looked as much into it, but I don't know. Maybe that's where he was coming from. Yeah, maybe. So I'm going to talk to you about larpitarians because I've heard that term. Tell me exactly what that is. That's your role play, right? Yeah, well, larping. I created just invented. I should patent it. I invented larpitarian, the term just now. But I probably didn't. But I'm just curious what you kind of think of that recently. What is larping? Tell me what that means. Yeah, live action role playing. It's just like as a libertarian, you're negating how great Bitcoin is. And you're my favorite more of like the Bitcoin cash thing or you want a free market.  And we have a solution that we can implement. Yeah, like, I think if I know what you're talking about. There's Eric July thing. And I didn't. I never understood what I didn't. I guess I didn't follow what he had said previously that he. I didn't either. I just can use it as like a broad umbrella example. But just like, like the. I know my friend Jeff Tucker. I think he was one of the ones who at first was like whining and complaining about the split and how those small blockers won and how.  And like, I honestly, from the beginning. Oh, the thing I wrote last night, this comment on my blog, it was an email I wrote to Walter Block in December 2011. And then that was where I wrote.  And it says something like I said, I said, actually in a sense Bitcoin is almost the ideal money because it's like gold, but better. So like, I even saw it. I wish I had like said, I should buy some of this because it might catch on. But anyway, I never thought it would be. Like I was going, I went to the Bitcoin conference in 2013 and they were like how these people, and I went to some things in New Hampshire a couple years after them.  I went to pork fest. There was a vending machine in the woods for Bitcoin. And then, you know, they're selling t-shirts for. There's a barcode thing. And I'm like, I tried it a couple times just to try to learn it. But I thought it was just silly activism because they're trying to force you to use it.   You know? And why would you need to record on the blockchain for eternity a couple, a purchase of a cup of coffee at Starbucks? It just doesn't make any sense to me. It never made sense to me. And I never thought that the utility of it and the case of it were wording was to overturn dollars. First of all, it's taxed capital. So every transaction's a counting nightmare. I mean, if you report it. What?   It's like, so I thought that the whole Bitcoin casting was ridiculous.  My view is very Rothbardian, Hopi and Misesian. I think that their money is a sui generis good. It's not a capital good, not a consumer good. It's not a good type of which increasing the supply increases consumer welfare or wealth. So I believe with Mises that any supply of money is optimal. And once you get there, you should never change it at all. And with gold, we have to tolerate that because it's a non-perfect money. It's better than nothing, but it's imperfect because it has a non-monetary value, which means it's a waste. It would just be used for money. And also it's an incentive to mine it, which is a wasteful activity and it causes inflation. And it's maybe sets in forth the canty on effect and business cycles and all that. I don't know, but at least causes inflation and a redistribution of wealth, which I think is bad. I don't think it's immoral. And I don't think it's a rights violation because it's done privately, but it's still imperfect. So Bitcoin is like approaching the ideal. It doesn't have a non-monetary use and it can't inflate beyond 21 million at all. So it's perfect. So that was always my thought about it. So these people that say, oh, you get one money for smart contracts and one money for small change and one money for privacy and one money for color coins and one money for non-fungible tokens.   I mean, the whole point of money is to attend a seat of one money. You want one world. It's like, ideally, we'd have one language, right? One language in the world and one money. And everyone could communicate. And you have one internet, one network, and you have one size of rail gauge in the world. So all the train rails, when they go from country to country, they can stay on the same rails. I mean, common protocols are good. So I think- Consents is bitches. Now, I am not persuaded that Bitcoin has anything special about it compared to the other ones. I could be wrong, but I'm not persuaded. I think that if Bitcoin- I want to get into this. Well, because I think that, like, you can't say that the block size is optimal. Maybe it should have been two. Maybe it should have been 32 megabytes. Maybe it should have been half. But what is optimal is, like what you said with Mises is that it is what it is.  Well, the one thing I'm concerned about is that over time, the one megabyte block size will become effectively smaller in relative terms, right? So, but- Or it could get bigger. But the point is- Sorry, sorry, just to cut in real quick. All right, go ahead. Go ahead. Is that whatever happens will change based on consensus of the entire network. Well, but no, what I mean is it'll get effectively smaller because it'll be one megabyte, but processing power bandwidth will get bigger and bigger. So it'll be effectively trivially small. And if you wanted to increase it, proportion it to technological development, you'd have to change, have a hard fork. And I think the split in 2017 proved that that's now impossible. So I sort of wonder if it would have been better to have a variable block size like BSV has. Not for the reasons they want. They want it so that you can have it go really big and have payments. I don't think that's the reason. I think the reason would simply be so that it could easily adapt to increasing technology improvements. But maybe the anti-centralizers are right, that that'd still be a bad idea. But my point is, I think that whatever we have, it's good enough because it's still better than gold. And it's good enough to work as a settlement layer. And so whatever it is, we'll adapt to that and it'll work. And I think it could have been Bitcoin Cash. I think it could be Bitcoin God, it could be Litecoin. It could have been any of those, I think. But Bitcoin now has the long chain in the network effect. Well, it also can't be anything else because everything else is centralized. Well, but if they had been more popular, would they still be a centralized? If they had been popular, they still, yeah, they still would have been centralized because the decentralization of Bitcoin was very much, as you said, like, prevalent in 2017 because the consensus of the network went against the Bitcoin Cash narrative. Correct. But if Bitcoin Cash had become dominant and Bitcoin Cash was worth a trillion dollars today and Bitcoin was now... Like that wouldn't have happened. Like this is the question. Correct. So yeah, my hypothetical may be nonsensical. So I'm just saying, I think that Bitcoin, I think that you could only have one and there should be one. And I think digital money is inevitable. Whether it's going to happen in this first attempt in iteration, I don't know. I suspect it might. And if so, it seems to me that it's going to be one and the most likely one is going to be the one that's dominant now, which is Bitcoin. So yeah.    They'll say things like, like Roger Ver, who I like kind of because he's libertarian. Like I, as shitty as he was, like I got mad respect for him, like the hustle and like the passion. He's anti IP. I think I actually gave him some Bitcoin, some IP advice years ago before he was a billionaire.  Anti-censorship. So do you think that Reddit, when they censor, when the Bitcoin thread on Reddit, censors people who talk about Bitcoin Cash, do you think that's compatible with censors? Because they're censoring people.  And then the same thing is with, oh, they'll say, oh, the word cash is in the title of the white paper.  You know, and second of all, Bitcoin is cash or will be cash if it's used to settle it. That's still cash by the definition. Yeah. So, VJ White Potties argument for that is like cash is something that is in of itself. Like, I don't know. I'm bastardizing what he says, but like, I agree 100%.  Oh, the argument that BSVers give is like, well, you're anti-Australian anti-free market if you want to have a rule that prevents the free market from supply and demand setting the size of the block. Like dumbass market. It's like you have whatever rule you want that everyone agrees to. That's not anti-free market. To have a fixed block size. It's just like if you play Monopoly and there's a fixed limit on the number of dollars on that board, that's not anti-free market. It's just the rule of the game. Yeah.     Now, you could argue that it would work better to have a supply and demand thing and then let the market decide which one's better. And the market decided Bitcoin was better. Yeah. Okay. Maybe the market's wrong. Maybe the market's wrong to adopt the QWERTY keyboard and maybe the Dvorak keyboard's better. But you know what? There's Pat dependency and it's too costly to switch over now. So we're going to use the keyboard. It works fine. And Bitcoin works fine. I googled the Dvorak keyboard and I'm just like, why? What is this?  And there's a thing where like the typewriter. I'd say it would be more optimal or something, yeah. Yeah, I don't know. But yeah, no one's showing these people, they can't do their super projects. We're just, as Bitcoiners, not going to allow it on the Bitcoin network. Well, it's like, you know, if England is like an outlier because they drive on the left side of the road, probably it would have been better for them if they had switched to the right at some point early on. But it's too late now because it would cause massive societal disruption. So the price they have to keep paying is there different for the rest of the world. Yeah.  But apparently it's not worth the cost to switch over. I think Japan did that, didn't they? I think Japan actually did that. They in the 60s or something, they had a day where everyone had to start driving the other side and there was lots of wrecks, but they finally bit the bullet and did it. But it's hard to do that. Wow. So I think that they bastardized what Hayek said because Bitcoin is a free market money. Like it is basically an embodiment of what Hayek was talking about. I don't know. I don't think the ambassador is Hayek. I think I don't like Hayek. I think Hayek is totally confused and wrong on this. I disagree with this knowledge problem. I'm one of these guys. I think that everything Hayek was good on, he was just a murky interpretation of Mises. And everything he was original on, he was bad on. I mean, I really don't, I'm not a Hayekian at all. So J.W. Weatherman has this same argument or I think it might be the same. So can you just kind of further explain? I've got a blog post on my Stefan Kinsella site.  It's under my Law and Libertarian World League. And one of them is on the knowledge, knowledge and calculation. Like I think the knowledge problem and all the Misesian Austrians like Hoppe, Hulsman, Salerno, Herbiner, they all think that, and Rothbard, they all think that Hayek was just, the whole knowledge paradigm was wrong. The function of prices is not to convey knowledge. And it's simply to provide a cardinal format that people can make comparisons to do economic calculation. And that depends on our property rights system. So it's not a conveyance of knowledge. I don't think prices are signals. They don't convey knowledge at all. And I don't agree with his competing currency idea at all. I think, again, it should just be one thing and it should be the best fungible commodity in a broad sense that can serve that function. And it used to be gold and now it's Bitcoin. Okay. I think I'm having to soul search right now. Read that post. You read that post. It might cause you to ponder some things. Just real quick, can I ask you why prices are not like signals in the market? Yeah. So Dietel Hulsman writes best on this. So there are no such thing as prices, current prices. There's only past prices, which are historical records of just the exchange someone engaged in. And there's future prices, which don't exist, but they're the appraisal or the forecast in someone's mind. It's just a prediction. So if I want to engage in a project in the future, the future is uncertain, but I want to make a monetary profit. So I have to use my scarce resources. I have to allocate them towards some project. And there's multiple projects I can engage in. Like I could build a bridge. I could make a light bulb factory. I could make a restaurant, whatever. So what I have to do is I have to try to guess what my monetary profit in the future would be. To do that, I have to guess what prices, what revenue I'm going to make, like what price I can charge for this product. And I have to guess what my costs are going to be. And those are all future things. So the only way to do that is to, you imagine the most recent set of prices and you extrapolate from there. So you take the most recent set of prices, which most people erroneously call current prices. And you say, you just try to calculate a delta, a difference. Like you say, okay, the price. So milk is like three times as expensive as eggs or whatever. And cows are half as expensive as horses, you know, these kinds of things, given money prices right now. That's a relative indication of how the higgling and the negotiation on the market resolves itself in terms of what people pay for these things. How they value them. Okay. But it doesn't tell you why they value them or what they know. So if I am selling like, if I have a farm and I can grow wheat or I can grow corn, and I think there's going to be a corn, I think there'll be a shortage of corn or I think there'll be an increase in demand for corn. Like maybe I think people will start using it to make ethanol or and the demand will go up. So I might plant corn predicting that I will have a higher price for corn in the future than other people think, right? But and when I do that, I bid up the price of corn because I buy corn seeds and all that. So by making a judgment about what I think the future price will be, I set the current price. But that current price is not right or wrong, it's just a consequence of my knowledge, which is uncertain in its local knowledge. So the price reflects my knowledge, but my knowledge could be wrong. And someone else seeing the price of corn go up right now doesn't know why it's going up. They don't know if the price of corn is going up because the demand for it is going up, which it is in this case, because I have a higher demand for corn because of my belief of what the future is going to hold. So someone sees the price of corn go up. One reason for that could be that there's an increase in demand. Another reason could be there's a decrease in supply. Or another reason could be there's a perceived increase in demand on my part. Like I could be wrong or there's a perceived increase. I could think there's an increase in our decrease in supply and I could be wrong. Like I could be wrong that there's a famine coming or a plague coming for corn. In other countries. And so I'm going to grow more corn. So all these ideas that I have go into the change in the price, but they could be wrong or right, and they could be a change in supply or a change in demand. So someone observing this new price doesn't learn anything from it. All they learn from it is that I am willing to pay this much for corn. Well, it sends some signals to whether or not to buy that versus the generic price or the generic brand, which is a cheaper price. Right? No. Well, prices are still sending information and influencing people's decision on what or what not to buy. And even if that price is reflective by your decision to like bid off the price of corn for this or that reason, is that not still like a free market solution and everyone has consensus around that price? It's a free market solution. Yeah, it's a free market solution. It converges in the long run in an equilibrium fashion towards an optimal equilibrium. However, we never reset because the market is dynamic and always changing. So there's always like an instantaneous tendency, but you never get there. It's just like a guiding force. But you got to read that article on my blog by Guido Hozman. He gives a good example about 10 and I quote from that. So let's say 10 becomes more scarce and people need 10 to make some things, right? The reason they can't use 10 as much in production processes is not because the price went up. It's because there is less 10 to go around. So usually the decrease in supply of 10 or the increase in demand for it, either one, would cause the price to go up and that price would mean people are simply less able to afford it because they don't have as much money to spend on it. So they would have to conserve it automatically. But the reason they're conserving it is because there's less of it to go around. It's not because of the price. So, and the price can be wrong. So if the price of 10 goes up. The price is still being based on supply and demand. Maybe not. No, it's really not. It's based upon my perception of supply and demand. So I'm the guy bidding the price of 10 up based upon my forecast of the future. My forecast could be wrong. My project might try not to be a loss in the future, which means that I changed the price of 10 in the wrong direction and everyone responded to that in the wrong way. So what ironically you... It didn't convey information. It conveyed bad information. So anyway, you ironically in the free market were being the central planner that dictated incorrectly the price of 10 or corn. And that's just because people are fallible and we're not omniscient and we don't know the future. Mistakes are... But that's like Hayek's argument, isn't it? I don't think so. Like the whole like road to surf something. I mean, like he also talks about like the pricing mechanism as well. But then he also talks about like, you know, you can't have a central planning like bureaucratic like government thing. But what's better is that if you have like planners in the free markets, make these solutions and we have consensus around like prices based on individual choice and subjective value. Well, I used to think that but... So I'll send you two links that you or your listeners who are interested in this can read further. Yeah, totally. So one is this knowledge thing. And just read the quotes that I selectively highlight from Hop-Up and Hulsman and these guys and Rothbard and Solerno and Herbner about Hayek and the Hayekians. And then also there was a huge debate in the late 80s and early 90s in the review of Austrian economics. And I've collected all the key resources in a blog post. It's called the great... The great... I see. The great... Well, there's two. The great... Yeah, the great Mises Hayek de-homogenization slash economic calculation debate. Now, the Hayekians... What they've always argued is that when Hayek elaborated on the calculation problem that Mises laid out in 19... It was 1921 in his economic calculation in the socialist Commonwealth and then in greater detail in his book, Socialism. Maybe it's 1919 or 20, and then the book was in 21 or 22. I forgot. But anyway, they always said that Hayek, when he talked about knowledge, was just either complimenting that argument or supplementing it. Or he was... When he talked about the knowledge signals and the knowledge prices, dispersed knowledge, local knowledge, all that stuff, he was just describing the flip side of the coin. That's what Pete Betke and Steve Horowitz and a lot of these Hayekians say. And I think that's actually wrong. I think that he's just... He went off on a wrong tangent and he's misdescribing... He's losing the central point and he's not adding anything useful to it. Now, they would vigorously disagree with me on this, but there was a whole debate on this and you'll see there's a debate between the Rothbardians, basically, and the Hayekians. And I basically am persuaded by the Rothbardians, although it's been 15 years since I read all this stuff. I want to revisit it, but there's so much to read now and so many clubhouse things to listen to. Yeah. So what is the main point that Hayek doesn't get? It's just what I'm talking about. So he thinks that the problem is that... The problem is that you can't coordinate because knowledge is local and it's tacit. By tacit, he means there's things that we know but we can't articulate in language, which is true. I might know how to ride a bicycle, but I can't tell you how to do it. I can maybe teach you, but I have to show you by demonstration, you have to learn it yourself. You can't really explain how you walk even, really. My mom is a good example. She's a great cook, but if I ask her what a recipe is, she doesn't... She goes, I just put a little bit of this, a little bit of that. She knows how to do it. She has a skill, a talent, a knack, but she can't articulate it. So some knowledge is tacit and some knowledge is local. Like only I know that there's a famine coming or that there's a shortage of eggs because I'm a farmer. And so the consumer of eggs 100 miles away doesn't know there's a shortage of eggs, but by me raising the price of my eggs, I raised the price of eggs. And so he effectively learns that eggs have a shortage because the price signal conveys that knowledge. But I don't think it does convey it. All it conveys is that the price of eggs went up. The consumer only knows that there is someone who thinks that the price of... There's someone who thinks that there's a shortage of eggs or that there's an increased demand of eggs coming. That's all they know. They don't know which one it is. They don't know if it's an increase in supply. I'm sorry, a decrease in supply or an increase in demand. And they don't know if I'm right. So it doesn't convey anything. All it conveys to them is that someone is not going to take the same price for eggs anymore. And then if they go to this seller, they have to pay his price. That's all they know. But the point is, if there really is a shortage of eggs, there are less eggs to go around and people cannot use as many eggs as before. Whether the price signal is right or not, they just can't. Like if the price is too low, they're just going to run out of eggs soon. There will be a shortage of eggs. And then the price will have to adjust because people will realize. So the idea of the tacit knowledge is you don't know how to explain it, but your actions on the market codify your knowledge in numerical terms. Because if I know how to cook a recipe, I don't know how to explain it, but I might go buy the ingredients. And when I buy those ingredients, that helps alter the price of those ingredients. And that knowledge is then conveyed in encoded form. See, I'm an engineer, an electrical engineer, and I'm used to actually thinking of signal encoding and encryption and transmission of data over fiber optic cables and through modems, modulator, demodulators. And to me, signal encoding is a precise term. It means a knowing actor has information he wants to transmit. And so he encodes it by a known scheme or schema and transmits it to be decoded at the other end and understood. If I write a book, I'm putting words on paper according to a schema, the alphabet and the language schema, and someone else with a dictionary effectively can decode it at the other end. But that's all intentional and rational. To make a metaphor and an analogy and say that prices encode information is extending a metaphor too much. And this is where we always get into trouble when we overdue metaphors. So it's deeper than that, and that's about all I can do to explain it, being this rusty on it. But if you're curious, just dip into that de-homogenization economic calculation debate, you'll see in that plug post. And I'll send you the links if you want to dive into it or put them on your show notes. And I need to go to about five or 10 minutes, by the way.  But that example was... Yeah, it took a literal approach and there's a process into decoding why something happens. And then it's almost high it comes at it in almost a metaphysical way. We don't know. Maybe. Maybe I'm just... We could be wrong, but just think about it. It's a fascinating debate. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, I'll be happy to take a look at those and put them in the show notes. Very cool. I think... Wow, how long it's been? Like an hour and a half? Jesus. This has been great. I thoroughly enjoyed the chat. Just one last thing. As the Bitcoin price is doing what it does, I'm sure you're maybe getting more people your age that aren't into Bitcoin asking you about it. Yeah, I'm the expert in my circles, which is scary, but I'm the expert. Yeah, how many questions and how do you describe Bitcoin to Gen X or a boomer? What are the questions been like and how has their feedback been? Well, it always comes up and they always have the confusing misconceptions, like the elementary things you have to correct, like, oh, I don't have to buy a whole Bitcoin, that kind of stuff. Or how do I buy it? Wait, if it's a separate thing, how do you get some? I say you buy it. Well, where do you buy it? It's out in the exchange. You can trade. It's like a currency exchange. People trade. There's on-ramps and off-ramps. There's dollar, fiat currency, off-ramps and on-ramps. It's like the basics. Then you explain how it's a fixed supply, but then you explain how some has been lost, and then you explain how it's growing asymptotically every four years by the difficulty adjustment and the block reward being adjusted and the difficulty adjustment every two weeks. Then you have to explain encryption, and then you have to explain what a wallet is and how you can store it in a custodial thing, or you can do it yourself. It's not on your treasure, but it holds the key. It's kind of difficult because we all went through this mind-bending thing for a few years of Agony trying to understand it and seeing the kind of learning process like Bitcoin finally learned that it wasn't a payment thing. I think the 2017 thing helped us learn more about its store of value function and the settlement nature layer of it and how hyper-Bitcoinization can happen. Then you go into what its potential future value could be, like if it displaced gold, and what's the free market value of gold? If it replaced that, then it might be worth this many dollars per coin. Ultimately, you wouldn't even have to sell it for dollars because you could just spend your Bitcoin in this enclosed Bitcoin economy. Then you tell them what's happened the last 11 years. That's 200% a year and how every time you tell them to buy, they say, oh, but I missed it at the top. It's $55,000 now.  When it was $13,000, you said the same thing. When it was $5,000, you said the same thing. When it's $100,000, you're going to say I wish I'd listened to you under $55,000. Say just buy now and hold it and forget it for three years or five years. But don't buy it if you're going to get nervous and sell it if it falls, or if you're going to get greedy and sell it if it goes up. You got to buy it and hold it for five years and ignore it no matter what happens. Only put into it something you can afford to lose and it won't make you nervous. Some people can't do that. Some people will sell it if it goes up and they'll sell it if it goes down. So it's like, well, then why buy it? They want to go home and tell their wife, oh, maybe 25% in two months. It's like, yeah, then it's going to go up another 500%.  Or if it falls, they'll sell it at a loss and they'll panic and then they hate you because they lost money and they'll say, well, you weren't supposed to buy it if you weren't going to hold it for five years. You know, I guess that's the rough advice all big winners give to normies, right? That was the best. Just the chronology. That was perfect. Like succinct. Like, you probably don't want to tell a newbie all that at once. But if I just clipped everything you said and gave it to him, I think that's a vice. Yeah. Wow. And you could do that in an hour maybe. Yeah. Huh. Okay. So how many people have you actually done that to?  A couple dozen, like in-laws, close friends, family members. Yeah, probably a couple dozen. And do they get it? Like what's the reception been like? Most of them, the higher the price goes, the more they get it, I find. And the longer it's been around. And the more public awareness it's getting. Like now they're saying, oh, Stefan, you're right. All these institutional investors, I'm hearing on regular news now, you're right. I'm like, yeah, we've been saying this for several years. It's going to happen in waves. It's going to be adopted in waves. Like, it'll get one price, it'll catch people's attention, and then they're going to start investing and that'll get the price higher up. And then another level of people that were old fogies will notice. And you that's our prediction about what might happen. And then there's always the wolf, the girl, but shut it down. I'm like, well, China shut it down. Did it kill it? China bans Google on the internet. Did it kill it? Uber didn't ask permission and they're finally unbanable because they built in a constituency. A lot of congressmen have nephews and kids that have Bitcoin now. Some of them might have Bitcoin. It's going to attach itself like a parasite to everyone. It's going to be too late to kill it. That's how it got into Bitcoin. VJ told me in 2012, I said, I loved it. I just think that it was $13. And I said, it's going to crash by the end of the year because if it goes up, the government's going to kill it. And he said, you want to bet $100? I said, okay. So I said, I'll bet $100 that in a year, it'll be one 20th of its current value, 65 cents. So about six months later, it was like 30 bucks.    And there were 30 bucks each, so I could save $10. So I bought, I bought five bitcoins on Coinbase while I was setting it up. So I gave him this three. But he was doing that to nudge me into getting into it. He was sneaky. Yeah. So I owe him, well, he owes me $150,000 right now, but I owe him for getting me into it. That's beautiful. Awesome.  Go ahead and not that you need to. I'm sure people know where to find you, but just show all your stuff where people want to find you. If you've got any cool stuff coming out or whatever. Well, I've got a book coming out, Law and Libertarian World, sometime this year, hopefully. It'll be kind of an edited selection of my kind of theoretical articles on Libertarian Property Theory and stuff. So my main site is stefanconcello.com and all my IP stuff, I kind of shunt it off into a separate site called C4SIFC, the number four, which stands for Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom.org, C4SIF.org. So if you're interested in IP stuff, go there and just Libertarian Theory, stefanconcello.com. Awesome. When the book comes out or is about to I'd love to have you back on to talk about that. We got into some of the property stuff, but I did want to ask more about like the natural law versus like objectivism and the ethics of liberty stuff. Be happy to. Awesome. Seven, thanks for your time. Be very generous and I've thoroughly enjoyed this chat, man. All right, I'll send you the file shortly. You bet. Peace out. All right, bye.


A bill to offset health insurance premium rate hikes passed in the Senate today, Republicans who control the legislature have pushed for income-based subsidies to offset 50 to 67 percent increases on the individual market this year. They're also looking to allow for-profit insurers to sell plans in Minnesota. Governor Mark Dayton and other Democrats have said that the setup would take too long to deliver the checks. We are probably going to move at slightly different speeds than the Senate, but we are going to make sure that all members get a chance to be heard. We're going to be talking about miniature and health care and health insurance a lot this session, lots of different potential reforms coming up. I look forward to working with everybody that's going to be involved, people from the administration, House, Senate, everybody. The House is expected to pass similar legislation next week. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.