KOL244 | “YOUR WELCOME” with Michael Malice Ep. 001: Intellectual Property, Prostate Cancer

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the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation little knowledge is a dangerous thing

you read a few lines ready to blow up the world chop heads off destroy authority

revolutions are never bloodless this refrain of terror will purge the land of

all corruption this congress refuses to grant any of my proposals on independence even so much as the

courtesy of open debate good god what in hell are you waiting

for good afternoon i’m michael malus and

let’s happy you’re welcome for the next hour i am very jazzed for our first show here on gas digital

one of the questions i’ve always been asked about politics and political theory is what is your stance on

intellectual property things like trademarks copyright so on and so forth and i never answer those

questions because i have no idea about it and being an author i clearly have a vested interest in the subject and just

because invested interest doesn’t mean i have the correct interest you know just like real estate people might have a vested interest in uh having the government

control their rents doesn’t mean they’re on the right side of morality so i brought here

as my guest stefan kinsella who is the world’s preeminent political philosopher when it comes to

anti-intellectual property which means abolishing trademarks abolishing copyrights abolishing is

their third one oh yeah trade secret and patent yes so you’re think none of these things you’re a

fellow anarchist you think none of these things should be protected by law of course whenever people hear about this they think it’s absolutely bonkers

and makes no sense because we’ve all been taught that piracy is stealing yes uh and that certainly is

where my gut is leading so what’s the elevator pitch for abolishing

intellectual property well i have a vested interest in it too because i’m a patent attorney and so if we abolished it i wouldn’t have a job

although we’d probably have a phase-out period i’d have a lot of work for 20 years cleaning up all the transitional issues

the elevator pitch idea is that property rights or control over scarce resources

their property rights that allow us to decide who uses things that we could have conflict over so they’re conflict avoidance mechanisms

and when the state meeting like if someone has their house is their property their car or their dog their horse yeah um and so

the property right says who can own this thing that people could have a fight over otherwise if we don’t have fights over it we want

to have property rules so that’s what property rules are for therefore there are response to the fact

of scarcity in the world and and copyright which are the two big big ones that are bad

basically come in and say that someone can’t compete with you they can’t copy your book and what that

means is um the copyright law prevents you from using your own property the way you see

fit right and patent law prevents you from using your own factory as you see fit

so it basically gives a control to someone else it creates scarcity where there is none

information is what ip tries to protect patent and copyright law information is not a scarce resource so

any number of people can use the same idea at the same time without conflict so you don’t need conflict avoidance

rules so when you try to establish these rules you necessarily cause conflict well but i i mean here let’s let’s see

how it applies to my own life personally i spent eight months writing deer reader right by north korea book

a lot of hard work you’re not going to deny that just because i work hard something doesn’t mean i have some kind of right to it necessarily

because you could work hard and be wasteful and be pointless correct i’m sure you’re not going to deny i’ve produced something that is a value

obviously people are buying it so there’s a value of it the point is so you’re saying that i write my book i put it out

and the next second anyone can take it and copy it and i’m not going to see a cent for it well first of all that can happen now

right because we have digital technology people can copy your book right now without your permission

uh sure but it i mean it’s easy to shoot them down he’s kind of easy there’s a whole you know

there’s the torrents there’s all over the web there’s it’s right but those are those are closed very frequently by governments

they are but people can get around it and they’re going to increasingly be able to get around it sure but hold on just because someone is i

know i’m begging the question here just because it’s easy to steal something doesn’t mean it’s not stealing yeah that’s not that’s not relevant so you you use the word

they can take it now the word take usually refers to a physical thing like if someone takes my glasses i don’t have them

sure right um and the reason i don’t want you to take my glasses because then i wouldn’t have them i wouldn’t be able to use them if you

could like reach out and just touch my glasses and have a copy in your hands it wouldn’t really bother me okay and

that’s what it’s like but your glasses aren’t really unique right they’re fungible there’s other glasses

that are like that ever in the world right my book is or anyone’s book is unique it’s a product of someone’s creative expression

it is unique but you see people keep changing the standards for why you should have a copyright or a

patent first it’s uh i had to put my labor into it and you shoot that down by saying well you don’t really own your labor

even in physics if you push against the wall you’re not performing work because you’re not moving a mass through a distance right

you just you’re doing nothing and if you waste your effort on something that is a product no one wants to buy you’ve

you’ve expended labor but you haven’t created any wealth sure and by the same token if you do create

wealth by making a product that people want to buy you’ve made the world better off you’ve made yourself better off that doesn’t necessarily mean you have a

property right in the right to re receive a stream of income from your customers you don’t you don’t own your

customers people say that you know a new pizza restaurant moves in next door to mine and starts stealing my

customers it’s not really stealing but they misuse this metaphor so when you said they take your idea

they’re not taking your idea they’re copying your book let’s say so you still have your book you still have the right to sell your book

um so they didn’t take anything that you own now and then the response would be well

they took the profits i could have made so then you get to the point well do you own future potential profits because

profits is just the money you could have made from potential future customers but who owns that money your potential

future customers you don’t own that money sure but let’s talk i mean there’s a lot of uh of things that are kind of triggering

my mind along the way the the most obvious one where it doesn’t apply just to me is what would be the consequences market

wise if this were put into place because there’d be very little incentive for someone to write a book

well and we can talk about that but you got to realize then now you switch to another thing about incentives and so people think that the purpose of

property rights and the purpose of law is to provide the incentives and of course that leads to all these special interest

laws that we have where we say well we need to tweak this tax this way or we need to have this subsidy here to incentivize or disincentivize the

following now libertarians believe the purpose of property rights and the purpose of law is to do justice

to protect people’s rights it’s not to incentivize the right things i don’t think that’s universally the libertarian perspective on rights at all

it’s my libertarian perspective i think it’s the rock party and perspective i think it’s the solid anarcho-capitalist property you just

said it was about to resolve disputes and now you’re saying it’s to provide justice those are separate things yeah i think it is i think

libertarianism is compatible with consequentialism that is you look at the consequences and the reasons for these rules but it doesn’t

mean it’s to provide incentives i do think the incentives flow from that in a natural sense but uh when you’re when you sell look

when you’re selling a good on the market or a service you have to think how can i make a profit on this good because we know from

economics profit is in a way unnatural right because profit is a deviation from the natural rate of interest and as soon as you make

a profit you’re going to send a signal to the price system and through your activities to the market and you’re going to tell people hey

this guy’s doing something that satisfies consumer welfare so come in and compete with him right so profit is always being pushed down

by competition right so profit is an unnatural thing so you always have to think how can i make a profit

and once i make it how am i going to keep making a profit knowing that i’m going to attract competitors now that’s the case for inline any line

of business right like what you’re doing here or a pizza restaurant or a steel factory or whatever there are certain types of

industries and activities where the concern might be it’s easier for someone to compete with me because

what i’m selling is just a book copy and it’s easy to copy that or it’s like a new tweak to an iphone design

which is a patentable invention and my competitor can just easily copy that that’s that’s the idea that it’s

easy to do all this of course it’s not that easy i can get to in a second but people think it’s just too easy to compete

so the the calculus you go through as an entrepreneur is well if i want to spend time writing a novel when i start selling the novel

someone can just knock me off right away it’s too easy to compete with me right and therefore we need the government to come in and raise the

barriers to competition by having monopoly privilege laws which is what copyright and patent do

so you have libertarians who are in favor of the property rights system because they see using the word monopoly

a little unfairly because every like for example if i’m selling my home i have a monopoly in my home right but that word monopoly has a

negative connotation especially in a libertarian context so i think that’s kind of uh not really using that term in in a

fair way you could argue that i mean of course monopoly just means uh you you have um

you have a legally privileged monopoly over a certain industry where you can charge above market prices right

um which is which is exactly the argument for copyright is that you can sell your book for a higher price than you could

if you had everyone competing with you sure to sell your iphone for a higher price than if everyone could copy your design right away

so but if you the reason i don’t think it’s unfair is if you look uh back in um first of all

the patent system we have now originated in the 1623 english act called the the statute of monopolies okay so these

were monopoly this arose from the practice of the king granting monopoly privileges to people

uh i’m going to give you the right to sell sheepskin in this town that’s right sure that has nothing to do with innovation but on occasion they would

give someone one of these patent patent means open so it was an open grant to everyone in the

world saying no one can do this except for this guy right uh pirates have that sir francis drake had

that they had the right to be the only ones who could do various things and sometimes it would be an inventor when this practice got

out of hand the parliament limited it with the statute of monopolies 1623 and they they they limited it only to inventions

so it came out of the the word the word monopoly was used by the people who promoted it in the

beginning thomas jefferson uh so the us constitution in 1789 had a has a provision which allows uh

the congress to pass patent and copyright law okay jefferson was corresponding with

madison during the drafting of the bill of rights in 1790 or so and he wrote he provoked he proposed an

article and i meant it would have been one of the bill of rights uh saying that uh the monopolies that

congress can grant for patenting copyright should be limited to x years and uh it was ignored it wasn’t done i

wish it had been done because otherwise uh you know copyright was around 14 years in the beginning right um and now it’s over a hundred right uh

oh but the point is even jefferson was using the word monopoly in the beginning um but again the word you’re i feel

using a word that has a negative connotation that did not have a negative connotation of time oh i think monopolies did have a

negative connotation so so what happened was um the the free market economist in the 1800s

started getting alarmed at this fairly new institutionalized practice of granting patents like in the us and then

in europe uh which was really institutionalized in the around the time of the constitution in america um

so they started having an uprising against this practice of granting monopoly privileges they shared and so the response to the entrenched by

the entrenched interest at the time they started saying it’s not a monopoly privilege it’s a uh

what do you call it it’s a it’s a property right and they say well it doesn’t look like a property right they said well it’s a it’s an intellectual

property right because it comes from your brain so the term intellectual property was an invention of the people the entrenched

interest defending this what had been called the monopoly privilege point before so it’s a euphemism

it is it’s definitely yeah so and you even have some ip advocates some

libertarians even a lot of objectives like adam mossoff and richard epstein you know they’ll say things like it’s a

natural right it’s like well why does it expire in x years right right um

you know uh why does it have to be a creature of legislation because these things would not exist without legislation unlike

other natural property rights we have which are that’s not necessarily true because if you had some kind of anarchist system you would very easily

be able to have a covenant where no one’s allowed to do this within the community you could argue that but i would argue that’s just a contract in

that case it’s not it’s not a general i mean it’s it’s a little bit into the the the legal weeds but in the law we have

the term in rem and in persona right in rem is a real right a right in property that’s good against the world

so you own your car or your house against someone even in france just even though it’s protected by the

new york legal system or the american legal system but if you own a right to a property

right i’m sorry a patent or a copyright it’s only protected within that jurisdiction someone could be doing the same invention

or copying your book in another country without you even knowing it and they’re not violating your property rights they’re not infringing on it at all you

don’t even know they’re doing it but this is what i don’t understand because i thought one big issue in the news is that china violates our ip all the time and the

government is limited about it technically that’s that’s legally incorrect they don’t violate her well okay so

there’s two aspects to it there are treaties that china is party to and they don’t enforce them a hundred

percent of course neither do we we don’t stop all infringement china is a little bit more lacks about allowing counterfeiting

to go on so in that sense they’re allowing uh they’re allowing some of their citizens to violate copyright

which is chinese copyright law which is in compliance with these federal treaties like the berne convention

but i think what trump is talking about is is cases that are not covered by chinese law so they’re just saying that they’re copying american ideas which

in the free market we call competition or learning from each other well okay so these uh patents monopolies

came out of what’s uh the britain and the u.s right yeah in europe europe had aversions too

but what i’m saying is these were actually the same places where innovation reached its peak correct so wouldn’t

this i obviously correlation is not causation but certainly you can’t say it was uh on

its face harmful to innovation well there’s uh

well that’s another argument that advocates use they’ll say they’ll say that well look at the rise of the west and we have the copyright and patent law and

so they’re making the correlation causation mistake because you could make any number of claims you could say imperialism or trade barriers or tariffs

or causes too because we’ve had all those we or you could a war every 10 years is what causes wealth um

but um here’s the way i look at it congress in

1789 puts in the copyright patent clause because we had this traditional sort of growing use of copyright and patent from

the british system they gave congress the power to do it because they figured we might need to do it

um they said it was to encourage the promotion of creative works right so it would have a

specifically utilitarian motive in mind right um

now in the 200 but they didn’t have any studies there was no empirical studies showing that it really would do this

we’ve had 200 plus years since then to prove it and time and time again over the last say seven or so decades

uh congress has commissioned a study fritz mclaughs some great economist they’ll come in and do a study they can never show that it encourages

or incentivizes let’s take the case of patents that incentivizes innovation almost every study you see they throw

their hands up they say we can’t figure it out because the numbers are just it’s too hard to prove or they’ll say it looks to us like it’s a drag on

innovation because um there’s all these barriers to small companies making a new smartphone or something like that or the big companies

acquire all the patents but i don’t understand how if i’m a drug company i’m sure this is a question you get all the time if i’m a drug company

and obviously creating a new drug is a huge tedious process very laborious very technical the idea

that i’m putting in seven years of work with these very expensive scientists and all this experimenting and then

on day two you come along and you you know duplicate that drug right why would i bother to create it to

begin with right and there’s a lot of answers to that but you have to first step back and the fundamental way to look at it i think is

is the function of the government to make sure that some dreamt up possible industry or product

can be can be successfully made is it the job of government to lower the costs

of competition that someone might face right because even if the government comes in and starts subsidizing the

pharmaceutical companies there’s still going to be some other drugs on the margin that is still not profit i mean it might take a trillion

dollars to find some new drug but okay but they’re not going to make that one even today they’re not going to make some drugs so

there’s always some drugs on the margin um so the and the other thing

if you look historically a lot of european countries which were the leaders in pharmaceutical

like italy and switzerland didn’t have patents at all in pharmaceuticals for like over 50 or 100 years and they were

still some of the leaders in these areas so there’s empirical evidence but so how do those companies make money they sell

the drugs but i mean like why would i buy company buy from you at the the rate you’re the st you

invent you discovered this drug right uh i’m going to undercut you at you know whatever the next day why wouldn’t i i mean it

just seems like the profits are good margin is going to be much much lower let me give a little example have you ever seen in a drugstore you have

tylenol sitting next to bargain brand or cbs acetaminophen right and they’re it’s about five dollars

versus two dollars right but tylenol still on the shelf some people are obviously still buying it

right why would people pay twice as much for tylenol as opposed to cvs it’s the brand name okay so that’s part

of it sure so people will pay more for brand name and reputation so that’s part of it so the idea that just because someone

can copy your formula right away doesn’t mean that you’re instantly going to have equal competition the other thing is you have to realize

that we have this fda process in the us which slows down the rate of innovation

greatly as to the cost so one reason it costs so much money takes so long to produce and sell a pharmaceutical is because the

fda process so the federal government comes in imposes a regulatory scheme um which

slows down the development of drugs hampers them plus these companies are taxed out the wazoo you know employment

taxes and uh there there’s there’s inflation there’s there’s uh there’s tariffs the minimum wage

there are these are the things that if you got these things out of the way would reduce their cost but so the federal government comes in and

hampers the pharmaceutical innovators and then to make up for that it gives them a patent monopoly so they

can maybe make some of it back but so it’s like they shackle them on one hand and they put them a helium balloon to the other and it’s like it’s

supposed to bounce out and not only that as part of the fda process during this examination process

takes around seven or eight years long time these companies have to reveal their secrets

like they’re made public documents so by the time they finally get their approval let’s say it’s five years later

all their competitors they they’ve been knowing for five years what the formula was going to be so they they’re written speaking of formulas let

me just finish your thought then we’re going to get to well they’re ready to compete right away whereas if you could keep it more secret and there wasn’t a federal government

regulatory agency you would have a longer natural sort of monopoly to sell your product before i see what

you’re saying so there’s something parallel here with which people might not know about which is kosher food

so the fda is what guarantees that the food you’re eating or drugs is safe right however under

jewish law the food has to be held to a much higher standard it’s a biblical standard and if you look at a jar of food it’s going to have a

it’s kind of a small k or a small u which means this has been certified by a rabbi so it if you did not have the fda for

drugs you would still have these certifying companies which would hold the drug companies to a higher standard

absolutely and at the same time they would allow those drug companies to keep their uh formula secret

so that you would not be able to compete because then if you want to you know deconstruct that drug that’s still going to have a huge startup cost anyway so effectively it

will keep the cost high enough that they would make a profit under this model correct uh absolutely and uh look the

pharmaceutical case is the one everyone turns to because they think it’s the easiest case actually we can’t go into here but if you look at

chapter nine of baldr and levine’s book against intellectual monopoly it’s an empirical attack on all the arguments for ip um

and it’s online at againstmonopoly.org they just go through systematically all the uh all the myths about

why we need ipatent and they went into this as economists assuming they were going to show why patent and copyright work

and they they came up with empirical studies showing it just it just all the all the myths around it um all

the arguments around it are just or just wrong um so so that’s that’s one but my point

is if even if you believe that we do need patents for the pharmaceutical industry let’s have it for the pharmaceutical industry but right now we have it for

software we have it for uh mouse traps we have it for uh the way your iphone curves around the outside corners

um we have it for so many things which is trivial and then you have the you have the patent trolls arise um

look you also have uh perverse things like um do you remember the anthrax scare about

12 15 years ago yes sir um and there’s a drug called cipro right which is one of the um

cures for this and there was only one company that had the u.s patent on that and the usf and the fda

regulatory approval for that and they they didn’t have enough to go around and so because they didn’t anticipate

this great need for it and no one else could come in and compete and make it because of the patent in the in the fda system and so at the time the

the the i think it’s the commerce department whichever department has control over

this ftc i believe threatened to do what the federal government has the right to do which is to grant a compulsory license because

technically these are compelling so technically patents are grants by the federal government and the government can take them away

because they grant them it’s just a monopoly privilege was the supreme court just recognized by the way about two weeks ago in a very important

case called oil states which is driving the um the pro-ip libertarians bonkers because it admitted

that these are not property rights these are just federal grants of privilege okay um and i was glad to see the

supreme court recognize that um do you remember the vote was it five four nine uh i think it was higher than that it was

like six three so it was it was it was really good um in any case um um

a compulsory license is the federal government has the right to to grant a license to some third party

to to make the product under that patent uh without them having to get a permission from the patent holder the government can grant

it that’s it now they have a statutory scheme where they then they’ll pay a fair mark it’s like it’s like taking’s law you’re

supposed to give fair market value so they’ll make the guy pay royalty back to the patent holder okay but they can’t stop it okay um so

they threatened to do that they started to do that several times and of course all the libertarians are like oh the government’s threatening to take away your property rights it

it’s like when social security holders say keep your cotton picking hands off my social security payments it’s like

wait a minute that’s coming from the federal government that’s a welfare payment right yeah you earn back your social security like what 20 months or something crazy

yeah and then anything after that is just absolutely money that has not you had not paid into the system i don’t know that number but it’s something very

small it sounds plausible um so speaking of the formula there was a moment where you had an

interview with robert wenzel uh which we’re going to play after right now where this

let’s play the clip well let’s let’s let’s start with the formula itself i i have a formula

i’m aware of it actually you don’t have a formula you know let’s be specific precise you don’t

you know a formula right you are aware of a formula it’s in your head i’m not aware of the formula i

know the formula yeah you know it but you don’t have it you know it it’s knowledgeable i certainly do have it does it have a

location really is knowledge hold it hold it does it is is location

necessary for scarcity i have the formula nobody else

i have the knowledge where in my brain i thought it was on the paper

i i put it there also but that’s just stupid that’s another place the same information’s in two places

yeah well that’s amazing maybe we could put it in a million places yeah but it’s not there now so is

it scarce or not when it’s just in two places no information’s not fierce so who else

has it besides me then if it’s not scarce you don’t have it you know it staphon

who who else can who who else can use it function look it who who in the world besides me

can act on that if i’m the only one that that has that formula no one only you

so if it’s scarce or not scarce is it is it super abundant everywhere it’s not scary it’s not a scarce

resource it’s not a scarce means of action it’s not scarce who else has it stefan

what has it what no one has it right so it’s scarce

isn’t it no it’s not what’s the formula stefan

so what was going through your head when he’s just yelling at you that he’s got you by the balls and what’s the formula

i mean over time i’ve learned to handle interviews and debates but different ways right and that was one of two or three i did that was it

kind of got out of hand it was crazy but it was so crazy it was almost funny this was like my friend jesse said

described it as you were trolling yourself i guess i mean some people some people thought it was hilarious something i thought was an embarrassment some

the reactions to it have been bizarre but he was a guy that you would think was a fellow traveler because he’s sort of a rothbardian

mizzian libertarian but he started going bonkers when jeff tucker and i

then at the mises institute were we kept attacking intellectual property and he you know he he was started going after

us and so he decided to have a debate and um yeah he brings up some point about he’s got a formula for

making money off of google ads or something like that and he said tell me what the formula is and i said i don’t know what the formula is

he said patents are valid what wait let’s go back to like the look for me personally

if you’re saying are you do you think it’s since libertarians regard monopoly as immoral

right and using the government to to get special privileges immoral right is it immoral for me to get profits from

kindle sales in my book absolutely not okay let me look let me let me um i didn’t expect such a hostile

interview so no i’m joking i’m joking the dog goes to [Laughter]

um no so here’s let me give let me give one example that might explain this um um imagine that there’s no copyright

okay okay and you’re jk rowling right the the author of harry potter and she was just some welfare mom writing her

novels on the subway every day something like that in london and so

she finally writes harry potter number one and so what would she do she might not have a publisher so she publishes

it for 99 cents on kindle and all of a sudden she’s got a million 10 million fans around the world she’s

like oh this is a runaway hit and she’s got we know she had six other books in her head right so let’s say she writes book number two but she says

she writes a note to her fans i’ve got another book ready to go as soon as i get five dollar subscription commitments

from everyone um which is kind of what i did with the kickstarter exactly and that that’s emerged to kickstarter and things like

that have emerged uh she goes i’ll release it and you know i’ll give you some swag or whatever so she does that 10 million

people give her five bucks she’s got 50 million bucks i mean that’s not little money then now in a world without copyright

and then she could do that seven more times right so we’re talking she’s half half a billionaire already just

even with people knocking your book off um and then let’s say someone wants to make

a movie well three companies can start making a movie in the same year on the same book they don’t need anyone’s permission

but one of them says hey i know if we can get jk rowling to be a consultant and say she endorses is this was the

official one we’ll get more of her fans come see the movie so we’ll give her 10 percent of the profits right and so she can make money

that way so let me build on this because one of the things that is clearly uh government at its worst is

character law which is like superman was invented in like 1935 by simon schuster yeah

dc comics i think has the copyright and the copyright was supposed to expire after it was like

75 years after the characters created and these characters this when these laws were written you didn’t have pop culture

now you have these huge corporations who have a lot of money investing in superman spider-man batman so on and so forth

and they lobby congress and every year congress extends this over and over mickey mouse should have been a long time ago copyright law

and the point similar to what you were just making if these characters were in public domain after 75 years or 50 years

you would have three superman movies a year instead of one yeah and we would have had to wait what

40 50 years for an atlas drug movie for example that might have been for the best i know

but maybe one a good one would have been that’s fair yeah um i’ve actually got a bunch of blog posts about various

comic book trademark and copyright battles which are crazy like you probably know some of them but you know captain marvel from dc

right who people erroneously call shazam right because he would say shazam to invoke his powers

um but there was like a there was a gap when they didn’t renew their training no

i’ll tell the captain marvel story so this is x so back in the 40s uh they invented captain marvel as a

competitor superman he’s the guy with the red clothes and the lightning bolts and he’s a kid billy batson and he says the word

shazam uh he gets the wisdom of solomon the strength of hercules the power of atlas the something of zeus

invulnerability achilles and speed of mercury right and then there was mary marvel his sister and then there was this crippled

boy uh freddie freeman who when he he instead of saying shazam he would say

captain marvel he would turn into captain marvel jr and what’s fascinating is that makes him one of the few characters

who can’t say his own name because when they say when he says shazam he turns back when he says captain marvel he turns back to

freddie freeman um this character at one point was more popular than superman yep and they were being published weekly uh his

arch enemies dr savannah whatever mr mind who’s this evil worm is might be my favorite comic supervillain of all time black

adam too right black adam yeah uh which is a from the ancient egypt times and the wizard shazam

one his name was teth adam and then there’s this very weird panel where the wizard shazam goes i changed your name to black adam and

now i banish you it’s like i don’t think that’s how names work anyway um and black adam’s gonna be played by

is it the rock i think maybe i think the rock’s gonna be playing him in the upcoming shazam movie

so that was fawcett comics f-a-w-s-c-e-t-t fawcett went out of business dc bought

the rights to all the faucet characters in the interim wait up but i believe they went out of business because of a suit because of a copyrighted right

because cdc was suing them that shazam captain marvel was a ripoff of superman

which in a sense it was but it’s not literally the same character it’s inspired by but again ripoff means stealing but it’s right

it’s there’s a copy or inspiration it’s clearly inspired by it no one would confuse the two no there’s no confusion

uh in the interim marvel starts publishing a character named captain marvel yeah marvel i think at first right i may

have been maybe the short alien writer yeah and because marvel had

that when the character from fawcett lapsed marvel had the right to call uh

books captain marvel right dc could use the character but they couldn’t call the comic book

itself captain marvel comics so they called the comic book shazam and now i think they even call the character shazam because get rid of all

these yeah there’s a movie coming up i think they’re calling it shazam they call him shazam yeah i believe i believe but that’s just one there’s there’s

other examples that’s very byzantine there’s another example let me just say one more thing with comics because i know people are comic fans

as a result of this dc especially another com keep reissuing yes comic book series from every two years

or so every few years because even these characters no one cares about they don’t want to lose the copyright right yeah um i yeah i’ve read that too and

then there’s some arcane issue with superboy right so this is what’s fascinating okay so superman was created in 1935 in 19

early 50s they started creating in more fun comics number 101 uh they started having super boy the

adventures of superman when he was a boy and he later created he later joined the legion of superheroes

and he had his own complete different world he had lana lang as his girlfriend pete ross was his best buddy uh he had

beppo the super monkey you know his parents were living on a farm in kansas the smallville and so on and so forth

um and they sued the creators super of simon schuster because they said superboy is a different character from

superman and the argument for that can easily be made because conceptually even though it’s the same person

uh you know like duh i can’t like eisenhower in world war ii is a

very different person than eisenhower is the president but i think superboy is actually a different character in some versions of the comic

book he’s actually not he’s not the same no he’s literally the same because then they had multiple earths so there’s different plans you

know parallel universes the point is the whole point is he grows up to be superman then there was a lawsuit so for a long

time dc couldn’t reprint uh comic books that had superboy in them

but they could print nuke issues with a different version of a superboy character

and now that i think there’s like six versions of super bowl well in the marvel cinematic universe right there was there was this complicated

thing where marvel licensed some of his characters to different companies like sony has won and warner brothers has

another so that’s why it took a while for spider-man to be incorporated into the

uh the marvel cinematic universe and it’s one reason uh my son even knows a lot about us

because he’s read more than me but the inhumans are rising and the mutants are going down because the mutants were

licensed to one company oh wow and the inhumans weren’t so in the comics the inhumans are being played up and there’s more inhumans

being created all the time but they’re not mutants they’re in humans right it’s the same idea but they’re trying to get around one of these licensing agreements

and of course none of this would exist without copyright this isn’t look in my view

if you understand that just the studies on it and how patent has to limit innovation i really believe that

patent law is one of the worst things the government does and probably imposes damage to the human race on the

order of a trillion dollars a year in terms of lost wealth because of lost innovation and of course that’s that’s

lost lives and lost uh you know we might have been living in a jetsons world by now if we had been hampering innovation

last 200 centuries well i do have a car that turns into a briefcase okay good what’s the formula

yeah i don’t know it’s the formula stefan got you by the balls uh copyright law i think does less

tangible damage but it’s it’s even worse in a way because it lasts a lot longer it lasts over 100 years now in most cases life of

the arthur plus like 70 years and it also gives the government an excuse to limit

freedom on the internet in the name of stopping piracy okay and it also heavily distorts culture what we’re talking about is an example of that it

heavily distorts culture i mean you were asking earlier how would do someone do this why would someone do that um look there’s industries that are that

are not that protected by copyright or patent like the perfume ministry or the fashion industry i know actually a

friend of mine was a product acquaintance of mine was a project runway winner and she went with tim gunn to lobby congress to have copyright applied to

clothing and i’m like this is not only is this just completely insane on its face

but how you would apply this when the whole point of fashion is to draw inspiration from other aspects of

fashion is bizarre well not only that the high fashion industry benefits from knockoffs because

uh you know a year later the the high fashion stuff that’s uh from chanel and these guys which is extremely expensive

starts appearing at walmart and you know a a target things like that so you’re a

devil esperado fan uh sure well you know she gives that whole speech about how innovation

happens yeah yeah um yes yeah about the colors and yeah you don’t realize how it permeates

through culture um but but then you know um because people can go by for 30 bucks off the rack somewhere um the

people with money they want something new to show that they have status and so the fashion industry can pay their

producers to come up with a new thing for the next season so it actually helps so it doesn’t hurt them at all to be knocked off

um but you do there is one funny thing is that there’s no copyright or patent exactly on fashion

but there is trademark and so i believe the reason where like a louis vuitton bag or chanel bag they have the big c

symbol or the gucci symbol or the louis vuitton logo all over their purses which is kind of weird if you think about it

right if you buy a mercedes car you don’t see the mercedes emblem all over the car right but the reason they do that is because

if you make a knock off of that bag now you’re violating their trademark so they’re trying to hook their designs into trademark well i thought the whole

point of that in all seriousness is that if you’re spending spending this much money in a bag those kind of people tend to be ostentatious and you want to make sure i

want to make sure other people know that i have a louis vuitton bag yeah so they’re going to have the logo on it but it doesn’t have to be

plastered all over so so much they do it so that they can stop uh trademark and so then of course

you’ll have government officials go down to the docks in turkey and raid all these

you know counterfeit shops and burn them in a big thing and make a big big display of it like like a nazi book burning or something so

in your world the model for book publishing would be the publishing houses basically go away and kickstarter would be the model for how books are

produced it’s hard to predict i think i think something would change i think it would go more like that and it’s hard to imagine what would have happened 50

years ago before we had the technology and the internet that we have now that makes that more conceivable because let’s

let’s let me play let me argue for your play angel’s advocate i guess which is what i’m agreeing with the person i’m talking to

which is right now how it works is i write up a proposal i shop it around to the six or seven publishing houses uh

my agent sends it to an agent at each house that agent looks at it says you know what i want to

you know produce this book he goes to his economic marketing team whatever the team is called they run the numbers and they say

this you know based on their projection of future sales they say okay we’re going to offer him you know 200 thousand

dollars for this book yes then and and hopefully more than one person is interested more than one house is interested and you have a bidding war

yes and they go back to my agent now what they’re basically doing economically is what a kickstarter would do they’re

trying to use the tea leaves to say okay this is what we think we can make a safe investment

whereas here it’s like i am asking individuals to actually make that investment uh and i don’t have to guess because as

long as i have enough of an audience to promote my kickstarter or whatever the program is i will immediately have that cash up front

and i will have and this is one of the reasons i did my kickstarter for my book on north korea because the book was so innovative having my

patting myself on the back uh that it’s like is this gonna work so i needed to know that there was enough of an audience to be able to

produce it and at the same time i’m talking myself into your idea people will want to contribute to a

kickstarter as opposed to editors because you want to be the one who’s like i was there first i was the one

who saw something special in this project and you have bragging rights with your friends which sounds like a joke but it’s not

because we all like to be the one who sees the next trend and is actually especially now with the internet culture who is investing in

things to make something special happen well you know not only that you can make more i think per sale

as an author if you go more direct like that i mean yes that’s 100 true and look the way i look at it i’ve i’ve published several

books uh all nonfiction so far um you know we all have that novel on us right but uh

i’ve got a bunch yeah they’re on my hard drive but most most authors of non-fiction don’t make much money

they’re not doing it for money either they’re doing it for reputation or to get an idea out there they break even they’re happy right um

yeah very few books just statistically very few books earned back by earn back meaning it sells enough that your advance has

been uh earned right and for fiction because let me just explain to the did your readers an advance is short for

advance on sales yes so if you are let’s suppose earning by your contract with the publisher a dollar per copy

and you got a 200 000 advance the first 200 000 copies that are sold you’re not up till that point you’re not

getting anything yeah which means they’re expecting so very few books reach the point of selling that in this

case 200 000 copies yeah and same thing with musician right a lot of musicians don’t make a lot of money right they make it from concerts but they’re

making i mean you got the big stars that used to make a lot of money but a lot of people don’t make much money if you remember prince had slave shaved into

his uh his beard for a while because he had been locked into this car the way i look at it was the printing press i thought it’s because he was

talking to kanye i don’t know i don’t think there’s a time overlap there but maybe there is um

let’s prance he can travel through time he’s funky before the printing press right the

scribes in the church the government they control what could be printed they can control dissemination of ideas to

the people the printing press emerges the government the church and the and the government freak out so they give a monopoly like in england

to the stationers company it’s for like a hundred years they have monopoly over printing so if you’re an author you have to go through them you’re not

doing it for money but they can control what you’re going to say what the people get to read etcetera when they when they when the charter of

the station’s company was going to expire the government decided instead of renewing it to grant to

pass what was called the statute of anne in 1709 which is where copyright comes from so the statute of ann gave a copyright

to the authors instead of to the publishing house but as a practical matter authors still had to go back to the

publishing companies you couldn’t publish a book on your own in 1710 right so you had to go to the publishing

companies so this model arose where the publishing companies right the uh were had the control

over artists and the same thing happened later with musicians and that’s lasted until about

20 years ago let’s say until the internet broke the monopoly and it was supported by copyright the whole time and it really wasn’t for the

benefit of most artists or most authors so i do think the model would be totally different now i do agree that

it’s harder to make a profit selling a book if people can knock you off more easily but that’s really because of

technology not because of the lack of copyright law yeah copyright law can slow down a little bit piracy but it’s gonna happen

anyway uh have you been following the martin shkreli case and because this this very much applies to what you’re

talking about so i’ve been following it all uh because he went after me on twitter and said i wasn’t funny and i should stick to doing what i like

and apparently that’s staying out of jail martin shkreli uh no i i do first of all do you think he

deserves to be in jail um i don’t think he’s in jail for the patent issue he’s not i’m just saying i didn’t follow the other issue with the

jail for uh it sounded like some kind of fraud on investors or something right but a lot of times that’s that’s legal double talk and they just want to

lynch somebody um so what’s talking i wouldn’t be surprised if he’s actually not not guilty of any legitimate right

libertarian crime so what so explain the martial shirley story and how this would apply

yeah but what he was infamous for was he bought the patent rights to i forgot what the drug was right some

aids drug life-saving it was okay you know some life-saving drug where only i think only one company had the patent to correct

or it gets complicated i actually don’t know if that was a patent case it might have been a case where the drug was

patented but then the patent expired but then he that the owner of that uh patent had the maintaining fda

license which is like a monopoly so the fda system acts like a patent license sometimes okay it was one of the other i believe

he just bought the fda rights okay and using those fda rights which gives you the right to sell something or whatever the free market price will bear

he realized i’m the only manufacturer he he raised the price by like 10 000 or something right and everyone raised

the ruckus about it so i i mean to me he didn’t do anything wrong he’s using it that’s like criticizing

someone who gets uh takes welfare i mean if it’s legal to apply for welfare and you qualify and

you get a check i mean you’re just feeding at the trough so you’re saying you can’t don’t hate the player hate the game yeah

i think look if if you could expect people to be moral and to not take advantage of government

uh advantages like this then we wouldn’t have any reason to oppose the law in the first place like if the government passed a welfare

law and no one would take it wait i wouldn’t care from what i remember though he was trying to make the case that by raising the price he’s actually making it more

available to people i don’t remember what his logic was i didn’t i didn’t hear that argument um it was probably some kind of double talk okay

okay so it was just as simple as rent sneaking you know he had a monopoly he exploited it he he might have been clearing the

market he might have been legitimately realizing that given the fact that i have a monopoly i’m the only seller like

i’m this is being priced too low okay and most of those most of those sales are being done via

insurance companies yes which is distorted by the government healthcare system in the first place right so this is all intertwined with

the government so almost every problem you can point to that you think patents are a solution for so

it’s a problem caused by the government and you want the government to come in and add another layer of regulatory control of monopoly

privilege in terms of patents to fix the problem i mean this is what mises called the problem of government intervention

is that controls breed controls once you have one control it causes problems people try to get around it you have to have more regulations to

stop the people from evading taxes or getting around this okay so we’ve got a couple more things

that i want to cover before we wrap up here today so in i was at the mises was it 30th

anniversary um 35th 35th 35th dinner 82 to yeah and i came there and i brought a toy

helicopter yes and i gave it to hans herman hopper and we took a picture together and he was very delighted yep and there’s this we

got some controversy online yeah because first of all people were thought well hans herman hoppa doesn’t

know what this is a reference to right and i want i haven’t spoken about this yet and i’m telling everyone now

uh first of all he most sure did because han sermon half a hand in the helicopter i go this is for you

and the first thing he says in his german accent is this should have had the chilean flag

so the what the reference is for people who are not we’re not in the know and i talked about this in my

forthcoming book in the same way that che guevara for the left is this symbol that has been divorced from the reality

he’s a symbol of hope and you know fighting oppression and all this other stuff even though he’s really just a horrible murderous

uh villain uh in chile when pinochet had a military coup and was at 74

until right 74. uh because you know the communists had taken over uh and they were starting to implement

all their communist ideas the thing with the commies is it’s not just that they start taking your property it’s that

they start having the secret police and start killing people arbitrarily and you have all these sorts of genocides which are almost i think which are actually inevitable

and universal uh so pinochet had a military coup uh he killed i think like 400 people in

some small number and he was absolutely a brutal dictator for the entirety of his um uh dictatorship it was a free market

dictatorship you know this was very odd like he brought in milton friedman guys from chicago and he had free market in an

authoritarian context but what he was most famous for humorously and on such on the internet

is he took a bunch of these commies up in helicopters and threw them into the ocean uh so

there’s you know a little meme that says you can run you can’t run you can’t hide you will get a helicopter ride uh and very often

uh uh you know hans herman hopper in his book at one point refers to when you have these private anarchist societies

the communists will be physically removed uh so these two things conflated to become hapa flying these helicopters and

throwing communists into the ocean so i took a photo with hapa with the helicopter uh gave it to him as a

present then later you you know took a photo with him with the helicopter and a huge meltdown on the internet

yeah and let’s just be clear so hans had nothing to do with the memes right there there’s a couple of meme sites on facebook where people think it’s funny

or they they’re fans of some of hapa stuff or they’re or they’re or they’re trolling but uh and i’ll i’ll just mention this

when i’m on twitter and sometimes when a journalist is being so reprehensibly egregious i’ll just re

quote retweet it with a helicopter emoji yeah it’s become a meme right um and uh and hans is aware of the meme

because he he reads the internet but i don’t he had nothing to do with it so when you gave him the helicopter i think he thought it was funny oh yeah he left

yeah he saw me you say look at this picture and then i was with hans later hopper later that night and i said hey let me see the

helicopter we did a selfie and i posted it and all these people started saying oh i didn’t know kinsella was a closet

fascist or you know it’s like look we libertarians still hate communists

and you know i’m not saying we should be pinochet throwing people out of a helicopter but it’s someone made a meme and it was kind of

funny it’s called having a sense of humor i got into it with a prominent libertarian whose name i won’t mention

who like myself is jewish and i said okay you’re jewish and he’s like yeah i’m like do you know any holocaust jokes and he’s like of course because every

jewish person has holocaust because gal is humor uh and dark humor is very much a part of jewish culture um and i go are you fine with that he’s

like yeah and he’s like but i’m not fine with these helicopter jokes because the nazis are all dead

but this is something that’s going on now so it’s like wait a minute the bigger concern in america isn’t the neo-nazis it’s the

neo-pinochet people like where are these helicopters i mean if anything the libertarians are the ones who are scared

the black government helicopters to begin with and the whole you know like alex jones crew yeah no i totally agree so it was one of

these crazy funny mean mimi type incidents on the internet but uh uh i don’t know

sometimes you say something if someone just says hey you’re a fascist and i’ve been advocating against all

forms of socialism my whole life what are you supposed to say i mean quote me you find something i did well

you took a picture with a plastic helicopter which right which is the universal simple effect it’s not the swastika it’s

a helicopter yeah which which i got i mean i think i got the i asked you where you got it from because i wanted to i was kmart

yeah so i went to kmart and i got like this toy toy army soldier set yeah like 17 right just to get the helicopter yeah

those seven

so we’re wrapping running out of time but there’s something i want to talk about on your personal level we’re getting ready to do the show i was

dming with you and you just had cancer yeah so what i find fascinating is

this is something that a lot of people are going to go through at some point in their life yeah and just the pathos of it like how did

you find out and like your dad get married i mean this is just let’s talk through it so i

think the more people talk about things like this the easier it is for people who are going to hear that word they’re not going to have that meltdown

although they will have the meltdown i’m sure well i can quickly summarize you have to be quick just so okay so about two years ago i had

another health issue which scared me um but then i kind of got over it and so now this time my doctor says was that

other issue life-threatening or possibility okay yes um but but that’s fine now you’re transitioning

going from one to the other yeah i just had my you know when you turn 50 you’re supposed to take your colonoscopy right as a man or a woman

and uh i was like let’s have colon cancer now i mean whatever the next thing is i’m against

that phase of life where things are happening but my point is having this first scare it made me so um

you you know if you do your annual physicals your blood work comes in and you know you see how much your cholesterol is and your doctor fusses at you and all that

you’re from louisiana yeah so you’re going to have the high cholesterol yeah yeah crawfish has a lot of

cholesterol in it especially if you suck the heads yeah a lot of fat in there but um

uh should is that is that a myth isn’t eating fat that’s not does not necessarily basically cholesterol yeah it probably doesn’t come from that

although here shrimp has a lot but i don’t know if the cholesterol comes from eating food right right just like fat being fat doesn’t come from eating

fats right so i don’t know doctors still say that though right yeah cut down on your cholesterol intake i’m

like okay so um should i switch to a louisiana accident oh please no i’m serious come on let’s do a little

well you go down to the bayou you’ve got beast details of them crawfish and stuck them heads

oh my god that’s so racist anyway i’ve tried all my life to watch that accent but i don’t know when i have when i have a miller light

or you know it comes out the red stripe yeah red stripe yeah

now so my psa levels is one of the blood tests and that’s your prostate specific antigen that’s a number that

is of some antigen produced by your prostate is which is a thing men have down around

your urethra right which um and as you get older it gets bigger

and so the psa level goes up naturally over time but if it goes up too far it’s a warning sign that you might have

prostate cancer which is fairly common yeah and a lot of men die with prostate cancer which i’ve learned in the last

but they don’t die from it okay so it’s fairly common as you get older like if you find out you have prostate cancer

when you’re 75 or 80 they might tell you well unless it’s aggressively growing just oh so this is one of those so this is actually

in terms of cancers to have this is one of the good ones it’s not going to keep like not like pancreatic a month later

you’re gone if you get it when you’re no it’s not it’s not usually fast growing is my understanding yeah i think it can be in some cases but um if you’re

younger like me in my early 50s and you get it it’s more of a concern because it could grow over time and finally it could spread to

the lymph nodes in your pelvis and get bone cancer and all that so it’s it’s something you want to watch or do something about and the typical

procedure is what’s called a radical prostatectomy they go in and they remove the prostate

and everything’s got to be radical with you oh my god can you get moderate can you be moderate on one actually didn’t do that so i guess it

was an anti-radical in this case um and it’s it’s a routine procedure but it’s fairly

horrendous in its complications you can be impotent and incontinent for life oh wow and it’s a pretty high percentage

of it if my understanding although good doctors say that the risk is pretty low but it’s pretty bad even in even the best case you have to have a catheter

for like four to six weeks for your wreath or group it’s pretty horrendous but they can cure it okay so it’s sort

of the the breast cancer for for men except of course it doesn’t get the attention breast cancer to us

right because we’re we’re just guys right right right we’re supposed to be coal miners and diarrhea we’re gonna yeah we’re gonna have the lower natural lifestyle anyway yeah it’s

a sunk cost um so i found out about this new procedure fairly new it’s been around i don’t know wait so you

how did you get diagnosed so so my my urologist said uh go do a uh go do a prostate biopsy

was he saying he was worried about something the psa level was high so he said you might have prostate cancer wait

so i’m sorry you’re going so fast okay so here’s a medical professional tell you to your face

you might have prostate cancer well he yes what was your emotional response to that well i thought it was he said there’s a

low chance okay so at the time i was like so i said i’ll get the radical i’ll get i’ll get the

prostate biopsy which is they knock you out they go up your rectum and they they poke a needle a dozen or so times

it’s like a core sample and they take a bunch of core samples and then they analyze them and they see if any of them are

or cancerous okay so were you still were you worried at this point no okay but then he called me one way

did you tell your wife yeah she took me because they have to knock you out i mean what was her reaction

just routine it’s a routine follow-up of when your psa goes up you go okay so she wasn’t did you tell your son

yeah okay yeah but then the results of the biopsy came back how much longer

maybe four or five days okay were you like antsy the whole time no okay see okay you were cool as a cucumber yes

okay because i didn’t know anything about prostate cancer at the time anyway but i think i still wouldn’t have been too worried okay because because of my first gear i’m

just not that worried anymore okay so he called me like on a friday and he said look two of the samples came back

cancerous you have a gleason score he did this over the phone yeah he’s like well he said you’re going to

have to come see me next week we’re going to talk about options but it’s just weird over the phone just found out on friday he called me on

friday okay so i guess that would be better than be like call us come in next week i can’t tell you why well i think they have a procedure for

dealing he said here’s a book 101 questions on products yeah he said go get this book and read

it before you come see me yeah i think he was trying to make his i like it he’s like uh i have to see you next week i can’t tell you why just

as a for completely unrelated reason read this book about so you have cancer and are going to die

well it’s kind of funny he was like look don’t be too worried about it try to have a good weekend i said i’m not worried

you really weren’t worried no not really are you an atheist yeah okay i don’t think that’s why i’m just scared

but um so i read the book and the book

mentioned all these various procedures which are all horrific they put radioactive splinters or seeds into your thing

and he and but they didn’t mention this laser thing which i’ll tell you about in a second because it was fairly new so i never

would have anyway so i saw the guy the next week and we talked and he gave me options

right and he and you still weren’t upset well i i i started getting upset when i read the

book and i realized what the what like i realized that you could probably take it out with this process so you

weren’t scared for your life though at any point no because i figured i could at the worst case get the surgery and get it

taken out okay but i was very worried about the going through the surgery and the possible consequences sure i mean you’d

want to be incontinent for life um and um so

then it was time to have my colonoscopy which i put off for a couple years because i had that other problem sure

so i asked my you know they go up your rectum again for that right and i asked my my my url i said can i have my

colonoscopy or do i have to wait a while he says now you can have it i’m like all right so i’m going to see if i call my my gni

doctor for the colonoscopy which came out fine by the way so uh but when i was in his office i was leaving

and he shares a reception room with another doctor and it’s called prostate lasers prostate laser center i’m like what the

hell is that so i went to the receptionist and she gave me a brochure and i went home and read it does it give you like electric sperm

no uh anyway um and so uh

i watched his website i had a meeting with him and i learned about it and what what there’s about four or five

doctors in the us that do this thing is called laser prostate laser surgery and what they do is

you instead of getting a prostate biopsy which is very invasive i mean there’s blood as it pulverizes your prostate

they you get an mri in a really advanced mri machine it’s called a 3t there’s only so many around

they have high resolution right and uh the pro the mri looks at your prostate and they

can see the cancer and they can see where it is and what the shape is and how many lesions there are things like that

so i did that and i met this guy and i decided to do that what they do is if you’re a candidate which i was you

you go into an mri machine for almost three hours oh my gosh and and they put a probe up you

and there’s a laser on the tip and they use the mri to position the laser exactly next to the lesion

and then they turn it on and they burn it on the inside is it going through your urethra or through your colon no they go through

your rectum right okay okay but just a few inches up to the prostate and they stick it’s just a probe about the size of your finger

um and there’s a little hole in the middle where a little cannular thing is first are you awake while this is

happening you’re awake because yeah it’s complicated but i was awake but i was today i was kind of it wasn’t too horrible it was painful

because they have to poke you about a dozen times to find the right spot right and when they do that they burn it

and for about five minutes but then they do that about eight times so they get can you smell the burning no it’s interior but i mean the smoke is

coming out so there’s no smoke it’s a laser it’s a laser it’s not i don’t know about lasers and the rectums okay

it’s a fiber optic it’s a fiber optic and it’s a bright light it’s about 15 watt light at the end it’s it’s like the little burning air is shaped like a

grape okay but it’s all on the inside of your body okay you can feel it though i didn’t know you had nerves up in there but you do and i was i was like ah it’s

starting to burn he says 30 more seconds and then he’d do it again right but they’re doing this with the mri on

live it’s bizarre and so at the end you go meet him and he shows you here’s the picture here’s before and after here was your cancer

and now it’s gone now my urologist is skeptical because he says oh they don’t have long-term data

because they’ve only been doing this five years wow and it’s not covered by insurance it’s extremely expensive so

i mean is it six figures five but it’s it’s up there you know wow but it’s worth it to to me to avoid

a lifetime of you know whatever course but anyway so you know so that’s what i went so as far as i can tell i’m cancer-free

and i walked out the same day walked or limped well like i walked i mean i mean if

you’ve got burned up your butt i mean it’s it’s not that bad

wow now i had a catheter for a couple days now that’s not fun but it’s not as bad as you think you

know what sounding is yes i so i was talking to my yes i figured i found out what sounding is i

could not believe it some people do this for fun yes this yes i had to learn this on new year’s day because this is what happens when you

have gay friends and they will teach you learn terms that you’re not supposed to know well okay so you said you brought it up so i had to

have the catheter for two days because i had the surgery in the afternoon and so usually anyway it was only two days and then i’m

back tomorrow how how wide is a catheter it’s like a pen oh no there are big ones they’re

different sizes but i’d say it’s a it’s it’s about the size of the urine stream roughly okay

okay some okay maybe like the lead in a pencil bigger no no about the size where you’re

i’d say maybe not a quarter of an inch but maybe an eighth of an inch okay maybe a little

bit more than eight okay okay so wider than it actually doesn’t hurt i was surprised

do we want to get graphic yes we do okay you are welcome it doesn’t hurt that much to go in for the mail but when they go so they go

through the penis and and then they have to go into the into the bladder and there’s there’s what they call a sphincter ins that stops your blood

yeah go through the sphincter can hurt if you tighten up so that part hurts it’s not as terrible

as it sounds really yeah it did okay otherwise some people would do it for fun wait so you i mean they got to lube

the hell out of that thing right yeah it’s lit they actually put like this it’s like a toothpaste too of like super glue but

it’s really this numbing benzo caners i don’t know what the hell it is and they they squirt that into you and it

numbs you up and that doesn’t hurt i was surprised it didn’t hurt wait but are you confident during these couple of

days when you have it in or you’re just peeing automatically not thinking about it you have a bag strapped to your leg attached to this tube so but you have

bladder control no because so the the catheter goes in and and when they go into your bladder

then they inflate this thing and there’s a little balloon that deflates on the inside about the size of a walnut

and that’s what anchors it in and keeps it from falling out okay and there’s on the top of that balloon there’s some openings where the urine

goes through so whenever your bladder gets urine it just starts trickling out do you feel it trickling out no

you but you’re going to feel the baggage heavier okay how often did you open empty that

bag is it you’re a couple of hours isn’t urine produced in a constant rate pretty much

pretty much did you did this discourage you from drinking like any water because you just wanted as less as possible no i want no i was afraid i

would be i was afraid i would be uh dehydrated or something no uh i was afraid i would be uh

there’s a word they use uh but it means uh uh retention okay and if you have retention the

reason they leave the catheter in for a couple of days after is because well the reason for the catheter during the surgery is because the heat of the

laser might burn a hole through your urethra so they’re pumping cooling it’s a coolant that’s the reason they do

it so they’re cooling your your urethra during the laser surgery the only other

where i’ve discussed urethra is this much was with tom woods i hate to do it but i just learned about

all this myself but i mean doesn’t it hurt more to taking out than putting it in no okay good because you go into the

sphincter to go in and that hurts okay taking out didn’t hurt but was it it was a relief it was did you have bladder control back

immediately yes okay which is good so you probably had pretty much the id

other than the money that you had to lay out you pretty much had the ideal cancer experience yes and also my understanding is there’s

no downside because if it doesn’t work let’s say the cancer comes back or it’s not really gone i can still go get the other surgery later it

doesn’t stop the money yeah you’re just out the money okay wow uh that’s so learning now listen i’m not

recommending this because i could be wrong and maybe my urologist would say i’m crazy so i’m not giving i don’t want to give medical

advice i do think guys should be aware that mri this and by the way the mri

thing is becoming my understanding is that isn’t that also a patent thing the mri machines

i don’t know they must be are you kidding it’s like very expensive but they’re expensive anyway um i mean it’s like i think that i was

asking the the center where they had this machine it’s like a one point something million dollars there’s no way that patent isn’t involved with an mbi

machine it’s got to be it’s got to be um yeah of course and so now there’s one there’s one good

thing in the in in in the patent statute in the u.s um

there is i think this was done in the 80s or 90s um there was an exemption made for medical

procedure patents okay in other words doctors can’t patent medical procedures okay

so they some doctor couldn’t get couldn’t come up with a new way to operate and then get a patent and prevent other

doctors from doing it unless they paid him a license they can’t they can’t stop that which is good they can patent their little devices but

they can’t patent their procedures at least all right uh we are long kinsella thank you so much for swinging by being my

first guest on gas and talking about uh patents and urethras which is going to be a big theme on the show in the coming weeks

i will see you all next week you are [Music]

welcome

you