Welcome to another episode of this series on the work of open innovation and free user innovation. It's brought to you by our friends at Wazoku, Wazoku, are pioneers of total innovation, transforming how our organizations solve challenges, drive growth, and deliver measurable results. As the world's only networked innovation marketplace Wazoku connects people, ideas, technology to create scalable, impactful innovation.
You can find our friends at Wazoku, at ww dot Wazoku, dot com, or you can join us at the Reinvention Summit this April 29th and 30th here in Dublin, Ireland, where I will host so many of the brilliant guests that we've had on the innovation show. Since its inception, we're gonna have Seth Godin, Alex Osterwalder here in Dublin himself, Rita McGrath, my friend Charles Conn, the Patagonia Chairman, Elvin Turner. Kahan Krippendorf, and so many, many more. Please do join us.
You can find out details at thereinventionsummit.com. So far, we've covered the work of Eric Von Hippel. We've covered patient innovation with Pedro Oliviera, and one of the questions that comes up with all this is, well, if you make a product, are you covered for that product? Is it legal that you share that product? They were the questions that came to me and then I sought out with Eric's help. One of the world's best experts on this leading expert on law with free user innovation.
We welcome to the show Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Kansas and visiting scholar at mit, Andrew w Torrance. Welcome to the show. Thanks very much, Aiden. It's delightful to be here. It's great to have you with us, man. And Andrew was just telling me, we found out we're gonna claim him. Him as one of us Irish. So he is Irish, he is bit Viking in there. Bit of cel from the Scots, bit of Channel Islands, the whole nine yards, all mixed up. But you're Irish man.
We're claiming you. I appreciate that. Thank you. Great to have you. So let's launch into this. The question that I asked there, is it legal? So the answer is, it's complicated. There are all sorts of things that are legal. And the way that I think about it, I think it's a good way for others to think about it, is that. The default is that things are typically legal. Now I'm talking about, you know, the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, places with similar legal systems.
Generally speaking, what you do in your everyday life is legal unless you're told otherwise. And you can look into the laws, you can look on the signs on the street, or maybe an official from the government will remind you from time to time, you know, if you're going a little fast in a slow. On a slow street, but the default is that you are free to do what you want.
And there's a wonderful metaphor, which is that your freedom or my freedom ends where my fist touches your nose, so I can interfere with you right up to the point that I'm touching you. And at that point, your rights kick in and my rights become secondary to yours. But generally speaking, as long as I'm not interfering with other people, there's a lot of things that I can do in a tremendous scope of freedom of action. Let's build it. So, I am a patient, I'm a free user. I've built a product.
I think to myself, you know what, I think others could benefit from this. I might give it to a few friends first that I know maybe suffer from the same ailment as me. Say it's a healthcare product, but then I wanna, do something about it. Yeah, that's a good place to go. And there's a couple of tiers that we can walk through. So the, the first tier is, I think about an invention. I don't make it, but I think about it completely, 100% free.
Second step, I go beyond thinking about it and I decide to tinker and make it. In almost all circumstances, that's also legal unless the government has specifically prohibited that particular type of invention. So for example, if you're working on a medical device, no problem. You can do that. If you're working on a thermonuclear weapon, the government may have a few things to say about that, and I wouldn't go there if I were you as an innovator.
Yeah, there's a variety of reasons in addition to the law not to do that. So, you can make things, you can invent things, and then the next step would be could you use them on yourself? I. And generally speaking, yes, you can use them on yourself. Now you start to get into an area of law, which is a little bit murky when you use things on yourself, and it intersects with the law of essentially mental illness. So if you started to experiment on yourself with your innovation.
For example, this is a famous example, trip panning. Do you know what trip panning is? It's drilling holes in your head. People used to do this in the middle ages to release the demons. I suspect they probably had migraine headaches didn't typically end well, although sometimes people would claim that there was alleviation of the head pain or the headache pain, probably because the other pain was overwhelming.
When you start to engage in crazy behavior like that, the government might start to pay attention. They might decide. Maybe through your loved ones reporting you or your neighbor saying, worried about this guy. He's poking holes in his head. They might come and try and assess you and see whether they think that you're in your right mind and if you're not, you know, you enter the mental health system, but as long as you're not doing that sort of thing, you can generally experiment on yourself.
Then you mentioned the case of. I've got some friends they might benefit from this. So the first stage there is you tell your friends about it. You phone them up and tell them orally. You bring them over and let them see your invention or you send them an email with a description or a picture, et cetera. No problem in general for you to spread that type of information. Especially when the language that accompanies it is neutral.
So you're not saying to a friend who really relies on you and looks to you for advice. You're not saying do it right now. You'd be, you'd be really dumb not to do it right now. Put it in your mouth, turn it on. As long as it's sort of presented in a neutral fashion, that's generally gonna be okay. The next step after that might be you give a version of it to your friends. You give a physical version to your friends, so you send it to them in the mail.
You walk it over to their houses, you, they come over to your house and they use it. That starts to trigger some responsibilities on your part because depending on what this invention. Does to your friends, you might start having a little bit of liability for damage that occurs.
On the other hand, if your friends are sophisticated people, intelligent people, wise, people who know enough to say no and have decent judgment, and you give them a copy of your invention, and let's say you give them a little bit of information about how it works and they go ahead and use it of their own accord. In a good state of mind, generally speaking, the responsibility transfers to them and you're still okay.
The next step might be you decide to share it more broadly, so maybe you put up a website and you put up some schematics. So that other people could build it, some schematics, instructions, et cetera. Generally speaking, that's okay as well. That sort of falls under free speech, so you can disseminate the idea over the internet or you can put a poster or a billboard up outside your house. Generally speaking, that's okay.
Again, if you are trying to influence people actively to do it or to use it and you turn out to influence people who. Maybe need a little bit of extra help to make decisions, you could start to trigger a little bit of responsibility and liability. But generally speaking, you can disseminate the ideas. The next stage is where things start to transfer into what I'd call the border lands. The lands where we're not quite sure it's okay. We're not quite sure.
It's not Okay. The intersection of the face and the fist. Well it's it's analogous to that. Yeah, exactly. You start to sell it, let's say, or you start to disseminate it widely to people that you don't know. But let's talk about the selling point, because once you start to sell and maybe you think this is a great invention, there's a wonderful market out there, I can't keep giving these things away for free. It's costing me money. I just wanna make my money back.
I just want to, I want to be even on the deal. You start selling to people. Well, in the countries that I mentioned in the Anglo-American legal system, selling is a magical threshold. Once you start to sell, the government really perks up its ears, starts paying attention, and I'll use the United States as an example. The federal government has a lot of power. Over anything that crosses the boundaries of a state. They call it interstate commerce.
So if you sell some things locally, generally speaking, the federal government is less interested in what you're doing. But if you sell something to somebody who lives in the next state over, it's crossed a state line, suddenly the federal government has very strong authority to regulate that type of sale, that type of commerce. So at that point. All of the federal agencies have jurisdiction over what you're doing. If it's a food item or a medical device.
The Food and Drug Administration, if it has to do with the environment, the EPA, if it has to do with crimes, the FBI if it has to do with, you know, selling it for too high an amount of money there's a variety of agencies that might try and regulate the price. But in general, once you start to sell things, you've triggered.
The might of the federal governments and they have strong legal standing to pay attention and to start regulating the sale, which could include regulating whether or not you're allowed to sell it. So that's really where things start to get into the strong legal realm where you need to be careful. It's so timely, Andrew, because I was watching, there's a series on Disney called The Age of Influence. I dunno if you saw it yet, but it covers all these influencers who are scam artists essentially.
And actually, I. You, you don't know actually for sure if they are or not, because they have these products. The products are damaging people. And I, I thought when I was preparing for you, I, I thought of that was like, oh, well. That's kind of what's happened and people either purposely build an audience on whatever platform and then they get to a point where somebody goes, Hey, you should sell this product, or I will pay you to advocate for this product.
And in many cases, they don't know what they're advocating for. So I thought that was a relevant piece to just pull into the conversation. And if you have any case studies of that or any thoughts on that, I'd love you to share them. It's very relevant. Aiden, one of the ways in which it's relevant is that. If you are passively selling something, that's a slightly different case than if you're selling it and making promises about it or instructing people how to use it.
This is often where people get into trouble. They not only sell a little medical device, but they say, you know, stick it in your ear, stick it in as far as it will go. It will really release that ear pressure, you know, as it pops through the Tim PanAm and destroys your hearing. Generally speaking, you don't wanna be making promises like that or instructing people like that and.
Again, the interstate commerce power triggers the FDA, the food and Drug administration to heavily regulate exactly that kind of sale or transfer. And, and in fact, what the FDA does primarily is it looks at people's products before they're allowed on the market. And it looks at the instructions and the description that comes with it, and they regulate the words very heavily.
So if you're going to make a claim that a drug cures a disease, gotta go through all sorts of tests in order to earn the right to describe in the packaging that it will help you with a particular disease. So words are really where the battleground is for the FDA in a lot of cases. But if you don't say anything about it, you're is, you're still in sort of the gray area. But if you're selling it. The federal government can really do what it wants in terms of regulation, as long as it's reasonable.
Now you talked about influencers. I don't have a lot of experience with influencers and you know, the, the only role as an influencer I play is with my kids and we're well beyond the point where I can influence anything that they think or do. Mine stopped listening around maybe 12 months, I think. Yeah, well, you're lucky you had the full 12 months.
But with respect to influencers, you know, this, this phenomenon on the web where you get people who have no particular expertise, but because people like them, because people like their, you know, the shininess of their skin or have fluidly they can talk, or the fact they can bust a couple of dance moves in a, you know, in a mall foyer. People will listen to what they say.
And once an influencer starts to make claims about a product that's being sold, the influencer or anybody else who's making those claims starts to attract some legal responsibility for the truth of those claims. So making false claims in interstate commerce is not something that you're allowed to do. You might get away with it if you're not caught. But not only the federal government, but the state government and the local government might all decide to question your claims.
And they have a variety of laws that enforce, for example, honesty in commerce and even if the government has not written down these laws. There is a very rich set of what we call common law rules, some of which go back 2000 years to the, the fall of the Roman Empire, well, I guess 1500 years to the fall of the Roman Empire, and, and they really guard against false claims. I. And you know, overreaching in advertising or slandering the reputation of somebody who's trying to sell something.
And those are things you don't need the government for. You can take people to court under the common law and claim fraud, for example, or false advertising or disparaging the name of a, of a, you know, of a merchant. So there's a long, there's a lot of different legal. Tools in the toolkit that start to kick in once you start to sell.
There's a, there's a dilemma in all of this, we did a show a few months ago now with Dan Ariely on his book, misbelief, which is essentially about misinformation and how misinformation can lead people into conspiracy theories, et cetera, et cetera. Brilliant, brilliant book. Highly, highly recommend it. guy. Brilliant guy. Brilliant guy. And. He was a victim himself of being a target for influencing the covid vaccine, et cetera.
And the reason I'm mentioning that is there's a, in an age of so much misinformation and such a difficulty to find the truth. If you were ill, and I thought about this when I was talking about Pedro and Eric. Somebody's ill, God forbid they have a bad diagnosis, and they say, I don't trust typical medicine, which happens a lot. And they go, I'm gonna take matters into my own hands. And then I go looking for. Some solution somewhere.
And this is very murky, and this is where they can be led by an influencer and people, people die. And I, I'm not, I'm not saying I'm not either for either side, so I'm not influencing any decision here, but I just wanted to share your thoughts in, in your world. How do you view those situations? Because it's a perfect storm in a way for people to buy a product because they think it's the right thing and they're trying to do the very best for themselves or a loved one.
Sure. You know, I'll, I'll just declare my own sort of bias, which is I take drugs that have gone through the FDA and if it's been through that rigorous process, I have a lot of faith that it's probably not gonna kill me. I. And it's probably gonna have a positive effect on whatever disease indication I'm using it for.
There's actually a book behind me called reputation and Power by an author in the political science department or the government department at Harvard, in which he talks about the growth , of trust in the FDA and what's amazing and the sort of long and short of it is that.
There's a lot of skepticism about government departments different constituencies, trust or distrust, different government departments in the us but there is one agency, the Food and Drug Administration, which has maintained faith at an incredibly high level. When you ask people in polls. Even up to the present day, people in general in the US really like the idea of the FDA and they really like what the FDA does and they trust the decisions that the FDI MA FDA makes.
Ironically, they have no idea what the FDA does. They have no idea what the tests are, and blind faith, I think, is usually a bad idea. However. I generally think it's good to have an agency that can bring scientific expertise to bear on figuring out whether things are safe and effective. However, sometimes people are in extremists. Sometimes they can't find a drug or a device or a method that can help them, and they get desperate, and it's, in those circumstances, I think that.
The legal framework I'm talking about is most powerful because it does enable people to go beyond what's been approved to a certain extent. They can experiment on themselves. I. To a large extent difficult to experiment on others without triggering liability. But you can suggest ideas to others. You can experiment with alternative techniques.
So there's a lot of liberty in the Anglo-American legal system for doing things on your own, for talking to people about ideas that you have and experiment experimentation in general. When people are in desperate straits and the conventional medical system doesn't offer any solutions, I understand why people turn to alternative medicine.
I would be very cautious about it myself, but I don't think that I would prevent other people if they were of sound mind and intelligent and thoughtful people with the right motives. I think in general, I would not stand in the way of letting them go beyond the regulated medical system. There are limits, of course, and many things that they try don't work. And a lot of alternative medicine is complete bunk.
Now, presumably some of it isn't because everything, every medicine starts as alternative medicine before it's regulated. So there's probably some gold in them. Bar hills. Along with a lot of fools gold and a lot of dangerous stuff that can hurt people. But what that returns back down to an illegal sense is what do we allow people to do themselves if it's their decision?
And what the law generally allows you to do is a lot of stuff if it's yourself, and it allows you to tell people a lot of things. Even if those things might not be true, because we have a very robust protection for freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and even freedom of disseminating information to others. But when you start to do things to other people, you've entered the tort system. If you do damage to them, they can sue you for a variety of torts for injury.
Also, the federal government the local government and the state government has an interest in preventing you from engaging in assault or battery. So one, one doctor's idea of treatment could be the patient's idea of assault and battery, and there are lots of cases where doctors in good faith are trying to help patients and if it involves physical touching, the patient might not agree and might be able to sue for battery. So stick to yourself, stick to your thoughts.
Generally speaking, you've got a lot of liberty to act and to think, start to do it to other people. Start to sell it. The law starts to kick in and the more you do it to other people, the more you influence people that. Can't really think wisely for themselves. Minors, for example, people with mental incapacity people who are unconscious. The more the law steps in to protect them, it makes it harder and harder for you to do what you wanna do, even if you think that it's for the best.
And then start to sell it, start to distribute it in interstate commerce. Then governments have very strong positions to regulate and sometimes to punish what you're doing. There's so many elements of the system here that's at play.
You mentioned the trust in the FDA, for example, and because of, I suppose that there's more platform TV or on-demand TV like Netflix or Hulu in the States, or Disney or Apple tv, you have series now being made that probably would've been not been made before the horrific story of Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers and Dope Sick. For example, watching something like that.
And then, and then on top of that, if you have this availability heuristic of these short bits of information saying, oh, they're all crooked and Then you have indigenous medicines, for example, which a lot of medicine came from plants or nature in the first place. Aspirin, I think is a tree bark or something like that. , and then there's a patent on it. It's sealed and then it, and then you have all these stories that Oh, yeah, they won't let your cure get out there.
They, because it will be a threat to their product and natural medicine and psychedelics now, and mushrooms and everything. And it's that storm that, you can see where it really is a trust issue? I agree. Where do you allocate trust is an important question. Do you allocate it only to the government or do you allocate it to. All the people or a subset of the people. And I think in the Anglo-American system, the default has been that the people get to keep a lot of trust in themselves.
Even when others might not think they deserve it. We trust people to make decisions for themselves. We trust people to take responsibility if they make mistakes, when they do things on themselves when they start to interfere with other people. That's, again, when the legal system and, governmental oversight kicks in. I I wanted to mention something that I think is related to this. Back in 1987, there was a movement that arose around the AIDS crisis.
It is called ACT Up or the, I think it was the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. And one of the reasons that the Act Up movement arose was the perception that the FDA was not, regulating and approving drugs fast enough that could have a beneficial effect on people who are suffering from HIV aids. Now, the FDA's position, I think was we're approving them as fast as we can test them, and they're not ready yet.
I think that was more or less the official position and the ACT Up folks, their position was, we can't wait. We are dying. Our loved ones are dying. We're dying by the thousands, and if there's a drug. That's not quite ready for prime time. If we're gonna die anyway, let us use those drugs. Let us make the decision about whether to use antiretrovirals rather than you, the FDA, act as the gatekeeper and wait four or five years until you're absolutely certain that it does work.
And Act Up was largely successful. It. Convinced the FDA to loosen the strictures a little bit and to release some of the, you might think of them as experimental drugs before those drugs had gone through the full battery of FDA tests and approval. I. Now this sort of continued this idea that maybe the FDA should release more drugs and let individuals test themselves with it. It continued until there was a case called Abigail Alliance.
Abigail was a young girl with what appeared to be a terminal condition. Her parents and her loved ones and a coalition of people tried to get the FDA to give permission to a company that was working on a drug that might help Abigail to allow that company to give the drug. To Abigail so the doctors could give her this drug. She was going to die anyway, was the position they took. So what's the worst that can happen? If this drug doesn't work, she will also die.
Or what happens if the drug is bad for her? Well, she's going to die anyway, so she might just die a little bit faster. I think. Hopefully I'm giving justice to the arguments, but these were very well-meaning people that wanted to do whatever they could to save Abigail. Now, the reason I mention the Abigail Alliance case is it went to the DC Court, which is a very influential low level court in the District of Columbia and the us.
But despite the fact it's a low level court, it has a lot of influence because it's in DC that DC Court gave some hope to the family. That maybe they didn't need permission from the FDA to get this drug. But then it went up to the appeals court in dc, which has authority over the lower court, and the appeals court essentially reversed the judgment and said there is no fundamental due process rights for any patient to get access to a drug that has not been approved by the FDA.
Essentially, the Constitution does not give terminal patients the right to access drugs before the FDA has approved them. However. Despite the fact that sadly, Abigail did pass away this idea that the FDA was sitting on a hoard of unapproved drugs that could potentially help people even before they were approved officially.
It really gnawed away at the activists and it eventually convinced the FDA to loosen their rules a little bit so that in extreme cases such as Abigail, it would be easier from then on for the FDA to give not approval, but to allow people to use these experimental drugs if there was no other alternative. So in the case of terminal ill patients, that's the strongest argument. They're going to die anyway. So what's the worst that can happen?
They die of a different cause, and I'm certainly not trying to make light of any of those decisions and say that it's better to die one way or the other. But essentially the argument was, we can't wait. You've gotta give us access to these things as long as we meet these extreme conditions. And one of the reasons I bring this up is that this, in a way is pushing at the boundaries.
That gray boundary between where law regulates and where law doesn't regulate, and the act Up folks and the folks that came after them, they really pushed that boundary. In favor of the patient, and they pushed it so that the government authority and the legal authority was lessened and the authority of the individual to make decisions about themselves, providing, of course, that they're wise in the right mind and not mentally incapacitated. They gained more freedom to make decisions.
So it's interesting that over the past 30 years or so. This frontier has been pushed back modestly to allow individuals more freedom to make decisions about their own medicine, for example, than they could before, of course, with strict conditions. But even so liberty has pushed forward a little bit. Now, there are critics of this who say, this opens the floodgate.
It essentially nullifies the authority of the FDA, which is there to prevent people from dying from bad drugs and crank cures and alternative medicine that has no basis in truth or maybe even could harm you, but. For whatever reason, the FDA, the government, congress and the public appear to be more or less comfortable with a little bit more freedom of people to make their own choices in that respect than they were before.
I have one more for you, which is, if we were to build it up the other way and go, okay, I have something that's of value. Some of the cases that Pedro and Eric covered, for example, I have something that's value. I now may want to patent it. And I read in your work that this is a deep part of your expertise as well. I want to do something about that.
Maybe you have some advice for some maker or some inventor who's created something, who knows it's of value, who wants to get it out there, but actually wants to keep the value, doesn't want to give away the IP or get it stolen. It's a great question. The answer to It is not easy. It's a little bit complicated, but I'll walk through the way that I think about those particular issues. In 2019, I had the opportunity to become the head of IP at a place called the Broad Institute in Boston.
It's the full name I think is the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. It's an institute that collects together some of the finest biomedical researchers in the world, and they produce absolute marvels in terms of medicines and treatments and devices and algorithms. So I, I spent two years there. I. Running the IP policy for the broad, and one of the things that I learned is that they had been thinking for years before I arrived about this balance between open and closed.
And I'm not for, I'm not suggesting for a moment that they got the balance absolutely right. But what the Broad Institute decided to do was to have a very aggressive patenting policy and a lot of the inventions that come out of the broad, such as. Crispr genome editing are worth billions and will eventually be worth trillions, so they have a patenting policy where they patent really good inventions.
However, even though they receive patents and a lot of their patents are extremely evaluable, they have a policy of letting researchers use those inventions. For non-commercial research. So they free up researchers around the world not to seek a license. They can simply use it and there is a license right on the website of the Broad Institute that says, here are the uses you can make of our patented technologies without seeking permission from us. So non-commercial or research oriented?
. Just to bring it into a common folk language like my own would be? It's almost like Creative Commons license that you would see, like a Wikipedia. , exactly. It's very much like that. And essentially what it says is we're not gonna come after you we're not gonna sign a piece of paper that says you can do whatever you want, but as long as you follow the rules and you stay non-commercial and research based.
All around the world, regardless of the country, the laboratory, you can access our technology. Now the idea there is twofold. One, one is it really worth going after a laboratory research with a bunch of lawyers? It's unfair. It doesn't look good. It's expensive, and you're never gonna get money out of them. So why even bother? So there's a pragmatic side to why you don't want to bother going after people who are innovating with patented inventions or processes, but not for money.
As long as they're non-commercial, it's really not worth your while. But then there's also a philosophical, a little more high-minded reason, which is we don't want patents clamping down on the next phase of innovation. We don't want people afraid to think thoughts and afraid to practice inventions that might lead to improvements and might lead to brand new horizons in innovation. So we don't want to get away with that. It's also, practically speaking, not worthwhile.
So why don't we just affirmatively set. That part of innovation free and we'll focus on the big companies that are using our inventions, which are patented without permission. And those big companies should know better. They themselves have SES of lawyers and deep pockets that they can fight back with. I think that is a really good balance. It may not be the perfect balance, but it's a really good balance because patents. And I think that patents do serve a purpose in certain circumstances.
For example, in the biomedical drug context patents I think are very helpful in allowing people to attract capital that you need to develop a complicated drug. I don't think patents are as useful if you develop a new type of clo peg, for example, but for a drug that requires. Billions of dollars of investment and years of FDA testing to get through the testing process and be licensed a patent.
Sort of holds that money and investment together long enough that you can get that drug onto the market. So there are certain circumstances, I think, where the arguments for patents are very strong. It's also an equalizer. Small inventors who may not have money, may not have influence, they may not have strong, powerful friends. They might have a patent. And it might equalize their bargaining power when they go up against a larger company that's simply trying to rip them off.
But if you have too many patents on too many things, especially trivial little innovations that don't really advance technological innovation, they don't contribute to human progress in any more than a trivial sense. That can gum up the works of innovation, not only by allowing the patentees to tie down the innovators in litigation, but even worse than that. And I think, the damage is far higher in the respect I'm about to say.
I think that the mere fear that somebody might come after you with a patent can be enough to cause an innovator. To not even bother to pursue a particular line of reasoning. So instead of being an inventor which could benefit the world, they go into chiropractic, which can benefit a person's back, but maybe doesn't contribute in the long term as much as a breakthrough innovation might. So I, my view of patents is that they should be used judiciously.
There are all kinds of instances in which they are probably not worthwhile. There are some instances where they serve a very important purpose, but that's usually in a big corporate circumstance or where you've got very unequal bargaining power between a little gal who's got an invention and a big party who's trying to rip them off. So, yeah, I straddle the line in that respect. I'm neither pro nor con, but I do think you've gotta slice the baby in the best way possible.
Cancel project close peg, cancel project. Right, right, right, . I was thinking about one of the things that patents are valuable for hugely is runway. Like I always think it gives you enough runway to do the work to then almost just recuperate , your investment even, and have maybe a little bit left over. But one of the, most beautiful ideas, and I think it talks so well to your work and the work of Eric Von Hippel is Jonah Salk, the inventor of the polio vaccine and.
People may know this or not, but he was asked, why didn't you patent it? And I'm sure he got a lot of pressure, I'm sure, from his family and loved ones who were like, you could have been a billionaire. And he said, well, could you patent the sun? And I love that spirit and that spirit's at the heart of your work. Eric's work, Pedro, who we spoke to as well. Andrew, absolute pleasure talking to you man. Where can people find out more about your work? You've Ted Talks out there as well.
I link to them in the show notes. Where's the best place for people to reach you? I have a website at the University of Kansas School of Law, so you could search on Torrance and ku. I also have a repository of almost all of my papers, which are available for free. I don't lock them up with any sort of intellectual property. On a place called SSRN. So if you searched on SSRN and Torrance, you'd come up against all my papers. I'll save you the bother.
I'll put the links in the show notes for those people listening to us. Absolute pleasure. Talking to, a good Irish man with a good heart distinguished professor of law at the Kansas University. Andrew w Torrance, thank you for joining us. It was a pleasure, Aiden. Thanks very much. Once again, thanks to our friends.
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