Bridging Business and Academia with K. Lance Anderson, Member at Dickinson Wright PLLC

(Josh (Producer/Audio Engineer) at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Lance Anderson, deputy CEO at Dickinson Wright, about the untapped business benefits of university research and joint ventures. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:18) You work with technology leaders to leverage university R&D for product innovation. Now here's why I found this compelling. I've talked around it. I've talked to the research-type people. I've talked to the CTOs, and they all kind of give a little explanation about how it works between the business sector or taking products to market or whatever it may be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:42) But I had an episode about two or three months ago with an AI attorney who was absolutely brilliant. Josh, do you remember his name? I can't remember.

(Josh (Producer/Audio Engineer) at 00:00:52) Yeah, Oliver.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:53) Oliver. Yeah. He's dealing with all the storm that is, you know, I'm an author and you're using my voice, and all this how it will play out with the AI and who owns what type situations. And then your opportunity came up shortly after that great conversation, and I said, why not talk to another attorney? Right? This is great. And I was hoping you could just explain to me exactly what you do and how that whole situation plays out, and then I'll have a ton of questions for you.

(Lance Anderson at 00:01:21) Sounds perfect. And I think, look, this is an interesting little kind of sub-industry that's been there for a long time. But effectively, taking university research and benefiting society is difficult. Right? You can publish a paper, I guess, and teach people. That's one way to do it, and certainly that's kind of the foundation of our educational system. But there's this technology transfer concept that we tend to point to and say that's really what needs to happen more. And so, yeah, I spend a lot of time—you know, I'm a practicing attorney and a lot of my clients—I'm in Austin, Texas, so everyone's got a startup, including me. But the struggle is to leverage innovation. And when it's coming out of a university, there's a set of challenges with that. And it's hard to explain sometimes without really getting in the weeds as to, you know, what are the true motivations of each of us. Okay? So say I'm a university professor. You know, it's going to look one way. That's why I decided to get into academia versus if I'm an entrepreneur and I've started a company. It's going to be a completely different picture, and I'm going to have completely different goals and objectives. And it's literally an oil and water situation. And so I'm trying to make that all work for the benefit of mankind is something that I've worked with for, jeez, almost 25 years. So going back to those early days, it really began with kind of watching a university, my alma mater, start an office that's meant to commercialize technology. Okay? And they were basically looking into the institution and saying, "Hey, everyone, send us your cool inventions, and we'll go do something with it and make you all a lot of money." Well, they don't care about that. Right? That's not why faculty researchers went into a university setting. And so I got to watch all that blow up in the faces of the administration as they tried to get a program propped up and running that would essentially do this function. And since then, I've gone in with a venture capital company that's taken advantage of these opportunities. And even more recently, I've gotten into private law practice. And so a lot of what I do is represent companies doing deals with universities. I represent universities as they do deals with companies. We represent joint ventures where they all throw in certain tools and try to do something together, corporate initiatives where big companies come in and fund entire wings of an institution's department and try to do it that way. It's really cool when it works. The problem is it hardly ever works. And so you've got to point to the reasons why, figure out how you can do better next time. And often there's common issues with most of the failures that I like to point to and say, "See, we can't do that. We need to be doing something different." And so at a high level, this technology transfer industry, so to speak, is a continually evolving one that's trying to mix this oil and water.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:03) I can't speak much from the college perspective, largely because I didn't go. But my siblings went and became doctors and scientists and stuff. But I just got into programming right out of school, and I said, this is what I'm doing. But so I do have the entrepreneurial aspect of it. And so I will ask, if I'm an entrepreneur—say, a tech entrepreneur or science entrepreneur—and I want—you said a lot of times this doesn't work out. It's a really difficult situation. But let's say I'm fishing for opportunities. Maybe I just sold my company and I'm fishing for opportunities. What would a—you said sometimes it does work. What are some traits or some things an entrepreneur can look for within these programs or within these university systems? And how would they recognize that it's a good match or a good deal?

(Lance Anderson at 00:05:51) So it's tricky. You, as an entrepreneur, you're going to have a focus in a certain technology. So let's just consider there being an innovation or an interest in taking advantage of certain innovations in a certain field.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:07) Let's say lasers.

(Lance Anderson at 00:06:08) Lasers. Alright, so you got—

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:10) Just make it up. Yeah. I'm interested in lasers.

(Lance Anderson at 00:06:12) In lasers. And so I can tell you right now, there's certain institutions across this nation that have expertise in lasers. The world's foremost laser experts are located in some of the halls of our academic institutions. And so you then identify where these strengths lie. Okay? And they could be at state institutions, at private institutions, at non-academic research institutions. They're everywhere. Right? And so if you're going to trade functions in certain areas of expertise, you will learn kind of where your experts are. And so you can kind of tag along and say, "Okay, well, this one goes to MIT. Well, I happen to know that MIT is well-developed in their ability to engage in this technology transfer exercise." So the next step would be, once you've identified where these areas of expertise are, you would then say, "Okay, well, how are those institutions set up to accommodate something like an entrepreneur knocking on the door saying, 'Hey, I'm interested in working with you guys'?" So you can kind of de-risk the whole concept by doing your homework on each of these institutions, because each university—let's just call it a university, and just remember, I'm talking about health science centers and other labs that may not necessarily qualify as university—let's just say a university. You can reach out to them, and they will have a dedicated office, for the most part, to this. Now, that office may be one person or it may be 30, depending on the size of the institution. And their job is to sit there and say, "Okay, this opportunity has presented itself. Let's put the entrepreneur in touch with the faculty researcher and see if they can get something going." And that something could be the entrepreneur funds some research in there, or it could be the entrepreneur kind of pokes around and says, "Look, I've got some cool things going on over here. I've got some market channels I've addressed, and you know, what over there in your lab or in your area of the department can come and help me?" Alright? It could be a security application. It could be some type of analytics capability. It could be some access to supercomputing. You name it. In our lasers hypothetical, it could be an experimental new, high-efficiency laser that gives wonderful optical or sensory qualities, and it's a better laser. And so what you'll want to do is learn more about that because it might benefit your business. The way you do that is then—that is the challenge. How do you interface and how do you get what you need without having the institution feel like they're being taken advantage of from the standpoint of knowledge transfer? Because nothing's free. And so what's in it for them? It could be research funding. It could be royalties on your sales. It could be they take a piece of your venture. All of those are mechanisms that have begun to become commonplace, and so that's what I do is try to go in. Once that match has been made and the parties want to work with each other, I'll come in and help organize all of structures that we consider to be best practices. And again, even with all that, it's still a risky endeavor.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:51) This would be a good time to plug your website, where people can learn more information. What would that be?

(Lance Anderson at 00:09:56) I'm at the law firm of Dickinson Wright, and that's dickinsonwright.com. We're a full-service law firm with about 500 lawyers. We've got about 20 offices. We just announced yesterday we're opening Denver, so we're excited about that. The firm was born out of Michigan, Detroit. And it's—the funny thing is, it's 140-plus years old, and I think it was the firm that actually incorporated Chrysler. So it's got pretty interesting roots way back into the automotive, you know, golden era. And certainly it is a Midwestern firm, and we have offices in Nashville and Fort Lauderdale and in certain places like that too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:41) Nice. Alright, so laser university. Let's say that we'll just use—we'll just say MIT has a laser department. I'm sure they do at some point.

(Lance Anderson at 00:10:50) I bet they do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:51) And I'm a laser entrepreneur, and I'm going to approach them. So would it be—some people have their stuff together better than others. So if I'm a laser person, I might look at two or three highly efficient laser programs at different colleges, and I'll know after interacting with them in my first interaction or two how mature their ability is to interface with an entrepreneur. Is that right?

(Lance Anderson at 00:11:25) Absolutely. You'll learn real quick. And, look, I almost believe sometimes that the larger institutions may actually be more difficult to work with that have well-established functionality for this versus maybe a smaller institution that really wants to get in the game or that has a great opportunity that they don't have a lot of, right, and they want to take that and shepherd it through. You get a lot more attention sometimes with that. So depending on what you're looking for, you may be wanting to affiliate yourself with a household name like MIT and their special laser department. You may rather want to focus on infrastructure. So, you know, some new facility has been built at some smaller institution, and they've made it very clear they're open for business. And that might actually get you further down the road than going and working with MIT's laser department. Now, the profile of the faculty researcher, the profile of the institution is certainly one aspect of that. If you go to an institution that's never done this before, you may put yourself in a weird spot where you're having—and you could have folks like me helping, right? But we're having—we, collectively—are having to educate the other side and make sure they understand exactly what it is we want. That sometimes gets to be difficult. So it's very fact-sensitive as to what technology, what research unit, the nature of the office, the profile of the institution itself—all that does factor in. And while it does seem intuitive to say, you know, the more established, larger institutions would be the easier to work with, that's not quite always the case. Sometimes they're a little too rigid. And if you ever hear the term, you know, bureaucratic, you run right into that sometimes. And it could take months to do what in the real world might take a couple weeks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:42) So you would—with all of that in mind, you would basically make contacts. If I want to do a first point of contact, let's say a smaller college. Let's say USF, right? They're a smaller one, but they're the ones that were close to me growing up and just an hour away. So let's say I want to do something in the University of South Florida, right? And I could—my first thing, when I first call the main campus and ask if they have some entrepreneurial connection. What word would I use, or would I look for a department head of lasers and call that person? Who would my first phone call be to?

(Lance Anderson at 00:14:17) You could—so if you're at a conference and you see the faculty researcher after they give their talk, you know, start there. Throw that card. They'll know where to go. But where you can go, absent that point of contact, is to each of the offices. They'll call it a technology transfer office. They'll call it an office of research commercialization. They have various terms for it, but the terms—commercialization, technology transfer, technology commercialization, variations thereof—and they usually fall under the research office. And so if you go to a website, just any university, they'll usually have an Academics, Administration, and a Research tab. And if you click that, you'll get pretty close to where you need to go. And they all are sister offices, so there'll be a sponsored research office. There'll be the technology commercialization office. They'll all know where to send you once you drop in there. And a lot of them have their own websites that once you get to, they'll give you all the contact. You want life sciences? Call this person. You want physical sciences? Call this person. You want to license technologies? Call this person. They'll even sometimes have a list of technologies available for license. And so you've heard me a couple times say, you know, the term license. And that's really one of the main mechanisms for this technology transfer experience, so to speak. So it involves—they will own the technology, the innovation, and they will give a license to you, the entrepreneur, to go out and hit the market with it. And that can be exclusive a lot of times, which is great, right, because no one else is going to do it. It gives you a little bit of an advantage. So think of it like music licensing. I mean, you're in Nashville. It's a similar concept where anything you go and do exploiting that innovation, you're going to owe back a royalty. And that's typically what you'll see, at least as a starting point on how these deals get set up. Not that that's necessarily a good thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:31) Do you ever see this happen? So I got to have on and talk with the CTO of NASA. At the time, it was Douglas Terrier. I don't know if he's still the CTO today, but he was a super cool guy. And he explained to me all the different cool gadgets that we have because of NASA. And then they had these technology transfer programs. Do you ever do any work with the—I know that universities are kind of like the government to some degree, some of them. But do you ever work with the government in private, or is it just university systems and entrepreneurs, things like that?

(Lance Anderson at 00:17:06) Well, I'm glad you brought that up because that actually is often—you'll see the noise of kind of the university, you know, this little industry of university tech transfer dominate a lot of the headlines. And frankly, working with the federal government, with the federal labs, has actually been—it could be easier, more stable, and honestly, they have a little more clarity on what their job is at the end of the day. Now this would involve groups like NIH, National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, DOD, Department of Energy, DOE. And they have, in recent years, essentially said, "Hey, we want to benefit the private sector."

(Lance Anderson at 00:17:58) So from DOD's perspective, you know, their job—I mean, they're like a $40,000,000,000 university, right, with a bunch of different labs spread across the country. And they have a—

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:08) Centralized tax dollars.

(Lance Anderson at 00:18:09) Yeah, paid for by tax dollars with a centralized, somewhat centralized management group. And they'll say—and they've also said—uh, dear DOD and contractor employees, et cetera, part of our mission is to benefit the public, you know, benefit society. And the way we want to do that is by interacting with the private sector. So not only is the DOD trying to make Americans safer and to make everyone else less safe, right, by killing them, but they also want to use dual-use technologies and having some of this development benefit society in different ways. And if you've ever toured some of these federal labs—NASA, I've toured a lot of them—it is mind-blowing, even from my, you know, unclassified position, to walk some of these halls.

(Lance Anderson at 00:19:05) It is mind-blowing what they have going on, ranging from, you know, the chemical arts to industrial materials, coatings, other things like that. So it almost makes you optimistic for the future of our society when you see some of the stuff that they're coming up with. Really does. They definitely have these mechanisms as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:28) Maybe we've got to turn off the news and then go walk into labs. Exactly. Get our get our hope back. But you're exactly right. I've made an entire career out of finding—I mean, look, it's my entire job to look for new, cool, emerging technology and talk to the people creating it and, you know, talk to great leaders and people doing interesting things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:49) And I can't—we can't even keep up. We have a whole team doing it. So as a consumer, if I'm every week saying, "Oh my gosh, that's so cool. Look at this new company that's doing it. Oh, they're not new. They've been around since 1929. They have 100,000 employees," you know, or whatever it is—to have these moments of, you know, awareness and insight, new information to me, just this constant stream. I've got a research team. They send me stuff every day. There are so many amazing, cool things happening in so many different niches. I mean, just even if you just scope it all the way down to image recognition inside of medicine—amazing things happening there on, like, a weekly, biweekly basis. It's crazy.

(Lance Anderson at 00:20:31) Yes. And you're kind of getting to a point where now we start throwing in advances in computing, AI being right in the middle of that conversation, and it makes everything, you know, increase in potential. Right? The developments and the discoveries that we're coming up with. So my background's in plant genetics, right? I was a farm boy. You know, genetics are essentially, you know, using four amino acids as opposed to two that you see in computing. There's similarities in there. And you start seeing, you know, how much advances we're making on the, you know, genetic side and personalized medicine and the ability to screen, and then start coupling that with the computing arts and where that's going. It's going to be an interesting next few years, to say the least.

(Lance Anderson at 00:21:25) And I'm sure your AI discussions were kind of going along those lines as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:30) Yeah. That is so cool. I actually saw yesterday on my wife's car—she had a red car, and then there was this green bug thing on it. And its whole back looked like a leaf. And I got super close with the camera and took a picture of it. It looked highly detailed like a leaf. I don't know what it was, but I was super excited to see it. And I've seen animals—or I'm sorry, the insects that camouflage themselves and that look like certain things. But this was the pixel by pixel, the closest thing I've ever seen to a leaf, this little insect. It was crazy.

(Lance Anderson at 00:22:07) That's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:09) I don't know if you know that.

(Lance Anderson at 00:22:10) There's a katydid—they're often, you know, their wings are kind of vertical. They're a type of grasshopper, but they're—I think their wing structure looks very much like a leaf, but they're very green.

(Josh (Producer/Audio Engineer) at 00:22:22) Yeah.

(Lance Anderson at 00:22:22) So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:23) Looks like a leaf. Yeah. It was like green. It looked like a green leaf. Have you messed around with Midjourney, dude? Have you seen this yet?

(Lance Anderson at 00:22:30) Yeah. I mean, if you follow—if you poke around in Midjourney and follow some of the images and look at the prompts that develop those images, it's scary good how the machine can actually interpret those prompts to come up with amazing works.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:48) I did it today for, like, the first—

(Lance Anderson at 00:22:51) It is insane what they can come up with, and these are—

(Josh (Producer/Audio Engineer) at 00:22:53) Yeah.

(Lance Anderson at 00:22:54) You know, these are things that are evolving in real time. Like, I did research in May and presented on, you know, AI as it applies to intellectual property and, like, who owns it, right? And those kinds of discussions. And even from then, I mean, there's a whole other dataset available to us now on how that's evolving, and there's a bunch of lawsuits that have been filed even since then based on, you know, copyright infringement, you mentioned earlier. It's crazy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:22) Well, it's such a tough situation because I guarantee you, Lance, I mean, there are several billion—what was it, six, seven billion people on the planet? There is somebody who, if I put their voice next to yours, sounds identical to you. There's somebody that sounds—that speaks like you, that has a similar tonal quality. There just is, right? We're all familiar with the concept of, like, a doppelganger. So the real question is, if you have, like, Eminem, you know, the musician, who speaks as his voice—well, if he owns that from a tonal scientific perspective of putting the voice in, speaking it—what about the other five people that speak and sound exactly like him without even trying? They just wake up and that's who they are. Do they know—because he got popular first, do they no longer have rights to their very own voice? I mean, it's a really tough situation. There are people that look exactly like people. Just because we look the same, does that mean that because you were popular first that you own that look and no one else can look like that? It's very—they're hard questions because we know the answers, and it's like—it's going to come down to, like, intent in relationship. It's going to be a real weird situation when it comes out because, you know, I should be able to make music. If I wake up tomorrow and somebody's like, "Oh, the music you make sounds like this other guy's music, so you can't make it," that's just not how life works.

(Lance Anderson at 00:24:49) No, it's not. And, you know, we've got examples, maybe pre-AI examples of this. You've got some music cases that have come out, probably with Ed Sheeran in particular, which that one to me, I was like, why did that even go to trial? It didn't seem to me like a copy scenario. And I can tell you there's ten other songs that take the same beat. You know, you're right. I mean, there will always be similarities and patterns and, you know, dialects, sounds, et cetera. It's just the nature of the beast. And then you start throwing in creative opportunities to create things that benchmark off of recorded things like photos and videos and sounds, like some of these AI tools, Midjourney being, you know, obviously in the crosshairs of a lot of the discussion. Where does it start and where does it stop?

(Lance Anderson at 00:25:46) And you've got concepts out there—remember Google scanned all the books for the digitization? Okay. That was deemed fair use. Okay. So now you've got Midjourney using the—well, I think it's the diffusion model where it's technically copying images to then learn on. What is that? Right? I don't know. It seems less overt than Google scanning books, but, you know, you may see the pendulum go the other way on this because it is—it seems like it's so unfair for artists, but yet it's so awesome and impactful, potentially, for society.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:27) I just think new business models are going to emerge. I mean, since the beginning of time, it's basically just made everybody super rich in the following way. If I was a king in the 1400s, I could just go find the best people in the land and pay them and have them infinitely create as much as I so deemed, right? And the thing is, now we have that. Now I can go directly. I have the equivalent of a full-time graphic designer for literally pennies on the hour, right? It costs me, like, a couple cents per hour of computer, whatever it is for running those models. Same thing with our creative writers and the GPT systems, the ChatGPT. Yeah, they're trained on these datasets, right? But then that training isn't, like, exactly those datasets stored. It's almost like an abstraction of it consuming that dataset, and then it's learning from all of our input on top of that. How can you—you won't be able to trace that back, right? Like, if it was one of those class action lawsuits where they're like, "Oh, your ad account on Facebook, you know, in 2016, you get a $5 credit because we traced it back to something." How are you going to trace back all the consumption of the Internet into these models and then the models getting compressed and compounded on top of each other and then new models, and then the models getting compressed and compounded on top of each other and then new learnings emerging from that? I don't think a money thing is going to come of it.

(Lance Anderson at 00:27:45) No. And if you already see some of these early cases that are filed, they're class actions featuring a few artists on behalf of all artists. It's like, okay, what—you know, maybe the damages of that appear to be more shaping policy and go-forward behavior as opposed to—there's no way you can account back and give proper attribution to anyone. Was it the "they" that created the work that's important, or "we" that consumed the work and thus have it featured in a, you know, popular streaming platform with more hits than, you know, my video that I—you know what I mean? It's like they're going to consume the Internet the way we set it up, if that makes sense, and all of the benefits and drawbacks of the way it's currently presented to any user.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:42) How do you think this will play out from a legal perspective? And try to keep it, like, super high level for us normal folk that don't have a legal education. Will these courts rule on these cases, and then we'll use the rulings of those cases to make—like, how do you think it'll play out from a case standpoint?

(Lance Anderson at 00:29:00) Well, okay, so the cases are starting up. In the meantime, you have some of the executives involved in the very creation of these tools saying we need reform, right? And we've all seen that in the headlines. I think what we are starting to do—we in the discussion of how does it shake out at the end of the day, you know, intellectual property rights and generative AI tools—Europe is leading the charge in kind of policy formation, and so maybe I would say, you know, let's all go see what they're up to and see if we can glean from that opportunities to shape our own policy. In the meantime, you've got these cases starting to mature within the court systems. And until there's a fix, right, it's not going to work. Like, trying to apply old concepts of intellectual property law to these new technologies, there's a gap.

(Lance Anderson at 00:30:02) And so I think the way it's going to shape out is there first needs to be some ability to fill in the gap with true policy, and then let that get tested by the courts. Because right now, it's just not—I think one case that I cited in my presentation in May was a pre-AI court case where there's a monkey in a zoo that took a selfie, and they were trying to say, you know, does the monkey own the copyright to the selfie? It took the portrait. And the court ruled, no, it has to be a human. That's what we're going off right now. That's not enough, you know? Because that means every AI development—public domain. And so we, as lawyers, are sitting there trying to buy companies and sell companies, and I'm like, "Oh, wait a minute. These assets were developed partially with AI." So it gets to be really tricky.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:54) Would it be safe to say that the economic impact will happen far before this is standard case law?

(Lance Anderson at 00:31:02) Yep. I would agree. And you've got examples of industries, you know, kind of getting out in front of the policy and regulation, only to kind of normalize over time. But there it is right there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:15) There's that monkey. He's looking good, though.

(Lance Anderson at 00:31:17) Oh, that's a great selfie. A lot of character there, centered.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:21) It'd be great if at the end of the photo, there's, like, a little disclaimer that it's actually a Midjourney image.

(Josh (Producer/Audio Engineer) at 00:31:28) Could be. The ChatGPT—

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:30) Got the Supreme Court to litigate it. No, I'm kidding. That's probably—

(Lance Anderson at 00:31:34) The best thing to do. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:37) Yeah. Have you seen the—so I like music too. You like music. Josh likes music. We're all big music fans. I'm glad Ed won that case because I thought it was absurd. I was like, "Gold diggers." The moment I looked—it took me two minutes of research into it to realize, oh, yeah, it's the families of the families suing because they think they might have a—anyway. Yeah. But did you see the lawyers that ran the math and generated essentially every combination of, I think it was notes possible? Like, they made every song that could ever be made or something like that. Did you see this?

(Lance Anderson at 00:32:12) I did not. No.

(Josh (Producer/Audio Engineer) at 00:32:13) It's got to be—

(Lance Anderson at 00:32:14) No, I have not seen this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:16) Oh, you've got to research it. Yeah. So there were these attorneys. I briefly read about it, okay? So take it with a grain of salt. But there were these attorneys, and they were constantly, you know, litigating music rights stuff. And they said—I think one of them was also a mathematician of some sort.

(Lance Anderson at 00:32:34) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:34) And he said, well, he looked at the notes and the scales and, you know, there's only so many, right? And he's like, so there's a finite number of combinations of these in the universe. This is not an infinite number. Like, this can be mathematically calculated. So they used a supercomputer. So they had the idea, and they couldn't process it at the time because I think it was, like, the early 2000s. There wasn't enough compute to do anything with the idea. But then it moved forward, and then a few years ago, it kicked back up again. And they actually processed onto a drive, like, every combination possible. I don't know if they did it with change in beats per minute or anything like that, but I know at least every combination of every note and every order they generated because it was just a math—a function of math. And then they said, "Here you go. Like, now no one owns any of this because it's all already been created." There you go, Josh. Josh got it up.

(Josh (Producer/Audio Engineer) at 00:33:24) Wow. Yeah. I'm not sure if this is the exact one, but the number here, if you can read it, 68,000,000,000 melodies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:30) He made every melody—got generated from his algorithm or whatever it was. Yep. 300,000 melodies a second.

(Lance Anderson at 00:33:42) Yeah. Yep. That's a good show.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:45) That all this stuff already exists. It's us just putting it together with current context and all of that in mind.

(Lance Anderson at 00:33:53) And then you put a songwriter slash terrible musician like me in the middle of it, and I can only play with major chords, right? So that even further limits, and I can come up with original works just the same. It just may not sound as good and it may just use major chords, which would seemingly further limit it.

(Lance Anderson at 00:34:18) Who's the band that uses microtonal notes? There's this whole concept of notes between the notes. And it's a known band. I just can't remember their name. But anyway, there's guitars they make that allow you to kind of play the notes within the notes, which seemingly opens the door for other notes. But again, you can take the same three chords and make one, four, five all day, dude.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:43) Yeah.

(Lance Anderson at 00:34:45) That's what I like anyway.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:48) Right? That's what's fun. What's fun is I am proficient enough at piano and guitar to be able to just pick up and play some basic stuff with some people. And that's as far as my education's got me, right? Like, I don't sit there and shred crazy solos and stuff like that, but I can jam.

(Lance Anderson at 00:35:07) I can jam.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:07) And that's what's fun. And when I get stressed out or I need some, I need to just, I call it connecting to the universe or whatever. When I just need this moment of stress relief, I can go sit down, kick up that piano, and just, like...

(Lance Anderson at 00:35:20) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:20) I call it emoting. It sounds kind of lame, but, like, you can just emote through the music. It's pretty cool.

(Lance Anderson at 00:35:25) You can. And if you, I like to jam as well. I like to do it. My sons are finally taking it to heart, and they're starting to get into it. And we, you know, can't, we're not really there where we can play entire songs together, but I mean, just somebody jump on a chord or a lick and let everyone just fill in and let's keep the structure out of it, you know, and just have some fun doing it. And it's amazing how cool that can sound sometimes when everyone hits it the right way. There's no doubt that's fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:59) Yeah. I love it. I love music. If I'm in your part of the, your neck of the woods, I'll let you know. And...

(Lance Anderson at 00:36:05) Yeah. I need a keyboardist.

(Josh (Producer/Audio Engineer) at 00:36:08) We got to go.

(Lance Anderson at 00:36:09) See, I can get you to the point where maybe I can come up with something, and it sounds good while I'm jamming. But the minute you press record, I freeze up.

(Josh (Producer/Audio Engineer) at 00:36:16) I'm not the guy.

(Lance Anderson at 00:36:19) I need some studio guys to come help me out here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:22) Well, you can keep making these awesome relationships between universities, governments, and entrepreneurs, and you're in the middle of changing the world. Like, you're an integral part in that system of taking technology and transferring it. And I think that's a beautiful way to spend your time.

(Lance Anderson at 00:36:41) It's much appreciated and, you know, kind of what we've been talking about, being able to see new developments, new innovation, and trying to harness that. When it goes right, there's nothing more fulfilling that I could imagine doing as a lawyer, right? But it is a challenge, and I think it amounts to, and you mentioned the federal labs as well, it applies to them. It amounts to early discovery versus, you know, applied research and development and, ultimately, product development. And so trying to gauge what level of effort needs to be put on a situation now versus next year versus three years from now, you know, it's a challenge. And so you've got a university that really focuses on basic research. They're not looking out there trying to compete with someone. They're just trying to make cool stuff, make something better. And then you bring in private enterprise where their motivations are, you know, competitive in nature, especially in a capitalist society. And so trying to talk to those two cultures at the same time and have them agree to stuff can be a challenge. And that's really where I spend a lot of time. And when it works, like I said, it's very fulfilling.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:03) Do you ever help at the top of the funnel? So, for example, let's say some existing business owners are listening or some technology leaders, and they want to explore this, but they don't necessarily know exactly how they want to get started. Maybe they want to call you up and say, hey, you know, I'm curious. We're in the laser space, or we're in this space, Lance. Do you know any universities that... Do you ever help at top of funnel stuff, or do you just help once we have the relationship, we know we want to do something?

(Lance Anderson at 00:38:30) No, I do. And that's probably my favorite kind of role to play would be, especially like, we have large energy companies. I've done some speaking before and it, you know, someone, it raised an eyebrow, and they reached out and said, you know, we haven't worked with you. We haven't done this before, right? We understand the concept, and we understand the potential for that. Can you help us? And so it was absolutely that. It was, okay, well, what are you interested in? Where's your sweet spot? What's your competitive advantage? Where's your disadvantages? And then we go and kind of shop around for opportunities. There were a few that I knew about. There were also some that, you know, as I mentioned before, we just looked into some areas and found some good opportunities. And that turned into a very productive set of collaborations for purposes of making their products better. And in that case, it had to do with surface functionalization. So they had certain materials that they were in the industry, and they wanted to make it more durable or less reactive. And so we were able to fix the problem. And, oh, guess what? They had a bunch of patents around it, so it gave a competitive advantage at the same time. So, yeah, if there's an opportunity for me to take someone that has never even talked to one university and say, come with me. Let me show you how this can help you. And we go through the process. We have some discussions with key thought leaders, right? They want to work with private sector. And in fact, all this started back in 1980, so we're not talking about an old concept here. I mean, I was born before 1980, so I'm maybe a little biased there. But, you know, this is evolving. It's continuing to evolve. And now you're seeing universities get much more comfortable with joint ventures, which to me kind of sums up how this all needs to go down. It's not a license agreement in exchange for royalty. It's like, let's everyone contribute into a new venture. And let's go, let's go off together, align our interests, align the motivations, and, you know, benefit society by watching products reach the marketplace that are, you know, it's a better product, more efficient product. So that's the ultimate goal, and I think we're getting better and better in the technology transfer business.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:56) I personally like the idea of joint ventures. I've had one successful one, and it was definitely the perfect setup for a joint venture because we both had, like, equal contributions to the situation. And, yeah, it's been going two and a half years now. It's going great. Yeah, I get checks every quarter. Exactly. It runs.

(Lance Anderson at 00:41:24) And when it works, like, it's a great thing, a great concept, and guess what? It's not your family jewels. It's not you opening things up for someone else to come in and run. It's, you know, everyone's contributing to a separate scenario, however that looks. And we all agree on who's making the decisions and who's calling the shots. So, um, if you're wanting to just get out of the way, it's going to be designed that way. Yeah. There's a lot of flexibility and a lot of potential in leveraging a joint venture structure. And, again, it doesn't have to be a new entity that you form. It can be a creature of contract where you just have a bunch of joint development agreements going around, and everyone knows their role and the results. We all share it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:09) Yeah. Well, man, this is great. We made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Lance Anderson at 00:42:14) No, Joel. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me participate with you guys. This is awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:19) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn, or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.