Tsan Abrahamson (Part 2): Free Will, Privilege, and the Moral Duty to Act

Welcome to the Legacy All Stars podcast. We feature inspirational stories from people who dedicate themselves to helping others. Here is your host, Alan Pavloski.

This is part two of a special two part episode with my good friend Sam Abrahamson talking about intellectual property and of course, leaving the world a better place. I hope you enjoy it. You know, about mentorship, you and I have talked about this before, but do you seek out people to mentor or do you encounter people that you see that might appear to you to need mentoring and then step in when asked?

You know, I don't think I've ever offered to be a mentor. And I do also think that there's a fine line between telling someone you want through something and making them believe that you don't think they're smart enough. So I try to say, hey, you're doing great. And hopefully if they would like some feedback from me, I'm happy to mentor about. I would also say that at my age, now, 30 years into a legal career, I'm actually looking for mentors myself. I'm looking for younger mentors. I'm looking for 20 year olds and 30 year olds to talk to me about how businesses differ. I learn every day from them. So I'm actively seeking out mentors for me and I'm trying to make myself available for people to ask me for guidance. And that has been a successful strategy.

That's super cool. I love that. And I totally agree with that philosophy, of course.

Thank you. It's the Denzel philosophy, right? What is it that Denzel Washington says? He says in the first part of your life you learn, in the second part of your life you earn and in the third part of your life you return. And so I'm really at that returning stage right now, but sometimes I need a little help too. And so that's why I'm actively seeking out mentors myself while I make myself available.

Yeah, you've been really intentional about giving back with what I've known about your activities. Where does that drive to serve and support others come from?

Parents. Right. Parents. Raised in the Bay Area, born in Berkeley. Both my parents were activists in the 60s and 70s. And we talked a little bit a few minutes ago about being a brown person, about being a woman. But the truth of the matter is I come from so much privilege. I have been well educated, I have been nurtured as a child. I did not come from a war torn country. I was actually able, didn't have the money to, wasn't raised wealthy, but I managed to pay off My student loans, I consider that a privilege, not a burden. And so when you begin to look, and when you have parents who educate you in this way, when you begin to look at why people fail, they typically don't fail because they don't have the drive to succeed. They don't fail because they don't have opportunity. And so to the extent that it takes so little effort on my part to create an opportunity for them, I need to do that because that's the way that we, you know, the rising tide lifts all boats philosophy and that's how I truly feel.

Yeah.

How do you balance your professional role in protecting ideas with your personal passion for protecting people?

I conflate them.

You know, there's a lot going on in the world right now. And one of the things that I can do to both protect people and protect the world, protect freedom, protect our country, and what many of our ancestors have worked hard to build here is to make sure that we create.

Space. I know that that is such a charged word. It's so I think I know when I say create space, I have to snap my fingers instead of clapping and stuff because it's, you know, it's a little Gen Z. But protecting people's ideas, their works of authorship is also protecting the incredible diversity that we have in this world by allowing people to actually get something for what they're doing. And going all the way back to what we talked about at the very beginning of this discussion, sort of bringing it full circle. We are doing exactly what the creators of intellectual property laws intended, which is giving the world a far better, more creative, more interesting, more beautiful, more scientifically advanced, more healthy world.

Because we, we are allowing people to own this property that they have and give it to the world with at least the promise of potentially making money for it. That's what creates what we have. And that protects people, it protects their health. Because now, you know, we can create cancer drugs and, and new Alzheimer's treatments. It brings more joy to us. We can have protection for our music, we can dance, we can learn new things. It gives us creative outlets for writing, which is going to give rise to, you know, everything from operas to movies, which is going to bring an incredible perspective. And of course, any form of creative outlet, in my opinion, gives us another thing to be curious about. And when we are curious, I think we become more human. And when we are more human, we create a better world for everyone. So I really feel like they're completely conflated now. I don't want to give too much like, it's not like intellectual property is going to save the world. It's not. But I do want to say that what I do for a living, I actually believe supports sort of the individual human rights of everyone, and it makes the world a better, more interesting place.

Yeah, for sure. Well said. Can you share a moment outside of your career that reinforced your commitment to service?

Oh, my gosh, so many. Yeah, I guess so. A very long time ago, I was listening to npr.

And there was a podcast, one of the episodes of this American Life, in which the host is interviewing people about the concept of free will.

And the argument was made that free will doesn't actually exist. The illusion of free will exists, and we need to live by the illusion of free will, otherwise we'd all go nuts.

But the.

That the idea is that free will doesn't exist. And this sent me down a rabbit hole.

Because if free will doesn't exist, do we even have prisons? I mean, is anybody ever going to get rehabilitated? Should we, you know, should I just sit at home and do nothing since my life is preordained? Well, no, it doesn't, of course, work that way. But it did get me thinking again. Kind of like what I was talking to you about how my own life, my own upbringing, which wasn't full of money, but it was full of lots of education and lots of love and living in a certain place has made me who I am today. If that is true, then people who are underserved in this world are also not at fault for being underserved. And if that is the case, then my insertion into those worlds changes the course of their free will.

And it becomes a duty then for me to do it. And so, yeah, the moment outside my career was listening to this podcast, going into the free will rabbit hole, reading all kinds of books about it, including Saplosky's book called Determined, which is all about the argument that free will doesn't exist. And realizing that there's all these balls that knock together that make you who you are. And I can insert myself into a situation in an underserved community where the balls are knocking together to take somebody down a left path. That isn't good, and I can redo that, then I have a moral obligation to do it.

Man, that brings up a book that I read that just had the most dynamic impact on me, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I mean, it goes back to the rabbit hole that you were talking about. There's a book called and I Can't Remember the author's name, but it's called Incognito, the Secret Science of the Brain. And I read this book, and I absolutely went berserk having to go in depth onto really trying to understand the meaning behind it. And the one story from that book that really drove me to think, like you were talking about right now, about the lack of free will or the lack of maybe being responsible completely for your actions or for your circumstances, is that there was a guy who was very aggressive and was violently aggressive toward people, and he went into the. Happened to get medical care. I think he was in prison, happened to get medical care. They found that there was a object, there was a growth pushing against a part of his brain that controlled aggressiveness. And they removed the growth, and he became completely unaggressive and was completely rehabilitated. Went back out into society. They didn't know this, but the growth came back. He became aggressive again. It hit me hard because there was scientific evidence that somebody literally could not control their behavior.

And so that's just another one of those books that just totally brought me into that rabbit hole that you're talking about.

Yeah, it's really true. I mean, it's really true. And you hear these things over and over again. And no matter where you fall on the. Do we have free will spectrum. Right. You don't have to be like me and think that free will doesn't exist. But no matter where you fall, I think we can all agree that the experiences that we have shape who we are.

Yeah, for sure.

And so if, again, wherever you fall on this, think about yourself as I always think of myself, as that big annoying kid at the swimming pool who does the cannonball. Right. If I can cannonball. Right. And we all hate him, but. But, like, he's like, cannonball. It's all splashed everywhere. But he creates a ripple for everything he does just because he inserted himself into the middle of that. And I like to think of myself as a slightly smaller cannonball going into and just disrupting all of the ripples in the flow, Removing. Dislodging the tumor, if you will.

That's right.

And the older I get, the more I realize that there are a lot of tumors to dislodged and that, like I said, it's just our duty. We come from such privilege, even if it's not the kind that most people scream about. Right. I'm not a multimillionaire, you know, I don't ride around in private jets. Nevertheless, my education, my upbringing, my friends, my lack of mental illness, well, who knows? But at least my controlled mental illness, my ability to speak for yourself. Yeah, right.

But I have so many privileges, right? I'm not in the prison system. I'm not in the welfare system, which is a very difficult system to get at. I heard about a woman. I read an article just the other day about a woman who's desperately trying to make ends meet. She's on public assistance. She uses the meager amount that she gets from food stamps, and she goes and buys flour and sugar and butter, and she sells cupcakes to make more money so that she can feed her kids. And she's arrested for misuse of funds. Are you kidding me? And of course, my first thought was if. If this was some guy, you know, if this was some, like, high school student, you know, who happened to look a certain way, as opposed to this black lady who happens to look a certain way, the headline would be something like, Entrepreneur takes Meager Funds and Parlays it into Lucrative Business. Instead, it's woman is arraigned on felony charges of abuse of the welfare system. Right. And so we've got to help people dislodge from the path that they are on because there are so many obstacles in place. Whether you believe in free will or not, we can at least agree that if you're on this track, you're probably staying on that track without some intervention.

That's right. Let's shift gears back to IP a little bit. What new projects are you working on, particularly that are noteworthy or special to you right now?

Ooh, special and noteworthy. I'll go with noteworthy. The big one, nil. Name, image, likeness in the time of AI. Yeah, so I'll be speaking in a couple of weeks in Vegas on sort of all the adverse proceedings that are going on in the sports and entertainment world with borrowing people's images. What's fair use? What can you fairly do? What is infringement? What happens when you tell AI I want a picture of a football player who's handsome enough to be on TV and is dating a movie star and.

You get a talking about me?

Sam, I. I'm sorry. I. I didn't think you figured out.

Unjustifiably used by name and likeness, obviously.

I'm sorry about that. What happens, for instance, when you say you want a football player and it looks like Travis Kelce and you didn't intend it, or you don't even know who Travis Kelce is and it turns out to look like him? So we're going to be covering some of those cases and I think in my world of intellectual property, there's always something going on. And right now, AI and the use of images as well as the use of AI to create content are the big hotbed issues. And we got a lot to work out there, so it's quite exciting. A little bit daunting, but I'm having a lot of fun with it. And some of it is absolutely comical. Like the guy who is suing because he believes that a company took his abs and are using them in a celebrity app without his permission, and that people can recognize that they're his apps. To really legitimate cases of asking a movie star to endorse your product, and when you say no, they create an AI generated version that's almost exactly like you. And. Right. Those are the two ends of the spectrum. So it's a lot of fun. It's a lot of interest in it externally, and so it keeps it exciting for me.

Yeah, I could go down that rabbit hole for about an hour and a half, but I will move on.

Okay, Move on.

We'll get stuck there. Listen, if listeners walk away with one lesson from your story, what do you hope it is.

From my story? I guess it's, you're richer than you think.

You know, more than you give yourself credit for.

And.

You owe it to the world to give back a little bit of that to the generation you're pulling up behind you.

Yeah.

Also register your copyrights. Come on.

There you go. Well, legacy is the central theme to this podcast. How do you define your own legacy?

You know, it's funny. I've thought about that, and I've thought about that in the context of intellectual property, because one of the things that we have when art artists die is we have their art, and the legacy they leave behind is their art. And I know that I will be forgotten. I'm just zan. And that's okay. And so the legacy that I hope is that I leave nothing.

That my carbon footprint is zero, that my ideas get lodged in other people's brains, and that three generations from now, maybe four, the people who are still espousing whatever it was that I stood up for or lived for don't even know it's from me.

I want no carbon footprint. No intellectual footprint except that which is passed down. That's good until I disappear completely. And that would actually make me feel good. And I know that that's probably not something that other people have said on your show.

That's a first.

But my legacy is to leave no trace.

The memories I want those to stay. And of course, for those people who are still living, who remember me, of course I want them to remember me fondly. And I will close by saying this. I was at a funeral many, many years ago.

And it was a lawyer, and I didn't know him very well, but he had a connection. And I went anyway. I was sitting there, and this guy got up, and people were waxing he was an amazing attorney, and people were waxing poetic about him. And one guy got up, and in closing, you know, he said some nice words. But then he said something that has stuck with me for decades now. He said, bill didn't ever practice what he preached. He just practiced.

I think from that moment on, that's all I wanted to do. I don't want to preach. I just want to practice. I want people to see that I'm doing the work, not that I'm talking about doing the work. I want them to take my ideas and make them theirs. And then when it's my time to go, I want them to remember me fondly as having practiced and own that stuff and pay it forward.

Yeah, that's classic Zan.

Well, listen, if anybody wants to reach you at your company and find out more about what they can do to engage you, how do they do it?

Yeah, Cobalt law dot com.

Cobalt.

Like the color LA W. Cobalt law dot com. Take a look at who we are, you know, and tell your listeners if they have, like, some quickie question. We can't give legal advice, you know, but what we can do is we can direct you to the answers. People can always reach out and they can ask a quick question. There's so much out in the Ethernet that can help you protect your intellectual property, protect your brand. And we can direct you to that information. Even if you don't want to become a client, we're happy to do that.

Yeah. Well, we've come to the end of the show. I want to thank my very special guest, Zan Abrahamson, for making this world a better place, not just through her work in the intellectual property field, but for all the other ways she's committed to helping others. I'm Alan Pavloski signing off for Legacy All Stars.