I know it's TPB so I should have known this, but beware of this link at the office. If you don't have a good ad-blocker installed it will throw up some non-HR friendly popups!
I was lucky to get Graham as a professor for an undergrad discrete math course at UCSD. He's incredibly funny and besides his ability to juggle can also speak a fair amount of Mandarin. Definitely one of my more memorable classes.
I don't think it's the cost he's referring to. The fact that you could personally could be treated differently because of patent law would have a profound impact on the public perception of patent law. That could help lead to real reform of the system.
It's really sad that this is the case, but in the lab I worked for at a UC many of our costs were complete BS made up so that we could use up the full amount of our grant. The system encourages this behavior. The logic is completely flawed: If you don't use the money, then you obviously don't need it. Next time you won't receive the full amount from your grant. When your grant is millions of dollars over a few years, you end up having a lot of very nice dinners paid for with money that was meant to be used for research and education.
His answer the 1996 interview question with Wired about technology revolutionizing our lives definitely seems at odds with what we've listened to him tout about such things as the iPad.