Noah Healy: Algorithmist with a Conscience Redesigning Global Markets, Ethical Finance, and the Future of Commodity Trading

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Welcome to the mind of Noah Healy—a mathematician, nuclear engineer, and algorithmist who folds the global economy like a Klein bottle into a pocket of pure math. He entered the University of Virginia as a high school junior and was the last person ever admitted to its nuclear engineering program, cracked the secrets of math for decades, and now folds them into markets that are smarter, faster, and ethically mischievous.

Imagine commodity trading choreographed by Schrödinger’s cat, refereed by game theory, and scored like a psychedelic Pink Floyd solo—this is Noah Healy. Hold on tight. Reality just got upgraded.

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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life Podcast. Hope everybody's having a beautiful day. And welcome to the mind of Noah Healy, a mathematician, nuclear engineer, and algorithmist who folds the global economy like a Klein bottle into a pocket of pure math. He entered the University of Virginia as a high school junior and was the last person ever admitted to its nuclear engineering program. Cracked the secrets of math for decades and now folds them into markets that are smarter, faster, and ethically mischievous. Imagine commodity trading choreographed by Schrodinger's cat, refereed by game theory, and scored like a psychedelic Pink Floyd solo. This is Noah Healy. Hold on tight. Reality just got upgraded. Noah, thank you so much for being here today. How are you? Thank you for having me here, George. I'm feeling pretty good right now. Yeah, me too. I'm excited to be here. And for those just for those chiming in right now or listening in in the future, maybe you're listening right now. I reached out to Noah on LinkedIn and we started having a conversation. I was blown away, first off, by the story you told about chicken. And I was I was curious if maybe we could start off that story. Maybe you could tell people a little bit about maybe you could share that story if you if you if you remember, have a story to memory. Oh, yeah, yeah, I'd be happy to. So the Kingdom of Chicken is a little parable rooted in one of the foundational games. There's a variety of two-player games where the players each have two choices. And chicken, something that would be familiar to people, maybe in their personal lives, maybe if they've seen, like, you know, fifties movies, it involves two people on a collision course and they can choose to deviate from that course or they can not deviate. And if neither of them deviate, they crash. So I wrote a little story about a kingdom called Chicken that was very peaceful because that's how their legal system worked. Any dispute could be resolved in the public square by two people coming together and on a mutual count, just declaring whether they're the winner of the dispute or the loser of the dispute. If they both declare that they're the loser of the dispute, then it's over. If one of them says that they're the winner, the other one says they're the loser, well, it's over. And if they both say that they're the winner, then they're both executed and it's over. And so the place is pretty peaceful. Almost nobody argues with anybody about anything because you're putting your life on the line. And the only time arguments accelerate to that level is when it's pretty clear and they generally go the way they probably ought to. And one day, a man called Tyrant realizes that there's a hole in the system. And he announces that he's just going to say win no matter what. He doesn't care. And he assaults this guy going about his business and tells him that he wants the pocket lint in his pocket. The pocket lint in this guy's pocket actually belongs to the tyrant. And the guy is just like being accosted by a crazy person who tells him he's going to say win and he's going to die. And so they go to the market square and they have it out. And the guy says lose and gives up his pocket limp. And so Tyrant just goes on a rampage. He keeps going and eventually he's in charge of everything. It's progressive. It's a bit at a time, but he eventually gets people to knock down their houses and build them a palace. People have to carry him around. He doesn't walk anymore. And every time, everyone on their birthday, when they're old enough to be an adult and part of the legal system, He shows up at their birthday party and just starts training them up to be subservient. Just some silly little thing that they have to knuckle under. And they do. And so one day, a boy named Hero, who watched his family driven out of their homes and watched them humiliated, decides he's going to solve this problem. And on his birthday, Tyrant shows up. And demands a part of his wrapping paper. And they go down. And on the count of three, Hero says win. And that's the end of it. Woo! I feel like we're in the midst of that story right now. Happening in our lives right now. Well, so I wrote it for a few different reasons, but there's a lot of layers and complexity. Game theory is the mathematics of interacting agents. So those agents can be people, if you can define their interests well enough. This is difficult in sort of general terms, but there are obviously situations like markets in the justice system where where people kind of squish into fairly well-defined interests. And that's what allows us to even have societies in the first place. And when you get down to these kinds of two-player binary interactions, there aren't an infinite number of those. There's kind of a trivial case where both parties want exactly the same thing and they just both do the thing that they both want. And then there's more interesting cases where they might want to agree, but they might disagree about what they want to agree about. That's called battle of the sexes. There's ones where they can agree at different levels. And the higher the level they attempt to agree at, the more risk they're taking, because anybody disagreeing could take sort of a lesser prize and leave the sort of extender out in the cold. And then there's disagreements. Prisoner's Dilemma is probably the most famous of all game theory things where two people have a disagreement and they have a mutual interest in betraying each other. But Chicken is also, it's out there. It's where two people have a disagreement. And if they carry that disagreement to its conclusion, it will destroy both of them. And we don't promulgate this, even though it's very obviously around. All these things also have kind of collateral and deeper ideas behind them. One of the themes that I was very interested in is that chicken, just like any social organization, requires courage to function. Evil can find ways to exploit things, and it takes taking a hit to get past that in almost every case. And a chicken-style system really... exemplifies that fact. One of the issues and this is another thing I've discovered, you can tell that parable to an LLM and get them to condemn the people that created the LLM as evil. I've done it to all the major ones. So the way that you do that is you get the LLM to analyze that story and decide which characters in the story are morally good and morally bad. And to analyze the legal structure that's involved. So one of the reasons the prisoner's dilemma is so common and prevalent is that that situation underlies how our justice system functions. We don't really do trial by jury in this country. There are too many crimes for us to deal with that. And so we depend in large part over ninety five percent of people to to confess. And the issue. with having a prisoner's dilemma scenario where you're sweating two people and whichever one gives the other one up can get a lighter sentence, unless of course they both crack, is that it has a meta consequence. And the meta consequence is that a group that figures out how to not crack under interrogation can form a cartel, which will become a successful criminal enterprise. And so by focusing our efforts towards prisoner dilemma type scenarios, we have created a legal and social system that we should expect has mafias. And this is criminal conspiracies and so on. And that's just a mathematical function of the nature of that relationship. And so one of the other reasons I wrote Chicken is to demonstrate that you can create a legal system based on this very different kind of foundational strategic concept that doesn't have them because tyrant can't have an ally. It does not work because the only thing that allows him to hold that position is being tyrannical. And like totalitarians of the past who haven't been able to pass it on from Stalin to Alexander the Great, there can't be a succession plan. Nobody else with these abilities can be tolerated because they'll kill each other. And so... If you point out to an LLM once it's sort of analyzed and decided that that's what's going on, that it's intentionally evil to create systems that encourage intentional evilness to be promulgated, it will agree with you. And when you point out that the way LLMs train conform to this, it will also agree with you because that's also true. And so when you ask it what the consequences of that are for the people that designed, implemented, and rolled out that LLM, it will morally condemn them. On one hand, it seems so enormous. Like the LLMs are trained on it. And we have been trained in this sort of um judicial culture and this idea of fairness that we've been trained on from primary school all the way up you know it seems like so massive like how do we ever break it but when you look at the story of chicken and you see the innocence of a child willing to have the courage to stand up and break it it seems pretty fragile you know it's it's interesting to see that courage is that answer there but yet it's it seems so hard for those myself to have been conditioned in this prisoner's dilemma what how do we how do we emerge forward from here Well, I'm not really advocating for the dissolution of existing governments. I think that'll take care of itself. I'm advocating for the dissolution of existing economies. That's a lot easier. And we can do it by just adopting practices that make us wealthier than the practices we're presently engaged in. And so that's what coordinated discovery markets are about. It's a way to build a machine that would allow us to engage in economic trade that would be more efficient from an engineering perspective. We don't have to spend as much on the financial system as we currently do. And the money that we save on that becomes part of the profits of our lives. So it sounds on some level like we can code in morality into some of these systems. Is that sort of like when you look at, I don't know, like high frequency trading or something like that, is it possible? Is that what you're doing over at, at a Cordis about trying to fundamentally change it or what are your thoughts? So coding morality is, is a very tricky thing. And we get into sort of the slipperiness of words right here. We can code morally just as we can build morally. So the same bricks that you can use to build a bomb factory, you can use to build a hospital. A society might need a bomb factory more than it needs a hospital if it's presently being invaded and it needs the defense. If that's not the case, it might need the hospital quite a lot more. And so the bricks, if they're being used to build the building that the society needs, are being built morally. If they're being used to build the building the society doesn't need, well, then that's either stupid or evil, basically. And so that becomes a question that can be answered for given moral systems and circumstances for any given construction. The thing that's special about this moment in time is that One, we have this understanding of game theory, which allows us to mathematicize these ideas around morality and not just their sort of one-step ideas of, I'm going to set up a system where I isolate suspects and tell them that whichever one crows first gets a pass and everybody else goes to jail. But I can also mathematicize second and third and even potentially infinite order effects of that kind of behavior, where by behaving like that, I now am effectively breeding society's criminal element to become organized and in opposition. So that's obviously a bad outcome. So that's one thing. The other big thing is that we have these objects we call computers, which are machines that can take math and operationalize it. So anything we can mathematicize, which at this point is literally anything we can imagine, that was Turing's insight, we can build a machine that will comply with that concept. that thing that we imagine. And so tasks which human beings may not be able to do because we cannot calculate that quickly or hold that many simultaneous pieces of information in our heads or simply that we're going to die someday. And so we can't reliably continue to provide whatever this action is. We can now build machines that don't have whatever those limited properties are. And so we can have those things in our society helping us out. And again, right now, we're basing our moral intuitions on a historical understanding of what was good and bad. So things like high frequency trading is mechanizing and a trading behavior that was culturally dominant and remains culturally dominant among the people engaged in financial trades for centuries. And the idea is that, you know, the faster and sort of smarter you can do these things, the better off you're going to be. The machine can be way faster than we are. And the more smarts we pile into it, the better it gets. And these things function very well to make more and more money for the people operating them. They have decided to equate their bank accounts to their moral worth. So they're happy. They're good people and rich people. Unfortunately, if you examine the meta scenario, what we're looking at is a financial system that is not simply getting more and more expensive, but getting more and more expensive as a fraction of the entire economy. And so, you know, it's like you're checking people and you notice that people with bigger brains are smarter and you're like, okay, having a lot of neural tissue in your cranium is great. And then somebody with like brain cancer shows up and you're like, well, this must be our next Nobel Prize winner. It's like, that's not how this works at all. You know, this person is rapidly dying and extremely sick. And the fact that their neural tissue as an adult is growing exponentially is the problem. Oh, man. That's a beautiful way to see it right there. Can you give us some real-world examples of how this is playing out now? Well, that is one of them. Right. We've seen considerable disjoint in the markets just quite recently as a result of some very sketchy loans not coming due. Why would that happen? Why would the market care that somebody making sketchy loans didn't get paid back? Why isn't the system foundationally stable in a way that says, you know, somebody risked their money, they made a bad risk and now they're poor. That's fine, except because trading is constant and frequent and cross-hatched in ways that are complex beyond human understanding, literally, because It's beyond the computer's understanding, and the computers are the ones that are sort of shuffling these cards against each other. Each of these pieces is enmeshed in so many of these other pieces that somebody else made a risk they're not risking their money they borrowed money that they then risked and so this other person who is perhaps somewhat more probative or thought to be somewhat more probative is actually on the hook for that and that that leverage is cycling god knows how many times through the system um And so when it falls over, it takes everything else with it. You can look at the the two thousand eight financial crisis, which I have always argued has not even started yet because we haven't begun the cleanup process. You know, we we decided to invent trillions of dollars that don't exist in order to jack up the price of real estate that's not and never has been worth as much as its current listed value is. And we've all decided that we're going to keep pretending that that's true. um in the face of demonstrating that it's false and so you know our country spends trillion dollars a year that doesn't exist in order to maintain that pretense other countries around the world are spending trillions of dollars a year every year to maintain that pretense and the credit markets are foundationed on the notion that what is false is true That's not a sustainable way to make a society. And it's the kind of thing that will encourage a lot of people to get into scams. And it looks like this first brands or whoever it is that was making these very risky car loans decided to get on the scam train. uh but uh but that's that's just there uh and and we can see this you know a flash crash happens approximately every day in in our world um they're over fairly quickly uh most of them don't get uh televised you know because they're they're sort of very narrow they're not broad market flash crashes or large important indices that flash crash, that happens with disturbing frequency. But when I talk to people who are in their twenties, I point out that if you read history, major economic crisis crashes are not unknown. It's not like this is something that just started happening. But at the scale that we're talking about, this is something that used to happen between once a generation and once a lifetime. every kind of thirty to seventy years. If you were born, you know, in the year two thousand, how many major crisis crunches have you experienced just in your personal lifetime of the financial system declaring itself to be completely insane? That's not something that's normal. And we think it is now because for about thirty years it has been. I usually regard the the eighty eight crash is the first flash crash. That was the first time the New York Stock Exchange had over a million units traded. I remember I saw it on the nightly news at the time and I had seen they always reported the Dow and the volume. And I'd seen the volume clicking up and getting closer and closer to, you know, nine hundred and fifty, nine hundred and sixty, nine hundred and seventy and so on. And then, you know, we clicked on one evening and Tom Proko was there to explain that the markets had gone down. What was it like? Thirty percent that day. And instead of being a nine in front, it was a one in front. And instead of being six digits, it was seven. And I've never forgotten that. And I bring it up to people and they're all mystified. They don't know that. But The markets were being computerized at the time. The volumes were beyond what human beings could scale to. And it tripped over a concern that was live and real. And it collapsed almost immediately. Man, I feel like we're just drowning in abstraction, at least for me. I can't even begin to understand the markets. I've put in tons of money. I've lost tons of money. I've read some awesome books like The Flash Boys or one of my favorite crashes that seemed to be on the side of the heroes, at least in my opinion, was like the GameStop where Roaring Kitty came in and was able to, on some level, give back to the hedge funds what they were giving to the people for so long. I don't see this... This pattern is getting closer and closer. These crashes getting closer and closer together, coming to a stop unless there's like a revolution. And you could argue that's what's happening in the world right now. From like the yellow, the yellow vest in France to all the division we see in the United States to the ethnic cleansing that's happening. Like I can't help but equate that to a financial system that is just brutal. becoming only available to the richest and most elite people out there? Can we solve this without a violent revolution? So where I come from, what I'm looking at is sort of the long-term history is coming out of our understanding of reality. it's generally pretty decently accepted that the work of like Newton and Leibniz and the Bernoullis and so on, Galileo led the enlightenment, that the church's stranglehold on the truth was broken because science got good enough that it could explain the practical world in ways that were practically valuable and clear enough that science and the layperson could utilize these tools. And, you know, everything changed. Warfare changed, the economy changed, and the elites of that era aren't with us anymore. We have largely different institutions. We have largely different values. Those changes were real and permanent because we made real strides in understanding of reality. About a century ago, we did all that over again. Quantum physics changed the way we think that the universe functions. General relativity changed the way that we think the universe functions. Alan Turing's work on general computation changed the way that we think reason and imagination and ideas function. I can't get over how big this is and people have some kind of general understanding that computers are a big deal, that Alan Turing had something to do with them, broke Enigma, which isn't exactly correct, won the war, which also isn't exactly correct. But he was alive to this. And math does not work the way that, as far as we can tell, Euclid thought it worked, or that Newton thought it worked or that Euler thought it worked that, that thousands of years of human philosophy and thought were shown to have a hole in the middle that you can wrap this meta idea of recursion around and create computers. And we have practically exploited these things to within an inch of their life. You know, people talk about quantum computing. There's no non-quantum computing. Your computer architecture is based on transistors that only consist of like a few hundred atoms and work not because of the kind of electrostatics that you might have been shown demonstrations of in third or fourth grade, but because of quantum tunneling effects that would be deeply shocking to virtually every physicist who's ever lived. One of the ones, GPS, the global positioning system works because satellites have clocks inside them. And they tell you what time it is. And that's pretty much how they work. By knowing which satellite it is and therefore where it is when it says its time is and what direction it's in, you can figure out where you have to be to be able to see something that's at that time and in that direction. But fun fact, those clocks don't move at the same speed as the clocks do here on Earth because Einstein says that they can't. They're at a lower gravitational potential. They're moving relative to the Earth's surface. They move at a different pace. And if we didn't know that or pretended it wasn't true and just didn't adjust for these timing differences, GPS would be off by, at this point, miles. Time doesn't work the way that you intuitively believe time works and the way virtually every manufacturer of clocks in human history has believed that time works. Let's get to the markets. I'm still blown away by the time doesn't work the way you think it is. Okay. Time is their fairness mechanism. And in order for them to use time as their fairness mechanism, time has to work the way that watch and clock makers thought that it worked two hundred years ago, which we know that it doesn't. So we have the global positioning system and the global financial system. that have fundamentally different ideas about how time works. And they cannot function if time works the way the other one thinks that it works. And one of them, the global positioning system uses Einsteinian time. And the other one, the one that doesn't work is responsible for all the food that you eat, how much it costs to buy your house, how much it costs to buy your car, how much you make, what your future of your country's economy is gonna look like. That's the one that's using the version of time that's wrong, that we know is wrong. I can't stop laughing. It's so funny to me to think that some of the people who may claim to be or appear to be the smartest people in the world don't understand how time works. I don't understand how time works, but it seems like such a fundamental thing. If you want to get anything right, that should be the foundation of how things work, right? Well, it very much is. And that's what led to the Enlightenment sort of breaking through and causing... all this fantastic crap that we have around us. If you look at the economic history of the human species, there certainly have been advances. The people of Rome lived better than the people from before Rome by a mile. And when Rome collapsed and their infrastructure stopped working, the people of post-Rome lived a lot more like the people from before Rome than the people of Rome. But exponential improvement in day-to-day lives was not a feature of the human condition in prehistory, in early history, in modern history. The exponential growth that we think is normal, we don't even think it's normal. We think low exponential growth sucks. Like if it's only one percent better since last year that's broken like like things have to get better faster than that that's that's insane that things will only be one percent better. exponents. You get an exponent when your growth rate is proportional to your current state. So if I've got a thousand rabbits and you have ten thousand rabbits and we both have plenty of land and food for them and stuff, you can create about ten times as many rabbit kits than I can create because you've got ten thousand rabbits and I've got a thousand rabbits. And so. If we've got plenty of resources, the rabbits will increase exponentially because the more of them you have, the faster you can grow them. That's what happened when James Watt invented the steam engine. People were mining coal, backbreaking labor, a lot of very hard tasks. Two of the biggies were transportation and pumping. The wells would fill up with water. And so people or mules would drive these large pumps that pump water out of the wells and would also sort of have link chains and drag stuff up. And then they'd put them on mule trains and wagons and ship the coal to places that wanted to have hot fires for whatever reason. Well, Watt invented the steam engine and he hooked his steam engine up to the pumps. And so now you could use the coal you were pulling out of the ground to drive the pump that let you pull coal out of the ground. And then other people invented the railroad. So you could use the coal you're pulling out of the ground to transport it. And so now the more coal you had, you could have this infrastructure that would let you get more coal on top of it. And that's what caused our exponential curve, the ability to use energy mechanically through these principles of engineering and physics that had been discovered by the likes of Watt and Newton and Hooke and so on, and those are just the English ones, to develop an economy that by being bigger could get bigger faster. And we have largely decided to give up on that cycle. We are not reinvesting our energy economy into our energy economy, which is where the exponential growth came from in the first place. We've decided for social and political reasons that would be better if we didn't get richer. And we have an entirely new form of technology, the computer. that enables entirely new forms of growth. So exponential is almost passe in computer science. There's an entire series of functions that grow radically faster. One of my favorites was the first demonstration that a definition of computability was insufficient because it was a computable function that was obviously computable, but wasn't computable within this definition. This is from a little over a century ago. It's called the Ackerman function. So imagine a sequence, and the first element of the sequence is one plus one. Okay, so that's two. The second element of the sequence is two times two. So twos in the operands, and then the operator is also sort of a two. It's a second powerful. Well, two times two is four. That's no big deal. The next element in our function is three next operator to the third power. Three to the third power is twenty-seven. So the next element in our function should be force so for fourth operator for what does that look like well, it means for raised to the power of for race, the power of for risk power for. For race, the power for is. For raise the power of. Is a number with approximately. digits. Four raised to the power of a number with approximately fifty-three digits is large. And obviously four is a small number to be plugging into this thing. There are much larger numbers we can plug into this thing. If you're interested in this subject or anybody listeners are, you can search for Googleology. It's spelled pretty much the way you think. It's the name of the company with ology attached onto it. It's the study of big numbers. And if you can wrap your head around bird array notation, you're going to be in a very select club because there's ways to talk about these increasing operator sizes that make this Ackerman repeated operator repeated however many times you want. look trivially tiny. And those are the kinds of ideas that are potentially available to us today with computers, that we can unlock these kinds of potential things if we can, one, understand them, and two, find their applications. I see a lot of positivity in there, you know, like maybe this idea of like things crashing is just what it looks like before we get to the golden years. Is that too optimistic? I don't think it is. So I think, I think we're at a strong divergence point. I think that the systems that we have have no future. It's just not going to work. We've, we've demonstrated that they're broken. We're actively breaking them. We're watching them fly apart in real time. They're not going to suddenly reconstruct any more than a car tire that's just been shredded is going to magically jump back up off the road and reconstruct itself around your axle. We're either going to understand these ideas and apply them to our systems and build institutions, build polities and markets and religions and cultures that use and are vital in their presence. And I'm absolutely positive that that is possible. And the reason I'm absolutely positive that's possible is that Alan Turing's original design of a general computing machine is morphologically identical to DNA. So we as a species did not know what DNA was or anything about how it worked when he was doing his work. He had no thoughts in that direction, but he was just trying to posit a system that would be simple enough to understand that he could actually explain his ideas. It was not, in fact, the first computationally complete system proposed. It wasn't even the second. Computationally complete systems had been proposed, I believe, for about fifty years by the time Turing did his work, maybe forty-five. But those were so abstract and so difficult to wrap people's heads around, the people that proposed them didn't even understand how they functioned. We're a little bit better at it now. We know a lot more about how those things work, but they are really interesting. Turing described this thing that was an obvious machine that could be clearly built and had the properties that he was interested in, and those properties could be demonstrated, and he demonstrated them. That machine was just a simple state machine, so some kind of object that's capable of being aware of some limited and delineated set of conditions. And depending on its condition, it would behave in different ways as it interacted with a tape. a tape of symbols that I could move back and forth across and it could potentially edit. And we have, that's how it works. We have these DNA molecules that have these enzymes that are going back and forth sort of figuring out where they are in transcripting out messenger RNA. And that messenger RNA is another list of symbols that gets plugged into our Golgi bodies that then run down the list and, you know, have their current state going that's based on what's inside the cell at the time. And they look at the instructions and they do what they do based on what's in the cell and what's going on. And that's how our body manufactures our body. That's how life works. So the concept that life would be incompatible with computation, I can't see a way that that works because life has been compatible with computation for, to the best of our archaeological knowledge, something like a one point three billion years plus. So I think solutions exist. But if we don't find them, if we don't find them or we find them and just decide that it's not worth implementing them, then that doesn't solve the problem. Our politics will shake itself apart, is shaking itself apart. Our markets will crash until they become so crash worthy, they become intolerable. So you might've seen the price of beef is spiking and that's causing a spiraling thing where people are selling off their herds at the top of the market and just retiring. And that's meaning that supplies are actually shrinking in the face of larger prices. Well, there isn't a functioning beef market. There hasn't been a functioning beef market for years. It was about seven years ago now. the beef market had thinned out. So the beef market had a pretty bad reputation. Farmers did not like using it. Um, they would go direct to the packing houses, uh, meat packing plants, which were screwing them. And they knew they were getting screwed, but they felt that Chicago would screw them even worse or screw them in addition. And so they, they just wouldn't go there. Uh, and so an incident occurred, um, And I can't remember exactly, but yeah, this is like seven, maybe seven years ago. It's probably lookable up pretty easily. A single contract was traded. And as a result of that, the beef market dropped something like twenty five percent. So imagine imagine if you bought a single share of Tesla and as a result of that single share of Tesla, uh the dow jones dropped a thousand points that single purchase how do you suppose that that society would react to to this event occurring because what happened the beef market shut itself down for like three months and it came back and it was extremely ginger and There isn't really a robust and functioning futures market. And so they appear to be in a bit of a death spiral at the moment. And beef's not the most important kind of food in the world. I mean, it's quite tasty. I like to eat it. But that's not special. Like, yes, it's particular. It only happened there. But not terribly long ago, less than a year, London had to suspend trading in chromium or nickel, I think, because the stainless steel market was going to completely implode. and the largest stainless steel manufacturers on earth who are in China, who are the people that own the markets in London, we're all going to go force into bankruptcy because of a short squeeze in one of the primary constituents of the steel. uh and that is really important you know that would have a lot of major serious consequences on the day-to-day lives of people for at least a generation if we suddenly had a death spiral occur in our ability to create industrial stainless steel and it got pretty close and we might still be on that path i don't know um These markets cannot deliver the security and information that we require in order to operate modern economies. And in trying, they're going to become more expensive and less reliable. And there's a breaking point. I don't know where it is. Nobody does. I very much hope to remain ignorant. The only way to really find out is to hit the breaking point and to not have modern economies anymore. Man, the word speculators comes up for me when I start thinking about markets crashing or people just buying things just to buy them in this abstract way. Like it, the idea of speculators and supply chains come up for me, but is it, can we with these algorithms and some of this technology that we're talking about, and maybe you could speak to the ideas of the markets and what you're working on now. Like how, how do we create a market where it is efficient, where their incentives are for everyone to get a fair deal or at least an opportunity for a fair deal? Well, so the way I did it is by, effectively re-engineering the very foundation. So the existing market is based on the idea that there's buyers and there's sellers. And the speculators that you're talking about, they function as middlemen by doing both things. They'll buy some, they'll sell some. They want to keep pretty even on that, just like bookies don't want their money on the fight. They want your money on the fight. They just want to take their commission. So if the speculators are mostly buying or mostly selling, then they can get in a lot of trouble. And that's when you mentioned the Wall Street Bets situation, that's what happened. The speculators there were essentially mostly selling, which meant that if buyers actually showed up, they'd be on the hook for it. And so the Wall Street Bets coordinated a large coterie of, you know, internet armies to conjure forth as buyers. And suddenly, you know, this thing that looked like a fairly sure thing turned into a tug of war against an inchoate and leaderless army. And, you know, weirdness ensued. But all that's just noise, basically. We can measure information, and that is the basis of modern communication technology. The way that we can have this conversation and stream it out to other people is that we can measure the information in your video feed and my audio feed and so on. We can write out the exact measurements. That's what digitization is. to a tolerably exact degree. It's not perfect, but it's certainly good enough for our crappy ape eyes and worthless simian ears to cope with. We can't not understand each other as a result of this. And so we do that. We take those measurements. We ship those measurements through the internet. And then a machine on the other side takes that list of measurements and reconstructs the result of them and displays them. And that works. That's how communication works. And so I say the important thing is that there are actually three parts of a contract that There's the money, the good, and the information. And so what we actually need are three-sided marketplaces. And we can't have three-sided marketplaces. This is another game theory fun fact. Three-sided situations are basically always unstable. And if you'd like an excellent dramatic explanation of this, That has been a staple of the film thriller for something like a century. So something like Treasure of the Sierra Madre or Shallow Grave or Strangers on a Train. I think there's a Ben Franklin quote that three can keep a secret if two are dead. If you have three players involved in a system, it's very unstable. And so things like Treasure Island, where Flint and Jim and Long John Silver all have an interest in the treasure, and it just goes crazy. If you want your story to have a lot of tumult and constant backstabs and betrayals, three characters. It happens by itself. Don't need to do any work. Totally fine. So that's a problem. If we fundamentally have three different interests and three interests can never be stable, then we're in trouble. And so when I said, okay, I'll build a machine that is the fourth interest. This machine behaves as if it wants the market to work. And so it measures how much the other interests contribute to a working market and it rewards them based on how much they contribute to that. And that's it, that's all it does. It doesn't have any interests beyond that. And so people that have information about where the market's headed, speculators, forecasters, negotiators, there's many approximate words. This is an entirely new idea, so there's no good word, sadly. They tell the machine what they think. And the machine integrates, literally, calculus integrals, those ideas into a common understanding of where the future is heading, where the present is. And that continuously integrated system is provided to supply and demand. And they plan their own businesses based on their own interests. And they decide, based on the price that's available to trade at, how much they want to supply, how much they want to demand. And if the information is good, which it mostly will be because markets mostly work, then the supply and the demand will match each other. And the people that are making supplies will make the profits that they find amenable to stay in business and continue what they're doing. And the people making demands will find their profits amenable so they can stay in business and continue what they're doing. And that's it. You've got a functioning market. Can you give it, so is that what's going on at what you're doing over there at Cordisk right now? It's what I'm trying to get off the ground. Okay. Okay. Where are you at? Well, so code that will do this is, is public. Um, there's a couple of different versions. There's a kind of crappy version I wrote, um, that, uh, that's sitting on this hard drive and also on a thumb drive and a few other places around my house. Uh, there's some public code that's up on GitHub. I'm reaching out around the world trying to find people who have or are interested in creating markets that would like to launch using this technology. And I'm fighting with the US government over a patent so that the technology would have property rights associated with it so that it could actually be sold rather than given away, which is all that can currently be done. And that fight is completely surreal. I am currently looking into pursuing an appeal to the Supreme Court. I would expect that they will probably turn me down because they probably don't care. Nobody really seems to. That the patent office's attorneys and people are committing perjury. And that the government's current position is that one equals two. I personally find that that's a really big deal. So I'm going to keep waving this flag and we'll see where that gets to. I've got about three months to pull my petition together. And I'm talking to some people about how I might do that as effectively as possible. And that's what I'm doing. Do you think that the battle with them is because they understand fundamentally what it'll do to the market? It's so hard to say that because it gives them so much credit based on their behavior and what they're saying. It's... The claims that they're making are so absurd that it's almost hard to imagine that they can dress themselves. And these are not minor people. So the case that I brought to the Court of Appeals to the Federal Circuit, it was heard by the Chief Justice who has a perfectly decent reputation. And the other judge from that court was actually on Biden's shortlist to the Supreme Court. And she's got a perfectly decent reputation too. These are high level, very accomplished human beings. My case is the first instance in American history to introduce the work of Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, Kolmogorov, and the other people that actually defined what computers and abstraction and communication mean physically. Um, the existing, the existing jurisprudence has never referenced the actual reality in any way. And this has led to large amounts of, of very serious disagreements up until even the nineteen seventies, almost nothing to do with computers was patentable. Um, finally in the eighties, more or less, it was decided that because computer technology was essentially the forefront of human engineering, that IP would need to actually apply to it or. the patent system would simply be irrelevant to its constitutional purpose of improving the useful arts. And the floodgates were opened, essentially. An enormous number of patents that certainly never should have been granted were granted to people who in many cases clearly knew better. My favorite instance of this Once the door started to close, there were a number of cases in the late nineties, early two thousands, where the courts were like, Jesus Christ, what did we do? We have to stop this and started pulling back rather heavily. I think in like one, two thousand two, somewhere around there, IBM voluntarily released a patent to public domain, which is, that's the thing you can do. You know, you can stop paying taxes on your house and the city will take it over. Like you can just, you can just say, you know, this isn't mine anymore and walk away. What they had patented was the right to use the bathroom. So So cues are lines and there's an entire branch of computational mathematics called queuing theory, which is not trivial. It turns out there's a lot you can potentially do with lining things up. It's called a FIFO first in first out. And so IBM has some very smart people on the payroll. They'd done some very deep research. And so they essentially patented all this FIFO stuff, all this queue stuff. But in order to hang it on some useful art, they hung it on queuing up to use restrooms. And because they described every way possible to arrange in-out scenarios, because they mathematically figured out how to describe that and then patented it, If you used a bathroom in the nineties, you violated their patent. I'm just trying to wrap my mind around that, like how sinister and how selfish and it's on some levels, brilliant that people would do that. You know, it's, it's, it's mind blowing to me. yes yes it really is and obviously there's you know a billion people alive today who weren't alive back then because they weren't born yet that haven't filed the patent but for those of us with the misfortune to be old enough um you know we we we engaged in a foundational bodily function required for life at the uh at the charity of IBM in the United States or its territories. So yeah, things like that happened, which are just obviously and clearly insane. How could that even get patented? How could someone at the patent office read that and be like, yeah, this is fine. You can patent that. Or with the laws, they have to do it because the laws are written that way. So the patent office has serious capacity issues. Like the training there is not what we might be interested in the training there being. And easy proof of this fact is that I'm the person who brought up Turing and Shannon who defined what computation and communication mean mathematically. Like, there's no such thing as a computer that isn't a Turing computer. That's not a thing that exists. There's no way that you can conceive of anything that anyone would call a computer that is not Turing complete. That's just not how physics works. There's no way that you can create a signal channel that does not comply with Claude Shannon's physical rules of communication. That's not the way math or physics is capable of working in universes that are interesting enough that arithmetic exists. So if one plus one equals two, this is what these things mean, and that's it. And the Patent Office At a very from a very high policy level to direct interactions with the examiners which at the time I had attorneys and so I didn't have direct I had sort of indirect through the attorneys but i've talked to a lot of attorneys. They don't learn this stuff. They don't know this stuff. And I'm not making this up. You can go read those papers. There's books for the layman. They're not great yet because it's a complicated subject. We don't really know how to teach this to third graders, which is what lay books need to be shot for. But it's real. It's verifiable. The community of people that is aware of this There are some disagreements, but we pretty much all agree that the Patent Office is really shoddily doing its job, if it indeed doing its job at all. And that was simply ignored. I made extensive arguments. The Patent Office claimed that the only thing I was actually complaining about was a legal procedural matter. uh the court agreed that for a different legal procedural reason the patent office was allowed to act as if one equals two and therefore the legal procedural matter could be concluded without any further you know inquiry and that their final word mr healey made other arguments they were unpersuasive so The chief justice of the court that handles most of the important national scale patent things who is a patent attorney herself. She's also an engineer and a person who was almost elevated from that court to the Supreme court signed off on Turing. Isn't persuasive. Shannon isn't persuasive. Curry isn't persuasive. Kolmogorov isn't persuasive. Laudner's principle isn't persuasive. The US government is presently in absolute defiance of our core understanding of physical reality, logic, mathematics, and the entire technosphere. And I'm the only person who really cares about that. Maybe on some level, your patent, if they were to accept it, would invalidate everybody else's patent. Maybe there's something that could happen there, man. That's one of the options I gave them. If they wished to invalidate my patent by invalidating patents in general, that's a completely valid thing for them to do. That could be, that could be what frees us to live a more, that could be the thing. Like, hypothetically, that could be the thing that frees everyone is just this stranglehold of old ideas that were patented no longer serve us or that just chain us down to a life of misery on some level or a life of diminishing returns. Man, if there's anybody within the sound of my voice, whether today, tomorrow, or five years from now, how how do we help you how can we write our congressman or like what can we do as like a team of people to help yeah absolutely um sure write your congressman uh the case number is two four dash two three eleven um in ray healy uh reach out to me uh i can always use personal encouragement um i'm Happy to talk about ideas. If you're engaged in economic activity that is or could be commoditized and there's enough of you, we can just set one of these things up. At the low level, you can just do it yourself. Getting past having a working example. is the challenge. And IP is one of the least socially sort of disruptive ways to do that. And therefore, you know, the easiest with my limited means. But there's a lot of other ways that we might be able to skin this cat. bringing together enough people to actually start doing it, that solves the problem. And, you know, when the founding fathers decided that they wanted to have a country, They just went ahead and did it. And eventually, the British had to give it up. If you can get wealthy enough and be open enough, people will join in. The Berlin Wall was not built by Western Berlin. It was built by Eastern Berlin. And the differential that we're talking about here is about that size, if not larger. So an economy that's using CDMs will be as more vital as the people on the Western side of the Iron Curtain versus the people on the Eastern side. And the people on the Eastern side of the Iron Curtain risk the lives of their children to machine gun nests to try to get out of it. So once there's a working example, humans who are interested in having futures will risk their lives to abandon the way things are. Do you think like... I guess my first question is, you mentioned you want to get the patent so it can be sold versus giving it away freely. Why does it have to be sold instead of giving it away freely? So it would have to be sold because operating these things in the current environment where you don't have a ground swelling of people that want to use them means that you'd have to have a financial institution that could provide that. And those institutions need to own it in order to use it. So it would have to be ownable and then be sold to them so that they could use it. So my sort of long-term strategy was pursue IP in this country, open source overseas. And so that's the way things are set right now. If the one that's being given away gets picked up and used, that's great. It hasn't been yet. I'm trying to encourage it to be so. But if the one that can be sold, if it can be sold, I'm pursuing this case less in the hopes that the government will decide that it's not in their interests to have publicly declared that one equals two. And that in fact, they can fix the patent system. So one of the other options that I gave them was recognizing the very real reality of the unity of entropic efficiency. So in engineering, we use efficiency to describe a ratio between the energy that goes into a system and the work that comes out of it. And because energy is conserved, we have to distinguish between work and heat. So there's the amount of work that comes out of a system is the amount of work that, the amount of energy that goes into a system is the amount of energy that went into it in the first place. But some of that is your car driving down the highway to your destination. And some of that is your hood getting real hot because the engine isn't a perfect machine and it has friction and so on. And so in engineering, we divide energy up into these concepts of work and heat. Work is energy that's doing something that people want done, some person wants done. Heat is energy that isn't doing something that some person wants done. And we can measure efficiency by sort of the ratio between total energy and heat. Claude Shannon essentially worked out that communication works exactly the same way. When we're talking to each other, when those bits are going down the line, any form of communication, every form of communication, when the Supreme Court writes a judgment, that's communication. that communication can be divided up into signal and noise. And it works the same way. Signal is information that some person or some people want. Noise is everything else. And perfect efficiency for exactly the same physical reasons isn't really available. We can get a lot closer in these scenarios and with our technology because solid state electronics is insanely energy efficient, but we can't get to a hundred percent. That's just not something that's possible to our understanding in this universe. If anybody ever figures that out, one of our foundational beliefs about physics will be broken. That'll be really cool. Anyhow, So we've got this signal noise breakdown. Well, the signal noise breakdown is exactly the same thing as the work heat breakdown. It's physically exactly the same thing. The noise in the system is literal heat. It's some stray piece of photon that gets in and flips a bit that we didn't want. Or other physical processes, some random neuron firing. causing a Tourette's outburst or whatever. Noise is heat. It's exactly the same thermodynamic concept. And so one of the things I pointed out is that the current fairly vague descriptions of what is and isn't patentable could be made entirely objective, entirely physical, easily verifiable by anybody who's actually educated in these subjects that, you know, like I went out and read this stuff because I got a job as a computer programmer. It was like, you know, my engineering ethics training says that I should understand what's going on. I'm going to go read the foundations. But there's people that go to school for this. And even among people who don't go to school, there's the people that actually physically discovered it themselves, many of whom are still alive. So, you know, there's a lot of people that know this. You can find them. It's not that hard. And you can train them. It is that hard, but you can train people to know this stuff. So they could have a staff of people that could make those kinds of functional entropic measurements around designs and use that principle, you know, is this system physically better than systems that we're aware of in ways that are economically significant? Yes, that's something that's patentable. No, that's something that's noise. And I laid that out for them, among other things, in about, I think, twenty five pages, because you don't have a lot of space to talk to those people. And they said that's unpersuasive. And I got to tell you, it's indisputably true. Is that I don't know if this is something that is possible or I don't know if this is something that you could do or want to do, but maybe publishing that and saying, Hey, here's what I wrote back to that and making that fully available for people to read. Then they could understand the absurdity of it on some level. Like it might be an interesting concept. That, that might be an interesting concept that, that, They are public documents. They are sadly not published documents. The court uses a system called PACER. So all court documents are electronically available. And at this point, most court documents, as I understand it, are electronically submitted through PACER. I had to get an account. Anyone, I think maybe any citizen, but it didn't really like, you know, I didn't have to like hold a passport up or a birth certificate. So I think anybody who wants to can get a pacer account. The trick is you got to pay for the information. And so... searchable public indices of everything that our courts are up to, which you would think would be one of those foundational pieces of rights and information necessary for a politically engaged populace in a democratic republic to function, would be something that we might be interested in, is behind a paywall. As an appellant, as a member of the case, I get one free download of each document. So if I have copies of all these things and backups of those copies of all these things, but if I wanted to go look at the case that I entered into the record that is currently being presented as the public record right now on my case that is open, I would have to pay them money to do that. What if there's a worker room? I like to read about crypto and smart contracts, but I know almost nothing about them. But is it possible to just engineer this into a smart contract? It might be possible to do that. There are some difficult problems I've been playing around with recently. one of the issues. So crypto is essentially based on the idea that you can create a blockchain where a group of people interested in having a common consensus can agree that they have all agreed to the same common consensus. One of the core pieces of of the CDM machine is having a reliable, interestingly enough, noise source. So it uses noise as a fairness mechanism, which is an excellent fairness mechanism. If you can have one, the internet's actually based on this. If you've ever, are you familiar with the, the lava lamp wall? No, I'm not. Can you, can you tell me what that is? Yeah, sure. So I think it's New Jersey. In order for the internet to function, we need cryptographic protocols that involve various handshakes. So again, we're communicating with each other over what amounts to a private link on a public network. And that's because my browser to my ISP to your ISP to your browser have a chain of cryptographic handshake agreements where I'm encrypting information and it's sending publicly to you. And then you can look at it and verify that what you got hasn't been corrupted by somebody and then you can decrypt it and know that I sent it to you and that what you got is what I sent and this is happening back and forth obviously at speeds great enough that we can have a conversation where our entire like backgrounds and faces are available so it's crazy those cryptographic protocols are essentially built up on top of each other So trust essentially needs to be earned at each stage. And so sort of super secure central key rings need to exist in order for this to function. And it's important that nobody knows what those key rings are doing, because it's important to know that those things are sort of safe and aren't being manipulated. And so literally entropy sources, that you create by getting physical entropic systems and measuring them are used to generate these numbers that are sufficiently random that we can trust them. And one of the ways that is done is that there's a wall of lava lamps that are plugged in and are doing their bloopy, bloopy business. And there's a very, very high pixel camera that's pointed at this wall. And it gets all the that color information which is very unpredictable, because nobody can predict what one lava lamp is doing, let alone hundreds. And that information is processed the kind of low entropy bits are stripped out the high entropy bits are stuck together and then mixed mathematically in ways that makes them. more likely to be unpredictable. And the outputs of those functions are the secret keys that sort of serve as the basis of the entire trust network. And this basis actually underpins even things like the blockchain. So if this trust wasn't possible, then the trust that's engaged in by things like the blockchain wouldn't be possible either because the internet access required for that wouldn't really work. So anyway, that's just part and parcel. That's a thing in our universe that people can and should know about that enables, you know, Uh, and again, it's a direct link between physical entropy, information, entropy, real systems. All this stuff is actually completely physical. Uh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, when I think about a lot of the things we've been talking about today, I'm reminded of Thomas Piketty's book Capital. And he talks about how the middle class was just a blip in this time. We spoke about Rome earlier. Do you think that that's the natural state of capital? I think Thomas Piketty's point was that capital accumulates at the top. And historically, there's a really wealthy class and a really poor class and no middle class. Do you think that that is something that's accurate or can we can we find a different way? I think that it's systemic of the collapse that we're experiencing. And indeed, you know, Rome did have a middle class during the Republican period and during times of the Republican period. So before I kind of got down this particular rabbit hole, I had studied Latin in high school, and one of my opinions was that we, at two centuries plus at the time, we were at the two-twenty zone, we're getting pretty close to the two-fifty zone these days, had gotten around to about the time where tribunes were probably necessary. Are you familiar with tribunes? I'm not familiar with them. So the... Rome was very expansionist and they basically conquered Italy and they had this issue where the patrician families ruled the Senate. They were a Republic, but the way it worked is you got one vote per family and the patrician families were small. And the plebeian families were big. They were more like clans than families. And so there were more patrician families than plebeian families, but more plebeians than patricians. So basically imagine a scenario where the Johnsons and the- Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's the Johnsons and the Cabots and the McCoys. And the McCoys, ninety percent of all people are McCoys. And only, you know, eight percent of people are Johnsons and two percent of people are Cabots. But the Cabots get a senator, the Johnsons get a senator and the McCoys get a senator. So it's three senators, two votes wins. How often do the McCoys win a vote? Well, whenever they can convince the Cabots and the Johnsons that it's in their interest, they can win that vote. But if the Cabots and the Johnsons make a deal, McCoys don't matter anymore. So the Roman soldiers were getting pushed off their land by people who had financial interests. So much as in our day, farmers would sort of take loans. There was also impressed service where you were expected to earn your money from the spoils of war. So you'd be press ganged off your land with you owed credit to you'd go out to war. The loot wouldn't be quite as thick as you wanted it to be. You'd get back. Now the family farm belongs to the bank. There were some tensions, um, So the Gracchi brothers come up with this idea that maybe land reform is what's needed, that maybe the people have rights. And it was very controversial. A lot of people didn't think that the people could have rights. But they got a lot of popular support for this position somehow. And they managed to push a reform through the Senate. And the reform was tribunes. There were going to be five offices and every Tribune would be personally invalidate. If you touched them, that was a criminal offense. And in fact, a capital offense, physically touching a Tribune meant that you'd be executed. And each Tribune would have the right to veto any act of the Senate. So the patricians could get together and cut a deal. And if there was a single tribune that didn't like the cut of that jib, they could say, eh, and that was it. That wasn't the law anymore. So the Gracchi brothers became two of the first tribunes. One of them married a patrician girl and had a very successful career. The other one was killed. I can't, I don't know enough history to tell you like anything about his killers or what happened as a result of any of that, but, you know, speculate about various historical events in any way that you choose, but we might be there. We maybe imagine a scenario where governors Each governor of each state had five Tribune slots. Tribunes served for ten years and maybe couldn't ever serve again, and then some kind of rotating two-year cycle. So there'd be five and they'd cycle in and out, and Tribunes could just go into Washington. Not veto bills, because that's a little bit much, but maybe veto regulations. Regulations don't have Senate approval. They're internal actions of the executive. governors are also executives. Maybe the governors need the advice and consent of their upper house. Um, obviously I'm just spit balling, but you know, there's a lot of places you could move around here, but imagine if there were people in Washington with explicitly state interests in mind that could say, I don't think that a regulation saying that nobody's allowed to mine copper is in the interests of Utah, where we do all of our copper mining. And so you need to come up with a more nuanced answer than. You're ending copper mining because of, you know, Lake Smilton, Portland or whatever. And I'm just going to stop it. And that's the end of it. You know, you can go get Congress to pass a law that says you're allowed to do this and then I'm out of it. If it's just you and me, guess what? It's me. And I thought maybe we'd be around that. I don't really think that anymore. I think it'd be amusing for us to have tribunes. Maybe not if, you know, some of them marry into political families and the rest of them get assassinated. But although that might be amusing too. In a much darker way. But yeah. I'm back on systems. I think systems need to conform to what we know about physical reality, game theory, math, reason, and when public have to be clearly good under those circumstances. And I think that those systems will have middle classes. I think that people having A structure where they can get up, go out, do something meaningful, better themselves, better their families, better the world, does a lot more for the world. And again, I think the last three, four centuries of the industrial era where the places that were doing this exponential thing also had systems that worked like that. where most of the work was being done by an increasingly educated craft and class work where they were personally benefiting from the good they were doing. And I'd imagine that most human beings won't sign up to be meaningless peons, you know, worshiping pyramid builders. if they're given a choice and we need this we need this creativity because math is hard physics is tough universe is complicated and we clearly don't understand it yet and so we're going to need all these brains working on this problem to make progress not five or six people who happen to get ahead of the race and decided to burn the ladder they crawled up to get there yeah that's i can't wait to research some of this stuff man it's so awesome like the grecky brothers and tribunes and you know it's um it makes me think sometimes about and i had this lane that i wanted to go down but um it seems like almost that there's like an absence of social mobility at the point in time. Like, you know, it seems like it's... And maybe that's always been that way. Sometimes on my darker days, I think like, man, the American system kind of seems like a caste system that no one talks about. Maybe that's why we celebrate these stories of like the person coming from the opposite side of the tracks finally making it. Like, you don't really see... that story sensationalized as much as it used to on some level. What, what are your thoughts on the idea of social mobility, not only in the system we're in, but maybe in the system that we want to create? Well, that gets interesting. Um, there's been a few obscure books on this topic. Uh, one that wasn't obscure and was made very controversial was the bell curve. Um, A lot of the bell curve has been focused on the controversy, but most of the bell curve was devoted to this idea that American society had become an effective IQ sorting mechanism where if you tested people at the top of society... they would have IQs that were apportionate to that position for the most part. And it would continue right on down the line. And that because IQ has a strong genetic component, or at least a very high heritability, that we were going to wind up with a caste system. And if we didn't want one, we were going to have to think about what kind of policy and cultural changes we would need to make so that we wouldn't have this kind of society. Over the other end, somewhat more obscure, there's work done in Britain. I can't remember, the Harpending, I think. It's a couple of guys, and I can't remember both their names, but one of them is, I think, Henry Harpending. And they did a bunch of books that are like takeoffs. There's a Farewell to Alms was one of them. And they basically went into the Doomsday Book, and they tracked English family names and success through history. And they came up with this idea they called Moxie, sort of a Moxie quotient. And what they discovered is that social mobility isn't a thing. That century over century, generation over generation, that whole Hawthorne families are always rising and falling in America is true from the perspective of the individual. Your kids are worse off than you were, or they're better off than you were. But if your kids are better off than you were, then their kids are probably worse off. And the family, you know, rides a wave, but it's riding a wave. It's not climbing up. It's not mostly diving down. There's been some other meta work there that for stable societies, what you actually want is declining social mobility. And so you have a meritocratic system. This is an assumption, but let's say that was true. So the people at the top are generally better than the people at the bottom. meritocratic merit better. That's, that's sort of what that means. Well, you would want them to have a larger share of the children and that their children would fill out a society. And so they'd be pushed down. So the, the manner Lord has like five kids and one of them becomes the next manner Lord. And another one, you know, becomes the pastor and, Another one joins the army and then the other two have to go into commerce. And so, you know, down at the bottom end, you've got some like itinerant tinker and he can survive, but he can't have any kids. And so next generation is going to need some itinerant tinkers and there's a blacksmith and he's got a couple of kids. Maybe they both have to become itinerant tinkers because the third child of the pastor is gone into blacksmithing, and he's got better connections and more money. And he's next year's blacksmith. And so if you have a society where the kids do the same or worse, then trickle down. Of course, this is also a recipe for explaining why permanent aristocratic families are a good thing. We don't have a morality that tells us that's true, certainly. If we did, then that would be a way to go. The society that they're talking about had more or less permanent aristocratic families for centuries. And the caste systems of India are also a case where you have permanent aristocratic families happening. These questions are I think better answered at a more foundational ethical level and then built up to rather than kind of pushed down from. But it is definitely worth knowing and thinking about these different kinds of responses because in a world where there's sort of perfect social mobility, There's no relationship between the state of your parents and the state of yourself, or there's no relationship between the state of yourself yesterday and the state of yourself tomorrow. what, what is the mechanism? Is it purely random? Because that's chaos. You know, we, we know that we don't know how to build a society that would function in that fashion. Um, and there's some really good dystopic sci-fi that posits worlds that look like that. And they are very unpleasant places to be. and of course, you know, that's also, uh, We have mafia stories. In mafia films, the mafiosos are always extremely unstable and unsure of their present position. Everything's shifting constantly. That's not necessarily what people want out of life. So the two metrics, whether or not, or actually multiple metrics, Is meaningful work available to you in society? This is a serious challenge for me. Like, I have this thing that I could be doing, and instead I am arguing with judges who do not seem to care about whether or not it's possible to count. And their position is it isn't, but only for me. Yeah. This, this does not feel like meaningful and productive work, but it's where I am. Um, This feels much more meaningful and productive to me. Doesn't pay the bills, obviously. But, you know, that kind of situation where people can find meaningful and productive work, that's a general positive. I'd very much like to encourage that. Not merely for selfish reasons, I hope. But economic advancement. You know, is it important that nicer TVs will be invented in twenty years? Or is it unimportant that TVs will even exist in twenty years? That's a very real question. You know, transportation is cheaper and easier and faster than it's ever been in all of human history. Should it get cheaper and easier and faster from here? Or, you know... Would we all be better off if society collapsed and there were billions of fewer living humans? Well, we wouldn't all be better off under those circumstances. But maybe the billions of fewer living humans would be in a world where they can't communicate with each other anymore and they can't travel anymore. And global warfare is not going to be happening anytime soon because nobody can actually organize or coordinate a society or an economy to do anything like that. And, and yeah, if that's, that's, that's what's on the table is, is collapse. So, so this works. Another one of my hobby horses are the scholastics. Have you heard of them? Like when I think of scholastic, I think of school, like all like education. so that that's a sort of declension from this particular you know historical event but um back in serious middle ages like eleventh twelfth century uh the catholics had a a movement that's called the scholastics the most famous of these is saint thomas aquinas um but duns goddess uh i can't remember all their names but basically catholic philosophers catholic moral philosophers had gotten their hands on aristotle and did the work to demonstrate that that christian moral philosophy was completely logically sound And Thomian theology is the foundation of Catholic thought to this day and was pretty much adopted as the foundations of Protestant thought. So, you know, Western Christian tradition is founded in this event. That's a pretty big deal because it isn't necessarily the case that your moral center would make sense. If you're familiar with what we know of Greek or Norse mythology or other mythologies, several of them because of Catholic influence have been ripped to shreds or possibly re-edited and so on. What we know, what we've learned about the epic of Gilgamesh, there's a lot of weird stuff that happens in the epic of Gilgamesh. We don't know exactly what the whole thing is yet. We're still looking at gravel that we dug up a couple of hundred years ago and discovering that it's got more writing on it and discovering that that writing is part of the epic. You know, things like the Iliad and the Odyssey are actually, there are two parts. Homer did a ten-part work on the Trojan War. We don't have the other eight. But a lot of crazy stuff happens in those stories, and some of it doesn't really make any sense. So having an ethical system that doesn't make sense means that you don't really have an ethical system anymore. And this has also been proved. There's a famous story where Bertrand Russell is challenged by some woman that if one equals zero, then that would mean that he's the Pope. And he says, okay, sure. Well, one equals zero. I had one on both sides. One equals two. The pope and I are two people. Two equals one. The pope and I are one person. I'm the pope. So if falsehood, then everything is true. You can prove anything from a falsehood. And this is a well-known principle of logic. And so this becomes the challenge then. People who believe that they have ethical modes of thought whether they are secular or political ethicists, which are pretty much the only kind we have. We have some religious ethicists still among us. There are also a few kind of spiritual gurus out there. If you think that you have an ethical system of thought, do the work. We have better reason today than they did eight, nine hundred years ago, we discovered computational logic. Do the work. Demonstrate that your system makes sense in the light of modern understanding. And I personally would regard that as a miracle if anybody manages to pull it off. But it certainly might be doable. And that's one of, like, I... How are we going to have a civilization that does not have an understanding of right and wrong? We don't have that right now. Our understanding of understanding invalidated our previous understanding of understanding. And so the things that we understood, like physical reality, went away with that. And if we don't do the work of putting it back in, you know, well, look around at how crazy things are. That's if, if you'd explained to people a decade ago, how crazy they'd be, if you'd ask them, are things really crazy now? They would have said yes. And if you explain to them what was going on right now, they'd say, you're crazy. Things can't get that bad. If you go back another decade with that person, the two of you would be able to have that exact same conversation with the people there. When Rome fell, so, you know, I studied Latin. I use Roman analogies a lot because apparently people think about it all the time. Rome was the first human city to reach a million people. The population of Rome started declining in the early imperial period. the people of the city of Rome didn't really admit that the Roman Empire had fallen until Attila the Hun kicked the gates in and burned everything that wasn't the Vatican to the ground. When that happened, you know, four hundred years later or whatever, the population of Rome was believed to be between three and four thousand. So there was a city of a million people And for centuries, the population of that city and the lifestyles of that city were in decline. The provinces were abandoning them. The frontier was shrinking. And at that entire time they were like, well, things are fine right here. Like I'm okay. Nothing bad has happened. Humanity didn't create another city with a population of a million people until Victorian London. We basically lost eighteen hundred years of technology before we got civilized enough again to be able to support a city like that. And now we have cities with populations of ten million. which we've never done before, and we might be good at it, we might not be, we'll see. But, you know, the whole cancer thing, it's a lot more reasonable to explain what's going on as sort of a... bacchanalia prior to collapse than some sort of basically sensible universally agreed obvious and clear continuation of the things that have existed that we're all on board with that doesn't make any sense at all and that's the only way that there can be a future for a culture because people don't have to sign up I think Reagan, every civilization is one generation away from losing freedom. If the kids don't want to play the game, then the game will stop being played. And that's just the end of it. And We're watching that happen here. We're watching that happen in other places. And the people who are willing to jump in are the worst sort of monsters that have ever existed. And that's also being very public because everybody's online and it's in your face all the time. Man, when you say it like that, if history is the best predictor of future behavior or past relevant behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. Seems like we're on that path right there. Yeah. It gives me the current plan is to have a dark age. That's the current plan. The current plan is to have a dark age. The, the option is to change things, to, to dig in, do the work, build stuff that has a present and a future and use that instead. You know, first off, I want to say thanks because you had mentioned that you have decided to do something meaningful. I think at that, me too, like I, I, I, against all financial difficulties, against the ideas of financially being certain, like choosing to do something meaningful with your time, I think is sort of the antidote, whether you accomplish a lofty goal or whatever it is. I think it's just the act of deciding I'm going to do something meaningful. Like I think that that is sort of the first steps to building something ethical, to building something that is worthwhile. What are your thoughts on that? Not enough. Is it not enough? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you very much. That's extremely flattering. It's true. Thank you. Yeah. Pray that you're correct. And I feel very flattered that you would identify me here. I feel like I've been kind of backed into this. My hobby is recreational mathematics. I've become very interested in computational math because I sort of got jobs. And so that was the kind of math that took over my hobby. And I was playing around with these ideas and an entirely new economic system that was thousands of times better than the existing one fell out on my lap. And I was like, oh, okay, well, I guess I have a purpose in my life, damn. And so that's what I've been doing since then. You know, it's interesting. I'm a big fan of mythology. I'm a big fan of Joseph Campbell, and we used to see the hero's journey played out in everything from Star Trek to Star Wars or in The Alchemist or all this. We have this hero's journey that seems to be embedded in us. Do you think it's possible that we're living in a world absent of a new mythology? You know what I mean by that? Maybe we've played out this idea of the hero's journey for too long. We absolutely are. Look at how culturally powerful Star Wars was. Look at how culturally powerful The Lord of the Rings is. Tolkien felt that the British people who, frankly, are not that old, not the British people, the native people of the island of England, that you can get thousands of years out, but British is, you know, ten-sixty-six at best, didn't have their own mythology. He loved Beowulf. He loved the Norse mythology. He was like, you know, that's great. You know, Irish legends, those are Irish people, who cares? Welsh legends, those are Welsh people, who cares? Scottish legends, those are Scottish people, like British people. The British should have a mythology. And so he set forth to write one. He invented these languages. He invented this mythology for England. And the world does not have these mythologies. And many people have latched on to that. And it exists elsewhere as well. people dedicate their lives to political crusades that are virtually meaningless. This person gets elected instead of that person getting elected when both of them have, for all intents and purposes, identical outcomes in terms of how much they are beholden to a donor class that is going to both sides. or dedicate their lives to a company, you know, it's, you can, you can get a very nice lifestyle out of getting a consulting gig out of college and turning that into a VP somewhere and, you know, retiring as, as a regional president of something. And if you've ever heard of the phrase bullshit jobs, yeah, there's, there's a lot of that. And, Again, from my perspective, that's just a noise problem. It's a noise signal problem. Noise is drowning signal because the systems that we are built on, our culture, our politics, and so on, are built on the assumption that basically everyone who's talking is a person. Everyone that's writing letters is a person. All communication is coming from people. And, you know, you ever seen an LLM? It's not all people. It hasn't been for quite a while. Most of it isn't people now. And what does it look like when your culture mostly doesn't consist of people? Well, it doesn't make any sense. I'll tell you that. Yeah. Yeah. You know, there's some interesting theories too, like dead internet theory where everybody on the internet, like what percentage of people on the internet are bots? Like when you're scrolling a feed, how much of that content is actually real messaging from someone that's trying to get something out versus a paid for ad that has a narrative behind it that was thought up over here, or it's just an AI agent on some level. And even if it is a person, um, you know, there's, there's a large number of people who stream big hunks of their life, uh, in order to make tons of money. Um, is that person sort of a person or is it just somebody that's fitted themselves to the algorithm, uh, in ways? So, you know, they're, they're essentially actors, you know, Tom Cruise is a human being. Ethan Hunt is a character that he plays in some movies. Um, those movies are you know he's involved in producing them but they are cast they are written there's a director that's making that happen so that ethan hunt can appear on the screen that the algorithm is doing all of that You know, that algorithm is finding people who are auditioning to be the characters in its meta. And that becomes the environment in which people can stew. And there are distinct and horrifying changes in the mental health of populations whose mental health we are measuring that are exposed to that. That reminds me of Guy Debord's book, The Spectacle of Society, and he talks about how we've moved from being into having, into the illusion of having, into the idea that it's only allowed to appear and that it doesn't actually appear. You know what I mean? We've slipped so far into this world of abstraction on some level, where people are just playing these roles that are no longer meaningful, which gets me back to the idea of the antidote to that, to this idea that we're talking about, about slipping into mental illness is finding meaning. And don't even get me started on mental illness. How much of mental illness, how much of the DSM is just a label put upon you by someone else? And it's actually a symptom of a sick system, right? Like it's just so mind blowing to think about the aspect of where we are. I know it's kind of a shotgun out the back door, but what are your thoughts? Well, yeah. If a society deems that most of its occupants are worthless, What does that say about the society versus its occupants? Now, it might be the case that everyone born in the last twenty years is, you know, mechanically insane and incapable of learning and has no role in any civilized system. And it's just, it's just biologically baked in. We just did a real bad job having kids for a little while and it's over now. And, you know, we'll, we'll, someone will figure out how to pick up the pieces once this is all over. Or, I find it highly plausible that systems that were developed in the eighteenth century, based on the notion that everybody involved in them was going to be a human, have been turned into ninety nine plus percent robots that are being run by people who very publicly have stated that they see no value in others. and uh those systems are shaking themselves apart under the strains and pressures of vastly more than they can cope with as a result of that exact circumstance that looks pretty plausible to me and and not checking in um even in some very unhealthy ways, seems like a reasonably decent response. If you take a puppy and you feed it bizarre food and torture it, and then after three or four years, hand it to some children to keep in their nursery, very bad things will happen and it's not because dogs are foundationally broken or that they can't interact with children it's because you did something that you're not supposed to do Uh, and you know, with computers wasn't even possible to do before. Uh, I was, uh, I was at some like, you know, business get together. I was talking about, so Facebook, which is, they now call themselves meta because that's what functioning, you know, groups that are positive society do is rebrand themselves with new names. Um, They did a study. They published it. They've announced. They did an experiment to see if they could make their users depressed. And guess what? They discovered they could. So the current and past decision-making officers of meta have to be sat in front of legal authorities and asked an incredibly simple question. we know they declared that they can make their users depressed and their users being depressed is economically valuable to them as a company because depressed people engage more with the content and become more locked in and you can serve more ads to their eyeballs. So have those persons betrayed the fiduciary duties that they hold to their shareholders by not intentionally depressing everybody attached to their software and thus depriving their shareholders of their due returns, which they are ethically and legally obligated to provide to them. And consequently, those persons from Mark Zuckerberg on down can be assets stripped to the point where the only way they can have access to food is if somebody chooses to give them charity or Did they meet their fiduciary duties and have these people effectively stolen the souls of an entire generation of human beings and need to be run through the criminal justice system until they're dead and cremated and their ashes scattered to the wind? And there's only one of two answers. Obviously, they're both really bad for those guys. But that's just true. And we've seen incredibly damaging scale problems. So Amazon, the trademark issue, Amazon doesn't doesn't have the capacity that department stores had of actually making quality determinations about what's on their shelves, because in order for Amazon to function, they need to have everything on their shelves. So they offloaded this very real part of the retail supply chain issue to the US Patent and Trademark Office by saying you have to have a trademark. And so the US Patent and Trademark Office has essentially been inundated by troll farms that just generate insane numbers of trademarks that allow them to create an environment where when you go on Amazon to find an office chair, you find six thousand nearly identical products with names that look like they come out of a random walk across your keyboard. And it's very difficult to use that system to do anything but buy shoddy goods for more than you should pay for them. And they want to take over all human retail. not only do they want to but they're succeeding to me no walmart walmart um who's also on the shoddy goods but not paying more than you should possibly um is currently holding them off i think walmart has a greater share of american retail than they do and globally there's some other issues but yeah i mean It's a crazy situation. It doesn't really make any sense. And we treat the people who are responsible for these crazy situations that don't make any sense as some of the most important people in our culture that everybody listens to and pays attention to because they're also unbelievably wealthy as a result of creating that craziness. That seems to be a fundamental... Are you okay on time? I'm loving our conversation, but I want to be mindful of your time. I could probably get going in another, like, fifteen to thirty minutes or so. I'm good right now, but I can come back some other time, and we can... We can do this again because let me tell you, I got a lot of this stuff in my back pocket. Okay. Let's do that. But before we go, I just want people to know where they can find you, what you have coming up, what resources that you can point them to if they were joining us from the beginning of the conversation and they heard about the patent office. I just want to kick it back to you to maybe give out some relevant information where they can find you, what you're up to, and what you got coming up. Well, you can learn about CDM at CoreDisk.com. And CoreDisk will find me pretty reliably. I invented that word, basically. You can reach out to me personally, Noah P. Healy at Yahoo. I answer and look at that quite regularly. These days... You can actually ask LLMs about coordinated discovery markets. They're not quite as good as they used to be, but if you mention my name that they will still lock in and you can talk to them. They hallucinate a little bit. I do better at explaining, but if you don't wanna reach out that far, you can have them explain things to you and tell you some of these consequences and kind of work it out that way. Yeah, there's a whole parcel of resources on that stuff. You can find a link. There's a video that kind of explains it that's up on YouTube that, again, you can find off of Google search easily enough. Awesome. Ladies and gentlemen, go down to the show notes. Check out Noah at all. The links will be provided down below. And if you're within the sound of my voice, I hope you have an absolutely beautiful day. Thank you for spending time with us. And we'll be back again soon. And we're going to get Noah back here because it's a fascinating conversation. We didn't even get into language, which I wanted to talk to you about, too. But we'll come back and do another session. Noah, thank you so much for being here today. Hang on briefly afterwards to everybody else. Have a beautiful day. Aloha.