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

Episode Date: October 23, 2025

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/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.https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-healyCoordisc – Coordinated Discovery Markets (CDM) One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Live podcast. I hope everybody's having a beautiful day. And welcome to the mind of Noah Healy, a mathematician, nuclear engineer, an 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 chiming in right now or listening in the future, or 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 curious,

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 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 would be familiar to, people, maybe in their personal lives, maybe if they've seen like, you know, 50s 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, if the other one says they're the loser, well, it's over. And if they both say that they're 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 sort of accelerate to that level is when it's pretty clear.

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 like the pocket lint in his pocket in his pocket the pocket in this guy's pocket actually bongs a tyrant um 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 they have it out and the guy says lose and gives up his pocket limb and so tyrant just goes on a rampage he keeps going and eventually he's in charge of everything he it's progressive it's a bit at a time but he eventually gets people to knock down their houses and build him a palace people have to carry him around he doesn't walk anymore and uh every time every everyone on their on their birthday when they're old enough to be and a 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, Tymer 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. the 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 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. And 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 to analyze the legal structure that's involved. So one of the reasons the prisoners 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 95% of people 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 prisoners dilemma type scenarios, we have created a legal and social system that we should expect has mothold is. 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 LLM's 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 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 interesting to see that courage is that answer there. But yet it's, it seems so hard

for those, myself too, have been conditioned in this prisoner's dilemma. How do we emerge forward from here? Well, I'm not, 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 a Cordes about trying to fundamentally change it? What are your thoughts?

So coding morality is a very tricky thing. And we get into sort of the slipperiness of words 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, you know, 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 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 Tarring's insight, we can build a machine that will comply. with 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 in 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 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 sort of 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. You know, 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, 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 crossed 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 was perhaps somewhat more probative or thought to be somewhat more probative is actually on the hook for that. And that leverage is cycling God knows how many times through the system. And so when it falls over, it takes everything else with it.

You can look at the 2008 financial crisis, which I have always argued, has not even started yet because we haven't begun the cleanup process. You know, 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 it's, listed value is. And we've all decided that we're going to keep pretending that that's true 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. But that's just there. And we can see this, you know, a flash crash happens approximately every day in our world.

They're over fairly quickly. Most of them don't get televised, you know, because they're sort of very narrow. They're not broad market flash crashes or large important indices that flash crashes. crash that happens with disturbing frequency but when I talk to when I talk to people who are in their 20s I point out that if you read history major economic crisis crashes are not unknown it's not like this is something 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 30 to 70 years.

If you were born, you know, in the year 2000, 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 that's normal and and we think it is now because for about 30 years it has been I usually regard the the 88 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 950 960 970 and so on and then you know we clicked on one evening and Tom Prokall was there to explain that the markets had gone down what was it like 30 that day and instead of being a nine in front it was a one in front and 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 rich. real and it collapsed almost immediately. Man,

I feel like we're just drowning in abstraction, at least for me. I don't, I can't even begin to understand the markets. Like 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, you know, was able to on some level give back to the hedge funds what, what they were giving to the people for so long. But how does I don't, I don't see this, this pattern that's getting closer and close, 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 becoming only a to the richest and most elite people out there. Can we solve this without a, like, a violent revolution? So, 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 Bernouli's and so on, Galileo led to 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 the that science and the layperson could utilize these tools and you know everything should 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 and 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 the computers are a big deal, that Alan Turing had something to do with them, you know, broke Enigma, which isn't exactly correct, you know, won the war, which also isn't exactly correct.

But he was live 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 Euler thought it worked, that, that, 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, the 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 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 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 clockmakers thought that it worked 200 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 going to 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 flat. 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 was sort of, 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 postage. 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 1% better since last year, that's broken. Like things have to get better faster than that. That's insane that things will only be 1% 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 10,000 rabbits and we both have plenty of land and food for them and stuff, you can create about 10 times as many rabbit kits than I can create because you've got 10,000 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 pumped water out of the wells and would also sort of have link chains and drag stuff up,

and then they'd put them on, you know, 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, you know, the likes of Watt and Newton and Hook 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 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.

So one of my favorites, this is 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 1 plus 1. Okay, so that's 2. The second element of the sequence is 2 times 2. So 2's in the operands, and then the operator is also sort of at 2.

It's a second powerful. Well, 2 times 2 is 4. That's no big a deal. The next element in our function is 3 next operator to the third power. 3 to the 3rd power is 27. So the next element in our function should be 4s. So 4, 4th operator 4. What does that look like?

Well, it means 4 raised to the power of 4 raised to the power of four raised to the power of four. Four raised to the power of four is 256. Four raised to the power of 256 is a number with approximately 53 digits. Four rates of the power of a number with approximately 53 digits is large. And obviously four is a small number

to be plugging into this thing. There are much larger numbers. We can play into this thing. If you're interested in the subject or anybody listeners are you can search for Google Ology. 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 of ray 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 it's 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 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 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 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 50 years by the time Turing did his work, maybe 45. 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. But 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 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 1.3 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-wrenchworked. they become intolerable.

So you might have 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, you know, 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 like 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. They would go direct to the packing houses, the meatpacking 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 just wouldn't go there. And so an incident occurred, and I can't remember, remember exactly, but yeah, this is like seven, maybe 70-ish 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 25%. So imagine if you bought a single share of Tesla, and as a result of that single share of Tesla, the Dow Jones dropped a thousand points. That single purchase. How do you suppose that society would react 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 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, you know, not terribly long ago. less than a year London had to suspend trading in chromium because or nickel I think because the stainless steel market was going to completely implode and the largest stainless steel manufacturers on earth or in China where 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 like you know constituents of the steel 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 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. 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 are just buying things just to buy them in this abstract way. The idea of speculators and supply chains come up for me. But 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.

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 reengineering the very foundation. So the existing market is based on the idea that there's buyers and their 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 um so if 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 bet situation that's what

happened yeah that the speculators there were essentially mostly selling um 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 to conventure forth as buyers. And suddenly, you know, this thing that looked like a fairly sure thing turned into a tug of war against an inco-hate 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, feed and so on. We can write out the exact measurements. That's what digitization is to a tolerably, you know, exact degree. It's not perfect, but it's certainly good enough for our crappy ape eyes

and sort of worthless simian ears to cope with. Like we're we can't not 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 reconstruct 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.

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 betrayal, 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, what you're doing over there at Kordesk right now? It's what I'm trying to get off the ground. Okay.

Okay. Where are you at? Yeah. Well, so code that will do this is public. There's a couple different versions. There's a kind of crappy version I wrote that's sitting on this hard drive and also on a thumb drive and a few other places around my house. 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 U.S. 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 it 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 offices 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 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. The claims that they're making are so absurd that they, 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, Kalmogorov, and the other people that actually defined what computers and abstraction and communication mean physically. The existing, the existing jurisprudence has never referenced the actual reality in any way. And this has led to large amounts of very serious disagreements. Up until even the 1970s, almost nothing to do with computers was patentable. Finally, in the 80s, 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 90s, early 2000s, 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 2001, 2002, 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 in 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, 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 FIFO, first in, first out. And so IBM has some very smart people in the payroll. They've done some very deep research. And so they essentially patented all this FIFO stuff, all these all this Q stuff. But in order to hang it on some useful art, that 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 90s, you violated their patent.

I'm trying to wrap my mind around that. Like how sinister and how selfish. And it's on some level, brilliant that people would do that. You know, 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, you know, we, we, we, we, engaged in a foundational bodily function required for life 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 pat-like, how could someone at the patent office read that and be like, yeah, this is fine? You can patent that. So- With the laws, they have to do it because that 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 an 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, 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 like, I'm not making this up. Like, you can go read those papers. There's books for the laymen. They're not great yet because it's a complicated subject. We don't really know how to teach this to, you know, third graders, which is what laybooks 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 shoddly 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. 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 inquiry, and that their final word, Mr. Healy 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 U.S. 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 that's something that could happen there man like that's one of the options i gave them uh if they wished to 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 that could be would freeze 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 patent that 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 like how do we help you. Can we write our congressman or like, what can we do as like a team of people to help? Yeah, absolutely. Sure, write your congressman. The case number is 24-2-311. In Ray Healy, reach out to me. I can always use personal encouragement. 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 and 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, you know, 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 as more vital as the people on the western side of the Iron Curtain versus the people on the eastern side and

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'll guess my first question is you mentioned it has, you want to get the patent so it can be sold versus giving it away freely. Like, 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. So and then be.

sold it to them so 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, 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 the 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 100%.

Like 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 energy, the work heat breakdown. It's physically exactly the same thing. the noise in the system is literal heat it's it's some stray piece of photon that gets in and flips a bit that we didn't want um

or other physical processes you know some random neuron firing and causing a Tourette's outburst or whatever noise is heat it's exactly the same thermodynamic concept and so one of the things I point it out is that the current fairly vague descriptions of what isn't 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 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.

Is this system physically better than systems that we're aware of in ways that are economically significant? Yes, that's something that's bandable. No, that's something that's noise. And I laid that out for them, among other things in about, I think 25 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. I don't know if this is something that you could do or want to do. But you'd be publishing that and saying, hey, here's what I wrote back to that. And making that freely available for people to read, then they could understand the absurdity of it on some level. It might be an interesting concept. That might be an interesting concept. 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, I didn't have to hold a passport up or a birth certificate. So I think anybody who wants to can get a payster 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 about what if there's like a worker rent? What about it's, and I don't, I like to read about crypto and smart contracts, but I don't, I know almost nothing about them.

But is it possible to just engineer this into like a smart contract and like maybe? It might be possible to do that. There are some difficult problems I've been playing around. with 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 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 is actually based on this.

Are you familiar with the lava lamp wall? No, I'm not. Can you tell me what that is? Yeah, sure. So I think it's in 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 blippy bit. And there's a very, very high pixel camera that's pointed at this wall. And it gets all 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 is 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, Amazon to exist, among other things, or email or this conversation. And again, it's a direct link between physical entropy, information entropy, real systems. All this stuff is actually completely physical. Yeah. You know, when I think about... A lot of the things we've been talking about today, I'm reminded of Thomas Pickety'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 Piccadie'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 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, you know, two-sum, centuries plus at the time. We were at, you know, like the 220 zone. We're getting pretty close to the 250 zone these days. Had gotten around about the time where tribunes

were probably necessary. Are you familiar with tribunes? I'm not, I'm not familiar with them. So, 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, you know, the Johnsons and the- Hathfields and middle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's the Johnsons and the Cabots and the McCoys. And the McCoys, 90% of all people are McCoys.

And only, you know, 8% of people are Johnson's and 2% of people are Cabots. But the Cabots get a senator, the Johnson 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 of the Johnson, that's in their interest, they can win that vote. But if the capits 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, 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. So the Gracie 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 Gracie brothers became two of the first tribunes. One of them married a patrician girl and had a very successful. 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 could have five tribune slots. Tribunes served for 10 years and maybe couldn't ever serve again. And then some kind of rotating like 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. Their internal actions of the executive. Governors are also executives. Maybe the governors need the advice and consent of their upper house. obviously I'm just spitballing but you know there's a lot of places you could move around here but imagine if there were 250 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 Smelt in Portland or whatever and that 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. But 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 tribune. Maybe not if, you know, some of them may. 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 happened to get ahead of the race and decided to burn the ladder. They crawled up to get there. Yeah. I can't wait to research some of this stuff, man. It's so awesome.

Like the Grecki brothers and tribunes. And, you know, it's, it makes me think sometimes about, I had this. lane that I wanted to go down. But 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. You don't really see that story sensationalized as much as it used to on some level.

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. There's been a few obscure books on this topic. One that wasn't obscure and was made very controversial was the bell curve. 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 very high heritability, that we were going to wind up with a caste system, whether we, you know, 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. 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 like 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.

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 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 manor lord has like five kids, and one of them becomes the next manor lord, and another one 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 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 push 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 is the mechanism? Is it purely random? Because that's chaos. You know, we know that we don't know how to build a society. that would function in that fashion. 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,

we have mafia stories, you know, the, you know, in mafia films, the mafiosos are always extremely, you know, unstable and unsure of their present position, you know, 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 that it isn't, but only for me. This does not feel like meaningful and productive work, but it's where I am. This feels much more meaningful and productive to me. Doesn't pay the bills, obviously. but you know that kind of situation where where people can find meaningful and productive work that's that's a general positive i very much like to encourage that not merely for selfish reasons i hope but economic advancement you know is it is it important that nicer TVs will be invented in 20 years or is it unimportant that TVs will even exist in 20 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 yeah if that's that's what's on the table is collapse so so this works another one of my hobby horses are the scholastics have you heard of them

like when I think a scholastic I think a school like all like education so that that's a sort of declension from this particular you know historical event But back in serious Middle Ages, like 11th, 12th century, the Catholics had a movement that's called the Scholastics.

The most famous of these is St. Thomas Aquinas. But Duns, Godus, 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 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, you know,

Norse mythology or other mythologies, several of them because of Catholic influence have been ripped shreds or possibly re-edited and so on. But what we know, what we've learned about sort of 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, you know, looking at gravel that we dug up a couple of hundred years ago, or 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 10-part work on the Trojan War. We don't have the other eight. So, 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 1 equals 0, then that would mean that he's the Pope. And he says, okay, sure. Well, 1 equals 0. I had one to 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, 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 you'd explain to people a decade ago how crazy things, They'd be, if you'd ask them, are things really crazy now? They would have said yes. And if you explained 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 of the ground. When that happened, you know, 400 years later or whatever, the population of Rome was believed to be be between three and four thousand. So there's 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 1,800 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 10 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 wanna 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 prediction of future behavior. Seems like we're on that path right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It gives me hope. The current plan is to have a dark age. That's the current plan.

The current plan is to have a dark age. The option is to change things, 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'd mention. that you have decided to do something meaningful. I think that, me too. I, I, I, against all financial, 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. 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. I 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 in 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, you know, we used to see the hero's journey played out and everything from Star Trek to Star Wars or in the alchemist or all this.

you know, we have this hero's journey that seems to be embedded in us. You know, do you think it's possible that we're living in a world absent of a new mythology? You know what I mean about that? Like, maybe we've played out this idea of the heroes count. The heroes journey for too long. We absolutely are. I mean, look at how culturally powerful Star Wars was. Look at how culturally powerful the Lord of the Rings is.

You know, 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 1066 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. You know, 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. I mean, people dedicate their lives to political crusades that are virtually meaningless. You know, this person gets elected instead of that person getting elected when both of them have, for all intents and purposes, identical out. comes in terms of, you know, how much, how much they are beholden to a donor class that is going to both sides. Or dedicate their lives to a company, you know, 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 a regional president of something. And if you ever heard of the phrase bullshit jobs, 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 as a person, everyone that's writing letters as 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. You know, there's some interesting theories too, like dead internet theory where, you know, 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. life.

Right. And even if it is a person, you know, there's a large number of people who stream big hunks of their life in order to make tons of money. Is that person sort of a person? Or is it just somebody that's fitted themselves to the algorithm in ways? So, you know, they're essentially actors. You know, Tom Cruise is a human being. Ethan Hunt is a character that he plays in some movies. 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 additioning 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, you know, that reminds me of guide a board's book, The Spectacle of Society. And he talks about how we've moved from from being into having into the illusion of having into the idea that it's only allowed to appear in that it doesn't actually appear. You know what I mean?

Like we slip so far into this in this world of abstraction on some level. 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, this. idea that we're talking about, about slipping into mental illness is finding me. 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 20 years is, you know, mechanically insane and incapable of learning and has no role in any civilized system. and 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 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 18th century, based on the notion that everybody involved in them was going to be a human,

have been turned into 99 plus percent robots that are being run by people who very publicly have stated that they see no value in others. And 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 circumstances. stance. That looks pretty plausible to me and not checking in, 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. and, you know, with computers wasn't even possible to do before.

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. 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 um so the 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 asset 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 that that's that's that's just true um and we've seen incredibly damaging scale problems uh so amazon the the trademark issue uh amazon doesn't doesn't have the capacity that department stores had of actually making quality determinations about what's on their shelds 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 U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by saying you have to have a trademark. And so the U.S. 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 6,000 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, my wrong, I hope to. Walmart, who is also on the shoddy goods, but not paying more than you should, possibly, 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 like, I love, I'm loving our conversation, but I want to be mindful of your time. I could probably get going in another like 15 to 30 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, or that's 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 cordisk.com and cordisk 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 want to reach out that

far. You can have them explain things to you and tell you some of these 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, but 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 if 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.