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Navigating Innovation: Patent Secrets, Market Dynamics, and the Future of Sustainability #160-Noah Kealy
6 Plays9 months ago
Discover the intricate dance between infinity and innovation as we probe its enigmatic grip on technology and the patent world, unwinding the threads from my own patent journey. As we navigate the tricky terrains of intellectual property and the Lang patent, we reveal how distinctions in mathematical infinities can clear legal hurdles, all while delving into the tribulations facing today's inventors. With a keen eye on the fashion of tech over true ingenuity, this episode doesn't stop there; we also dissect the evolution of SEO and its detrimental effects on search quality, and tease out the exciting future AI and generative models could bring to search algorithms.
Venture with us through the complex landscape of financial policies and cryptocurrency markets, where the Federal Reserve's targets collide with the rise of digital currencies. Listen closely as our guest charts the treacherous waters of financial fraud and navigates the uncharted territories of Bitcoin's limitations. Our discussion spans the agricultural plains to consumer goods shelves, unpacking the ripple effects of market dynamics on various sectors and the middle class. We even ponder the future of transportation energy, putting the feasibility of nuclear-powered vehicles and titanic energy projects like the Strait of Gibraltar dam under the microscope.
Finally, we pull back the curtain on the interwoven fabric of food production and market systems. From the lofty aspirations of tech giants aiming to disrupt traditional agricultural models to the authenticity of organic food in our AI-dominated era, we examine the potential consequences of retail-driven food systems. Our guest shares insights from the creation of an empowering coffee index for East African farmers, illuminating the market innovations that could bridge gaps between producers and consumers. Strap in for a thought-provoking journey that promises to challenge conventions and spotlight the complex symphony of invention, economics, and sustainability.
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Transcript
Infinity and Patent Systems
00:00:00
Speaker
How do you think this idea of infinity influences your life? It played actually a critical role during my pursuit of my patent. There was something called the Lang patent where these guys essentially wrote a math treatise and patented
00:00:20
Speaker
every kind of paramutual system that they could imagine, and then also put a loop around every kind of paramutual system that in theory could be imaginable.
00:00:34
Speaker
but they explicitly restricted it to that first order of infinity we were talking about, just that sort of first race of numbers, if you will, because the nature of the structure of the higher order infinities are such that if they were to have attempted to have looped those as well without restriction as they did, then they technically would have been describing
00:01:01
Speaker
every conceivable concept and that wouldn't have been patentable. I don't know whether they or the patent office was aware of that restriction, but because the nature of my system is intrinsically based on concepts from transfinite
Transfinite Set Theory in Patents
00:01:24
Speaker
set theory, their patent's restriction of themselves to countably finite sets meant that their patent was totally irrelevant to my patent. And so I didn't have to go into a incredibly lengthy, detailed, and ridiculously expensive defense. I could simply point to the fact that they had explicitly excluded my patent of interest.
00:01:52
Speaker
And yeah, I mean, it shows up in my business and research interests as well.
Defining Invention and Noise Reduction
00:02:00
Speaker
I think about infinity, you know, in terms of infinite loops and where they are appropriate and where they are inappropriate. What is your definition of an inventive?
00:02:21
Speaker
What advice would you give to young inventors whether they're in
00:02:25
Speaker
any type of scientific field? I think invention probably would be, let's see, fairly defined as the introduction of an idea or system which reduces the noise from a economically viable activity. I think that's as fair as I can get.
00:02:57
Speaker
For inventors, I think there's sort of a very divergent future.
AI, Deep Learning, and Technological Noise
00:03:04
Speaker
On the one hand, the technologies that we have and are rapidly developing
00:03:12
Speaker
with some of the generative AI and deep learning types of techniques and some of the things mean that developing new systems and radically more powerful systems has become so easy that you can basically do it in your living room.
00:03:34
Speaker
That, however, means that there's going to be a much noisier world and a lot more claims to that status. And so we've already seen this in computer science for quite some time. Apple is one of the more successful computer companies that has ever existed. And from my point of view, it is a fashion house, not a technology company.
00:04:03
Speaker
as fashion dominates in the technological space, we will see the word inventor being co-opted by highly successful fashion designers because that's already happened. And that's extremely unfortunate because they're radically different skill sets. And
00:04:31
Speaker
And one of them, the one that gets rewarded isn't strictly necessary. And the other one, the one that doesn't get rewarded is. So Apple is a passion. So I've said this for decades. Yeah. I think that that's the fairest way to think about them. What would Android be? Uh, Android.
00:04:58
Speaker
Google's a bit of an enigma to me. They basically had one decent-ish basic idea that isn't stable. So Google's initial notion was something called PageRank.
00:05:16
Speaker
which does not refer to web page, it refers to Larry Page, one of the Google founders.
The Evolution of PageRank
00:05:22
Speaker
And it was an idea he had for relevancy ranking of scientific papers. Scientific papers, of course, have references. When you are doing work based on other people's work, you give them credit. And so his notion was that if we basically built a very large matrix
00:05:46
Speaker
and gave every single paper a value that was effectively equal to the amount of incoming value from all of its incoming references where that value was then divided out to all the outgoing value of all of its outgoing references, we would be able to come up with a relevancy figure for each paper and sort of figure out what the most important scientific papers were because they're the what scientists were talking about.
00:06:16
Speaker
And then they applied that to the Internet and used hyperlinks to do those kinds of things. The difficulty is that
00:06:25
Speaker
In order for that to keep working, there has to be an external desire for a well-ordered set of cross-references, which in science we are seeing with things like the replication crisis and some of the more recent issues with plagiarism at Harvard and possibly more cases where that
00:06:51
Speaker
that set of things isn't holding up so well. But even the culture of having a system of respectful cross-reference and credit does not and has never existed on the internet. And so as it became economically valuable to have a large Google page rank,
00:07:15
Speaker
a sort of evolutionary war erupted to hack the algorithm and then change it in ways that couldn't be published and therefore behaved in ways that couldn't be defended in order to stop the people who were hacking the algorithm. And you come up with our present condition where
00:07:38
Speaker
we don't have super intelligent search anymore. We, you know, sort of have fluff and you do the best you can. Well, this is when things get interesting
SEO and the Value of Search Engines
00:07:51
Speaker
now. So are you, the first thing I thought about when you said that was something called search engine optimization. Do you think that kind of falls into that category sometimes?
00:08:02
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Search engine optimization could be renamed sort of search engine algorithm defeating or hacking perfectly fairly. And so the degree to which search engines are offering their user-based value, SEO as it's called, shouldn't function.
00:08:31
Speaker
So the degree to which it does function, and certainly billions of dollars are collected by people who are under the impression that it works, the search engines are less valuable to the tune of multiples of those billions of dollars. Yeah, you see, do you think now with things like, because I'm thinking of other things now, like Bing AI, you now kind of have
00:09:02
Speaker
AI search engines now. Do you think that would kind of make the algorithm more exploitative or less exploitative? Do you think this is a good thing for companies, a bad thing for companies, a good thing for consumers, a bad thing for consumers? What do you think is your opinion on that overall?
00:09:20
Speaker
So the AI summarizer right now, as far as anybody can tell, is based on whatever the original training section was.
AI Summarizers: Potential and Challenges
00:09:34
Speaker
I suppose in theory, these generative AIs could become so quickly tunable that you'd be able to take the set of web pages that came out of a search
00:09:48
Speaker
and tune up a generative AI on them and then communicate with that. This would, of course, wildly violate our current conceptions of copyright at the corporate level. That kind of a system coupled with sufficiently powerful spam avoidance could give us the old world, but there's no incentives built into that system to cause
00:10:17
Speaker
that combination of factors to exist and the technology to do computation at that scale also doesn't presently exist. So right now what it looks like to me is
00:10:30
Speaker
a sort of infinitely black box into which they can hawk their various algorithm tuning to try to stay ahead of or on par with the SEO people. So I don't really see it as in general outperforming Wikipedia, which again is
00:10:49
Speaker
declining in its performance level as it becomes important. I can't remember, there's an economics concept. I can't remember who it's named after, but the idea is basically once you start using any particular measurement as a goal, then it loses its value as a measurement because the system now is comporting itself around the attempt to get that goal state to where it's supposed to be.
00:11:19
Speaker
So for example, the move from the late 80s, early 90s to today to move executive compensation largely into stock options in order to get executives to target stock values has largely led stock values to become economically meaningless. And so we see stock values
00:11:48
Speaker
outside of particularly egregious events like the big short going consistently up, whereas the economy has its ups and its downs. Let's kind of start diving into your business. Do you think your business is almost in a way as you suggested before
00:12:10
Speaker
Do you think it's sort of a means of measurement? Do you think it's a black box? What would you classify your business as? I think we could use this now as a time for me to kind of learn better because I took a few notes on the business. There's a lot of technical terminology that tends to veer more into economics.
00:12:33
Speaker
Yeah, I am targeting sort of financial professionals there because that's the people that I need to target to sell to. But at the end of the day, functioning markets are about information and communication and they are measuring supply and demand in price.
00:12:58
Speaker
So a price causes basically two things. For people that are selling, higher prices mean more potential profits and durable higher prices give them a picture of a world where investments for increased efficiency or capacity will
Economics: Pricing and Inflation
00:13:21
Speaker
pay off.
00:13:22
Speaker
and lower prices mean the opposite of those things. Whereas for consumers, it's more or less precisely reversed. High prices mean that
00:13:36
Speaker
finding alternatives is valuable and durable high prices means investing in efficiency and avoidance is very valuable. Whereas low prices mean abundance and durable low prices mean that you can effectively just pick things up whenever you actually need them. You don't necessarily need to stockpile or otherwise.
00:14:06
Speaker
And so that co-information is what's necessary. Effectively, there's a price that's high enough to encourage enough production that is also low enough to encourage enough consumption so that the people that want to make things have people to sell them to, and the people that want to buy things have those things available to be bought.
00:14:33
Speaker
When prices mismatch, then we see some fairly horrific economic dislocations. People have money, they go to the store, but there's nothing in the store, so the money isn't worth anything. Or people make stuff, but nobody actually wants to buy this stuff, and so instead of being able to sell, they just have to warehouse
00:15:01
Speaker
tons of cheese or grain or something. It can be the case that the government can step in to ameliorate one or the other of those problems. But more frequently, if you're consistently getting prices wrong, then you're consistently mismanaging your businesses in your economy. And that is increasingly what we're seeing happen. All right. That's quite interesting.
00:15:32
Speaker
Do you think maybe, again, this is just one of the typical issues that happened due to capitalism as a whole here and sort of going in a bit deeper, do you think there might be a correlation? You mentioned bad things happening when this hurts.
00:15:55
Speaker
When I think about bad things, at least when it comes to these financial problems, I think of maybe incidents in Argentina and maybe in America, even with the Great Depression, where there's like the dollar value going down. Do you think the dollar value could potentially go down if these relationships aren't kept in balance by things like, you know, your creation here?
00:16:20
Speaker
The dollar value has been declining since before I was born. We've had inflation issues. Our Fed is actually set up with a mandate to keep inflation contained, also to maintain employment levels. But there has been basically no year since its inception in which there has not been some inflation. And at this point,
00:16:48
Speaker
They don't even claim that they're attempting to target a zero inflation environment. They claim they're attempting to target a 2% inflation environment. And if you plug in the rule of 72, that means that over the course of an American lifespan, which is a little over 72 years, the value of the dollar should be expected to just over quarter in value. So a dollar
00:17:16
Speaker
the day that you die should be worth a little bit less than a quarter of the day you were born. And that's if they hit their targets, which they haven't been doing quite consistently for decades. Interesting. So do you think it's impossible at this stage to even hit zero? Is that what you're implying here?
00:17:43
Speaker
It's not being done, whether or not it's possible is not really in my expertise.
00:17:56
Speaker
The non-expansion of credit is so divorced from the nature of how economies in the financial system function that it would be pretty mind-bending to imagine. However, there are crackpot groups, the gold bugs, some of the hardcore Bitcoin people who really do believe that they can implement a
00:18:24
Speaker
a constant value or deflationary currency and eliminate these things. And while none of them possesses anything like political power at this point, the world's in pretty massive flux. And the systems that are presently operating on this
00:18:49
Speaker
only credit system are becoming more and more expensive and less and less useful. So as those systems crack apart, it's hard to imagine what could take over from them. I would like mine or something like, or at least with the capacities,
System Adaptation in Complex Economies
00:19:12
Speaker
of my system to be the answer because it's the only thing I'm aware of that can actually meet the needs of having a complex regional economy, but in the event that
00:19:30
Speaker
our current complex economy goes away, there are functioning tribal units that operate in a largely pre-monetary environment, but which nonetheless have what we might think of as stable values. So do you think cryptocurrency is good for the economy? And the reason I was smiling again was because
00:20:00
Speaker
There have been a lot of frauds, a lot of controversies with all types of Bitcoin. I remember the older one, you know, I think it's a mean now. I love the net. And, you know, it was just this massive scam. And a lot of times when I think of cryptocurrency now, I just think, all right, you either blow tons of money on buying these little mini computers in order to do Bitcoin like
00:20:28
Speaker
or you kind of rely on this arbitrary system. And again, I see a lot of people doing it now. It looks cool because you have the wallets and the wallets sort of are digital.
Bitcoin and the Financial System Critique
00:20:42
Speaker
So you kind of put the money on the digital wallet itself. It offers a lot more security. Well, that's a big question. A lot more privacy. I should be careful with the words there. But what do you think about privacy?
00:20:58
Speaker
So I don't really think that Bitcoin offers significant privacy for a general use currency because
00:21:07
Speaker
It works by maintaining records. So if your entire use of your wallet is permanently online for the purchase and usage of digital assets, which you entirely interact with through dark web style systems. So there's never any traceability of anything back to you.
00:21:30
Speaker
That's fine. But if you want to actually make anything real, then at some point a delivery will occur in physical space. And once the record of that delivery is tied to the particular transaction that inspired it, then that transaction and its historical trace of the wallets that are involved are all being recorded, since that's actually how the transaction network functions.
00:22:00
Speaker
I see Bitcoin as effectively irrelevant. I think that the scams are quite harmful and also quite ubiquitous and basically embarrassing. But I don't think that the problem with our existing financial system is that the money supply is in the charge of
00:22:28
Speaker
governments or more accurately the large banking institutions. I think the problem is that the mechanism that we're using to trade in marketplaces is one of those things that can't stand up to infinite recursion.
00:22:45
Speaker
And now that we've plugged computers into them, they've stopped working. So flash crashes are happening with greater frequency. Because of the flash crashes, people have to spend more money to utilize the system. That money is not available to actually produce
00:23:05
Speaker
food and clothing and shelter and energy and other stuff that the economy actually requires to function. And there's no top end. As technology improves, the risk of using these systems increases. And so the better we get at producing the things that we want, the more expensive it becomes to maintain a complex economy.
00:23:32
Speaker
that can do these things. And that's a system that has a breaking point. And I would expect at the rate at which things are going off the rails, that breaking point is within the lives of most of those living. Okay. Well, how do you think, okay, because when I think about all this stuff you're telling me now, how would this sort of
00:23:59
Speaker
relate more towards the average consumer. Is this more focused on B2B? Or is this more B2C? What would you consider your established more associated? Because when I think about this, this seems more like a B2B situation when it comes to these big commodities moving around in trade. I don't think we care much about the average person sort of moving these around, a bad sense of technical.
00:24:29
Speaker
Well, so markets are a B2B scenario, but there's two sides. Number one, commodity production, particularly in the agricultural space, has been a watchword of
00:24:47
Speaker
of middle class action. Farmers have shifted over the last couple centuries from being a virtual slave class of serfs to being generally well off small business owners and having the markets move in a way that makes it much more expensive
00:25:10
Speaker
is one of, if not the primary cause that led to things like farm aid and other calls for the death of the small farm.
00:25:25
Speaker
creating better marketplaces creates more independent middle-class opportunities for people to get into productive environments because they don't have to face daunting market costs anymore. The second thing is that all this money comes from somewhere and ultimately money comes from the people that are
00:25:53
Speaker
paying. So the shenanigans in the financial market show up when you buy aluminum foil and when you buy a car and when you buy things that were shipped to the factory packed in boxes that were made out of commodity product. So your grocery bill
00:26:18
Speaker
is in some ways affected by the markets going haywire and causing costs to go up without transiting those costs to the actual producers to signal them that they should start upping production and increasing the amount of viable product that exists.
00:26:44
Speaker
People don't interact with these things on a day-to-day. Improving the marketplace would, one, increase the ability of people to interact with them on a day-to-day to their great benefit, and two, would ameliorate a large amount of the costs that are associated with pumping gas into your car, buying clothing for school, and just the weekly shopping trip.
00:27:10
Speaker
Yeah, go on. Well, going into the future, there's some extremely exciting technologies around automation that are part and parcel of the current AI crop.
00:27:22
Speaker
Some of these things are extremely high value, extremely esoteric things. There's a company in town, I got to talk to the owner, and he developed a way to basically put a mechanical engineering PhD in a box. There's this technique that you can do with lasers where you use a very quick burst laser to microheat the surface of a
00:27:50
Speaker
of an object and then do some spectroscopy or some other things on that and work out what the
00:27:58
Speaker
the physical properties of the surface of an object are. And this is a well-known technique that's been in use for decades, but it's effectively only been in use in very constrained lab environments because it takes very smart people a decade of training. It's basically harder to produce these people than it is to produce brain surgeons, or at least we don't produce as many of them as we produce brain surgeons.
00:28:28
Speaker
But he did some work and he's now got a box that you plug a computer into and it'll do all the fiddly bits and controls and so on and it costs a lot less than one year's annual salary.
00:28:48
Speaker
3D printing in food is a thing that's under active research and it's getting crazier and crazier. So we could see a world where we rapidly develop high skill craft in a box. And so rather than having like an oven and a dishwasher, you could have a
00:29:13
Speaker
Michelin two-star chef in a box and you could buy commodity product at, you know, no more freezer meals. You could buy commodity product at Costco, plug it into your Michelin two-star and have incredibly high quality food. Now that's not happening, you know, soon, but the,
00:29:41
Speaker
the sort of precursors are out there. And we could see for manufacturing, for daily life, we could see some of these technologies being incorporated and commodifying inputs and transits in ways that could largely deteriorate the value of retail options like Amazon for even complex objects like furniture. That's excellent.
Cybertruck: Fashion vs. Safety
00:30:12
Speaker
If you were to talk more about current events, the cyber truck, how do you think the cyber truck might be pushing for this new era? And do you think it's pushing for this new era? Was this just a weak suggestion in life? Be honest with me.
00:30:32
Speaker
I think the Cybertruck and Tesla in general is another example of fashion taking over a technology company or a technology idea.
00:30:47
Speaker
I don't know how to gauge how successful the Cybertruck is as a fashion statement. Elon's relationship with his user base has become much more complicated since he waded into the whole Twitter X scenario.
00:31:06
Speaker
The Cybertruck to me looks relatively suspicious just because of sort of Ralph Nader's unsafe at any speed. It looks more or less like an ax hat to me. And so I'm really curious what pedestrian safety from Cybertrucks actually looks like. Because it certainly looks like it has to be pretty bad.
00:31:35
Speaker
In general, I'm not that up on the electrification of vehicles. I think that electrification of transportation isn't necessarily a bad idea, but my back of the envelope
00:31:56
Speaker
computation suggests that electrical energy would have to get something like eight times less expensive to make it a reasonable goal. And there aren't any existing initiatives to radically drop the cost of electricity. And so I don't see that as a practical thing for people to work on.
00:32:22
Speaker
Yeah, externalizing your power source from your transport would save you weight. Unfortunately, using an even heavier battery to replace that externalized power source more than eliminates that gain.
00:32:40
Speaker
for things like electrified trains as they use in France, there's a huge benefit to externalizing the engine from the transport vehicle. Interesting. So from what I understand, you know, you have, you put this on your about page, but you're a part of kind of a nuclear program and you also have some periods of nuclear engineering
00:33:10
Speaker
This might sound a bit bizarre, but how would you feel about, you know, maybe incorporating more nuclear energy? Like a nuclear power car? How does that sound absolutely ridiculous?
00:33:25
Speaker
So nuclear powered cars are absolutely ridiculous.
Nuclear Energy: Promise and Challenges
00:33:28
Speaker
Notwithstanding, there was actually a concept vehicle. No actual nuclear material was ever located inside of it. Ford, you can find it online. It's absolutely ridiculous.
00:33:42
Speaker
It dates back to the very oogee cool car days. And it's pretty much a batmobile on steroids. Part of the design involves a foot of lead shielding between the passenger compartment and the engine compartment, which leads to a more elongated front to accommodate those things.
00:34:10
Speaker
I think greater exploitation of nuclear energy would be a fantastic and is really the only viable way to move towards increased economic prosperity of the human species in general.
00:34:32
Speaker
I know lots of humans are individually interested in increased economic prosperity, but many of them are perfectly happy to simply take larger slices of a diminishing pie, whether or not we'll get it within ourselves to figure out that there's just not going to be any more dessert left if we keep doing this.
00:34:56
Speaker
Again, that's outside of my ambit, but nukes are not a panacea. The existing technologies have pretty severe limitations. There are a number of better technologies that
00:35:15
Speaker
have gotten through what I would call the pilot stage. In sort of the early days of nuclear exploration, a number of devices were actually built and operated. And some of those have potential. But to really get us up, we would need to not merely have nuclear power, but have inexpensive nuclear power.
00:35:44
Speaker
and that requires basically engaging usefully on all of the front simultaneously. And since it's basically become a political football of the, you know, no progress of any cost community, appropriate engagement in that direction
00:36:12
Speaker
that's gonna be incredibly difficult. Are you familiar with the movie called Oppenheimer?
Oppenheimer Film and Nuclear Accuracy
00:36:23
Speaker
I am familiar with it. I didn't watch it. I hope to someday, but I don't really get out to the films that much. I saw the trailer and the explosion scenes that are intercut in the trailer
00:36:41
Speaker
There's some fairly notorious photographs that were actually taken of early bomb explosions that are fairly interesting because of the nature of how atomic bombs work. The explosions are almost perfectly spherical, but they aren't.
00:37:01
Speaker
actually perfectly spherical. They have some very odd nodules on them. And from what I could tell, the explosions that were in the film were recreations of the pictures of the few nanoseconds after detonation explosives. And so I'm very fascinated to see whether or not it sort of holds up to what
00:37:31
Speaker
the atomic explosions are supposed to actually look like. We can't see that quickly, of course. And I also hope to sort of see some behind the scenes at some point to figure out how they did. With Nolan, I expect they're not computer generated. And so I'm curious about what sort of fluid dynamics calculations went into designing
00:37:59
Speaker
the explosives to actually have a front that resembles an atomic blast. Do you think, again, and I know it's hard to get this answer since you haven't watched the movie yet, but from your first impression,
00:38:20
Speaker
Did you see it almost as a political football in some sort, especially now in this day and age, and how do you see it as a political football, or if it's not at all? Well, it absolutely was. They go into the Strauss incident, and Oppenheimer's accused of communist sympathy. There were people.
00:38:44
Speaker
at Los Alamos who were communist sympathizers and intentionally turned over details of the construction of the bomb to the Soviet Union for the explicit purpose of not allowing the United States to have a monopoly on atomic bombs. And that was one of the defining political decisions of the 20th century.
00:39:13
Speaker
There were forces within the United States that were virulently anti-communist for reasons which we in hindsight can see were very reasonable that the behavior of the communist dictatorships was
00:39:32
Speaker
barely better or to considerably worse than the behavior of the fascist dictatorships that we fought the war against. And there's certainly a case to be made, although not a terribly strong one for nuclear holocaust, that
00:39:54
Speaker
that possessing the bomb would have allowed a military solution in less time with less death to that opposition.
00:40:07
Speaker
not everybody was opposed. And it's not generally talked about, but Hitler was Times Man of the Year back in the early 30s. There was very broad approval of a governmental control and even his opponents
00:40:32
Speaker
very much favored a strong executive moving things into governmental spheres. So there was considerable sympathy. In terms of its civilian use, there's things like the Three Mile Island incident and the China Syndrome film.
Chernobyl: Risks and Trust in Nuclear Tech
00:40:56
Speaker
uh... the Chernobyl has recently come out as a miniseries and of course as an incidence that was quite a shock uh... so that there's there it's not a risk-free technology and it requires a level of competence and trust that are existing political relationships do not appear to be able to produce and
00:41:25
Speaker
you'd have to produce that first before it would be viable to solve the technical problems. There's a proposal from over a century ago to put a dam across Gibraltar and effectively drain the Mediterranean. And then you could build train lines across the Med into Africa. And this was all done during the colonial period. So the proposal was that
00:41:54
Speaker
Number one, you could create this massive amount of hydroelectric power by essentially having the Atlantic powering your hydro generators. And then you could use that to drive rail across the now drained or largely drained Mediterranean across the Sahara into central Africa in order to extract the minerals that are there for use in Europe.
00:42:23
Speaker
happily, this didn't happen. But in addition to the large scale technical bar, the economic problem is that Europe was in the United Front, Africa doesn't belong to them. And without the accomplishment of both those things, it isn't economically viable
00:42:48
Speaker
to turn off the Mediterranean in order to make African minerals more easily exploitable by Northern Europeans. And so nobody's even tried to actually solve the real and significant technical problems involved in doing that transformation. Excellent. And you kind of bounced to the Chernobyl incident. Do you think
00:43:15
Speaker
whenever we have movies talking about, you know, the situation involving any nuclear energy, those types of things, radiation, do you think they're meant to cause different reactions? Like using the Chernobyl incident may have caused a unique reaction to sort of this new type of, you know, technology compared to the other incidents, because I feel like that
00:43:43
Speaker
incident may have been unique in itself, because it was almost like it wasn't really a man incited. Well, I don't know too much about it, but it felt like it was more of something just becoming unstable, something just happened.
Human Error and Radiation Risks
00:43:58
Speaker
That's almost precisely false, actually. So Chernobyl was exactly a human incited incident.
00:44:07
Speaker
that particular design of reactor has a known issue that when operated in certain ways, if it's being operated in a particular way and it gets into trouble, then the things that you would ordinarily be able to do to get it out of trouble will cause the trouble to actually get worse instead.
00:44:32
Speaker
And there's no alternative to those ordinary things that you would do to get it out of trouble. You can simply allow the trouble to happen, or you can make it worse. And this was well known as part of the design. And so effectively, the operator's manual for this particular design of reactor is that you should never even get near
00:45:00
Speaker
this regime of behavior where your off switch is actually a do more switch. At Chernobyl, as a result of a party mandate, they decided to do an experiment to see how long they could operate it in the danger regime without it getting away from them.
00:45:26
Speaker
Just, just because apparently, uh, and as a result of that, it broke. So, you know, if somebody's driving a motorcycle and they crash, maybe they're at fault, maybe they're not at fault, you know, whatever. If somebody's popping a wheelie to see how long they can pop a wheelie for before they crash and then they crash, well,
00:45:54
Speaker
That's not really operating the motorcycle the way it was designed to be operated. And if you intentionally let air out of the tire continuously while you're doing this, then whatever finally happened to you is basically just your fault.
00:46:13
Speaker
even if whatever finally happened to you was a drunk driver came out of nowhere because you never would have been there in the first place if you hadn't been doing this monumentally stupid thing guaranteed to end in failure. What you're basically saying is it was an uncontrollable situation but it was an uncontrollable situation that was sort of caused by a factor that could have been controlled.
00:46:41
Speaker
It was an intentionally created uncontrollable situation to see how bad uncontrollable situations are and it turns out that that's how bad they are. I haven't seen the full Chernobyl. I watched the first episode and some pieces of some of the other ones. It was
00:46:59
Speaker
pretty clinically depressing. And also, as part of my training, we'd actually spent a few days going over the exact incidences. So some of the things that are sort of more horrifying and shocking, I'm just kind of waiting to take boxes off of. And some of the technical information wasn't strictly correct and things like that. But the first episode is emotionally harrowing and with fairly reasonable reason.
00:47:31
Speaker
The reason being, um, what I could remember at least it was the incident with the radiation poison, you know, one thing looking normal. And then another thing it's like your, your whole body is literally just melting on a molecular level.
00:47:46
Speaker
Yeah, there's a visceral nature of radiation damage that has caused a lot of reaction among everybody and for fairly reasonable reasons, I would say. I mean, it is pretty horrifying. There's a film called Fat Man and Little Boy, which was sort of Oppenheimer before Oppenheimer.
00:48:08
Speaker
It's got a stacked cast. The General Groves is played by Paul Newman. But one of the bit roles is played by John Cusack, I believe. And they do the incident of the Demon Core. So there was a hunk of plutonium that they were experimenting with to figure out exactly what was and was not a critical mass.
00:48:34
Speaker
And the way that they did it is that they basically had two pieces and they would stick a screwdriver in with their hand to hold the two pieces apart. And the first person that killed was a guy whose job was doing this and his hand slips and the two pieces come together and he sees the blue flash in the presence of a critical mass.
00:48:57
Speaker
electrons are produced that are traveling so quickly, there's this kind of radiation that occurs when the electrons are traveling faster than light travels in the
00:49:10
Speaker
in the medium in which they're traveling that causes this blue glow. It's called Kerenkov radiation. And so he saw the blue glow. And basically, if you've seen the blue glow up close and personal, you're dead. And in a very dramatic scene, he sort of reaches in, pulls the things apart, orders everybody to use chalk to outline where their feet are.
00:49:36
Speaker
and to run out of the room right after they're done. And so there's sort of a, you know, evacuation quarantine and he's in the room with the thing, he can't leave. And so while he's waiting for them to sort of come in and figure out how to decon the situation, he does the math. And when they walk in the door, he basically says, everybody else is fine, I'm dead.
00:50:00
Speaker
and he died. It's pretty nasty. There's a level of radiation that will effectively instantly kill you, and there's a level of radiation that you will likely survive, but there's a pretty broad range between those.
00:50:21
Speaker
and in that range the quick death is very unpleasant and it has all the hair falling out and other associated things that people have heard about from popular culture. Now I think another thing too is sort of the aftermath affects as well because I've heard
00:50:44
Speaker
at least in Japan, a lot of the kids there, they were sort of experiencing aftermath effects in those incidents. And even in Chernobyl, I was hearing some of the animals were getting like multiple limbs. One of the most horrific aspects of radiation is that at the bottom end of the
00:51:04
Speaker
of the death zone is a zone of increased cancer. So you can get a dose of radiation that
00:51:17
Speaker
seems to be fine that you will perhaps feel relatively uncomfortable with. Maybe get some other secondary effects like some clumps of hair falling out, issues with stomach lining and so on. But with care, you get through them. And there are subclinical levels as well where you get exposed. But things like that don't happen to you. And maybe you feel weak for a little while. But maybe you don't even feel that. Maybe it's fine. And then 20 years from then,
00:51:45
Speaker
there's a sudden plateau and you basically get simultaneous multi-system cancer. And again, we don't really know like why it takes 20 years. We don't know how to fix it. We do know what that regime looks like. And there appears to be a bottom end if you could expose below that
00:52:14
Speaker
Nothing happens because people are exposed to background radiation all the time. And some people have large multiples. People living in Denver get a lot more background radiation than I do in Charlottesville.
00:52:30
Speaker
And there's varying levels based on latitude. People living near the equator generally get more than people living near the poles just because sunshine's a non-trivial part of background radiation. But these things have their effects. And that's mutation of children.
00:53:00
Speaker
That's a very obvious one. It's very disturbing. Cancer is still a very disturbing thing to this day. And so being able to be harmed in a way that you can't see, but then causes problems for you down the road or in other generations, quite rightly, it's very disturbing for people. Now, Mikayo,
00:53:30
Speaker
go in here before we get more into you I just want to make a bit of a jump here so we kind of talked about electric cars and do you think electricity is a viable way of creating sustainable energy because again not to sound biased here but I think when people think of nuclear energy maybe oil
00:53:55
Speaker
It's usually considered more in the redacted territory in comparison to things like electricity, water, air, and not to be offensive. I'm just talking more about common beliefs. Yeah, I'd say that's a fair characterization of common belief. And in fact, you're exhibiting one of the more false common beliefs. Electricity is not a source of energy.
00:54:22
Speaker
Electricity is a mechanism of transit of energy. So, electrical cars in the States, for the most part, or not really the most part, the plurality part, run on coal. Coal is the single largest component of our electrical production. That is shifting, but it's mostly shifting to natural gas. What are the consequences of
00:54:51
Speaker
these large wind farms and some of these solar installations.
00:54:56
Speaker
is that those forms of energy are relatively unpredictable. And while there have been some moves to create unpredictable energy usage, I've talked to people who are operating co-locations in Texas where they do heavy expensive computation, but only when the wind is blowing. So you were talking about Bitcoin mining before, that would be an example
00:55:23
Speaker
You run it when the electricity is cheap. You stop running it when the electricity is not cheap. That's not really changing the shape of the daily lives of people that need their lights to come on. And so what we've seen as we've increased these unpredictable forms of electricity, in concert with that, we've had to increase the
00:55:48
Speaker
level of electrical production that can be turned on and off rapidly to make up for them. And that is mostly gas turbine, so natural gas, but also gasoline can be run through those things or other forms of fuel oils. But natural gas is usually the cheapest here in the state, so lots of them just use that.
00:56:14
Speaker
In terms of transiting energy, electricity has a lot of advantages, not least of which we've got a lot of built out capacity for moving electricity around. There are problems with that capacity.
00:56:31
Speaker
There's hardening issues, so there's things like nuclear EMP as well as Carrington events. There was actually, less than a year ago, there was a solar mass ejection that was probably the size of the Carrington event, which basically burned out the telegraph wires back in the 1800s.
00:56:58
Speaker
Fortunately, it was directed almost precisely away from the Earth, so there was some interesting magnetic consequences of that. There was, I think, some enhance aurora borealis, but it didn't have, you know, scramble or electrical devices.
00:57:21
Speaker
Energy transited is only energy transited. For transportation, gasoline is, because of how much gasoline infrastructure we have, is still the most effective way of transacting energy. Strictly speaking, because diesel has a greater energy per gallon, diesel would probably be the best way.
00:57:42
Speaker
And in a very high energy productive environment, we could actually drive the carbon cycle and use
Future Energy Solutions
00:57:53
Speaker
plastic garbage as well as in theory, captured CO2 and turn it into diesel with cheap enough power. There was a company, when the price of gas went above $100 a barrel,
00:58:11
Speaker
after the recession, after the dot com crash, there was a company that got started that actually was turning trash into gasoline. But of course,
00:58:21
Speaker
gas didn't stay that expensive very long, and they weren't viable below that level. I think with our current electrical infrastructure, the number I've seen quoted is $400. So there's a functional ceiling of $400 a barrel for oil, because at $400, it becomes economically viable to just turn everything into oil with the kinds of electrical production we have.
00:58:48
Speaker
So that's a potentially interesting idea if these renewable sources become much more prevalent and remain as unpredictable as they currently are, shifting to a more easily transportable and storable mechanism, basically having
00:59:16
Speaker
windmills make gasoline instead of making electricity could amusingly enough be a viable option. But that's still all pretty thermodynamically suspect. At the end of the day, the amount of energy that we will need to produce for the number of people that we have to have the sorts of lifestyles that
00:59:47
Speaker
we generally presently aspire to is a very large multiple of the amount of energy that we presently have.
00:59:55
Speaker
And so either we are going to have to start burning lots more fossil fuels or adopt nuclear energy or work out radically more efficient mechanisms for hydroelectric recovery, which will radically change the hydro ecosystem, probably both on land and in the ocean.
01:00:24
Speaker
or come up with some very, very different solutions. I'm not really an expert on those things either. At the end of the day, those are decisions that are best left up to functioning marketplaces. And so having functional energy markets would provide the information to allow individuals to
01:00:52
Speaker
sort of make decisions and business decisions that I believe that we can work out. When you compare the amount of energy being released by the sun, even just incident to the planet compared to the energy costs of all of our economies, we still have a lot of room to run. So we're nowhere near a disaster point in that sense.
01:01:22
Speaker
we're also doing a lot of stupid things all of the time and it's only getting dumber. And that's a disaster point I see as being near. So that all is a lot of interesting information. So what I'm thinking now is sort of, I think in general, when you talk about all these different things to kind of go back to kind of what your business does, do you think?
01:01:51
Speaker
uh your business here um is focused along maybe things involved in sustainable energy because you kind of mentioned before that you're not really too invested in sustainability do you think that could help the all-time goal of the business and maybe we could get into more of the all-time goal you have is just to kind of reduce costs overall my goal is essentially to improve knowledge um
01:02:20
Speaker
Sustainable energy, if it wants to become a viable thing, we'll need a functioning marketplace, something that they don't really have.
Sustainable Energy and Market Functionality
01:02:30
Speaker
And so I'm perfectly willing and eager, in fact, to partner with people in that group to create stable markets to function around that kind of system.
01:02:44
Speaker
But the thing about markets is that there's a lot of them using very similar or in many cases, identical structures. And so I'm positioning myself to work with whoever the first people in the door are. One of my clients who's actually signed a licensing agreement is trying to set up a cold index in South Africa.
01:03:14
Speaker
I'd rather live in a world that has functioning markets even if they're on coal than live in a world that doesn't have functioning markets even if they're not on wind power.
01:03:25
Speaker
So I'm basically agnostic. If coal gets a functioning marketplace and consequently becomes the dominant form of energy production here on planet earth and wipes out windmills, well, then the windmill people should have set a marketplace up and competed is essentially my attitude.
01:03:50
Speaker
mention the goal of your company is to spread information. And obviously, I think after a lot of our discussion here, you know, your main point is that sustainable energy definitely needs a lot of folks. But what industry do you think requires the most information? What industry is your company focused on for providing that type of information?
01:04:14
Speaker
Well, again, I don't really have a focus. I think probably the most important industrial umbrella for information is agriculture, just because you're sort of doing battle with the entire world ecology. And so there's so many different things going on.
01:04:36
Speaker
Also, it's one of the fundamentals. Everybody needs to eat. And so food production keeps being important no matter what. So a lot of my examples and research are in that direction, but I've talked to people in industrial metals and lumber and every other subject I can get my hands on.
01:05:02
Speaker
looking for people that want to move forward. I think that with the internet and computer technology, we're seeing a hyper exponential explosion in data. Information as signal has not so much kept up. There's a lot of noise out there.
01:05:29
Speaker
And I think complex civilization needs common understanding of things that are also happen to be true.
01:05:39
Speaker
in order to function. Because if everybody thinks that there isn't a brick wall up ahead, then you keep driving the car until you hit the brick wall. But if nobody thinks that anybody is going in the right direction, then the car never moves, and you're all just stuck there. So common understanding of true things is important. And the only way I can see that happening
01:06:05
Speaker
is creating ways to align super intelligent systems so that we can gain access to the actual true information that's in all this stuff that's going on everywhere. Because it's not practical to read the internet every millisecond and figure out what's going on. We need human scale aggregation and we need it to happen in ways that
01:06:36
Speaker
encourage them to be true and encourage the true things to be trustable. And the things that we have so far that operate at that scale are web scale companies like Google and Facebook and the markets. And both of those are unstable. I think I want to definitely get into maybe Google.
01:07:01
Speaker
and maybe their involvement in agriculture if they possibly have one, but I'm just thinking now some more the influence of technology in agriculture now. I was looking at some videos and they actually have drones that can look into the actual trees themselves as they're moving around and pick out the rightest fruits to kind of place in.
01:07:25
Speaker
And I just found that so fascinating and agriculture gets so complicated. Robots are becoming extremely sophisticated and are getting better very, very quickly. And so the replacement of stoop labor
01:07:42
Speaker
is becoming much more practical. And that's an enormous political football right there. Google actually does have some agricultural ambitions. Google, like Amazon, is essentially attempting to
01:08:01
Speaker
retailize the agriculture business. So rather than farms selling to a sort of production hub that can mill their goods into flowers or, you know, steaks or whatever, they would be able to direct connect to consumers, bypassing the existing
01:08:29
Speaker
you know, farm to table infrastructure of grocery stores and so on. Both Google and Amazon are doing this for basically the same reason. They make money off of retail sales in the case of Amazon directly because they charge for it in the case of Google because they charge for advertising.
01:08:47
Speaker
Fortunately, it's incredibly difficult to retailize these marketplaces. And so they are pretty consistently failing in those attempts. And the reason that's incredibly fortunate is because if they did actually succeed in those attempts, basically the food supply would vanish almost immediately because retail is just much too unstable
01:09:15
Speaker
to support the kinds of investments and work required for commodity production. So two of the world's most powerful companies have spent billions of dollars attempting to do something that will quite literally end civilization if they succeed, but is fortunately probably too difficult for them to accomplish. And that's more or less where that stands right now.
01:09:44
Speaker
Do you think agriculture and retail sort of have a good symbiosis together? Do you think they blend together very nicely now? Or do you think there's issues with them? Because at least when I think about retail a lot, like if you think about Stu Leonard,
01:10:06
Speaker
Stu Leonard's, even though it looks a lot like a retail place, it gives off almost an agricultural vibe, almost as if you're going into a farm, if you will, in the store. So maybe that's just a marketing tactic, but I'm just fascinated in your opinion. Do you think retail companies are trying to look more associated with commodity production rather than distribution in a sense?
01:10:32
Speaker
Retail is effectively the opposite of commodity action. The entire purpose of retail is to create a differentiated product that you are trying to achieve monopoly control of the space for. Whereas the entire point of commodity is effectively entirely based on production.
01:10:58
Speaker
you have no advantage in quality because there's no quality difference because product is that which is of the quality required to be product. I think that
01:11:14
Speaker
commodity production is radically superior to retail for effective and efficient production because it's solely focused on that, whereas retail is solely focused on making the sale.
Commodity Production vs. Retail
01:11:29
Speaker
And retail-dominated companies have a long history of becoming less and less efficient and effective at producing their core product.
01:11:39
Speaker
and then getting replaced by new retail companies. So retail is functioning in an environment of continual business ferment where new players will come on board to replace the old players that have achieved sort of heat death. They've got their built-in customer base, but they've lost their product quality.
01:12:03
Speaker
Since I see production as fundamentally more important and valuable than sales, I think sales pipelines that pretty much solely value production are superior to sales pipelines that value salespeople.
01:12:22
Speaker
I don't see any way that salespeople would be ultimately eliminated because there's always going to be a market space for fashion
01:12:38
Speaker
and luxury and other forms of relatively one-off objects and having salespeople basically get into the mosh pit and try to eat each other in those industries doesn't strike me as a necessarily dangerous or bad thing to do with salespeople. But
01:13:00
Speaker
for the production of the fundamentally important things in life like bolts and milk and bread and meat and clothing, I think commodity markets are always going to be the win. So for the viewers out here, how do you think
01:13:26
Speaker
People can begin using information such as the information you have to begin maybe investing in commodities, maybe researching commodities on the news. What are some of your, do you have any favorite stocks to even play in the stock market? No, not at all. Really? Wow.
01:13:47
Speaker
Yeah. In my evaluation, the current markets are effectively broken, which means that the markets effectively offer three roles. Criminal, dupe, and victim. The people who have made money are basically either criminals or dupes, and people who have lost money are basically either criminals or victims. If you have made money and you're not responsible for that, then you're a dupe.
01:14:18
Speaker
If you've made money and you are responsible for that, you're a criminal. If you've lost money and you're responsible, you might be a criminal and you might be a victim. You'd have to examine whether the thing that you're doing was an attempt to do something unethical and illegal that failed or an attempt to imitate the behavior of dupes that failed. Interesting.
01:14:49
Speaker
As we can continue to look a bit deeper into sort of the stock market now, were you just never interested in the stock market? Did it ever not resonate with you too much? Was day trading just not really a thing? Because you seem like a technical guy and there's definitely a lot of math involved in what I believe from
01:15:13
Speaker
you know, working in the stock markets, you seem like someone who would be quite skilled at analyzing this type of stuff, if you get what I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah, sure. It hasn't been terrifically interesting to me. Uh, I, you know, have had some slight, you know, money market accounts, things like that, where I, I just kind of gotten index, uh, at, at sometimes in my life, but,
01:15:42
Speaker
In particular, once I started digging into market structure after coming up with my discovery, everything that I've seen and also news items from before then, so the dot-com bust and some of the stuff that sort of came out in that aftermath,
01:16:06
Speaker
the whole housing crisis debacle, the global financial crisis, which I maintain hasn't really even gotten off the starting line yet, has pretty consistently pushed me into a more and more cynical view. And then once I analyzed it from a computational math and information standpoint,
01:16:27
Speaker
it became pretty obvious that the system is effectively a, a pay to win lottery. Um, and that's a big turnoff for me. Do you think that's what it is? Investing is basically just sophisticated gambling.
01:16:52
Speaker
In many cases, it's highly unsophisticated gambling. And in most cases, it's technically not even gambling at all because they're simply exploiting flaws in market structure to create sure bets for themselves. So you'd rather probably gamble in a casino than invest in the stock?
01:17:20
Speaker
I have no interest in gambling casinos either, but I can't see any way that a knowledgeable person could intentionally invest in the marketplaces without criminal intent. So as I continue to drive this question forward though, because I'm just really curious here, how do you think the average
01:17:45
Speaker
Okay, what if he wanted to begin to because from what I could get from a lot of our talk here sustainable energy retail That's not really where the majority of the good commodities are where that will change it. So it's really aggregate How do you think someone can? Begin to invest and get involved in this agriculture industry.
Agricultural Investment and Skill Development
01:18:09
Speaker
What could he do the involvement?
01:18:13
Speaker
Well, you'd learn to garden. It's not my cup of tea. I'm not really an outdoorsy kind of a person. I burn very quickly and I don't sweat when it gets too hot. So it's been a problem for quite some time. But yeah, you could start eating some of your own food if you're into that kind of thing.
01:18:32
Speaker
And in the event that there is, in fact, a collapse in complex systems, that's on the list of things that are useful skills to have. You raise an excellent point there. And I'm just thinking here for a second. You know what? One thing I want to ask about is definitely organic.
01:19:00
Speaker
You know, organic food can sometimes be really inaccessible in this day and age. You know, raw milk, for example. Raw milk is extremely hard to access. A lot of times in some areas, it's completely illegal. In order to get raw milk sometimes, you have to actually buy a cow from a farmer and then the farmer will give you shares of the cow, which is essentially in the milk. So what you have is a bunch of people sharing one cow.
01:19:30
Speaker
So why do you think organic food sometimes is so hard to access on some locations? And is there really any type of organic food anymore? Or do you think that's a factor? Do you think most food is just processed and processed now? Well, again, that gets into the existing infrastructure
01:19:52
Speaker
The move in business has been to attempt to isolate a non-competitive value add niche for your business. You want zero competition because competition drives down your margins and you want some kind of plus percentage on your cost of goods so that you stay profitable.
01:20:20
Speaker
And so there's been an explosion of people wangling their way into the supply chain to pull off these things. And that has changed culturally
01:20:40
Speaker
our connection. There's enormous numbers of people that live in cities and effectively can't use their kitchens or even don't have them and forget the lack of organic food in the grocery store.
01:20:56
Speaker
they're exclusively buying restaurant meals or things at the deli counter. So we're talking about a long and very complicated system with a lot of layers. And the difficulty with that is that any untrustworthy layer in that system
01:21:23
Speaker
produces an untrustworthy product. So if you're direct, if you're a plant that's sitting out and the sun's shining on you, you're making your own food.
01:21:40
Speaker
But then if you're eating that plant, then, well, the plant's pretty trustable unless it's poisonous. The sun's pretty trustable, you know, unless we get another Carrington event. If you're the predator that's eating that, if you're the person that goes to the deli counter and buys pastrami, then there's a lot of hands that were involved.
01:22:05
Speaker
in the production of that sandwich you're eating. And there can be slips anywhere. And so I think we actually need a complicated civilization that has a lot of these niches available, but in order to make them reliable and not things that can shift
01:22:34
Speaker
from having a good product and trying to tell people about it to pretending that you have a good product and very successfully telling people about it, is to have markets that are much more focused on the real, whereas our existing markets have just completely left planet earth behind.
01:22:55
Speaker
So yeah, I see it as a foundational duty for people that want to have institutions going forward to get out and build those institutions today.
Challenges in Accessing Organic Food
01:23:06
Speaker
Because the ones we have, they don't have a future. Excellent. You know, I think you're so right about that idea because I feel like you're asking an overarching question of
01:23:20
Speaker
What is process as a whole? Because it reminds me so much of AI nowadays, because Disney was always a mecca of dominating copyright laws. But now with the rise of AI, we have to start questioning, OK, what is original? What is creative? And now we have to question what is access to that, et cetera. So these types of questions, I think, are just
01:23:45
Speaker
Very interesting things. And again, I don't think it's, you know, I don't think it's in anyone's place here to kind of ask these types of questions, but kind of more about what you're doing now. Do you think, what do you, what is your company doing right now necessarily when it comes to agriculture? Are you more so educating people on how to take advantage of agriculture now, or are you more so forecasting?
01:24:12
Speaker
So my focus is on trying to find people to launch new markets that, that for whatever usage they want. So my only agriculture contact right now, uh, is a guy who's trying to set up a coffee index in East Africa. Okay. Coffee index. So why is he, why, why did he choose to work with your company?
01:24:39
Speaker
Well, I actually met him through a podcast. He's been working on internet-based retail outlets for farms in the East African region. I think he's from there originally, or maybe his family is, but he's a Swiss citizen with a financial background.
01:25:06
Speaker
And he's interested in upping the sophistication and power of the market access that he's giving his clients and the costs of existing market design
01:25:21
Speaker
are in the millions of dollars. And so it's impractical, basically. Whereas setting up my markets are considerably cheaper than that. And so he's working towards getting indices that would use my technology to maintain and proffer themselves.
01:25:43
Speaker
Now, I don't mean to be a bit nosy here, but how is this progress now since working with you? It's obviously improved, right? Well, setting up markets is actually fairly difficult, and having a new form of technology is also fairly difficult. So while there are three different people who are working towards getting markets that would have my technology incorporated in them,
01:26:07
Speaker
none of them actually has a functioning market live. There's another couple of people in sort of the sales end of things that are scouring the world looking for people to make deals with. One here in the States and another one in India who's concentrated in sort of the Middle East Central Asian region. But, you know, first is still yet to happen for me.
01:26:36
Speaker
So what markets is your company most proficient and are there certain markets you avoid? Maybe because they're a bit more oversaturated. Do you look at the trends of this type of stuff? What types of markets do you focus on?
01:26:52
Speaker
So my system works when the buyer group and the seller group are different groups. And so it isn't a good fit for the existing stock equities marketplaces. Also gold.
01:27:09
Speaker
and other monetary things direct. So a Bitcoin to dollars wouldn't necessarily be the best environment for this style of marketplace. There are some kinds of currency trades that are much more like goods flow. And there are certain kinds of bonds that work much like that. So for example, most countries don't rebuy their own debts. And so,
01:27:39
Speaker
as a point of sale for sovereign debt, a CDM would be a viable option. However, the sort of the pure fit is all physical commodities outside of probably gold. And so my primary focus is towards the agriculture, what are known as softs, things like wood and industrial metals. The woods and metal.
01:28:09
Speaker
Why wood in particular with agri, we're getting to the metal. Well, so wood isn't designated as an agricultural commodity. It's instead designated as a soft. It's thought of as more as an industrial material, but it's not hard like steel is. And while wood is obviously produced agriculturally because it's operated on
01:28:35
Speaker
much larger time spans, regrowing a forest takes decades, not a season. The nature of how those markets function is a lot closer to the nature of mine management than it is to farm management. So you talked about mine management. What is that necessary? Well, mine management has a number of components. There's
01:29:00
Speaker
Having a saleable product, so there's a certain amount of exploration that ends up being done.
01:29:11
Speaker
But also in general, you need to secure that sales pipeline. People don't dig stuff out of the ground on spec frequently. It's just too expensive to do. And then depending on the prevalence and distribution of the ore, you might be talking about strip mining. You might be talking about pit mining. You might be talking about deep mining.
01:29:39
Speaker
Those are radically different activities with very different technology stacks that would need to be engaged. And then the production is going to be a very specific grade of ore that again will need its post-processing. And so things tend to be a lot more specific and negotiable at
01:30:06
Speaker
per mine site and then informed by the broad metals, which is more on the post smelting and production and unification side of things. So for those kinds of things, indexes that are trustable and reliable are more important because commodity product doesn't come out of the ground.
01:30:33
Speaker
specific to this part of the ground, product comes out of the ground and you need a reference, you know, standard for negotiation to occur. So what do you think is the future of your business? And do you think that future of your business might tie along maybe the future of where markets stand, where the world stands? What type of correlation do you think that future would be a part of?
01:31:02
Speaker
I think that the general adoption of this technology is one of the gating questions of the continued existence of complex civilization. So I think that it'll break through somewhere.
01:31:19
Speaker
as it goes from being the kind of thing that is being intellectually discussed by me and other people to something that human beings can look at and point at and imitate, it will very rapidly expand and replace the existing financial arrangements because it's more accurate and less expensive and more profitable than they're capable of being and that
01:31:49
Speaker
At broad adoption, it would effectively double the amount of human wealth that exists because it will remove cost overheads that are on par with the rate of economic growth of the human species. And so it will form a foundational core
01:32:13
Speaker
of what new civilization looks like, much as the existing marketplaces did for the Renaissance. It was the adoption and building of more complex civilizations on top of those commodity markets which enabled
01:32:32
Speaker
Europe's economic and then political and scientific domination of the world during the early modern period. So whoever it is that gets off the line first, I'd imagine would have a significant advantage in that as well in our post-modern period. Now, Ola, this has been a really educational, I think, informative
01:33:02
Speaker
Do you have any closing words you'd like to get to the audience? Maybe any people listening that might need a bit more insight, a bit more guidance in their life, maybe how to break into working in marketplaces all like you. So if you could just close off with that, please.
01:33:19
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, sure. Well, for people who like to hear more about my thoughts on AI, I actually co-host a podcast with a guy named Marty Weiner, who used to be CTO of Reddit.
Podcast and Further Insights
01:33:31
Speaker
It's called The Fourth Age, the AI Revolution. And we've got 10 episodes out on all the platforms now.
01:33:40
Speaker
Also, you brought up the core disk website. There's a white paper available for download there. It's a little hard to get through, I'm sorry, but it's what I could manage. Reach out. And also build out. You can explore this. There's stuff up on GitHub about this as well.
01:34:04
Speaker
creating new institutions is our general responsibility. And if you want them in the future, you're going to have to build them. So, you know, get together with your neighbors, get together with your friends, think about how to put together ways of living that are going to survive the absence of the current ways of living.
01:34:31
Speaker
All right, so thank you, Noah, for being on the show. This has definitely been a massive privilege. And I will be seeing you all next time.