Game theory, math of information, economic shifts w/ Noah Healy

Misbah Haque  00:00

Hey, welcome back to another episode of Inside The Mind, I am your host Misbah Haque. And before we dive into today’s episode, I just wanted to say a quick thank you to our sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Pod Mahal. They help people who have a purpose, they have something they want to share something they want to say, and they want to profit, they want to do it without perfectionism. So get started on creating content for your business has never been easier. You literally show up and speak your ideas into existence, and they take care of the rest, they are able to authentically preserve your voice. And translate that into Instagram posts or your own podcast on Apple and Spotify, or YouTube videos if that’s your thing. So check them out at pod mahal.com. And if you want to start a project and tell them we send you email [email protected]. Thanks so much for supporting the show. And without further ado, enjoy today’s episode.

Misbah  00:57

Noah, thank you so much for coming on here today you are someone who has involved heavily in the mathematics and physics world. And also finance. And so I always find it interesting where, you know, people find creativity and fields that have a sense of like, okay, that’s just, it’s black and white, right? It’s zeros and ones math there, what creativity could there be in this field, but often with anything, like when you dig deep enough, there, there is an art to, you know, even the most boring of subjects and so unexcited to kind of hear some of your background and journey in this world. I mean, you’re up to a lot of cool stuff today. But like, take us back what was how did you kind of get involved in this world? Were you somebody who just excelled, or, or was drawn to it at a young age?

Noah  01:50

I’ve always been yeah, pretty proficient with reasoning, I’m, I’m of an age where they were still giving IQ tests to, you know, basically all children as part of the assessment to kind of figure out how to track through. And I essentially nailed the fluid reasoning section, which is kind of the how good you are at the logic part of that test. And I’ve been pretty much knocking those out of the park. Ever since I think I got like one wrong on that section of the GRE. Which is pretty embarrassing. But um, wow, I’m really, really bad at clerical speed and accuracy. So I’ve got a little little bit of dyslexia and I kind of one bubble filled in wrong out of 200 questions is actually a little, that’s a little good for me, I usually average a little worse than that. And I’m into those things.

Misbah  02:55

Well, what is it about that world, I guess, or that process that brought you to be like, Oh, I, I should double down here. Because I’m sure you had a moment where you’re like, this is working, or I’m, you know, maybe it was after the test before the test. But what made you go, this is something I want to dedicate a lot of my time and energy into for a long time to come hopefully.

Noah  03:19

It was basically just ease of opportunity. I’ve never been physically robust. I’m really prone to to heatstroke, for example, fact, while I can sweat when I will, if it’s if it’s too hot, I just stopped sweating. And then, you know, pretty swiftly stop doing everything else as well, right sort of pathing towards not working with my brain was never really seemed realistic. And I don’t write very well either. I my brain sort of shuts down in the face of creating permanent media. But I did develop some capacity to have conversations and I’ve got a great memory. And I’ve got this sort of logical facility. So I just kind of Canal down that road. In college, I wound up studying nuclear engineering, largely because of how broad it was. Nuclear Engineering brings civil engineering, mechanical engineering, along with nuclear physics all together in this one package. And you get to you just get to learn a whole bunch of fascinating things. And energy production is a vital part of society. There’s a very direct correlation between how much energy is available and how wealthy a society is. And one of the most dramatic demonstrations of this. We’ve seen that Night Sky Map, where they’ve got the map of the world, but it’s all lit up bright, in some places, and then totally dark and others. Well, there’s, you know, the UN releases, you know, demographic maps. And if you look at map of, you know, per capita incomes, or life expectancies, or any of the other sort of wealth correlates, all those maps are the same as each other. And they’re all the same as the night sky map, you just, you know, the what makes people wealthy is, is having more energy to live their lives. And what makes people poor is having to physically do everything. The world has moved into sort of the digital space, yeah, computers are ever more important. But I contend that energy is still important what computers provide is an entirely new way to use that energy. Whereas the mechanical breakthroughs of the last say, for centuries, made it cheaper to do physical labor with the machine than it was to do it with a person if you could figure out how to build that machine. Since computers are control or decision engines, what they ultimately allow is potentially making it cheaper to do a job with a computer than with a human, but that job would be sort of a kind of service, you know, expertise type of a job. And we can already see this, for example, with translation, where, you know, my browser has a machine translation button on it in head-to-head competition regularly outpaces human capacity, there have been some studies suggesting that medical diagnosis could actually be improved. Although there are some major barriers to the commercialization of that kind of technology, some of which are that it’s explicitly unpatentable. So if you were to make any strides in that realm, you would not be able to have any patent protection around what you were doing. But in theory, where we’re either just over or really close to the line of where we would have sufficient computer technology that, that we could do diagnostician actions better through computer mediation than sort of the family doctor, what my project is working on, right is, is a way to create financial markets, that obviate most of the roles of existing financial professionals. And just focus down on the ones that have an information service that’s still actually valuable within that market.

Misbah  08:14

Wow, that’s pretty fascinating. I do wonder about that a lot like that translator example that you gave, or even the doctor, I mean, the doctor example, is another thing, right? Where it’s like, okay, doctors could be replaced, but they can’t be replaced. The translator is a more real look at like, oh, man, that’s so true. Like, I can go on Google Translate. And, you know, that eliminates the need for a lot of people who may be spent their lives doing that. What’s the solution there? Or is there still a need? Do you think for that human element, no matter if our browsers still able to do that? You know, I don’t know if there’s an answer to that. But I’m curious, because you’ve thought about this a lot.

Noah  08:56

Well, in the case of translation, and in the case of many things that we’re sort of getting first cracks at the technology is leaning upon a society that already has these capacities, that’s being used in a way that is, say fundamentally honest, unfortunately, the introduction of that technology not only undermines the existence of that society but also creates an incentive for fundamental dishonesty, which undermines the algorithm itself. So whereas, so, I was explaining to somebody earlier, the way the algorithm works, it’s sort of a very baseline, is that records of saying every trans you know, from any two languages, you know, French and polish, every, every two documents that exist in French and Polish translation that are available, which is effective, every such pair of documents that sort of currently exists, are sort of cross indexed with each other and stored in a big, big pile. And so when you want to know what a word means, say we, I can’t really quote any polish, but I know one or two French words, what you would do is you’d search through the French file and find every single instance of that word in the French pile. And then you would get the corresponding Polish pile, look at what the correlates were in the Polish pile. So this word means something, it has to appear in all of these documents, because it’s getting translated, what appears in all of these documents, you know, because this word is here, well, that’s whatever the Polish word for the French word we is, that depends on a large corpus of honestly translated documents. But if I got this automatic translator, I can create honestly translated documents all day long. But those documents don’t actually help out very much. But here’s where things get crazy. I could dishonestly translate documents. What if I wanted, you know, French tourists to come into my tourist trap in Poland, I could, basically dishonestly associate documents were the name of my tourist trap was associated with names of superlatives in French. And suddenly, like the name of my tourist trap, like translate says exactly what you’re looking for, no matter what you’re looking for, and polluting the system, right? translated documents, which would be incredibly expensive, and something that academics would have to do, and that would ruin their reputations. But it’s now something that I’m going to have a computer, just crank out trillions, Oh, right. You know, I could, I could rent some from Jeff Bezos and just have him do that for me suddenly becomes this option. And if and if that were to happen, then the value of, of these translations would degrade. So we, the way we do things, right now we’re opening up these new capacities, but what we’re also doing is opening up these new opportunities for entirely new kinds of attacks on society at large. Whereas when we were sort of keeping expertise inside of human beings, a person would destroy their own reputation, to, to perform one of these attacks, and society sort of doesn’t need any given individual. Because, you know, if it does, then people are mortal, they die. And then if the society needed that person dies too so we have these new opportunities, we also have these new challenges. We really don’t think about these things in public in any productive way that I’ve seen. But it very much looks to me, like, while we have other problems as well, these challenges seem to underlie or directly represent major issues that are actually driving crises on a regular basis. And, therefore worth studying in solution if possible.

Misbah  13:37

Because it’s like, if tech kind of works at scale, then any error you have is also going to be scaled. And, you know, obviously, you’re doing your best to mitigate that. But you you want to I guess, yeah, protect your well. So before I kind of move along, if there’s something you said that really stood out to me around computers and tech are responsible for like, they’re like controller decision machines. And that was interesting, because it’s like, well, if tech and computers and all that stuff are in charge, and you can help, you know, leverage them to make control or decisions, then what is it that humans can leverage to like as a Trent, let’s keep rolling with the translator concept here. Like the idea there for somebody who is a translator of polish or French and now it’s like the one plugin has taken over maybe the whole browser and eliminated the need for maybe them to translate your web pages or something to this language. Would you say that the safe solution, the smart solution, the inevitable one probably is that you pivot and you’re like, Alright, I’m not a translator anymore, but I’m going to use my skills of translating to this other or area? Or I’m going to build my own version of this that, you know, maybe people could use? I don’t know if there’s an answer, but what is the out for people who are in a field where it feels like it’s going extinct? If not already.

Noah  15:16

On an individual basis. That’s, that’s a productive approach. It’s certainly the one I would encourage. It’s certainly not the only approach. This happened. In the industrial revolution, large numbers of jobs stopped happening. One of the conservative objections to the Industrial Revolution was that people were moving off the farms that it used to be where 80% of people lived rurally. And essentially did farm work for a living. And so in the same early seven digests, that the social thinkers were saying, this certification urbanization was very concerning, because we all eat food, 80% of people work their entire lives making food, clearly, if 60% of all people spend their entire lives making food than total food, we reduced by 25%, a quarter of all people are going to die. Now, no, in this country, something like 2% of people makes all of the food, because machines have allowed them to become radically more productive. And that’s why people can live in cities. But there was uneven progress along the way of figuring out what was going on. Some people moved to cities and completely lost their minds. Some people moved to cities and did very well, some people set up rebellions and destroyed things. And some of those people did really well, too, if they if the rebellion was successful, and they took over a country or a county or something, I see this as the foundational problem of our time, is that right now, it’s pretty fringe. People like chess masters and translators, who are people that, I’d say most human beings don’t actually encounter one in the course of their lives, or when only sort of collaterally no one or maybe a friend of a friend type of thing. It’s not doctors and lawyers, and   mayors and police officers yet. But it, it’s very easy to see how it could be those sorts of things, just as it’s very easy to see how it could be judges or legislatures, or, or even sort of lower skill clerk type, secretarial type positions are getting swiftly moved into these sorts of spaces. And so that’s, that’s a real challenge. One of the issues that I think about since I’m proposing this thing that would essentially shift the financial system is the people who used to work for the financial system, but are no longer useful within my system, what future is available for them. And I think to myself, well, these people are very wealthy, and very savvy human beings. So I feel that they would have a relatively easy time pivoting. If you, if you’re a sort of successful day trader that’s managing 10s of millions of dollars or more, I feel like you have a personal network and personal net worth and some kind of skill set that would allow you to find something else to do with your life. If what you were doing right now, just didn’t exist. But yeah, it’s a very different thing. If you’re doing that, even to highly educated, highly intelligent people who have just gotten out of college and have $200,000 of student debt, which, if you’re if you’re like a language translator, maybe that’s who you are.

Misbah  19:17

Yeah, it’s one of those situations, like when you look at a Rocket Lawyer, or something like that, that has taken a very high billable like you needed to have it in person, attorney or something like that for the longest time. And then, and people spend hundreds of 1000s of dollars getting the credentials to be able to practice the law. And then you’ve got something like Rocket Lawyer that doesn’t solve all the issues like if you’re in trouble, it’s Rocket Lawyer isn’t maybe going to represent you, but it can help you file an LLC, it can help you come up with a privacy policy. And there’s these things where now you see lawyers who I’ve seen are Okay, there are some who are still in the traditional path, they have this personal network they play they’re playing the game as everybody is. And then you’ve got kind of the ones who are like, Oh, they’re making their own version of that Rocket Lawyer, where it’s like, oh, you can, instead of paying me a retainer, and coming into my office and all this stuff, it’s like, okay, it’s a little bit more accessible for you, but you’re getting access to all my law. Like, I’ll provide this document for you. And I’ll do this for you. And it’s very interesting to see how it’s forcing some creativity within a certain segment of an industry, but then you do have maybe the traditional side of it, where the people who don’t have the three things you mentioned, like the personal network, or the all the stuff, the moat kind of built around you to be able to maybe pivot and do something else with your life. It’s like, Yeah, well, I would say seven years again, spent passing the bar.

Noah  21:03

I would say those people are essentially in the buggy whip. Business. This is something my grandfather used to like to talk about is that when Henry Ford started Ford Motor Company, there was something called the Selden patent, which was actually owned by a consortium of buggy whip manufacturers that they contended, meant that nobody could build a car inside the United States. And Ford took it off to the Supreme Court and basically said, No, that isn’t a fact with this baton says, but ultimately, there was sort of only one buggy whip manufacturer left, and then they wanted the business. And the last one in was the best of the bunch. But it’s, if you’re in a declining market share, you can be the captain of the ship that’s going down. Or maybe you can be one of the guys one of the poor bastards in the engine room in a ship that’s going down. But you cannot say it’s going down. 

Misbah  22:08

That’s a very, like, harsh reality of it, I guess.

Noah  22:10

But we’re in a position where the upper echelons of our society in terms of wealth, fame, and power are dominated by people who are in these positions which don’t have futures. And so that’s a very confusing time. Because ambitious people are going to ape the behaviors of successful people that are like how culture works. But if it’s it’s like the closing days of the Royals in Europe getting into Henry, the 14th Court was a really good career move getting into Henry the 16th. Court, or Louie, Louie the 14th Court was a good career move will be the 16th pretty bad career move. But people did it. Like the day before Bastille Day, there was some hard-charging Cordia that just had finally gotten permission to go to Versailles for the first time.  I’m sure that’s true. And if it wasn’t that day, it was the day before. And he would have been way better off running into the countryside the week before.

Misbah  23:28

It’s still funny Ray, sometimes, like by the time, like, you’re so excited about something. And by the time that it comes, when it’s not as like valuable or like you said, it’s a declining market share, like you’re in this thing of like, Ah, I, like I just got here, you know what I mean? And you want to figure it out. I do see what you’re saying there with like, you have this, people who are ambitious, will probably figure out a way to repurpose it and turn it into something. But it creates more and more and more of a gap than there already is between, like you said, the people in the engine room who are who just got the credentials just are fresh out of college or whatever. And like you’re in a confusing time, you’re like, alright, what what did I just do do that for? So what you were saying your system is designed to kind of like shift how the fight the financial system kind of works, right? What is what does that what how does that even begin to look like? And I’m sure it takes some of these things into account to somebody like me, how could you kind of explain what it is that you’re working on and how it might help or impact people who are in these markets?

Noah  24:38

The first thing to understand is that the financial industry is an Information Industry, the to the extent that they’re providing services, which are valuable and some of the services they provide are actually valuable in general to society. That service is disseminating true knowledge about the value and That is what allows individuals to make their own individual assessments. If the price of wheat is going up, maybe your bakery makes more oatmeal cookies, if the price of outs is going up, maybe they make more bread, those sorts of decisions, the better and, and better in terms of sort of truth plus widespread dissemination of information that individuals have with an economy, the more effectively that economy can function. Because individual businesses can be run more economically, the better your information is, if you are operating a taxi service on the assumption that gas was going to be $3.50 A gallon until your retirement in the mid-2000s. Sometimes you’re not doing too well right now. But if you knew that this was on the horizon, right, you could mitigate the thing that’s important about that is that the information that we’re talking about here is resident, although in a very scattered and relatively noisy way, across us, like individual people know what their value or cost propositions are, for these various things. If you make corn or mine or dig, you know, drill for oil, or dig copper or whatever, you’ve got a pretty decent idea of what your unit economics looks like. And if you use any of this stuff, you’ve got a pretty good idea of what your value proposition looks like. So what the existing markets do is basically try to force these people to come together in an agreement to trade just in one on one trades. The tricky bit is that these edge users essentially can’t absorb the risk of getting it wrong. So if you’ve ever seen penguins about to dive into the water, they all crowd up against the edge. Well, that’s because they’re basically looking for predators. That guy that gets pushed off they’re checking to see whether or not something eats him. And if something does, then they don’t get in the water. So what happens within these moral litmus test? Yes, is that there’s this group of people that have enough money to absorb that central risk, and they more or less negotiate that center and the riskier those sort of wider that center gets, because the riskier the marketplace is the way the edge people kind of stop to check where, where things are gonna get to.

Misbah  27:48

And then how do this impact the ever like someone like me and you right, to where, so dozen…

Noah  28:00

The first one is higher costs, there was some people who about a decade ago figured out a scam in the aluminum market, which essentially jacked up the price of aluminum by something in the neighborhood of 40 or 50%. So if you bought any aluminum, Louth products, back then something like a third of what you paid for that product, wound up in the pockets of these guys and worked out a scam of how to up risk the aluminum market. At the more severe end, we see supply chain disruption, like we’re seeing right now, and which we expect to be seeing. One of the issues with the destruction of the Ukrainian wheat is that ideally, we would like to see the global wheat stock production increase to sort of compensating for the fact that 8% of the wheat that used to be produced won’t be produced this year, the two countries with sort of the biggest slack in wheat production, our Canada and the United States, we are increasing our wheat production this year, because the system that we have stabilizes the price at the production end, which means that the farmers aren’t actually participating in this increase in wheat price. And the farmers are not going to increase their land under cultivation until they actually see prices increase, we’ll see a sort of protraction of this issue. Because the middlemen are going to be able to eat up at least the first round of this windfall, and who knows how much more of the windfall and they’ll try to get as much as they can. Those are the things that impact us sort of day to day out of this kind of issue.

Misbah  30:00

It’s kind of like, when you heard during, I don’t know, it’s 2020 2021, where the chicken was almost like is after the toilet paper shortage and the paper towels were coming next. And it was like, oh, man, we’re not gonna have enough chicken because like, the supply chain issue, like it was just something you didn’t honestly think about, for a couple of decades, like there was a period of time where this was like supply chain issues were very common, right? And then it just became like, oh, we figured it out. And it felt like it was going to be figured out forever.

Noah  30:36

Figuring things out forever isn’t really the way things work unless you’ve managed to produce a mathematical proof or something like yeah, and, and in many cases. In many cases, what we essentially did was improve efficiencies by increasing fragility. So the assumption was that since the world is at peace, we, we don’t need to worry about what happens if the US and the Soviets start, like throwing missiles at each other. So we can, we can design around, right things, all eggs in one basket, those types of systems. As we saw with the Suez Canal,  this big boat gets lodged in the thing, and suddenly, the entire world is on fire. Because not only does that one boat have more stuff in it than a city does. But there’s a whole line of boats that big trying to come through in both directions. That can’t for a week, and now, everybody’s just in time factories all have to turn off. Because they don’t have any parts that the shipment was supposed to come in, and then the shipment was supposed to come out, you don’t get your car, I think you’re gonna.

Misbah  32:10

Do you see this IV being exacerbated as time goes on? Or this is something that you think we’ll get a handle on again because we’re experiencing a lot of it right now,  where you’re like, Okay, we got to figure out how so that this doesn’t happen again.

Noah  32:26

This is a solver-die problem, we will either work out and adopt systems that are capable of weathering crises, or civilization will disintegrate as food, energy, shelter, and other supply shocks roll through rolling blackouts, well, rolling everything else, basically. We’re having a baby formula shortage right now. And, and several major networks have announced that rolling blackouts are strong and probability this summer, but why wouldn’t there just be more rolling blackouts?

Misbah  33:12

What does that mean? Is he talking like electrical and internet and everything? 

Noah  33:17

I’m mostly talking electrical. But this is a strategy in California, they have very high energy demands during the summer. And they also have a forest fire problem where high energy demand powerlines working, can cause forest fires, the PG and E balances the demands for power versus forest fire risk, and, and essentially turns the crank down so that they don’t set the stage on fire. That’s not the best possible response to that solution. But if you’re in a crappy situation, sometimes you only have crappy choices. And, and so, they’ve announced that they expect the summer to see rolling blackouts again, that’s one pretty severe supply chain issue. But in an environment where more and more markets are actually failing to deliver useful and true information. Because the stress is being placed on those markets. By the communication computer technology we’ve now developed, exceeds their capacity to function. People rely on their senses to tell them about the universe around them so that they can  walk around without stubbing their toes or falling. If, if your wiring gets messed up, and you can’t see what’s around you, you start walking into things. And if you’re in a dangerous environment, that’s really dangerous. We have these systems to tell us true facts about the universe, that that are losing the cup has to do that. And we have built our societies on the proposition that the that the information they deliver are true facts about the universe at the same time, when it’s obvious that that’s not the case, when the foundation of something crumbles, what happens to that thing?

Misbah  35:18

I heard this concept from a scientist, once it was like, you can like your limitation. And what you can track and measure is by the technology that’s available to you at that time, right. So it’s just the same way like you couldn’t track certain types of doping and cheating and sports 30 years ago, and then it’s like, oh, all of a sudden, you can go back 50 years and test the same thing that somebody used, and it that, that is an example of something that has massively shifted in the course of whatever, 10 years, five years, and it continues to do so at that rate. I mean, this might be I don’t want this to be like super heavy. But how fast could this happen? If you think about it, right, where the supply chains issue the blackouts, the I don’t know, the collapse or decline of some of these things, the solver I think that you’re talking about if we don’t solve it, how quickly is it a couple of years at this point? Is it 10 years? 50 years? I don’t know, it does seem like it could happen very, very quickly. Based on what we saw, a couple of years.

Noah  36:31

They could propagate extraordinarily quickly, whether or not things will crack and whether or not we’ll just be able to have a decline is very much an open question. But one example I like to point out is that pretty much intil Attila the Hun rolled through and burned Rome to the ground, you would have been able to find people in Rome, in spite of the fact that the population of the city had declined by 99%. In spite of the fact that France, Germany, England, and Switzerland, were no longer held, Sicily was no longer part of the empire, in spite of anything that you could imagine they would maintain that Rome, the Eternal City, was still the jewel of humanity and that and the ruler of the greatest empire that could ever exist. And that would be centuries after, right after the Caesars. So human beings have the capacity to sort of do this to ourselves and say, Oh, we don’t really rural Caledonia, well, who cares? Like that’s where the hell out there. And it’s cold and the Scots are blue painted barbarians, we didn’t want to anyway, it’s, it’s very easy. And it will be very easy for the people in leadership positions to regard failure as Oh, just a thing that happens. This doesn’t have anything to do with me, this doesn’t have to do with my kids. This doesn’t have to do with the future like this is just, it’s just an event and I didn’t care about it. And so it doesn’t matter which way the cookie crumbles. On the other hand, the systems that we have, are centered around an industrial economy. And we don’t have one of those anymore, we now have this computer information economy, we have new capacities. The challenge, therefore, is discovering what values and habits are required of us to utilize these capacities in ways that are productive and not destructive, that challenge to bring us back to the beginning. That challenge is a mathematical challenge. Because the capacities themselves are our mathematical computers are basically math machines.

Misbah  38:55

That’s what I was gonna say is like, that’s why I asked you is because of the math mind. Like, there is a number that if you were to statistically be like, okay, more blackouts, or brownouts, more formula shortage, or this or that, and if it keeps going, you could foresee just like you could predict the weather out six months out, like, this is a very possible event. It’s funny, like the Rome example, you said, you’re right, it’s like down to the very last moment, you’re still kind of in this delusion of like, Oh, we’re the best, like things are gonna work out and you hope you do. I’m sure that you did hope for that. But like, it’s kind of, I don’t know, it takes you back to just like, like a survival movie were like, the zombies came and the aliens took over and it’s like, oh, like to life as we knew it is over and now it’s like, it’s a whole new age. It’s not It’s like reversing from Computer Information Age to like back to the Stone Age in a sense or something. You know, how to do that. drastic.

Noah  40:00

I would say a dark age is one of the two possibilities, we either come up with a modus vivendi that allows us to use this technology. And if we do, then, based on how cool the toys, we presently have, I would assume that would be a much higher level of wealth than human beings have here to for experience, which sounds great to me. But if we can’t, then we’ve already reached the point where our economic and political, and social systems can’t produce things that are productive. We have a an association between teen suicide and like social network use, our political systems are basically mired in, Twitter warfare. And, and can’t really think intelligently about the risks and, and trade-offs of communication networks, like in this country, we’ve got freedom of speech. And that’s largely allowed the tech giants to be unregulated. But as I was pointing out with the example from translation, there’s an entirely new scale of attack possibility around information dissemination, in a way that never existed before, maybe a decade ago. And, and we know that political systems are really, really bad at regulating information systems. So we have, on the one hand, this absolute need to have trustable Information Systems. On the other hand, we have this absolutely failed mode of managing risks, how do you square that circle? And then we have these, these economic systems that are being stretched far beyond their breaking point, have been becoming increasingly unstable, since the 80s, since the introduction of computational technology in the first place, and again what’s a society that doesn’t have an economy, a government or a culture look like?

Misbah  42:37

Especially now that you’re seeing also right, like, it’s, the internet is one way here, or in the US, right? But then in China, or Russia, or something? Totally different? Totally. It’s, it’s like a whole nother world almost, especially now. And that’s just the beginning of it, right? Where it’s like, Hey, we’re closing off our internet, you guys are in your own side of the web that we’re on over on this side. I mean, that’s kind of a crazy concept, too, because you never, I mean, you did think it was coming one day where you’re like, This is going to be regulated, or something’s going to happen to the internet. And maybe it’s not fully here yet. But there is something you’re beginning to see in just how other countries are able to regulate. That is scary. And even if it doesn’t directly affect us like, it is, I don’t know, it does in some way where you’re like, it’s a model, right? You’re watching a model for how a whole piece of the Earth can kind of like break off into its own planet. And how heavily You’re right. Like, I think this year, past couple of years, it’s more, I don’t know. Like, it’s more apparent than ever, to everyone that we’re all headline readers. And we are influenced by a quack, you can’t unsee a headline, right? You can’t on like, you can’t we’re not emotionally strong enough, most of us to like, bat away every headline and judge it and be like, is this true? Is this not? It’s kind of just like you take it in, you take it and you take it in. And that’s where I think the problem that you’re talking about happens, where it’s so easy to shift the perception of a stock or a person or a place anything with a dishonest media, in a sense. So I don’t know. It is scary to think about. It’s also kind of one of those things where you talked about social networks and the effects that it’s having on people who just grew up with it. That never had a chance to live without it. How do you escape that? I guess in the future when it seems so like, oh, man, I don’t really exist. If I don’t have an Instagram or LinkedIn or I seem like the guy who’s preparing for the apocalypse. 20 years too early. What I mean? It’s like how do you survive and continue to live a normal IFE do is it? Does it come to a point where we go, Hey, screw it, we’ve had enough of social media, I get it I get how annoying it is, and how terrible it is for me?  I’m off the grid, and becomes more acceptable to do that? Or is it like, we all keep drinking the poison and hope we survive?

Noah  45:22

As somebody that isn’t on social media, I hope that the first thing eventually happens, and some more people sort of join, join my bunkered-up area. I really don’t know. I mean, I, I have a probable solution to the economic problem. And I’m trying to get that up and adopted. I don’t, I can, I can mathematically formulate the cultural and political issues. And I can, I can, like run through the checklist to of potential solutions to determine whether or not they sort of hit their marks and, and are internally consistent. If anybody wants to propose anything, nothing in the public sphere, is fit for purpose. Like I can tell you that because I’ve seen the public sphere. There’s nothing in there that’s fit for purpose. But yeah, I mean, I’m, I’m bright, and I got lucky, I tripped over this. Maybe I’ll come up with some other solutions, but much more likely, a lot of us are going to have to be thinking about this kind of stuff. And hopefully, enough of us will get lucky to trip over some stuff that will get us through this thing.

Misbah  46:43

Oh, for sure. I mean, I think just alone, like what I said, just acknowledging that like, oh, I may I am also a headline reader, even though I don’t want to be maybe sometimes. And so you’re just more aware of that. And so over time, the more you’re aware of it, you see it, you’re like, Okay, maybe this isn’t there is take what you see with a grain of salt versus like the behavior and you know, just how people consume media 30 years ago was like, whatever you heard was fact it was just, that was the news source. That was the one source of information you were getting things from. So maybe it’s like this, this massive onslaught of stuff that’s coming at us forces you to be somewhat more intelligent.

Noah  47:27

I think that the healthy skepticism you’re talking about as good, you need to be aware that mistrust, which is kind of necessary in our world detracts from the capacity of this self-organized working together, which is very much a part of what has built up the wealth and capacity that presently exists, we need to be trustable. And that’s where I contend that building that into the system on the basis. And my approach of measuring information content, what my system does is it measures the information content of people’s contributing forecasts, and then classifies that into useful and worthless, essentially, forecasts that move the needle towards where the needle eventually winds up and gets used are useful. forecasts that move the needle away from there are worthless. And so we reward based on the number of users that you put into the system. And we essentially charge for the amount of information that you attempt to put in the system. So if you put most or all worthless information into the system, then you’re basically paying somebody to fix your mistakes for you, or for everyone else. If you put mostly valuable information system, then you earn a very high rate of return. And so those sorts of things, I think, are a possibility, how something like that translates into other realms, where if that’s even the right approach for those realms, I couldn’t say but a greater focus on traceability seems to be the core of anything that could be a part of a functioning information system.

Misbah  49:34

No, that’s really fascinating. I’m glad you pointed that out. Because it’s like a paradox, right? You’re like, okay, there’s this mistrust. It’s good to have the healthy skepticism, but then it’s like it’s so counterproductive to the other part of it that you need to make it work and to keep going and not just be a veto paranoid pessimist all the time, I guess. But I’m curious for you, someone who isn’t on social or on those networks Like you’re here on the podcast today, you mentioned permanent media as something like, you maybe don’t partake in as much and things like that, but conversations you’re able to have. And I’m curious, what made podcasting as a medium for you something that was like, oh, let’s use this to share and discuss these ideas versus like, the other million forms of putting your ideas out that you could I mean, you don’t strike me as maybe the like, I’m gonna go Instagram real Oh, my information. But like  that option was available to you as well. What made you choose podcasting, I guess, overall, that.

Noah  50:41

Mostly the conversational nature, I’ve just felt it would be easier and more productive to produce content, conversationally, that would be through monologue. Or were written both, which didn’t strike me as terribly. So I do have a website that’s got a pile of crap on it, that describes all about this stuff. You know, it’s a white paper, you can, you can go read the integral equations and figure out exactly how this works if you want to. But in order to increase my footprint and sort of create more awareness, I felt like I should be generating more content. And this was a natural fit again, I kind of it’s, it’s kind of who I am, I kind of go with what’s close, convenient, easy, as my first go-to.

Misbah  51:34

I think that’s something we can learn from, right. I mean, if we all did that, I think if there’s a little bit less friction we’d all be dealing with, it’s like, what can you lean into that fits with your, like, you having the awareness like, oh, I’m not a writer, I don’t like doing it. But like, I could talk that saves me so much time just making that decision being like, alright, let’s try it this way. But yeah, that world and of itself of creating content, needing to do some of that nowadays to increase your footprint, but then also the the others Flipside that we just spent the whole hour talking about of what comes with contributing to that system and, and whatnot. So yeah, somebody like yourself, who’s thought a lot about this, I found it fascinating that you, it shows me that you, you know, there’s something to podcasting, when someone like yourself who vets platforms as like, is this worth it is it’s not as it’s worthless or useful. So very cool that you Yeah, thanks for taking the time to spend and share all your knowledge with us.

Noah  52:39

Thanks for having me. This was a great conversation. And I hope this gets out there. If it tickles somebody they take off and want to work on the next phase of the human economy. That would be terrific. And, and otherwise, probably get a transcription of this and add it to my sort of contents pile and kind of see what I can do with this to try to get that message out to somebody that does want to do that.

Misbah  53:11

1I love what you’re doing. I really appreciate just the intellect and thoughtfulness you brought to today. Where can you kind of keep up with what you’re up to? You mentioned you have a website and all that. What is that for people who are listening and also make sure to link it up in the description?

Noah  53:29

Yeah, sure. So the website is cord disk.com. That’s C O R di SC, coordinated discovery. I say I’m not on social media, but I am on LinkedIn. I’m Noah Healy on LinkedIn. I’m the oldest Noah Healy, according to Google. So most of the new elites are me out there on the internet.

Misbah  53:49

That’s an advantage there.

Noah  53:51

That’s right. For a while

Misbah  53:54

I was I love it. Awesome, man. Well, thank you. This was really fun. And I’ll be in touch. And yeah, thank you so much, once again, and I’ll talk to you soon. Great.