Conversations #8 — Mike Elias (Transcript)
Tags: Knowledge, Culture, Truth, Society, Media

NICHOLAS MCCAY: Hello everyone. Welcome to Eclectic Spacewalk “Conversations.” I’m your host Nicholas McCay, and today my guest is Mike Elias, Founder of Idea Markets, which allows the public to establish credibility without relying on corporate media. Welcome to Conversations Mike.

MIKE ELIAS: Thank you very much.

NM: Where were you born?

ME: I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. Known as a flyover state to some, but as a fly-from state to natives. I’m referring of course to Ohio’s long and weird history of being the birthplace of great aviators like Neil Armstrong for example. Neil Armstrong got about as far from Ohio as anybody possibly could and he went back, so I think that says something good about Ohio.

NM: How long were you there for?

ME: I grew up there in the same house until my early teens, and then my family moved to Philadelphia and then Los Angeles. So I’ve kind of lived around. In the second half of my life, I went to college in California at UC Santa Cruz. That’s been the journey. I didn’t grow up as a mover. Then I kind of became one.

NM: What did you want to be when you grow up?

ME: To be completely honest with you, which I was not expecting to do, I wanted to be an airplane. Not a pilot. I wanted to be an airplane. Let’s eliminate the middleman here. So yeah, that was my first aspiration. Then you know, I’ve had a series of deep interests that have kind of changed what that aspiration is. just over time. I have gone through a bunch of things.

NM: Who were your earliest influences?

ME: Well as far as thinkers go, my family is Jewish and agnostic, so I didn’t grow up around any particular religious institution. My dad is a very thoughtful and conversation loving kind of guy, so we would talk about everything. We also enjoyed comedy a lot, and my first philosophical initiations were actually from, I want to say, George Carlin. The great comedian George Carlin. Yeah, so I didn’t really grow up thinking about religion and philosophy all that much. Though I preface it by saying I didn’t really have any pressure to either. Then I saw George Carlin when I was maybe 12 and thought: “You know what? Religion doesn’t make sense.” So, my first philosophical inclinations were becoming an atheist. Taking a position on that from George Carlin. And my dad also happened to be an atheist, so we could kind of you know riff on that. Lots of conversation ensued.

NM: How have your influences evolved over time?

ME: I owe the man(George Carlin) eternal gratitude just as an early influence. In a way he’ll always be a part of me and I’ll always appreciate that. My influences, in a more mature sense, have definitely evolved a lot since then. I was rather an annoying type of atheist for the next, you know, five or six years. Before it was cool. I’ll say that. It wasn’t a thing yet. There was no euphoria yet. It was just regular annoyingness.

There were things I wanted to figure out. I got shot down by a girl that I had a crush on when I was about 13. I went, “You know, that was not pleasant. I I want the future to go better.” So, I went online and found the early germ of what eventually became the seduction community and learned about how psychology of romance, attraction, and relationships work. I quickly found that the more superficial answers to that question were about as satisfying as they were transformative — which is not at all. If you just ask for a pick-up line, you might be able to seem cool for a second, but then you can’t back it up and nothing ever works. That frustration becomes the new frustration. Then the question becomes “What does being a good man entail?” and “Can I be that? etc.”

The questions got much deeper in a psychological sense, and that eventually led me to spirituality which I did not intend to find at all. But, I started meditating and studying consciousness, and just realizing, in the context of being a good man that people can pick up on the most minute and infinitesimal details of your vibe. If it’s not unconsciously competent, if it’s not unconsciously cultivated, you’re going to have a bad time.

NM: Carl Jung talks about that a lot in his archetypes. Thinking critically asking yourself and asking, “What does it take to be a good person?” “What does it take to be a good steward of information?” Asking those types of questions are half the battle.

ME: Sure. It’s definitely not, you know, socially encouraged all too much, but any case I wanted to tie this together. In order to handle the unconscious things that sort of come out and get built into your vibe in a way that you can’t control and consciously steer is a deep kind of emanation that is a result of a totality of your being. It’s basically the opposite of a pick-up line. As I saw, you had Vinay Gupta on here. I know he knows about that. So without any intention of doing so, I’ve started having synchronicities, meditating, and studying Consciousness. Studying “What is the Self,” and all that stuff. And, I started to have spiritual experiences in meditation that were just the most real of the real. I don’t care what the truth is, I just want to know what it is.

NM: The contents don’t necessarily matter. It’s just that we’re moving towards it.

ME: Yes, and that was the key that unlocked my death grip on atheism, and you know unlocked just a torrent that would reverse my position completely. So, I’ve had this great fortune to be on both ends of this extreme spectrum about a very intense topic. That’s a big part of my intellectual maturation.

NM: Is meditation a continual thing that you keep up with even now? Or have you experienced other types of altered brain stated with the aid of psychedelics?

ME: I don’t have much experience with psychedelics, but meditation has always been extremely rewarding. More recently, it’s taken some different forms, but unlocks things that are inaccessible otherwise.

NM: If we go back a little bit to when you’re at UC Santa Cruz. What were you studying? What happened after graduation up until now?

ME: Well, I didn’t really want to go to college. The proposition didn’t make sense, but my parents always wanted me to and blah blah blah. It was kind of the easy thing to do. I actually dropped out immediately, and then went back, and dropped out again, and then went back. It’s all kind of long and convoluted. I’ve always been sure that I shouldn’t go to college, and I had trouble following through on that conviction on a permanent basis. Let’s put it that way. I studied philosophy because I had a head start. I’ve been working on problems that philosophy deals with for some years before hand. I figured I can just kind of skate. I was aided by my background. Let’s put it that way. That’s sort of the the course that I took through it.

NM: How long have you been here in Los Angeles?

ME: My family’s been here for about 10 years. I’ve been here off and on, as I would skip from here to Santa Cruz, to China, and otther places like. I’ve kind of hopped around, but my family’s base has been in LA for about that time and we’re here now.

NM: What are you working on now aside from Idea Markets?

ME: Business Development. I work for a company called Global Liquidity and the founder was one of the pioneers of what came to be called: high frequency trading on Wall Street; and he’s built a tool that allows order books and other trading data to be visualized in real time, in 3D. So instead of looking at traditional trading interfaces that looks like Binance, or Coinbase, or Bloomberg terminal that all feel kind of like dealing with spreadsheets or doing your taxes and it’s all very foreboding with a kind of ivory tower barrier about it.

So, what James, the founder of Global Liquidity, has built is a 3D framework for rendering live data in 3D, so that it looks and feels more like Guitar Hero. Not only is it much friendlier and sort of dopamine inducing for lay people who’ve never seen such a thing, but it gives you an entire dimension more of information immediately. When you take an order book, a two-dimensional order book, which shows this instance order structure, the buys and sells in the quantities of each, and they flash and change about every second and so you can see what’s going on right now. You’re looking at two dimensions of data in kind of a confusing way. When you look at this in 3D, and I brought my laptop so I can show you, you can see how the order book evolves. The front row is equivalent to this layer, but then it also shows maybe 60 layers or rows back, so you have a history of the order book and how orders are being placed and removed. You can see at a microscopic level what traders, algorithmic bots, and exchanges are doing.

NM: Very interesting. It’s not necessarily like a you have a regular X-Y axis, and then the Z-axis when you usually model data in 3D. But, it’s more like you’re taking that two dimensional data of the order book and putting it in a different kind user experience interface that is more in depth?

ME: You are taking data and visualizing it with a z-axis. The labels are different from what you would expect. The labels of the axes are different than in a two-dimensional chart. What you’re able to see with that is the context behind a two-dimensional order book which compared to it doesn’t really have as much utility as you might think by its prevalence.

NM: A quick aside. The stock market was just again at an all-time high, and as you know ~3% of Americans own stocks. It’s such a small percentage. We just talked about ivory towers. How do you feel about working in such a highly prestigious kind of industry such as the stock market?

ME: Well our mission is to undo that trend, and to cross the chasm from experts who are the nerds who go: “Binance. I’m totally going to learn how to use that.” Then take it to the 4 billion gamers around the world, put it in a web browser on their mobile device, so they can sit there and just use their thumbs to trade. It’s allowing retail traders to have the same access to markets as institutions, and the same power to execute trades as institutions, but with the ease of a video game and the accessibility and comprehensibility of a video game. The goal is to reverse the current way of thinking entirely.

NM: Is it gamification of the trading that makes it so easy?

ME: If I’m gonna nitpick, and I will, the answer is no. What I understand of gamification is it’s kind of about stratification, levels, and getting people to progress in a thing. Maybe I’m misunderstanding. That’s the connotation that I get, but in terms of making a thing that is less game-like into something that is more game-like, then absolutely that’s the goal.

NM: What kind of the success have you had so far?

ME: We got funded in November 2018 by Block Tower and Ari Paul. Since then we’ve built a 3D order book that shows all the trading pairs on the 16 top exchanges. It can embed in a website extremely easily with just an iframe, and the framework underlying all that is open source as well. So, if you want to graph social sentiment data, or network data, or blockchain transaction data. Or, if you want to do trading data in a different way that’s all available for the world. It’s for anybody to use and create 3D views like this.

NM: Is the stock market just your first use case?

ME: So, I should have been clearer at the beginning. Our first foray is actually in the crypto markets only. When I say the top 16 exchanges, I mean Binance, Coinbase, and that kind of thing. So, we don’t have anything plugged into the stock market yet, though we could easily do so. All we would need is a developer to go code it. There’s been a lot of interest in doing that, but we aren’t going to dedicate the resources ourselves at this moment.

NM: Did you have any background in crypto currency before?

ME: My interesting crypto story came as a kind of a lucky break. I’ve known for a long time that I’ve wanted to work remotely and just be able to make a living from a laptop, and I’m not a coder. So, I did some freelance executive assistant, operations manager and operations consultant type work. One of the first gigs that I got was with an ICO, during the summer of 2017 .

NM: In the bubble?

ME: In the pre-bubble, the summer bubble, the little bubble. So yeah, it was with an ICO company called HealthChain, the founders were Stanford faculty in the Psychiatry department and we we’re creating basically EMR (electronic medical records) on the blockchain.

Anyway, that’s an enormous catastrophe and a mess. Not the ICO, but the situation is a mess because you look at the chart and you see, you know, cost of doctors goes like this (up), cost of administration goes like this (down) because all the redundant records and everything. Anyway, that was their mission: to raise money on an ICO to do EMR in the blockchain. Which they already had basically all the software for. The devs were excellent. So, I became intimately familiar with the industry.

Then I was in charge of a lot of their fundraising, marketing, and things like that. When the atmosphere of the crypto markets and the investment markets sort of outpaced the founder’s comfort level to the point they were in their lives, they had a budding family and other practices that they couldn’t detach themselves from in time and things like that. Just a different kind of set of priorities. I couldn’t keep up with the extremely fast-paced crypto markets. The bar for ICO investment went like this (exponential). It used to be a white paper and a big name. Then it became a white paper, a big name, and a product. Then it became a white paper, a big name, a product, and traction. Like it went like this (hold hands up diagonally). It just skyrocketed. We started when the bar was down here (lower), and didn’t executed on enough by the time the bar was up here (higher). So I parted ways with them, but wanted to stay in the industry because the technology and the spirit of it are really fascinating and energizing to me.

NM: Who are your favorite philosophers?

ME: I have a variety of favorites. I hope most philosophy fans would. Some favorites are William James, who was not only a great philosopher but one of the founding fathers of psychology. His influence in America was on a similar level to that of Freud, and he’s perhaps less of caricature than Freud. But, he had absolutely monstrous contributions, and his philosophy was likely informed by that. I’m referring particularly to pragmatism, and the idea that the value of an idea is in terms of its effects. How useful it is. So that’s an epistemic leaning that is different from straight empirical science, and yet yields access to things that empirical science doesn’t really have a reference frame for. That’s a very light intro to why I like William James. I also like Wittgenstein. I would also say Hagel, though I have to confess, I haven’t really read Hegel. I’m just a big fan of the Hegelian Dialectic of: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis as a model for looking at the world and at various phenomena. We can go into more detail about any of those later.

NM: Heuristics are shortcuts in seeing things in different ways. Do you have any other heuristics that stand out to you, that you use, or love to talk about?

ME: I absolutely do, and I’m sure I’ll remember most of them as soon as we’re done. However, I’ll start with the the Hegelian Dialectic which is a useful filter for controversy. When there are two sides fighting in an intractable manner there tends to be some way in which the strengths of each side can be resolved, and the weaknesses of each side are both eliminated. That’s the thesis, antithesis, synthesis. We have the thesis and the antithesis kind of fighting. Then there is a way of proposing a solution, or of configuring the conversation so that the strong points of each side remain and can co-exist while the weak points lose their influence.

NM: Sounds like a lot like a non-zero-sum game.

ME: Yes. When there is a perpetual debate and controversy playing the same notes over and over it tends to be because the framing of the debate is inadequate to allow for the exploration of nuance or the articulation of a resolution. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a resolution. It doesn’t mean that we’re not capable of coming up with one and having a consensus. It’s just a stuck point. You can’t necessarily replicate philosophical insight on a mass scale.

But the existence of the Hegelian dialectic and the successes I’ve repeatedly seen personally gives me eternal optimism that any protracted debate, within oneself or on a societal scale, has a resolution and a way of moving forward in a productive way. That you can have it all. Both sides can be happy.

It’s a third dimension. The analogy I like to use is it’s like a bicycle. When you’re learning to ride a bike, if you’re going real slow, it’s easy to fall to the left or fall to the right. But, if you go straight then neither happens. There is a direction in which a conversation can move that has neither the pitfalls of the one side or the other. All that’s necessary is for both sides to go in that direction. That’s easier said than done, but I find that framework to be a helpful heuristic when looking at controversy.

NM: Do you believe the Hegelian dialectic is a uniquely human thing?

ME: I think the Hegelian dialectic is part of the physics of ideas. I mean that in exactly as abstract a way as that sounds…The end.

NM: Do you see this kind of dialectical way of thinking more, now that you are aware of it?

ME: Yes. I absolutely do. One of the easier examples because it has a large time scale, and always a hot topic, is cultural views on sex. The history of recorded history tends to be religion dictating views on sex. Being oppressive, and saying: “It’s basically bad. Don’t do it. It’s bad.” Modern culture has rebelled against that, and said, “No. It’s good! Free love, biology, etc, etc. There’s an antithesis there. What a lot of people are realizing now is that there are consequences to unbridled sexuality.

It’s not that pleasure is bad, or that sex is bad, or that it is inherently sinful or anything like that. But, what it is fundamentally, sinful or good, is powerful. When you have something powerful, you have to treat it with the respect, discipline, and the right relationship to it that it deserves. That relationship is neither total excessive oppression or excessive expression. So, an approach to sexuality that involves discipline is emerging, in some subcultures and particularly online and whatnot. I’m a big fan of that because it is the right one after a very long, you know, social battle between two extremes. A disciplined, deliberate, and conscious approach to sexuality could potentially solve every human problem. Literally every single one.

NM: What are your ideas on pendulum swings? Not alway in the middle I assume?

ME: When pendulum swing repeatedly, it might be a pretty good sign that the middle is not where to go, or it would have been obvious. Also, a lot of things are not really measurable on a spectrum. I don’t want to digress too much, but in general, I like the sexuality example of the Hegelian Dialectic because it’s so clear and useful. But, the answer is no. It’s not necessarily in the middle. Whatever that might seem.

NM: What exactly is a narrative? And what is the difference between a narrative and a fiat narrative?

ME: What is a narrative? That’s a little abstract even for me, but I will concede that in order for a culture to kind of hang together we all kind of have to agree on what world we live in. Just a vague definition of reality. When I think of a narrative in a kind of vague all-encompassing way, I think that’s what I’m referring to. Just a story with a general social consensus, which if you agree, you might be perceived as the same. Like we can argue whether we live in a fascist state, or an anti-state, or whatever. We can argue that to the ends of the earth, but if I say we live on Venus — that’s not a narrative that’s going to garner a lot of consensus. So, when I say narrative, I think the main function is just to have some sort of starting place socially.

NM: On your site it says, “Centralized media institutions create ‘fiat narratives’ by forcing self-serving interpretations of reality on the public in the same way that fiat currencies are valuable only because governments say they are. Fiat narratives are true only because media corporations say they are so.” Can you explain more?

ME: I can’t take credit for the term because Been Hunt of Epsilon Theory is the one came up with it first. I thought I had come up with it, but someone helpfully informed me that there was someone even cleverer than I. Fiat the word, is Latin for, “Let There Be.” Seen at a lot of colleges is Fiat Lux, “Let there be light.” When you’re saying: “Let there be money.” You are saying, “fiat money.” That’s where it comes from. Fiat narratives. Let this be true. That’s what they’re saying. It’s truth by declaration rather than by rigor or something like that. Thats whats meant by Fiat narratives.

NM: Let’s go through some examples from your website. “Media corporations have near limitless power to enforce fiat narratives, and are using tactics like these: limiting the scope of discussion.” Like Democrat versus Republican. Putting two people or two sides against each other when there’s no third or fourth option, or there is no Nuance.

ME: One way to perpetuate or keep alive a narrative that doesn’t make sense under scrutiny is to allow people to sort of vent outrage at each other in a cyclical manner. It doesn’t matter what the answer is if you’re asking the wrong question. This is a tactic corporate media use to perpetuate a narrative that they would like to be true. By fiat. By declaration. By preventing the right answer from being an option on the table. Just preventing satisfaction by limiting the scope of discussion. A totalitarian way of perpetuating a fiat narrative is China and their great fire wall. The Chinese government wants you to believe X. Well, we’re just going to let you read about not X. It’s pretty simple and straightforward.

NM: From the abstract to the more specific, distributing air time is another example of fiat narrative influence. $4 billion of free air time went to Donald Trump in 2016. Maybe that had an influence on his winning the election? Just maybe?

ME: There’s a famous quote by Les Moonves, the then CEO of CBS, I’ll bet you remember this as a journalist. He said, “Donald Trump may not be good for America, but he sure is good for CBS.” That might not be verbatim, but it’s close. It’s close. It illustrates the broken incentive mechanisms that corporate media have in terms of doing its duty to inform the electorate.

NM: Other examples are sponsoring of entertainment and media. The NFL playoffs are in full swing with their huge patronage in terms of nationalism and showing jets flying over, etcetera. Also, the CIA’s history of involvement in media. Like directly overseeing copy, scripting, and artistic decisions in films like The Hurt Locker & Zero Dark Thirty.

ME: Yes, the involvement of government agencies like the CIA like the Department of Defense is another. For example they lent the Navy’s planes to Top Gun in order to help them shoot the movie. The military is often involved in the production of military movies. I bet it’s more difficult to DIY an F-14 on an aircraft carrier. I bet that’s true. That’s one way that the government allows media to exist that it can sort of steer, or approve of, or have some kind of message control on.

Also, the New York Times has a pre-approval process, the CIA pre-approval process, that when sharing something important with the public they run it by the CIA for “National Security” concerns. But, The Constitution doesn’t say, “We will not inhibit the freedom of the press for National Security.” It says, “We will not inhibit the freedom of the press.”

So there have been constitutional, absolutely fundamental, breaches of what media is supposed to be and do for America and the world. Government agencies are involved in all these sneaky ways. I believe it was Bernstein of Woodward & Bernstein, the Watergate guys, who wrote a fantastic expose on the CIA’s involvement in the media that’s readily available online. I can send you the link.

NM: The Panama Papers are a recent incarnation showing how government, celebrities, and others having hundreds of billions of wealth offshore in tax havens. These papers come out, and it’s news for a day, then “whomp, whomp” nothing happens.

ME: The Afghanistan papers recently, as well. Yes, much more recent, and much quicker into the “Womp, Womp” zone. Very telling, I guess you could say.

NM: Whistleblowers in general are interesting. You think of Chelsea Manning with the cables to Julian Assange that then is published by Wikileaks. We have all of this corruption at the highest of levels in the Drone program, including Obama. Literally killing a United States citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16 yeas old son. That’s insane, but the media kind of positions the mainstream narrative of how that’s okay and it’s not insane. The mainstream narrative then becomes that war, murder, and corruption are all totally sane, logical, and rational. Or any mainstream American narrative about current tensions with Iran.

So, the whistleblowers are just very interesting because they throw a wrench in everything. But, if you fight the power the power fights back. You’ve seen the treatment of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, so then that’s why you might not see more people whistleblow. You can name them all: Thomas Drake from the NSA, Snowden, etc. They’ve been vilified by the exact media that should be the people pushing for more whistleblowers to come out.

ME: Given that it’s winter in Russia…’He’s probably snowed in.’

*Ba dum tss* — #NailedIt

NM: (Laughs) I’ll give you two snaps for that…all right.

NM: Moving on to the two other examples of fiat narratives. The first of the two is scripting local news on a national scale.

ME: Yes. There was a viral video that Illustrated this very cleverly not too long ago, and it still makes the airwaves — pun intended — now and then. It ends with you know about a hundred local journalists saying, “This is a big threat to democracy. This is extremely dangerous for democracy.” They say the same phrase into the camera synchronized: “This is extremely dangerous for democracy!” It’s orchestrated (the editing of the mashup video), so that you can see the sort of strings being pulled that create a uniform word-for-word narrative that’s being delivered in a extremely centralized way. And THAT is “extremely dangerous to democracy.”

NM: Another example is just picking what goes on the air. As a former journalist in local news, to clue people in, usually every morning you have a standup or editorial meeting where the reporters come in and say what they’re pitching or working on, either for that day, or the future. Then the news director and the producers dictate what stories you and your colleagues will be covering. How much power does the New York Times, “the paper of record,” still have? How much power does a local news station have?

ME: It’s hard to quantify and that’s the problem. That’s one of the problems that Idea Markets aims to fix.

NM: We were talking off air about the success of the Tobacco Strategy, the film Merchants of Doubt, and how scientists were paid large sums of money from tobacco companies to muddy the scientific waters, if you will, with dubious claims of safety and easily debunked research that concluded stuff like, “Smoking doesn’t kill.” Now those same tactics, and some of the same literal people, are on the forefront of the climate change denial issue muddying the waters. Propaganda is usually thought of as what Stalin did, or back in history sometime ago, but, propaganda is very subtle nowadays in terms of targeted advertising in digital networks such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. Let’s riff on how propaganda influences these networks.

ME: Have you heard the name Edward Bernays?

NM: Yes.

ME: Edward Bernays is Sigmund Freud’s nephew, which you know, but I’m saying just in case anybody hasn’t heard yet. He pioneered the field of public relations about a hundred years ago. He used Freud’s theories about ‘the unconscious’ to help institutions shape public narratives. The word propaganda already had kind of a ‘ickey’ connotation, so they called it public relations. That’s an industry that still exists, and is probably not the only instance of itself. But in any case, we have a very long tradition of controlling the narrative on an Institutional scale. We’re only getting better at it.

Especially now that we can have targeted advertising, filter bubbles, and algorithms that not only are closed source, but a lot of people don’t really care about you having fun on Facebook. Why would you look under the hood? Do you know the technical tools to do so? The power of propagandists has increased with the power of anybody to access information. Who was it in 1985, he wrote ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death”?

NM: Neil Postman. One the best. That was a prophetic book. Oh my goodness.

ME: Yes. Aldous Huxley who said, or maybe it wasn’t Huxley. Anyway, somebody said: “There’s no need to really combat the truth. You just drown it in a sea of irrelevance.” That’s one of the frequent tactics that that’s employed now. It’s very easy to get a quick dopamine hit. It’s very easy to spark outrage, and to kind of circumvent the critical faculties. Not only is it easy to do that, its profitable! One of the main ways propaganda propagates is just by pushing the buttons and cashing in on what we can’t resist. People, individuals, have no antibodies necessarily. It takes a great deal of effort, discipline, and a great deal more than most people have the luxury of developing.

If people are just trying to survive, or you don’t want to check Facebook on their smoke break to get a laugh or whatever, they don’t have an arsenal to go up against an arsenal of propaganda powered by modern technology that exists to exploit and deceive them.

So, it’s not really the public’s fault that we are in the state we are in. It’s a matter of who has power. What it’s being used and for what reason.

NM: I hope that we will be inoculating ourselves with more antibodies. We may be living through an epistemic crisis, or maybe we’re past the crisis and now in the revolution?

ME: We are noticing the crisis now, and the crisis is we haven’t really left the age of Galileo in terms of public knowledge. In Galileo’s time of course, the Catholic Church basically decided what everybody believed. When Galileo said, contrariwise, his voice was suppressed and he was made to recant it, etcetera. The top-down power structure of narrative creation persists to this day. Science was very much inspired by Galileo’s strategy of epistemology and observing things, but narrative propagation on a more global and society wide-scale has not changed at all.

We are experiencing the effects of that, and the inability of a centralized authoritative epistemology to adequately handle the nuances of the information age.

The internet has been a tool for the realization of this, yes. As people rely less on corporate media, which despite its deceptive practices has historically had sort of unifying effect relative to now, they are able to do research on their own and congregate into groups that share their beliefs.

There’s been this two-sided, double-edged sword evolution where people have more independent ability to research and less reliance on a centralized media agency, and at the same time less capacity for a unifying narrative.

NM: Your website, IdeaMarket.com, says it, “aims to change the incentive landscape for creating common knowledge.” Can you talk more about the importance of common knowledge, and why is it needed now more than ever?

ME: Historically the best knowledge has never overlapped with common knowledge. Great knowledge and common knowledge have always been mutually exclusive, and that’s not necessary anymore. We have the technology for that to not be true anymore, and we haven’t taken advantage of it. There was no need to be told what to believe, policed, moderated, or mediated between like there was before the internet.

For hundreds of years, a journalist who went to school, trained, and paid their dues by coming up through the ranks of an organization was trusted by industry and the population to be a mediator between the edges of reality and firsthand sources on important stories. To mediate between all of that and the information consumer mainstream journalism was perhaps the most efficient way to handle that problem. Now, it’s not only outdated, it’s inadequate to the challenges of the information age.

NM: How did Idea Market come to fruition?

ME: I don’t remember exactly how it started, but I know I was relatively new to crypto. I had just started to learn to use exchanges, trade, and stuff. I was thinking about the incentives involved, and how the markets were basically a measure of confidence. And, if you were right, you made money, and if you were wrong, you lost money. This seemed like an excellent way to sort knowledge in general.

I began to try to figure out how using exchanges, markets, and trading venues one could represent the components of human knowledge in some way. It’s to introduce those same sorts of incentives without interference by a centralized body. Just people competing to curate what we already know. What somebody already knows because, as I said, the best knowledge tends to never overlap with the common knowledge. So, if there’s some freak in Tahiti who has figured out in his basement how to cure cancer, fifty years ago, there’s not really a means by which we would know that.

This is us at a human survival level issue. We have the technology to access the best knowledge, in a way that can be trusted to be organic in a way that centralized control of media and narratives cannot be trusted, and it is time for us to use it.

NM: I saw a quote on your website, “Success is achieved not when lies disappear forever, but when the trend reverses from a competition to exploit, terrorize, and divide the public to a competition to serve, inspire, and unite it.” What does success and failure look like for Idea Market?

ME: Idea Markets changes the incentives of common knowledge creation. Right now, if you’re a media corporation, which in itself is kind of an anachronism, you have Media (holds up left hand) & Corporation (holds up right hand). Well, which one is it? Are you trying to inform? Or are you trying to profit? Just the existence of such a thing as a media corporation is its own comment. So, in order for media corporations to profit they have to do the things that result in retaining viewers. That often means encouraging polarization because if you don’t trust anyone else you’re not going to leave. Encouraging outrage because if you’re provoked you’re going to pay attention, even if it’s negative attention. Fear.

They use human psychological vulnerabilities to extract attention from us. We are basically being farmed by corporations that have access to our attention, or profit from our attention. The incentives there are to divide people so that they won’t leave, to freak them out so that they won’t turn it off, and to upset them so that they pay attention, etc. That’s the direction that public knowledge is going, and the results of this — the effects of this — are readily apparent to literally everybody. There’s not a baby born in Iraq that doesn’t know there’s a problem.

What Idea Market does is it requires narratives to be backed by financial risk. It doesn’t outright prohibit you from purchasing a high rank on the market, and creating the appearance that you are well trusted. However, publishers that earn trust, and earn this investment organically, get that promotion for free. The more people participate then the more it becomes increasingly expensive, prohibitively expensive, to fake that level of trust. As corporate media’s attention worthiness not only continues to lag, but is registered on this first global dashboard of what people really believe, they will be forced to either ignore the game or play it right. If they ignore the game, they’ll simply be left out, and if they play it they will have to organically earn public trust.

NM: How do you quantify “organically earned public trust”?

ME: In terms of quantifying trust, what we’re really quantifying is credibility. The way Idea Market allows that to occur is by inviting people to buy tokens that represent a publisher, NewYorkTimes.com, FoxNews.com, InfoWars.com, Wikileaks.org, etc., in order to signal confidence.

In the same way that the stock market exists so that the public can signal confidence in a company’s future profitability; Idea Market is a decentralized market place that allows people to signal public confidence in a publisher’s attention worthiness.

That’s the metaphor, and the translation that’s being done there. In terms of measuring credibility, its measured in risk. How much people have put into this to say, “I bet that if more people see this, then even more people than that will agree that even more people than that will want to see this. A purchase on Idea Market is a wager on the attention worthiness relative to everything else in the market of a publisher. If a corporation wants to compete with that, then they will have to not only earn public trust compared to nothing, but they’ll have to earn it compared to any other potential choice the public might have.

The way I would recommend that they do that is by scouting the hot, small publications and absorbing their narratives, entertaining their theses and evidence, and bringing them into the conversation. Because without taking on the investigative qualities of the publishers that are earning trust organically there will be no way for a media corporation to continue to deserve trust.

NM: Why did you decide to run Idea Market on the Ethereum blockchain protocol?

ME: Yes, we’re running on the Ethereum blockchain and Maker’s DAI for the currency. We use RDIA which is an adaptation of DAI that allows tokens to earn interest because they are plugged into Compound. Compound is a decentralized lending platform where people can take out collateralized loans, using crypto currency, trustlessly.

When you make a purchase on Idea Market, the money that you spend to get a token, representing your purchase, is deposited and held into a compound smart contract. So, people can take out loans against it, and that money that you just spent in idea Market earns interest. Idea Market then distributes that interest on your money disproportionately to market winners.

NM: Incentives on every layer.

ME: The purpose of that is so top publications have an incentive case for the long term. If something’s at the top, it’s not necessarily just going to go down. There’s a reason that something might persist over time, and if it does it will benefit from the interest on deposits made by everybody else. There is a possibility for blue chips to emerge. It’s not necessarily going to be a constant cycling.

NM: You make a point to mention that, “publications are impossible to remove from the list (Idea Market).” Can you talk more about why you made that decision, in the context of centralization versus decentralization?

ME: A centralized entity is one that has a specific set of servers, a specific set of buildings, or relies on a specific company which can be shut down. If the government says, “New York Times, we don’t like you anymore. Shut off your servers Amazon or whatever. They can do that.” There’s a vulnerability there. A single point of failure. Most institutions and organizations are centralized in some way, it’s just the way it’s had to be up until recently.

The way a decentralized network works, like Bitcoin or Ethereum on which idea Market runs, is instead of having centralized servers that somebody can shut down; the network runs simultaneously on thousands, or millions, of independently owned computers around the world. Those networks belong to people who live in different countries, work for different companies, are citizens to different governments, and all have different interests.

If China says no more cryptocurrency, Switzerland might say, “You know what? We like it. We’re going to keep it.” So, there’s no governmental decree by which you can shut down a decentralized network. I’m going to spoil the end, but if you’ve read all the Harry Potter books Voldemort maintains his life or stays alive by putting his soul into Horcruxes. Into different objects and spreading them across the ends of the Earth. As long as one of those stays alive then he’s basically fine. Ethereum, Bitcoin, and other decentralized networks basically work like that. It’s basically a horcrux system. In order to take it down you have to take them all down. And there are a lot, and they belong to a lot of different people.

Where as one country might see it as a threat, another might see it as an opportunity. Even though one country might want you to stop, another country is going to want to continue, so there’s not going to be a single point of failure that some government can just say, “You know what? Enough of you!”

NM: We have talked about public narratives being decided by private interests as the main thesis of our epistemic crisis. On your website, you say “When we seek narratives, we naturally seek authority. When seeking Investments, we naturally seek value. Therefore, the best way to choose public narratives is with investment.” Is it just “Skin in the Game”?

ME: A hundred percent. I haven’t read Skin in the Game, but I’m very much inspired by quotes from it.

ME: In terms of seeking authority naturally, the way society has been organized until now, especially in the last hundred or so years, is if the New York Times says it, then I can’t be blamed for believing it because the New York Times said it. When we seek authority it’s not because we’re weak sheep. It’s because we want to be able to talk to someone at work. It’s a basic functioning fabric of society. It is not a bug, but a feature, that we naturally seek authority. We want to hold everything together, and be able to function communicate with our fellow man. That has been a large part of the power that media corporations have had in playing that necessary role of mediating between the world and the consumer. It’s also created a medium for the consumer to relate to each other. If you believe Bob.WordPress.com more than you believe the New York Times, if that was a thing in 1975, you’d be a crackpot. A lot of people still are, I’m a proud one. There’s a function to seeking authority, and it’s a sort of social cohesion. The problem though is that the social cohesion is being manufactured by corporations.

NM: Markets have not exactly had the best success record in dealing with the most pressing issues of our time. Thinking of climate change and externalities as the best example. I applaud you for critiquing your own idea, understanding how Idea Market could possibly be used in a negative, immoral, or unethical way, and asking the community for collaboration in this regard,

“Idea Market can be implemented with abusive motives, so it seems extremely important to require certain criteria to protect against this list. What should they be?” You had some ideas: “sensible,” “transparent,” “audible,” “simple,” and someone else threw in “decentralized” and “properly incentivized” which we’ve kind of covered.

So, why a market?

ME: I’d like to roll it back a little bit before I get into that. That is to say, I mentioned tying credibility to visibility with Idea Market. It’s not just another Reddit, another front page of the internet where people are going to go and be entertained or whatever. It’s actually the back end of a new way of monitoring and filtering the information and attention economy.

The first way it’s going to do that is by eliminating fake news, corporate and otherwise. The way it’s going to do that is with a browser extension. A user has the ability to set the filter on whatever level, so when you look at Idea Market and you see the top 10, or other publications of your choice, you can have a browser extension that only shows you stuff from those top 10 or your other choices. The first version that we’re going to release is simply going to insert the Idea Market rank, or market capitalization, next to every link that you see. While surfing the web you will see a Wikileaks URL link, and then an Idea Market’s rank showing Wikileaks is number 2 or something on your list will appear. You kind of have a reference point for how much the public trusts the publisher, whose link you’re being invited to read. So, by extension fake news becomes extremely expensive.

NM: Over time, the ROI on fake news goes down and public trust goes up?

ME: Yes. As the market winners of Idea Market have larger capitalizations, they raise the threshold of credibility — as measured in risk for everyone involved. If the 100th publication has a million dollar market cap, then in order to be even remotely credible you have to spend a million dollars, or you have to earn trust so that people invest a million dollars and expected you to be attention worthy.

NM: What are your future plans with Idea Market?

ME: I’ve got a secret plan. What I will tell you is I would like to open source the protocol itself, so that it can be used to curate other things using markets like scientific papers, patents, and products so that fake reviews don’t matter so much. Anything really. Any category of thing that needs curation, but I think scientific papers is among the most important.

NM: I ask every guest the same question. One of the biggest heuristics, or modalities of thinking that we prescribe to is, “The Overview Effect” when astronauts look at the Earth from space. If you were up on the space station, or the moon, and the entire world was looking up at you, what would you say?

ME: Big responsibility.

NM: I know, that’s why I put it up to you. I think everyone has a subjective, awe-inspiring viewpoint of our reality. Every single person, from a boy in Bangladesh to a girl in France to a mother in Argentina, all of them have something to say about this reality or the human experience.

ME: Look up Karezza. K-A-R-E-Z-Z-A. Look it up.

NM: Karezza. Okay. Well, thanks for coming on eclectic spacewalk conversations Mike. I really appreciate it. Until next time, Ad Astra!