Mindset: Turning Vulnerability into Strength with Mike Skrypnek

[00:00:00] Ray D: Welcome everyone. I just wanna thank you all for listening to the show and supporting our growth over the years. I specifically want to give thanks to our super cast subscribers who have been so kind as to provide monthly financial contributions to keep health on chain going. Some of you are longtime listeners, others are hearing my voice for the first time.

[00:00:19] Ray D: Either way. If you find these conversations valuable and would like to continue listening, add free, I encourage you to check out our super cast subscription page in the show notes where you can become members of the health and chain community. As my listeners know, I am obsessed with the intersection of healthcare and blockchain, and I will continue to create high quality content that can help you navigate this strange and often confusing new.

[00:00:43] Ray D: Ultimately, our hope is that all healthcare stakeholders will benefit from the unique capabilities that decentralized networks can offer. The more people that believe in the potential of these technologies, the sooner we'll be able to break free from our existing broken systems and adopt a more peer to peer trusted, decentralized healthcare system.

[00:01:00] Ray D: One of the most important and challenging components of decentralized networks in general is ensuring credibility of participants in the network. You may have heard of digital identities or self sovereign identities. These concepts are super difficult to implement and scale. Many teams, organizations, and countries are working to build models that individuals can use to prove who they are.

[00:01:22] Ray D: This is especially true in the decentralized science space where we need to be able to trust the scientists and the data that they generate. In today's episode, I speak with Mike Sin, who's a libertarian software engineer at K. Which is an open source community owned platform for precision health, and with Mike Elias, who built an interesting credibility layer of the internet called Idea market.io.

[00:01:44] Ray D: Together the Mikes and I discuss some of the opportunities and challenges in the next wave of the internet, often called Web three. We also talk about the future of clinical trials and their own experiences with health and wellness. I really enjoyed this episode and I hope you all do too. Remember, the Health on Chain podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and we are not providing any sort of legal, financial, or medical advice.

[00:02:05] Ray D: Please do your own research and due diligence before making any important decisions related to these matters. And now let's get to the show.

[00:02:12] john: Welcome to the Health On Chain

[00:02:14] john: Podcast. I have two guests today who are gonna be speaking about how decentralized science and credibility on the internet are really important things and how we can ensure that the future of science and research is supported by people that are saying truthful things essentially.

[00:02:29] john: let me introduce Mike Sin and Mike Elias. Uh, Mike Sin is a engineer at Cure Dow, which you might have heard of before. And Mike Elis is the founder of Idea Market, which you may or may not have heard of before, but it's pretty interesting. They have a token as well called imo which it helps drive the tokens of the platform.

[00:02:49] john: And we're gonna dive deep into what that all means for Desi Healthcare. And, uh, yeah guys, if you wanna quickly introduce yourselves as well, just so the audience has a good idea of who you are as well. You can start with Mike Sin. Hi. Thank you so much for having me, my background's in electrical engineering and kind of industrial root cause failure, AEs and I had a bunch of different diseases like arthritis and psoriasis and depression and anxiety for decades.

[00:03:15] john: And went to a ton of different specialists for each of the different conditions and took probably over 50 different drugs and it was still pretty miserable. So I kind of started applying the same kind of techniques that we used to solve problems for different industries using root cause failure analysis in my lab to figure out what the hell was wrong with me.

[00:03:36] john: So I started recording my diets my treatments and sleep and exercise and everything else I could with lots of different apps and devices. And then with my symptom severity, which varied over time, but I had no idea what were the primary factors exacerbating or improving it on different days.

[00:03:53] john: So after collecting a bunch of data, I just like exported it all the spreadsheets and then combined it and applied pharmacokinetic modeling and kind of causal inference algorithms and identified that there were numerous like factors in my diet that significantly uh, preceded significantly increased or decreased symptoms severity such as lectin intake.

[00:04:13] john: that's in nightshade vegetables, like tomato skins and stuff like that, and gluten intake. And typically they consuming. After about two days resulted in an increased symptoms of severity, and then if I abstain from those, it took about 10 to 14 days before the symptoms would go away.

[00:04:30] john: So due to these lagging and this onset delay I was able to go decades without ever noticing the effects of these components in my diet. And um, Over decades of seeing doctors, not one ever asked me anything about my diet. so there's about a billion people with autoimmune diseases and mental illnesses, which are increasingly shown be influenced by the immune system and thereby the microbiome and diet, yet we eat about A few thousand different chemicals every day in the 3.5 pounds of food in our diet.

[00:04:59] john: there's no like long term research on almost any of them because there's no financial incentive to do research on any given additive the FDA is cleared as generally recognized as safe. Whereas if it's a drug, then you have to spend 10 years and a few hundred million dollars to just take a few milligrams of it.

[00:05:17] john: Yet we get prescribed all of these chemicals every day without our knowledge and without any data. but it's been working on a project to kind of crowd sources research and drive down the cost of identifying the effects of all of these things that we're already doing. then find ways to help, like the billing people that are suffering from a lot of diseases that can be influenced by this.

[00:05:36] john: thank you for sharing that. I think it's important to understand that, look, There is so much data that we are generating every day. There's so many activities, things that we're doing that is not being recorded on our own and we don't really know what's wrong with us.

[00:05:48] john: Sometimes it's really hard to identify that, and I think doctors are not really trained in that way. even like our genetic information is not really part of a typical provider's toolkit. It's really not like they don't look at your genetics before they see you as a PCP or anything like that.

[00:06:04] john: So thanks for sharing that and thanks for doing all that work to get all, that data together and make it make sense as well. And I'm sure now that people can benefit from the work that you've done. Mike Lies. Hi. Yeah, thank you Ray for having me. I felt like that was a great, intro mike to Thanks, prepare to talk about Idea Market two because it seems like one of the large, problems that you're solving is the low hanging fruit of scientific discovery.

[00:06:30] john: That there's so many big breakthroughs that are not actually expensive to realize, not actually expensive to implement and benefit from but are stuck in this place where only a few people who have done the research personally know about it. And there's not really a good channel to scale that knowledge so that the public can benefit um, like if, how, how many, how many lives would be changed if a hundred million people knew exactly what you know about, some of the causal features of, these variables that you're taking into account on cure data.

[00:07:03] john: And that's the gap that Idea Market wants to close. Our mission has always been to build a tool to crowdsource credibility so that we're no longer depending on institutions like media, corporations major scientific for, for profit journals or large institutions like the cdc, fda, W H O, et c. Which not only are very often very slow and administrative, but often wrong, often have conflicting incentives in terms of delivering information that's best for people as opposed to best for drug companies.

[00:07:39] john: And I'm not trying to, start political debates about corruption or anything like that, but I, sense a lot of frustration in the general public about the huge gap between the best information in the world and the information that gets called common knowledge and the best information that gets legitimized.

[00:07:55] john: So what Idea Market wants to do is create alternate pathways for the world's best information to reach legitimacy in the public sphere faster. And the way we're doing that is we built a social network that allows you to post short statements, kind of like tweets, and then everyone can rate. Those statements to express their agreement on a scale of zero to a hundred.

[00:08:17] john: So if we take a discovery of Mike's or, from Kdo that might really help people and just phrase that as a statement and then also link to the research that Mike has done and have this little post. And then we can get experts in the field or even merely influencers who have the social power to draw attention to a thing and give legitimacy to a thing.

[00:08:36] john: If we can get enough of those kinds of people to express positive opinions on record, on shame about this kind of finding. provides an initial batch of social capital, reason for trust and deeper investigation that can be assembled in a, day or a week. And we don't have to go through all the wga role of institutional cooperation.

[00:08:56] john: Does that make sense? It does make sense. And I just wanna use an example. So let's say part of Mike's research or part of Cure do, or whoever ends up discovering this idea, Let's say broccoli cures colon cancer. Let's say if you eat a ton of broccoli, someone is claiming that it cure colon cancer.

[00:09:12] john: So I'm gonna put that on idea mark. I'm gonna post it, and then I'm gonna wait for people to either agree or disagree with me. I'm gonna put my citations, any research I've done, any evidence or data or proof that I think argues my point and, and just see what happens. So it's kind of interesting because this is sort of what happens over a long term period of time in science in general, right?

[00:09:36] john: People take time to publish their articles and do their research, and then other scientists in different parts of the world or whatever either try to replicate it or disagree with. What was found and have a debate and that's how science kind of works. So this is in a way just more transparent

[00:09:52] john: It's not happening behind the scenes with just some peer reviewers. It's more public, is what I'm understanding. It's pretty interesting. Yeah. you could also basically circulate a post, like a petition. It ends up kind of acting like a petition where you're collecting all this social capital in one place.

[00:10:08] john: And ultimately, as you mentioned, it is kind of doing something in a fast way that we're already doing in a slow way. Even after all of the clinical trials and RCTs and meta analyses analysis as Scott Alexander pointed out years ago in one of the handiest infographics of all time at the end of all this research, you're left.

[00:10:27] john: Personal opinion about what all those mean. Like at the end of all the research and all the fact finding and all the rigor, we're back at personal opinion. so idea market goes straight to personal opinion from day one and helps improve the quality of personal opinion, but it starts and ends with that.

[00:10:44] john: And skips a lot of the middle. And in order to fast track the low hanging fruit, the easy ones. So let's think about how the current healthcare data industry works and functions. I think a lot of the data that's generated is either from health systems or providers about patients and it goes into medical records and potentially there's some other information from other sources.

[00:11:08] john: and you can also think about social data That's going to like Google and Amazon and Facebook and all of them, and they're monetizing our data, of course through marketing and all of that. But what is the future of this sort of data and how does that apply to what you guys are working on?

[00:11:22] john: I think the future of this sort of data, like that's probably the greatest value in web three. The ability for one, utilize their data in manner that benefits society generally as opposed to a manner which is profitable a particular entity.

[00:11:40] john: because currently. There are about 350,000 data silos that exist, whether maybe digital health apps or devices or EHR systems and it's all scattered. best you can do with kind of like one aspect of the human is see some descriptive statistics or a timeline of what, you've done in the past.

[00:12:01] john: But by combining and aggregating all of this data, we can. Ultimately determine like precise effects any nutritional supplement or food or drug on given subsets patients and individuals based upon their genetic profile or microbiome profile. But kind of the obstacle has been the prisoners' dilemma whereby individual companies that hold this data currently see that sharing it it's a zero sum game where if they make it possible.

[00:12:31] john: For individuals to access and share their data with other companies, that is relative loss to them. It makes it easier. Prevents kind of customer lock in. There's actually been hospitals, like studies showing that hospitals like actively make it hard for you to export your health record because that means it's much easier to transfer to a different provider.

[00:12:49] john: But if we are able to and an organization or platform that monetizes. Makes it possible fractionalize ownership and then reward all of these silos for making it easy to share their data. There's a lot of value in the data. Currently, there's about 60 billion spent every year on these anonymized health records from Epic, Cerner, and health records are.

[00:13:13] john: Terrible in that they're very infrequent. typically every few months, and then there's a telephone game of what you tell your doctor. It's not necessarily what ends up in your health record, as well as the fact that people can barely remember what they ate yesterday, let alone over the last three months.

[00:13:28] john: all of the data that currently exists out there, that's mostly like in Amazon uh, receipt purchases and Google searches and, um, in wearable devices. And all of this is far more valuable, I think, than the current health data that's being purchased. So I think the value is a lot more than $60 billion here, but in aggregate, like by combining this data, the value is multiplicative as opposed just additive.

[00:13:51] john: if we are able to create a much larger pie and then a use Like tokenization to be able to share the increased benefits of this buy with all of the data silos that are currently making hard to export your data, then maybe we can overcome the, prisoner's dilemma that prevents them from making it easy for people to share and access their data.

[00:14:11] john: And then eventually we've also been working on a project called the Digital Twin Safe, where you can store all of your data and then easily share it with any other device. we can hopefully accelerate clinical discovery that way, and massively reduce suffering, I think.

[00:14:26] john: Yeah. I agree with you and there are so many devices and so many different applications and platforms that exist now that we use to generate data. In five years and 10 years, there's gonna be way more, I mean, I imagine nanobots inside of you collecting protein levels, all different types of chemicals that are floating in your body detecting that.

[00:14:45] john: And then hopefully you can use that data to know how to make yourself better, you know, and optimize your own health. Right. That's like the idea behind digital twin. But we're not there yet, right? we're still like collecting, you know, if I wanted to report all the meals I ate in a day, I mean, some apps you could take a picture of it and sometimes they make it easy.

[00:15:01] john: If you order online, you can just add whatever you ordered on Uber Eats and put it into your dietary plan app. So there are some integrations in place which is interesting, I think, but we're not there yet. Do you think that people are not really adopting what we're talking about? This isn't happening as.

[00:15:16] john: Because we don't have all the tools to make it easy, Like maybe when we all are wearing augmented reality goggles or glasses and we're going about our day, everything is recorded. So it's way easier to know, the things that you're doing and the things that you're eating or the supplements you're taking that way as opposed to remembering to write it down every day or, note it in your app.

[00:15:33] john: What do you think of that? Yeah. One thing that I made previously was like a Gmail connector that would go and parse your receipts from Amazon so you could automatically import your purchases of like nutritional supplements that way. And then grocery delivery services. it would parse, like shipped receipts and then import the grocery purchases.

[00:15:54] john: lots of, all this data kind of exists. It's just the, the silos. Siloed and If we had like some good Google glasses that could automatically do it, that would make it a lot easier. and then was importing from Amazon for a while, but they try to make it as hard as possible for you too.

[00:16:10] john: Easily export. Like if you want to export your Amazon receipts, they say you go to. your account settings and they say, Okay, we'll send you something, an email in like a month or two with all your receipts in it. cuz it's all valuable marketing data that would be used by competitors I suppose.

[00:16:27] john: But yeah, parsing emails is currently the easiest way to automate it. And one thing that I'm desperately waiting for is like some kind of smart toilet that will analyze all my metabolites and stuff like that exist now, actually. I've seen that out in the market. I don't know how good they are, but that's definitely, I can share some links like after Great. Yeah. And I get the idea of data ownership in the web three world, right? No one else can stop you from sharing it, using it, things like that. But what about privacy? So all this data is very private to us, to the individual, right? I don't want everyone knowing what I'm. Necessarily eating or what supplements are taking, I mean, in most cases is not a big deal, but some people are more private and maybe they want to share everything.

[00:17:04] john: So is what you're building privacy centric? Is it privacy and like native? how does that tie into the applications for both, for curdo? And I'm also curious for idea market. I feel like it's less about privacy, more about actually transparency. Currently like everything that we do files all the HIPAA compliancy requirements.

[00:17:23] john: and I've been looking at lots of ways to kind of decentralize. Currently it's just like a tradition, like the data storage is stored in a traditional database. I've been looking at ways to decentralize the storage. There's not really a great one that's like super gdpr, C. Because you have to have the right to delete or the right to be forgotten.

[00:17:44] john: And if you put it on I was encrypting data, so my own data and putting on ipfs, using ceramic, then using this thing called the Late protocol to to allocate access to specific other wallets like your doctor or something. That would probably not be legal in Europe due to the inability to force all of the. To delete your data. One alternative is to like spin up all of your own IPFS ceramic nodes on ipf, on AWS HIPAA-compliant servers. But at that point it is no longer decentralized.

[00:18:20] john: so you kind of lose any of the decentralization benefits and then you add a lot of computational overhead because it's much slower to access data that way than it is through a, standard relational database. there's, I think ceramic is working on integrating. A ceramic node into like the brave browser and maybe Firefox.

[00:18:39] john: one that could then possibly store all their data in their browser and then synchronize it between their own devices that way. there's this stuff called Federated Learning and Homomorphic Encryption. And there's another project called Weave Chain that's, doing like good work on this, they have a dock container, so you would run one of nodes on the same server next to your database.

[00:19:02] john: And then like researchers can provide it. There's like a integrated Python Jupyter Notebook. Researchers can enter machine learning algorithms and run data on run algorithms on the raw data that's in the database without having it leave the premises and then only receive the outputs of the analysis.

[00:19:22] john: I do that to some extent currently, like in our applicant analyzed studies directly on the person's computer and then we can aggregate only the results. So it's the results that we publish on the journal decision science consists of like apples eaten and arthritis pain severity or something.

[00:19:40] john: So it's just the aggregate typical change from baseline for thousands of people as opposed to but making any of the time series data available. Yeah. And so that brings to mind the Journal of Citizen Science that I was looking into that also offers.

[00:19:56] john: And that sounds like something, by the way, thank you for that explanation. I feel like all my developer listeners are chief information officers who are listening. Probably loved your explanation, so thanks for that. But in terms of the Journal of Citizen Science, we have these crowdsourced, aggregated pieces of information about health and activity or supplements or diet or whatever it is all being shared.

[00:20:18] john: at what point is it so good that we'll start discovering like, things we never expected to discover? Like I feel like there's hidden secrets that we'll be able to uncover that typical clinical trials and things like that we're not able to, but in the aggregate. Especially when you incorporate genetic information, will be able to find some cool things about either, super foods, maybe, or, super supplements that affect a certain type of person, but not everybody.

[00:20:42] john: And then that can really open some interesting doors. What do you think about that? Yeah, it depends on how fast we can get people to cooperate and share data. so we're trying to make cured as infrastructure as highly composable as possible so that anybody can create machine learning algorithm and then monetize it however they want to.

[00:20:59] john: Similar to the way WordPress was which was originally developed just as a blogging platform, but it had good documentation. So 59,000 plugin developers created a ton of different plugins that make WordPress usable in a wide array of use cases for like eCommerce physician scheduling and, all these different things.

[00:21:18] john: So we're trying to make cured out composable in the same way and then additionally make it easy to share and. The individual and the data silo for sharing the data. So currently we have data about 12 million data points or measurements from about 10,000 people, and we use that to generate several thousand different studies.

[00:21:40] john: where do these individuals come from? how do they hear about it typically? we've been working on it a long time. It's just a word of mouth. We haven't really done any marketing, but yeah, I've been working on it for a number of years in my spare time and just over time it kind of accumulated slowly, even though we data, like tens of thousands of these studies on the relationships between various factors and symptoms, so the data's very broad, but it's very shallow.

[00:22:04] john: for any given specific supplement, like some specific brand of Vitamin D supplement and inflammatory pain, we may only have a few part. However the data exists today to have tons of participants if they were able to easily share it. And then, the two barriers are just like getting access to all of the existing data, which I think there's enough in existence to generate studies with far higher statistical power than we currently have.

[00:22:33] john: there's also plenty of room for improvement on machine learning algorithms. It's an ever evolving fields. So yeah, and with what Dolly three can do and, All of these different technologies I think there's massive potential if the people who, are developing these amazing algorithms could apply.

[00:22:49] john: It could have a large database of data to run it on. So Mike Golia. In terms of how can we use the concepts or infrastructure of something like Idea Market and apply it to, the tens of thousands of people who have put their data into Cure. Do, how do we ensure that the data or the insights that are gathered from Cure DA's Analytics?

[00:23:11] john: And I know that there might be different types of models and different insights come outta those models, but in general, if, someone's making a claim like supplement from company A is is just not good or doesn't work I don't know, I guess it's sort of like an opinion as well as facts because it's facts for them.

[00:23:30] john: how do we get to the bottom of this? one of the things that is inevitably going to happen as kdo and solutions like a Grow is that. discoveries that are disruptive are going to be made if someone has spent, a hundred million dollars developing a pill for something that it turns out you can eat broccoli and get the same effect The, you know, the investors aren't gonna be, excited about that. And this is a historical, phenomenon like you had in other industries. You've seen it too with electric cars being invented by the original Ola Tesla maybe a hundred hundred 20 years ago and even before him perhaps.

[00:24:04] john: this, you know, happening at the same time as the rise of the oil barons and the, and Rockefellers and all of that. we end up kind of delaying adoption of electric cars by over a century. And it's not because we didn't have the knowledge, it's because the social environment and the political environment was kind of engineered.

[00:24:23] john: To make only one solution socially acceptable and available to the public. what idea market is, trying to do is kind of blast open the gatekeeper doors between obscure genius and the rest of the world and the public and the gatekeepers. as Mike discovers, the Magic Broccoli what I want Idea market to be able to do is to show how many of the people you trust believe that there's something worth paying attention to here.

[00:24:51] john: Because as institutional trust, dwindles and falls for various reasons we're expecting that the opinions of a hundred people, or even just 10 people that you trust will outweigh in your mind the opinion of one institution or two institutions that you don't trust. , like, how long is it going to be before Tim Ferris and Biology Suite of Usan and, and who else?

[00:25:16] john: You know, when they say something is true that matters more than whether CNN or the FDA says something is true. I don't think that time is far in the future at all. we'll need something like Idea Market to make sure that the discoveries that Mike and Kdo make aren't pigeonholed and, and kept separate from the public or kept socially unacceptable for reasons other than knowledge and discovery and advancing what's available to the public because it's unfortunately not as simple as discovery.

[00:25:44] john: We also have to make sure that people that we trust are giving us the best information that's actually relevant and that's tough. I think, if you just think about like the things Elon Musk tweets and people trust that pretty quickly and. Even the institutions try to, protect consumers.

[00:26:01] john: Like the SEC is trying to protect consumers from investing in Kim Kardashians, Ethereum, Max Coin or whatever. I'm not promoting these coins, by the way, did not financial advice. Please don't invest based on anything I say or we say. But the point is here, these influencers are these people that we may trust.

[00:26:18] john: And maybe when you say the 10 people that you trust, it could be like family members, friends or people that you've known a long time. So it's more in your close circle. But people are also gonna trust their, Pope or other people that are sort of very popular and they just have a tendency to trust them.

[00:26:32] john: Idea market through normal use basically builds a public database of personal opinion. We see what everybody has said about everything throughout all time, and it's all time stamped, and you can kind of see who believed what at what time, and all that information is on chain.

[00:26:51] john: So you can sort the opinions by any on chain metric you like. For example, if there's a Dow that is, has a bunch of great scientists uh, you can say, All right, show me all the opinions of these Dow members on this and this and this scientific topic. So the, the group of people whom you trust is left entirely up to you, The end user.

[00:27:14] john: You can select a group of 10 friends or a group of 10 tech Twitter influencers, or a Dow or an nft, or you can make your own NFT and pick your own set of people and then filter them, filter their opinions by that nf. So it's really open to being, analyzed and slice and dice in any number of ways so that we can figure out who really deserves trust on which topics.

[00:27:38] john: So that, their judgment is what drives public knowledge instead of institutional judgment. Are you afraid by any chance that it might create some sort of echo chamber that we may already have so people will just agree with each other and then you'll have the opposite group or disagree, and then there'll be like two truths in a way is that a, how are you mitigating against those types of risks? Sure. in the internet world that we're in, echo chambers are going to be there because they're kind of a psychological path of least resistance. It's comfortable to be surrounded by things you agree with, and so we're naturally gonna gravitate toward that.

[00:28:15] john: And there's not really a way to fight that head on however people have a genuine interest in the truth. It affects their lives. Whether something is true or false can make the difference as to whether they quit their job or whether they pay for something expensive or whether they move, or whether they are take special health.

[00:28:37] john: Precautions of truth has material impacts on people. And because of that, there's always going to be a demand for the world's best information. And over time even if there is division of opinion about things there's always going to be a reason for the more accurate opinions to sort themselves out.

[00:28:56] john: An idea Market just provides the rails for that to happen faster. It's not that we're never gonna be wrong anymore, it's just that we're gonna iterate a lot faster. is there a benefit or is there sort of a reward if. , you agree on something today and then in a year it's proven to be true. Is there like a, oh, you win something cuz you're right or something like that?

[00:29:15] john: How does that work? There could be in the future and there's nothing inherently built in for that right now. However what we do want to have happen is that when there's a controversial topic or issue or an important one or a crisis, that everyone kind of expressed their opinion on idea market at the, at the beginning.

[00:29:33] john: So that in the hindsight of history we can look back and see, hey, whose opinion was insightful back then and who was just following trends. And so if, example, when Covid was just starting out the media was downplaying it, saying it'll never make it to the United States. It's not a big deal.

[00:29:50] john: Don't worry about it, it's not gonna affect your life. But there was a subset of technologists on Twitter. I am particularly thinking biology swing of a song. It was really ringing the alarm bell on it early, like in January or February, and the New York Times didn't really freak out until March 15th or March 17th.

[00:30:06] john: And so when I talk, about flattening the curve, like how many lives could have been saved if we had listened to biology instead of waited for the people whose jobs it is to actually give us the best information. what we wanna be able to do is query who believed X at time T and the more important the issue is, the more your name you'll want to have on that list, because those are the people that the public will swim to in the next crisis.

[00:30:31] john: That's really cool. I think that's a cool concept because you'll create a whole population of individuals with, I don't wanna say social scores, but they sort of have like a credibility score in a way. We just need to make sure that we think about that very ethically and because there's gonna, people that are, are just wrong.

[00:30:48] john: A lot of the times they're not bad people, Their opinions are inaccurate. Yeah. So there just needs, needs to be a lot of thought about how to, you know, um, I'm interested in what dangers you're alluding to there. I mean, Yeah. Well, I just like, if, there's someone I meet and then I look them up on idea market and it turns out like most of their opinions are either wrong, proven to be wrong, or I don't agree with either I'm probably not gonna trust that person's next opinion.

[00:31:12] john: And I think that could be harmful for, the relationship with that person might not really grow as much as the relationship with the more credible person. So there's that. And that exists now though, too. It's not like that doesn't exist now. People with many publications and citations are trusted more than a researcher hasn't published anything yet.

[00:31:28] john: for better or worse, right, . it's really more important that people who have ambitions of public influence participate than that Everyone does. Okay. Everyone's welcome. but uh, yeah, it's, it's really mostly making sure that the largest groups of people place trust in the places where it's most deserved instead of just the places with the biggest programs and the longest institutional risk.

[00:31:49] Ray D: Welcome to the Health Unchained News Corner. For today's corner, we'd like to address a sad fact in the United States. According to a Wikipedia list, as of October 25th, 2022, there have been 582 mass shootings with 604 individuals killed, including the shooters. A total of 2,380 people have been wounded, including the.

[00:32:16] Ray D: This year has been a record year for mass shootings in America, and it does not seem to be getting any better. Although many attribute shooter motive to serious mental illness, studies have shown personal issues such as combination of acute life stressors, anger and nihilism contribute to a shooter's motive.

[00:32:36] Ray D: Gun policies in the criminal justice system in general are also factors that play a part in the probability of mass. On October 22nd, a man fatally shot two Methodist Dallas Medical Center Hospital employees because he was angry with his girlfriend who had just given birth. The man who was on parole and wearing an ankle monitor accused his girlfriend of cheating on him.

[00:33:02] Ray D: Dallas Police Chief Eddie Garcia said at a news conference Monday. In my opinion, this is a failure of our criminal justice. A violent individual such as this should not have been on ankle monitor and should have remained in custody end. So it's easy to claim after the event that he shouldn't have been allowed to visit his girlfriend at the hospital.

[00:33:27] Ray D: One would think after serving six years in prison for aggravated robbery, the shooter would be more aware of the consequences of his actions and he just wanted to be with his. But this is a very complex social and political issue that can't be ignored. The victims are not only the murdered or injured, it's their families, their communities, and in this case of this example, all of the employees who work at the hospital.

[00:33:55] Ray D: We need to protect our healthcare workers, teachers, and children. Although this news corner doesn't have anything to do with blockchain, te. It has everything to do with social stability, security, and human nature. It's unlikely that will ever end all violence in our world, but we should be addressing and studying some of the root causes of violence by educating children about the importance of community safety, gun safety, and human morality, open public policy and local education regarding gun.

[00:34:32] Ray D: Can be tools to help mitigate future tragedies and increase trust in our communities. To learn more about this unfortunate trend, check out the episode show notes, and now back to the conversation with your host, Ray and guess Mike Sin from Kow and Mike Elias of Idea Market.

[00:34:51] john: I think idea market is massive potential and accelerating global knowledge. And it's also important to consider there's been a lot of research on effective grad sourcing and methods of doing this. And there's one great book by James Wicke called The Wisdom of Crowds, Where he Exam, he looked at a ton of different case studies of effective and ineffective methods of crowd sourcing and came up with a number of rules and one, critical one that is like the importance of independent, the aggregation of independent judge.

[00:35:23] john: As opposed to a like informed judgements. So you have in the case of the US political system we elect a president and typically there's a large segment of people, like the majority of the population is not entirely enthusiastic about either the Democratic or Republican parties. But everybody there's a narrative that if you vote for anyone else, you're like throwing your vote away.

[00:35:47] john: I think that most people are gonna vote for a Democrat or a Republican, I pick from them. And it's kind of analogous to this phenomenon with these army ants that will typically, like in order to make their way back to their home after forging for food, we like follow each other's pheromones.

[00:36:04] john: So you have a big long line of them. And somehow, sometimes the army ant is the. He will end up curving around and then following the last Army man. So they're all walking in a big circle. It's called a death spiral. And they will just walk in a circle until they die of either thirst or exhaustion.

[00:36:20] john: And I feel like it's very much the same situation, like our political system is. Everybody votes out of the 300 million people in the us like Donald Trump was probably the smartest and most qualified person to run the country. And, then our other alternatives, we keep getting these democratic candidates that all voted for the Iraq war.

[00:36:38] john: half the country was opposed to that. they're obviously less intelligent on foreign foreign policy than probably about half the country. So there's 150 million better people on that. Yet because we're all. Just following each other. Instead of making independent assessments about maybe we think that Ralph Nader somebody else's would be preferable we don't vote for them because we instead follow each other.

[00:36:59] john: So I think like hiding the opinions of other people and trying to minimize those as much as possible when idea market is, getting its when people are making their assessments about the validity of a claim may be valuable. There's lots of kind of examples in the wisdom of crowds about how effective crowdsourcing can be at coming up with more accurate answers than even.

[00:37:20] john: The best experts in a field like one example is they give is like who wants to be a millionaire? Where they have if you don't know the answer, you have several options like phone a friend, so you can phone the smartest person that you know on a given topic and ask them the answer and consistently ask the audience, even though it's just a.

[00:37:37] john: Idiots. I went to see who wants to be a millionaire in the studio. they're on average, like right about 86% of the dime versus like 60% or something for the, the phone, a friend thing. And then there's lots of other examples like Wikipedia and then this one about guessing how much is mule is, et cetera.

[00:37:54] john: But there's a societal biases. So if you ask people like, how much you think we spend on foreign aid, then the average person says like 10% or something in the US where in reality it's like a fraction of 1%. So if you take a histogram of all of these different guesses and you look at how many people guessed like 10%, How many people guessed 5%?

[00:38:17] john: How many people guess 1%? You'll see like a. Around 10% cuz that's what most people think. there's like some kind of bias. I don't know where they get this. But it produces the, so crowdsourcing in that case, if you just looked at everyone's answers and who, assumed that the most people guess right.

[00:38:35] john: Then you're guess the wrong answer. However if you look at this histogram you'll see a tiny little. Around somewhere under, a percent where it doesn't go kind of along the curve. And so it's like peeking out. and that comes from the experts from, there's like a small number of people who like actually looked it up one time and kind of, it kind of peaks out and the rest is kind of like noise.

[00:38:58] john: instead of just like simply taking the, in that case just like simple crowdsourcing, asking everybody wouldn't work, but if you look at the histogram and then and find this peak then you could find the right answer using crowdsourcing that way. And then also with Mike's suggestion about prior accuracy rates and stuff, if you can wait people's previously previous predictions accuracy, then you could also overcome that problem as well.

[00:39:25] john: yeah, it's important to like consider the local max, not just the global Max and these, graphs. That's fair. You know what something that always interests me is the tokens of all these different types of protocols and, and, platforms. Can you talk a little bit about the function and use and utility of IMO on Idea Market and then maybe Mike Sin if you have like a comparison for here do as well and how tokens works there?

[00:39:49] john: Yeah, sure. in order to explain imo, it makes sense to explain a little bit of the monetization features that are in the platform in general. First it costs, there's a 1000th of an Ethereum posting fee, and that's about, a dollar 30 right now. And what's the purpose of that you would say?

[00:40:07] john: That is to fund the idea market protocol treasury to fund the growth of the ecosystem and, development and all of that. Just kind of a, pool of funds that will eventually be group managed, community managed, but for now just goes toward development. I feel like it also prevents from overuse or spam or, things like that too, in a way.

[00:40:24] john: I guess it's not that expensive, but if it was totally free people could abuse it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's good to have more posts and more activity, but that, income also just, guarantees things. It, it'll tie it together in a second here. Sure. the other fee is for rating.

[00:40:39] john: So when you rate a post, you also, you pay the same amount. You pay a thousand to least about a buck 30 right now. for example, Mike takes the cur dow, you know, a cure do owned wallet, And makes a post Broccoli cures cancer on Idea market and you know, that costs him a buck 30. And then if he gets 10 people to rate it, then he earns 10 times a buck 30 in rating fees.

[00:41:06] john: So if you can, make some important breakthrough that stirs up some controversy and gets some big names to spread it around you can make potentially a lot of money and, rating fees the rating fees go to uh, the post owner. The post is an nft so you can actually sell it to someone else.

[00:41:25] john: And then the new owner receives the rating fees during the term of their ownership. if Cureo gets the first, you know, 200 people to rate it and they get 0.2 E or about $260, I guess, then let's say some big influencer like biology sees the potential of this post to really stir up some, cultural impact.

[00:41:43] john: And he says, You know what, I'll pay $2,000 for that nft. And then so Kdo gets $2,260, Biology gets the nft, and then Biology does a, publicity campaign around it and gets, 50,000 more people to rate it. Then he gets 50 E, he gets 50,000 times a buck 30 in rating fees, and at the same time, he owns the nft, which he can resell if he wants, or has a cultural artifact or something like that.

[00:42:07] john: there are these monetization features built in where every post is potentially an income stream and the posts are also networked together through citations. Like when you're rating a post, you can cite another post to explain your reasoning. So what ends up happening is, it feels like a social network, but it gets, it builds into a knowledge graph like Wikipedia or like room research.

[00:42:32] john: And the more important topics that keep getting referred to again repeatedly end up being used as citations in various arguments. I might want to cite. Broccoli Cures Cancer in any number of conversations and contexts. And the more different places where that post shows up, the more people will see it, the more people will rate it and the more income from rating fees all day.

[00:42:57] john: So it's kind of like owning land in a conversation that just continues indefinitely. So there's kind of a lot of income potential assuming, widespread adoption of course, and that's where IMO comes in. IMO right now is used to. Basically vote for which users. You want to decide which posts are important.

[00:43:21] john: So you can stake IMO on a user. And what that does is when that user rates a post, it will increase that post visibility. So if I put, 10,000 IMO on Mike sin, whenever Mike sin rates a post, either low or high, it doesn't matter, that post visibility will increase by, 10,000 points basically.

[00:43:44] john: And so what you end up having is curation by the most trusted users on the platform. And when I stake that money, there's no risk of losing it. Mike doesn't have access to it, He can't withdraw it or spend it. And if I decide I don't trust Mike anymore, then I can take that stake back and put it somewhere else or even put it on myself.

[00:44:02] john: It's really just kind of like an electoral mechanism to decide who opinions. On what's important, should count the most. So it's kind of a way of curating without any centralized authority taking control of it. Wow, that's interesting. So in terms of like how that might work for Cure Dow, or what does Cure Dow currently do for its tos?

[00:44:25] john: If you wanna. Yes. So currently we're just like, have a, decentralized theon organization whereby contributors currently 46 of these kind founders tokens for contributions to the project. But in ultimately the thing that we're working on is creating this sdk which allows easy shareability between different digital health applications or services.

[00:44:49] john: and then facilitating through a DAG exchange the sale of individual data sets. And by, from the data. Who created them by recording their, symptoms and treatments, et cetera, to potential data buyers who maybe pharma or insurance companies, Really quick, when you said data sets, are you saying in an individual's data set or the set of data from an aggregated group of people?

[00:45:15] john: A set of data from an individual. So it's kind of like uni swap but for health data. and then in order to incentivize and make it easy for people to extract their data from different applications the indivi, like the application that installs the SDK within their app and then has this embedable exchange within their.

[00:45:36] john: Is able to set some transaction tax or fee, like a half a percent or whatever, which is typical of defi exchanges. And then the individual gets 99% or whatever of the transaction cost. And then the app that integrates the SDK in the exchange into their app receives a half a percent or whatever they said.

[00:45:58] john: So people are different. There's a lot of apps. they're incentivized to minimize their transaction fees. but there is a, like a cost overhead to integrating it. And then again, there's like the prisoners' dilemma of, making your data making it easy for people to extract data from your app that we're hoping that this will be adequate in overcoming.

[00:46:18] john: is there like a data standard that's being used for. The datasets aggregated for individuals. Is it like HL seven buyer type of Yes, so there's a ton. I mean, they've been trying to like force everyone to adopt a single standard for decades. And I've been working with other developers and other database schema and stuff and, it's like really hard to get even two people to agree on what the optimal data standard is.

[00:46:44] john: And HL seven and fire and stuff, I find them like, Very overcomplicated. Um, It's highly nested data. So if you're going to be combining data to apply machine learning to them, you have to do a ton of transformations and stuff to get into a fly format. So instead of trying to force everyone to adopt the same format, we're focusing on making these data transformation modules, which will allow anyone to specify the format when they're like submitting data into the API and or specify the format that they desire when requesting data from the api.

[00:47:21] john: So then you don't force anyone to modify their existing software architecture, which can be very expensive. and then. Enable like a defi exchange. While you swap different tokens for each other, you can just swap and specify what kind of output format you desire whenever you're making your request Sure.

[00:47:37] john: To the api. And then anybody would be able to make their own uh, transformer. So then it would be available to everyone. So then you don't have to have, right now every, you have a bunch of these close source projects. Like everyone's like that wants to use the Fitbit api, for instance, has to implement their own transformer to get it converted into their own format of whatever they they normally store it as.

[00:47:58] john: and so we went to kind of reduce the duplication of effort by making it possible to have plugins that for different data transformer modules. Interesting. Yeah, I wasn't aware. How much transformation is required for taking Hhl seven data and using machine learning for applying machine learning for them?

[00:48:16] john: , and I'm sure it's more complicated. Hhl, Hhl seven is not like particularly bad. But like the majority of data is not inhl, AHL seven and it's not in fire. and so I fire I guess has been, is the replacement standard for Hhl seven cuz um, Hhl seven is the result of like a community negotiation.

[00:48:37] john: like designed by committee often creates like monstrous complexity designed to handle every possible scenario in the world. Maybe we should make a post on ideal market saying Fire is the best data standard for healthcare, and see if people agree or disagree and how far take that. Yeah. I could talk to you guys forever about this stuff.

[00:48:57] john: I wanna kind ask a few questions to wrap it up and kind of give you a chance, an opportunity to give any final takeaways to the audience as well. But so what's the culture like at both Curdo and Idea Market? I'm sure you guys have people that you work with on a daily basis and probably remote too, but what's your sense of the culture with your teams?

[00:49:17] john: Mike Alaskan Go first. Yeah. I built Idea Marketer started it out of a frustration at this huge gap between the best information on the internet and common knowledge. what, you know, translated. That means I'm a big fan of crack pots and I think a lot of 'em deserve to be indicated. I think there's a lot of wonderful low hanging fruit, single sentences worth of information that can save millions of lives or similar things in that magnitude.

[00:49:46] john: and I suspect that a lot of our, biggest scourges are not really problems of lack of knowledge but misplaced trust and credibility. It's not that we don't possess answers to many of our, major challenges. It's that we're not using them. so idea markets, culture and community is, very much open to the fringe and craziness.

[00:50:09] john: And we like taking a long shot because, one long shot that really works out is gonna be worth looking silly. 99 other times. Fair enough. Yeah. Makes in. Yeah. So it's a bunch of great people as there's no significant financial incentive to partcipating currently. it's a lot of people that are motivated just by either reducing suffering or extending longevity.

[00:50:32] john: So kind of like a different factions. I've been kind of miserable in my life. I've been, had a great appreciation of just existence for it's sake. So there's a lot of communities like around chronic disease and stuff, but I've found that people among the longevity community, they're general.

[00:50:49] john: Extremely healthy and super high functioning, which is why they wanna live forever. So they seem to get a lot more stuff done. and so yeah, I've been working with, whoever, we all have the same goal basically, which is to drive down the cross of this researchers, which is absurd at this point, and kind of overcome all of these disincentives to progress.

[00:51:08] john: So, yeah, I'm very grateful to all the organizations and individuals who are participating and to Mike for all the great work he's doing and for working with and let s do use his his platform too to try to and for as some degree of causality for, for these studies as it's really hard to determine if there's a plausible mechanism of action for a given factor on an outcome with algorithms.

[00:51:35] john: And you kind of need aggregated human wisdom to do that. And I see that is a great idea market as a great means of kind of aggregating this intrinsically and necessarily human knowledge. Yeah. No, I totally I'm with you. I think ha, being open source. So cure DO is an open source project.

[00:51:53] john: I think that really is part of the culture too. Idea market also open source Is it sort of source? Yeah. No, it's all open. The spark contracts are open source. Everything that we can possibly open source is open source. We want the data that gets created through all these opinions to be available to anyone to use and interpret and analyze however they can imagine doing so.

[00:52:14] john: Sure. And I just wanted to also think a health on Chan community member Tristan. That's kind of how we actually met all of us through the research collective. So I appreciate Tristan's connection there. You know, very much part of the biohacking community. and there's a lot going on with biohacking these days too, which is really exciting.

[00:52:33] john: I think that's individual scientists, community research scientists, our citizen scientists are gonna be I think the future. So that's really exciting. You were gonna say something, Or I was just saying, Yeah, he's an amazing dude. Yeah. Thank you. So I got just a couple more questions. One is, do you have any open positions for people listening that might, or any ways for them to connect with you or participate?

[00:52:57] john: How would you suggest they get involved?

[00:53:00] john: I'd be happy to personally onboard anyone. I know you mentioned that not everyone listening may be a deep crypto head, but I'm happy to sit on the phone and walk people through it. It, it's not actually very difficult. It's just a little intimidating if you've never used Meta Mask. But uh, please reach out on on Twitter, twitter.com/harmony Lion one is my personal or Idea Market underscore io is Idea Market.

[00:53:23] john: And yeah, I would be happy to help anyone get up, get set up and, and experiment and playing with idea. Thanks. And yeah, we're working on a ton of different projects, so Yeah, any developers are great. Greatly appreciated. And then we're also have some kind of like these other laboratories we call 'em because, so we wanna be data driven and like we have a data lab focused on data analysis, development lab focused on development and community and other aspects of the organization.

[00:53:54] john: So we definitely need help coordinating those different laboratories. So anybody that is just interested generally uh, it'd be great if they were to cure it out.org and click they join us button and then tell us what they're interested in and then we can get back to it and get started.

[00:54:10] john: Awesome. Thanks for sharing that.

[00:54:12] Ray D: All right, so question for both of you you can choose one or the other. So there's two questions. One is, can you tell me about a medical experience you've had or some sort of disease or acute injury you might have had taken to the hospital or something like that, and how that's impacted the way you view the healthcare system?

[00:54:30] Ray D: Or can you please explain an experience you've had with psychedelics and how that's impacted your.

[00:54:36] Mike S: Who's, you go first, Mike. Should I do?

[00:54:39] Mike E: You want me to go first?

[00:54:40] Mike S: Yes,

[00:54:42] Mike E: Oh, sure. Okay. So I'll take question number two. I only have done a drug that you'd consider psychedelic on a very, very few times in my life. And it was MDMA or ecstasy or like, some, some cut of it. It was off the street. It wasn't like, you know, it was a pleasant experience, but it was actually very inferior to some experiences that I'd had just as a result of meditation and prayer and the psychedelics kind of. Innovate really close to the hardware. They go way down in there and, and play with things. And for that reason, I'm a little scared of them.

[00:55:26] Mike E: I'm a little scared of like, if they become legal or widespread, kind of in the way of marijuana is For example, corporate trickery might be embedded in them. Like this, this dimension brought to you by Pepsi. You know, like there's, there's gonna be weird, incentives.

[00:55:41] Mike E: And, and, and the users might be in a certain sense, powerless to resist because it's like getting written directly into the neurons in a way that normal advertisements are. So it's kind of a, it's kind of a, a frontier that seems high. And high reward. Like I understand that, you know, a lot of depressions and, and various mental issues can be drastically improved with that.

[00:56:03] Mike E: But it, it all, it seems like the nuclear option and would, and I, I encourage people to, to be optimistic about Naturally achieved states of mind because there's, there's, there's really a lot there. Plenty to go around. there's a lot of discussion about this on Twitter actually, that like some of the best antidepressants or some of the, some of the best technology to come out of the like positive psychology movement is, might be 3000 years old or 2000 years old

[00:56:30] Ray D: Hmm.

[00:56:30] Mike E: in

[00:56:30] Ray D: Meditation. Yeah. No, I'm a fan of meditation. So I, I hear your, your point there. That's interesting. Thanks for sharing that.

[00:56:39] Mike E: My pleasure. Thank you.

[00:56:41] Ray D: Mr.

[00:56:42] Mike S: regard about the health question. I kind of already went went over that in our other interview, and I have about many years of high frequency longitudinal data publicly available on, on all the symptoms and and health problems that have, so couldn't

[00:56:56] Ray D: you said publicly available right?

[00:56:58] Mike S: Yeah.

[00:56:58] Mike S: Yeah.

[00:56:59] Ray D: could send me a link, I'll include that in the show notes as well. So, sorry to interrupt you, but go ahead if you want me to.

[00:57:04] Mike S: kinda, it's kinda. Embarra, it's, it's available if you uh, look for it, but I don't know, it's kind of embarrassing as . So but regarding the psychedelic, so I've, I've like taken probably every drug one can imagine to try to cuz I've had pretty severe depression most of my life and been very desperate to find a way to fix it.

[00:57:26] Mike S: So kind of, but. Many psychedelics have had like temporary benefits, but it's, yeah, it, it's dietary changes and like removing things has had the greatest like, kind of long term benefits. But kind of one of the most powerful and kind of amazing things that, that I did before was, was dmt because that, that like destroyed my.

[00:57:53] Mike S: Like, I forgot who, like most psychedelics do this too. Some extent, but like, I totally forgot who I was. And like it kind of you don't realize to what extent all of your thought processes and, and motivations are kind of like selfishly driven and again, like the, I was talking about with the like salvage gene thing like It made me appreciate kind of open source a a lot more.

[00:58:26] Mike S: And, and because you're going to like our, my, my goal, what I, what I say my goal is, and what I think philosophically is that we should minimize, do whatever actions. The correct action is the one that minimizes the greatest suffering for the greatest amount or maximizes pleasure, but still I am like selfishly motivated, like I could.

[00:58:48] Mike S: There's an infinite number of things I could be doing better in my life to, to achieve that. But because of this ego I'm, I, I'm driven to engage in, in selfish acts instead of the optimal acts. And I. It kind of, and the unfortunate thing about the the dmt, it's like super short. So it, it didn't, this characteristic did not persist.

[00:59:10] Mike S: I think meditation, if I could do it right and was dedicated enough, I think I could get maybe eventually achieve that state without. Anything. And then hopefully, and I'm sure it would probably be since uh, like neurons that fire together, wire together. I'm sure like doing long term meditation could produce a persistent state closer to what I would like to achieve.

[00:59:33] Mike S: But it kind of was nice just in that it showed me what's possible somehow. Yet, yet, I haven't been able to, to achieve it yet. I think. And I am not recommending that anyone take dmd. It increases your blood pressure and

[00:59:50] Ray D: That,

[00:59:52] Mike S: you should consult your doctor, your DMT doctor about that.

[00:59:55] Ray D: definitely this podcast or no one on it condones any, anything. No drug use, no financial investments. I'm just covering my basis here as, as we are all are. All right. Um, Mikes, thank you so much for sharing that and opening up with me.

[01:00:09] john: I have a couple quick fun questions for you and then we'll, wrap up for the, Interview. Thank you guys both so much. So first is if you had to have a microchip implanted in your body, where would you prefer it to be implanted? What's the most amputated part of my body?

[01:00:24] john: Let's see. finger. Yeah, Absolutely my brain. Brain. That's where I'm at. . The greatest deficiency, I think or most in need of computational resources. What does this microchip do? Does it that's a good question. So it's pretty vague question. And who is, controlled by Bill Gates? I hope not.

[01:00:43] john: I have a lot of those with my vaccine. Right. , right. No, it's just a general question. People have different funny answers. So it's not specifically meant to do anything particular. It could be like an R F I D I think humans are like we've been designed to survive in this world of scarcity and the zero sum game thing and we're completely out of date as far as our motivations.

[01:01:05] john: And I think it would be great if we could kind of design, the human brain to reward people for engaging in prosocial behaviors as opposed to gluing, which was necessary for survival in the past, but now it's like very harmful and causes all these wars and over, and obesity, et cetera.

[01:01:21] john: So that's, that's an interesting perspective actually. So that's pretty interesting. Find a way to promote prosocial activity and reduce gluing because in history we've eaten so much to survive. That's when we get food disease. that's just a really interesting perspective I haven't heard before.

[01:01:37] john: Thanks Mike. Right. Favorite book? What's your favorite book, guys? Yeah. the one that comes to mind when people ask that question is Gandhi's autobiography. And there are a million reasons, but one of them it's called the Story of My Experiments with truth.

[01:01:54] john: Gandhi was a man who treated truth as a force of nature, not merely a set of propositions or beliefs. It's something that operates objectively in the world. And by relating to it skillfully, you can actually use it as a force to achieve honest aims that are in alignment with truth. and that is how Gandhi kicked out the British Empire from India.

[01:02:19] john: he basically went about this scientifically and said, you know, truth is a force going through, you know, moving through everything. How can I raise this sales? And power my ship and achieve an objective. And I think that's a really profound and concrete and faith enhancing way to relate to truth.

[01:02:39] john: And in this time when it seems like truth is very subjective or, people disagree and there's no way to agree, blah, blah, blah I think that kind of perspective is incredibly valuable because it helps us trust that truth is a real thing. It deserves our trust, it deserves our pursuit. It will win.

[01:03:00] john: And we have to trust that and, and bet on it. Bet really hard on it cuz it'll pay off. Good answer. . Yeah, that's a great answer. Mine's kind of aligned in a weird way so a lot of people kind of aspire to, be like, like Gandhi or Jesus or something, but are limited.

[01:03:16] john: So I think the selfish gene is, kind of like the greatest paradigm shifting book that I've ever read before because there's so many things I didn't understand why people would donate to like what more well off, relatively well off people that live near them instead of like people who are like, deathly ill in Africa or whatever.

[01:03:35] john: And, uh, why racism exists or why speciesism. and then kind of initially there was the idea that evolution the individual was the unit of evolution where things that characteristics that led to the survival of the individual would iterate, but that didn't explain altruism. why people would sacrifice their lives and more for their country or why mothers would sacrifice their lives for the children.

[01:03:58] john: So they came up with group selection but that didn't explain all the gluing and stuff. So then populars by Richard Dawkins in the salvage gene, there's a gene centric view of evolution whereby characteristics that increase the likelihood a given gene will be replicated will proliferate throughout the species.

[01:04:15] john: And so, so we've kind of been designed to engage in. Ways like with the glu that would facilitate the replication of our genes. So we're kind of like automatons that are slaves to these, oh, like little genes in our head, like pulling levers and stuff, forcing us to behave in ways which are often contradictory to like our rational Value systems.

[01:04:40] john: So like lots of people recognize gluing is bad or lying is bad, or more is bad. but because we are, kind of controlled by these emotions which have pain and pleasure, which are a function of these genetic imperatives we are not able to kind of like realize our aspirational. High ideals like Jesus or Gandier or one of these people.

[01:05:02] john: yeah, and then that goes back to the microchip question. So eventually when we have the technology and if we can accelerate research I think that we'll be able to eventually control our motivational systems so that they are governed by our rational prefrontal cortex as opposed to these like kind of genetic imperatives that designed us to survive in a world on the African Savannah.

[01:05:25] john: Completely like the world of abundance we live in today. But yeah. So I highly recommend the selfish gene. You and anyone. Thank you for that answer. I appreciate it. Um, Guys, it's been a pleasure, really great talking to you. If you have any other final takeaways you wanna share with the audience, this is a good time to do so.

[01:05:42] john: We can start with either one of you, Mike. Because you're a yeah. I'm just like incredibly grateful for all the not great work that you're doing. and then all the work of everyone at Curnow and Idea Market and all of our partner organizations which are too long to list. And I don't wanna for anybody, but Thank you so much, Ray. It's been a pleasure. Sure. Yeah. I'll add to that. Thank you for having us on and thank you Mike for all the fun, you know, cooperations that we're doing and planning and, and Tristan, of course, for setting this up. I wanted to add one little thing to my Gandhi spiel from earlier.

[01:06:14] john: Cause I left out something really important and what I said was, you know, truth is how Gandhi kicked the British out of India. But that's not actually a fair way to describe what he did. He actually convinced the British to leave. He convinced the British against their own. Cooperation. Like they didn't wanna leave.

[01:06:34] john: Gandhi persuaded them without even there wanting to be persuaded. And I think there's some magic in there. I think there's something key in there because right now people are very difficult to persuade and if there are permissionless ways to persuade that don't insult or shame or suppress or censor or overpower that's a really important thing to, to familiarize ourselves well.

[01:06:59] john: So I just wanted to add that to the end. Amazing. Thank you guys. Really appreciate it. Talk to you soon, I hope. Take care.