Doug Howarth Podcast Transcript
Doug Howarth joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of The Digital Executive podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Doug Howarth. At age 14, Doug Howarth sensed the plotting systems created by Rene Descartes were inadequate for many tasks. Decades later, he made a series of startling discoveries.
He found the economy self organizes in recognizable opposing patterns and devised ways to portray markets in four, five, or any other number of dimensions. Doug named this new field Hypernomics. In 2011, he formed a company, Hypernomics Inc, who show their customers how to take advantage of Hypernomics.
Hypernomics Inc. has worked for NASA, United Technologies, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, amongst many others. Along with two of his Hypernomics colleagues, he was awarded U. S. patent number 10,402,838 for a multivariable regression analysis, the world’s first software designed to deconstruct markets into their 4D structures.
Doug has written 13 peer reviewed publications across four continents. They’ve been issued by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the Society of Automotive Engineers, and the International Council of Aeronautical Sciences, amongst many others.
Well, good afternoon, Doug. Welcome to the show!
Doug Howarth: Hi, Brian. Hey, thanks so much for having me on. I really appreciate your podcast and I love your content. Thank you.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. This is awesome, Doug. I really, when I say I talked to a lot of thought leaders, different leaders, technological leaders, but talking to, again, an entrepreneur, like most of my guests, but talking to somebody that really can break down some stuff around economics really jazzes me because that was, one of my main focuses is going through school, starting in high school.
I had this passion for finance, but I ended up in tech. It’s weird. Long story. I really do appreciate you making the time and I want to just jump right into the question so we can get your story out there. Let’s talk about your early life, right? You had some early insights into Cartesian systems at the age of 14.
You realized the limitations of Rene Descartes plotting systems. Can you share what specifically about these systems you found inadequate and how. This early insight set the stage for your future work.
Doug Howarth: Yeah, I can do that, Brian. Basically, what happened was I, I noticed, and for those, those listeners that know what Rene Descartes systems look like, he’s got what’s known as a two-dimensional system.
And in that two-dimensional system, he cuts, he has an up down and a left right coordinate system. And in that system, three of the four sections entertain negative numbers. And then in his 3D system, he, you know, he adds another dimension. So, he has left and right, up and down, front and back in his 3D system, seven of the eight regions entertain negative numbers.
And I always wondered what it meant to be tripled negative. I know what it could be mean to be double negative, but I always wondered if we always needed to have all those negative dimensions. And years later, when I was listening to my wife by a washing machine, I realized that we could get by with a system that had nothing, but.
non negative coordinate systems. And that’s what Hypernomics does. It looks at all the market facets in a new coordinate system, exclusively consisting of non-negative dimensions.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. And, you know, looking back at a young age, right, it’s like a lot of times it’s a curiosity that makes us dig a little bit deeper and ask questions.
And I can fully see that here in your story and I appreciate the share and your contribution to society as a whole. So, Doug, jumping in here to the next question, you’ve created the field of Hypernomics, which analyzes economic patterns in multiple dimensions. Could you explain the foundational principles of Hypernomics and what inspired you to explore economics beyond traditional dimensions?
Doug Howarth: Yeah, yeah, Brian, that’s pretty easy. Actually, Hypernomics means a field of study existing in more than three dimensions So hyper, one of the definitions is a field of study that it says existing in three or more dimensions That’s what hyper means one of the definitions and then nonomy n o m y means a field of study.
So Hypernomics It’s a field of study that starts in four dimensions and goes from there. And I got the idea by watching my wife buy a washing machine. We needed to have a new washer and so we traipsed through a bunch of stores and we finally found ourselves at a big box appliance store and we rolled up to the washing machine section and she says, you know, as she looked at this one machine, she says, you know, I like this machine.
It’s got more capacity than we have at home. And I thought capacity dimension one versus price. Dimension two. I said, that’s a two-dimensional problem. And then she said, you know, we don’t have many delicate cycles at home. I want more cycles all the way around. And then I thought cycles, dimension three versus price.
So, she’s up to a 3D problem. And we looked at the machine that we’re, you know, we examined the machine that we were studying there for a while. And then we moved down to the next one up the line. And, you know, I had more of everything. And I said to my wife, what about this one? And she said, “Well, it’s too expensive. We can’t afford it. And I realized that we were part of a global network that was buying this particular washing machine. And as we added a single unit, we were adding something to the quantity element of this. So that would be quantity versus price. So, we were part of a system that was, that was examining capacity in one direction cycles in another.
Price in another and quantity in another so my wife and everybody in the store I realized was working a 4d problem in their heads at the same time and so what I raced back and started to do was to Figure out a way to a plot that and then be it turns out over months and months and years and years I discovered that not only do all markets work in these four dimensions people have their collectively self-aggregate their behaviors in a way in which We can actually predict what the market is going to do based on what it’s done.
Wow.
Brian Thomas: Again, you know, the story behind this and how you really discovered a way to look at things differently is amazing. And it’s interesting. As simple as going out shopping for a washing machine to come across that. You know, I, that’s just awesome to hear that story. Cause we hear all kinds of unique and crazy stories here on the podcast, but I love it.
And I, and I just love how people stumble upon things and then get curious and ask questions. So, I appreciate that. And Doug, let’s go to the next question. You’ve authored numerous peer reviewed publications across four continents. Is there a particular paper or topic among these that you feel most proud of and why?
Doug Howarth: Yeah, probably in my latest publication, it’s entitled 8D Cost Trades with Entanglement. And so it works out that in Hypernomics, if you take one 4D system and append it to another 4D system, since they share the price axis, it becomes a 7D system. And if you add time to that, it becomes an 8D system. And so, in this particular paper, this is not, it’s never hypothetical, by the way, ladies and gentlemen.
These are all dealing with real data points that we maintain that you must find and plot to be able to figure out how markets work. So, in this particular scenario, I was looking at business jets and the engines that go into business jets. And I made two. Pretty important discoveries, one which was, one was that the, the market for business jet sets what’s known as a couple of demand frontiers.
There’s an upper demand frontier, which is the price limiting line that people can afford to buy the, the products that are in it. And they also have an outer demand frontier, which is the saturation point at which they’ve got too much. They can’t afford to absorb any more product. And so, it worked out that this one outfit, this is where I had the time in here.
This one outfit was proposing to sell 300 supersonic business jets in 300 of them in 10 years. Well, I worked out what the demand frontier was when they launched, they launched with 20 orders. And when they started, the market could support about 47 of those kinds of vehicles. And then five years later, when they still had just the 20 orders, The market could have supported 63 orders.
And so, it was moving in the right direction for them, but not by enough. And so, in the paper and also on LinkedIn, I called, I called them out and said that you’re not going to make it kind of angry reply back that said that they just got a bunch of orders in. They didn’t mention that they were all options, but it turned out that they ended up going bankrupt six months later.
So that was the first big discovery. The second big discovery was that the, I was looking at both the. Aircraft involves that was a 40 problem and their engines, which is another 40 problem. Again, when you glue them together, you get a 70 problem. And it turned out that in the way in which I modeled it, it worked out that there was one business aircraft that was up against its demand frontier and another and one of the engines that goes into it was also up against its frontier.
And the insight was that if both the engine manufacturer and the Okay. Engine manufacturer and the aircraft manufacturer both were to drop their prices. They, if they were, those prices stayed above their cost curves that they could make more money. And so this becomes a way to dig very deeply into a market in this case, using seven dimensions to basically extract the most useful tasty bits out of it so that you can make some important business decisions.
Brian Thomas: I simply love that. And thank you. I can understand why exactly. You’re pretty proud of that particular article, obviously, you know, at the end of the day, and we all know this people genuinely want to serve and help others and providing a little bit of. The story behind you digging in and providing really some, what I would consider constructive feedback in both situations was very helpful.
One of the first one obviously ended with a little negative at the end, but, but again, we, we, we learned from this and I really appreciate that story. So, thank you. And Doug, last question of the day, as we look into the future, how do you see Hypernomics evolving and what do you believe will be its long-term impact on the field of economic analysis and business strategy?
Doug Howarth: Well, that’s an excellent question too Brian the evolution of Hypernomics actually starts, starts to expand a week from Tuesday. That’s when my book, Hypernomics Using Hidden Dimensions to Solve Unseen Problems releases. And there’s been quite a few pre orders, hundreds of pre orders already, in the, through the websites that carry it.
And there’s thousands of books, of the book copies sitting in the warehouse. What this is going to show people is that there’s a lot more to economic analysis than met the eye. You know, a bunch of the stuff that we learned in introductory economics, and even in some of the advanced classes, was Kind of laden with a bunch of hypotheses and, and hypothetical situations.
And it turns out that you not only can avoid those kinds of situations when you start to do economic analysis, you should never resort to that kind of stuff. You should never suppose that you’re going to guess at what a situation is when you can actually go out and measure it. And so what we do is we, we plot all these disparate points and show how the market reacts to The products that are given to it relative to its responsiveness to price changes, which is a demand function, and that’s running in the opposite direction across a vertical axis from what we call the value space and value in our vernacular is the sustainable price for products based on their features.
And so, it works out that the value of products goes up as you get more that you have something you want or. Goes down as you get less of what you want. And at the same time, as the prices go up, the quantity still will fall. And so these, these opposing forces, it turns out work in this 4d arrangement and we can further modulate what happens in the value side by adding any other number of variables to it.
So it might, my view in the long-term. Is the governments will adopt this right now. This this has been applied initially to to consumer products, but it also works for the government. It works for turns out Congress has their own limits. There are limits on the number of satellites they can buy or missiles or aircraft.
It turns out that the world’s got a limit on currency, so there’s a demand frontier for currency. Both the fiat currencies and the cryptocurrencies, they both abide by demand frontiers, and they’re, both the currencies are held up by the same mechanisms that hold up prices in other markets. And so, once people start to understand that they’re going to, I hope, make fewer poor decisions based on not knowing what they could know if they took the time to do the analysis.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. That’s amazing. And I, I, I truly, and what I like about. Hypernomics is it’s more than just theory, it’s actually putting some, some data points together and plotting really the, the reality and, you know, back to the, the government, right? If, if they would adopt this and start moving in this direction, I think a lot of us will be a lot more optimistic because today I think a lot of people are a little bit, uncertain of what’s going to happen with you know, debt, economy inflation, all this other stuff. And, and I’m hoping that Hypernomics is going to play a pivotal role in, in getting us back to get the ship steered on the right course. So, I appreciate the insights on your Hypernomics and how it’s going to be in the future. So, thank you.
Doug Howarth: Well, thank you, Brian. I really appreciate your time and, and love your podcast. Love your content. And thanks so much for having me on the show.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. It was going to say it was my pleasure as well. And just want to say – bye for now.
Doug Howarth Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
