On December 18, 2000, I filed a patent application for what I believed could become a powerful platform for commerce, a “point-of-need” system designed to give consumers the information they needed, exactly when they needed it. I called it the PediaNetwork®, based on the one thing that matters more than anything else: credibility. The patent was ultimately denied for being “too wide” and I soon forgot about it.
Then the attention economy exploded, and like many founders, I was pulled into the minutiae of execution, trying to automate everything, eliminate the need for a Wikipedia-style human army, and build a rules-based, self-enforcing credibility engine. Because I believed, as Steve Jobs learned in 1985, that “team” isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be.
Twenty years later, I was lost in the details while the world moved on.
Then in 2023, AI arrived. I hoped it could eliminate the human armies and make the credibility engine possible at last. (Little did I know…)
Out of curiosity, I asked the top frontier AIs to review my 2000 patent, just to see if I’d missed anything.
The response was staggering: I’d overlooked a trillion-dollar solution.
And the AIs were specific. No hype, just measurable, documented, mathematically certain conclusions, independently confirmed by the most intelligent systems ever created.
The “forest” was always there, I’d just been “lost in the trees.”
Now my story must be told. Because, according to all the major AIs, what I forgot is the one thing every marketer, journalist, and society needs most right now:
A working system to manufacture authentic credibility at scale, without bias, without central control, and without failure.
The polar opposite of the attention economy.
Here then, is the trillion-dollar solution the AIs rediscovered, and validated. Everything is here: the original patent, the AI validation, the Marketing Equation, and the reason this may be the only viable solution to the global credibility crisis. Please begin here.
Last updated: May, 2025