He was working for the US government, and one of the ideas that he put forth was, "Wow, humans are creating so much information, and we can't keep track of all the books that we've read or the connections between important ideas."

So what started out as an idea, is now being implemented to churn out millions of sequences that we can use to investigate the long-term evolutionary history of human health and disease, right down to the genetic code of individual pathogens.

And what you're looking at is columns of dust where there's so much dust -- by the way, the scale of this is a trillion vertical miles -- and what's happening is there's so much dust, it comes together and it fuses and ignites a thermonuclear reaction.

Eyeota also buys information from third parties such as the credit rating agency Experian, which amasses a massive database of 15 different demographic types and 66 lifestyles, all based on people's post codes.

We've spent a great deal of time investigating a $1 billion -- that's right, a $1 billion — oil deal that he was involved with, and what we found was pretty shocking, but more about that later.

In doing so, I apologize, I'm going to use an outdated analogy of encyclopedias rather than Wikipedia, but I'm going to do so to try and help make the point that as we did this inventory, we needed to be able to look at massive amounts of information.

So what did Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan, as chairs of the Fed, do when they got these warnings that these were massively fraudulent loans and that they were being sold to the secondary market?

As you can see, this is a very resource-intensive process, requiring both expert physicians, expensive medical imaging technologies, and is not considered practical for the developing world.

In premodern Italy, failed business owners, who had outstanding debts, were taken totally naked to the public square where they had to bang their butts against a special stone while a crowd jeered at them.

With all of the stuff we make, we spend a tremendous amount of money and energy -- in fact, last year, about two trillion dollars -- convincing people to buy the things we've made.

The Fed uses vast amounts of economic data to determine how much currency should be in circulation, including previous rates of inflation, international trends, and the unemployment rate.

They spend an enormous amount of time attacking their parents' backgrounds as profane, impure, blasphemous, the wrong type of Islam, and their vision instead is a fantastical view of cosmic apocalypse.

But there is actually a very positive side to this, and that is this: The 27 million people who are in slavery today, that's a lot of people, but it's also the smallest fraction of the global population to ever be in slavery.