Clients don’t just license the Index. They engage with the people who built it.

W. Travis Hanes III holds a doctorate in British Imperial History from the University of Texas at Austin. His scholarly work spans two centuries of civilizational stress — from the Opium Wars to the twilight of the British Empire in Africa — with a specific focus on how institutional systems accumulate pressure, suppress adaptive response, and eventually release in ways that reshape the global order.

His published books include The Opium Wars: The Addiction of One Empire and the Corruption of Another and Imperial Diplomacy in the Era of Decolonization — studies of the exact mechanisms the Entropy Index is designed to detect and measure. The framework did not emerge from political science or finance. It emerged from decades of studying how empires fail.

The core insight of the Index — that systemic collapse follows measurable entropy patterns long before it registers in conventional data — is Travis's. He developed the thermodynamic model of human insecurity over years of research into how fear propagates through complex systems, identifying six domains through which pressure accumulates, amplifies, and either adapts or ruptures.

The Entropy Index is the quantified, AI-deployed version of that research. What Travis spent a career documenting historically, the platform now measures in real time.

Taylor Good is CEO of the Entropy Index. He built the live platform that turns Travis Hanes’s thermodynamic framework into institutional product — scoring engine, evidence and briefing systems, entity architecture, client portal, and API — and runs the company that delivers it. The production Index face is V5-locked: Map-A point-in-time scoring, Watch and Act clocks, and CAIL first-principles fill, under Travis’s signed claim ceiling.

Besides systems AI, his emphasis is brand, distribution, and capital networks at the institutional edge. He led brand for Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis Finance (1.5M+ customers; 10M monthly site visitors), co-founded Silo Labs (venture-backed; TechCrunch), advised a single-LP family office (~$2B AUM) on strategy and outreach, and has been in crypto markets since the 2017 ICO era. In parallel he built a contemporary art practice at unusual speed — 5,000+ works released, 1,300+ collectors, a collaboration with Paris Hilton, work with Soho House, and a presentation at the Getty Center’s 25th anniversary, including FLOUR (GETTY) SOUP. That is why Perceived Insecurity is operational for him: how systems communicate, and how audiences price fear.

He builds with an AI-native stack that lets a two-person founding core compound delivery without a services org. What institutions encounter now is not a prototype — continuous six-domain scoring with sealed physics, case-study proof, and an operating model built for judgment under load.