How Your Free Will And Data Are Being Hacked By Micro-Targeting Of Your Personality
Andy Russell explains how tech companies use your personal data to micro-target ads and political messages designed to manipulate your behavior. He describes the lack of regulation around these practices and their threat to democracy and individual choice.
What we need to do is be a lot more discerning about the stuff we take as gospel that we read, that we see in the internet, and realize that for right now, for this moment in time, nobody's regulating it. Nobody's saying whether it's truthful or false. Hi everyone, Kaya Perowich here, one of the producers of the Doctors Pharmacy Podcast. Before we get started with this week's episode, we have a quick word from our sponsor, which happens to be Dr. Hyman's new company, Pharmacy. Thanks for tuning in.
Hey, it's Dr. Hyman.
Do you have FLC?
What's FLC? It's when you feel like crap. It's a problem that so many people suffer from and often have no idea that it's not normal or that you can fix it. I mean, you know the feeling. It's when you're super sluggish, your digestion's off, you can't think clearly, or you have brain fog, or you just feel run down. Can you relate? I know most people can. But the real question is, what the heck do we do about it? Well, I hate to break the news, but there's no magic bullet. FLC isn't caused by one single thing, so there's not not one single solution. However, there is a systems-based approach, a way to tackle the multiple root factors that contribute to FLC. And I call that system the 10-Day Reset. The 10-Day Reset combines food, key lifestyle habits, and targeted supplements to address FLC straight on. It's a protocol that I've used with thousands of my community members to help them get their health back on track. It's not a magic bullet. It's not a quick fix. It's a system that works. if you want to learn more and get your health back on track, click on the button below or visit getpharmacy.com that's getpharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y.com hi, everyone.
Just wanted to let you know that this episode contains some colorful language. So if you're listening with kids, you might want to save this episode for later.
Welcome to the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's Pharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. And if you care about digital privacy and your data, this is a conversation you should listen to because though you may think you're making choices on your own, you may not be, and your free will is being usurped in ways that are invisible, insidious, and nefarious. And the guest we have today is the guy to talk about it because he was involved at Ground Zero, Andy Russell. And Andy and I met at a party a number of weeks ago and we had a brief conversation that just shocked me and I wanted everybody to hear this. Even though it's not about health and medicine or food, it is about our mental health and it is about our brain, how it works, and how it's being undermined by various activities that are happening across the technology world that you may not be aware of. And I certainly think of myself as well informed, but I was not really aware of the depth of the use of our personal data against us to make us do things that we think are our choices, but may not be. So Andy is a digital media, ad tech, marketing tech, data science innovator. as well as a pioneer and self-taught behavioral economist. He went to Cornell as I did, and he took the same psychology class. He went further with it. I ended up bearded off into medicine. He's incubated run over 50 technology companies, including many you might have heard of, including Daily Candy, Thrillist, Tasting Table, Ideal Bite, PureWow, Zinga, heard of that, Betaworks, Business Insider, and on and on and on. He also was a founding partner with Bob Pittman, who's an incredible brand guy you might have heard about. In the private equity firm pilot group and he's co-founder of one of New York's best hot spots, the restaurant lounge, Moomba, which he did when he was 26, which is impressive. I don't know what I was doing at 26. I was in medical school. And he's the chairman of Treat House. He's also does a lot of philanthropic stuff. Worked on the board of Mount Sinai Department of Children, Analysts in Psychiatry. He's on the advisory council for the New York Stem Cell Research Foundation and founding chairman of Build New York and has been a keynote speaker at the Prentice School and specializes in teaching students with dyslexia. and he's a recipient of Network's 2020 Global Leadership Award on and on and on. So, the fact that you went to Cornell is awesome because I went there and you graduated in abnormal psychology. I thought that was a joke in your bio, but it's actually a thing. We'll talk about what that means. And you also went to Columbia Business School. So, you're a smart dude. And the reason I invited you on this podcast was to talk about what's happening underneath the surface of our smartphones and our web browsers that people just aren't aware of. Everybody hears about data privacy. We hear about our 50 million emails, I mean, 50 million Facebook profiles being stolen by Cambridge Analytica that's used against us. And we hear about all these hearings in the Senate and Congress from Mark Zuckerberg and Zuckerberg and Google. And yet most of us don't probably understand it very well, including me. So I invited you here to educate me and us about what's actually happening in this technology landscape? And the conversation that got me really intrigued was you said that this technology, which is sort of agnostic, it could be used for good or bad to target people using digital marketing and advertising, was being used against us in ways that we weren't aware of for political purposes and that we're also being used in a one-sided way by Republicans and the Democrats, you hinted, weren't up to speed on what they should be up to speed on to have an even playing field. Whether you're a Democrat or Republican doesn't matter. But if one political party has a technology sort of like a smart bomb that the other group doesn't, we're in trouble, right? Because then it's not a democracy, right? It's not a fair democracy. And that's what worries me. And I want to sort of get into to sort of what, first let's start off with sort of the high level. You know, what happens when we go on our phones and our websites and we're browsing around and doing stuff? Like how much is Google and Facebook and all these apps watching and what are they doing with all this data they collect? Like tell us about how this works at sort of start at 30,000 foot level. Because I don't think people understand.
Sure. So basically imagine your worst nightmare of being watched. Every action you do, every feeling you have, any emotion you might have, not just the things you purchase but deep into your soul. Your insecurities are, there are ways of pulling those out of you.
So using your worst traits against you.
Well, so it's just technology, right? It's just tech. So there is a parallel universe where the internet knows so much about you that the internet knows the things that you want, should want, will make you happier. have a more joyous life and have less frustrations. There's a parallel universe.
That sounds good.
Yeah, it sounds amazing. And this is what we were trying to build. Like all of us who've been part of building the infrastructure of the internet and digital technologies. Imagine a world where companies create services and products that are very valuable. to segments of the population and segments of the population have needs, desires, and wants. And there's a connectivity or curation where it's easy for those consumers to find those things that they want, making their life better and easier. And it's easier for companies to find those consumers, making their businesses grow with less cost, less inefficiencies. That's the, that's what we were trying to build. Like really trying to build.
Yeah, so if I create my broken brain docu-series and I want to share with people and do Facebook ads, I can actually get it to people who might be suffering and benefit from it. That's what I said. Not bad. We do that. I do that.
I mean 100%. Like you actually provide real value to real people and the real people out there who maybe don't know that you exist But once they found out that you exist, their lives would be better. Yeah, that's fantastic. Now, the flip side of that is we do live in a capitalist society, and I'm fine with capitalism.
As a venture capitalist, you'd imagine you would be.
Yeah, and I believe in hard work and competition. and that hard work and competition and capitalism drives some innovation. But when greed and power overstep their bounds, the same technologies that could be used for very good purposes, satisfying needs of people, lowering their anxieties, making them overall happier, less angry, less frustrated, less hate. The same technologies can tear us apart.
Yeah.
And make us paranoid of those around us. And we've seen it. So this isn't a new thing with sociology or anthropology. You see it all throughout history. Yeah.
I mean, you have demagogues. I mean, you can activate people like Hitler did. And right. So they had propaganda films. They had more crude technologies, but now...
This is just propaganda on steroids.
Yeah.
And opposed to a single message going out to a greater population, it's going directly to you. Because in your newsfeed or the ads that you see or the content that you see, whether you put a search into Google or you're flipping through your your Facebook feed, your Instagram feed, your Snapchat feed, anything, it's personalized to you. Now, why is it personalized to you? Well, obviously, those big tech companies know a lot about you. Now, in a perfect world, that's great. You have a personal curation service of valuable information to you. But in an imperfect world, which is what we obviously live in, It turns into manipulation and it can get so dangerous and it already has the way it turns into almost hypnotism.
Right, so here's the thing. Advertising, when there's an ad on TV or there's a radio ad or there's an ad on a podcast, you know you're being sold to.
Yep.
It's pretty obvious.
100%.
This is news masquerading as Well, this is ads masquerading as news, right? This is insidious ways of communicating that you don't know you're being targeted.
But it's not only ads.
It's content.
It's content, yeah.
It's that news article that seems like it's an authentic news article.
100% because anybody can put up a website and can put up a Facebook page or can put up a Twitter handle or a LinkedIn page or an Instagram page and all of a sudden can put a name to it that sounds somewhat official and can start making up their own news.
And this is sort of become completely unregulated because we didn't really understand that this was going to be a problem.
There's been zero time to regulate it.
It's happened so fast that it hasn't been... people don't even know what's going on, right?
Not a clue. And what's very upsetting, at least to me, seeing I've been in this industry for over 20 years, specifically in this industry.
Digital ads and marketing.
Digital ads targeting, yeah, persuasion, but more around advertising to get people to buy certain things. The laws that were written for television and for print and for radio, don't apply to the laws that are written for the internet, so we're completely in the wild, wild west. And to make matters worse, people who make those laws and who have policy are not digital natives in the slightest.
In other words, the 60-year-old lawmakers didn't grow up with technology.
And don't have a clue how the algorithms work. Right. And Zuckerberg's Senate hearing, what was it, like two years ago? Yeah. Being somebody who, literally, I go hands on keyboards, I look at the dashboards, I know exactly where everybody is, what they're doing, how to target, da-da-da-da. It was painful to me to watch the senators ask questions because it was so blatant that they were just completely clueless. Now, I don't blame them for being clueless. That's not what they're experts at. It's kind of like having regulators looking.
At.
Astrophysics or satellites or rockets around the technology behind it. Or the mechanics of a car. Like, I can't build a car. I have no idea how to go in there and make a car work. And to make things worse, a lot of the journalists who cover the space aren't real experts in the tactical aspects of how information flows, how data flows. And so they get stuck using big words I'm sure everybody listening to this has heard the term big data lots of times.
Yeah.
Do they really know what it means? Yeah. Algorithm. Okay, cool. But what does it really mean? Really mean? Machine learning. Interesting word. But what does it mean?
AI.
Artificial intelligence. Ooh, sexy word. Cool. What does it mean?
Yeah, tell us. What do these things mean? Because I'm hearing things and I don't know if they're accurate or not, but I mean, I heard one woman give a talk and she said, There's up to 3 billion data points on every person that these companies collect all of our activities where we shop, where we go, they have location tracking on our phone, they know where we are, there's geotargeting, they can literally ping people's phones if they're at a rally and be able to then target them later. You're on your phone, all of a sudden you're talking to a friend about something and then some ad for that thing you're talking about pops up on your phone, are they listening? Is the iPhone listening? Are Google and Facebook selling your data to third parties that are using it against us? Are third parties selling it back to Google and Facebook? What's happening? I read the other day that when you go to WebMD, WebMD sells the data on what you're searching on. If you have heartburn or you have cancer or you have constipation or a headache, it sells that data back to Google and Facebook, which then can use it to target you.
That just seems like a real invasion of privacy. All right, so let's break some myths here.
Okay, go.
Hardcore just breaks a myth. So number one, by the way, I'm a doctor.
I don't think about technology, so I'm here with everybody listening trying to figure this out. So that's why I brought Andy.
So let's have fun. What's data? Literally, oh my God, they have all my data. We should have data rights and data privacy. What kind of data are you talking about?
Well, that I searched for a vacation in Mongolia, that I wanted to buy a new iPhone that whatever, you know, like, right. They know that.
Okay, so let me just break it down. All right, so you know how every morning or so you get a piece of maybe two or three or four pieces of direct mail, snail mail, the old-fashioned stuff.
Oh, yeah.
In your mailbox.
Right.
The ones I don't open and throw in recycling.
Yeah. So.
There are 10,000 direct mail campaigns, different campaigns that happen every day in this country. I'm assuming you don't get 10,000 pieces of direct mail.
Mm-mm.
Huh, you ever wonder why?
Because they know shit about me.
Because they know a lot of shit about you.
Yeah.
Like a lot, right? So for, since the birth of the credit card and even before then, Okay, they're big data companies. Companies such as Experian, Epsilon, Oracle, Alliant, lots of them, okay? And what they've done for decades is against you as a persona.
Create a profile, right?
Create a profile on you. How the hell does some company, which is just like a company with the name like Epsilon. They buy what?
Your data.
From who? From all the credit card companies.
Yeah.
So every credit card company sells companies like Axiom Experian Epsilon information on every purchase you've ever made up with those credit cards. And this has been going on for decades. Decades.
Like my wife buys all these cat toys. and cat things and cat exercise wheels. And so she gets targeted all the time with cat stuff.
No, but let's come back to the old fashioned stuff. Free internet. Because this is not like a new phenomenon.
Yeah, it's just more dangerous.
So who else sells this information to the big data companies? The banks. Like you have your money in a bank, right? So all that information, your tax records, How much money you make, how much taxes.
The IRS sells your tax data?
No.
All of it is sold to the big data companies. All of it.
How does the government sell your tax return data?
Most of it's put on public record, that stuff.
So how come we don't have Trump's tax returns then?
Good question. That I can't answer. I can't answer that. but what airlines you fly, that you went to Cornell, that you're a doctor, every address you've ever lived at, right? And then what they do, because they've got hundreds of thousands of individuals that they have that level of detailed data on, so that's the kind of data we're talking about for offline stuff.
Yeah.
Right. Then you can append to it like, oh, what television shows are watching your home? That's good. What kind of car you drive? How long you've driven the car? Might you now be in the market for a new car? Because we know that you have whatever kind of car and you've been driving for years.
Leases up soon.
And you've only bought tires like six years ago and you had your oil changed. I mean, they know everything. So then, The data companies take all these personas, people, individuals, human beings, and all this, let's stop calling it data, information about these people.
Yes.
Okay. And run what's called predictive models against these people. And say that there's like 50,000 people who have like 60% of the same purchases that you've made for the past two years. And then, you know, of those people, the next purchase they made, they went on to get a Amex Platinum card.
Yeah.
But you haven't yet gotten your Amex Platinum card.
Yeah.
So if you model all this purchase behavior off of all these people who have similar purchase, upbringing, educational income levels as you, now it's worth sending you a piece of direct mail, offering you the opportunity to get a Amex Platinum. I am a platinum card. And by the way, that piece of mail costs 72 cents.
Yeah, it's a lot.
A lot. It's a fortune to get to you. And the estimate of the industry is that only you like, oh, they throw it away. I throw it away. I throw it away. Two percent of the time.
And it gets open.
Yeah, two percent. So if it's two percent of the time and it costs 72 cents, I mean, to get you to open that. is $35. Yeah. Holy shit. That's a lot of money.
Yeah.
So, guess what?
Per person.
Per person. So now you can extrapolate. Huh. If I have a lot of information on someone, a lot and I compare it to a lot of information on lots of other people and therefore I can predict what your next purchase might be.
Yeah.
Therefore it's worth $35. For me to get that piece of mail in your hands and for you to open it up.
Yeah.
And the number of... This is all analog.
You're not even talking digital yet.
I'm just talking analog because this is the birth of the whole thing.
Yeah, so they know how to do this. They've been doing it for years. And then the digital revolution comes along and all of a sudden... Everybody freaks.
It's like a million X on that. Everybody freaks. Oh my God, my data, my personal.
Data, holy cow, people know stuff about me.
Really?
Well, they did, but you weren't getting news feeds that were fiction.
Correct.
You weren't getting some fake newspaper in your box.
That's where it got really, really bad.
And I just want to back up a little bit because most people don't realize that there was sort of a pivotal moment in the media with the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. And the Fairness Doctrine was a regulation law that basically mandated that all news was fair and was honest and equal. And that's when you had Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, ABC, CBS, NBC. That was it. It wasn't CNN. There wasn't anything.
Right.
And I remember those days because I'm that old.
I remember those days.
And you could trust it. They were trustworthy. It was fair and partial. That got repealed under Ronald Reagan. And that led to the birth of alternative media and Fox News and other channels of distribution of information so that all of a sudden now when you read the news, it may not be news. I mean, I used to live in China and it was a totalitarian state where the people's daily was fiction. You know, it was fiction. and it's not, and what they people mostly did with it was wipe their butt because they didn't have toilet paper, which is probably the best use for the people's daily. So I think that's actually happening now, but we don't know it. But that's also, people knew that the people's daily was fiction. You know, Chinese citizens understood that it was propaganda, but we don't know that anymore.
So I'm forgetting the date. It was either 1995 or 1996. There was an article put into, I think, the Communications Act. that said that any digital platform, that digital platform that has content on it that is provided by a third party, the platform itself is not responsible for the content that is on the platform.
So if Facebook puts up a jihadist post, then it's not responsible for that?
Yes. And by the way, it's like a 16-word article in obscure regulations. That's it. And that's the loophole that protects Facebook, Google, or any digital publisher that takes third-party content. That's it. And if it weren't for that one little article in that document, Facebook would be responsible.
But what's really concerning, though, is not that that third parties put stuff on Google and Facebook and other digital platforms is that then those platforms, Google and Facebook and others, sell our data to third parties.
Oh, it's worse than that.
To other groups that may use it for good or may use it for bad.
They're not really.
No?
Not really. So what happened in 2014? Okay. So think about it. You log on to Facebook with one email address.
Right?
But you probably have like four or five or six different email addresses over your lifetime.
Yeah. Right.
And you log on to Google with an email address. But you probably had six or seven different email addresses.
Yeah.
And same thing for YouTube and same thing for Instagram.
Sure.
Okay. So in the years kind of 2013, 14 and 15, all these big data companies, the one I just told you about that we're buying all your credit card information, all your financial information, your travel information. They started, it's called appending to your file, adding to your file, all of your email addresses. All of them, right? So in 2014, all of the big data companies, then when they were analog.
They then got digital.
They were analog. went to Facebook and went to Google and because Facebook owns Instagram, same thing with Instagram and because Google owns YouTube, same thing with YouTube. If the email address that you logged on to Facebook with, they had as one of their set, the data companies had as one of their seven email addresses, they were able to find you And they sold all the data, your offline data, behind the scenes to Facebook and to Google.
So it was like a swap. It's a big data swap.
No, it was a cash sale. 25 million bucks.
They sold it, but it was basically Facebook and Google gave them their digital data.
No, they didn't.
They didn't give them the emails?
No, because remember, you logged on to Facebook with one email address.
Yes.
If data companies had that email address as one of their seven, they were able to find you and it was a financial transaction. The data companies sold to Facebook all of the offline data on you plus up to six additional email addresses on you.
Okay, so this is just fine if that information was being used to better curate what we think we might like. Because I don't mind getting ads about things that I might want to buy that I didn't know about. I can sort of sift through that. But what's really happened and what I really want to get into now is the political piece of this. So there's a movie called the Great Hack, which I'm sure you saw and.
No one-- I did a screening of it.
It did a screening of it. It's on Netflix. For those who haven't watched it, please watch it.
It's a must watch.
But essentially, I mean, it's like a.
Must, must, must, have to watch for any human being in society who cares about how they make decisions and how we're influenced by good or bad actors.
Yeah, so this is really important that you said. I agree. Everybody should watch it. And the reason it was so disturbing to me, because I understand the food system really well, and I understand how they use their tactics, which I wrote about in my book Food Fix coming out in February 2020, how they use their tactics to drive our eating behavior and our food choices and the food that's grown and all that. And I think that's one of the biggest threats to humanity and the planet today. I agree. But when I started learning about what's in the Great Hack and when I heard this woman, Brittany Kaiser, give a talk, I was like, and talking to you, I was like, wait a minute. There's another big threat that is not so obvious. Everybody understands that.
Maybe even worse.
People drink Coca-Cola, we get that it's not great for you, right? But this is invisible for most people.
Yes.
We kind of know that we get curated ads and stuff and we're sort of aware of it. But what this movie highlighted was how this company Cambridge Analytica created a personality typing based on all these data points, whether it's 3 million or 3 billion, I don't know how many it is, but there's a lot of information on us Yeah. From all these sources, from the analog sources, from the digital sources, from every activity we do. I mean, I went on my iPhone and like you can stop the tracking of, of your phone because they track your phone and what you go on and they target ads to you. It's like, and then they sell that, I don't know if iPhone's listening or not to us. It seems like it is sometimes. And they sell that data to Google and Facebook. I don't know that's true, but I heard that somewhere. And, and what's concerning me is, and they use this for more nefarious purposes. It wasn't selling you a new jacket, a new shoe or something you might like. It was selling you political ideas.
Yes.
And it was using the personality typing to target.
And it's not just political messaging. It is seeding a fear inside of your head.
Yeah.
And then it is watering that seed of an idea, fertilizing that seed of an idea, surround sounding you, in an echo chamber, reverberating that fear back into your head until you take an action.
Exactly. Yeah, that's what was striking to me was that they know us better than we know ourselves. They know our weaknesses and fears and insecurities better than we know them, and they use that data to create customized messaging to manipulate our behavior so that free will becomes a fiction. And then they're doing this not just in the last election where they created campaigns targeting, for example, certain voters with certain weaknesses to get them to shift their allegiance. But they're doing this globally and so they're activating despots all around the world. And I don't understand their motivation or what their motivation was to start to put in right-wing despots and fascists across the globe. But that's what they've done. And then they've also activated- Are you.
Speaking just about Cambridge Analytica?
Well, that's all I know about. I'm sure there's more going on that I don't know about. But what struck me really was that they were able to activate different groups. So in other words, if there's a riot of African Americans and white supremacists that show up in a certain place at a certain time, it ain't spontaneous. It literally can be orchestrated and people can be driven to show up to activate those riots or those conflicts that are manufactured that then create a whole downstreams that are consequences that are not good.
So, absolutely.
That's terrifying to me. And people who show up to those rallies think, oh, this is my idea, this is my belief, this is what I feel. But it turns out it may not be.
So, nobody wants to think that they are influencable or persuadable. Like, we like to think that our brains are so magnificent and we have free will and we make our own decisions and we're rational human beings.
Yeah.
Right?
Well, so a really famous psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, who actually won the Nobel Prize in economics based on something called cognitive biases, insecurities, and how we make decisions. He said something at a speech once that really freaked me out. He said, the human being remembers about 0.05% of their memories. Of their memories, 0.05 seconds.
Of their memories.
Yeah.
And a memory's period of time, moments of time are defined as three seconds intervals. Because that's how long it takes for the neurons to actually fire and create a memory, right? Yeah, three seconds. If we're only remembering 0.05% of all of our memories and all the actions we've done, a computer database that remembers all of it.
All of it.
Including, yes, where you take your cell phone, right? As you go on an easy pass, as you use Google Maps, plus all your offline purchase data, everywhere you've ever lived, everywhere you've ever had a meal.
You go buy, yeah.
Yep. Coffee, vitamins, you take everything like that. Plus, it's studying what content you read, what videos you watch, What magazines you subscribe to? Holy shit. So now it's like, wait a second, what do you mean Google or Facebook or YouTube knows me better than I know myself? Well, excuse me, Mr. Or Mrs. Human Being, you only remember 0.05%. And the computers, the databases remember all of it. And therefore, as they're studying that stuff, It becomes very easy, scarily, wickedly easy to tap into your insecurities and your fears by playing you information that they already know will rattle you and trigger you.
Yeah, and it's one thing if they're selling you some stuff to buy, it's another thing if they're selling you political ideology or hate.
Or hate or fear.
Or fear.
And I'll just give you a really nice example. And by the way, I consider myself a centrist when it comes to politics. But I'll give you a really good example. I'm a hardworking American. I live in Texas and I have kids and I have to, you know, clothe them and medical expenses and all that. And I've worked my bought off for years, right? I'm trying to save a little bit of money for retirement, but I've got like another 12 years of work. And then I just have to say to you, the immigrants are coming across the border.
Right, they're gonna take your job.
And they're gonna take your job. Well, that's my greatest fear, that I'm gonna lose my job and not be able to take care of my family.
Yeah.
Like, that's a real fear of mine.
The aliens are coming.
But not just as they're crossing the border, they're coming for your job. And now let's just say they're coming across the border, they're gonna have no money and they're coming from violent places, now they're gonna do violent things to your family. Well, that's another real fear of mine. And those are legitimate fears, right? I want the safety for my family. I want to have my job, to be able to take care of my family. So it's very, very easy to use fear tactics around things that aren't true. It might be a little bit true, might be like a small chance of being true, but like, huh.
Yeah, I remember the rally, the white supremacist rally in Virginia. It was like the white supremacists were yelling, Jews will not replace us. And I'm like, wow, well first of all, there's not that many of us. Jews will not, And I'm like, what? And I'm like, we probably don't want those jobs. They're not going to do those jobs, whatever. I just don't understand.
So here it's Jews will not replace us, right? And then it was immigrants will not replace us. And then in Europe, it's Muslims will not replace us. All right? Holy cow. Others are coming to take away what's mine, and I've worked really hard for it. The psychology.
That's just one example of a whole series of things. It's not just people who, you know, might not be worried about their job, but there'd be other ways of targeting fears and insecurities around political action. So the defeat of Crooked Hillary, whether you're for against Hillary or not, the methodology that was used was to target Hillary voters, people who were for Hillary, with information, misinformation, to actually sway those voters to not vote for Hillary, to stay home or vote for Trump.
Hillary's running a child sex slave operation out of a basement of a pizzeria.
I remember that.
Yeah.
That wasn't true?
Actually, so I follow up on all this stuff, right? And people went to that pizzeria. To free those poor children.
Yes.
And there was no basement and there were no children.
Yeah.
But damn, does that work?
It works, right?
Holy, I mean, just completely false. Like completely false.
So where are we at now? Because if this is happening, you know, we're facing another election.
Yes.
And one of the things you said to me was that, you know, one team, the Republican team, understands this technology. knows how to use it and the other team, the Democrats, don't really know what's going on.
So what we've discussed.
And so we're facing an election coming up, which we think is about representative democracy, but has turned into a little bit of a totalitarian process.
And by the way, is that overstating it? That's understating it.
Okay, well give us the real deal there.
All right. So what we've discussed so far, so far, is we've now changed this term data to being just information.
Your personal information.
And just like everything you've ever done and everything you read and everything you care about and just information about you. It's not data. It's just like everything about you.
But who owns that? We thought we own it, but we don't own it.
That's a whole. We'll talk about that.
Okay.
We've never owned that.
Right.
We've never owned it, but now we want to own it.
So that's a whole other conversation. So we've talked about the big tech companies, knowing a lot about you, like a ton. And then we talked about psychologically driven advertising messages, which are political. Advertising, right? Trying to convince you to have an idea, do something, vote. And then we spoke about the fact that it can be just totally made up bullshit stuff. We know that it will resonate, nauseate you.
Slave trade and pizzeria.
At the core of who, and by the way, if any of that were true, it should nauseate you.
Of course.
Right? And by the way, if people really were coming to take your job and do damage to your family, and Hillary really was running a child sex slave thing in a pizzeria. Like, yeah, this is all real stuff that you should be concerned about. So now we've discussed the fakeness of it, right? And by the way, who would I be targeting that Hillary sex slave stuff to?
Hillary voters.
Well, not just Hillary voters. How about people who have good morals and ethics?
Yeah.
And really care about ending sex slave. or who run orphanages, or who are teachers, or who care about real humanitarian stuff. Well, if I can actually convince these people that Hillary's really running a sex slave operation, then there's no way in hell they're voting for Hillary.
And it shows up not as an ad, it shows up as a news story.
And that's the whole point. It shows up as 30 different news stories across 30 different sites. Therefore it validates one or the other.
Who's writing this nonsense?
People get hired because people are greedy and people who want to win elections.
So they're hired by political parties with all the donation money.
Or not necessarily the political parties, right? So like Super PAC. Yeah, well Super PAC stuff or people who just like want one candidate to win really, really badly, so they'll just put their own money up and just become journalists. But like journalists that publish fake stuff. I mean, just completely fake.
Like the Martians have landed in Kansas and the National Enquirer. Is it?
All right, so did we discuss?
Brad Pitt is actually a Martian.
He's not. So we've discussed all kind of that, which is kind of like the basics underlining of it. So why are the Republicans so damn good at it? And Democrats are so damn bad at it.
So.
Now let's get away from the fake news part.
Yeah.
Let's just talk about like political advertising.
Yes.
All right. Every political year over the history of politics, over a billion dollars has been spent on political advertising on television. It's a lot of money. Like a lot of money.
Right.
So seeing that the Democrats and Republicans, now literally forget about like the fake stuff.
And that was interesting during the last election for president. The Democrat Hillary spent far more than Trump on winning but lost.
On television. Yes.
And that Trump spent like 50 million on Facebook ads, right? All right.
So Trump's got a secret weapon. His name is Brad Parscale. Brad Parscale is a phenomenal, phenomenal digital media marketer. And it's not He doesn't usually, I mean, yes, he ran some lies about Biden, right? I mean, we all read about that. We know that.
The corruption scandal, you mean?
Yeah, yeah, I mean, those were ads that he ran. For the most part, Brad Parscale does not run fakeness or lies about Trump or about the opponents. For the most part, he doesn't.
Yeah.
But what he's damn good at is using the platforms. And it's not just like, oh, there's Facebook, and then there's Google, and then there's Instagram, and there's Google Display, and there's YouTube, and there's email, and then there are different landing pages, all as separate things. So if you think of the internet.
As a whole, Yeah, that's one thing.
Yeah.
It's made up of a whole bunch of different puzzle pieces. Lots of different puzzle pieces. Only one of which is Facebook. And by the way, all the tools that are, gotta be pretty sophisticated to know how to really use those tools. And nobody in the old school Democrat or Republican side, had ever rolled up their sleeves, gone hands-on keyboards, and bought actual ads on Facebook, Google, Instagram, nobody power or money or in the old system had done that. What Donald Trump did is he hired a digital media native, Brad Parscale, who was designing websites.
Who is 25?
There is a real methodology, a very specific methodology otherwise known as a way of putting the puzzle pieces together that turn this type of digital marketing persuasion into a weapon.
Yeah, so you call this weapon of mass destruction.
On weapon of either mass destruction or mass good.
Yeah.
All right. And the Democrats just missed it. Nice and simple. Because what Brad Parscale did for Trump only became possible technically, like with all the technology that exists, in 2014.
Yeah.
Two years after Obama's election and exactly two years before the 2016 election.
But you're saying even now that Democrats still haven't clued into this.
Democrats are trying. But it's only in the past, first of all, once again, the movie the Great Hack, everybody has to see it. Because however much you think you know, nobody knows. Watch this movie. It's a really good insight. After that movie, I'm going to go.
Have a bottle of tequila. Yeah, you're gonna wanna like- Move to New Zealand.
Yeah, we're not gonna be very happy.
But it's good to be aware. I mean, if we don't, if we are aware, that's the first step, I think, in protecting ourselves from those influences.
If you don't want to be manipulated, if you don't want to be persuaded to do stuff that you don't think.
Is in your best interest, then actually learn. It's like, you know, it's like when you get those emails now from the King of Nigeria that left you $5 million and all you have to to do is give me your bank account information. People kind of go, okay, I get that it's a scam, but they don't get that this is a scam.
100%. I mean, you just don't know. You really just don't know. So first and foremost, people should see that movie. And second is four things happened in 2014 that made it possible for the first time ever to do the type of very sophisticated digital marketing that Brad Parscale does. Number one, all those big data companies, Axiom Experience, Epsilon, Oracle, Bubba, started appending up to six email addresses.
Yeah, that was late. It seems late for that to happen.
Yeah.
Then they all sold all that offline data plus the emails behind the scenes to Facebook and Google, Instagram and YouTube, and everybody else, once that happened, something called Facebook Custom Audiences got introduced, which meant if you have email lists or email newsletters, which is what I had, Daily Candy, all the different-- Sure, like I do. Curated email newsletter lists. You could take segments of those people who react to certain content in a certain way. upload those and find those people on Facebook. But why can you find them? Because you might not have the email address that somebody signed up to Facebook with, but now Facebook has up to seven email addresses on you. Ah, so whatever they sign up to your email newsletter with, as long as it's one of those seven that are on Facebook, you find those people on Facebook.
Yeah.
So now you can target those people. Yeah, that happened in 2013-14. And then the next thing that happened is just like I told you, the big data companies would study all of your behavior and say the next thing that you might purchase is a Amex platinum card.
Yeah.
Now Facebook gives you the ability to use something called lookalikes against that custom audience. Yeah, so you put in that custom audience.
Sounds like, right?
They look at all the data they have. Offline purchase data, where you've lived, everything, behavioral data, what you read, blah, blah, blah. See what these people, this cohort of people in custom audiences have in common.
Yeah.
And then Facebook will align you with other people on Facebook who have common data sets.
Right, so you seem like you and I seem similar, so then we have the same values, look at the same.
Stuff, so they're going to target us. And now what's really fascinating, it's so much more powerful than just the offline purchases. Yes, they have that, but they have your behavioral data on what type of content you watch, see, da-da-da, right? So now that's the psychological profiling. Yeah, and people don't realize this.
When you click on a website or click on an area in a website article, all that data is being tracked. Yes. And so they know what you're interested in, what you're looking at. If you click on the Tesla ad, they know if you're reading an article about climate change, you're reading an article about immigration, or you're watching a video. I mean, great, Netflix knows which movies I like. I don't mind that. That's okay.
But this is a different purpose, right? 100%. So that was the next thing that Facebook did. It said, oh, if you have a small group, now you can plug it in and find everybody else on Facebook who will react to the same emotional storytelling, otherwise can be brainwashed around the same type of fear tactics. And then you remember in 2014, the ice bucket challenge?
Yes.
So that's actually the first time video went into the live feed of Facebook. So yes, I am the guy who frickin noticed seeing I used to own television stations and knew that there was a billion dollars of video political advertising being done on television. Well, holy cow, what if you get a bunch of these email newsletters and then you could study what people care about? by what subject lines they open up on, what content they read about, and you study that psychological behavior for long enough, and now you can upload that into the Facebook Custom Audience, find all those people who are similar, and now you can play them political ads. So I was building the first ever political advertising agency with video, with hyper-targeted psychological tactics to then grow a billion dollar business out of it for both Democrats and Republicans because it was just a new media channel.
Yeah, because that was your job. You were digital media, ad tech, marketing tech, data science guy, innovator, right? So you saw, okay, all these technologies coming together. We can use this to enhance the political process and help people get to voters and help people activate the democratic process. but you didn't know it was going to be usurped.
So unbeknownst to me, the person who I was doing this with ended up being a very close ally of our now president. And he took the entire game plan, tactically, all the way down, execution, whole nine yards, handed over to are now president, and is the exact game plan that Brad Parscale, who was Trump's digital marketer for the 2016 election, and now he is his campaign manager across the board. And if you watch Brad Parscale in any of his interviews, because he loves press now, he just says, oh, I'm just treating the election like marketing. Like this is just direct marketing.
Yeah.
And I can study the behavior of all these individuals and then collect their email addresses, which you'll see just about every single Trump ad.
So it's sort of like a football game where, you know, one coach gets the game plan of the other team, and then the other team doesn't know they have it, and then they're using it against them.
Yeah.
And unfortunately, after this all happened, I didn't have any relationships up at high up in the Democratic Party to be like, although I tried, really, really hard. Hey, guys, here's your story.
So you saw this happening in real time.
Oh, yeah.
Before the election.
Oh, yeah. And I was screaming from the rooftops. From the rooftops.
But no one was listening.
Well, think how silly it sounded.
Yeah.
I mean, business partners with this guy who's, you know, kind of has a reputation for being a little bit shady. There's this thing called Facebook. There's email newsletters and this thing called Data. And then this real estate tycoon slash TV personality named Donald Trump. And he's going to use this weird methodology of psychological manipulation and he's gonna win the election.
I mean, I hate to say this, but Trump is not a digital native. So how did he come to understand this? Or was it just the people around him?
So the person who I was doing this deal with is a very, very, very smart publisher.
Yeah.
Old school. Long time. And became very smart at digital. And what does Trump do? He hires really, really well. So we hired a guy named Brad Parscale, who it pisses me off because he's two inches taller than me, and I'm six foot six. And Parscale has the exact game plan, and I watch him every day using it. What it turns out is it's a lot more complicated than one would think. A lot more complicated than one would think to execute on to perfection. So currently, just about every one of the Democratic organizations out there are now after the Great Hack and then after the New York Times ran a couple of large articles about the Democrats being far behind, now they're like, oh, we must spend more money on digital and on Facebook. But if you don't spend it the right way, you're throwing away money.
So who's advising them?
Yeah, so there is one group who's actually really, really good at this. And they don't do this in a nefarious way whatsoever. They just use the communication channel the best way.
So it's current media?
Yeah, well, it's current media and a group called Acronym. And they're just very good at this. They're the best that the Democrats have. But listen, we're under a year out from this election, and Brad Parscale has been doing this for five years.
Yeah.
And has email addresses, data, and has brainwashed a fair chunk of Americans. And by the way, I don't hold it against the Americans are good people, like really good people. But it's ripping apart. our country.
It is.
Of us versus them.
You know, in college I remember reading a novel, I mean a play called Rhinoceros by Ionesco. And the play was about Nazi Germany and how could, you know, upstanding German citizens with good upbringing and good morals stand by while in their backyard there were crematoriums and concentration camps and do nothing and say nothing. And how could they all fall in line behind a clearly crazy fanatical totalitarian leader like Hitler? And it was the banality of evil. Heinrich Heine talked about the banality of evil. And I think we're in that moment where our democracy is being threatened in many ways, but in particularly in this way and the democracies around the world are being threatened and it's this problem that isn't organic, it's manufactured. So we're manufacturing hate, we're manufacturing divisiveness, we're manufacturing disconnection. And I think that's what really worries me is that, you know, people are generally good, I think. I think people are generally wanting good things for themselves and their families and their communities and their nation. But when that gets shifted through this manipulation that is invisible, that's coming through our technology, and that there are big players who understand this, who use it against us. What do we do?
So I've spent a great deal of time not only seeing all the ads that Trump runs on Facebook, and if any of your listeners want to see the ads, You can just go into Google and type in Facebook Library and put in there Donald Trump and you can see all the ads. You can see all the ads for any of the politicians to see what they're running. Facebook has now made that transparent, which is a good thing to-- yeah. People should see it. It's the Facebook Library, right? And something you just said just really resonates with me because I've spent a lot of time not just studying the ads, but watching a lot of the Trump rallies. And I actually want to go to a Trump rally, because I think it'd be really interesting.
They don't get targeted, because they ping your phone. If your location services are on, and they ping your phone, and they know where you're at.
Yeah, but you know what?
Get over it, all right?
All of this stuff does. So does every single app. Right, exactly, right. So don't sign up for it. If you don't want it, don't sign up for it.
Like I'm on Google Drive right now. And I have all these questions about all this. Is Google reading my documents and then using that somehow and selling it? Because that's terrifying to me.
In Google Documents, I'm actually not sure. I don't want to-- Because when you.
Have an email and you have Google Gmail and then you type in something and then you get an ad for something that was in your email.
So let me come back to what I was just saying.
Okay, sorry.
I get distracted. Americans. Whether you're wearing a Make America Great Again hat or you want somebody else to be president, if you put those people together, they have common interests, common concerns, common desires, common fears. And it kind of goes like this. I'd like the ability to have a job, so I can make money and take care of myself and my family. I'd like to be able to have health care so I don't have to worry about illnesses. I'd like my children to have a good education and I'd like to have safety. And I don't really want to have to worry about food, right? I don't think there are many Americans who would argue that they agree with those statements.
For sure.
All right.
So.
I don't like this division of Republican versus Democrat. Us versus them.
Right.
No, we're all human beings.
First, yeah.
First.
American second.
American second. And just break down what's important to us, right? As individuals. Like, I want to go out there and start hugging All these people who have Make America Great Hat on again and be like, we're the same thing. We care about the same stuff. And where it gets really ugly, really, really ugly. I'm glad you brought up-- and I.
Know that's true because I take care of everybody, right? I take care of all religions, all political persuasions in my office. And everybody's a human being first, and that's where I connect with with them.
I mean, that's the beauty of our country, is, you know, we have freedom of choice and freedom of belief systems and freedom of all this stuff.
But, like, not so much.
Well, let's, let's just remember that we, we all care about each other, the future of our country, the future of our children, the future of our own health, the future of Education. And we're all in this together. Right? What's horrible is when politics gets in the way. Power and greed gets in the way.
And.
People of power and greed don't mind using fear against people to get them to hate others, us versus them. Yeah, it doesn't make sense. No, it just. How can you hate other people that you've never met? Yeah, I guess that doesn't make sense. It just doesn't make sense. But that is absolutely what's happening. Our country is absolutely being divided apart.
There's a great movie called the Sacrifice by Darren Brown. People should watch it. It's on Netflix. And it shows how this American who was very much against immigration, who was very racist against Hispanics and Mexicans, was put through a process of understanding the humanity of everyone and connecting with actual human beings.
He was a white supremacist, right?
Yes, who were actual, you know, Mexicans or immigrants. And in the film, he gets him to have so much empathy and connection with these people he thought were evil and bad, taking what was rightfully his. that he was willing to take a bullet for someone who barely knew who was a Mexican immigrant.
So I've met that guy.
Darren Brown or the guy who was-- no, Darren Brown. So people should watch it because it shows how much we are all just really a conversation or two away from.
Actually-- and then let me just use one more example because you used Nazi Germany and that's-- like an obvious one to go towards. But if people have studied the genocide in Rwanda.
Yeah.
Right. Where 1 million Tutsi were slaughtered by the Hutu in 100 days. 1 million. Right.
And it was their neighbor. It was like the person who lived next door. It wasn't some remote community somewhere.
Like, really, like, not their neighbor in terms of, like, border. No, like. right next door, right.
The next door neighbor.
You went to school with them and all that stuff. How did this happen?
All right.
And the history of it's really fascinating. Going back to end of World War One, the, the Belgian went into the, uh, into the Congo, and they also went into Rwanda, and they said, huh, we're gonna give you a card that says you're Tutsi. and you guys have cards that says you're Hutu, literally arbitrary. It wasn't by culture, it wasn't by race, it wasn't by anything, right? And they just made sure that they were a lot fewer of the ruling class that were the Tutsi, and they're up for a lot more of the working class that were the Hutu, right? And they're because the smaller class of privileged people are easier to control for the Belgium, right? To suck money out of the working class of the Hutu. Back then, the communication channel was radio.
Yeah. Right.
So what started this genocide? The Hutu got hold of the national radio and said, the Tutsi are about to slaughter us. Get to them first. That was it. That was it.
Just a sound bite.
The people have been oppressing us, and now they're about to slaughter us. grab your knives, your forks, your axes, your everything. Get to them before they kill us first.
Yeah.
Holy shit. A million people slaughtered next door neighbors. Yeah. So. So don't ever underestimate what's possible.
Right.
What was also fascinating is the end of that story, which is when Kagami, who you could debate whether he's a good ruler or not, was the president of Rwanda. Came in as an autocrat essentially, but said, Look, the end of this, you're all gonna talk to each other, you're all gonna say you're sorry, and you're all gonna live together in harmony, and.
Here'S how you're gonna do it. He also said, Burn those cards, and it's now illegal to refer to anybody.
As a Hutu or Tutsi. Yeah, it was sort of like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. It was very similar. And when you see the movie about this, it's just extraordinary how literally, you know, it'd be like me going over and killing your parents and your kids, and then me having to sit down with you and have a conversation.
Absolutely.
Like if that can happen there.
And by the way, that was on the local radio station. Now, everybody now realize we're living in a world where hate groups or people of power or politicians can get so deep into your individual head.
Yeah.
And the head of those who are in your immediate community to drive so much hate, so much anger, so, so let's- so mysterious.
So what do we do about this? We talk about data rights. Should we actually regulate data privacy differently? What are the ways that we can combat this? How does the individual protect themselves? How do we not get sucked into this manipulation? How do we actually get our democracy back? I mean, these are the questions that I'm thinking about.
I don't have the answers to, but maybe you do. So unfortunately, I don't think it's a data thing. And unfortunately, I don't think these big companies are gonna self-regulate because they make money doing it and they'll accept money from anybody doing it and that's our capitalist society. And I don't think it's going to be regulated by government because the regulators have no idea how it all works. They don't know what to regulate. There are a bunch of really good people out there who care a ton about this stuff. A very good friend of mine, Tristan Harris, a guy named John Borthwick, a whole bunch of people who are really trying to figure this stuff out.
Within the government?
No, from the private sector. A bunch of us that kind of like grew up building this stuff and then being like, oh shit, what did we build? So, you know, it's kind of like our, like, by the way, yeah, I'll say I'm sorry. Like, I am really, really sorry because I took place of building something for financial benefit and I didn't realize the harm it was gonna do. And Mia Calpapa, oh shit, I'm not just going to say sorry, I'm going to do something about it to try and fix it for the future of society. What I hope, what I really, really hope for.
I mean, it's like you dented a car, but then you didn't realize people are going to be driving in through crowds and killing people, right? Like that's sort of it.
Well, it's a little bit worse than that, to be honest, because advertising and convincing people to buy stuff and then being and knowing how potent this form of communication is once you are able to do psychological profiling on people by what they listen to, what they watch, blah, blah, blah. So the most important thing right now, here and now, is people, what they read, what they see, what they view as video, don't take it as fact.
Yeah.
Full stop. Research the hell out of it. All right. We don't live in a world where just because you read something or see a video or it's on your internet feed, don't think it came from a scholar or from somebody who's an expert.
Yeah.
I mean, holy. If my car breaks down, right, and I need. to be able to fix my car, I'm not going to go online and listen to some phony telling me about how to go into my car and fix my carburetor. No, I'm going to go and find an expert mechanic to know how to do that. Otherwise, my children are going to get into a car and I'm going to drive off a cliff and die. Right? So please, everybody who's...
Buyer beware, reader beware.
But it's reader... Question, question all of it and realize that most of it out there is fiction.
Yeah.
Or most of it, if it's not fiction, it's opinion. And then before you trust someone's opinion, make sure that they're qualified.
Yeah.
To have that type of. Is that somebody who you should be listening to?
How do you do that? I mean, the average person, like, how do you vet? whether this is true or not. I read articles all the time, like I look at where the authorship is, I look at who they are, I look at where they work for. I mean, I try to do that, but it's tough. Like even in science, we think science is this pristine field, but no, much of science is funded by industry, much of the data is manipulated to shape it into outcomes that the funder wants.
How about this? Take your time. Take your fucking time, all right? We're all going from article to article to article. We all have to open up all of our email addresses. We have to get back to everybody's text, and we have so much we have to do. So we just read the headline or no, no, no, no. Take your time. Be curious.
It's confusing. You know, you watch CNN and then you flip to Fox and you feel like you're living in two different planets.
100%.
It's like, wait a minute. I mean, they can't both be right. So maybe they're both wrong.
So at a minimum, and by the way, this drives me crazy. It drives me batshit crazy living in New York, right? So all the people I know, they watch CNN, they watch NBC, they read the New York Times. I'm like, okay, well, how often you watch Fox?
Yeah.
And how often do you. Oh, I can't stand them. What are you talking about? At least listen to both sides.
Oh, yeah.
And the same thing to people who might read Breitbart or might watch Fox, at least listen to the other side.
Yeah.
If it's opinion based stuff, right? At least see both arguments of it.
Where is Walter Cronkite when we need him?
And then be proud of being.
If.
You don't want to be manipulated, if you don't and you don't think you can be manipulated and you don't think you can be brainwashed, then at least listen to all the arguments.
Yeah.
And then you can make up your own mind.
Yeah.
Otherwise, if you're only listening to one of the arguments, by definition, you're being brainwashed by that argument. You're not making up your own decision.
So basically we need to be more astute, discerning readers of content and not trust it as fact. Number one. Number two, what about regulations on our digital data? Or should we actually be like looking at our phones and saying, turn off all the tracking things and turn off like our Google changing our privacy settings? And I mean, how do we protect ourselves besides just being smart?
So listen, my hope, Like my big hope. And this is what should happen because we're an educated society. We really are an educated society. If people literally listen to both sides of an argument, then they can choose who they're gonna trust as their curator or teacher of information. And therefore, less people will be reading false information. And remember, these are just businesses that all make money off of advertising. So if less people are reading stuff that's untruthful, they'll go out of business. They literally will go out of business because they're not making money off of advertising.
That's something we can do. What else can we do besides that?
But that's a big one. That's a really, really big one. Another thing you can do, and this is fun, Like really fun and I forgot the name of the company. I wish I had it with me right now. It's an organization that and it's now up to 400,000 people across the globe. When they read hate news or see hate messages on the internet and then see recognizable brands like Audi, JetBlue, Walmart, whatever, next to those hate messages, they take a screenshot and they send it to the company. They send it to the companies. They send it to the JetBlue or the Walmart or the Kmart or whomever.
Right.
So are those companies deliberately selling ads into those hate?
Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Those ads get there because of something called.
It'S all algorithms, right?
No, no. Programmatic media buying, which are these big kind of conglomerates that represent all these small little publishers. So if like AJetBlue wants to reach all these small little publishers, They don't even know what the content is that their brand is going to be sitting next to. And trust me, like a Walmart, a JC Penney, they don't want their ad next to. They do not want their ad sitting next to neo-Nazi type stuff.
So there's grassroots movements that are changing.
A big, big thing that people can do.
Yeah.
Besides that, you know, Yeah, you can go live in a cave. Nobody is forcing it.
The guy who mows my lawn, he's like, doesn't have a cell phone, he doesn't have an email, he doesn't have a computer. And I thought he was a paranoid screwball, but turns out he may not be.
It may be at all. It's all how much we value convenience.
And what about the regulation, legislation? I mean, how do we solve this? Because it terrifies me to think that our democracy is on the decline. And that freedom and freedom of choice and autonomy as a country is being usurped by this kind of invisible force that I think some people are using for their particular ends, which may not be laudable, but in themselves aren't necessarily evil. But when you add it all together, it's a mess. And I feel terrified for our future and for my children and grandchildren because I I don't, I don't understand, I mean, I know how to fix the food system. I mean, I think I do. Anyway, I wrote a book about it. I have an idea of what the problems are and what the solutions are. I really, other than like being a smart reader of your newsfeed and, you know, creating a grassroots movement to pressure companies to not do this and turning off the tracking on my phone, like what, what can we do?
Well, so it's a number one, and this is something I did want to say. There's a huge debate right now around whether Facebook and Google should get rid of political ads. Yeah. Right now. And a lot of people who are very smart but don't understand the technology all that well, don't realize that if Facebook and Google shut down political ads right now, that is the destruction of democracy.
Yeah. to this both sides.
No, no, because Brad Parscale and Donald Trump have already weaponized up. And if they shut, even if they shut it all down, they already have relationships with, you know, something like 40 million Americans, their email address can find them and, and all this stuff because the Democrats are slow, have been slow, slow to the game. This, if the big tech Giants were to shut down political ads or the tools, that are needed, like custom audiences and lookalikes. If they were to shut it down now, this upcoming election 2020, it'd be like Trump has a nuclear weapon and the Democrats have a switchblade.
Yeah.
If it gets shut down now.
That's terrifying.
And by the way, whatever democracy does, at least all sides should have an equal voice. an equal ability to communicate with voters, right? And if the tech giants shut it down right now, only Trump will be able to communicate effectively.
Because it's true, because what you're saying is that up to now, the Democrats really haven't created news, whether it's fake news or whatever, they haven't created their version of fake news or whatever truth or not. And the Republicans have. And so shut it down.
So again, remember, it's not about fake news. It's about knowing how to put the pieces of the technology puzzle together to effectively understand you as a human being through your own behavior of what you watch, read, care about to then be able to message to you certain things around those issues and educate you on who the best candidate is, whether it's Trump or somebody else. Yeah. All right. That's what Trump has. And Trump is just Trump's Trump. Brad Parscale is the brilliant digital marketer. Brilliant. Okay. So it's just right now that the Democrats are catching up, and in particular this organization called Acronym, who's really good at it. And it's not fake stuff. It's real news. It's important stuff.
And the other thing is, you know, to voters, we've seen the death of local media, the death of local newspapers, thousands have shut down, which is often the most trusted source of information, but there's a company that was formed called Courier Media to create local reporting and local news. It's legitimate, but that speaks to voters in their communities. And that's really what happened in the Virginia election, where the legislature and the governorship switched over for the first time in a generation because they were very smart about using very local, specific, targeted information that was a counterpoint to the other side. And I think that speaks volumes. And I think right now it seems like David and Goliath and Curry media seems like David, but maybe when these issues sort of come out, I think people will be able to sort of think differently about how to go forward in the election. Because it doesn't matter if you're Republican or Democrat, I think there really are a lot of commonalities values that both parties share.
Yes.
And that the overlaps are often more than the disagreements. Sort of like paleo and vegans, they both agree on almost everything except where you get your protein and far more in common than, for example, people who eat the standard American diet, right? But they're sort of like these opposing camps. And I think the same thing is true in our political process, but we have to sort of start to sort of take back our democracy. I think that's really the message.
Listen, the genie's out of the bottle or Pandora's box is open. were in a period of time with a brand new, I mean, I just told you, for the first time it was ever possible was 2014. Compared to the history of our country, that's only five years ago.
Yes.
That any of this was possible. And when I tell you that it's like exponentially better than television, print, radio, direct mail, any of these other forms are exponentially, if done correctly, then all sides, I don't have to say like right or left, right, left, middle, top, bottom, whomever it should be, everybody should be able to communicate using the platforms to their best ability technically. So, you know, I'm trying to help. share this methodology that only Brad Parscale has been an expert at. Anybody who wants to do that.
So you basically invented it, you gave it to him.
I didn't give it to him.
He stole it.
It was taken from me and was handed to that organization. I see. All right. I was just building a business to make money from Democrats and Republicans and centrists and independent, blah, blah, blah. 'cause there's a billion dollars of political advertising every election.
It's going to be good business.
It's going to be really good business. What I didn't know is the guy who I was doing it with was in bed with Trump. And so we handed it over to Trump and handed it over to this, Brad Parscale was not a very good digital marketer. He was a bankrupt web designer. a bankrupt web designer who had the blueprint on how to manufacture a car.
Yeah.
And, like, step by step, was able to manufacture a car.
Wow.
And now he does it really, really well.
Okay. What final words do you have for everybody so they don't go slip their wrists or jump off a bridge? I'm like, what are we gonna do?
Sure. So we're living in a time of absolute freaking chaos. like in my, and by the way, communication channels like this, right? Changing is the first time in human history that we're all connected. Done correctly as one species communicating collectively. We can end climate change.
Yes.
We can change the food system. Yes. We can educate everybody. We can finally have equality across the board. We can further science. And we can come together as a less competitive society and working together to collaborate for everybody's good. Sounds good. And therefore have better mental health and enjoyable lives for the first time ever in the history of the human species.
And to do that we need to?
To do that what we need to do is be a lot more discerning about the stuff we take as gospel that we read, that we see in the internet, and realize it for right now, for this moment in time, nobody's regulating it, nobody's saying whether it's truthful or false, so don't believe 99.9% of it until you can actually go and do the research to figure, use internet to search for a store. Use internet to search for a product. Do not get your news off the internet.
But what's frightening to me is you hear Trump say, Don't believe what you're reading. Don't believe what you see. Don't believe what you hear. Just believe what I say. And I'm like, well, he's also saying the same thing, right? Which is be discerning about what you're reading, about the impeachment, about Russia, about whatever, because...
But then just make people back it up with facts. I mean, I mean, it's an old thing. Just because somebody tells you to jump off a bridge, you're gonna go jump off a bridge?
No.
Like literally think before you believe.
Think before you do. Well, that was the other movie I encourage people to watch called the Push by Darren Brown, where he literally in 45 minutes gets totally normal people to commit murder.
Really?
Yeah. Frightening. That's how manipulatable we are.
Yes.
That's what we all should be aware of. Watch the movie, the push, watch the sacrifice, watch the great hack.
Definitely watch the great hack. And definitely be careful of what you think is fact or fiction. Make sure that you're being, this is the generation. This is the society of the tipping point. So take your time and please don't jump to anger and hate first. Give people the benefit of the doubt and realize that we're all in this together.
How about we lead with love?
Absolutely lead with love, compassion, right? And a sense of respect for one another. And realize that it's very easy to have somebody make you angry, frustrated, infuriated, and go into battle. Don't be that easily fool or that easily riled up. No, if you want to say that you have free choice and the ability to make up your own mind, then prove it. Don't be so easy to be angry.
I think that's true. I remember Dalai Lama said, someone asked him, Are you mad at China? He's like, no. They took my country, but they didn't take my soul, my mind, my heart.
You got it.
And I think that, I think it's a good message to leave with.
You got it.
So thank you, Andy, for being on the Doctor's Pharmacy. If you love this conversation, please share with your friends and family on social media, I guess. Leave a comment. We'd love to hear from you. Fact check all of it. You can read the book Targeted, which is also about this. And you'll hear us next week on the Doctor's Pharmacy talking about another conversation that matters. So, See y'all later and I hope this wasn't too depressing, but I think it's good to be empowered. And Nandy, thank you so much for being on this podcast and we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy.
Thank you so much.
More from AI
This Is Why 99% of Skin Conditions Don't Heal — And What Dermatologists Won't Tell You
Why you need to start strength training today #strengthtraining #healthyaging #fitness
