From UFOs, two, ghosts and government cover ups. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to now. Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt and i'm Ben. We're here with our super producer Noel, which makes this stuff they moge want you to know. Close snug quite there. You're right, I said something wrong. I can't figure out what it was. Yeah, we're pretty excited about this new gadget or I guess new to us gadget that's here in the studio to day, Matt, do you want to tell everybody a little bit about it? It's just a couple of old school synthesizers from the seventies and eighties, and hopefully no one's going to be bringing those in the mix. Maybe on this show, maybe not. I don't know. I don't know. He looks like it could go either way. So let's start today's episode with an anecdote that you may have heard if you watched our video series earlier this week two thousand twelve. Minnesota, and this family starts getting ads from Target. You know every people get ads from Target, right, You're used to it. It happens, but this time something's different. They've received ads before, but this time something's off. The ads are for stuff like diapers, strollers and baby lotion and stuff. You get the idea, like for someone who's expecting lovely thing to be. But there's a catch here. Nobody at that house is expecting. So the dad is livid, and the especially about the ads addressed specifically to his teenage daughter. That's the whole point to his high school aged daughter. Yeah, yep. And so he goes to Target in person on in some beast mode WTF kind of stuff trending towards w w E. Possibly when he goes back, has a chat with his daughter, comes back to Target and says, oh, yeah, she's expecting in August. Whoops on all accounts. This comes to us through a New York Times piece that was published on February nineteenth, two thousand twelve, about how obsessively companies track your shopping habits and every little piece of information they can about you to hopefully make you more likely to buy something. And the guy who was interviewed, the statistics man working for Target interviewed in this New York Times article was shut down after he mentioned this because what we're talking about is something that many many companies do but is incredibly controversial, and that is big data. Yeah, it's something that it's not necessarily something they don't want you to know, but they don't want you to know about it, Like it's kind of a known thing now that you are being tracked in all these different ways and looked at. But this is something that we feel you should know more about, right, Yeah, it's something that it's it's strange that you say it's not necessarily something they don't want you to know, because they certainly don't want other people to know the techniques used to gather this information. Absolutely, they might not want you to know some of the things that we can't tell you because we don't know, right, because the data sets themselves are important, But what maybe even more important and even more secretive would be the techniques used to parson analyze this information and even where they're getting some of this data from. Ah. Yes, yeah, So what what is big data? If we have to define it, it's not like it's not the same thing as uh, big agribusiness or big bell or something big pomegranate. Right, No, big data is just as in definition, any extremely large data set or data set so that can be analyzed usually now in the modern day computationally is the only way to even get your wrap your head around it um to reveal patterns and trends all kinds of associations, especially those relating to human behavior and or the interactions between humans. So, for instance, this big data would not be the GPS of one person. It would be the GPS of a city, or people who all work at a large company or yeah, one one GPS companies data. Yeah or yeah, But I love the idea of the GPS information of one like certain area and just all of that data stacked vertically together from everyone that's been in that area. Right. There are different ways to parse this, uh. This big data usually include sets that are so large there beyond the ability of typical software tools Like you couldn't, for instance, just take uh, some data set that is big data size and put it in an Excel spreadsheet on a Google travel. No, there's no way, and if you did, it would be the largest file in the history of XL. So when we look at the range of this, we also know that the size of data is a constantly moving target. Because it seems that there's just more and more and more out there. There's a really weird statistic here somewhere that I think is like nine percent of all the data that exists was made in the last twenty or ten years or something. Oh. Absolutely, it's exponential. And that's one of the things we're gonna talk about here. Just the number of devices that collect data or that you can collect data upon, and just everything that's connected to the Internet nowadays. It's insane. And again, it doesn't go away once. Once you have a data set, it's not like it's irrelevant. You're still going to need that maybe for future, you know, whatever endeavor is that you're going to do as a big business. Right for gamers, uh, this would be sort of the equivalent of an inventory that doesn't register weight. How role playing games turn and you're more familiar with this, and I am, how role playing games turn so many people into orders. We are data orders as well, like the NSA clearly is. Uh. So, what we'll do is will walk through some history of big data, and then we'll also talk about some of the controversy surrounding it, the ways it could be used, some of the conspiracies theoretical and factual about this practice. So one way that one way there's a group called Meta Group or Gardner. Uh. They they have an analyst there named Doug Laney, and he said, one great way to measure big data would be in the three vs. That would be increasing volume, uh, just how much data you have, Uh, the velocity of the data, the speed of the in and out right, and variety that type of stuff, where is it coming from? So not just all homogeneous GPS records, but also like what something else people would collect on another set of data that's really interesting to look at when when combined with GPS data, our phone records, that's always a fun thing. Um. And these these three vs that you're mentioning, this is now an industry standard the way the whole industry looks at big data with what is it? Volume? Velocity? What was the third one? That's volume, velocity and variety. So uh, GPS and phone records would be something that that helps you flesh out a virtual persona, but it comes from the same device probably for most people. True. So another thing that would be more very would be stuff like medical records, stuff like recent purchases on your financial records, so you could part it down to uh people who let's get a little bit dark with it. You could parse it down to uh some We have these four sets of data out this person, right, So we know that once every week or something they go to a clinic right and specializes in some kind of treatment, right. And then we know that the medical records that they have some kind of uh, debilitating condition. And then we see that one of their recent purchases is a skydiving suit. So we have built this picture with just the very little information about someone who probably has a terminal disease and wants to skydive because it was on their bucket list. Now we know exactly the kind of things to sell to this person, and we know exactly the kind of things to sell, which is frightening. Uh. So this is I mean, this is an example that you and I just made up now, right, Matt, this is not we don't know any more and that this has happened to so this is a new information age. It's tough to stress how quickly personal privacy has eroded, right, um, and we the people of the information age, have committed um, have have lost our privacy due to acts of negligence, not due to aggressively rooting for this loss of privacy. It's just who reads terms and conditions, right, Yeah, And we're all very happy about some of the things that providing this type of data gives to us. The GPS thing alone, I think is a massive I mean a lot of people would I don't. I can't speak for everyone, but for myself to have the ability to use the GPS when I'm out on the road somewhere instead of having to look at a physical map is one of those things where sometimes I just go, you know what, screw it, turn my GPS on. I need it, right, And even if they know that this, were highly aware that this is being tracked. But but there's also there's such a a sort of narcissism in paranoia, this idea that yes, of course they care where I get my pickles. Of course, of course someone does. And don't get me wrong, I mean sure grocery stores for sure do. Every time you swipe a loyalty card, you are generating more information for them to uh target ads toward you, which we'll talk about whether or not that is, you know, morally wrong or ethically sticky or whatever or if you would, would someone want that? Like, are there people out there that want Kroger to know exactly what the order so they can just say, hey, here's all the things that you want and hear the coupons right there? And there are some people I would definitely take some coupons for things. But also, this is okay, this is so unrelated. This is a side conspiracy here. And Matt, uh, So you and I are just old enough to remember before these loyalty cards came out everywhere, right, Yeah, when I was in college, they didn't exist. So the way that they were instant you did was that for for all the young guns out there, the way that these cards were instituted was at first they gave you discounts on things. Right. But one of the conspiracies I've heard is that this artificial price shenaniganting if I can make up the word, uh, ultimately became something where having the card didn't really get you a discount. It just got you the the regular price. The regular price, yes, and the money that they're making on top of selling your information to third parties. CBS is like yeah, thanks, yeah, it's and and so you're you're being penalized at least, this theory goes for not participating in this program. And that's because again, the overwhelming majority of companies, uh, don't just do this. They do this with relish and it is profitable. But it is a very very old idea. Is that I have to say this, here's the worst news about that whole situation. What's that even if you go somewhere and shop. I'm just gonna use an example, but I'm aware of like publics that I don't have a loyalty card for and I don't know that you can get one. Maybe you can now, but and you you try and save money there, if you pay with a card of any type, then that stuff is being tracked, maybe by a separate company, a third party, or maybe just your credit card company. But the same thing is happening. And we'll see a couple of different reasons that this happens, you know, or or a couple of different motivations for this collection. But let's walk through the history first. Okay, so this is not a new thing. Trying to track data, trying to understand numbers about things that are happening in the world around you. Goes back seven thousand years to something that we've mentioned before in Mesopotamia during the birth of agriculture, when you had to keep track of seeds, you had to keep track of crops and soil, just everything you needed to know data about the ground and the plants that you're trying to put in there. So yeah, So, for example, there's an accounting system that goes in to monitor the growth of a I don't know, uh, an olive sure, an olive tree, right, and so, um, you know some farmer named John Stamos, a very common name in Mesopotamia at the time. I imagine, Uh, this farmer, John Stamos has uh, a bunch of olives, and they have to have a way to track year over year the performance of that crop. Right. So this is when they begin saying, Okay, you know John Stamos has X amount of trees. They yield y amount of olives each year. This is what we can expect. This is what we can expect, this is what we can bet against, this is what we can sell an advance before it's made. Then you get into we're gonna jump forward pretty far here, all the way to sixteen sixty three. Nothing else happened, yeah, zero, nothing between seven thousand years ago. Let's just say improvements are being in incrementally, you know, are happening up until this point. But then on the next big change, the sixteen sixty three when John Grant, I think that's how you correctly spell it. Grant very British. Uh. He recorded an examined information about mortality rates because the bubonic plague was just ravaging just the entire area at the time, and he decided he wanted to know more information about, like how what is happening here, exactly how many people are getting affected? Why are they getting affected? Let's get information and we can start solving this. Yeah, and that sounds that sounds sensible. It's the least you could do, right we I don't know, have we ever talked on this show about just how profoundly the plague or the series of things known as the plague change the world. No, I've listened to a little too much stuff you missed in history class about it. So the information, Saan sometimes gets muddled between what we've talked about and what I've just heard. These plagues have played such a profound role in uh, the global evolution of the human species. It's just crazy it's the kind of stuff you would want to keep track on. So this guy, uh, John Grant becomes, uh the father of statistics, or he's considered that because he does the first statistical data analysis that we have recordings of, uh, and he has a book about it called Natural and Political Observations Made upon the Bills of Mortality. Just kind of a dry name, right, but it's it's not a feel good subject, and people continue to work off this statistical analysis. So let's fast forward to the twenty century. Okay, so we're going to fast forward all the way to eighteen eight seven. This is when the modern the age of modern data, modern data is when it is born. So this gentleman named Herman Hollerith invented a computing machine that could read these holes punched holes in cards that paper cards in order to organize census data. And this is a huge change because you have to imagine just collecting data, of going door to door getting information, then trying to compile that just with humans in rooms. That it was taking so they would do one one census every ten years, I believe at the time, and it was taking almost nine years before you would get the results from the census of the previous the previous census. So it was almost I don't not worthless, but it was just felt like they were running backwards almost right. Yeah, they had they had a data set that would be when it was finally complete, useful for a little less than a year. Yeah, exactly so. Uh. The first data processing machine appeared in nineteen forty three. This was, of course, it came out of war. A lot of technological in vations come out of war. Uh. And it was meant to decipher codes from the Nationalist Socialists or the Nazis. Uh. This thing was named Colossus, which is a pretty cool name. And they would intercept messages. They would feed things to Colossus and would search for patterns in these characters. And it worked pretty quickly. Yeah. It would go five thousand characters per second, which is huge. It reduced the time from weeks two hours. Let's stroll through some other stuff here, just kind of laundry listed so you can get to the good stuff. Uh. Nineteen fifty two, everybody's favorite, the n s A, the National Security Agency is created, and within ten years they have more than twelve thousand cryptologists on contract. That's huge. Then you've got. In nineteen sixty five, the US government builds the first data center which can store seven hundred and forty two million tax returns and also a hundred and seventy five million sets of fingerprints. Now this is pretty interesting here because this is this is something that was recorded on the magnetic tape and computer tape. You may, I don't know if anybody listening would know what that is. Hopefully maybe you've heard of this magnetic tape. My father is a controller controlling account and they have a like a newer version of this magnetic tape, but it's still all of their stuff is backed up to this magnetic tape because it's so well, it's supposedly so reliable. Well, also, people will recognize the magnetic tape if you've never seen it before. Um, every time you see an old computer with reels on it, that's magnetic tape. In Captain America the Winter Soldier, the sequel to the First Captain America, Uh, there is a scene which I won't spoil for you if you haven't gotten around the scene it yet, but there is a scene which involves a gigantic computer and that is magnetic tape. Awesome, Okay, good reference. Now we understand. But here here's the thing. Though, This whole project was scrapped because of fears of quote big brother right, being a little bit too big brotherish little Orwellian. So this, however, changed everything because people were thinking, what if we centralize, um, the location of data, you know, no more paper, just electronically store it. A British guy, so you may have heard of tim Berners Lee of Invince what will go on to become the World Wide Web? And with this foom, we're going like gangbusters because people are able to generate massive amounts of information, much more so than anybody could plausibly read. And when it's connected up to this uh interweb, if you will, it can be it can be sent somewhere else, right. And then if you do have a data center, doesn't matter where the data is collected, you can send it directly over there almost immediately. Yeah, it's it's bizarre when we think about that, and especially we think about um, how just let's have a John Henry moment, and can you compare matt the the ability of a supercomputer to a person. Oh God, can I m hmm. Let's say okay, let's say in the first supercomputer. Let's use that one as our example. It could do as much work in one second then a single human being operating a calculator could do in thirty thousand years. Thirty thousand years. And that's not even the twenty one century, ladies and gentlemen. Now we are at the modern age. And two thousand five, a guy from O'Reilly media coined the term big data for the first time. Uh and this was, you know, a successor to a another less fortunate buzzword, which was web two point oh yeah, yeah, the new coke of web words. But yeah, so this this idea here is a little bit more bad of the idea of data set that is just so massive and complex and interwoven that you can't use the traditional business intelligence tools to figure out what's going on. Right And oh five is also the year that Hoddup was created by Yahoo, which was built on the back of Google's map produce. And these are just softwares that can basically take data from using a bunch of different computers to crunched numbers like and huge amounts um And it was the goal to index the entire or the entire worldwide Web. That's why these things were created and uh, it's the open source to dupe. It was used by a lot of organizations to crunch through data. That just is it's almost in quantifiable how huge it is. Right, and this is not just a private industry thing, of course, And the line is blurry. We seem to talk about these two events in isolation, as if the n s A using phone records and social media contacts. Who do you know that knows who? That knows who on Facebook? Right on the list? Now you're on the list right. Uh, they're they're not just using that, Uh and target or another private organization, um, a data broker. There are companies that just broker data. Uh. These do not exist in a vacuum. There's interplay between them, and uh, they're increasingly merging to do just some amazing things. We're getting very very good at seeing the present as never before. And other governments are involved in this as well. In two thousand nine, the Indian government did something just ambitious is like the most reasonable word for this. They decided to take an Irish scan, fingerprint and photo of everyone in India, every single person in India. There are so many people, Yes, can you imagine listener Uh, if the government came to you and said, Okay, we're going to need we're gonna need an Irish skin of fingerprint, and we're also going to need a photograph, a really nicely framed photograph with good contrast. We're gonna put it in of you and everyone in your family put it into this database. Don't worry. We're gonna make sure it's secure, and we're not going to use it for anything but for good things. Right, Yeah, and that's one point to billion people to bill. Yeah, this is the largest biometric database in the world. So there's a great thing that Eric Schmidt from Google also said, right, just another sense of perspective here, yeah, he he stated at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe. He he stated, quote, there were five exabytes of information created by the entire world between the dawn of civilization and two thousand three. Now that same amount is created every two days. Boom. Take take that history of the universe. I can't wait till the aliens land and say uh that they're like, Wow, these guys figured out how to make uh pizza into burritos and there's a blog about it. It's sort of like when you know, when people modern times find ancient Greek or Roman or African ruins from these empires of bygone days. And there's always some jerk like hundreds of years ago who wrote like Tim was here, yeah and true, like dick butt from Reddit. They're just like, what is a precursor right there? Right? So there's but there's so much information being made and you know, I'm being a little crass here, but the point I'm hoping to make is that this information is not you know, noble stuff or even stuff that would really make sense to a human being you didn't know they were looking for. These are metrics, these are movements. These are little breadcrumbs of you scattered around the Internet at large, and then you're just bringing them together to make another picture. It's like pointali is um, Really that's a wonderful, wonderful image. Yeah, that's really good. On Everything you do online today or in any electronic medium is recorded by somebody. Yep. If you're typing on a keyboard or on a touchpad, it's getting recorded, So enjoy it. I'm like, hey, unless you're on an air gas computer, and we've all learned now what that is, so okay, so let's just another example here. Uh, Fortunately for some of us, I'm not going to name names, but for some of us, it is not a crime to be drunk on the internet. Well yeah, okay, sure. And there are people who you know, have maybe in a fit of passion or maybe they had some drinks and they wrote something crazy on the Internet and they almost sent it and they said, no, wait, I'm gonna sleep on this. Let me think about this before I write anything. Well, those ghost movements, those drafts that you make, are also part of this. So just the act of typing, especially in Facebook. Oh you know, yeah, don't goos draft in Facebook, right, yeah, and all of these pieces of information assemble. Again, that's such a beautiful image, man, a point list portrait of you and who you are. And the big worry that a lot of people have, and we see it through sci fi and pop culture, and we've seen this for decades, is that this will be able to go beyond just a a panopoly view of the present or a panopticon kind of view of the present, to become predictive. Oh yeah, so eventually you just have an understanding of what each one of these people is going to do throughout their daily lives, what what the corporation is going to profit from in the next two three years? You can. I mean, it's crazy to imagine all the information that we will eventually be able to get from this big data and whose hands will it be in well? And who can who can accurately understand this? So we we also talk about these controversies. This stuff is around to stay until the lights go out on humanity. Yeah, this this stuff will be around to stay. Oh yeah, it is here to stay unless there's some kind of weird fight club moment and all the buildings holding all the stuff the data centers blow up, which is probably not gonna happen. There's really good security at those buildings, right, and it's a distributed network, so it would be hard to take the head off. It would hard be hard to take all of the heads off the hydrant that is the information age. Of course, this doesn't come without controversy. We have we have a video about four creepy things about big aida, or this umbrella term, which can again apply to government as well as industry. It can learn big data can be used to learn your secrets. That's scary. So if you think, uh, nobody knows that you routinely order three large cheese pizzas with ham and sit in the dark in your house at two am every Thursday night eating and crying. Nope, sorry, getching reruns A Firefly, watching reruns a Firefly? Nope, sorry. Somebody knows. Papa John's knows. Comcast, probably knows, Podcast, probably knows. Maybe Netflix. Uh so. The another thing it doesn't have to tell you what it knows. There is a surprising lack of transparency on the part of companies collecting your information. Yeah, that, Um, what is the name of the company Axiom? Axiom? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, they're scary. Huh uh dude, Yeah, I've been We're making this video, and the way it works is usually Ben will Ben will write an outline for what he's going to present in the vlog. I will shoot it. Then as I'm editing, I end up doing a lot of research and oh my god, Ben, I've just been scouring their website and nothing against you, Axiom. If you're listening your employees, Um, it's just a murky world. Well, it's pervasive. Like the the amount of information that Axiom has is is impressive. Yeah, and the way they talk about it sometimes their offline data that they have used for online purposes. I don't know, it's fascinating if you go to the website. So we we've talked a little bit about just the science fiction elements and how we see some science fact generating. But we knew know that this is a very old story. We've seen things like Isaac Asmov's Foundation series, which deal with the fictional at this point fictional science of psychohistory predicting the future on a large scale event. We dealt with gatica, where personal information medical information is used to gosh, I'm trying to not to spoil things, yeah, but I mean, what's the limit with spoilers? Like, at what point it kind of stinks? I guess you just have to put an alert at the very beginning of something that might have a spoiler in it and just say don't listen to this if you have not seen these movies, read these books, or listen to these songs. Wow. Pretty okay, all right, So that's that's pretty complicated. But we've also seen it in of course Minority Report, which we mentioned. But the controversy surrounding this, which is expressed in our culture is uh oh oh and Another one would be the dark night. Oh yes, yeah, we're Lucius Fox. Yeah, and the cell phone system monitoring system. So, uh, we see, we see this expressed in the culture of UM multiple nations. But what what's the real stuff? What's the real controversy? Could could it damage your credit report if you had GPS data that said you were I don't know, going to a pawn shop often or something? You know, Yeah, I don't know, And that's I don't want to scare anybody. That's a that's a made up example there, But we do know that the we do know that the possibilities for that kind of stuff. Again, just possibilities are there. And then I love that you pointed out the other side of the argument, which is, well, maybe this is more convenient, Maybe this is the way things should be. Uh, it's a personalized experience for me wherever I go. Yeah, it's certainly sold to us that way, and I think maybe some people by that. I I am, unfortunately somewhere in the middle. I don't know if you ask for my opinion, Ben, but guess what I'm giving. I have fall somewhere in the middle where I'm I appreciate what the I appreciate the attempt of what's trying to happen, but ultimately, really the bottom line is that these companies are trying to make a profit by targeting. Sure, right, and that's the way you sell things. Nowadays, we're so inundative with advertising that the only real way to get a message across is to send it with an arrow straight at your eyeball in your ear like, uh hi, super producer Noel Brown, we understand that you have recently begun working with a move. Here are some products that might interest you exactly. I mean, that's the only way you're gonna do it now. But yeah, that's that's probably true, man. But I personally, my biggest concern about this, this encroaching analysis. My biggest concern is that a can function as a kind of inherent censorship due to like the search bubble, the idea that based on your past search history, you only receive results that are quote unquote relevant to you. I don't want to receive the results that are relevant to me. I want to see both sides of any argument. I want to see um news that would be in another language. There's gonna be some kind of college course that shows you how to get the most balanced Google search results, and it will all it will be an entire course that just shows you how to develop over time by searching for certain things at certain times. Well, there are things like scroogle and Duck duck go that are supposed to not track your search. There are places to go currently, but you know, we've seen as acquisitions continue and certain corporations continue to get more and more monolithic, I can see a future where there is one place to search for things. Well. And there's also this idea that that I think is tremendously positive, even noble almost, that if we had enough data, and we had enough sophisticated part seeing algorithms or software, then we might be able to address global problems that ordinarily wouldn't have been able to be solved, Like what if there were a way to uh stop the massive extinction of Earth's wildlife? Right, agreed, And that's amazing and I love that view. But conversely, you could also with that same data stomp out all and every form of resistance against a certain movement. That's true, right, and uh, this this becomes a matter of uh, I don't know, the short term stuff versus the long term problems. With that being said, let's go straight to the crazy stuff, the conspiracies, both theoretical and actual. Uh, there's a there's a this theory, the troubling possibility, the kind of thing that a sci fi writer would make a dystopian novel about, that we could eventually arrive at a world in which circumstance and accident has fallen to the statistical hand of faith and certitude, so that something very much like an artificial god knows how you will live your days from the cradle to the grave. Yeah. I don't like that, Ben, It's a scary thing. There is some silver lining here, though. Uh, there are many competitors right now in this space. There's not just one big data right company. Right, Um, so at least, you know, much in the same way that there are shadowy forces trying to control the world, there are a lot of them. There's not just one group. Yeah. And then these groups might not necessarily work together, especially if they're competing in a private sphere, right, not unless it's you know, helpful for the bottom line. Right. They gather their data sets and and they guard their techniques pretty jealously. Also, here's the one thing when we talk about this super all knowing Wizard of Oz type computer. The fact of the matter is that we still apparently can't build a computer that can predict the weather. No, because there there's always with the weather. There's always that um I don't know, that chaos factor almost to where you can't. There's so it's so complex, all of the different moving parts that create the weather. But what ben what Yeah, I guess it would be. I guess the same would be true for big data. There's so many different moving parts and it's so complex. Yeah, it seems like it would be. I don't know. Is it easier to build something that can predict the weather or something that can predict the passage of time in a country? You know, we've talked before off air about this and maybe on air too, but uh, you know, I had a professor a long time ago and in different life who was working with DARPA to build an artificial model of a country, with the idea that if they programmed enough data points together and assign them to these individuals, then they could measure kind of like foundation in real life. They could measure the likelihood of trends, you know, like if if police, if support for police goes up by x percent, what will be the effect upon the livelihood or the likelihood of the regime's collapse or stability. And I don't know where he went with it, but it is some amazing, terrifying and inspiring stuff. Either way, he can't talk about it anymore, right, and this and still at least our knowledge listeners. Uh, this remains a theoretical thing, but it is a fact that big business is doing stuff like this all the time, and not necessarily. You know, it's not like there's somebody out there just rubbing their hands together, supervillain style, waiting for you to slip so they can, you know, tell tell your mom that you are smoking cigarettes. There's something there. What what it is more about is um not immoral but amoral um providing of a better service or being a better um service to the consumer. But now consumers are increasingly the product as well, right exactly, Your information is the thing the commodity, which is so weird. Information as commodity. I guess it's been coming for a long time and it has been that way for a long time. It's just strange to think about it on this scale. It's almost like the information what I'm seeing it is the access and ability to collect massive amounts of information. Is this new gold rush thing? Ah, that's good. Yeah, you're killing it with the comparisons. So I don't know if that's just what I'm seeing. Where all these large corporations that are building you know, massive supercomputer complexes of supercomputers that can just crunch numbers. Man, well we're but we're at a point where, you know, they're could be some positives for this if if it was able to if these data sets were able to, for instance, help humanity combat I don't know, over fishing, or help humanity figure out the best way to prevent mass starvation or disease. But again, you know, those things are also they seem to be more complex than weather patterns. They are, and I just it's hard for me to imagine someone looking at those problems and making a profit from it, or you know, devising a way to make a profit from it and use all these assets in order to do something good. I'm sorry, man, my faith in humanity just like got ticked down a couple of notches for some reason in thinking about all this stuff. Because this is all really what we're talking about here, are ways to sell things, right, That's what this whole thing is about. Well, what I would say, what I feel like, what we're talking about is a little bit further than that. It's ways to predict future events. So selling something is trying to predict what will trigger a purchase, right, So it's it's still predictive, or hopefully predictive. But the question though right now, and the answer it seems, is that overall, while we know that people are working fervently to build a machine that can read the future, right, a modern day fortune teller, uh, we we do not yet have that oracle, at least in the public sphere. We don't know about it, but we do know that people are working on it, and that brings us to um, I guess one of the things we can close with today. Huh Yeah, a little something called anomaly detection at multiple scales or atoms. It's brought to you by DARPA. Friends over at DARPA, good people. Um, they were card over at DARPA. So this comes directly from the DARPA website. And I'm just going to read you this quote's a little along bear with me quote. The anomaly detection at multiple scales or atoms program creates, adapts, and applies technology to anomaly characterization and detection in massive data sets. Anomalies in data cue the collection of additional actionable information in a wide variety of real world contexts. The initial application domain is insider threat detection, in which malevolent or possibly inadvertent actions by a trusted individual are detected against a background of everyday network activity. So they're looking, they're looking at a person, a trusted insider person, and and then they are going, oh, well, here is an anomalous action or an anomalous piece of data inside this. Sure, Like Mrs Cunningham works for a Wall Street investment firm, and every day Mrs Cunningham has lunch at twelve thirty and goes back to work until six thirty, at which point she leaves and it takes her an hour and a half to get home because of traffic. And then one day she goes to lunch, but instead of going to a restaurant, she goes down to you know, um, a gun store, or she goes to a you know her her anomalous change, right yeah, Or she seems to be in closer contact with the competitors, so they could they could call these anomalies. And we've we've heard people talk about this sometimes, like if you haven't checked out the website zero hedge, that's a it's a very interesting read and it's well done. One of the things that they've talked about before is anomaly detection and these theories about you know, UM market forces or investor actions right before calamitous events. Oh yeah, there's some great analysis of that stuff by Tyler Dirton actually speaking of fight Club. Yes, yes, uh so what Okay, this is part of one one of the things I wanted to ask you about. Have you heard the theory that um not only is Tyler Dirden not real, but the girlfriend character is not real either. I know that it's another person he made up. Oh wow, okay, oh wow, okay. I'm trying to check it out. It has nothing to do with what we're talking about it, but we do want to hear from you, not just with your Fight Club theories. But send him if you want. I think it's an interesting movie too. I won't go into some of the plothole parts. All right, Well, let us know what you think about it, but more importantly, let us know what you think about big data. Is it possible to get off of the grid? How difficult is it? What do you think, um, what do you think people are doing with all this information the public and private sphere. One of the big concerns that we hear a lot about is the idea that the surveillance state, at least in the US and the West, has grown because um, the intelligence agencies and departments are able to use the dirt they have on the elected officials to prevent the elected officials from uh, you know, slowing the growth of the surveillance state, the idea of a deep state or shadow government. Okay, so to make me feel better, please send in your suggestions like Ben had earlier, of positive things that could be used that big data could be used for. Please please send those to us, just to make me feel better. Thank you, all right, and you can you can hit us up on Facebook and Twitter where we are conspiracy stuff. You can also drop a drop by our website stuff they don't want you to know dot com which has a bunch of stuff on it. And if you want to send us an email directly, please knock yourself out. It doesn't have to be answering, just the questions, we asked, it could be I don't know a joke during the jokes. Sure. Our email address is conspiracy at how stuff works dot com. From more on this topic, another unexplained phenomenon, visit YouTube dot com slash conspiracy stuff. You can also get in touch on Twitter at the handle at conspiracy stuff

From UFOs, two, ghosts and government cover ups. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to now. Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt and i'm Ben. We're here with our super producer Noel, which makes this stuff they moge want you to know. Close snug quite there. You're right, I said something wrong. I can't figure out what it was. Yeah, we're pretty excited about this new gadget or I guess new to us gadget that's here in the studio to day, Matt, do you want to tell everybody a little bit about it? It's just a couple of old school synthesizers from the seventies and eighties, and hopefully no one's going to be bringing those in the mix. Maybe on this show, maybe not. I don't know. I don't know. He looks like it could go either way. So let's start today's episode with an anecdote that you may have heard if you watched our video series earlier this week two thousand twelve. Minnesota, and this family starts getting ads from Target. You know every people get ads from Target, right, You're used to it. It happens, but this time something's different. They've received ads before, but this time something's off. The ads are for stuff like diapers, strollers and baby lotion and stuff. You get the idea, like for someone who's expecting lovely thing to be. But there's a catch here. Nobody at that house is expecting. So the dad is livid, and the especially about the ads addressed specifically to his teenage daughter. That's the whole point to his high school aged daughter. Yeah, yep. And so he goes to Target in person on in some beast mode WTF kind of stuff trending towards w w E. Possibly when he goes back, has a chat with his daughter, comes back to Target and says, oh, yeah, she's expecting in August. Whoops on all accounts. This comes to us through a New York Times piece that was published on February nineteenth, two thousand twelve, about how obsessively companies track your shopping habits and every little piece of information they can about you to hopefully make you more likely to buy something. And the guy who was interviewed, the statistics man working for Target interviewed in this New York Times article was shut down after he mentioned this because what we're talking about is something that many many companies do but is incredibly controversial, and that is big data. Yeah, it's something that it's not necessarily something they don't want you to know, but they don't want you to know about it, Like it's kind of a known thing now that you are being tracked in all these different ways and looked at. But this is something that we feel you should know more about, right, Yeah, it's something that it's it's strange that you say it's not necessarily something they don't want you to know, because they certainly don't want other people to know the techniques used to gather this information. Absolutely, they might not want you to know some of the things that we can't tell you because we don't know, right, because the data sets themselves are important, But what maybe even more important and even more secretive would be the techniques used to parson analyze this information and even where they're getting some of this data from. Ah. Yes, yeah, So what what is big data? If we have to define it, it's not like it's not the same thing as uh, big agribusiness or big bell or something big pomegranate. Right, No, big data is just as in definition, any extremely large data set or data set so that can be analyzed usually now in the modern day computationally is the only way to even get your wrap your head around it um to reveal patterns and trends all kinds of associations, especially those relating to human behavior and or the interactions between humans. So, for instance, this big data would not be the GPS of one person. It would be the GPS of a city, or people who all work at a large company or yeah, one one GPS companies data. Yeah or yeah, But I love the idea of the GPS information of one like certain area and just all of that data stacked vertically together from everyone that's been in that area. Right. There are different ways to parse this, uh. This big data usually include sets that are so large there beyond the ability of typical software tools Like you couldn't, for instance, just take uh, some data set that is big data size and put it in an Excel spreadsheet on a Google travel. No, there's no way, and if you did, it would be the largest file in the history of XL. So when we look at the range of this, we also know that the size of data is a constantly moving target. Because it seems that there's just more and more and more out there. There's a really weird statistic here somewhere that I think is like nine percent of all the data that exists was made in the last twenty or ten years or something. Oh. Absolutely, it's exponential. And that's one of the things we're gonna talk about here. Just the number of devices that collect data or that you can collect data upon, and just everything that's connected to the Internet nowadays. It's insane. And again, it doesn't go away once. Once you have a data set, it's not like it's irrelevant. You're still going to need that maybe for future, you know, whatever endeavor is that you're going to do as a big business. Right for gamers, uh, this would be sort of the equivalent of an inventory that doesn't register weight. How role playing games turn and you're more familiar with this, and I am, how role playing games turn so many people into orders. We are data orders as well, like the NSA clearly is. Uh. So, what we'll do is will walk through some history of big data, and then we'll also talk about some of the controversy surrounding it, the ways it could be used, some of the conspiracies theoretical and factual about this practice. So one way that one way there's a group called Meta Group or Gardner. Uh. They they have an analyst there named Doug Laney, and he said, one great way to measure big data would be in the three vs. That would be increasing volume, uh, just how much data you have, Uh, the velocity of the data, the speed of the in and out right, and variety that type of stuff, where is it coming from? So not just all homogeneous GPS records, but also like what something else people would collect on another set of data that's really interesting to look at when when combined with GPS data, our phone records, that's always a fun thing. Um. And these these three vs that you're mentioning, this is now an industry standard the way the whole industry looks at big data with what is it? Volume? Velocity? What was the third one? That's volume, velocity and variety. So uh, GPS and phone records would be something that that helps you flesh out a virtual persona, but it comes from the same device probably for most people. True. So another thing that would be more very would be stuff like medical records, stuff like recent purchases on your financial records, so you could part it down to uh people who let's get a little bit dark with it. You could parse it down to uh some We have these four sets of data out this person, right, So we know that once every week or something they go to a clinic right and specializes in some kind of treatment, right. And then we know that the medical records that they have some kind of uh, debilitating condition. And then we see that one of their recent purchases is a skydiving suit. So we have built this picture with just the very little information about someone who probably has a terminal disease and wants to skydive because it was on their bucket list. Now we know exactly the kind of things to sell to this person, and we know exactly the kind of things to sell, which is frightening. Uh. So this is I mean, this is an example that you and I just made up now, right, Matt, this is not we don't know any more and that this has happened to so this is a new information age. It's tough to stress how quickly personal privacy has eroded, right, um, and we the people of the information age, have committed um, have have lost our privacy due to acts of negligence, not due to aggressively rooting for this loss of privacy. It's just who reads terms and conditions, right, Yeah, And we're all very happy about some of the things that providing this type of data gives to us. The GPS thing alone, I think is a massive I mean a lot of people would I don't. I can't speak for everyone, but for myself to have the ability to use the GPS when I'm out on the road somewhere instead of having to look at a physical map is one of those things where sometimes I just go, you know what, screw it, turn my GPS on. I need it, right, And even if they know that this, were highly aware that this is being tracked. But but there's also there's such a a sort of narcissism in paranoia, this idea that yes, of course they care where I get my pickles. Of course, of course someone does. And don't get me wrong, I mean sure grocery stores for sure do. Every time you swipe a loyalty card, you are generating more information for them to uh target ads toward you, which we'll talk about whether or not that is, you know, morally wrong or ethically sticky or whatever or if you would, would someone want that? Like, are there people out there that want Kroger to know exactly what the order so they can just say, hey, here's all the things that you want and hear the coupons right there? And there are some people I would definitely take some coupons for things. But also, this is okay, this is so unrelated. This is a side conspiracy here. And Matt, uh, So you and I are just old enough to remember before these loyalty cards came out everywhere, right, Yeah, when I was in college, they didn't exist. So the way that they were instant you did was that for for all the young guns out there, the way that these cards were instituted was at first they gave you discounts on things. Right. But one of the conspiracies I've heard is that this artificial price shenaniganting if I can make up the word, uh, ultimately became something where having the card didn't really get you a discount. It just got you the the regular price. The regular price, yes, and the money that they're making on top of selling your information to third parties. CBS is like yeah, thanks, yeah, it's and and so you're you're being penalized at least, this theory goes for not participating in this program. And that's because again, the overwhelming majority of companies, uh, don't just do this. They do this with relish and it is profitable. But it is a very very old idea. Is that I have to say this, here's the worst news about that whole situation. What's that even if you go somewhere and shop. I'm just gonna use an example, but I'm aware of like publics that I don't have a loyalty card for and I don't know that you can get one. Maybe you can now, but and you you try and save money there, if you pay with a card of any type, then that stuff is being tracked, maybe by a separate company, a third party, or maybe just your credit card company. But the same thing is happening. And we'll see a couple of different reasons that this happens, you know, or or a couple of different motivations for this collection. But let's walk through the history first. Okay, so this is not a new thing. Trying to track data, trying to understand numbers about things that are happening in the world around you. Goes back seven thousand years to something that we've mentioned before in Mesopotamia during the birth of agriculture, when you had to keep track of seeds, you had to keep track of crops and soil, just everything you needed to know data about the ground and the plants that you're trying to put in there. So yeah, So, for example, there's an accounting system that goes in to monitor the growth of a I don't know, uh, an olive sure, an olive tree, right, and so, um, you know some farmer named John Stamos, a very common name in Mesopotamia at the time. I imagine, Uh, this farmer, John Stamos has uh, a bunch of olives, and they have to have a way to track year over year the performance of that crop. Right. So this is when they begin saying, Okay, you know John Stamos has X amount of trees. They yield y amount of olives each year. This is what we can expect. This is what we can expect, this is what we can bet against, this is what we can sell an advance before it's made. Then you get into we're gonna jump forward pretty far here, all the way to sixteen sixty three. Nothing else happened, yeah, zero, nothing between seven thousand years ago. Let's just say improvements are being in incrementally, you know, are happening up until this point. But then on the next big change, the sixteen sixty three when John Grant, I think that's how you correctly spell it. Grant very British. Uh. He recorded an examined information about mortality rates because the bubonic plague was just ravaging just the entire area at the time, and he decided he wanted to know more information about, like how what is happening here, exactly how many people are getting affected? Why are they getting affected? Let's get information and we can start solving this. Yeah, and that sounds that sounds sensible. It's the least you could do, right we I don't know, have we ever talked on this show about just how profoundly the plague or the series of things known as the plague change the world. No, I've listened to a little too much stuff you missed in history class about it. So the information, Saan sometimes gets muddled between what we've talked about and what I've just heard. These plagues have played such a profound role in uh, the global evolution of the human species. It's just crazy it's the kind of stuff you would want to keep track on. So this guy, uh, John Grant becomes, uh the father of statistics, or he's considered that because he does the first statistical data analysis that we have recordings of, uh, and he has a book about it called Natural and Political Observations Made upon the Bills of Mortality. Just kind of a dry name, right, but it's it's not a feel good subject, and people continue to work off this statistical analysis. So let's fast forward to the twenty century. Okay, so we're going to fast forward all the way to eighteen eight seven. This is when the modern the age of modern data, modern data is when it is born. So this gentleman named Herman Hollerith invented a computing machine that could read these holes punched holes in cards that paper cards in order to organize census data. And this is a huge change because you have to imagine just collecting data, of going door to door getting information, then trying to compile that just with humans in rooms. That it was taking so they would do one one census every ten years, I believe at the time, and it was taking almost nine years before you would get the results from the census of the previous the previous census. So it was almost I don't not worthless, but it was just felt like they were running backwards almost right. Yeah, they had they had a data set that would be when it was finally complete, useful for a little less than a year. Yeah, exactly so. Uh. The first data processing machine appeared in nineteen forty three. This was, of course, it came out of war. A lot of technological in vations come out of war. Uh. And it was meant to decipher codes from the Nationalist Socialists or the Nazis. Uh. This thing was named Colossus, which is a pretty cool name. And they would intercept messages. They would feed things to Colossus and would search for patterns in these characters. And it worked pretty quickly. Yeah. It would go five thousand characters per second, which is huge. It reduced the time from weeks two hours. Let's stroll through some other stuff here, just kind of laundry listed so you can get to the good stuff. Uh. Nineteen fifty two, everybody's favorite, the n s A, the National Security Agency is created, and within ten years they have more than twelve thousand cryptologists on contract. That's huge. Then you've got. In nineteen sixty five, the US government builds the first data center which can store seven hundred and forty two million tax returns and also a hundred and seventy five million sets of fingerprints. Now this is pretty interesting here because this is this is something that was recorded on the magnetic tape and computer tape. You may, I don't know if anybody listening would know what that is. Hopefully maybe you've heard of this magnetic tape. My father is a controller controlling account and they have a like a newer version of this magnetic tape, but it's still all of their stuff is backed up to this magnetic tape because it's so well, it's supposedly so reliable. Well, also, people will recognize the magnetic tape if you've never seen it before. Um, every time you see an old computer with reels on it, that's magnetic tape. In Captain America the Winter Soldier, the sequel to the First Captain America, Uh, there is a scene which I won't spoil for you if you haven't gotten around the scene it yet, but there is a scene which involves a gigantic computer and that is magnetic tape. Awesome, Okay, good reference. Now we understand. But here here's the thing. Though, This whole project was scrapped because of fears of quote big brother right, being a little bit too big brotherish little Orwellian. So this, however, changed everything because people were thinking, what if we centralize, um, the location of data, you know, no more paper, just electronically store it. A British guy, so you may have heard of tim Berners Lee of Invince what will go on to become the World Wide Web? And with this foom, we're going like gangbusters because people are able to generate massive amounts of information, much more so than anybody could plausibly read. And when it's connected up to this uh interweb, if you will, it can be it can be sent somewhere else, right. And then if you do have a data center, doesn't matter where the data is collected, you can send it directly over there almost immediately. Yeah, it's it's bizarre when we think about that, and especially we think about um, how just let's have a John Henry moment, and can you compare matt the the ability of a supercomputer to a person. Oh God, can I m hmm. Let's say okay, let's say in the first supercomputer. Let's use that one as our example. It could do as much work in one second then a single human being operating a calculator could do in thirty thousand years. Thirty thousand years. And that's not even the twenty one century, ladies and gentlemen. Now we are at the modern age. And two thousand five, a guy from O'Reilly media coined the term big data for the first time. Uh and this was, you know, a successor to a another less fortunate buzzword, which was web two point oh yeah, yeah, the new coke of web words. But yeah, so this this idea here is a little bit more bad of the idea of data set that is just so massive and complex and interwoven that you can't use the traditional business intelligence tools to figure out what's going on. Right And oh five is also the year that Hoddup was created by Yahoo, which was built on the back of Google's map produce. And these are just softwares that can basically take data from using a bunch of different computers to crunched numbers like and huge amounts um And it was the goal to index the entire or the entire worldwide Web. That's why these things were created and uh, it's the open source to dupe. It was used by a lot of organizations to crunch through data. That just is it's almost in quantifiable how huge it is. Right, and this is not just a private industry thing, of course, And the line is blurry. We seem to talk about these two events in isolation, as if the n s A using phone records and social media contacts. Who do you know that knows who? That knows who on Facebook? Right on the list? Now you're on the list right. Uh, they're they're not just using that, Uh and target or another private organization, um, a data broker. There are companies that just broker data. Uh. These do not exist in a vacuum. There's interplay between them, and uh, they're increasingly merging to do just some amazing things. We're getting very very good at seeing the present as never before. And other governments are involved in this as well. In two thousand nine, the Indian government did something just ambitious is like the most reasonable word for this. They decided to take an Irish scan, fingerprint and photo of everyone in India, every single person in India. There are so many people, Yes, can you imagine listener Uh, if the government came to you and said, Okay, we're going to need we're gonna need an Irish skin of fingerprint, and we're also going to need a photograph, a really nicely framed photograph with good contrast. We're gonna put it in of you and everyone in your family put it into this database. Don't worry. We're gonna make sure it's secure, and we're not going to use it for anything but for good things. Right, Yeah, and that's one point to billion people to bill. Yeah, this is the largest biometric database in the world. So there's a great thing that Eric Schmidt from Google also said, right, just another sense of perspective here, yeah, he he stated at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe. He he stated, quote, there were five exabytes of information created by the entire world between the dawn of civilization and two thousand three. Now that same amount is created every two days. Boom. Take take that history of the universe. I can't wait till the aliens land and say uh that they're like, Wow, these guys figured out how to make uh pizza into burritos and there's a blog about it. It's sort of like when you know, when people modern times find ancient Greek or Roman or African ruins from these empires of bygone days. And there's always some jerk like hundreds of years ago who wrote like Tim was here, yeah and true, like dick butt from Reddit. They're just like, what is a precursor right there? Right? So there's but there's so much information being made and you know, I'm being a little crass here, but the point I'm hoping to make is that this information is not you know, noble stuff or even stuff that would really make sense to a human being you didn't know they were looking for. These are metrics, these are movements. These are little breadcrumbs of you scattered around the Internet at large, and then you're just bringing them together to make another picture. It's like pointali is um, Really that's a wonderful, wonderful image. Yeah, that's really good. On Everything you do online today or in any electronic medium is recorded by somebody. Yep. If you're typing on a keyboard or on a touchpad, it's getting recorded, So enjoy it. I'm like, hey, unless you're on an air gas computer, and we've all learned now what that is, so okay, so let's just another example here. Uh, Fortunately for some of us, I'm not going to name names, but for some of us, it is not a crime to be drunk on the internet. Well yeah, okay, sure. And there are people who you know, have maybe in a fit of passion or maybe they had some drinks and they wrote something crazy on the Internet and they almost sent it and they said, no, wait, I'm gonna sleep on this. Let me think about this before I write anything. Well, those ghost movements, those drafts that you make, are also part of this. So just the act of typing, especially in Facebook. Oh you know, yeah, don't goos draft in Facebook, right, yeah, and all of these pieces of information assemble. Again, that's such a beautiful image, man, a point list portrait of you and who you are. And the big worry that a lot of people have, and we see it through sci fi and pop culture, and we've seen this for decades, is that this will be able to go beyond just a a panopoly view of the present or a panopticon kind of view of the present, to become predictive. Oh yeah, so eventually you just have an understanding of what each one of these people is going to do throughout their daily lives, what what the corporation is going to profit from in the next two three years? You can. I mean, it's crazy to imagine all the information that we will eventually be able to get from this big data and whose hands will it be in well? And who can who can accurately understand this? So we we also talk about these controversies. This stuff is around to stay until the lights go out on humanity. Yeah, this this stuff will be around to stay. Oh yeah, it is here to stay unless there's some kind of weird fight club moment and all the buildings holding all the stuff the data centers blow up, which is probably not gonna happen. There's really good security at those buildings, right, and it's a distributed network, so it would be hard to take the head off. It would hard be hard to take all of the heads off the hydrant that is the information age. Of course, this doesn't come without controversy. We have we have a video about four creepy things about big aida, or this umbrella term, which can again apply to government as well as industry. It can learn big data can be used to learn your secrets. That's scary. So if you think, uh, nobody knows that you routinely order three large cheese pizzas with ham and sit in the dark in your house at two am every Thursday night eating and crying. Nope, sorry, getching reruns A Firefly, watching reruns a Firefly? Nope, sorry. Somebody knows. Papa John's knows. Comcast, probably knows, Podcast, probably knows. Maybe Netflix. Uh so. The another thing it doesn't have to tell you what it knows. There is a surprising lack of transparency on the part of companies collecting your information. Yeah, that, Um, what is the name of the company Axiom? Axiom? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, they're scary. Huh uh dude, Yeah, I've been We're making this video, and the way it works is usually Ben will Ben will write an outline for what he's going to present in the vlog. I will shoot it. Then as I'm editing, I end up doing a lot of research and oh my god, Ben, I've just been scouring their website and nothing against you, Axiom. If you're listening your employees, Um, it's just a murky world. Well, it's pervasive. Like the the amount of information that Axiom has is is impressive. Yeah, and the way they talk about it sometimes their offline data that they have used for online purposes. I don't know, it's fascinating if you go to the website. So we we've talked a little bit about just the science fiction elements and how we see some science fact generating. But we knew know that this is a very old story. We've seen things like Isaac Asmov's Foundation series, which deal with the fictional at this point fictional science of psychohistory predicting the future on a large scale event. We dealt with gatica, where personal information medical information is used to gosh, I'm trying to not to spoil things, yeah, but I mean, what's the limit with spoilers? Like, at what point it kind of stinks? I guess you just have to put an alert at the very beginning of something that might have a spoiler in it and just say don't listen to this if you have not seen these movies, read these books, or listen to these songs. Wow. Pretty okay, all right, So that's that's pretty complicated. But we've also seen it in of course Minority Report, which we mentioned. But the controversy surrounding this, which is expressed in our culture is uh oh oh and Another one would be the dark night. Oh yes, yeah, we're Lucius Fox. Yeah, and the cell phone system monitoring system. So, uh, we see, we see this expressed in the culture of UM multiple nations. But what what's the real stuff? What's the real controversy? Could could it damage your credit report if you had GPS data that said you were I don't know, going to a pawn shop often or something? You know, Yeah, I don't know, And that's I don't want to scare anybody. That's a that's a made up example there, But we do know that the we do know that the possibilities for that kind of stuff. Again, just possibilities are there. And then I love that you pointed out the other side of the argument, which is, well, maybe this is more convenient, Maybe this is the way things should be. Uh, it's a personalized experience for me wherever I go. Yeah, it's certainly sold to us that way, and I think maybe some people by that. I I am, unfortunately somewhere in the middle. I don't know if you ask for my opinion, Ben, but guess what I'm giving. I have fall somewhere in the middle where I'm I appreciate what the I appreciate the attempt of what's trying to happen, but ultimately, really the bottom line is that these companies are trying to make a profit by targeting. Sure, right, and that's the way you sell things. Nowadays, we're so inundative with advertising that the only real way to get a message across is to send it with an arrow straight at your eyeball in your ear like, uh hi, super producer Noel Brown, we understand that you have recently begun working with a move. Here are some products that might interest you exactly. I mean, that's the only way you're gonna do it now. But yeah, that's that's probably true, man. But I personally, my biggest concern about this, this encroaching analysis. My biggest concern is that a can function as a kind of inherent censorship due to like the search bubble, the idea that based on your past search history, you only receive results that are quote unquote relevant to you. I don't want to receive the results that are relevant to me. I want to see both sides of any argument. I want to see um news that would be in another language. There's gonna be some kind of college course that shows you how to get the most balanced Google search results, and it will all it will be an entire course that just shows you how to develop over time by searching for certain things at certain times. Well, there are things like scroogle and Duck duck go that are supposed to not track your search. There are places to go currently, but you know, we've seen as acquisitions continue and certain corporations continue to get more and more monolithic, I can see a future where there is one place to search for things. Well. And there's also this idea that that I think is tremendously positive, even noble almost, that if we had enough data, and we had enough sophisticated part seeing algorithms or software, then we might be able to address global problems that ordinarily wouldn't have been able to be solved, Like what if there were a way to uh stop the massive extinction of Earth's wildlife? Right, agreed, And that's amazing and I love that view. But conversely, you could also with that same data stomp out all and every form of resistance against a certain movement. That's true, right, and uh, this this becomes a matter of uh, I don't know, the short term stuff versus the long term problems. With that being said, let's go straight to the crazy stuff, the conspiracies, both theoretical and actual. Uh, there's a there's a this theory, the troubling possibility, the kind of thing that a sci fi writer would make a dystopian novel about, that we could eventually arrive at a world in which circumstance and accident has fallen to the statistical hand of faith and certitude, so that something very much like an artificial god knows how you will live your days from the cradle to the grave. Yeah. I don't like that, Ben, It's a scary thing. There is some silver lining here, though. Uh, there are many competitors right now in this space. There's not just one big data right company. Right, Um, so at least, you know, much in the same way that there are shadowy forces trying to control the world, there are a lot of them. There's not just one group. Yeah. And then these groups might not necessarily work together, especially if they're competing in a private sphere, right, not unless it's you know, helpful for the bottom line. Right. They gather their data sets and and they guard their techniques pretty jealously. Also, here's the one thing when we talk about this super all knowing Wizard of Oz type computer. The fact of the matter is that we still apparently can't build a computer that can predict the weather. No, because there there's always with the weather. There's always that um I don't know, that chaos factor almost to where you can't. There's so it's so complex, all of the different moving parts that create the weather. But what ben what Yeah, I guess it would be. I guess the same would be true for big data. There's so many different moving parts and it's so complex. Yeah, it seems like it would be. I don't know. Is it easier to build something that can predict the weather or something that can predict the passage of time in a country? You know, we've talked before off air about this and maybe on air too, but uh, you know, I had a professor a long time ago and in different life who was working with DARPA to build an artificial model of a country, with the idea that if they programmed enough data points together and assign them to these individuals, then they could measure kind of like foundation in real life. They could measure the likelihood of trends, you know, like if if police, if support for police goes up by x percent, what will be the effect upon the livelihood or the likelihood of the regime's collapse or stability. And I don't know where he went with it, but it is some amazing, terrifying and inspiring stuff. Either way, he can't talk about it anymore, right, and this and still at least our knowledge listeners. Uh, this remains a theoretical thing, but it is a fact that big business is doing stuff like this all the time, and not necessarily. You know, it's not like there's somebody out there just rubbing their hands together, supervillain style, waiting for you to slip so they can, you know, tell tell your mom that you are smoking cigarettes. There's something there. What what it is more about is um not immoral but amoral um providing of a better service or being a better um service to the consumer. But now consumers are increasingly the product as well, right exactly, Your information is the thing the commodity, which is so weird. Information as commodity. I guess it's been coming for a long time and it has been that way for a long time. It's just strange to think about it on this scale. It's almost like the information what I'm seeing it is the access and ability to collect massive amounts of information. Is this new gold rush thing? Ah, that's good. Yeah, you're killing it with the comparisons. So I don't know if that's just what I'm seeing. Where all these large corporations that are building you know, massive supercomputer complexes of supercomputers that can just crunch numbers. Man, well we're but we're at a point where, you know, they're could be some positives for this if if it was able to if these data sets were able to, for instance, help humanity combat I don't know, over fishing, or help humanity figure out the best way to prevent mass starvation or disease. But again, you know, those things are also they seem to be more complex than weather patterns. They are, and I just it's hard for me to imagine someone looking at those problems and making a profit from it, or you know, devising a way to make a profit from it and use all these assets in order to do something good. I'm sorry, man, my faith in humanity just like got ticked down a couple of notches for some reason in thinking about all this stuff. Because this is all really what we're talking about here, are ways to sell things, right, That's what this whole thing is about. Well, what I would say, what I feel like, what we're talking about is a little bit further than that. It's ways to predict future events. So selling something is trying to predict what will trigger a purchase, right, So it's it's still predictive, or hopefully predictive. But the question though right now, and the answer it seems, is that overall, while we know that people are working fervently to build a machine that can read the future, right, a modern day fortune teller, uh, we we do not yet have that oracle, at least in the public sphere. We don't know about it, but we do know that people are working on it, and that brings us to um, I guess one of the things we can close with today. Huh Yeah, a little something called anomaly detection at multiple scales or atoms. It's brought to you by DARPA. Friends over at DARPA, good people. Um, they were card over at DARPA. So this comes directly from the DARPA website. And I'm just going to read you this quote's a little along bear with me quote. The anomaly detection at multiple scales or atoms program creates, adapts, and applies technology to anomaly characterization and detection in massive data sets. Anomalies in data cue the collection of additional actionable information in a wide variety of real world contexts. The initial application domain is insider threat detection, in which malevolent or possibly inadvertent actions by a trusted individual are detected against a background of everyday network activity. So they're looking, they're looking at a person, a trusted insider person, and and then they are going, oh, well, here is an anomalous action or an anomalous piece of data inside this. Sure, Like Mrs Cunningham works for a Wall Street investment firm, and every day Mrs Cunningham has lunch at twelve thirty and goes back to work until six thirty, at which point she leaves and it takes her an hour and a half to get home because of traffic. And then one day she goes to lunch, but instead of going to a restaurant, she goes down to you know, um, a gun store, or she goes to a you know her her anomalous change, right yeah, Or she seems to be in closer contact with the competitors, so they could they could call these anomalies. And we've we've heard people talk about this sometimes, like if you haven't checked out the website zero hedge, that's a it's a very interesting read and it's well done. One of the things that they've talked about before is anomaly detection and these theories about you know, UM market forces or investor actions right before calamitous events. Oh yeah, there's some great analysis of that stuff by Tyler Dirton actually speaking of fight Club. Yes, yes, uh so what Okay, this is part of one one of the things I wanted to ask you about. Have you heard the theory that um not only is Tyler Dirden not real, but the girlfriend character is not real either. I know that it's another person he made up. Oh wow, okay, oh wow, okay. I'm trying to check it out. It has nothing to do with what we're talking about it, but we do want to hear from you, not just with your Fight Club theories. But send him if you want. I think it's an interesting movie too. I won't go into some of the plothole parts. All right, Well, let us know what you think about it, but more importantly, let us know what you think about big data. Is it possible to get off of the grid? How difficult is it? What do you think, um, what do you think people are doing with all this information the public and private sphere. One of the big concerns that we hear a lot about is the idea that the surveillance state, at least in the US and the West, has grown because um, the intelligence agencies and departments are able to use the dirt they have on the elected officials to prevent the elected officials from uh, you know, slowing the growth of the surveillance state, the idea of a deep state or shadow government. Okay, so to make me feel better, please send in your suggestions like Ben had earlier, of positive things that could be used that big data could be used for. Please please send those to us, just to make me feel better. Thank you, all right, and you can you can hit us up on Facebook and Twitter where we are conspiracy stuff. You can also drop a drop by our website stuff they don't want you to know dot com which has a bunch of stuff on it. And if you want to send us an email directly, please knock yourself out. It doesn't have to be answering, just the questions, we asked, it could be I don't know a joke during the jokes. Sure. Our email address is conspiracy at how stuff works dot com. From more on this topic, another unexplained phenomenon, visit YouTube dot com slash conspiracy stuff. You can also get in touch on Twitter at the handle at conspiracy stuff