From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noah, my name is Ben. You are you that makes this stuff they don't want you to know? But not any ordinary episode of this show. And here's the part where you're saying, well, Ben, what is ordinary? Great question question for another day, ladies and gentlemen, because we are joined today by a special guest, a returning force to our show, longtime collaborator and friend of all three of ours, ladies and gentlemen, the illustrious, the magnanimous, the Transatlantic accenting, the phenomenal, the inevitable, ladies and gentlemen, Jonathan Stricklett. Guys, I have to say that your ability to introduce a person is only matched by your ability to tie incredibly complicated knots. I look forward to getting out of the studio. What are we talking about today? Okay, let's get through this quickly then, guys. Look, no one is getting untied until the show is over. Pipe down strictly, all right, And that goes for you as well, Matt. It is an excellent question. We are talking today about something that might seem a little bit strange for some people, which is advertising, but not just advertising, a specific kind of advertising, targeted online advertising. So in our personal lives, let's start there. Have you guys had any weird experiences yourself with that? Absolutely? Yeah, yeah, well, I mean all sorts of things, right, But okay, So first, when you think about targeted advertising, you know you wanted to find that a little bit, right. This is advertising that is specifically geared to most likely uh interest you, based upon whatever data the advertiser has on you in the effort to sell a good or service to you. Right. That's the whole purpose of ads. So often we talk about data mining, machine learning, examining people's behavior in order to target them more effectively. But in the beginning, before you gather all that information you're targeted, ads tend to be a little more random and chaotic, may not necessarily really target the person. And I'm specifically thinking of an AD that popped up again and again and again for me on Facebook for the longest time until I actually had to take the effort to hide that ad. And say I don't want to see this anymore. I didn't do that. Yes you can, you can, you can. There's a little there's a little menu you can pull up and say this doesn't interest me. And and what it can do is it actually tells Facebook, oh well, I can better serve ads to this person by not showing this stuff like it benefits Facebook, it benefits the companies that are advertising, and it benefits the user. Right. What was the head was? Uh for a muscle enhancer which had an impossibly muscular person with an impossibly tiny head. Uh, Like you look at you think if this isn't photoshopped, this guy has a miserable experience in his day to day life because he's so muscular that his range of movement has to be limited. It does not at all make me want to even remotely consider getting whatever nutritional supplement they're trying to sell or or there you know, uh weight loss program or muscle building photoshop courses. I mean, you guys can see me. You you guys out there can't, but the guys here in the podcast room could see me. Your head is normal size. And you can also tell that I am clearly not terrible ly concerned about building lots of muscle mass. I don't know. I might need a few moments here. I could take off the shirt, but that's probably not something any of us really wants to have burned into our memory. All that being said, you do clearly have a pension for different flavors of muscle milk. Well, that's true. That's it's just because you know, I support those guys really fast to get in here before we move on. I recently had a baby and we made the mistake of making a registry at Target. And as soon as we did that, all of the advertising back when we had cable, all of it was maybe centric and maybe it wasn't the you know, going to Target doing that, Maybe it was our search result in history, maybe it was any number of things. But as soon as that life event happened for us, every advertisement that we saw was about it. I've got I've got an even more recent one for me that um, I'm curious to see what comes out of it now, because right now, at the earliest stages, I was looking for a price quote for a particular type of vehicle. So I used a website where you can get price comparisons for dealerships in your area that sell whatever vehicle you're looking into, and in order to get that information, you have to do things like put in your email address and put in your phone number. I knew what was going to happen while I was doing it, but I really needed to see those price quotes, so I did it. Immediately, I'm getting phone calls and emails from all the dealerships in the area. Now that's the first wave. I suspect what happens next is if I keep checking my email and I looked through the spam filter, I'm gonna see a lot of car related stuff come at me. Not the specific make and model that I was looking at, but all sorts of things like aftermarket and all that kind of stuff, the related things around the car industry. I expect I'll get a lot of that because I have been identified as someone actively looking into purchasing a car, and it is very valuable information for a company to have. They could sell that to other companies before money, and then I get inundated by all this advertising. So let's look at advertisements. Jonathan, you provided an excellent definition of what an advertisement is, essentially at heart and unsolicited attempt to showcase the benefits of product X or the less concrete sense of the brand or tone of an experience, in hopes of having you, the customer, purchase an item or service. And the thing is this is super I'm not gonna occurse because we're still a family show. This is super old. How old is it? Well, the earliest known advertisement that we have right now comes from three thousand BC from thebes Grease. I'm not sure if you've seen this, Jonathan, you might have seen this, but it's uh, it's it can't take a wild guess. I mean, if I had to guess ancient Greece advertisement, I'm gonna say it's something brothel related. No, in fact, which got one to tell you? Yeah? Okay, Well, let me do this one really fast. So this was for okay, let's just go to it. It was a seller of fabrics who had made this papyrus right, and he claimed that he would give a reward to anyone who would report the whereabouts of quote slave sem somebody. This was, yeah, Hapo was was the name of the gentleman, and not to be confused with Shemp, the underappreciated Yes so anywhere, Yes, so, anyone who would report the whereabouts of this slave sem and then report to him at his store where he is would get a reward. And here's the thing it's said on the papyrus, anyone who returns him to the store quote where the most beautiful fabrics are woven for each person's taste. By the way, I think it sounds more like an A. P. B. Than an AD. It's it's both, it's both. The pirates was crazy. You know, it wasn't as available as paper is today. But I think I know the example you're going to mention. Yeah, so the example I'm mentioning was a more permanent type of advertise. And uh so I've I've visited Pompeii, well known as the village that was completely engulfed in volcanic ash, killing everybody who was there, but preserving the village very well. And you can go and tour Pompeii and it's very interesting. One of the things you will notice if you're looking down, which I recommend you do because the ground is very uneven in certain places, is that every occasional paving stone you come across, there's a very particular relief on that paving stone, a fallus if you will, or as my tour guide referred to it, a p noose, and these pointed the direction toward the closest brothel. Yes, because people would have visit Pompeii and they wouldn't necessarily be able to speak Greek. It was all Greek to them, but they understood what the signs meant, could follow it and get to their desired destination, whereupon they would be greeted with a mural that would have the offerings of the house displayed, and they could just point to whatever one they wanted, the House of ill Repute. And so as we see, advertising is an ancient craft, art, science, trick scam. Much of what we see a modern advertising today can be traced back to a fellow named Edward Burns. We will not labor you with the description of Edward Burns other than to say you can check out our multiple videos and audio podcasts on it. The first audio podcast for this show actually go all the way back. The dude was incredibly manipulative and intelligent and and some could argue unscrupulous. And so now we know there are several types of advertisement. Here just a few. So first we have direct address. So this is basically the equivalent of Hello, I am an ad for this product, product X, y Z whatever. Here is a cool joke by it by me. So it's the idea of sort of instilling positive feelings in people and associating those positive feelings with a particular product, like those those lovely Mentos ads from the nineties. You know, that was a trivia question recently and I immediately recalled the warm, fuzzy feelings you got when you saw that plucky businessman who got paint on his suit lay down on the bench and turn it into a pin stripe. You know, it was just like you go guy for me. I think the most recent example that that leaps to mind would be either the old spice commercials, which sure yeah, the ones that us Campbell as well, those two, because they instill that sense of absurd city while getting across this idea of this is this is a manly, manly thing and will make you manly while not stinky and clearly for our purpose. Is one of the most important things here is that it is clearly being sold transparently, and then that gets us to other things that would be like branded content. You can find this in uh not nonprofits and NPR, for instance, that they will have something where there will be a show that you might enjoy or an episode of a thing, and then at the beginning or at the end, or somewhere in the middle, they will say brought to you by And this is this is something where the advertiser wants to be associated with the thing but doesn't want to, you know, be all in your business. About a company that is super successful at doing that is red Bull. They do it all for themselves, So they have these publications. They make these skateboard videos, extreme sports videos, and all the gear that people featuring these videos are wearing have red Bull all over it. The skate board half pipe says red Bull. The bloody parachute says red Bull. You know, but at the same time, you're like, you know what, this is exciting content. I'm enjoying watching these people do these death defying feats. And and and one person sitting at this table has a show sponsored by a large company. I I do a show called Forward Thinking, and our sponsor is Toyota. And Toyota is the company that makes our show possible. It is entirely because of them. If it weren't for Toyota, it would not exist. And again you're transparent about it. Every episode starts with a pre roll that's just brought to you by Toyota. And even even more importantly to me is that Toyota gives me the message of we want you to talk about things that excite you about the future. That was my that's my that's my direction is awesome. They don't, they don't give you anything. They don't ever, they don't ever tell them like, they don't ever tell them, like what you should do is relate space travel to this new sedan, right, And so the direction I get is, what do you think it's really awesome about the future? Make episodes about that? And I don't, like, I don't even have to submit something to Toyota to get approval. They trust me to do what is good for our show and good for their brand, which is weird because you're crazy sketchy. Yeah, well, I mean that's that's true. But for four years we've managed to do that show. So, and this is one of those things where if it's done well, it can be a huge wind for everyone involved, but it can also go in a bad direction either for for any of the parties. And it's just because it hasn't been handled properly that brings us to a darker side what is called native advertising, or in a clever portmanteau advertorial it yeah, so that what's that in Jonathan? You know? Yeah, it would go kind of like this, Hi, I'm a real thing. I'm not an ad, but hey, hey, is it isn't product X cool? You know what that reminds me? There is some legitimate journalism that I can point to right here that this shows you how objectively amazing Product X is not to mention science. Look at the science right and this this is this is an iteration that you can probably recognize any time you've been on the internet. You can also see it in history, for one example, with Edward Burns of course, and had the reason people bacon for breakfast because there was this avatarial thing which was purportedly a study by doctors. During a darker time in my life, I actually worked for UM, a company that published a community magazine. You guys know these community magazines. Everyone's got it your little city as a city X magazine. So I'm not going to name names, but based on my experience with this, I can only assume that a lot of them are kind of like this, but I could be wrong with My particular situation was like this, where every single piece of content in this City X magazine was paid for by local business owners, but it was all like trained as some sort of profile or some sort of you know, community interest piece where it's about, look the great things that this lawyer is doing. But wait, why are there nine stories about nine different lawyers in this magazine. That's weird. That is native advertising advertorials, and that's the bread and butter of a lot of these smaller publications because people want to be seen, and they want but the thing is, no one's Maybe some people are fooled, but I would say anyone listening to the show likely would not be fool or taken in. It's one of the things that I find the most maddening about that approach, because we know you guys out there, We know that you are smart, we know that you can smell when someone's trying to sell something to you, and you can't imagine how frustrating it can be on the other side of that equation to be the person who has to produce that thing through whatever directive, like to be told, Hey, you've got to create this podcast or video or article or whatever it may be because we want to sell more widgets, and so you've got to make this widget thing. And uh, it's your you know how widgets work, but you but really you're you're explaining how awesome widgets are. Uh. This doesn't happen frequently, and it's not something that I think most people have caught on that. It's not necessarily the most useful approach because since the audience can recognize what's happening, they lose respect for the outlet that is producing the stuff. They're saying, Oh, these people are just selling an ad or they're just selling a product or service. Therefore I don't respect them anymore because it is stuff they don't want you to know. But the problem is you know it when you see it. This brings us to the subject of two Days podcast, which is targeted advertising. No based on what we know about you, and we do know more than you think. Jonathan Matt and I are going to show you this product. You're going to love it. Everything about who you are tells us you were going to love it. I'm excited to see it. Look, look, look, look, didn't you say you like kayaks? I love kayaks and this one plays electronica. I love electronica playing kayaks, and maybe Tom York signed it. You'll never know unless you buy it. Never know. There's also a handy place to put whiskey. What are you saying that I'm an alcoholic? No, we just know you. Oh no, he just clicked he found this ad offensive. Back to the drawing board. The next step was to talk about Beard Doyle. That's funny. That's funny, But it's kind of the way these things are. It's a it's a series of trial and error. It's like Jonathan was saying earlier with the offensive what not offensive? But the ad that was getting on your nerves to the point where you had to hide it. When you told Facebook that you didn't want to see that ad, it Facebook took that as an opportunity, the opportunity to say, Okay, well he doesn't like this, Let's try something new, Let's try something Let's let's change a little bit and see if he maybe likes this version of this thing. It's switching up the bait in the trap and going further than that. Like like the early stages of this it relied a lot on us giving direct information to whatever platform we're talking about. Like Facebook is a great example, saying actively saying I don't like this, Well, Facebook's like, all right, well, now we know they don't like this, but maybe they like this other thing. Maybe body builders like bigger heads. Yeah, maybe that would have made me feel less freaked out at this. Amazon is another great example, right, Like the early version of Amazon is that you would buy something, or you would be browsing for a specific thing, and it would just show you related items that other people who had also bought that that particular item were interested in. Say, hey, people who are interested in kayaks often also look at paddles. That makes sense, right. The thing there is it's you are feeding Amazon this information by buying things, and the more things you buy, oh and god forbid you buy one of those suggested items, the more accurate it gets at predicting the kinds of things you or people like you will like. Once a month, I buy something just completely out of left field. It's like when you do the ratings on Netflix, you're giving the algorithm good information that it can then turn around and serve you better adds. Is that a good thing. Ah, that's where he goes. So let's just talk about the evolution of this. So when the nineteen nineties, internet companies websites advertised with a method that was pretty similar to what we saw in television. Right, it would say, we'll choose ads based on what we think will appeal to the most people in an audience. So, for example, we've got Jonathan on a site about baseball statistics, and they don't know anything about you other than you're a person who visited this site, and by the virtue of that piece of information, they say, you know what, ads for gloves, ads for bats, ads for related merchandise, bobbleheads, bobbleheads perfos. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty simple on the surface. It worked for TV, but a great deal of marketing, research and focus group stuff when in behind this. In the early two thousands, online advertising, like the terminator robots started to become more sophisticated. At first, we could tell the difference, right, but now it became a little more complex. Company said hey, we can use this Amazon stuff. So companies said, hey, we can use these Google browsing habits. This anonymous information on this allowed companies to tailor ads to a specific user. So it's for example, Matt, you and Jonathan could vote both visit the same website on your computers and and and you wouldn't see the same ads you would have. You would have space a auded for an AD or perhaps a pop up or pop under whatever format that ad would take. And I'm sure we could all list our most hated types of advertising from top to bottom. Pop unders are the worst anyway, especially pop unders with automated audio playing. But yeah, what is this my Space or GEO? You made me decide to never buy a kayak again, I guess, and just not hanging out in the rapid. There are a couple of sites in particular that are super guilty of those, Like I'm gonna say Salon is like one of the worst of the middle of an article and then this animated video will come down and fill up the whole screen, play music at me, and I'm just like, I don't even want to I don't even remember what I was reading anymore. That there are other ones that have like related video that will start to auto play, yeah, and then you have to track it down like is at the top of the screen is the bottom of the screen where can I turn this off? Do I just need to mute the tab, which I have done in the past, But at any rate, Yeah, there's very us on a page that are designated for advertising, whether it's on the physical page itself or it's some sort of pop up or whatever. And while that layout would remain largely the same for for Matt's visit and for my visit, the actual ads we would view would be based more upon the information that the web browser was able to pull from me, that the the web page owner was able to pull for me. Really, when you think about it, those ads spaces, it's kind of like a placeholder. You've got an advertising company that is responsible for serving the ads that go into that placeholder. The advertising company has tons of clients. Some of those clients are going to appeal to Matt, some of those clients are going to appeal to me. Some might appeal to both of us. And so what will happen is based on Matt's behavior, which is exemplary, he would get a certain type of ads, and based upon my behavior, which is nefarious, I would get a different set of ads. We're talking aboutlawful good, lawful evil, differ at experience I have often been described as lawful idea, who I am? And really? Um So, so it sounds like we're kind of demonizing ads a little bit. Yeah, but we do need these things to to have our economy continue functioning. Not to mention we specifically as Internet content creators need these things as in this show and ads. Let's let's remember the ads can actually show us stuff that is useful to us. Right, So, so if if people use the abilities that we have generated for targeted advertising, and those abilities include things like collecting and mining huge amounts of information about an enormous number of people, being able to differentiate the important factors in that and match advertising up with those factors, to parse it, yeah, and to act upon it properly. That's that's pretty complicates of this kid stuff. If we use that correctly, then under ideal circumstances, our experience as users will be that we encounter the ads that actually matter to us, stuff that either we would otherwise be interested in maybe we were actively searching for it, but we hadn't found what we really wanted yet, and we would be able to connect to the things that matter to us. And that's a positive experience on our end, the the company selling that good or service, it's a positive experience on therein because they get a customer. The advertising company, it's a positive experience on there, And because they delivered the proper ad to the proper place, to the proper time. And for whatever website that ad appears on, it's a positive experience. Because they get rewarded for being the host of that ad, everyone wins. The problem is this technology, this capacity that we have, it is much easier to misuse it than to use it properly. Returning to our earlier comparison of the evolution of terminators, or for fans of deep cuts, the evolution of the robots and screamers, huh anyone? Oh man? You know so many things are like that movie Looper all the time. The thing that we find though, is that as there is an increasingly cynical and jaded and aware population, people don't care to be manipulated. I think we can all agree. As this population learns more and more about these advertising tricks, and as people build things like ad blockers and stuff like that, targeted advertising is also evolving and finding new ways to gather more data. So it leads us to a question is there a legitimate privacy concern when it comes to targeted advertising? Jonathan, you raised an excellent point in a live podcast we did just before we hopped into while we were in the studio, but just before we started recording, and you can also shameless plug check it out on our web on our Facebook page, Facebook dot com, forward slash conspiracy stuff. And you said something that really stayed with me, which is you talked about collecting this data and you said it's anonymous. You said, the thing they care least about is your name. Your name means nothing. What what an advertiser needs to know is what are you interested in? How likely are you to buy something, how frequently are you going to buy it, and what is the best way to convince you to buy that thing? What your name is matters probably the least. But here's the other thing is that it takes a an incredibly small amount of data to identify a person. Uh. There was a Harvard study that came out several years ago in which a professor found that really if you had a person's zip code, uh, the uh, the model of car they had, and the color of that car. UM. I think there might have been one other piece of information that you could identify more than of the individuals based upon that little bit of information. So think about all the stuff, all the data you create just through your browsing. So they're they're using local vehicle registrations to find everybody. Well, this was just an example from Harvard saying that it takes very little. It takes very few points of data to to identify a person, to to link it to an actual individual. But Jonathan, I'm a beautiful and unique snow flick. Isn't it a bit reductive to you describe me and to find me based on just a handful of data points? Absolutely, but that's what advertising does. Right, there's this sounds like there's some unrest in the demo. That's okay, we can we can give him some some nice uh some nice, some nice soft drinks to really just take that edge off with valium valium gas. So here's the thing. It doesn't take very much information to get a really good grip on who a person is. Even if you don't know the person's name, you know what there wants and desires are, like the things that make us us. We end up sharing that through our activities online, just through your browsing history that tells people a lot of stuff. What you share on social networks obviously tells people a lot of stuff, and this is valuable information for advertisers. They pay money to get access to that kind of information. And so there are companies that when they gather that info, they gather that data, they'll sell it to a data broker. The data broker will go around collecting larger and larger amounts of this information. Just imagine a huge spreadsheet filled with lots of little data points about the things that you are particularly interested in. Then they'll go and sell that to advertisers who will then plot advertising against that information. Now, clearly this could lead to some really nasty breaches in privacy and security if it's used incorrectly. Before we move on, I remember you did a tech stuff a while back. We talked about some of this stuff, and I was surprised to find that as an individual, your data ain't worth all that much in terms of monetary value. It's when you bundle it together for big picture use that it becomes valuable. But do you remember what that number was? It was? It was I think just it was either just over or just under one dollar for for a person, that's how much you're worth. Now. Now, obviously to you, that information is worth a lot more because that is you, that is who you are, That that information represents the person that you are, So do you is priceless. To a company that is trying to sell that data to an advertiser, it's worth around the buck a dollar per person, And obviously the amount of money is dependent also upon how rich is that data, how much information do they have, what's the depth of profile? And we are the ones handing that information over. We are actively doing it ourselves simply by using the Internet, by browsing the pages we go to, by posting the things that we post on Facebook or Twitter, we are actively generating that information that other people are selling and profiting from. Now you can limit that to a degree, I would, yeah, mitigate is probably a better word. So you could do things like you could use uh incognito mode where you're not using cookies or anything like that. That would help limit the amount of information that you are sharing when you're visiting various websites, But that also limits what you're able to do. Right, Let's say you want to buy something on Amazon while you've got to be signed into an account. Yeah. I mean that's just the way the system works. It's like, if you want to buy something in the store, you better have money or a credit card or something like that. Uh, if you don't, you can't buy the thing. And or for something like a social media platform, Facebook being the example we're using in this podcast, a social media platform that is built to show you things it thinks you would like from your friends, uses some of the same techniques that they used to sell you kayaks or baseball uh, gloves, bats. What do we do? I think we did tickets like baseball sticks man the ball into the goal and you know what sports ball paddles. It adds up, It adds up. But that's that's a very good point, and at this point we also should look at something that needs to be more transparent across the board. Often online advertising is what I would call the Achilles Heel of online content. You know, it's it's a primary funding thing that enables a lot of the stuff we like to see to occur. And you know, if you have listened to this show for more than this episode, you know that occasionally we have run ads, sometimes by really cool companies like Great courses right where you can pretty much learn for free. Or we've run ads for shadier companies, like an outfit called Illumination Global Unlimited. So we want to be completely clear about this that we see this practice across the board, across the world, and across the net as a continuing thing. The Pandora's box, which was actually a jar in the story, is is already open. Ben. It's not just a continuing thing. This is going to be an explosive thing. Let me paint a picture of what the future is going to be. Bend, I get under the just grab a brush. Just imagine this. This future, This is the future of future generations, Matt. So you think about that for a second. Okay, I'm getting real here, man. So it's a world where you can put on UH an augmented reality pair of glasses which gives you incredible abilities to see all sorts of really awesome information. Imagine being able to walk down the streets of London and with a simple command you can look at what it would have looked like during Shakespeare's time. It would be really cool. That's really interesting stuff. Or you're just asking to get directions in a city that you're not familiar with. And it's giving you a little overlay showing you where you need to walk and where you can turn really useful stuff. Oh it's also pointing out, hey, you really like curry. You had eight of that curry place a couple of weeks ago. That was really awesome. This place that you're passing right now has the best curry in the city. You should probably go in there and eat. Oh and by the way, across the street, Uh, there's a book shop and they are having a sale for Neil game in books. I know you really loved the that last Neil gaming book. You loved American God. So you need to go in there. And oh, by the way, you try to push, you try to push skip and then you get at you cannot skip this content. Now you know who's done this. The best, the best UM pop culture representation of this near future dystopia is on a little show called Black Mirror that many of you might be familiar with, in an episode called fifteen Million Merits, and it's the second episode is the second episode. Yes, it depicts a world where there is a hierarchy um a class divide between content creators basically and people that are working the equivalent of blue collar jobs, and they ride these bikes to generate power for the content creators. Presumably it's not entirely clear, because it's almost this fairy tale structure, which that's a wonderful one of and you're following from the perspective of one of those blue colors, which means that you have a limited amount of information about the world. But the way it works is they spend time on these exercise bikes and earn the equivalent of pay, but it's actually some sort of imaginary money called Xbox for merits. It's like Xbox points, and it gives them the ability to buy um different pieces of clothing for their avatar, which in the episode looks kind of like those WE those ME characters and the WE network or whatever. And I don't want to spoil anything. Everyone that hasn't seen it, please watch it. It's a wonderful, prescient piece of science fiction. The whole series is fantastic. Actually, it's been picked up by Netflix for an American not reboot, but whole new run featuring the same show runner, Charlie Brooker, who is a genius. Anyway. The way the ads play in the episode are you get this ad and you can skip it, but it could cost you. It will cost you your merits to skip the ad. And then eventually, you know, the people that don't have any merits, they got to watch all the ads. And it's this whole economic ecosystem, for lack of a better term, where you know, it's like a self feeding system. It's it's like indentured servitude, but it's a high tech version of it. So the thing is that that this advertising is going to become more pervasive as we get into the realm of the Internet of things, as we get personal digital assistance, like you get things like um the Amazon Echo or Google. As we record this, it's on the day that Google announced their Google Assistant, and they're going to have their own Amazon Echo type of product called Google Home. These are products that will live in our houses if we choose to buy them, and they will listen when we talk to them, and maybe sometimes they'll listen when we're not trying to talk to them, and they will help us do things and buy stuff and learn about us and learn what stuff we want to buy. And it becomes so pervasive and part of our lives that it just becomes reality, and it's no longer adds it is reality, right right, It's just another layer of information that is biquitous, the same way that the majority of people receive constant information from their skin, their eyes, their ears, or their nose. Right. And it's terrifying because I just see these pictures of someone like. Let's let's step even further, a little bit less plausible at this point. Let's go full dystopian. Let's say that you have an offer to have the Internet in your head boom little chip. You can search anything we talked about on this show before. And it's free, but it's ad supported, which means that every so often, when you're in the midst of some amazing research and you're saying, you're saying, oh, Google, what was the name of r Siria or whomever? What was the name of at John Carpenter movie with Kurt Russell right right right, and and then this list pops up in your in your like interface and you can somehow see it, and then it pauses and everything stops, and you listen to a voice in your head tell you about the reboot of Big Trouble in Little China, and it's louder Jonathan, you are our tech expert here how stuff works. And one thing we love about having you over on our show or coming to visit you on your show is that we are able to explore in a credible and well informed way these possibilities that that can so often be exaggerated but then also ignored when there, when there is dangerous. So we come to you today to ask do you think this stuff is possible? If so, do you think it's plausible? How realistic is that picture you painted? The picture I painted with augmented reality is not just possible, it's happening. I mean you get things like the Microsoft Hollow lens that is going to open up opportunities for app developers to create apps that are going to be ADS supported, just as the apps on your smartphone often are ADS supported. If you've ever played any game on your smartphone, chances are you've encountered one that is supported by ADS, and in order to progress in the game, you need to watch an AD first. Same thing is gonna happen with augmented reality. For a future in which the entire reality is ADS supported, I think that's going to be that's more far fetched, but devices that that react to us and listen to us. You can guarantee that they are going to go into feeding more data two services like Amazon or Google that will build out even more robust dossiers if you prefer on the individuals within that home. Because there's an adage it goes if the service you are using is free, you are the product. You are the thing that is being sold. Google is not really a search company. Google is an ad company. And Google is able to sell information based upon the searches that numerous individuals over billions of different searches have provided. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it can be a bad thing, and certainly it's the it's the sort of stuff that if someone had the intent to misuse it, they could do a great deal of harm or um end up being personally very damaging to a particular individual. It's not likely to happen. It's not like it would behoof whichever company it is that owns that data to allow it to happen. But it's possible because information is power. I mean, if you have a lot of information about somebody, you can use that information either to help that person or you could do lots of harm. To that person. Um So, really, I think the worry is making sure that the companies that are gathering all this information are practicing good stewardship, that they're being responsible with it. Uh. But there's nothing forcing them to do that other than their own self interests. But self interest is power, I agree. So I'm saying like, as soon as their behavior affects the bottom line, only then will they change. But I would argue that we contribute to this system willingly because it's the cost of doing business, the cost of having all the benefits and joys associated with being able to be on the Internet all the time, and having free email accounts and free web hosting and this, that and the other, I mean free podcasts. We we love this stuff, you know well. And and with things like social media platforms like Facebook and and the fact, you know, people talk about oversharing here I say, we're addicted to this stuff. Well, for me, Facebook is the primary way that I interact with my friends now because I have so little time, my friends have so little time. We don't live close to one another. Uh. That taking the time to to make taking time to make time, boyam son of a preacher man to take that time so that we can have personal interactions in a real space. It's getting increasingly difficult. So Facebook is a legitimately valuable tool for me to stay in touch and learn what's going on with my friends lives. You know who's having who just got a new job, who's getting married, you know who's having a kid. That kind of stuff. That's really important for me to to be able to keep up with that. And I love being able to share in those experiences, even vicariously through this platform. And so I willingly engage in using Facebook because it does have a value to me. Um. But I know that the upside of that is I'm feeding more and more information about myself in the process. And you have to ask your question yourself, a question, is what I'm getting out of it worth the fact that I'm giving up some of myself in return, exactly? And that is a question that we would like you to answer for us, ladies and gentlemen. Today, we are going to skip our shout out corner because we wanted to spend some more time exploring this question. You can check out that live broadcast we mentioned earlier at the front of our podcast, where you can see Matt Jonathan Noel and I talking about some other aspects of this that maybe we didn't quite touch on in the same so I was worried that when we did that that we were leaving all around the table and we're going to skip it on the podcast. We ended up kind of going in a little bit different directions. So definitely a good supplement for this episode. So do check it out. And while you're on the internet, Hey, hey, why not like and follow us on Twitter and Facebook? What a you're You're already You're already on a list. It's we're conspiracy stuff at both of those. Jonathan. For the people who have not heard your appearances on earlier episodes or our appearances on earlier episodes of your show, where's the best place for people to find you? Well, I mean if you love the tech world. Tech Stuff is the podcast that is going on eight years now and more than seven hundred fifty episodes of all things tech, so you can go check that out. We've done everything from how specific technology works, to deep profiles of big tech companies to explanations of important events in tech like the video game crash of three. So that would be my first suggestion, and of course, you can check out things like now dot how stuff works dot com, which is our more news oriented website. I write and shoot video for that constantly, so you can check me out there, uh, tons of other places, but you just need to explore how stuff works dot com. If you love this show and you love learning, and you love knowing what really makes the universe tick, you gotta go to how stuff works dot com. Well said, I will also mention you can catch Jonathan as we said, I'm forward thinking and brain stuff audio and video. If you like the future, you'll love those things. And speaking of the future, our best suggestions for upcoming episodes come from you, ladies and gentlemen. So let us know on Twitter, let us know on Facebook. Answer the question Jonathan posed at the end, which I think verges on philosophy and matters of cosmic import. We want to hear your answer. We want to hear your recommendations for things we should cover. If you don't want to mess around with the social media, then after this episode we get it. I'm I'm rethinking some things as well. Yeah, so you can instead of uh playing out there on the on the vast social sUAS of the Internet, you can email us directly. We are conspiracy at how stuff works dot com.

From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noah, my name is Ben. You are you that makes this stuff they don't want you to know? But not any ordinary episode of this show. And here's the part where you're saying, well, Ben, what is ordinary? Great question question for another day, ladies and gentlemen, because we are joined today by a special guest, a returning force to our show, longtime collaborator and friend of all three of ours, ladies and gentlemen, the illustrious, the magnanimous, the Transatlantic accenting, the phenomenal, the inevitable, ladies and gentlemen, Jonathan Stricklett. Guys, I have to say that your ability to introduce a person is only matched by your ability to tie incredibly complicated knots. I look forward to getting out of the studio. What are we talking about today? Okay, let's get through this quickly then, guys. Look, no one is getting untied until the show is over. Pipe down strictly, all right, And that goes for you as well, Matt. It is an excellent question. We are talking today about something that might seem a little bit strange for some people, which is advertising, but not just advertising, a specific kind of advertising, targeted online advertising. So in our personal lives, let's start there. Have you guys had any weird experiences yourself with that? Absolutely? Yeah, yeah, well, I mean all sorts of things, right, But okay, So first, when you think about targeted advertising, you know you wanted to find that a little bit, right. This is advertising that is specifically geared to most likely uh interest you, based upon whatever data the advertiser has on you in the effort to sell a good or service to you. Right. That's the whole purpose of ads. So often we talk about data mining, machine learning, examining people's behavior in order to target them more effectively. But in the beginning, before you gather all that information you're targeted, ads tend to be a little more random and chaotic, may not necessarily really target the person. And I'm specifically thinking of an AD that popped up again and again and again for me on Facebook for the longest time until I actually had to take the effort to hide that ad. And say I don't want to see this anymore. I didn't do that. Yes you can, you can, you can. There's a little there's a little menu you can pull up and say this doesn't interest me. And and what it can do is it actually tells Facebook, oh well, I can better serve ads to this person by not showing this stuff like it benefits Facebook, it benefits the companies that are advertising, and it benefits the user. Right. What was the head was? Uh for a muscle enhancer which had an impossibly muscular person with an impossibly tiny head. Uh, Like you look at you think if this isn't photoshopped, this guy has a miserable experience in his day to day life because he's so muscular that his range of movement has to be limited. It does not at all make me want to even remotely consider getting whatever nutritional supplement they're trying to sell or or there you know, uh weight loss program or muscle building photoshop courses. I mean, you guys can see me. You you guys out there can't, but the guys here in the podcast room could see me. Your head is normal size. And you can also tell that I am clearly not terrible ly concerned about building lots of muscle mass. I don't know. I might need a few moments here. I could take off the shirt, but that's probably not something any of us really wants to have burned into our memory. All that being said, you do clearly have a pension for different flavors of muscle milk. Well, that's true. That's it's just because you know, I support those guys really fast to get in here before we move on. I recently had a baby and we made the mistake of making a registry at Target. And as soon as we did that, all of the advertising back when we had cable, all of it was maybe centric and maybe it wasn't the you know, going to Target doing that, Maybe it was our search result in history, maybe it was any number of things. But as soon as that life event happened for us, every advertisement that we saw was about it. I've got I've got an even more recent one for me that um, I'm curious to see what comes out of it now, because right now, at the earliest stages, I was looking for a price quote for a particular type of vehicle. So I used a website where you can get price comparisons for dealerships in your area that sell whatever vehicle you're looking into, and in order to get that information, you have to do things like put in your email address and put in your phone number. I knew what was going to happen while I was doing it, but I really needed to see those price quotes, so I did it. Immediately, I'm getting phone calls and emails from all the dealerships in the area. Now that's the first wave. I suspect what happens next is if I keep checking my email and I looked through the spam filter, I'm gonna see a lot of car related stuff come at me. Not the specific make and model that I was looking at, but all sorts of things like aftermarket and all that kind of stuff, the related things around the car industry. I expect I'll get a lot of that because I have been identified as someone actively looking into purchasing a car, and it is very valuable information for a company to have. They could sell that to other companies before money, and then I get inundated by all this advertising. So let's look at advertisements. Jonathan, you provided an excellent definition of what an advertisement is, essentially at heart and unsolicited attempt to showcase the benefits of product X or the less concrete sense of the brand or tone of an experience, in hopes of having you, the customer, purchase an item or service. And the thing is this is super I'm not gonna occurse because we're still a family show. This is super old. How old is it? Well, the earliest known advertisement that we have right now comes from three thousand BC from thebes Grease. I'm not sure if you've seen this, Jonathan, you might have seen this, but it's uh, it's it can't take a wild guess. I mean, if I had to guess ancient Greece advertisement, I'm gonna say it's something brothel related. No, in fact, which got one to tell you? Yeah? Okay, Well, let me do this one really fast. So this was for okay, let's just go to it. It was a seller of fabrics who had made this papyrus right, and he claimed that he would give a reward to anyone who would report the whereabouts of quote slave sem somebody. This was, yeah, Hapo was was the name of the gentleman, and not to be confused with Shemp, the underappreciated Yes so anywhere, Yes, so, anyone who would report the whereabouts of this slave sem and then report to him at his store where he is would get a reward. And here's the thing it's said on the papyrus, anyone who returns him to the store quote where the most beautiful fabrics are woven for each person's taste. By the way, I think it sounds more like an A. P. B. Than an AD. It's it's both, it's both. The pirates was crazy. You know, it wasn't as available as paper is today. But I think I know the example you're going to mention. Yeah, so the example I'm mentioning was a more permanent type of advertise. And uh so I've I've visited Pompeii, well known as the village that was completely engulfed in volcanic ash, killing everybody who was there, but preserving the village very well. And you can go and tour Pompeii and it's very interesting. One of the things you will notice if you're looking down, which I recommend you do because the ground is very uneven in certain places, is that every occasional paving stone you come across, there's a very particular relief on that paving stone, a fallus if you will, or as my tour guide referred to it, a p noose, and these pointed the direction toward the closest brothel. Yes, because people would have visit Pompeii and they wouldn't necessarily be able to speak Greek. It was all Greek to them, but they understood what the signs meant, could follow it and get to their desired destination, whereupon they would be greeted with a mural that would have the offerings of the house displayed, and they could just point to whatever one they wanted, the House of ill Repute. And so as we see, advertising is an ancient craft, art, science, trick scam. Much of what we see a modern advertising today can be traced back to a fellow named Edward Burns. We will not labor you with the description of Edward Burns other than to say you can check out our multiple videos and audio podcasts on it. The first audio podcast for this show actually go all the way back. The dude was incredibly manipulative and intelligent and and some could argue unscrupulous. And so now we know there are several types of advertisement. Here just a few. So first we have direct address. So this is basically the equivalent of Hello, I am an ad for this product, product X, y Z whatever. Here is a cool joke by it by me. So it's the idea of sort of instilling positive feelings in people and associating those positive feelings with a particular product, like those those lovely Mentos ads from the nineties. You know, that was a trivia question recently and I immediately recalled the warm, fuzzy feelings you got when you saw that plucky businessman who got paint on his suit lay down on the bench and turn it into a pin stripe. You know, it was just like you go guy for me. I think the most recent example that that leaps to mind would be either the old spice commercials, which sure yeah, the ones that us Campbell as well, those two, because they instill that sense of absurd city while getting across this idea of this is this is a manly, manly thing and will make you manly while not stinky and clearly for our purpose. Is one of the most important things here is that it is clearly being sold transparently, and then that gets us to other things that would be like branded content. You can find this in uh not nonprofits and NPR, for instance, that they will have something where there will be a show that you might enjoy or an episode of a thing, and then at the beginning or at the end, or somewhere in the middle, they will say brought to you by And this is this is something where the advertiser wants to be associated with the thing but doesn't want to, you know, be all in your business. About a company that is super successful at doing that is red Bull. They do it all for themselves, So they have these publications. They make these skateboard videos, extreme sports videos, and all the gear that people featuring these videos are wearing have red Bull all over it. The skate board half pipe says red Bull. The bloody parachute says red Bull. You know, but at the same time, you're like, you know what, this is exciting content. I'm enjoying watching these people do these death defying feats. And and and one person sitting at this table has a show sponsored by a large company. I I do a show called Forward Thinking, and our sponsor is Toyota. And Toyota is the company that makes our show possible. It is entirely because of them. If it weren't for Toyota, it would not exist. And again you're transparent about it. Every episode starts with a pre roll that's just brought to you by Toyota. And even even more importantly to me is that Toyota gives me the message of we want you to talk about things that excite you about the future. That was my that's my that's my direction is awesome. They don't, they don't give you anything. They don't ever, they don't ever tell them like, they don't ever tell them, like what you should do is relate space travel to this new sedan, right, And so the direction I get is, what do you think it's really awesome about the future? Make episodes about that? And I don't, like, I don't even have to submit something to Toyota to get approval. They trust me to do what is good for our show and good for their brand, which is weird because you're crazy sketchy. Yeah, well, I mean that's that's true. But for four years we've managed to do that show. So, and this is one of those things where if it's done well, it can be a huge wind for everyone involved, but it can also go in a bad direction either for for any of the parties. And it's just because it hasn't been handled properly that brings us to a darker side what is called native advertising, or in a clever portmanteau advertorial it yeah, so that what's that in Jonathan? You know? Yeah, it would go kind of like this, Hi, I'm a real thing. I'm not an ad, but hey, hey, is it isn't product X cool? You know what that reminds me? There is some legitimate journalism that I can point to right here that this shows you how objectively amazing Product X is not to mention science. Look at the science right and this this is this is an iteration that you can probably recognize any time you've been on the internet. You can also see it in history, for one example, with Edward Burns of course, and had the reason people bacon for breakfast because there was this avatarial thing which was purportedly a study by doctors. During a darker time in my life, I actually worked for UM, a company that published a community magazine. You guys know these community magazines. Everyone's got it your little city as a city X magazine. So I'm not going to name names, but based on my experience with this, I can only assume that a lot of them are kind of like this, but I could be wrong with My particular situation was like this, where every single piece of content in this City X magazine was paid for by local business owners, but it was all like trained as some sort of profile or some sort of you know, community interest piece where it's about, look the great things that this lawyer is doing. But wait, why are there nine stories about nine different lawyers in this magazine. That's weird. That is native advertising advertorials, and that's the bread and butter of a lot of these smaller publications because people want to be seen, and they want but the thing is, no one's Maybe some people are fooled, but I would say anyone listening to the show likely would not be fool or taken in. It's one of the things that I find the most maddening about that approach, because we know you guys out there, We know that you are smart, we know that you can smell when someone's trying to sell something to you, and you can't imagine how frustrating it can be on the other side of that equation to be the person who has to produce that thing through whatever directive, like to be told, Hey, you've got to create this podcast or video or article or whatever it may be because we want to sell more widgets, and so you've got to make this widget thing. And uh, it's your you know how widgets work, but you but really you're you're explaining how awesome widgets are. Uh. This doesn't happen frequently, and it's not something that I think most people have caught on that. It's not necessarily the most useful approach because since the audience can recognize what's happening, they lose respect for the outlet that is producing the stuff. They're saying, Oh, these people are just selling an ad or they're just selling a product or service. Therefore I don't respect them anymore because it is stuff they don't want you to know. But the problem is you know it when you see it. This brings us to the subject of two Days podcast, which is targeted advertising. No based on what we know about you, and we do know more than you think. Jonathan Matt and I are going to show you this product. You're going to love it. Everything about who you are tells us you were going to love it. I'm excited to see it. Look, look, look, look, didn't you say you like kayaks? I love kayaks and this one plays electronica. I love electronica playing kayaks, and maybe Tom York signed it. You'll never know unless you buy it. Never know. There's also a handy place to put whiskey. What are you saying that I'm an alcoholic? No, we just know you. Oh no, he just clicked he found this ad offensive. Back to the drawing board. The next step was to talk about Beard Doyle. That's funny. That's funny, But it's kind of the way these things are. It's a it's a series of trial and error. It's like Jonathan was saying earlier with the offensive what not offensive? But the ad that was getting on your nerves to the point where you had to hide it. When you told Facebook that you didn't want to see that ad, it Facebook took that as an opportunity, the opportunity to say, Okay, well he doesn't like this, Let's try something new, Let's try something Let's let's change a little bit and see if he maybe likes this version of this thing. It's switching up the bait in the trap and going further than that. Like like the early stages of this it relied a lot on us giving direct information to whatever platform we're talking about. Like Facebook is a great example, saying actively saying I don't like this, Well, Facebook's like, all right, well, now we know they don't like this, but maybe they like this other thing. Maybe body builders like bigger heads. Yeah, maybe that would have made me feel less freaked out at this. Amazon is another great example, right, Like the early version of Amazon is that you would buy something, or you would be browsing for a specific thing, and it would just show you related items that other people who had also bought that that particular item were interested in. Say, hey, people who are interested in kayaks often also look at paddles. That makes sense, right. The thing there is it's you are feeding Amazon this information by buying things, and the more things you buy, oh and god forbid you buy one of those suggested items, the more accurate it gets at predicting the kinds of things you or people like you will like. Once a month, I buy something just completely out of left field. It's like when you do the ratings on Netflix, you're giving the algorithm good information that it can then turn around and serve you better adds. Is that a good thing. Ah, that's where he goes. So let's just talk about the evolution of this. So when the nineteen nineties, internet companies websites advertised with a method that was pretty similar to what we saw in television. Right, it would say, we'll choose ads based on what we think will appeal to the most people in an audience. So, for example, we've got Jonathan on a site about baseball statistics, and they don't know anything about you other than you're a person who visited this site, and by the virtue of that piece of information, they say, you know what, ads for gloves, ads for bats, ads for related merchandise, bobbleheads, bobbleheads perfos. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty simple on the surface. It worked for TV, but a great deal of marketing, research and focus group stuff when in behind this. In the early two thousands, online advertising, like the terminator robots started to become more sophisticated. At first, we could tell the difference, right, but now it became a little more complex. Company said hey, we can use this Amazon stuff. So companies said, hey, we can use these Google browsing habits. This anonymous information on this allowed companies to tailor ads to a specific user. So it's for example, Matt, you and Jonathan could vote both visit the same website on your computers and and and you wouldn't see the same ads you would have. You would have space a auded for an AD or perhaps a pop up or pop under whatever format that ad would take. And I'm sure we could all list our most hated types of advertising from top to bottom. Pop unders are the worst anyway, especially pop unders with automated audio playing. But yeah, what is this my Space or GEO? You made me decide to never buy a kayak again, I guess, and just not hanging out in the rapid. There are a couple of sites in particular that are super guilty of those, Like I'm gonna say Salon is like one of the worst of the middle of an article and then this animated video will come down and fill up the whole screen, play music at me, and I'm just like, I don't even want to I don't even remember what I was reading anymore. That there are other ones that have like related video that will start to auto play, yeah, and then you have to track it down like is at the top of the screen is the bottom of the screen where can I turn this off? Do I just need to mute the tab, which I have done in the past, But at any rate, Yeah, there's very us on a page that are designated for advertising, whether it's on the physical page itself or it's some sort of pop up or whatever. And while that layout would remain largely the same for for Matt's visit and for my visit, the actual ads we would view would be based more upon the information that the web browser was able to pull from me, that the the web page owner was able to pull for me. Really, when you think about it, those ads spaces, it's kind of like a placeholder. You've got an advertising company that is responsible for serving the ads that go into that placeholder. The advertising company has tons of clients. Some of those clients are going to appeal to Matt, some of those clients are going to appeal to me. Some might appeal to both of us. And so what will happen is based on Matt's behavior, which is exemplary, he would get a certain type of ads, and based upon my behavior, which is nefarious, I would get a different set of ads. We're talking aboutlawful good, lawful evil, differ at experience I have often been described as lawful idea, who I am? And really? Um So, so it sounds like we're kind of demonizing ads a little bit. Yeah, but we do need these things to to have our economy continue functioning. Not to mention we specifically as Internet content creators need these things as in this show and ads. Let's let's remember the ads can actually show us stuff that is useful to us. Right, So, so if if people use the abilities that we have generated for targeted advertising, and those abilities include things like collecting and mining huge amounts of information about an enormous number of people, being able to differentiate the important factors in that and match advertising up with those factors, to parse it, yeah, and to act upon it properly. That's that's pretty complicates of this kid stuff. If we use that correctly, then under ideal circumstances, our experience as users will be that we encounter the ads that actually matter to us, stuff that either we would otherwise be interested in maybe we were actively searching for it, but we hadn't found what we really wanted yet, and we would be able to connect to the things that matter to us. And that's a positive experience on our end, the the company selling that good or service, it's a positive experience on therein because they get a customer. The advertising company, it's a positive experience on there, And because they delivered the proper ad to the proper place, to the proper time. And for whatever website that ad appears on, it's a positive experience. Because they get rewarded for being the host of that ad, everyone wins. The problem is this technology, this capacity that we have, it is much easier to misuse it than to use it properly. Returning to our earlier comparison of the evolution of terminators, or for fans of deep cuts, the evolution of the robots and screamers, huh anyone? Oh man? You know so many things are like that movie Looper all the time. The thing that we find though, is that as there is an increasingly cynical and jaded and aware population, people don't care to be manipulated. I think we can all agree. As this population learns more and more about these advertising tricks, and as people build things like ad blockers and stuff like that, targeted advertising is also evolving and finding new ways to gather more data. So it leads us to a question is there a legitimate privacy concern when it comes to targeted advertising? Jonathan, you raised an excellent point in a live podcast we did just before we hopped into while we were in the studio, but just before we started recording, and you can also shameless plug check it out on our web on our Facebook page, Facebook dot com, forward slash conspiracy stuff. And you said something that really stayed with me, which is you talked about collecting this data and you said it's anonymous. You said, the thing they care least about is your name. Your name means nothing. What what an advertiser needs to know is what are you interested in? How likely are you to buy something, how frequently are you going to buy it, and what is the best way to convince you to buy that thing? What your name is matters probably the least. But here's the other thing is that it takes a an incredibly small amount of data to identify a person. Uh. There was a Harvard study that came out several years ago in which a professor found that really if you had a person's zip code, uh, the uh, the model of car they had, and the color of that car. UM. I think there might have been one other piece of information that you could identify more than of the individuals based upon that little bit of information. So think about all the stuff, all the data you create just through your browsing. So they're they're using local vehicle registrations to find everybody. Well, this was just an example from Harvard saying that it takes very little. It takes very few points of data to to identify a person, to to link it to an actual individual. But Jonathan, I'm a beautiful and unique snow flick. Isn't it a bit reductive to you describe me and to find me based on just a handful of data points? Absolutely, but that's what advertising does. Right, there's this sounds like there's some unrest in the demo. That's okay, we can we can give him some some nice uh some nice, some nice soft drinks to really just take that edge off with valium valium gas. So here's the thing. It doesn't take very much information to get a really good grip on who a person is. Even if you don't know the person's name, you know what there wants and desires are, like the things that make us us. We end up sharing that through our activities online, just through your browsing history that tells people a lot of stuff. What you share on social networks obviously tells people a lot of stuff, and this is valuable information for advertisers. They pay money to get access to that kind of information. And so there are companies that when they gather that info, they gather that data, they'll sell it to a data broker. The data broker will go around collecting larger and larger amounts of this information. Just imagine a huge spreadsheet filled with lots of little data points about the things that you are particularly interested in. Then they'll go and sell that to advertisers who will then plot advertising against that information. Now, clearly this could lead to some really nasty breaches in privacy and security if it's used incorrectly. Before we move on, I remember you did a tech stuff a while back. We talked about some of this stuff, and I was surprised to find that as an individual, your data ain't worth all that much in terms of monetary value. It's when you bundle it together for big picture use that it becomes valuable. But do you remember what that number was? It was? It was I think just it was either just over or just under one dollar for for a person, that's how much you're worth. Now. Now, obviously to you, that information is worth a lot more because that is you, that is who you are, That that information represents the person that you are, So do you is priceless. To a company that is trying to sell that data to an advertiser, it's worth around the buck a dollar per person, And obviously the amount of money is dependent also upon how rich is that data, how much information do they have, what's the depth of profile? And we are the ones handing that information over. We are actively doing it ourselves simply by using the Internet, by browsing the pages we go to, by posting the things that we post on Facebook or Twitter, we are actively generating that information that other people are selling and profiting from. Now you can limit that to a degree, I would, yeah, mitigate is probably a better word. So you could do things like you could use uh incognito mode where you're not using cookies or anything like that. That would help limit the amount of information that you are sharing when you're visiting various websites, But that also limits what you're able to do. Right, Let's say you want to buy something on Amazon while you've got to be signed into an account. Yeah. I mean that's just the way the system works. It's like, if you want to buy something in the store, you better have money or a credit card or something like that. Uh, if you don't, you can't buy the thing. And or for something like a social media platform, Facebook being the example we're using in this podcast, a social media platform that is built to show you things it thinks you would like from your friends, uses some of the same techniques that they used to sell you kayaks or baseball uh, gloves, bats. What do we do? I think we did tickets like baseball sticks man the ball into the goal and you know what sports ball paddles. It adds up, It adds up. But that's that's a very good point, and at this point we also should look at something that needs to be more transparent across the board. Often online advertising is what I would call the Achilles Heel of online content. You know, it's it's a primary funding thing that enables a lot of the stuff we like to see to occur. And you know, if you have listened to this show for more than this episode, you know that occasionally we have run ads, sometimes by really cool companies like Great courses right where you can pretty much learn for free. Or we've run ads for shadier companies, like an outfit called Illumination Global Unlimited. So we want to be completely clear about this that we see this practice across the board, across the world, and across the net as a continuing thing. The Pandora's box, which was actually a jar in the story, is is already open. Ben. It's not just a continuing thing. This is going to be an explosive thing. Let me paint a picture of what the future is going to be. Bend, I get under the just grab a brush. Just imagine this. This future, This is the future of future generations, Matt. So you think about that for a second. Okay, I'm getting real here, man. So it's a world where you can put on UH an augmented reality pair of glasses which gives you incredible abilities to see all sorts of really awesome information. Imagine being able to walk down the streets of London and with a simple command you can look at what it would have looked like during Shakespeare's time. It would be really cool. That's really interesting stuff. Or you're just asking to get directions in a city that you're not familiar with. And it's giving you a little overlay showing you where you need to walk and where you can turn really useful stuff. Oh it's also pointing out, hey, you really like curry. You had eight of that curry place a couple of weeks ago. That was really awesome. This place that you're passing right now has the best curry in the city. You should probably go in there and eat. Oh and by the way, across the street, Uh, there's a book shop and they are having a sale for Neil game in books. I know you really loved the that last Neil gaming book. You loved American God. So you need to go in there. And oh, by the way, you try to push, you try to push skip and then you get at you cannot skip this content. Now you know who's done this. The best, the best UM pop culture representation of this near future dystopia is on a little show called Black Mirror that many of you might be familiar with, in an episode called fifteen Million Merits, and it's the second episode is the second episode. Yes, it depicts a world where there is a hierarchy um a class divide between content creators basically and people that are working the equivalent of blue collar jobs, and they ride these bikes to generate power for the content creators. Presumably it's not entirely clear, because it's almost this fairy tale structure, which that's a wonderful one of and you're following from the perspective of one of those blue colors, which means that you have a limited amount of information about the world. But the way it works is they spend time on these exercise bikes and earn the equivalent of pay, but it's actually some sort of imaginary money called Xbox for merits. It's like Xbox points, and it gives them the ability to buy um different pieces of clothing for their avatar, which in the episode looks kind of like those WE those ME characters and the WE network or whatever. And I don't want to spoil anything. Everyone that hasn't seen it, please watch it. It's a wonderful, prescient piece of science fiction. The whole series is fantastic. Actually, it's been picked up by Netflix for an American not reboot, but whole new run featuring the same show runner, Charlie Brooker, who is a genius. Anyway. The way the ads play in the episode are you get this ad and you can skip it, but it could cost you. It will cost you your merits to skip the ad. And then eventually, you know, the people that don't have any merits, they got to watch all the ads. And it's this whole economic ecosystem, for lack of a better term, where you know, it's like a self feeding system. It's it's like indentured servitude, but it's a high tech version of it. So the thing is that that this advertising is going to become more pervasive as we get into the realm of the Internet of things, as we get personal digital assistance, like you get things like um the Amazon Echo or Google. As we record this, it's on the day that Google announced their Google Assistant, and they're going to have their own Amazon Echo type of product called Google Home. These are products that will live in our houses if we choose to buy them, and they will listen when we talk to them, and maybe sometimes they'll listen when we're not trying to talk to them, and they will help us do things and buy stuff and learn about us and learn what stuff we want to buy. And it becomes so pervasive and part of our lives that it just becomes reality, and it's no longer adds it is reality, right right, It's just another layer of information that is biquitous, the same way that the majority of people receive constant information from their skin, their eyes, their ears, or their nose. Right. And it's terrifying because I just see these pictures of someone like. Let's let's step even further, a little bit less plausible at this point. Let's go full dystopian. Let's say that you have an offer to have the Internet in your head boom little chip. You can search anything we talked about on this show before. And it's free, but it's ad supported, which means that every so often, when you're in the midst of some amazing research and you're saying, you're saying, oh, Google, what was the name of r Siria or whomever? What was the name of at John Carpenter movie with Kurt Russell right right right, and and then this list pops up in your in your like interface and you can somehow see it, and then it pauses and everything stops, and you listen to a voice in your head tell you about the reboot of Big Trouble in Little China, and it's louder Jonathan, you are our tech expert here how stuff works. And one thing we love about having you over on our show or coming to visit you on your show is that we are able to explore in a credible and well informed way these possibilities that that can so often be exaggerated but then also ignored when there, when there is dangerous. So we come to you today to ask do you think this stuff is possible? If so, do you think it's plausible? How realistic is that picture you painted? The picture I painted with augmented reality is not just possible, it's happening. I mean you get things like the Microsoft Hollow lens that is going to open up opportunities for app developers to create apps that are going to be ADS supported, just as the apps on your smartphone often are ADS supported. If you've ever played any game on your smartphone, chances are you've encountered one that is supported by ADS, and in order to progress in the game, you need to watch an AD first. Same thing is gonna happen with augmented reality. For a future in which the entire reality is ADS supported, I think that's going to be that's more far fetched, but devices that that react to us and listen to us. You can guarantee that they are going to go into feeding more data two services like Amazon or Google that will build out even more robust dossiers if you prefer on the individuals within that home. Because there's an adage it goes if the service you are using is free, you are the product. You are the thing that is being sold. Google is not really a search company. Google is an ad company. And Google is able to sell information based upon the searches that numerous individuals over billions of different searches have provided. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it can be a bad thing, and certainly it's the it's the sort of stuff that if someone had the intent to misuse it, they could do a great deal of harm or um end up being personally very damaging to a particular individual. It's not likely to happen. It's not like it would behoof whichever company it is that owns that data to allow it to happen. But it's possible because information is power. I mean, if you have a lot of information about somebody, you can use that information either to help that person or you could do lots of harm. To that person. Um So, really, I think the worry is making sure that the companies that are gathering all this information are practicing good stewardship, that they're being responsible with it. Uh. But there's nothing forcing them to do that other than their own self interests. But self interest is power, I agree. So I'm saying like, as soon as their behavior affects the bottom line, only then will they change. But I would argue that we contribute to this system willingly because it's the cost of doing business, the cost of having all the benefits and joys associated with being able to be on the Internet all the time, and having free email accounts and free web hosting and this, that and the other, I mean free podcasts. We we love this stuff, you know well. And and with things like social media platforms like Facebook and and the fact, you know, people talk about oversharing here I say, we're addicted to this stuff. Well, for me, Facebook is the primary way that I interact with my friends now because I have so little time, my friends have so little time. We don't live close to one another. Uh. That taking the time to to make taking time to make time, boyam son of a preacher man to take that time so that we can have personal interactions in a real space. It's getting increasingly difficult. So Facebook is a legitimately valuable tool for me to stay in touch and learn what's going on with my friends lives. You know who's having who just got a new job, who's getting married, you know who's having a kid. That kind of stuff. That's really important for me to to be able to keep up with that. And I love being able to share in those experiences, even vicariously through this platform. And so I willingly engage in using Facebook because it does have a value to me. Um. But I know that the upside of that is I'm feeding more and more information about myself in the process. And you have to ask your question yourself, a question, is what I'm getting out of it worth the fact that I'm giving up some of myself in return, exactly? And that is a question that we would like you to answer for us, ladies and gentlemen. Today, we are going to skip our shout out corner because we wanted to spend some more time exploring this question. You can check out that live broadcast we mentioned earlier at the front of our podcast, where you can see Matt Jonathan Noel and I talking about some other aspects of this that maybe we didn't quite touch on in the same so I was worried that when we did that that we were leaving all around the table and we're going to skip it on the podcast. We ended up kind of going in a little bit different directions. So definitely a good supplement for this episode. So do check it out. And while you're on the internet, Hey, hey, why not like and follow us on Twitter and Facebook? What a you're You're already You're already on a list. It's we're conspiracy stuff at both of those. Jonathan. For the people who have not heard your appearances on earlier episodes or our appearances on earlier episodes of your show, where's the best place for people to find you? Well, I mean if you love the tech world. Tech Stuff is the podcast that is going on eight years now and more than seven hundred fifty episodes of all things tech, so you can go check that out. We've done everything from how specific technology works, to deep profiles of big tech companies to explanations of important events in tech like the video game crash of three. So that would be my first suggestion, and of course, you can check out things like now dot how stuff works dot com, which is our more news oriented website. I write and shoot video for that constantly, so you can check me out there, uh, tons of other places, but you just need to explore how stuff works dot com. If you love this show and you love learning, and you love knowing what really makes the universe tick, you gotta go to how stuff works dot com. Well said, I will also mention you can catch Jonathan as we said, I'm forward thinking and brain stuff audio and video. If you like the future, you'll love those things. And speaking of the future, our best suggestions for upcoming episodes come from you, ladies and gentlemen. So let us know on Twitter, let us know on Facebook. Answer the question Jonathan posed at the end, which I think verges on philosophy and matters of cosmic import. We want to hear your answer. We want to hear your recommendations for things we should cover. If you don't want to mess around with the social media, then after this episode we get it. I'm I'm rethinking some things as well. Yeah, so you can instead of uh playing out there on the on the vast social sUAS of the Internet, you can email us directly. We are conspiracy at how stuff works dot com.