Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower Opens Up

in the last 13 years the longest you stayed in one place was ten days suppose sometimes I get myself into a bit of mischief I saw the number that data is a trillion dollar your industry multi trillion when does Facebook come into place what country should you really be living in who's your favorite Disney Princess this has given you information not only your data but the data of everybody else in your network how does that make it legal though it's not anybody you can buy that data bought farms fake accounts troll factories they're going to show them those pictures of a polar bear standing on a tiny piece of ice see all that fake news I bet they're not gonna show the middle finger she put up this is a crazy political upset do you think Rachel Maddow is gonna be on by never what does that tell you huh Wow do we have a right to opt out you've never had any right sign me up it means that our democracy is up to the highest bidder that's called being dumb the more you find out the worse it is did you ever think you would make it take sweet victory I know this slice meant for me why would you bet on July it well we got red tape now you came it gives it values today this this world of entrepreneurs we can evaluate this run homie look what I become I'm under born [Music] so today's guest is Brittany Kaiser who is Cambridge analytic --is whistle blower also the author of targeted the Cambridge analytical whistleblowers insights story of how big data Trump and Facebook broke democracy and how it can happen again Brittany thanks for coming out thank you so much for having me yes so so you and I were talking earlier and I was asking you you know what it's like to have the life that you've had because you've been all over the world and you told me the longest you stayed in one place was what the last 13 years for only 10 days so let me get this through so everybody understands it's in the last 13 years you've only the longest you stayed in one place was 10 days sometimes I don't stray too far I'll just go to a neighboring city you somewhere else in the same state or the same country but sometimes I'm in a different country every day how much of that is because of your personality how much is of that is because of what you're currently at a bit of both I've always been someone that loves to explore the world find out everything I possibly can go and see and do everything I can get access to and sometimes that turns out very well and I suppose sometimes I get myself into a bit of mischief who were you know who were you if I was friends with you like what kind of a ten-year-old kid were you not even in high school I want to know how you were at 10 years old when I was 10 years old I spent a lot of my time sitting in the corner of the playground reading the biggest book I could find and not joining in the games of tag the biggest book you could find biggest book I could find or I'd be at home working on my history fair science fair project or studying for mathletes or debate club how though is it your wiring was it inspired by pen because I know your dad I think was like a real estate that he was in real estate and mom was with Enron before was there conversations about politics was there conversations about like deeper issues or was it just more in your DNA my parents always raised me to work as hard as I possibly could and to be a very high achiever they both grew up in households where they had I would say they weren't completely motivated to be the most academic students they got involved in a lot of things as kids parents yeah so they just felt they just felt that they wanted to give me opportunities that they didn't have so did they kind of flip meaning good they didn't have the highest standard of expectation and they said we're gonna have a higher standard expectations' from you exactly it's interesting how that goes because it's like oh it's too high I'm gonna be a little bit more liberal leaving my kids on this thing and kids come back cuz I want me a little bit more discipline well I wouldn't say a little bit more discipline my mom was raised military so she had a lot of discipline but she was the oldest of six kids raising them on a military base so she was almost like a second mom and didn't really get to concentrate on her studies that's tough and you also when you're when you're in that situation sometimes you also are not able to be a kid or a teenager because your so much as relied on you to lead so you almost skip a generation of your life and you sometimes look back and say I don't even know what it is to be a kid yeah my mom's expressed exactly that very many times what kind of conversation was it if I'm in your house we got four or five cameras at your you know dinner table you six o'clock you know Thursday night you're sitting having dinner you're 11 12 years old mom dad sitting what are you guys talking about I would say probably what I did in school that day I was always very interested to talk about what I had learned what I was going to do with it what I had done after school I was very lucky to be put in you know art lessons and photography lessons and be playing sports after school my parents really spent all of their lives trying to make sure that me and my sister had as many opportunities as possible and obviously you did I mean to see what you ended up doing yourself where you're at today there was a lot of that grown up absolutely was there conversations about politics and different issues or not really so interestingly enough my parents have considered themselves independent for a lot of their lives my dad's side of the family although they're from Chicago they've always leaned conservative but they voted for both Republicans and Democrats my mom's side of the family are military Republicans that grew up in all over the world so they do a world view but they've lived by a military base and in the south for a while and I've always voted a Republican so my parents really didn't have a strong you know party stance and they never really instilled that in me or my sister even when we were little they wanted us to feel out what what our religion should be what our political views should be without enforcing that on that kind of that kind of was left on you which is great because it allows you to think for yourself I grew up in a family my mother's side they were communists my dad said they were imperialists so for me it was that girl oh yeah was it was crazy you know yeah it's like if MSNBC and Fox News got married and had a baby that's me I'm the baby of them and said you see a fox news that's kind of amazing that's kind of like it's kind of confusing because you love these for these people and they have such different worldviews but it first makes you just now won't have anything to do with it and then later on a little bit of the itch comes back and I'm just curious why my mom thought this way mom my dad does this way that's why I asked to see where you were at so you're 14 years old I think you're 14 years old are you in Scotland where you get this inspiration to go and want go support Obama President Obama's campaign that is that right is that really happened so 14 was when I joined Howard Dean's campaign his primary that was 2003 I suppose I think I was 15 or 16 when I first met Barack Obama that was right after Howard Dean had lost the primary to John Kerry and then I was supporting John Kerry as a volunteer and I go to the DNC the Democratic National Convention in Boston in 2004 and the young State Senator Barack Obama is what you were there absolutely yeah it was I was in at boarding school and there was a summer program that I was invited to participate in called lead America and they taught kids how to run political campaigns so we did a mock political campaign I actually ran for president I had a campaign manager and the press team and all of this different stuff it was it was really interesting to learn all of the mechanics like that while you're at the deans so they would take us to you know different caucus meetings and different rallies and I went to this very small environmental rally there are about thirty people there and State Senator Barack Obama was the keynote speaker with only 29 other people competing with me for his time when he stepped off the stage how was that the first time I saw him speak it was awe-inspiring actually I had heard of him before but I didn't really know much about him obviously state senators don't get a lot of press or fame but I'm from Chicago so you know I knew of some of my point of view what part of Chicago yeah Lincoln Park is where I grew up and I was just so excited about what he was talking about supporting senator dick durbin in blocking British Petroleum from dumping into the streams and waterways that would that were polluting Lake Michigan and I thought that was something I wanted to get involved with I thought that I should support him in any way I could and I asked how do I do that he said volunteer for my campaign for a US Senate I'm going to be running and come to breakfast with me tomorrow morning if you're from Illinois so I did that and at breakfast the next morning he said by the way I'm making a speech tonight jan Schakowsky why don't you get her a ticket I was sitting there having breakfast with him me rahm emanuel i got some yeah i'm 15 or 16 years old and i get this ticket and i go to see his famous speech about how we're not the red states and the blue states were the united states and that's when i knew that he was going to be President it's the moment you know some people have the moment that was the moment where you heard him speak you said this guy could be a president now at the moment you're sitting or having breakfast with them do you have any idea who he is going to be like are you getting a feeling of this is a very special guy he could go places did you know that all absolutely how did you know that you can feel it from the second that you meet I mean a lot of people only have the opportunity to see him through the TV screen which is unfortunate because when when you meet him he just has this aura about him where you can tell that he is genuine that he's powerful and that he has trie intentions genuine powerful and true intentions that's a good combination yeah it is that's a good combination to be a president one day absolutely to term president one day right exactly variant so from there what happens so you do that you work with them then what happens next so I went to go finish high school I left the United States when George Bush got his second term that was my last year and it was my first year going to Scotland so I started college there at Edinburgh University and it was in my second year there when Barack announced that he was going to be running for president or senator Obama I should say I thought well you know university is great and all but it's not as important as this guy becoming president of the United States what you're thinking yeah so I left University actually I told my professors that if I was going to leave I was doing something important I'm gonna go work on the u.s. presidential elections aren't you so excited for me they said oh great you're going to work for Hillary Clinton it's like no that no Senator Barack Obama he's my senator and from the state of Illinois and they didn't know who he was so they said well it's it's really not a good idea for you to be leaving University in order to you know just go go work for someone that's not going to win they told you this yes more than one professor they said you know if you leave now that the best grade you can get is you know a 60 or 70 percent because you'll be failing all your exams I said okay fill me then I'm leaving was it almost like a proving a point thing to you or no like did you get that ship saying what do you mean this guy's not gonna win did you get that feeling yourself or no I realized that it was it was going to be something that they looked back upon and regretted not me did you ever go back and see them or no yeah I went back and finished my degree of course so you had a conversation after he got elected was that conversation like it was more like well congratulations Adem you know and the first one was the first one was McCain right McCain and Palin you're doing your school and then what happens next I was in school wall I got the opportunity to go study abroad in Hong Kong and I was very excited about this this was actually why I didn't apply for a job in the Obama White House most of us that had worked on the campaign were offered that opportunity to continue and move to the White House once we won and I said well I've been studying Chinese for so many years I got this amazing opportunity to go study in Hong Kong I've never been there it's really important for me to go and explore Asia after studying Mandarin for so long and Asian history and Asian religion it's actually much more important to me to go do that you believe that that it was much more important to you yes why is that going out and seeing the world and experiencing new things was always kind of the core of what I wanted to achieve in my life of see as much and explore as much as I could in my lifetime but also I really thought you know if I'm going to come back and do the American government any service it's probably going to be more in a diplomatic role ambassador me doing communications for the White House is not a good use of my time actually so I I did go to Hong Kong and very quickly got wrapped up in the human rights world there which is very topical now of course but this was 2008 and my eleven years ago now all they talk about yeah exactly and in 2008 the Chinese government was trying to push something called article 8 which would have given the Chinese Communist Party a veto over anything that was decided in the Hong Kong Parliament mm-hmm and this obviously put the people in Hong Kong in an uproar because the entire point of them being a special administrative region is they are allowed to administrate their own region they have their own Parliament they make their own decisions and I would spend a lot of time marching in the streets it looks kind of similar to the things that you've seen recently the big protests you know out with umbrellas so the cameras can't see your face people wearing masks and protesting and demanding that the Parliament get rid of this or the Chinese Communist Party to stop pushing that it's not as it's not as bad as some of the bills that they tried to put through this past year which is why the protests now are a lot worse but it definitely became a core part of what I did while I was a student there and I started really getting into human rights and luckily met some incredible people that did a lot of work at the United Nations and at the European Parliament and I thought well you know I'm studying international relations actually human rights is what I want to do because the people that I'm meeting here and working with every day are very inspiring are you when you when you're going through that with being inspired to do work with human rights the deeper you get is it getting more troubling to you and is it more unsafe to talk about it openly that we need to do something about this that did you get an end up feeling there or no the more you find out the worse it is definitely definitely in China specifically China specifically has always been a place that I've concentrated on in terms of my research and my work originally because I thought it was one of the greatest civilizations on earth and I wanted to go live in China and know everything about it and then when I started understanding the politics there and the way that people are treated and the way that minorities are targeted I thought this is a place I don't want to be but it's a place in need of reform and maybe I can help that what made you believe it's one of the greatest civilization was it the education was at the school and you went to was it a professor that painted China to be a great place in America's not as good as China was there any influence there or was it yourself I originally it was actually my grandfather who spent 27 years and military intelligence and originally infiltrate in the infantry in Korea and in Vietnam he was a paratrooper and then went into military intelligence for a long time and when I was in eighth grade preparing to go to boarding school I told him grams I want to take Japanese I'm I'm given this amazing choice of all these different languages and I want to take something that most of my friends are not going to get the opportunity to take and you said no no that's not what you want to take I see they also have Chinese as a choice you should take Chinese it's like okay or they explained to me why he goes this is one of the most powerful civilizations on earth and by the time you are in the working world probably at least a fifth or even a quarter of the world is going to be speaking this language and it's going to be much more important than Japanese and you need to know that now this was 2000 I suppose was he was he a my active at the time or no was he military intelligent was he selective or no are you ever inactive what I'm saying religion once you're 27 years was he still during his 27 years was it post no technically retired okay he would still get calls when assistance was required I mean 27 years of experience they're going to be able to use the Intel and experience you got so they're going to call you that so it's very said so what was your grandpa a big inspiration into being who you are today definitely he was so very close that's your mom's dad yes yes make sense so okay so now you're in China you kind of see what's going on your the deeper you get the more concerned you are what do you do next so I had to go finish the fourth year of my degree at Edinburgh University this was my third year abroad in Hong Kong so I came back to finish my it was technically a master's with honors in international relations and I was doing international law and Chinese as the two kind of other main components besides just international relations and so I came back and I ended up writing my entire master's thesis on human rights in China on Falun Gong persecution the illegal organ harvesting trade on persecution of weekers you know Muslim minorities and the political prison camps which is not just something I learned in Hong Kong the people that I met there gave me accreditation to go participate as a human rights lobbyist at the European Parliament and at the United Nations in Geneva so I spend a lot of time there with a lot of the world's top experts a lot of people who were considered defectors who had escaped political prison camps or re-education through labor camps they call it and I was just kind of blown away by some people's story is and the gravity of the problem because it looked very much like well you know I grew up Jewish and going to a Jewish school and it looked very much like a lot of the stuff that I had studied about the Holocaust growing up and I was shocked to find out that there were things like that still going on in the modern world you know I'm still very young a teenager and starting to figure all this out and I thought well this is the topic the world needs to know about what what do what do people think about when you compare that I mean I'm sure it's not the first time you've said it had signs of a Holocaust type of tendencies what do people tell you when you shared that with them this was I don't want to see a taboo topic with still a very minority group of researchers and human rights activists that were involved in exposing this type of these types of abuses back then now it's a little bit more mainstream more people understand it it comes up a lot more in the press it comes up a lot more in diplomatic conversations when countries like the United States are thinking about their relationship with China and it's it's no longer I would say a topic that you would have to be in a tiny meeting room in some far-flung wing of the European part of the building to know about now it's it's a lot bigger so I'm happy that so many people have followed that through and done something put pressure but I definitely think we're we're hopefully starting to live in a world where things like that cannot go unseen anymore what do you think I want politicians protect China you don't sometimes people are too careful like even today like there's I'll have guests that will come here and I'll interview them and they'll say there's only one thing I can't talk about what's that China this is the one topic I can't talk about China what is it with so many politicians business folks you know any word that has any kind of link to China that's not the one topic you want to talk about it's because they're afraid afraid of what though afraid of Chinese money being pulled out of their businesses afraid of Chinese companies not wanting to do business with them afraid of Chinese spies following them around trust me I've had that happen to me Chinese spies follow me well absolutely definitely especially at all of the meetings at the you know European Parliament in the UN where China is discussed there's plenty of people there where they're wearing badges that aren't even their real name you don't know where they came from they're not from a human rights organization it's pretty obvious but a lot of people are afraid of that and I you know I totally understand you know I I totally understand but if you're not willing to stand for something then you stand for nothing I agree with that and it it's in a way empowering them to know that you're afraid of them to me it's exactly what they want they want to impose the fear so you stop talking about it because they'll threaten you in their own ways I mean you got sports you got NBA being hit by it you got businesspeople being it buddy got politicians being a bite yeah very interesting what's going on right now with them so so how does whole this whole thing come about let's go right into Cambridge analytically that's when you're experienced you've done a lot of different things you worked on a lot of different projects how was the transition from where you're at to all of a sudden saying I'm gonna work with Alexander I'm gonna go and work with Kimber Kimber general Etica how did that happen right so I was still going back and forth between my academic work and my activism which was all you know pro bono spending my student loan to get myself to Geneva to the UN and I'm in the third year of my PhD I'm writing a doctorate on something called preventive diplomacy which means that the people in the world that holds the most diplomatic power so heads of state presidents prime ministers ambassadors preventive diplomacy is how they can intervene in situations before massive atrocities happen so how do you stop war before it happens how do you you know intervene in a country's economy before there's massive inflation or a famine there's all of these different factors and somehow my entire doctorate or at least the third chapter that I was working on when I met Alexander was all about how you could use big data and predictive algorithms in order to predict the future and find out that any of these atrocities or war or violence or any other problems in society find out that they're going to happen before they do so that you can intervene early on and prevent it now no one at my law school could teach me about big data or predictive algorithms so one of my friends introduced me to the CEO Alexander Nicks that's actually the first chapter of my book and I thought hey this is very interesting he was using data for defense he was using data for politics he's using data for humanitarian purposes okay this is the type of stuff that I need to learn if I'm ever going to finish my PhD so let's see if I can get a bit of consultancy work and get an income besides my student loan payments and see where this goes how was he pitching you when when you first meet him how impressive of a guy was yeah I know you talk about when you met President Obama you know presence character power all of that you know combined together what was Alexander Nyx's personality - for some you met him I really thought that he was someone that was guy doesn't describe him as a you know very posh the the type of Englishman that didn't usually describe the friends that I had on a day-to-day basis but someone that was so incredibly privileged that he had extreme expertise he knew about things in the world because of his access to powerful people because of probably tons of projects that he had undertaken around the world and he had power so it wasn't that kind of inspiring Barack Obama feeling no nothing like that but it was definitely that feeling where you know that this is a person that really knows what they're talking about that they are very powerful and they have the network to do what they say that they can do and that has a different sort of aura that as a different sort of poll I suppose it is magnetic just in a different way so he recruits you and you decided to go run with them what happens next so I joined this company and immediately I'm introduced to some of the people that I suppose I would have considered my mentors in in most situations the Cambridge analytic oh or the SCL group strategic communications Laboratories which was what it was called at the time the parent company they had a lot of other people that had spent their life in human rights work and in you know humanitarian operations people from the International Rescue Committee and the United Nations and diplomats from the Commonwealth and Wow I thought these people are amazing I can't wait to work with them we started working on all of these different projects that were both humanitarian some were defense and some of them were politics in countries that I had never been to before I didn't know much about so it was a very steep learning curve when I first got there and what do you do what is your role is it bizdev are you mainly going building relationships you're not necessarily doing the data analytics what in Cambridge analytics right so I had no data experience before really not much I mean obviously working on the Obama campaign I had digital and social media strategy experience but not data analytics and data science so my role in the company was business development so I would go out and build relationships with people who could use data analytics or were approaching us that they wanted to use data analytics and figure out what their goals were what capacity they had you know what they're trying to achieve and help design a program so that usually included me helping design a proposal of how they were gonna use data how that would help them achieve their goals and then moving that through to contract and helping build the team that would go do that for them so are you selling are you pitching somebody else is selling and closing I am usually well in the very beginning I was working with Alexander or dr. Alex Taylor who was the chief data scientist at the time and they would do the main pitching in the beginning until I was at the company for long enough to start pitches on my own but I took me about six months to learn enough from every department to actually be able to go do that by myself eventually the goal impressive six months later for you to start pitching and sitting down with these high-profile people that's that's the that takes a lot to be able to how would you at that time when you're doing this this is a 26 you're 26 when you're doing it yes and you were sitting with some of the most powerful people in the world yes and you're signing Khan you getting them to agree to do business with you guys and spend millions of dollars on advertising yes it's pretty impressive to be able to do that so you're going you're building relationships you're bringing them in they're signing the contracts is it purely a marketing strategy pitch that you're talking to them about or is it were the best of the best were the only game in town like that you guys almost have a monopoly in that play or no so in some respects I the SCL group had so much global experience in running political campaigns that that was the big pitch at oh look at what we've done all around the world all of these huge campaigns in countries with up to hundreds of millions of people or you know tiny island nations any size of political campaign we can figure out a strategy we can execute and we can win if you give us enough time and funding and that was kind of the big play because on the data analytic side that was very new I joined the company in 2014 and only in 2013 did they birth Cambridge analytic which was to be the the North American the North American subsidiary of the SEL group specifically because in the United States there weren't any data laws or regulations and therefore the amount of data that you could purchase and license to do predictive analytics was unmatched anywhere else so let's unpack the the company who is behind it because you see a lot of names that come behind Cambridge analytic ah who was there who was the power the money behind the brand so for Cambridge analytic Hospice if eclis it was the Mercer family and Steve Danon and they came in in 2013 in order to basically have a separate but like wholly owned subsidiary of the SCL group that would just operate in North America and they were really specifically concerned with the United States obviously so Alexander had pitched them here's all of my political experience from all around the world here's what my company can do I want to start a data analytics company and he had decided that because Sophie Schmidt the daughter of Eric Schmidt of Google had interned for him in 2010 I believe or maybe it was 2013 sorry I I'll have to double check in my bug but she had interned for him and everyday had shown him what Google Analytics was doing and that predictive analytics was the future so he thought as soon as she left I'm gonna go build my own data analytics company not just in the eyes of Google but I'm gonna combine data and politics and supercharge everything that I'm already doing now what does facebook come into play when does when does the conversation of Facebook come in where the ability to get five different five thousand different you know points of you know tracking of this person is known for this and that person is known for this what when does Facebook come into play right so again that's also in 2013 it was part of the founding strategy of Cambridge analytical which was to begin to build one of the largest databases that anyone had ever seen and this included harvesting data off of Facebook which at the time was pretty easy to do Facebook had started a program I believe in 2010 where you could as a developer pay for access to any of the data for Facebook users you just had to create an application you could create something like a game candy crush farmville or you could create a quiz the famous one is this is your digital life which is one of the first ones that Cambridge made but you probably also would recognize ones like what country should you really be living in or who's your favorite Disney Princess and so those this has given you data this has given you information absolutely I'm sure most people never read the terms and conditions of those apps but if you did you would have seen that it gave the developer of that application not only your data but the data of everybody else in your network which unfortunately is not actually legally possible not legally possible it's technically possible but not legally I cannot consent on behalf of another able-bodied adult they have to consent on their own behalf how does that make it legal though it's not so how we're able to do it I mean Facebook's not a small company when they're doing that Facebook created the friends API and the friends API allowed people to do that how much money did that make them it's hard to estimate that it's our destiny that I actually don't have those numbers but originally they thought this is in order to have a developer program you know they wave a carrot stick and people you get access to all of this data in order to improve your product and get more users and whatever it is and you know you pay us a nominal fee for that they had at least 40,000 developers participating in this program so whatever the fees were from 40,000 different companies at the time that was good enough for Facebook but again they were still a bit young it was only a couple years later where they realized our data that we're collecting off our users is so incredibly valuable that if we don't give anyone access to it and they have to advertise in facebook then we're gonna make a lot more money and that's why they closed it off in April 2015 April 2015 and how long did it stay open about five years I think five years and a lot of people took advantage of it absolutely so so is Cambridge analytical possible to rebuild today not in the not with the same Facebook data sets obviously those data sets are still out there they're all over the world and we can never get our privacy back because of it or at least if you had a Facebook account before April 2015 but you can build something very similar because the majority of Cambridge's data was not from Facebook it was from big data aggregators like Experian an info group Magellan axiom l2 two labels and lists it's a political data company anyone anywhere in the world whether you're American or Russian or from anywhere you can buy that data you can just buy that data those are that's the lack of regulation in this country anybody you can buy that data I saw the number that the data is a trillion dollar your industry multi trillion multi truly absolutely de data is the world's most valuable asset now it runs all decision-making and all user experience and all communications for every organization for-profit nonprofit governmental you know ten years ago TEDx did their convention I think it was in either C or Canada this was like maybe 11 years ago or 10 years ago and when the speaker's got up and said the future of business anything you do it's all about data if you have data you have value absolutely anybody since then what are you talking about oil you got this you got that no data is the future of everything people that make a lot of money it's going to be data companies so Facebook gets fined five billion dollars what's five billion dollars of Facebook when they pay five billion Auto fine it's nothing to them because there's stock price spiked from all the press and they made the money back in no time yeah five billion of Facebook is pretty much nothing by that this is a point that I really want to make which is that it's nothing to Facebook but it's a really big deal for the Federal Trade Commission why is that because the the FTC has never had that type of budget and they're responsible for protecting consumers right so now they have five billion dollars to play with yeah I think that's a very good thing you know it might put it it might not be good for it might not mean anything to Facebook but it means a lot to the government yes so what was so so what'd they do with it now it allows them to go a little bit deeper with some other companies that are maybe doing what they're doing I hope it doesn't just go to investigations I hope it goes into investing into technologies that can protect consumers while government's not famous for doing good with money so we'll see what they're gonna delete can finish a five billion dollars because you can do some damage with that all right who is the modern-day Cambridge a Politico today is there one I wish it was just one many of them so many of them is a dominant one not really I would say a lot of them are still quite small there's even a lot of them that came out of Cambridge analytic ah a lot of my former colleagues sure just started new political consultancies and recently I think it was two maybe three months ago the University of Oxford put out this really scathing report that showed companies even worse than Cambridge analytical popping up all over the world companies that could be described as propaganda as a service which I could say some of that is very relatable to what I saw at Cambridge and but some of it is worse they have disinformation and fake news as a service they have that as a service yeah deep this enformation of fake nose yeah disinformation fake news definitely saw some dissing formation at Cambridge analytical but it wasn't really a core competency but it was used in the Trump campaign for sure and also a lot of these companies now have offer bot farms and making mass amounts of fake accounts and troll factories and all of these different things that you know Cambridge analytical to my knowledge never did at all Cambridge analytical never did at all so you guys didn't say this you didn't say I don't have some fakeness for two million dollars I'll have some misinformation for five million dollars and give me some these Detroit robots to help me out no a lot of people unfortunately confused what was coming out of Russia and what was coming out of Cambridge analytic oh so that was coming from them it wasn't coming out at Cambridge analytical so so can you can you explain to the rest of us what is behavioral micro-targeting traditional micro targeting and demographic polling of course so let me start with demographic pulling so demographic polling will mean that I'm going to go out and ask questions of the population and I'm going to make sure that my polling addresses the correct amount of men and women different age groups different ethnicities different belief structures different parts of the country or states that people live in according to the population so it's weighted properly and I'm gonna ask opinion questions like do you like Donald Trump right and that's all well and good but that doesn't give you that much information I'll give you a basic poll okay you know less than 50% of the country likes Donald Trump right now okay what do you do with that for political communications that doesn't help anything it kind of just test the water to see where where where people are at what what is the National feeling right and so if you're going to go into what did you ask for the next level traditional micro-targeting or ba micro-targeting so the traditional micro-targeting is going to take all of these different people and put them into groups and it's not just going to be you know alright I'm going to talk to all of the women I'm going to talk to all of the youth but sometimes it does look like that it might just be like okay I'm going to talk to all of the conservative women I'm going to talk to all of the young people who care about the environment I'm going to talk to all of the conservative Hispanics in this state and so it's putting together basic demographic categories and a little going a little bit further and then you will have a handful of different campaigns that will come out of a political campaign targeted at those different types of people an example so again like we're gonna talk to youth about the environment okay great well that might mean that I'm not going to make any other environmental campaigns because I've seen that only youth are active or are talking about these topics when I've done polling so we're going to talk just about environmental initiatives to the youth because they're going to be the people that are actually going to get active they're gonna come out to events they're going to go vote for me because of my environmental policy right and so that's what that will look like now when you go into behavioral micro-targeting or you know I was a real micro-targeting this is when you don't have to pick and choose your campaigns here and there you don't just have to choose you know okay five or ten big topics at different targeted at different groups of people you can target every single person in America if you want to and you're going to target everybody according to how they view the world so instead of just the youth campaign on the environment I'm going to have a different campaign towards youth who are open-minded and extroverted they're going to have a campaign about how you can get involved how you can help stop how you can help stop climate change because they're gonna go and they're gonna take an action and they're going to go and they're gonna share that on social media and you can find something very specific for those people to get active that is about our hope for the future and how the you know the planet for our children can be better than it is for us today now there's gonna be a whole different group of other youth what that also care about the environment but they're introverted and neurotic so you're going to play instead on their fears about the environment you're going to show them those pictures of a polar bear standing on a tiny piece of ice with melting ice caps in the background you're going to show them the giant floating island of plastic and all of the dead birds and fish around it you are going to use fear-based messaging in order to drive them to action or to care about your environmental policy and when you're trying to do something positive in the world I guess that doesn't sound as bad when I phrase it on let's save the environment type of platform but it starts to get really bad when you talk about a different topic let's talk about registering to vote what if I saw that the open-minded and extroverted people could be encouraged to go vote but the neurotic people could really easily be encouraged to not vote at all because I could instead make them afraid of politics I could make them disengage with government I could make them feel like their government has never done anything for them so why should they care so you could flip and forget like let's win by not getting the guys to come out and vote and impose fear that this may not even happen or there's not even a chance or don't even worry about coming out and voting that's on book so you guys went that deep into it that's what I was shown in the two-day debrief that I talk about in my book that I was given a month to the Trump campaign all my colleagues that had worked on the Trump campaign and the Trump super PAC showed me the strategies that they used when we were wondering okay what did you guys do how did how did you win this this is a crazy political upset that no one in history is ever going to forget what did you do and we thought we'd see some pretty cool stuff with numbers engagement how did you get there what were they clicking on what were the tools that you used there's a little bit of that but there was also some really dark stuff that they showed us and voter suppression tactics were one of them they showed us these charts of how they label different groups of people you know like I said you know the the neurotic youth environmentalist or you know the conservative Hispanic Texan there's you know these different groups great but they found groups of people who were going to vote for Hillary Clinton they couldn't ever be convinced to vote for Donald Trump because the the way that modeling works in politics is you're going to show how likely people are to vote how likely they are to support certain candidates what issues are most important to them those are kind of the the main crux of political modeling so if you find the group of people that might vote if they're shown the right message or they might not if they're shown the wrong message and they're on the Hillary Clinton side then the cheapest way that you can win with those people is by getting them not to go to the polls at all because no amount of money is ever going to get them to vote for Donald Trump the cheapest ways to get them to stay home yes that's the way that these tools are designed how much did the campaign of folks know that these were some of the tactics being used oh they were very aware and there the target group was called debtor ins to deter people that for this part yeah prevent them to coming out yeah the jury the charts that were used in the campaign headquarters it was this big group of people this chart were called deader ins it's like an X&Y access you know the Trump people are over here Hillary people over here very likely voters at the top and people who will never vote in their lives at the bottom so if you can find people who are in the middle who may or may not vote and they're definitely on the Hillary Clinton side there's only one way you're gonna use your money so so and then you guys had also group they called persuadable what is that a whole different category no well it's all on the same chart so the persuadable czar people that are in between Hillary and Trump independents libertarians I can go either way I can go hello react and go true as swing voters and brand advertising they're called the switchers you can really easy get the easily get them to try a different brand that's the same thing in politics except pursuit ability is something that you know it's very nuanced to measure everyone's persuadable on some topics but persuade ability on presidential candidate is a very specific type of person right and finding those people and finding the persuadable z-- that are very likely to vote is where the majority of the money always gets spent now which one of those groups was the most effective which would if you were to say you know how like you you're see we got a marketing so what's your no more selling product milk okay and you know it's like the main thing you got in a now what's the number one combo I sell us one or you know McDonald's Big Mac right which one was the most effective out of all those different groups from all of the case studies that I saw and the most effective were increasing intent to vote for for Donald Trump with persuadable 's and decreasing intent to vote for Hillary decreasing vote to vote for Hillary so the deterrents weren't necessarily the biggest ones that help you out I mean it's a bit of both when you're winning an election with tens of thousands of votes in some states every little bit as something that needs to be considered now let me ask you what other clients did you guys have at that time I know I saw I think you guys were working with brexit as well leaving you campaign yes who else what what other major campaigns I mean there were campaigns all over the world I mean arou Kenyatta and Kenya working on the last presidential elections in Mexico um working on I mean even in the state of Texas for senator Ted Cruz's primary working in Romania working in four other parties in the United Kingdom working for I mean really about 50 different countries over my time there simultaneously yeah how much is a team at the time by the time we reached our peak we were about a hundred and twenty people full time and another thirty to fifty consultants around the world that would come on for kind of ad-hoc projects that's not a lot no that's just that's a small group and you guys were about to be but I think the CFO Julian said you guys were about to be a billion dollar company that's what everyone was aiming for was that in the talks was that the conversations behind closed doors are now really yes Alexander talked about that every day we're building a billion dollar company don't you want to be a part of it so he was a visionary absolutely now you also said in an interview that the three-and-a-half years experience working with him he didn't have a bad experience you said you actually enjoyed working with him like it wasn't like it was you know something where you said this guy was my friend he was my mentor at one point right and then things turned I thought he was was there a dark side of working with them or no yes he was very volatile okay so he'd be the type of person where out of one side of his mouth he's saying you know what bar are we going to tonight after our last meeting and I the other side of his mouth he's screaming at you because we lost a contract to somebody else but he would also be the type of person that would say oh I only like yell or get upset to make a point and then almost like Jekyll and Hyde he would switch his personality and then he's like okay let's go out to dinner and so that was always kind of jarring and like an emotional roller coaster and I always thought okay well you know I've never worked for you know for profit company really before maybe this is what it's like because it's a bit ruthless its cutthroat you're trying to make money you know I I had never done that I'd spent my whole life in academia or working for nonprofits and advocacy organizations and charities so I was like okay well he's building a billion-dollar company this this must be what it's like I don't know I think this is supposed to be normal like working with somebody like this right yeah and by the way it's many of them are wired like that right so many of them are wired like that you know you had a lot of people talk about the fact that behind closed doors Hillary had a little bit of that herself and had a lot of people talking about behind closed doors that Trump has not behind closed doors for him it's like oh and by the way even right now when he gives a talk get her out of here get her out of here see all that fake news I bet they're not gonna show the middle finger she put up get her out of here I mean he just doesn't even even with the cameras on he's got no filters exactly which in a way you know you gotta appreciate that because you know he's he can't help himself he is who he can't even help himself on Twitter you can at least say let me think about this tweet for an hour before I send it up now it's going out so so you get a lot of different clients yeah David Carroll obviously the guy who in the documentary the great hack documentary that's very good question he said where did you guys get our data how did they process it who did they share it with do we have a right to opt out now your necklace right there which you are the founder of own your own data you're the founder of own your own data is it own your own data that org am I saying it right so I'm own your data dot foundation is our new nonprofit but I actually started the campaign last April right you know the week after I became a whistleblower specifically to start raising public awareness starting to open up people's minds to the fact that your date is important yep your data has contributed to one of the world's biggest industries and is now the world's most valuable asset it surpassed oil and gas in 2017 and its value yet the entire time you've been producing data on digital devices which for some people is their entire lives you've never had any rights to that data but how you know a part of that this is what I'll come back to you and challenge me on it I actually want to hear your argument so how many times you hear in the music industry you know oh my gosh I sound a cop I didn't know I gave up my you know rights of this forever to you how many times have you seen it in movies you know then these stories well yeah I was in the contract I never read I trust you should all read the contract right or you know yeah I own this thing myself 51% I thought you wanted 30% no this I set it up right so how much do that are we responsible for to just say oh the new site is called what the Facebook okay sign me up I'll go what information do I have to put in my date of birth where I was born my relationships complicated go ahead and put it how much of it is on us to have the freedom to choose and make the right decisions on how much of it is on the creator of the brand of Facebook well I'm so happy that you asked that actually because I think it's a bit of a balance you know it's important to have informed consumers and informed citizens so that we know how to protect ourselves it's also really imperative that the entire onus is not on us that companies and even governments are giving us more transparency and awareness of what they're doing and they're not putting us in a position where if we are not well educated that we're being taken advantage of and that we can so easily be abused so right now we have two massive problems which is that tech companies will not make the ethical decision without being forced to by laws and regulations that we don't yet have and decide oh one more time of course so tech companies will not make the ethical decision without being forced to by laws and regulation that we don't yet have right and so that's why we're in the position where Facebook has so much power in companies like Facebook and on the other hand we have a population that is incredibly digitally illiterate we do not understand what our data rights are how to protect them we don't understand basic cybersecurity protocols and how to keep our data private if we wanted it that way we don't understand media literacy you know how to spot disinformation and fake news you know kids don't know how to understand cyberbullying and how to stop it we don't know how to be ethical to each other online especially when we're anonymous these are all things that need to start being integrated into the education system because we just have an undereducated population for our overexposure to you know our digital life how much how much of that are we teaching in high school right now how much it out are we teaching in junior high school right now I mean you were you were 13 14 years old and 13 years old is what eighth grade seventh grade I think that's what it is right so how much it how much of that are is our educational system right now saying be careful texting this person messaging this person if you get a profile like this let me show you five different examples or we actually I actually don't know if we're doing this right now it's it's not taught in schools but it's just being it's just starting and that's why I started to own your data foundation that's what we actually do we do digital literacy training for kids in schools we're starting with middle schools because we think that's really the first the first age group like eight to twelve years old where your parents have probably given you a phone even if your parents haven't given you a phone you might have a family computer and you're probably using digital devices in school so you have your own accounts whether it be social media or you or at least email accounts you're surfing online for Shore in order to do at least research projects but you know a lot of kids have full exposure they're on their phones all day every day there are some kids or if their parents do not stop them they will actually be on it 24/7 and not having the awareness of all of the different issues that I just listed is really debilitating and it's really harming the the psyche of kids and it's harming their chances to be successful fully agree with you fully agree with that and there's a lot of things that we don't teach you enough of I think that's one of them that we gotta be more involved talking there was a movie I watched I think was called connected is it connected by the guy from Horrible Bosses who's the guy the guy that the Jennifer Aniston was no no the other guy Horrible Bosses Kevin Spacey was his boss in a movie what's that guy's name oh I know that was a really funny money nominal actor right so good but but in this movie the story is about that his kid is being bullied online and these friends servicing in school create a profile and they say hey you share your penis with me I'm gonna share the picture on my grill because I'm gonna share my privates and they took the picture of the guy the girl that they knew he was obsessed with right and he sends it to him and then the next day those bullies from school take the picture and send it to everybody in school right he goes to school comes home one day the dad is coming home from work he goes to his room he's putting allowed me heavy-metal music and he goes in he's about to hang himself dad grabs and puts announces what happened and it find out what the whole story was that was a perfect example of what kind of bullying is gonna be taking place right if you don't teach your kids one of the best movies to watch with your kids is that movie because I think it will show your kids what is possible anyways I don't want to digress from it let's go back to we're talking about would you would you consider yourself I mean I know politically I've heard you say you're burning you were you were for burning yes not you were not Hillary camp you were Bernie and you're Democrat would you still position yourself as that today or has a change a little bit I would say the way that I see American politics is more from an independent stance especially because I spent my entire adult life living in the United Kingdom where actually even the Democrats in the United States look quite conservative in the United Kingdom and in a lot of other countries in Europe it's taken for expectation taken for granted that everybody has free access to health care that if you become homeless you get a government house that you can have a weekly or monthly stipend from the government that will cover the needs of you and your family if you fall on hard times so a lot of the policies in America even on the Democrat side I find to be actually shockingly on humanitarian so it's really hard for long statement you're making yeah somebody listening to this could say you could be semi socialist it can say whatever they want I care about human rights okay but but economically you're comfortable more leaning towards a socialist site if it comes out to programs to take care of people who just say you put yourself in that position absolutely which is why I have always been a Democrat because I do believe in social programs I've never voted for a Republican before although I would consider it if they had policies that made sense to me and a Republican that's been attractive to you anybody that you say you know what that guy could have worked uh Marco Rubio really yeah again it was that crazy moment the first time that I ever saw him speak in person where I was just so attracted to his personality and to some of his policies and the way that he talks about unifying people and you know including people that have usually been left behind that that makes sense to me and he's a fantastic speaker oh my gosh yeah maybe I mean right now I'll take anyone that even knows how to speak in full sentences in the White House so it's fair to say that the gift we had outside for you of President Donald Trump's poster signed we had that as a gift for you we weren't gonna give it to you to go home with it because yeah I mean didn't you get like the to America hats we got two different size for you so we have a waiting outside food we got mega candy Magus steak we got everything for you outside I've seen some really interesting takes on the Magra hats recently which say make racism bad again make racism bat again racism bed again yeah Mr BA huh unfortunately I think this president has made people think that it's acceptable you think so you fully believe that 100 yeah okay would you position yourself as a true believer in what in your beliefs my beliefs yes absolutely like you like you said earlier if you don't stand for something you you know you're you consider yourself as a true believer yeah I'm back to that okay I had a few years where I was steered down the wrong path so the reason why I asked this question is the following reason because you know how at first anything we do were naively in love you know like you and I are dating we're 13 years old and I'm the first guy you've kissed you're the first girl I've kissed I'm like oh my gosh I love her for the rest of my life she's my mommy I love her so much and we're inseparable right puppy love right yeah and I had that when I was a kid yeah me too believe me I had that in Germany at the refugee camp I was staying at so and then you move on and you go to a different relationship and a different relationship and they're different really and the older you get doc the tougher it becomes to go experience what you wants experience with that puppy love right yeah so for you you're you're in a family your grandpa's an mi person 27 years military you know then from there you go and you're inspired to work on the Barack Obama campaign senator you have breakfast with him with him and Rahm Emanuel and you're like oh my gosh I can't believe this person exists and then you see him when you go back to school you talk to your professors and then from there you come out and you start working on a couple different campaigns you go to China you're kind of seeing the human rights that kind of moves you you come over here you write your PhD thesis on it then you get involved with Cambridge analytical then you're getting involved and then you're seeing what happened with this campaign President Trump gets elected he becomes president then you become a whistleblower then you step away and then but you also said some time where you know even you have to make money so sometimes to make money you've got to take some jobs that you don't know what happens are you are you are you at a point where you still have that naive innocence love or wanting to correct and injustice or have you gone from that to skeptic to a little bit cynic have you have you gone to that power politics gotten you to be a cynic a little bit right now or now yet well I think cynicism has its place it's always good to have a dose of some cynicism I would say skepticism to make sure that you are actually questioning what people are telling you I think I spent too many years believing people at face value that what they were telling me was true and that they actually had an intention to do something good for the world when they didn't and so now I'm a lot more skeptical of what I'm told I do more due diligence definitely that I did before before I think about working with people or thinking that what they say to the public is actually what they believe behind closed doors and you know that's why I think right now in the presidential field when I think about you know who represents my true beliefs some people have some good things to say but you know I I haven't earned my support behind anybody specifically because there's nobody that really speaks to everything that I'm talking about I mean the only candidates that we have that even have Technology Policy are Elizabeth Warren and Andrew yang Andrew Yang's fantastic but you know he would he would make a really great you know CTO of America but we I think we really have been shown over the past few years that we need someone with a lot of foreign policy experience someone that can go out and do diplomacy maybe Elizabeth Warren is one of those people maybe if she's not but the rest of the political field hasn't even thought about data or privacy policy or Technology regulation and they don't even talk about it and you know obviously that's my number one issue at the moment because I believe it underpins so many of our other problems that we have in society that it needs to be taken care of and it's not being addressed I wonder who is going to do it though I wonder who is going to actually be talking about it because when you look at I haven't heard Joe Biden talk about it I have Sanders talk about it you know yang will talk about it and people will resonate with them Elizabeth Warren it's part of a message Tulsi got to Gabbard I haven't heard so do you think what do you think the chances of anybody being able to be Trump right now the way it's going I would say right now if it's if it continues to go as it is right now no one can beat him no one can beat him not if it continues to go as it's going right now what do you mean by that I think the Democratic side is spending too much time tearing each other apart as opposed to actually building a unified message that can get people to care about politics again and actually get people out to the polls I think right now the DNC is terribly disorganized and that's unfortunate now there's another topic of what's going on right now which is impeachment so where is that going to go is he going to be impeached by the Senate we don't know the articles have not even been sent over to the Senate I have a strong feeling after watching the Republican members of the House of Representatives making their testimony that it is very unlikely that the Senate will proceed 12 2/3 yeah I mean so so who voted president Tulsi Gabbard voted president to other people voted president right and a hundred percent Republicans voted you know against it and a Senate you already heard what what he said that he's gonna do it's not even it's gonna die they want right but do you think here's a curious question for you since you've worked in our marketing world and messaging is critical do you think sometimes a lot of these candidates are in the shadow of Nancy Pelosi and the impeachment campaign that they have that they're driving where's taking it there like last night so nobody knew the debate was taking place last I'm sorry should we've got a democratic debate right do you think I also forgot when I say watch that so do you think do you think in a strategic way it's actually hurting the camp because like it's almost like a father that cannot help take the shadow away so his spa his son can you know it's like the demo DNS he cannot take the attention way to say listen let let Biden let Bernie let Warren let these guys get because the media should be talking about them 24/7 not be talking about impeachment knowing you're not gonna want two-thirds on Senate so what are your thoughts on they think it's kind of a hurting a little bit of the Democratic candidates well I think technically it could be but we can't think of it that way because when laws are broken and when our Constitution is violated people need to be held to account and I'm sorry but I actually believe that when this president is no longer immune when he's no longer in this seat that he will be indicted for many different crimes do you think so absolutely how certain are you pretty sure there's sealed indictments waiting for him you think so yes so let me ask you so I mean the same can be said because for me when we're going through this here's how I process it and again I I prefer you challenge me non-stop the entire time okay so this is how I process it so when you're when we're going through Cambridge analytic and I'm looking at some okay it's very obvious you know the different kind of persuadable the deterrence you know the possible pro-trump the absolute anti you know Hillary great great strategy I get it but somebody could say well Britney I mean let's not be naive this has been going on for a long time it just happens to be that today's tool is this somebody could say you know there used to be time we used it by bullying people like literally bullying people and preventing some communities are from being able to vote and no one who to target and putting the fear into some communities to not even going to vote by bringing some power people like in the 1800s and the 1900s hey making sure people were fed to vote you know just throw some food at them they needed sort of poor areas to win their votes over well then you know could be we used a mob a little bit because a mob helps with Kennedy to help them with election and you know the mobs involvement with that election that took place and then well you know what helped with some of these other guys is radio whoever was better on radio oh it's not fair Nixon wasn't good on TV but Nixon was better on radio but the reason why JFK won is because you have kids better on TV and Nixon wasn't good on TV you were sweating yet in che he had a four o'clock you know so hey but that's not fair because Jeff Kennedy's better-looking you don't need to vote for a president because it's better looking at me because Nixon's not as Hanan handsome as he's and he speaks as much so or somebody could say well if you look at media today 99% of media except for one TV station is on a liberal side somebody could say mainstream media's are liberal you can say MSNBC NBC CBS ABC you know CNN you can go Time magazine fortune magazine Money Magazine New York Times LA Times I'm you can say New York Post try bribe our DRI Drudge Report right Washington Times ripe a Washington Post lever somebody could say well this is great I don't know why you guys are so upset because liberals have been doing this for a very very long time with the media and the only opposition you have is Fox so maybe just maybe again I want to hear your argument on this just maybe you are getting the taste of your own medicine why are you upset now because Trump won because if Hillary would have won would you have come out and said that she used some tactics or maybe Trump was in LA or you know Russia was involved so again I want to hear your response to that so I'm just asking at minimum that we obey the laws that we've already agreed to uphold voter suppression is illegal discrimination using racism and sexism in order to gain power incitement of violence all of those things are definitely illegal yet somehow the Trump campaign and the Trump super PAC were allowed to use these tactics in order to get him into the White House and ever since he's been there he's used some of the same tactics to stay there that's a big problem for me and unfortunately Facebook refuses to enforce these laws on its platform either even though it is the world's largest communications platform I'm not talking about censorship versus free speech and I hate that people always bring it to that because my free speech is not unfettered my free speech ends when your human rights begin so I am NOT allowed to discriminate against you I am NOT allowed to incite violence upon you allowed to suppress your vote but yet somehow I'm allowed to do that on Facebook or politicians are allowed to I'm not allowed to because I'm a common person this is the problem that I'm talking about I'm with you on that part I mean are you kidding me absolutely not but what are your thoughts on mainstream media because mainstream media I mean you could say Britain you're a smart cookie and it's not like you're like but you're brilliant yourself I mean mainstream media was 100% team Hillary mainstream media unfortunately was 100% team Trump because they covered him disproportionately and name recognition everything at the party but but that's a different story that's called being dumb that's called being dumb that's not called being team Trump that's called the more you talk about him the more attention you give them versus the more you talk about so what I mean by this is the following so let's just say if you and I break up okay and and I'm going out there said but you don't understand she's also this and she's also she was this she was that she was this and you know you're kind of like but look here's what I wanted and that's not what he wanted I wanted to have kids he didn't wanna have kids and so you're talking about why we had a different I'm talking about how bad of a person you were guess who's winning you're winning and yeah I'm mainstream media right I you can are like listen we need to build a wall I hate the wall that's what I want to do but if you keep on saying wall wall wall wall wall think about exactly if no one thought about the wall before you brought up no I'm not I'm not sitting here telling you like what I'm saying to you is I honestly think the DNC needs to hire a legitimate marketing firm to help with the language Inc and if MSM mainstream media needs to collectively come together and change their messaging or else the way they're going right now it's gonna be bad for a long time because the more you give me an anti how bad of a person I am you're constantly building me up I don't think that's an effective strategy no I totally agree and something that you'll I don't know if you'll find it funny or horrible but after Donald Trump on the election and we as Cambridge analytic commercial or going out to pitch advertising campaigns when we went to go pick big media companies they would say you know we'd get a meeting with CNN for example and we'd go in and we'd be like oh well we thought it was gonna be really hard to get this meeting because you know you don't like our biggest client and they'd say ha no we made so much money off of covering Donald Trump you're forgiven don't worry about get out of here yeah so what does that tell you about their loyalty is the loyalty to money or is a loyalty to their beliefs indirectly my interpretation of what you just said is they're not true believers no but again the entire point of a news agency is that's they're supposed to do their research and present unbiased facts come on you think the point you you you think they're supposed to keep themselves in business you think Sean Hannity is going to be unbiased you think you think Rachel Maddow is gonna be unbiased never you you you think a cooper or Watters world you think these guys are gonna come on now but their entire business model is I totally get it and continue to present what they see is news I did it it's an interesting who the next candidates gonna be when I say next candidate let's just say the next four years you know he's re-elected because if it goes like this the strategy they're using it's going to be disastrous if it goes this way and yeah did you see the other day one of the congressman said don't buy a house in DC rent because many of you are gonna lose your jobs with the way you're going right now because your community is not going to vote for you it's it's again United States of America politicians like if you and I sit down here for instance you and I we go have a drink together we go for a cup of coffee we go have dinner together we're gonna have differences but we're probably gonna walk away saying hey we really enjoyed the conversation this was phenomenally yeah total like you know he came up as well you know it's been I'm like listen in my company I have 50% Democrats we've got 12,000 agents 50% Democrats 50% of Republicans okay and obviously when I said 50% of Republicans we got the ten fifteen percent of middle that's independent libertarian and obviously you got a community I could care less about politics just don't even bring up anything with politics I don't want to talk about but you and I can have that civil conversation these guys in DC are having a hard time having a civil conversation it is so sad isn't it it's very sad it's extremely sad to see that yeah as we said when we started our conversation today you know unfortunately who loses when there's arguments in politics it's the citizens that no doubt about it the voters are losing I'm from the school of thought of believing that in every generation like I believe Trump got elected because of Obama I think Obama gave birth to Trump about I think Bush gave birth to Obama and I think Clinton gave birth to the pendulum and I think Carter gave birth to Reagan and I think you know I mean I can go forward you know we can go back and forth if you notice what happens we get sick of something so you know I don't know I want this I want that back again you know what it was better one who was Democrat Republican like we keep going back and forth but I think the one thing that I'd love to see happen which I haven't yet seen in America during my time of being here I was a Clinton fan bill I was a Clinton fan obviously forget about what he did with Monica but as somebody who was sit down and do his stuff I was a fan of his it'd be very interesting if all of a sudden we get a synergist that's actually able to bring people together and now I don't know if it's gonna happen or not maybe I'm a little bit too optimistic that it's possible but you know I've seen these things happen you know you see families that are divided that somebody comes in and brings a whole family together it's a beautiful thing ain't no very very interesting to have somebody come in here let me ask you this question we got like a few minutes left what what is life like right now for you as a whistleblower career-wise your personal life your comfort your level of comfort of feeling safe your fears what is life of a whistleblower today oh it's definitely the scariest thing I've ever done I'm not gonna pretend anything other than that but it's been something where I've been so lucky that what I said resonated with people people actually care now they care about their use of technology they care about being abused and taken advantage of by big tech they care about owning their data and actually having control over the value that they produce every day and over their private information if they want to keep it private but it should be all of our choice and so I've been lucky you know I was given a platform I had the incredible opportunity to work with the great hat team and we've now been shortlisted for an Oscar this week which is just so incredible and I was so lucky to work with HarperCollins as well to write this book targeted and to get the word out there and now I have millions of supporters around the world who ask me every day what can I do how do I protect myself how do I support the own your data campaign and these are people that are calling their legislators these are people that are going out and getting active some of these are people that are working in big advertising companies that are now working on data protection policy and working on data ownership mechanisms for their consumers where that concept didn't even exist in their companies before I mean it's it's really a revolution I've been again you know lucky and honored to be a part of it because a lot of other whistleblowers don't get that I earlier I think it was before this interview that we were chatting about national whistleblower Day they all started the July cried July 30 yeah and you know it was many days of different sessions in order to help whistleblowers in some of these sessions where you know is your story a book or how to tell your story to the media was it therapeutic and you know I at first it was really disheartening for me because I saw some people in in this room who had a really important story to tell they had managed to find evidence of corruption in government agencies or within important companies and they didn't know how to talk to the media or they had been trying for years and no one wanted to tell their story I'm sitting there with five million press you know press pieces about me in my story and a book deal and a film and I'm just like wow it's so amazing that some of these people persist and keep on going even though people are not listening and the fact that I was so lucky that people wanted to listen just blows my mind and I want to address you know the safety question that you had which is that you know no I don't feel completely safe it's not like I get threats every day but there are definitely a lot of powerful people that would prefer if I stopped doing interviews like this every day and and would prefer if I stopped if I stopped pushing data privacy legislation in Congress but I'm not going to stop the threats are not interesting to me so I think that it's just important to recognize that becoming a whistleblower is not easy and it's something that should be encouraged in order to force transparency and to weed out corruption you know one day hopefully whistleblowers are protected enough that it's a lot easier for us to stop corruption before it becomes a really big problem would you say Julian Assange is a friend or somebody you admire well he was someone that I admired for a very long time I think whatever role that he had in the hacking of the DNC or not that's not something that I support obviously but the work that he did in the beginning and what he stood for for full transparency and for holding power to account is something that I will always support his dropping of the Iraq war files to show the crimes against humanity that were committed or war crimes that were committed had such an effect on what I did for the rest of my life and the way that I viewed the world in the way that I view my own government and the way that I questioned things so I think you know he's someone that is in a very sad situation right now and it's specifically because whistleblowing laws are not strong enough and they need to be how was when you met with them because I know UNM had a meeting together how was that experience it was so sad to see someone who has been basically in solitary confinement for seven years he was nearly see-through and I hardly got to have a conversation with him I mean you could tell he was obviously psychologically affected by being in there because it was almost like he was just talking at me for the whole like 20 minutes that I was there you know everything that was inside his head because he doesn't really get that much human contact so everything he was thinking about he just rattled off and he you know it's really sad to see that especially when when I worked in human rights working with prisoners of conscience and working with political prisoners was something that I specialized in and you know at the time I really did kind of see him as a political prisoner I mean his life is done I mean what are you gonna do two married kids public life going out seeing things movies just a date today I want to go to a restaurant having dinner he can never do that for the words of his life Australia is fighting to get him back but Australia versus America doesn't usually Australian time no it's not it's not it's not one that you're gonna win too often Hey what are some of the biggest threats we have today now obviously you know data is one and by the way you know what's so weird is I'm a CEO of a financial forum and I go to a lot of these conferences with these big 50 hundred 200 billion-dollar insurance companies and in the last 18 months the most common conversation that's been coming up as cybersecurity I mean it's just it's we've never seen this much before and it's continuously coming up right now right based on what you see and what you know and being on the inside on many of these things what do you see as the biggest threat we are facing today is it data cybersecurity is a China is it Russia is it internal is it companies the size of Facebook Amazon you know what what do you see as the biggest threat to the average person I would say the biggest threat to the average person is the fact that there is a complete and utter lack of data protection and data protection has a lot of different parts to it right that is everything from yes cybersecurity fending off attacks that could come from anywhere in the world from bad actors that is also securing the value that us as individuals produce the tracking and traceability of where data goes who has it where it's held what it's being used for and actually having any sort of opt-in or permission structures for my personal information to be used by certain people for certain purposes and the right to actually monetize my own value for myself as opposed to being exploited data and the way that it is used means that anybody in the world can buy my time my attention and my privacy it goes to the highest bidder and right now because of our lack of legislation and regulation because of our lack of technology that can actually manage and track and trace data in a reliable way it means that our democracy is up to the highest bidder and that's what scares me the most which is why I do what I do every day what is my data worth what does the average person's data worth your data can be worth whatever you want it to be depending on who you want to share it with I really hate that Mark Zuckerberg tells people it's worth it was $17 a quarter or something like that you know what I just had a friend that did a study with you know a set of diabetes researchers and pharma companies and said for somebody that qualifies for a diabetes study how much do you pay for that medical data because you know most medical data comes from young 18 to 35 year old white men in college who go for extra beer money to medical trials right and so to find someone that qualifies for a diabetes study it cost them $28,000 for six to eight weeks of data in order to find the people in order to get people to become part of a study in order to complete that for a couple months of medical data which is probably just blood tests urine samples they go in a couple times right so if we are to build a future where we own our data and where we are actually able to profit from our own human value we need to have systems where we can share our data anonymously and securely where we have laws and regulations that allow us to own it as our property and that okay I'm fine if I produce data with a farmer company or I produce data with Facebook they can have part ownership and I can have part ownership I wouldn't have produced that data without them that's fine fractionalize ownership is cool but we really need to recognize that we have rights to the information that we produce in order to flip the switch and change these business models from being exploited to empowering I think it's gonna come soon though I actually think's gonna come soon I don't think it's something that's you know x some idea comes in there's a little bit of abuse there's and then there's a lot of abuse then there's incredible wealth made and then there's some regulations yes and then you kind of work it out with the regulators and the entrepreneurs and they make you work I actually think based on what you're saying it's reasonable business like Facebook myself Kyle paid this much for your data I'll pay this much for your data let's partner up on it very interesting what's the cost of being a president today here's what I mean by is there dollar amongst I hear the numbers saying it costs two billion dollars to be president today why it costs a billion and a half to be a president today can anybody get two billion dollars behind them and be a president or do you need a little bit of a pitchman somebody that's going to be able to be doing the work what would you say is the number for someone to become a president well Donald Trump won the election with 600 million and not a lot Hilary spent 1.3 billion what does that tell you it tells you that the tools are incredibly important he definitely had a more sophisticated data strategy that's for sure but I think if we had laws and regulations that prevented fake news disinformation voter suppression races incitement of violence and he wouldn't have one because that's how he used to get where he is today so someone who is a better pitch man won and saved himself 700 million dollars or someone would have better marketing strategy won and saved himself 700 million dollars someone that was willing to break any laws in order to win you think that won that campaign you firmly believe that absolutely yeah and you you're saying you don't believe Hillary's camp at all broke any laws I don't know I didn't work there got it country so your time off from your POV of where you're at so so today you think the campaign this year it's gonna be that much money spent as well like that kind of on your thing you're gonna go we're gonna go a little higher yeah thanks very much to David bossy ahead of Citizens United who now has again put democracy on an auction block and whoever wants to pay the most money is going to be the most powerful mouthpiece that's the biggest disaster that we've ever had in politics in America the rest of the world thinks it's insane that we allow super PACs to exist where you can funnel hundreds of millions of dollars through them it's completely insane you can obfuscate where that money comes from you can put complex structures so you don't know who the donors I actually are I mean it's disgusting it is disgusting you think it's gonna go away though all the first ever the first ever tabling of the reversal of it has started to be discussed this year again by Adam Schiff thank God for him I think it's such an important conversation especially because David bossy was also the head of the defeat crooked Hillary campaign which was the make America number one super PAC that was run by Cambridge analytic and spent all of their money targeting neurotic people with fear-based messaging and disinformation to get them to not vote for Hillary Clinton what's what's Alex doing today is he working today absolutely he is I know from very many sources that he is still very active as a political consultant apparently after the conservative victory in the United Kingdom he was seen with the heads of the levy you brexit campaign chugging champagne and Mayfair so still active he might have had something to do with it he not he might have I mean at this point you know anybody who knows who he is he did somebody asked me a question I posted a question somebody said tell us about your involvement with fun where what's your is it fun we're fun were my saying it properly pH UN yeah I like that down from negotiation you're not a part of it I'll join their board yeah I was really looking forward to working with a data company that actually wanted to give their their data back to consumers and they had designed a strategy that I was helping them with where all of the data that they own on individuals would be put into a wallet so an app on your phone you would log in and you would be able to see you would be able to see all the data that they had on you how much money they had earned off of it and then it would be given back to you so you now own that you can decide what they were doing that was the plan and then I found out that they were working with the Trump campaign from investigative journalists not from the executives themselves so I ceased all negotiations and I'm no longer involved with them never receive oh yeah I've never received $1 a stock a token from those individuals and I will not pursue that in the few that's good to know that's very good to know because I think what it was a tweet by David Carroll that said you know look at Britney Kaiser she's back at it again yeah involved with these guys and help and I would trump what are the chances of Zuckerberg record or see if Zuckerberg or Dorsey ran how much of an advantage did they have for being a president huh well that's that's an interesting one because 2.2 billion followers essentially yeah Mark Zuckerberg was from everything that I heard had designs on running for president before the cambridge analytic facebook data crisis now i don't think he would decide to pursue that given the current atmosphere but considering he has the world's largest communications platform i think nearly anything that he wanted to do he could accomplish if he were to abuse his own tools if he were to Bews his own tools yes got it if he were to views his own I mean he lets any politician anywhere in the world abused his tools so why wouldn't he let himself is that I think at this point the light is so much on he would have to step down sell majority of his shares etc etc to say if I want to do it I don't know if he's gonna be running although I heard he gave a recommendation to Mayor P to one of his best marketers at Facebook to help mayor Pete and apparently it's working for him he was able to get some attention there let's do a quick speed round okay to wrap this up I'll give a name and tell me the first word that comes to mind okay this will be fine this will be fun first word that comes to mind whatever maybe tell me the first word that comes to mind okay Linda Tripp you know she is actually it's gonna say old school nostalgia yes missed out okay cool how about Sharon Watkins and run whistle blow I met her okay I met her for the first time at the Congressional thing at hero hero okay cool mark felt Nixon scandal he was supposed to be prepared no that's great I think Daniel Ellsberg when I think oh yeah of Watergate absolutely here's a good one here's a good one here Jeffrey Wigand I may not be saying it right Jeffrey white mama he was a former tobacco company executive that the 60 Minutes the movie the insider would Russell Crowe oh I never saw that obviously well let me put it to this for you something I need to see 100 okay hundred it's phenomenal I will Julian Assange sad sad Rachel Maddow angry okay Trump criminal okay Bernie activist Biden vice Hillary Clinton secretary okay David Carol professor Robert Mahler that's how so many words come to mind um integrity okay uh Amy lobbyist for these big companies as a profession is what I'm asking so I'm a lobbyist to your love too but I'm a lobbyist pro bono for things that I believe in lot of different story lobbying is important but it depends what you're lobbying for joy lobbying has a place so you do believe that has a place yeah some lobbyists are very seedy some of them or not okay Robert Mercer data scientist Ted Cruz Senator Chris Wiley whistleblower Steve Bennett populist Corey Lewandowski used-car salesman used-car salesman Alexander Knicks fugitive fugitive Bloomberg last one mmm candidate candidate this guy's got fifty four billion dollars he's got all the money in the world to be able to make it really work I think also has quite a media platform massive media platform are you kidding me it's a massive media platform it's gonna be interesting to see if it's gonna work as a case study I'm just curious to know how far he can go with this work you know first of all Britney thank you for what I do want to say is guys if you haven't yet purchased a book we're gonna put a link below obviously I open it up with the book we're gonna put a link below for you to go well buy a copy and start reading it I highly recommend you read this type of content because it's good for you to be in to know especially today know when data is now multitrillion-dollar your industry so you know how to protect yourself your business and your family Brittany thank you so much for coming out I had so much fun with this absolutely yes it's a pleasure appreciate you [Music]

Channel: Valuetainment

Views: 267,251

Keywords: brittany kaiser, patrick bet david, cambridge analytica, whistleblower, brittany whistleblower, china politica, usa vs china

Id: D6FvWxaus0M

Length: 101min 54sec (6114 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 10 2020