In this episode, I was joined by my good friend, A.J. Jacobs on a very important topic, The Good and Bad about Privacy!
In today's day and age, do you actually have privacy? And is it good, or is it bad to have privacy?
In this episode, A.J. Jacobs and I are talking about the good and the bad about Privacy!
Listen to the episode, tweet us at @jaltucher, and @ajjacobs, and tell us, what do you think about Olympics!
My new book Skip The Line is out! Make sure you get a copy wherever you get your new book!
Join You Should Run For President 2.0 Facebook Group, and we discuss why should run for president.
I write about all my podcasts! Check out the full post and learn what I learned at jamesaltucher.com/podcast.
Thanks so much for listening! If you like this episode, please subscribe to “The James Altucher Show” and rate and review wherever you get your podcasts:
Follow me on Social Media:
AJ Jacob 0:02
Welcome to Good or bad with AJ Jacobs and James Altucher. This is the show where we take big topic, and we try to figure out whether it's good for the world or bad for the world. And this week's episode is privacy. So privacy. Is it a fundamental right that is critically endangered by big tech and big government and various other bigs? Or is it an annoying vestige of past times? Is it an excuse for scoundrels to do bad things and an impediment to progress? Or perhaps a little bit of both? So I was thinking though, before this episode, you and I are kind of outliers, because we sort of give away our privacy more than your average Gen X, or at least maybe not your millennials.
James Altucher 0:52
Yeah. I mean, you you basically, I would say the I always describe it as the AJ Jacobs technique. So if you're going to write about, let's say, a topic, like the Bible, many authors, you know, analyze and theorize and philosophize about different texts in the Bible, and they write their book and no one reads it, you on the other hand, you have this immersive technique where you take a topic, and you don't philosophize about it, you do it. So you wrote, The Year of Living biblically, where you actually live every single day by all the tenets of the Old Testament. And, you know, you then you document your life through the book, and you tell every pretty much every aspect of what happens you including, you know your solutions, when Julie your wife is having a period and, and and then in your book my life as an experiment, you talk about arguments you have what, Julie and how you outsource the arguments to India, you've also talked about measuring whether you love your wife, or not like you talk about all these really personal things. And for me, I originally was writing about finance. And then I realized, you know, everybody I meet in the finance world, and particularly like on in the news, part of it is just lying all the time. So it's totally true. I started writing totally transparently, about going broke repeatedly and being depressed and even suicidal and how I came back from that. And I found a not only were people were much more interested, because everyone can relate to that, but be a lot of finance people would tweet, you know, in response is James going crazy, but then they were privately email me, Hey, I've been there also, you know, good luck. And, and then the other thing I know is everyone told me, No one's gonna ever invest money in any of your projects. Again, you're always talking about going broke. But I found more than ever, people were would reach out to me to invest because I was the one person they felt they could trust. So being being transparent or allowing people into your life actually engenders, it creates this vulnerability on your side and engenders trust with other people. So some kind of sometimes releasing, consciously releasing aspects of your privacy, you know, allows people to say, oh, this person I could talk to or I could trust.
AJ Jacob 3:18
So having no privacy actually helps your business.
James Altucher 3:21
Definitely. My business was about loss of privacy, basically, you know, the flip side, though, is, you know, all the kind of scandalous things we've been hearing about the past two years about how, you know, your data is all available, you know, as George Gilder the futurist told me, If you can't, if you're getting something for free, then you're the product. So with Google, we get search services for free with Facebook, we get, you know, communication for free. But the flip side is where the product, they take all of our data and sell it to advertisers.
AJ Jacob 3:53
The New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo, he says, he wrote a article called, maybe it's time to panic about privacy. So maybe it is maybe I should and my mom has been yelling at me for years, like what are you doing? Telling people all your secrets? But, but maybe we should start by just defining
James Altucher 4:13
privacy is very complicated itself. By the way,
AJ Jacob 4:17
the dictionary definition is a state of being free from being observed or disturbed by other people. That's a good start.
James Altucher 4:25
Louis Brandeis, famous lawyer, the Brandeis University's named after him is also a former Supreme Court justice, wrote a famous essay in 1890, called the right to privacy suggesting that privacy is actually baked into the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution and future courts have sort of upheld that. But and the Fourth Amendment is why you can't be searched or have any assets seized. Yet to
AJ Jacob 4:50
me. Privacy is also about the control of information, who knows what you do, and what your behaviors are. And I did a little thought experiment, so Stay with me here. But I thought about a world where there's zero privacy, and then a world where there's total privacy, no one gives any information about themselves, even voluntarily. So, zero privacy, obviously a nightmare. Everyone knows your browser history, including your searches of Menudo or whatever. What What would be your most embarrassing search browser history?
James Altucher 5:26
Believe it or not, I don't use the computer that much. For these very reasons. It's not so much worried about someone hacking. I don't want advertisers to inappropriately target me. Right. So so I'm very careful about what I search for. Yeah, I usually just search on my name. I do bad any searches. Nice. Alright, search on AJ Jacobs name. Sure. So Arnold, Steven Jacobs, your original name by
AJ Jacob 5:51
Oh, you Boston me? So you have you have invaded my privacy? Yes. Are you? You told me earlier though, you, you wish you had more time? So you could be more invasive?
James Altucher 6:03
Yeah. Like when I was thinking about this podcast yesterday, I was like, Damn, if I had, if I had just had like maybe an extra? Realistically, two, three weeks, I could have definitely done something interesting in terms of invading your privacy, like what? Well, you know, for instance, I know the names of all your neighbors, right? So not because I visited you, but because it's freely available information online. So and I know, You've written about in my life as an expert, and you've written about that you use a nanny. So you could call your house during the day, I could say, hey, you know, I'm the nurse taking care of so and so neighbor. You know, our Wi Fi is down? Can I just I see your Wi Fi, can I just have a password for 15 minutes to some problem? You know, I could figure out some social engineering way to get into your computer network, chances are you there are vulnerabilities that you're not aware of in your home computer network, which could lead to access to your, your printer, Alexa, Siri, whatever you use your Nest thermostat, your your Mac or Windows machine, hopefully a Windows machine that has more vulnerabilities. And then I could start you probably, like most people have very basic password on the administrator of your Windows machine if you have one. And then you get access to all the files. So it's very simple ways, just using what's called social engineering, not like pure hacking, but like a combination of psychological influence combined with hacking techniques to have access to every that's one way there's many ways to get access to your to your particular data.
AJ Jacob 7:45
Interesting and scary. The one thing you can have is my printer such a piece of shit, if you can figure out how to make it work. That would be awesome.
James Altucher 7:54
All right, I could do that. Also, there's lots of ways I could you know, if I inundate, you and and your wife and your kids with so called what's called a phishing attack, like AJ, this is James, are you in this bear? No, I can find other Facebook friends, I could make them send you an email, like AJ, I just tagged you in this video, check it out. And then you click on that, that downloads a freely available keystroke logger onto your computer or your laptop, then I'll be able to track all your passwords. And then from then on out, I can log into all of your accounts so that it's very simple to do happens every day. You know, you have to be very careful about
AJ Jacob 8:35
this. Well, I am delighted that you didn't have two or three weeks. I'm very thankful you're you're busy man. My friend Kevin Roose, who's a technology writer wrote about social engineering and how they would play audio of crying babies in the background and impersonate the wife and be like, my kid is crying. You gotta help me. I need the password to our bank.
James Altucher 8:57
I mean, there's so many I mean, even Kevin Mitnick, whose was a famous cyber hacker who went to jail for hacking. And when he got to jail, or in jail, he was not allowed to be close, even to a whistle because they thought by using a whistle, he could send messages to any phones and launch nuclear weapons. That's how apparently, but he even admitted he mostly did social engineering to do the initial hacking. Yeah, that sounds interesting. And I will say in the 90s, it was very simple. Not anymore, but it was very simple to hack people's emails, particularly in a corporate environment. Almost all corporations were unsafe about how they protected emails. So I used to do tricks all the time, where I would send email from, like legal@mtv.com to a friend of mine, and start this whole thing just as a prank. But then I felt bad and I admitted it pretty quickly. And then I even also sent to my boss, an email to him from the CEO. Have HBO. And so you might, you know, Bruce, come see me immediately, you know, we need to discuss. And he I see him running past and I had to like tell him no, just kidding.
AJ Jacob 10:15
Yeah, my I remember when I first started dating my wife, we weren't supposed to have an interoffice romance. So I would disguise my emails by sending her really boring headers, subject headers, like, you know, third quarter results. And then I pour my heart out in the email about a I doubt at work and be I doubt anyone cared even about the the pouring out of my heart.
James Altucher 10:39
I'm not sure I think people do. In the corporate level, I think that is a common occurrence where people read emails, because I remember, at one place I worked, somebody was trashing the editor in chief of this publication, and making insults that would not be appropriate. And he was fired. So somebody clearly read his email. And he was and he was fired by the guy.
AJ Jacob 11:02
Interesting. So anyway, yes, there. If you imagine a world with no privacy, it's obviously a nightmare, the browser searches assigned from you who only search yourself and people can Facebook Live View while you're going to the bathroom. It's obviously big brother on steroids, terrible. But the other side is also not a great world. Because if you have complete and total privacy, and no one shares anything about themselves, that means severely psychotic people can just go out and buy guns. There won't be any taxes, which I know you might like. But you wouldn't have any roads or firefighters because the government wouldn't know how much you made. Because everyone has the right to keep their everything private. And if you take the extreme, people wouldn't tell you their names, they wouldn't, you know, it would be a weird world. So there's got to be a balance a middle side, you just defined
James Altucher 12:01
what I'll call the Jacobs curve. So on one axis is the level of privacy in your society on the other axis is, let's call it the happiness of society it let's assume that can be measured. So it's basically going to start at the bottom at 0% privacy, there's gonna be zero happiness, it's going to go up. So some somewhere around 50% Happiness is where 50% privacy give or take is max happiness for society. And then it's gonna go back down to zero. So that's like the Laffer curve, which I believe has to do with the income tax rate that basically 0% taxes and 100% Taxes are bad for society is somewhere in the middle is peak, you know, wellbeing for society love that the Laffer curve is a famous economics thing from from that still applies.
AJ Jacob 12:46
And you may Yeah, he made it sound so mathematical and makes us look good. But then
James Altucher 12:50
you have to decide like, you know, do you want data used for advertising purposes? Some people might say yes, because they don't want to see ads about diapers, they want to see ads about shaving cream, or I don't know, sports, and but then there's the the, you know, flipside we saw on the election, that data, you know, was able to kind of steer opinions in critical fringe states would have by having access to too much data about people. It's interesting how privacy concerns have changed since that paper, in written in 1890, the right to privacy, he was concerned because photography had just been started to be used in newspapers. So he was concerned that this was an invasion of privacy, but even to the point where he thought billboards should be banned, as opposed to ads in newspapers. So an ad in a newspaper, you have a choice to buy that newspaper or not a billboard ad, you have no choice. You have to pass it if it's on your road to work, for instance. So he thought that was an invasion of privacy
AJ Jacob 13:56
invasion of your visual privacy. Yeah, I love that. I agree with him that billboard cpbn I mean, I wonder how many accidents have been caught, maybe only like five or 10. But still, I want to see that.
James Altucher 14:09
And there's an irony there, by the way, because the average billboard says something like, you know, have you been hurt in a car accident, call this number, these attorneys will help you? And I'm thinking, is this your target audience, the people actually driving?
AJ Jacob 14:21
For business. It's like a positive feedback loop. Right? Historically, a lot of cultures had very, very little privacy. So it is really about when and where you live, what your tolerance is. I wrote an article on like, how the Puritans were stunningly good at privacy invasion. So they would they would have these, these snoopers called tising men. And their job was to peek into the neighbor's windows and spy on their every move to make sure they weren't doing anything naughty, like going for a stroll on the Sabbath or something terrible like that. So they had no privacy. then we're all
James Altucher 15:00
primates. So primates, you know, assemble in, in groups of 25 to 30, you know, throughout the past several million years, and humans are primates that have gone beyond that number, but below 30, you know everything about every other person in your tribe. And, you know, from 30 to 150, you know, about every other person, not directly, but very many people through gossip. So gossip had this use of I might not know you, but my friend, Dan says, oh, yeah, AJ is a good guy. He does this, this this. So your privacy has just been invaded by me, but for good purposes. So now I know through gossip, whether I could trust you or not if we go hunting, but now, our brains are wired for that level of privacy. We're okay with it. But now in the millions. Lack of privacy has a much deeper ramification, but our brains don't even understand what that means. We're wired from millions of years to think in terms of tribal privacy, where it may or may not be okay, still, but at least we're fine with the members in our community, roughly knowing about us,
AJ Jacob 16:07
but now our communities the entire work, right. Yeah, I think that's really interesting and true. Just to go back to the historical lack of privacy. In ancient Rome, going to the bathroom was not considered a private act, they would have these public restrooms, where they would have to have toilets next to one another. So instead of going to a restaurant and ordering a meal, you'd go and sit next to your friend and take a dump. So it's really very culturally constrained and
James Altucher 16:33
now we do the same thing but there's just like a wall with a three inch gap at the bottom of the wall for some reason. Why did they put that guy at the bottom of wall so you're like, go into the bathroom right next to someone there inches from you. And that should be private. I can't go into the bathroom when there's anybody else in there. But But I have a question for you related to this and and and related to vomitorium, which is in 1993, you posted on Usenet, on a message board, wanting to know what movies contain scenes where a person who suddenly gets psychologically jarring news, vomits?
AJ Jacob 17:10
I really I am terrified and horrified. One of the
James Altucher 17:15
movies you came up with was the Crying Game, which I never saw.
AJ Jacob 17:19
What the hell was I asking that for? I
James Altucher 17:21
assumed you were reading an article about vomit in movies.
AJ Jacob 17:25
Oh, my God. Well, if that's the worst thing you found, thank God
James Altucher 17:30
in June of 1994, you needed someone to drive a car from Berkeley to New York.
AJ Jacob 17:35
Do you remember that? Yes, no, no, I was moving back to New York, from Berkeley, from Berkeley, you
James Altucher 17:40
did post in June 15. That you needed someone to drive your car?
AJ Jacob 17:45
And are you just using Google or using the dark web? Or what the hell are you doing? Yes, there's
James Altucher 17:49
lots of types of searches. There's Google, there is Tor, which is kind of this dark web aspect. And then Google, you know, there used to be on the internet, pre web, new news message boards called Usenet. And I thought I used Usenet. I know you did. And there's archives of all those. Texas just there's various ways to search those those texts. Or there were like, these BBs things is that they're all kind of tied together.
AJ Jacob 18:17
Well, let me I had a little bit of an outline, which we kind of abandoned though. It's all
James Altucher 18:22
your phone numbers. By the way. Do you really? Yeah.
AJ Jacob 18:24
What's my current phone number?
James Altucher 18:26
Well, your landline or yourself? Well, I
AJ Jacob 18:27
guess you know, my cell. But yeah, if you can figure out my landline, or is it?
James Altucher 18:32
Sure? 212. You could tell them when to stop? Or e 961.
AJ Jacob 18:39
I thought it's not that anyone's gonna call me. I thought we could talk about how lack of privacy might make our world better. Because I think it's it's a more interesting and tougher argument. Everyone knows that. Having your privacy invaded can be horrible. But what about the other side? So I have three examples of how we need our privacy invaded for a good world. The first is pretty obvious. Too much privacy is dangerous. Too much privacy can endanger the health of the public. So you can have psychotics buying guns, and no one can stop them.
James Altucher 19:22
And you mean it doesn't have a no.
AJ Jacob 19:24
That's even worse than now. I was listening to the history of birth certificates. And until the 19th century, there was no birth certificates. But child labor activists who wanted to ban child labor, like we got to have a record so the government started issuing birth certificates. And the parents were freaking out, like that's not your business, how my kid is. So if you want to stop some of these horrible practices, you have to invade privacy a little. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. You brought this up before we started taping anonymity and total private IBC enables people to be real assholes, like trolls on the internet, if everyone had their name and face attached to their account, I don't think you've seen nearly as much horrible uncivil behavior on the internet.
James Altucher 20:17
But one time I was so upset. This is in January 2018. And people were very upset about some article or whatever. And it was three in the morning and people were just trashing me non stop. And I should just ignore it, I should have just left and it would have passed like it always does. But I said, Look, if anyone has a problem with me, they can call me right now. Here's my number, call me. And for the next 24 hours, people were calling me. And a they were usually surprised that I picked up so they didn't quite know what to say at first. But then actually some well known people called me and like, oh, I had a problem with this, this and this, and I would talk to them, and then they will go once you talk to people, like in any situation, if people think you're reasonable. They're going to say, Okay, well, I get it now. And so Pete, some people did go back into it and say I just spoke with James. And this was very reason why I understand where he's coming from.
AJ Jacob 21:11
And basically, the big argument here is, is you need for national security, you need some invasion of privacy as well. So you know, you can track some of the people who are plotting to blow up the world. Because if you take this argument to the extreme that we need to invade people's privacy, to protect the world, you get to this argument by Nick Bostrom, the philosopher at Oxford, have you heard this one, he talks about how nuclear bombs and other massively destructive technology, they're becoming easier and easier to make. So if this continues, imagine in 50 years, using gene editing, anyone, any of the seven 10 billion people on Earth can make a deadly pandemic in your kitchen that could wipe out of humanity or, or the equivalent of a nuclear bomb. And the only way he argues that we might be able to prevent this is to have big brother to the nth degree, like a totally authoritarian government, where every movement, every arm, every finger movement is monitored. So you don't get the one in a million crazy nihilist who blows up the world. But what do you say to that?
James Altucher 22:27
But I would argue he's, that's correct, theoretically. But on the one hand, you get into a 1984, George Orwell scenario where a big brother controls everything, including, you know, or you get into a Minority Report scenario, where they know your thoughts, so well, they can predict a crime before they can arrest you before you commit the crime. Right. So there's, there's issues there that are pretty scary. But also my argument is that in reality, is that those technologies, for instance, already exist, and they're already is incredible government surveillance that we have no idea about, as if you knew the ways in which your data was known, you would be shocked. And it's, it's probably 100 times more than you realize. And again, for probably for evolutionary reasons, you don't even know how much data you have, whether it's from the your genes to your phone conversations to all your texts, all of this stuff is scanned by something, not the genes as much, but the texts and emails and and your movements are seen by every camera, as you know, was there like 100,000 cameras in New York City on every corner. So your data is already out there. People are already tracking it. There are companies that look at every bank transaction, and try to detect if you AJ Jacobs is doing something statistically significantly unusual, or statistically significantly related to somebody who is doing something unusual. And so you're already being tracked.
AJ Jacob 24:03
Well, what do you think about that, though? If all right, let's assume that we do have technology now that people could use the blow up the world. I do think it's gonna get easier. But suppose we do have people who can access that technology and assume that the government is tracking us so much more than we know. What do you think of that?
James Altucher 24:25
Well, I think we're 98% there. And that might be the right number 98 or 99%. Because they have so they say and I've been hearing this ever since 911. They have stopped 1000s and 1000s. of you know, terrorist planning or terror, you know, potential acts of terrorism. I gotta tell you this too. I wanted to FBI visit me in like December 2011. And they can tell you the story. I love it. So they rang my doorbell and I could see through a video camera and they held up a badge. And they're like NYPD, and I got scared. I'm like, What did I do? So I let them come up. But before I open the door, I'm like, you know, who are you guys? And I, they said, Actually, we're from the FBI. And I'm like, Why didn't you say, FBI downstairs? And they said, We didn't want to scare anyone. And so we said, NYPD, and I'm like, Why do you think NYPD is less scary than FBI? So I let them in. And they talk to someone who I talked to someone who, you know, heard me say something about something. And they wanted to talk more about it was nothing in this and they ended up hanging out for a while we were shooting pool at a pool table at the time. And I asked them, are there a lot of things that you're stopping? And he said, you wouldn't? You can't even imagine like we're stopping everything. So there's so much stuff going on. And so I presume more of the same is still happening. Oh, so to answer your point about Nick Bostrom, no, I think we're already 98 or 99%. There, I think 100% gets dangerous. And you can't get to 100%. This because it because again, there's going to be there's always going to be more tools to develop it. The people who are doing bad things in, in general are smarter than the people. It's better to be offensive than defensive because you can't figure out everything defensively. It's better to be on the offensive.
AJ Jacob 26:27
Well, I, I hope you're wrong, because otherwise our world is gonna blow up. Like if the bad guys are always ahead of the good guys.
James Altucher 26:35
I think I think a gene edited pandemic is more than anything else is probably the likely if there is to be an end of the world in the next 100 years or an end of civilization the next 100 years, it is likely to come from a gene at a pandemic versus anything else.
AJ Jacob 26:56
Okay, so I have a second reason why we should allow people to invade our privacy. And that is, it's just so convenient. It's just so nice. You know if Amazon recommends they make good recommendations and Netflix, they know what I watched but it helps me like I watch I love Brooklyn nine nine. So Netflix said why don't you watch cuckoo with Andy Samberg? I never heard of it.
James Altucher 27:20
Oh my god, I've never heard of that. I love Andy Samberg.
AJ Jacob 27:22
It's delightful. So ya know, I'm with Waze, I'm driving and they'll tell me Oh, look, there's a gas station nearby,
James Altucher 27:29
or there's a traffic jam coming up? Yeah. Or there's a police car if three cars ahead of you, right.
AJ Jacob 27:37
And I don't have to take my credit card into Amazon every day. I mean, it makes life so much better. So how much are we willing to give up to have this much better? Like
James Altucher 27:46
I agree with you. I like the fact that ads are so targeted. I like you know, there's times when you have to watch out if the ads are weirdly targeted. I don't know if people are looking over your shoulder. But
AJ Jacob 27:59
well, you should be only getting ads about you since you only search yourself.
James Altucher 28:03
Well on Amazon, though I'll buy things and recommendations got. So you know, and then you can argue again, like this guy did that certain types of advertising in and of itself is an invasion of privacy. But I like that. And you can argue on political advertising, that there you're seeing only one skew of opinions, because they're targeting what you like to open versus
AJ Jacob 28:26
totally you know, so that's the downside we are going to get to later is that, yeah, they will force you these algorithms will force you into a corner and they breathe extremism. I think YouTube's algorithm has been disastrous for politics, because they, if you watch a slightly right wing, YouTube, then it'll be like, Oh, he likes the right wing, and eventually you'll be in the Nazi. So but we'll get to that later. But so yeah, it is it is convenient. Alright, so then this isn't an odd one about the the upside of privacy invasion. And I'm still working it out. But follow me here for a second. I think that secrecy sometimes impedes social progress. So you think about how everyone was secret and private about their sexuality. Until maybe 4050 years ago, there were so many gay people who suffered so much, because they didn't know that whatever five 10% Whatever the number is, that there are millions of other gay people out there.
James Altucher 29:36
But is that a privacy issue or a cultural issue? Like if everybody kind of registered gay or straight and that was like a forced, you know, invasion of privacy? Would that have solved the problem or actually made it worse?
AJ Jacob 29:50
Well, I think you're right, it wouldn't be I wouldn't want people to have to answer on their, you know, on the Census. Are you gay or straight? But I think how Having them having privacy be less important culturally, would make it the people were more open to target. And and let me give you one other example on this, because Cass Sunstein just wrote a book about social change. He's a professor at Harvard. And he argues one of the probably one of the reasons it takes a while to change is because everyone is so private, and they're not telling the world how they really feel. And he cites this one amazing study in Saudi Arabia, where they asked all these men who were married, do you do you want? Would you be okay with having your wife get a job? And the vast majority said, Yeah, sure. And then they said, Well, what do you think other husbands think? And they're like, Oh, no one else. I'm the only one who feels this way? Well, once they informed these men know, actually, the vast majority of husbands are okay with it. It changed society, radically. Women were actually applying for jobs. So having this secrecy and privacy was was holding back.
James Altucher 31:10
Yeah, but let's look at the flip side of that, which is, you know, because a lot of our society is dependent on technological innovation. Yeah, often, there's some degree of secrecy and privacy required to innovate, because your incentive to innovate is to be out there first. And so you can make the most amount of money. That's the incentive to come up with a new medicine that cures cancer. Now, obviously, it'd be great if it was all altruistic or incentives, but they're not. And so many inventions are made because there's this assumption of privacy, that tell would not have been made. If there was zero privacy.
AJ Jacob 31:49
I think that's a hugely important point, like you need some level of privacy and secrecy, for progress to occur, especially technological or even government. I remember reading about how the, the founding fathers when they were writing the Constitution, it was locked down. No one was allowed to talk to the press, no one leaked anyway, I wonder why? Well, because they knew that if anything leaked out, there would be a public outcry. And people be like, No, that, and it would never get done, the Constitution would never have been written. So without this crazy, conspiratorial secrecy, there would be no constitution, which is very strange.
James Altucher 32:28
Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, but the flip side, too, is, is that open source research, it kind of makes progress faster. But again, that's more on the altruistic side. At some point, there's a profit incentive, particularly as if it costs a lot of money to invent,
AJ Jacob 32:44
right? On the flip side, then we say that like 400 times crap, so
James Altucher 32:50
we are talking about good or on the flip side, bad.
AJ Jacob 32:52
Exactly. And this one, I think, is related to this idea of privacy can sometimes be constraining is the idea of liberation, when you have no privacy. In some senses. It's horrible. And I did this experiment, as you know, radical honesty, where it's this theory that he never lie, but more than that, you say whatever's on your mind. So like, you want to sleep with your wife, sister, you tell your wife and you tell your sister. So in some senses, yes, horrible. But
James Altucher 33:25
Freudian slip, by the way that you said, you tell your sister.
AJ Jacob 33:32
Oh, interesting. Yes. Now see, look at that. I have my I feel my privacy invaded. But the basic idea is tell everyone everything. And in some senses, it in many senses, it's horrible. But in some sense, it's totally liberating. Because you don't have to feel that you're keeping things you don't have to remember your lies. I agree with that. So there is there is something to complete lack of privacy.
James Altucher 33:56
I mean, your your chapter on radical honesty in my life as an experiment, I think was a really good one, and that sometimes it could just be too radical. But But in general, I think integrity is very important. One other
AJ Jacob 34:10
thing that I thought it was really interesting, that historically, voting was not always private.
James Altucher 34:17
Really, yeah. You know, who people voted for, you would
AJ Jacob 34:20
vote by voice in the early history of America. And the downside, of course, is that, you know, if you have an authoritarian leader, and you vote against him, then you'll have your head chopped off. But the good part is, it encouraged people to vote for the common good, instead of for their own private interests. Let's move on to some of the good parts of of keeping your privacy. And one of them is what what you just mentioned, one of them is freedom from manipulation, like the more these companies and government know about you, the more they can manipulate you. And I read about this amazing new technology that this professor has devised. And basically, he'll look on your Facebook page and find your closest friends, and then do an amalgam of their face. So he'll merge their faces to create a new person. And you don't recognize that person. But somehow instinctively, you're like, Oh, I trust this person. So this person will be saying, you know, you should buy GEICO Insurance. And you'll be like, Oh, I really should. Because that nice person, I feel really warmly about us. Or imagine like, if you still had a girlfriend, you were pining over. And like, a version of her is telling you to do things. It's so
James Altucher 35:40
Oh, my god, that's amazing. That's a great dating app. A great idea for a dating app is basically you take the amalgamation of all the women your Facebook friends with, and then you put it into the, into a dating site, and it matches you to all the women who most closely match that face, and sets and, and if you match theirs, then it sets you up on a date.
AJ Jacob 36:03
I love it. I also have this plan. I love that that's very out to turian that you take something and turn it into a business plan. But
James Altucher 36:11
but but you know, related to that, because because that's very fascinating about the our biological reaction to faces we're familiar with. But related to that is, you know, when you go on vacation, what do you do you post photos on Facebook, of you're on vacation? So this kind of social invasion, not invasion of privacy, but people who have bad intent? No, you're not in your house. So they could rob your house?
AJ Jacob 36:39
Yeah. Well, that's, I mean, that's, I think that's another point that is very important. Should we voluntarily a lot of us share our information? And is oversharing? It may feel good at the time. But is it bad for you in the future and bad for the world? I did a book on on health. And there was this app called bowel mover Pro. And it was part of this you every time you moved your bowels, he would make a note, he would say what kind what it looked like, you know the consistency, and then it had a sharing aspect. So you could tweet to your friends about your latest bowel move. And to me that was like the epitome of oversharing gone wrong. It's like we need as a society to pull back and stop sharing so much. I think the world might be a better place. That's,
James Altucher 37:36
that's I agree. This comes from two people who overshare I think
AJ Jacob 37:40
the sharing on Facebook, we tend to share we overshare but we over share the good parts. Right? So right so people are depressed, right? You look at people online, they're having a wonderful life. So maybe Facebook's maybe our our privacy should be invaded. And we should be forced to share. You know, I just had a big fight with my wife, I you know, my kid just failed an exam. Because that's a more realistic view of the world. And then you wouldn't have this depression on from people looking at Facebook
James Altucher 38:10
might be a good exercise to try. For every positive thing you share, share something negative.
AJ Jacob 38:16
I love that. I mean, I want you could also design an algorithm where everyone's the horrible things in their lives pop up on your feed, so that you feel better by comparison.
James Altucher 38:27
Yeah, or I would challenge people to write a resume and post on Facebook of all the things you failed at. If you're embarrassed you found that like, Oh, I was doing at a school or I was fired from this job for these reasons. I was caught stealing paper clips, and like build a resume like that. And just
AJ Jacob 38:41
I love that. Have you done that? Yeah, done that. You did? What did you put because you are the master of sharing you I
James Altucher 38:47
was thrown out of graduate school. I basically convinced a professor to change my grade and undergrad. So I had a GPA what good enough to graduate. I wasn't going to graduate. You know on I love it.
AJ Jacob 39:01
I want to see that resume. I think it's
James Altucher 39:04
all right up again. All I could probably write it better. Now. I have more failure since then. I wrote that in 2011. I think
AJ Jacob 39:10
I read another good part of primacy is it's just it's an obvious one. But it's huge. The big brother the freedom from tyranny. I mean, if you have no privacy. Tyrants can control your life. And we're already seeing this to some extent here, but especially in China, I mean, I'm reading these stories terrifies me the, the facial recognition. You know, in one study, they have facial recognition set up so that if you jaywalk, it recognizes you and then they have a dedicated twitter feed of like, hey, look, everybody, here's the jaywalker and it's just like shame culture and I do not want to live in that I'm not moving to that city. Before we wrap up. I have one last problem with invasion of privacy and this is from Farhan Manu, The New York Times columnist, talks about this very well, how it really enables discrimination. So there's this new gadget, that sort of a door. It's supposed to help you when people ring your doorbell. So, and the idea is if someone looks sketchy, then it'll alert you. But what is sketchy mean? Like that? It's sort of on, you know, it, it could lead very easily to racism. Because, you know, if you say, oh, this person looks a little sketchy, and he happens to be African American, then, every time right,
James Altucher 40:41
there's this sort of like a digital profiling aspect of this. Whoa, that's, that's worrisome.
AJ Jacob 40:46
So it's very worrisome. So yeah, maybe having more privacy and stopping this kind of thing. Will, will make for a fairer world.
James Altucher 40:56
Let me ask you this, because I have my opinion on this. Do you think in this current world, are we at the right spot of privacy in terms of laws in terms of reality, in terms of what you freely give in terms of what you are not aware you're giving? Or do you think we're too much in one direction? Or the other?
AJ Jacob 41:16
That is a great question. I would say it depends on the area. In some areas, we are so way out there, our privacy is invaded way too much. So for instance, my aunt, she puts in a fake birthdate. So she makes herself 35, instead of whatever she is 7075, because he hates getting the wrinkle cream adds, like it just depresses her. So they I think are bad for our mental health. On the other hand, if Nick Bostrom is right, and in 50 years, you know, your average person can make a pandemic in their kitchen that wipes out humanity, where I don't know the solution,
James Altucher 41:58
I kind of think we're at a good spot. But you have to be aware of it. And you have to you have to be paranoid, you have to assume Facebook is selling your data, because they are Yeah. You have to assume Google selling your data, because they are I mean, you could you so so you have to be aware that you have to decide, like I could use duck calm instead of Google, which is a search engine that doesn't track your data. Right. So I think we're at the right spot. I just think awareness of it is not at the right spot in so that probably needs to go way up. And we also privacy education needs to go up. Yeah. And then culturally, again, look at this shift from now to the 1890s, where even a billboard was questionable as to whether that was an invasion of privacy. Now, clearly, it's not. So this is a cultural definition that changes. But no matter what awareness is important, because there's so much information that we're giving away freely, that you need to be aware of the worst case scenario and that it can happen to you. And just be aware of it. Your opinions could be manipulated. Somebody could get hold of the Alexa data. So even if you can't change the settings, unplug Alexa when you're not using it. Yeah, that'll solve the problem.
AJ Jacob 43:06
So the biggest takeaway is that we got to get rid of billboards because they're invading my visual privacy. I love that. All right. So either everything is going to hell, or it's just fine as its love it.