The Evolving Leader

Restoring Our Sanity Online with Mark Weinstein

• Mark Weinstein • Season 7 • Episode 10

Share episode

To kick off 2025, we’re releasing a conversation that Evolving Leader co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender had with Mark Weinstein. Mark is a tech entrepreneur, contemporary thought leader, privacy expert and one of the inventors of social networking. His work around social media, privacy, AI, free speech antitrust and protecting children online is widely published in publications including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Fox, CNN and the BBC (to name but a few).

 Mark has been listed as one of the ‘Top 8 Minds in Online Privacy’ and his book ‘Restoring Our Sanity Online’ was published in September 2024.

In this conversation, Mark talks about the profound impact of social media on society, politics and well-being, highlighting the shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 where users became the product, leading to surveillance capitalism. 

This is an important listen.

Social:
Instagram           @evolvingleader
LinkedIn             The Evolving Leader Podcast
Bluesky           @evolvingleader.bsky.social
YouTube           @evolvingleader

 

The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.

Send a message to The Evolving Leader team

Jean Gomes:

Social media's influence on society, politics and our well being cannot be overstated. It has literally changed the world in the most profound of ways. Around 5 billion people, over 60% of the world's population, now spend their time there, and that number is only likely to grow faster in the coming years. It's an alternative reality for 30% of users who express their most extreme feelings and opinions. It's also a transformative business model harvesting our data in ways we're only really starting to comprehend. In this show, we're talking to one of the pioneers of social media, Mark Weinstein, about his concerns and what we can do to take back control. Tune in for an important conversation on the evolving leader you

Scott Allender:

Hey folks, welcome to The Evolving Leader,

Jean Gomes:

And I'm Jean Gomes. a show born from the belief that we need deeper, more accountable

Scott Allender:

How are you feeling today Mr. Gomes, what and more human leadership to confront the world's biggest challenges. I'm Scott Allender are you bringing with you today?

Jean Gomes:

I am bringing hope. That's what I'm bringing. I've had a redefinition of the word given an event I went to last week, which is making a big distinction between optimism and hope from a kind of generational perspective. And yeah, so I'm bringing hope. How about you, Scott, how you feeling? I'm ready to receive your hope. I need some hope. I'm feeling a bit activated. I'm feeling, I don't know when this is going to go up, but you know, we've we're facing a monumental election in the US next week, and I'm feeling a lot related to that, but I'm feeling along with that gratitude to be back with you today in the studio and excited to have the conversation we're about to have, because today we're joined by Mark Weinstein. Mark is a world renowned tech entrepreneur, contemporary thought leader, privacy expert, and one of the visionary inventors of social networking. His adventure in social media has lasted over 25 years through three award winning personal social media platforms enjoyed by millions of members worldwide. Mark is the author of several books, and today we're going to be speaking with him all about his most recent book, restoring our sanity online. And I can almost feel our listeners ears perk up just at the thought of that. His book asked the question, what would social media look like if it nourished our critical thinking, mental health, privacy, civil discourse and our democracy? Mark has been listed as one of the top eight minds in online privacy and was named privacy by design Ambassador by the Canadian government. He's also the inventor of 10 revolutionary US patents that disrupt the targeting and data collection underpinnings of surveillance capitalism. This is going to be an important conversation. Mark, welcome to The Evolving Leader.

Mark Weinstein:

Thank you, Scott, thank you, John. It's great to be with you guys. You know, you are such great leaders, teaching leaders. And you know, today, we want to talk to everybody, because everybody uses the web. Everybody knows about social media. Virtually all of us use some form of social media, and we've got to fix it. So this is a great conversation.

Jean Gomes:

Welcome to the show Mark. How are you feeling today?

Mark Weinstein:

You know, I'm just going to double down a little bit on the hope and gratitude. Because, you know, I love hope, and I think prayer thoughtful prayer is very important too, and I liken hope to being like prayer without action. So when you put hope and action together, magic happens. So let's go for magic. Excellent.

Jean Gomes:

Okay, cool. Well, let's allow our audiences to get to know you a little bit. Mark. What's the background to your story? And how did you come to focus on social media and surveillance capitalism. What's the journey you've been on?

Mark Weinstein:

It's fascinating everybody, because as we all walk through life, we're just, you know, attracted to and, you know, inventive with our own lives. And for me, it was 1997 in a hike with my 10 year old nephew on a family vacation. And we had started this dialog about, you know, start with Uncle Mark. He wouldn't be great if we could. And my nephew was just concerned about how we could all stay connected. We all were living all around the world, working, playing. And 10 minutes to them. We were talking about using the web, and we're not talking about email everybody. Because if you're old enough to remember email in 1997 and and don't worry if you're not, because it's the same, it's the same in 2024 so it's one dimensional. It's hard to figure out what the other person is really thinking. And it's in a word, almost dysfunctional. And so what we were looking at was, how can we use all this great new technology, you know, to share our lives together as a family and with our friends online, and 10 minutes in the conversation with my nephew, I looked at him, I said, I'm going to start a company. I just thought it was, what a great conversation. And this is how I got into social media. I went back to my home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I received a grant from the state government,$300,000 great offices. We built the largest commercial server infrastructure in the state of New Mexico. Bill Gates, by the way, had left New Mexico because they wouldn't fund him several years earlier. So when I went to the state master funding, they said, we let gates go. We're keeping you anyway. That's how it starts. And that's web one. And I built superfamily.com and superfriends.com and, you know, listen, there was plenty of technology back then. You know, the web was already eight or nine years old. The internet was now part of it, and it was an exciting time, and there weren't bots and there weren't trolls, and there wasn't boosted content, and there wasn't surveillance capitalism. This is web one.

Scott Allender:

So for our audience, let's, let's define a little bit sort of web one. It's sort of shortcomings, and then the birth of web two, and your involvement in all of that,

Mark Weinstein:

sure. Listen to me. Web one was pure capitalism. Pure capitalism is when you ideate, you come up with this product or service that serves people, serves your customer, and they love it, and they give you their business pure it's great capitalism. And that's really, yeah, in the free market, you gotta have the free market. So, you know, everybody's inventive, and you know, who's ever doing well, you know, gets the right solutions. You know, becomes the winners. So and interesting was called the new economy. So for our listeners, web one was, there was this whole catch phrase called the new economy. And the new economy was not based on revenue in that moment, because the whole idea of the internet, and you know, these services then had all these eyeballs, there was all new so the magic of web one, the the money of web one were eyeballs, and we called them eyeballs back then, instead of users, it was really, yeah, of course, you had members, but it was how many eyeballs you could get. And that was how you measured your success, how many users you had. But the investors weren't worried about revenue. Revenue would come later. First you had to grab as many users as possible. Now, web one lasted from about 98 to 2001 in the middle of 2001 you know, investing is emotional, and the emotions changed. There was a panic. There was a panic, and it was supported by the media about, wait a minute. You know, we've got these sites. Have all these users, but how they can make money? And we're all dependent on the investment capital, because we had users and super family and super friends had plenty, but nobody had revenue. So if you read about the history of web one, it implodes. They call it the bubble bursting in 2000 1000s, of companies went out of business almost overnight, because without investor capital, you didn't have a company. We were still working on, how were we going to monetize those eyeballs? So that's web one. And you know, super family, Super Friends, we all said, super familiar, super teams up gone overnight, just like everybody else. So that was the end. And this is where you read about the bubble burst. Web one is over. Now. Web two starts, you know, there's a washout for a while, a washout lasting. And then, you know, in social media, you look at places like MySpace comes up in this new era called Web two, Facebook comes up right behind them in this new era called Web two. But it's, it's MySpace first. You know, it's big one, of course, there's Friendster and others. And by the time in the mid 2000s 2004 5678, Google, as a search engine is becomes big. Facebook becomes big. It's before they were met everybody. It's Facebook, MySpace, you know, goes way up, but MySpace has a fundamental error that they never fix, and it starts with the word my, because they missed the week. So MySpace was all about me. And even if you read about Taylor Swift, you know, she got her social media, you know, sea legs on MySpace. That's where she really started to get her following. But we needed a we there, and this is where I Facebook came and ate my spaces lunch. And by 2007 2008 MySpace is, you know, really starting to crater, but by 2010 2011 MySpace is essentially gone, sold for $35 million and never resurrected in any meaningful way. But anyway, here's what happens. So users become data in web two so, and the masterminds figured out that, wait a minute, we're getting all this information on our users. And you know, there's advertising. Well, let's make advertising very effective, and, you know, very connected to our users. So what happened was, this is the birth in the what I call the data ecosystem, these massive data companies, which include companies like Facebook and Google, but there are also larger ones that aggregate all of it, and all of a sudden you have a data packet of 1000s of pages, And then you've got all these psychologists, data analyst and surveillance capitalism is born in a way that was never before, sure your credit card company the old days used to know what you bought because, you know, actually you're using their card so, but now instantaneously, you Were being targeted, and, you know, sold by so here's, here's the shift in Web, two users became the product sold to the customer. So users are no longer the customer in Web, two users are the product, advertisers, marketers, political operatives, anybody willing to pay to target is now the customer. The user is the product, and that, my friends, is surveillance capitalism, and that's where we got off track in a rather massive way.

Jean Gomes:

So we've had the human rights lawyer Susan Allegre has joined us a couple of times on the show to talk about the risks to our freedom to think as a opposed to our freedom of speech, which is a much more profound thing, because how social media can interpret and then be manipulated to tell other people how to treat us. And what you're you're talking about here, you talk about how social media platforms have been employed all these psychologists and data analysts to work together to manipulate us in this way so that as the product, we are more attractive to the advertisers. Can we look at the research you've been doing specifically in that area?

Mark Weinstein:

So it the there is so much research on this. Now here's, I want to speak to this idea of free, you know, the freedom of thought. Because, you know, fast forward to today, and this has been, you know, this the data for a long time. Half of Facebook's users get their news on Facebook. Now, who controls the news that they're getting? Facebook does. So I want to look at this idea of critical thinking. When you're no longer selecting the news that you're receiving, you might still be asking and looking, but they're feeding you. They're feeding you ideas. They're feeding they're looking at what they think you're interested in, and then they're targeting and manipulating you, either to think something different or just to pigeonhole there. So you really, when you look at the idea of the freedom of thinking, you can't really have freedom of thinking if your mind is being manipulated by the data you're being served. And this has been the way it's been for a while. Facebook's algorithms were come very astute over the years, even 10 years ago, very astute at targeting you, manipulating your purchase decisions, your self images. You know this idea of teen suicides and things like that. This has been going on for quite a while, the harm of social media. But when you fast forward, gentlemen, to the advent of AI, which is really algorithms on steroids, because they're always quote self learning. But now you know you the whole algorithm idea is supercharged with this artificial intelligence that can learn on the fly faster than anything in the history of humankind. So at this point, it's it's anticipating and knowing what you're going. Think before you think it. And I wrote about this in I didn't write about I spoke about this in my TED Talk in 2020 the rise of surveillance capitalism, a nine minute talk, by the way, everybody. So if you want to really fast primer on surveillance capitalism, it's a nine minute TED Talk. Boom. But Facebook was already buying up companies that could anticipate your thoughts before you think them, and that was all through this advent of AI. So when we talk about what's going on in the world today, and of course, the bots and the trolls, this gets complex in terms of the question we have Nano, especially on a show like this, is, how do we restore critical thinking? Because that's where we're at, and we're being interrupted and disrupted. Democracy is being disrupted and our brains are being interrupted, so you know, and part of it is, and you can, you can split it, split the egg, and F put it is products and services. So the AI is being really intelligent about figuring out what you need, what you want, what your worries and concerns and emotions are, so they can serve you, the product, the marketing, everything that makes a social network money or a search engine money, you know, etc, so. But the other piece is that it's looking at what you're thinking and then selling to the political operatives and others who want to manipulate your thought process and have you vote a certain way, or have you hate somebody you know, I like to say, Scott, you mentioned the United States and the elections in this country. I like to say, we don't hate each other in America, but we've been manipulated to so and this is where surveillance capitalism has served adverter adversaries, adversarial countries that you know bots and trolls remarkably well. The service that surveillance capitalism provides to people who want to target and manipulate your thoughts people want to disrupt democracy. This is medicine, and we've got a big problem.

Scott Allender:

So what can we do? Because I building on that the democracy piece, which is obviously very front of mind. You know, there's a Pew research paper that found that 64% of social people found that social media is bad for democracy. So they're agreeing that it's bad for democracy, yet it's not really slowing down engagement, right? So we kind of know we're being manipulated, manipulated. We know that the algorithm is sending us the stuff we want to see, and then perpetuates a belief, perpetuates divisiveness, all the things you're talking about. And it's not really slowing down engagement, even though there's a growing awareness of the problem. Love to get your thoughts on that

Mark Weinstein:

well, and let's, let's hit on that first piece as the foundation. It doesn't slow down engagement, because it's actually enhancing it. At this point, on almost every interview I do, I'm hearing about the parents and grandparents. Never mind the kids are all addicted, but the parents who can't put x down can't put because the algorithm is so effective. Because remember, everybody, how it works is keeping you engaged, keeping you on your screen, and the screens addictive already, and the AI is so smart it can just keep you hooked. Story after story knows exactly where to take you next. Keep you hooked. You know, with the outrage and with the whatever it is. Now there's great news. Scott Jones, there's great news. Everybody, fixing this is not that hard, you know. And this is where Joe, we talk about the hope and the action together. Because, you know, what we need and what we want is for the free market to be restored. You know, we want the free market to work again, because when I compare big, AG, big energy and big tech, and the word big, really kind of means monopoly, big. And so what happens in a capitalism is, in the early stages of a new market, a new market opportunity, there's a ton of free market competition, which is really healthy. And then what can often happen is the early successors find investors, because investors like to bet unsafe bets. So in the case of big tech, Facebook, you know, of course, Myspace got successful, and Murdoch bought it for 700 million bucks, a lot of money at the time. Eventually, he sold it for 35 million when, you know, he didn't help it evolve, and their team didn't know how to evolve it properly. But Facebook was funded with hundreds of millions of dollars, and. In, just like Google was, and then they box out the competition. And this is why, you know, free market democracies really require the government to regulate and break up the monopolies to keep the free market system working. And that's part of the American free market system. The government has very strict antitrust regulations, and in fact, Google was just found guilty, finally, of antitrust infringements in a huge way that this, the data was massive against Google. But so well, we need the government to help here, get the free market working again, and they're working on it. They have meta in their crosshairs, and I've actually been deposed, been subpoenaed and testified in that case. But also there's some simple fixes. And we did this on me. We my last social network, which I left about three years ago to write the book, because me, we is not big enough and strong enough. Can't solve the problem by itself, but we need a real you know, we need a lot of help, and a lot of people taking action, but no boost of content. For starters, that's going to take care of, you know, the bots and trolls on x now they can get a blue check, because bots and trolls are funded often by adversarial countries, Russia, China, etc, and they have, you know, 10s of 1000s of them, if not hundreds of 1000s of, you know, bots and trolls and people behind them. And of course, they can all be programmed to have a credit card, to plug it in to x to get a blue check, and then their content gets boosted. So we really want to make it so that the user chooses what they're following. It's got to be user choice all the time, user choice, user choice. No posted content, timeline, order, news feeds, data portability, which is coming Sir Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the web, everybody. He has invented a new system called pots, so that we will control our data. Not you know, it will no longer be centralized in the huge data ecosystem where it's all aggregated, and we'll have total control over it, and we'll decide who gets it, and then we'll pull it back. Now, the government is looking at regulations for data portability so that we can, you know, because right now, if you want to, you leave Facebook, let's say you go to me, where you go to Mastodon, you know, you go somewhere else, and then you tell all your friends to come there's a problem. It's called the network effect. They're all in meta. They're all somewhere else, and they cannot download their content easily, and even if they can, have you noticed that no one ever built an uploader for your Facebook content that you downloaded, because it's impossible, because Facebook's engineers can change it the next day, if anybody ever built one. At me, we, when I was a CEO, we built in a uploader when Google Plus went out of business, so people could download their content from Google Plus in that data packet, and then our engineers engineered an uploader so we could parse and put that up into a new me, we account for you, put the data in the right places, your photos, your text, your content, all that stuff. No one's ever built an uploader for Facebook doesn't exist because, first of all, the packet is so messy, and their engineers can change the packet anytime they want, if anybody try. But with data portability and pods and these are coming, everybody, we will be able to say, you know, meta, I'm sorry, but you've lost your right to have my business, and the whole family decides, and then all family moves somewhere else, just like that. Now that will encourage the free market, that'll help the free market come back. So this is what, and this is Tim has been hard work on this. And also, you know, there's something called Web three. And you've probably, many of you have probably heard this phrase web three, and there's still a lot of mystification about what is it, you know, and it's involved with Blockchain, and what is blockchain? And then cryptocurrencies are there, and the book has three chapters on web three. So web three has a lot of promises about data portability, data privacy, fair, moderation, safety, anonymity, unfortunately, most of the promises are unfulfilled. And web three has a lot of billionaires in the backing of it, Andreessen, Horowitz, Jack Dorsey, you know, people that are massively wealthy. So it's not a necessarily, really the democratic system it's supposed to be. So the book I talk about web four, we got a catapult, so we've got to move into a new era, restoration networking. I call it restoring our sanity online, of course, is the book. But you know where we come together, where users, you know, are a big part. Remember, Facebook makes money because of us, because of its users. You. Same thing with X, same thing with SNAP, same thing with this and snap. And you know, tick tock is its own animal, which would require a separate conversation, because tick tock is owned by the Chinese and the Chinese government is involved with tick tock in a very deep way, which is why you saw our government say several months ago that the American version it got must be sold to an American company. There's there these issues. But here's the thing, God and John there there's hope, there's hope, and there's hope right now, because there are places you can start to move to, and also for your kids and everything. Because, you know, social media is devastating for our children. And you know, remember when I say kids, if you're a 30 year old, you grew up with MySpace in Facebook. So you know, our kids are now getting older, and you can see the damage. And some of some, of you are now parents who have young kids, and you know, really, the bottom line is, every social media executive I know doesn't let their kids on social media. So you know, you really have to hold them back, and there will be new regulations around that. And when you're ready, guys, I think we ought to talk about privacy and anonymity, because there's some solutions here that are really critical that we fix social media.

Jean Gomes:

So before we get on to that, you know, I'm thinking here that we've a whole generation has been taught. You know what Kevin Kelly said? You know, the price of social media is transparency. If you're going to get the benefits of social media, you have got to give it what it wants, which is all your information, all your attention. And you're saying that technologies are now possible to be able to keep you from becoming the product, and make the social media the product that you experience and you have control about what, what do we need to start doing immediately as individuals, to to kind of be part of encouraging that to happen.

Mark Weinstein:

Great question, great question. And really we almost need to parse it into, what do we need to start doing for ourselves and our children? Because, you know this is critical, and you know, you guys, we've all heard of this great book by Jonathan, hate the anxious generation, because what we're perpetrating on our kids by allowing these companies to, you know, manipulate and control their minds and plant ideas and seeds in their minds that we would never have. We have to address that. And so, you know, one of the things that we want to do is role model. And you start by role modeling. This also takes care of yourself. The first thing is, the screen is addictive. So much so that in Sweden, they just came out with a the Pediatric Association just came out with a very strong recommendation endorsed by the Swedish government, that kids, until they're two years old, don't see a screen at all, like you don't use your phone in front of them at all. You don't let them see a television screen on at all, because the data is that the screen is addictive, and if you're you know, like me, Well, I grew up with televisions and telephones. You know, my parents had to regulate those, just like we need to regulate today. So we want to get back to no phones at the dinner table, no phones in the bedroom for everybody, you know, think simple things and also start looking at your time your phones can actually, you know, give you a report. Apple will be apple, apple. You know, iPhones are very good at this, telling you how much time you're spending every day on your phone, on certain apps, etc. So number one is you want to actually learn to limit your time. Number two is you want to start, you know, with your kids. Anyhow, you want to delay, and we're seeing this, you know, in the United States, the schools are also banning phones in schools right through high school. You want to delay the age that your kid gets a smartphone. You know, get them a flip phone. Get them a phone that takes cameras and can text you and talk to you. You know you want to make sure you're being careful about, you know, how they use their phones. Now, what you guys can do, also, what we can all do, is look at the apps that we're using. So, you know, by the way, we should talk about turning off the metadata on your photos. So most of you don't realize that every picture you take on your phone is stamped. It's stamped with the time, it's stamped with the date, it's stamped with the location, and that stamp lives there forever. So anybody who has any good. Sense of how to find it. Can find it once that photos out in the world. So it's really easy to turn this off. You can do this right now. Go to your phones privacy and security settings, go to the camera settings in there and turn off the timestamp, turn off the metadata. It's very easy to find on both iPhone and Androids, so that's something you just want to do immediately. You don't want people to know where you are when you're there. You don't want people to know where your kids are, you know, where, when, etc. This is so easy. So immediately do that, and then start to watch for parents. You really need to watch the content, because, you know, tick tock has a mission, tick tock. And I apologize to all of you who are maybe also making money on tick tock, because I understand that many of us Americans have our our businesses on tick tock. But tick tocks purpose with our children. If you put your 13 year old tick tock for the first time. Just take a look at the news feed. Tick tock built for them, and then you'll understand what I'm saying. They are muddying the waters. They are not teaching your kids about science, technology, engineering and math. They're gonna, you know, they're gonna throw violence, they're gonna throw sex, they're gonna throw all kinds of junk at the young lines of our children, and then they're going to do their best if through the feed, kids are going to want to become social media stars. And you know what? There's not enough room in the world for every kid that wants to be a social media star in China, the same app has a different name. Is the content is way different, and kids are limited to 40 minutes a day. So think about that grown ups, if China limits Tiktok to 40 minutes a day for all their kids, it's time for us to do the same for our kids right here. But we've got to do it because the Chinese government is doing it there. You know, at 40 minutes, that thing times out, we're going to have to help time it out for our kids. This is really important, and it's not that YouTube is that much better, so you're really gonna want to start to work with the controls. And also remember, kids do what we do, not what we say. Now listen, I know I've got young kids, the last thing they're going to do is, you know, do anything that I won't do myself, and they will set, you know, how kids are, they're going to second guess you, and they're going to, you know, they're going to flag it for you, right? They're going to put it in your face. But Daddy, you're, you know, so and listen, it's good discipline. And then, you know, guys, this is simple. Some of these are not with the phone. It's like, put the phone down, take your kids outside and do something with them. Take a walk, have a catch, do whatever it is. You know, all our kids are fascinated. Go look at insects. Whatever your kids into doesn't have to be athletic. It's just got to be stump, something that connects them to the real world. So you really want to look at, you know, a structure for connecting your kids to the real world and yourself. You know, watch the moon rise, watch his sunro watches, you know, all those things that you know. Like you look, oh, look at that. And then you're done. No, no pause. There are many things we can do, including voting with you know, where do we go? What apps do we choose for ourselves? What do we let our kids see that we're watching, etc? I hope that's helpful, because there's so many things the book has super helpful, punch lists, punch lists, you know, of how we, you know, get rid of Boston trolls. You know, like 15 things you can do with your kids right now. You

Scott Allender:

that in a moment. I think so super helpful know, with yourselves, you know. And also there is, listen, I for me, the advice on parenting and I the how to set the just want everybody know. I love social media. You heard the story at the beginning of the podcast about how it started. I love the connectedness. We can stay connectedness and the evolving leader. What these gentlemen are all about, I mean, connectedness is everything, authenticity, love. You know, this is really the best use of the web. And we want to get back to those uses, not to disenfranchising, not to disrupting, not to hating so and this is where we can, you know when you're ready. We can talk about the gladiator battle between privacy and anonymity and how we're going to fix that. controls in the phone and limit the date stamps and all those things super, super useful. And you talked about how even CEOs of social media companies are like, you know, preventing their own children from coming on to the very thing that is their livelihood. And I'm thinking about organizations who have dependencies on social media for a. Um, their organizations for, you know, marketing all these things. What are the watch outs and the strategies and the suggestions you have for for us now, you know, we're not at web four. We're in this current reality where Instagram and Facebook and Twitter are kind of the, you know, vehicles of the day for much commerce. What is the practical advice you have for leaders? Listening right now, going, I'm on social media all day because it's my job. What do I need to think about?

Mark Weinstein:

You know, listen, and we understand this, right? Because, you know, in capitalism, advertising is a critical component. By the way. I am a pure capitalist. I love capitalism. I think it's a great economic system. I think it gets muddied when we get into monopoly power that, you know, squeezes out the free market. So free market capitalism is brilliant because it allows us to be so innovative and creative with our thinking. And I'm an entrepreneur. I got my first patent, you know, geez, over 30 years ago. So I love ideating about how we can make the world better and more interesting and serve people and for the marketers, listen, that's the reality. That's the medium today. It's no longer the newspaper or the you know or the billboard, as much as it's you know, getting you know, one to one with your customers. And you know, we understand this. And so, you know that marketer is kind of stuck in a box, you know, that's a different, you know, someone who's working for Procter and Gamble or, you know, let's say you've invented a new sports drink or something really cool, healthy, or, you know, in advance. And my first patent was on a bicycle accessory, you know. So, so we're always ideating, and now we've got to reach the market. So I understand this. And so for you, you know, first of all, you're not doing anything wrong. You know, you just you've got to deal with your reality. That's a different reality than someone who's perpetrating, you know, a negative, false news story, in order to create hostility and change an opinion about something. So if you feel good about your product and you feel good that it's serving, this is really about ethical capitalism. This is where the B Corp movement and the conscious capitalist movement really come into play. So you know, if you feel, even if your company is not a B Corp or a conscious capitalism Corporation, but you're operating with with good principles, you know you don't feel good about yourself and what you're doing, because that's your current reality. Now, you know, it's as they mentioned. I have actually 11 patents now that are assigned to scruples, Incorporated me, we, which is me, we parent company. But you know on how we can personalize and anonymize advertising for people so it's not dependent on their data at on all. And I've been building this portfolio since 2012 because I was interviewed on Fox Business the day before Facebook went public. And I said, guys, they've got this wrong. This is creepy, and people are going to figure this out. At first we thought, wow, that's cool. They know I need dog food, and they know I need some curated dog Chow. You know, great. How cool is that there's the my coupon. It became creepy overnight when it was like, Oh, they're reading everything I'm writing. They're they know everything about me. They know, you know how old my dog is, and they know everything. And they being the data ecosystem. So it got creepy fast. So that's that's different. And so I've been working for years on a very important patent portfolio on how we can serve advertising that, because we need to, you know, we've got to reach our customers, but how we can do it where the customer is actually involved and completely anonymized. I mean, you know, so that there's no way for a hack to break that anonymity unless the customer breaks it themselves intentional. Gives you their information intentional. So anyway, but for those listen for the corporate world that I'm an MBA. I went to UCLA. I have an MBA, you know, and my undergrad is in philosophy and sociology. I mean, this is all about ethical capitalism, by the way. I got to see the only see in my graduate education, guys. And this is one of those little stories. Was in my ethics class, business ethics. Okay, I got to tell you, everybody listening. I got to just come clean. I got to see in my ethics class, only see in my graduate school history, and I'll tell you why, because the professor taught us every day to follow the law, and every day I argued with him. That wasn't enough. If the company's doing something wrong, but it's legal, you still shouldn't be doing it. So he gave me a seat for that. I wear that badge of honor proudly.

Jean Gomes:

You've been you've been making up for ever since that's right

Emma Sinclair:

Here on the evolving leader. We're committed to stretching the leadership conversation in every episode, and we invite you to help spread the word if you've learnt or been inspired by something you've heard on this podcast, the chances are that others would too. Please consider sharing your favorite episode on your network, on LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram. Thanks for listening.

Jean Gomes:

So let's go back to this gladiatorial battle then talk to us about that.

Mark Weinstein:

All right. So listen, everybody. Democracy one of the prizes for humankind in democracies is the right to privacy. So and this is very important. And you know, when you look at the American evolution of the democracy and the Declaration of Independence, all the reason was that, you know, the the British would love to respect because they're one of our greatest allies and friends. But you know, the British soldiers were kind of camping in the homes of the colonial colonists, and people were really offended by that. There was no privacy. So we've evolved, and the web, with the development of the web, anonymity became a prize so you could terrorize and bully and and still, you know, body control, but also, human beings could do lots of terrible things on the web and be completely anonymous. So here's what's happened. What's happened is we have this rather disrupted where, you know, a 13 year old kid can be, you know, targeted by a 50 year old creep who's being anonymous. And you know, a 10 year old kid can tell Facebook that they're really 23 and set up an account. Now, here's here, here's here's the catch. They already know who we are. We're going to start with this premise. Now, I am one of the world's leading privacy advocates. I've argued against user ID systems for over a decade. You know, 15 years I've been on government committees where I've said, You guys are loony. There's no way we we should ever do this. Alright? Now it's 2024 they know who we are. The government, the data ecosystem, Google, meta, you know the black, the black, the dark web. They all know who we are. Cambridge, analytically, 220, data on two, 20 million Americans. Our data is there. They all know who we are. So why don't we throw away this idea that we're anonymous. Let's just throw it away because it's not real anymore. It's a fantasy, and it doesn't work. It's harming our kids. It's creating massive problems. Bots and trolls are destroying our democracy. Let's have a user ID verification system. I've changed my mind, and I've changed my mind, because they know who we are already. So let's stop pretending, and let's fix this problem. So the 13 year old kid is not going to be fished by a 50 year old creep, and a 10 year old kid is not going to get on social media because they pretended they were 23 and the bots and trolls are not going to be effective because they're not real, and this is going to take a while to sort out. This is where you use AI for the good guys, because this is going to be very sophisticated. But look, financial services companies already have these things. This is not a new idea. And even MIT and other places say this is pretty easy to implement, and it doesn't have to be the government. Just have to be the government has to give sort of a stamp of approval to make sure that the verification is real, so that if you're not 13, you're not on social media. Now the US Surgeon General says it should be 16. I agree, but here's my asterisk, that's never gonna work. So let's keep kids off social media until they're 13. Let's get good user ID for all of us, verification. And then let's make sure until a kid is 18, they can't be targeted, no boosted content, nothing manipulative. They can only connect with their peers, etc. And but this is all doable. It's all doable, and we do have some good legislation in the United States, the kids Online Safety Act, the American Privacy Rights Act, and Copa two, which are all bipartisan, which have all either gotten through committee. Copa two and cosa the kids all day Safety Act have already passed the Senate bipartisan, and we've got to get the House to pass these so we need the government to help. And in my book, there's an appendix about what we need the government to do. And of course, then there's all the stuff we do, like keep your kids off social media, stop giving your kids a phone when you. In a restaurant, because it's an easy way for you to have a good time. Forget that you got kids involved. I promise you, you know, unless it's a really long drive in our house, the rule is, if the drive is less than an hour and a half, you don't get a screen. If the drive is more than an hour and a half, you get 30 minutes on, 30 minutes off. You gotta talk to dad, you got to play games. You got to look out the window. We got to see what's going on.

Jean Gomes:

How far away do you think we are from achieving that? What are the obstacles to it? Because the the pressure from the monopoly to not do these things is huge. I'm guessing

Mark Weinstein:

Jean, Jean, listen guy, everybody, what Jean saying is exactly right. You know when the US government surprisingly beat Google just recently, about six weeks ago now, and I wrote about this in Newsweek and explained why and how what Google had done wrong and all the evidence that supported the government. Because Google has billions of dollars to pay its lawyers, and the government doesn't. That's not the budget for the Federal Trade Commission, meta has literally billions of dollars to pay lobbyists and lawyers. The government doesn't. So, John, you're making a very good point. And of course, the government doesn't, and the legislative bodies are dependent on, you know, funding from these sources, from tech and from other big investors, who, you know, who, who fund their campaigns. So the fact that some of these are moving in a bipartisan way, what I see now, John, is that there's some momentum now, after the US elections, I think the first quarter, we'll see, and then we'll see, you know, who is really, you know, going to help the kids? If it's a Trump or a Harris? We don't know the answer to this yet, because we also don't know the makeup of Congress yet, and so we've got to see this. So you're right, John, there's interference, which is why it took this long to get Google into the courtroom and find them guilty of antitrust, and now there's going to be decisions about how to, you know, break up their struggle, because Google also, if you're Googling for a product on Google, what one of the things that came up was, every time in the search, their results, the top result is going to be something that they get a piece of the action on. It doesn't look like Google's involved in it, but that's how it's working. And then Google muscled out competition by making deals with Apple and others about who uses their search engine. So Google just muscled everybody out. And then, like meta, they bought out competitors. So you know, even Google Maps, right? They bought ways. They buy everybody you know, or put them out of business. Same thing with meta. Why is there only snap and me? We, according to the Federal Trade Commission in the complaint against Facebook, they're the only two personal social networks left. The other ones are not personal. They're not about connecting your friends and your family at all. So where are the other ones? Well, if you're a monopoly, you buy everybody out and you crush the ones you don't buy out. So John, good point. It's encouraging that we're seeing, you know, and what it requires is bipartisanship to stand up to the big monopolies and say, Hold on, guys, hold on. And the reason, in this case, it works different than standing up to big ag or big energy is because the legislators see the impact on their children. They see it directly, so they see it on their family members. And that's different. And so it becomes personal.

Scott Allender:

Excellent. Well we'll put the link to the book in the show notes, and, somewhat ironically, advertise it all over our social media. But I thank you so much for your insights. I really, I really eye opening with with so much of your research, your book is an easy read. I really enjoyed it. So thank you for coming on and sharing just a part of it. And folks, we barely scratched the surface, so do make sure you stop and order your copy today, and thank you for your time, and remember folks Until next time the world is evolving. Are you?

People on this episode

Head Shot

Jean Gomes

Co-host
Head Shot

Scott Allender

Co-host