Let’s settle it: Is your phone actually listening to you?

Have you checked in on the FBI agent in your phone lately? Winter can be tough, you know. They could probably use a muffin basket or something.

I’m only kind of kidding because there isn’t actually an FBI agent in your phone, but there might as well be given the incredible amount of data that you offer up every time you paw through Instagram to find your high school nemesis or type in “perciatelli vs bucatini” on Google.

This week on Thinking Is Cool, I explore the depths of surveillance capitalism we’ve willingly and unwillingly submitted ourselves to. It’s pretty astounding how much we don’t know about the information we hand over in the form of anonymized data. 

It might not seem like a big deal when you think about it in the context of just yourself—I mean, realistically I’m 1 of about a million carbon copies of girlies in their late 20s who like to read and also like to dress like Claudia Schiffer in the ’90s and also have a fondness for matching sets and also think maybe snail mucus will cure their skin problems. But when you think about the ways the data we may or may not care about can be weaponized en masse to literally shape society…things get kind of scary.

This episode explores those fears. But it also offers solutions and considerations that were entirely new to me, a power internet user, when I heard them first. Listen and send to the friend in your life who’s holding out on Instagram Reels because TikTok is a Chinese-owned entity.

Important deets:

• My guests are Nik Sharma, head of Sharma Brands and Twitter’s go-to DTC Guy, and Robert Reeve, a privacy tech expert whose thread on data-driven ads and surveillance went viral last year. They’re both incredibly intelligent.
• Get your Massican here. My favorites are the Annia and the Sauvignon Blanc.
• It would be great if you shared this episode! And even better if you shared this episode and then rated and reviewed the show. And even better than that? Sharing, rating, reviewing, and subscribing to my newsletter. Do that here.