Cease . Guest ing well, thanks for asking. By the word hacking, i mean a playful rethinking of a subject as compare today a nefarious computer hacker, and that has to do with the book that i wrote. The logic is we can rethink happiness so its not just about mood, and we can also measure happiness by using emerging technology, and thats also where the app in paren the cease comes into play. How you can be accountable, how you can be a provider and how you can be proactive. So it has to do with a subject matter i cover in the book. Host whats the role of technology in creating happiness . Guest well, i think its, the first thing is that technology is so much a part of our lives now in one sense, it has to a certain extent become us. Outside the idea of sort of cyborg questions, we have a fake limb thats wifi enabled which is pretty possible, the logic is that our iphones and smartphones are such a huge part of our lives, to ignore technology or say im just going to ignore it, i think for most of us in this day and age is pretty hard to do. I recently read a study that said of the women surveyed in this sur say there were about 3,000 people almost half of them, 48 , said they would rather skip sex for a month than go without their smartphone. So my logic in the book is lets acknowledge all the wonderful tools that are being used largely right now by advertisers and marketers to track our lives, to headache sure that our data make sure that our data is safe, but use the sensors and the other aspects of these phones so we can actually recognize and study the patterns of our well being, our mood and actually optimize or increase our happiness. And, again, not just our mood, but our intrinsic, longterm welling being. Host how tracked are we . Guest we are tracked [laughter] ubiquitously, intimately and all the time. Like, i think its easier just to assume there are very few times that were not tracked. By that, most people will say to me a lot of times, you know, i read a lot for Technology Magazines like marble and the Guardian Mashable and the guardian, and theyll say, well, it doesnt t affect me because im not on facebook. Look, first of all, the numbers Something Like 45 Million People whose photos are on facebook and who can be facially identified through tagging, and they may not even be on facebook. So to say like my activity and my behavior that i know about means that im not being tracked is, in general, factually just untrue. So its best to sort of acknowledge whats there. Secondly, outside of things like mobile technology and our laptops which were most more used to this idea of cookie data as we type in our computer and go to a web site, were aware that we leave a track of our digital activity through these cookies. A lot of people dont understand the concept of the internet of things or whats also known as you ubiquitous computing. And what that means is sensors in the world around us or things like surveillance cameras as well that track our lives. One example that people are pretty familiar with is Something Like an ezpat. You drive from i live in jersey, so you drive from jersey to new york, go 70 miles an hour and get automatically deducted from your credit card, and thats an hfid are fid rfid technology. Thats just one little piece of my identity when im being tracked. Now, again, knowingly, and ostensibly ive given permission for that. But we are tracked all the time. Host john havens, you write in your new book i see day and technology when leveraged via informed choice as being instrumental toward insightful living. Guest i do, and thanks for the quote. I talk in the book about if we want our lives to count, then we have to take account of our lives. And the book was really inspired by the loss of my dad. And my dad was a psychiatrist for over 40 years, and what i realized in dealing with my grief be over his loss is that i really wanted to continue his work. What he did is he sat in front of people, next to people, and we tracked it once. I think it was 50,000 hours that he sat face to face. And what he did is he gave people the chance to take a measure of their lives. He gave them permission to reflect on their lives. Now, in their case, you know, they were struggling sometimes with some pretty serious stuff. But all of us in our lives, i want to get per higgs in one sense permission in one sense for people to realize that when you track your life through Something Like a paper journal or certainly through these amazing tools or the new trend of quantified self, the logic is you get to see all the aspects of your life you may not have seen before. And with data, a lot of our lives thats been invisible becomes visible, and we can use it for ourselves. Host what do you mean by quantified self . Guest sure. So quantified self is a movement that was created, most people credit gary wolfe from wired magazine. And be by movement, i mean its actually been around the world now globally, all these meetup groups where geeks like me come to meetups and talk about things theyve been studying in their lives. And a lot of times these are Data Scientist thes or programmers and scientists or programmers, and i have great admiration for the skill a lot of Data Scientists have which is the ability to track your life with some type of general hypothesis. But the hypothesis is more to give it direction versus already having a bias for why to track. So ill give you a for instance. Most of us, you know, track our weight, you know, myself included. You track your weight because youre upset, you know . Oh, i put on too many pounds over the holidays or something. So youre already starting in one sense from place of bias, and youre assuming that i have to lose weight or x. A good Data Scientist, what they tend to do is they take a step back and say, well, i want to optimize my health, and i will be healthier, yes, if i lose this weight, but i also want to do behavior where i can track other elements besides just this weight with loss. So, for instance, they may get a fitbit or a jawbone and measure how their sleep affects their eating. So instead of just getting on the scale or going to the gym, they may realize if they go to sleep every night at 10 00 for two months, they start to lose weight. And theyre doing that through data. And that logic means you can start to analyze your life, see where theres patterns. The patterns are critical. And you have to give yourself two or three months depending on what youre studying. But you can start to see these insights and say, well, if i change these Different Things here, here and here, i can optimize my well being, my health or even my mood. Host john havens, how many different entities or companies have information about us . Guest well, peter, its a great question. Its, again, its easier to say in terms of companies that have information about us, its probably faster to list the companies that dont have information about us. And, first of all be, thats either none or, you know, im being a little bit hyperboll bic, but it depends on which company were talking about, sort of what vertical n. The states especially theres this whole industry of data brokers, and day data brokers, many of them doing great work that we as consumers rely on. You know, information about sort of an aggregate picture of our identity. And when that data is made available to us, i have no problem with data brokers. But in the states ahone, its about a trillion dollar annual industry, and right now as of today unless ive missed something in the past couple weeks the ftc has sanctioned about ten of these largest data brokers ors and these industries right now today, if i write to, say, an axiom or a Different Company that that has this datad ask them for a full copy of what theyve collected about me, they are not mandated to send that to me. Its the same type of environment that we were in back about 20 years ago before i forget the name of the act, but with the credit card side of things, Credit Card Companies didnt have to give us information about what weve purchased. Even if we pay them. So when theres an acolluded sense of all of this data thats being collected about he, about you, about us that we dont have access to about one particular part of the culture, i think its a very dangerous precedent, and its something im really fighting to have people understand. This is your data. You should get to manage it and use it so, again, im not trying to dictate how people would use it, but right now theres no common standards or policies even about how any of those companies can or should collect right now. Host john havens, these ten or so data brokers that you speak of, how do they get their information . Do they buy it from a facebook, from a google . Guest it varies, and different data brokers, you know, i can speak in general terms how they get it. Sometimes theyll purchase it from third parties, a lot of times they might have cookies, you know, data this taken thats taken originally from a source, say a browser, a web browser, and theyve just gotten really good at aggregating all that day and putting it into almost sound bites for companies so they can then more effectively, if thats the right word to choose, more specifically target with behavioral targeting. But if you see sometimes kind of the inner workings of how these data brokers put us together in terms of not a demographic like me, white male, 45 who lives near new york city, but listing a person like hasnt paid their bills in the past six months or deadbeat, theres this real, horrible, very icky sense of how these data brokers parcel our identities out to the world. And, again, theyre broadcasting our identities in the ways that they choose to do to the companies they sell to. Host you write that trust ranks high in importance for the happiness economy. Can we trust these data brokers . Guest i dont trust data brokers. And, again, its i dont like to unilaterally demonize an industry, because thats not fair, and and also its uninformed to just say theyre evil, you know . And the word evil and the word trust, theyre both tough words because theyre so subjective fending on the angle youre taking. But i i will say i think transparency is key for me in the sense of when a company, a day Broker Company wont give a person access to data about who they are. First of all, if they dont give any access, then i think, first of all, theres an industry thats ripe for disruption. And again, its about a trillion dollar annual industry. Actually according to the New York Times in 2013, i think its 1. 1 billion in revenue they made. So that means that whole industry that are using the data about our lives, theres this opportunity potentially for us to sell our data directly to brands. And, again, its not just a question of the transaction. Its not, oh, i might get 10 a month for my data, although theres a lot of Great Companies doing that type of work. But its more this idea of the insight, as i mentioned. Where are we sharing that data . When . How is it affecting our lives . We should get to have those insights. Its how we uniquely live in the real and virtual world. Host in your book hacking happiness why your personal data counts and how tracking it can change the world, you tell the story of finishing federico. Who is that . Guest i wish i had met him. I believe hes an nyu student, or at least he was at the time i wrote the book. He did a really fun thing which is he put his own personal data up on a kickstarter account. What that means is i think it was for a month, maybe longer, he tracked his action. He had a web cam pointed at himself. He tracked all his cookie data, and he had beautiful visualizations about his life. And the point he was making is, look, if everyone else is going to track me anyway and make money off of my actions again, my unique portrait and identity in the world, digitally or even in, quote, the real world when we get tracked by cameras and rfid tags and all that he said i should be able to make money, thats my data. So it was, in one sense, almost an experiment. But these beautiful visualizations, graphs and pie charts. I forget what it was, i paid 5, i think, for two days of data. And he sent it to me. I dont know him, its not like im going to use it to target him, but i almost bought it in the sense of it was a form of artwork to me because it was a portrait of his life for those few days. And, again, i like keeping that money from people who are going to use his data or our data where the soul practice is without any direct connection between me and a brandt or between me and and a brand or between me and another individual. Theres no personal transaction when stuff goes to a Third Party Data broker, and i think he did a wonderful job of portraying how our data is ours, and i think he did pretty well on kickstarter. Host so, john havens, what did you learn about him . Guest i learned he was smart and industrious, and in terms of selling his data, i learned he got my money. I was happy to pay him 5 and get what he sent me. And in terms of the specific granularity of his data, i didnt, you know, scrutinize it for too long. I saw hes a student, so he was sitting around for a month doing a lot of research for, you know, i think a 24, 25yearold would do. I thought it was interesting. But especially, again, hes really an artist. You know, when you have someone who cannot only be a Data Scientist and parse and examine and analyze day which is its own skill already, but when you can communicate what that data is in the form of pictures or visualizations and let someone like me or most people who dont really understand the 1s and 0s or sort of granularlevel day, he portrayed these things, essentially, as art. So i got a sense of his life for a few days in the form of artwork. Host john havens, how do you recommend people manage their own day . Guest so in terms of managing your own data, theres a couple of companies and a couple of precedents that are happening right now which i would highly recommend people check out. First of all, theres a Company Called personal. Com, i believe theyre based in d. C. , and they have a service right now that they fall fill it. And its pretty simple. The action of it, why i think they were so smart to introduce the idea of whats called the personal data vault or personal bank which ill explain more in a second, what they did is you take whats called the golden copy of your data or what is called pii datas personallyidentifiable information, this is the stuff like your Social Security number, your name, your address, the most precious aspects of your identity that makes it the easiest to see who you are in any environment. See meaning digital or in the real world. So fill it, right now today its excruciating, its 2014, and im sure you like this. Of the 10, 20, 30 sites well visit today, you and i both, ether, well enter in a unique password on, like, 14 different sites. And even if they remember, weve asked the site to remember our cookie data, the point is its still 14 different, unique identifiers all the time. Anyway, so the service that fill it provides is you have of that core data of yours, and then you, i think you press a button, and that data is used anytime you sign up anywhere. But the thing about personal. Com and this idea of what are called personal clouds that i talk a hot about in the book, this is something i strongly encourage people to check out. Clouds or databanks, the logic is something new. A lot of people think its just theoretical. I dont want. I think now or i know from my research of people ive talked to, its a growing industry. What this means is most people right now are used to sharing their data like their pictures or their files in Something Like a dropbox. And if you havent used dropbox, its a cloud provider where instead of having your files stored on a home hard drive, it goes up to a cloud which means theres servers somewhere else and you feel safer, maybe with amazon, for instance, that your files are with this provider. So a personal cloud or a personal vault or databank, that pii data, the id theoretically but also with how it actually functions, is that precious data and, again, its called the golden copy. The one first, unique copy of that data you protect. And why i say that one copy is most people think of their data as they go to a site, and they share something once. They sign a terms and conditions agreement, and theyre like, cool, ill sign this one, and the exchange of my data to use this service free for the next hour, that seems like a fair transaction. People dont realize that, of course, your Digital Information can be copied a zillion times, literally hundreds of thousands of times, sold and resold and resold. And, again, thats a piece of your identity time stamped, whatever your action was, easily aggregate bl to show our activities youre doing at the same time. This logic, personal banks, this is hine. You want to operate with me . Lets talk. Lets have a transaction oneonone. So now theres also organizations like respect network and the nonprofit that i founded called the happithon project, and respect network. Globally, hes trying to get this idea of these clouds to be something whereby 2015, 2016 maybe even a Million People will pay 25 a year to have these databanks and to protect and be able to manage their own data so they get to say when and with who they want to share day with and also for how long. A lot of these day banks whats fascinating is this idea you can kill your data. If you see you shared your data with someone, im going to share my data with peter because i trust peter, and through no fault of your own, that gets to a third party provider, i can get sort of a ping thats the mentality of these databanks i get a ping that lets me know that this data has gone somewhere. I know thats not how i want my data to be used. I then have the power to go and watch it go be away. So, again, to review, personal. Com is one of the many companies, reputation. Com is doing great work in this space. I advise people and respect network, also the work of a guy named doc serles who wrote the clue train manifesto and the intention economy. Its a mustread in terms of what he calls vendor relationship management, vrm, where all the other sort of interlopers or third parties between an individual and, say, brand or an individual and someone else they want to interact with digitally goes away. So, hopefully, thats helpful in terms of people, you know, what they can check out. Host but, john havens, so much of our informatio