 Hello everybody and welcome to our speaker series with 42 courses, my name is Louise Ward and you are very welcome and I'm so glad that so many of you have joined us today to meet our special guest here the wisdom of the words of Bob Hoffman. Now Bob Hoffman is a legend name in the advertising world, but of course I don't know if all of you are in the advertising world and if you are familiar with Bob I'm presuming that's why you've joined us today. Bob is the founder of one of the leading independent advertising agencies in the US self titled chief aggravation officer. He's the author of five books bestsellers in Amazon and the super blog ad crunch contrarian, which if you don't already subscribe to what have you been doing I absolutely advise that you go away and subscribe now. His most recent newsletter you would so enjoy the blindness of visionaries it's extremely topical everything that's going on at the moment. So Bob Hoffman, you are very welcome to join us in the 42 courses speaker series. Thank you Louise it's very nice to be here. So Bob, for those of them who joined us today. I'm just going to a little bit of housekeeping before we kick off which is just to ask you all if you don't mind to mute yourselves. And what we'll be doing is we'll be having a chat about Bob's book for the next sort of 25 or 30 minutes. And then I can just see somebody isn't on mute. But if you could all mute yourselves. Thank you. And then do in your chat. Tell us where you're joining us for joining us from. And also if you have questions for Bob, please put them into the chat and we will come to you in about 30 minutes. So Bob for those of them who are joining us who don't know about you. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself. Okay I spent about 40 years or so in the advertising agency business. And I was the chief executive of three agencies. I retired from the agency business nine years ago. And since then I have been writing and speaking about advertising. Before I got into advertising. I was a teacher. I was a science teacher for a few years. I was the world's worst teacher. And teachers as you know are they are patient and they are nurturing and I am neither patient or nurturing. But I got into advertising and I had a very nice career in advertising and. But since I retired I've been speaking and writing about some of the issues that I think are very important to the advertising and marketing industry that I don't think are being addressed sufficiently by our industry. And you've written a series of books, the second to this last one we're going to be talking today about ads scam your newest book, but am I right in thinking that the one prior to this was sort of building along the same lines into this theme Bob. Actually, two books ago I wrote a book called bad men that was about the same theme about the difficulties and indiscretions and dangers of what's going on in advertising. And this new book ad scam looks at those issues five years later. And what has happened after five years of our industry doing nothing about problems that have been plaguing us and have been plaguing society I think. And as I said to Bob when we met for our chat yesterday. I've absolutely bored the pants off anybody who'd give me bandwidth to talk about this book because it's one of those books that when you read it. It really get under your skin and it seems to beg a belief that this business is carrying on. So we're talking today about Bob's book ad scam. How online advertising gave birth to one of history's greatest frauds and became a threat to democracy which is strong words but it's kind of true isn't it Bob. It's quite true. And I think that we are those of us in the advertising and marketing industries have been willfully ignorant of some of the damage that we've been doing. And we need to wake up, and we need to, we need to understand what's happening and figure out what we're going to do about it. Okay, so in your book you address this issue in three sort of sections you first talk about the danger. Then the middle section is called fraud and the third section partners in crime. And in a very loose summary. There are about three troubling aspects of online advertising. How it has contributed to this wedge that's developed in politics, how it enables the transfer of money to criminal enterprises. Finally, how you feel that advertising leaders have turned a blind eye to the damage that's done by tracking based marketing analytics and you particularly single out Facebook. There are a number of important issues that have been raised by tracking online tracking of us. And as those of you in the advertising business know the essence of online advertising. The engine of online advertising is based on tracking tracking people, which we never did before in advertising for decades we targeted people based on non personal kinds of information demographics and stuff like that. But the online advertising industry tracks us all everything we do everywhere we go everyone we speak to and bases advertising targeting on that tracking. And that tracking has led to a lot of unintended consequences. One of which is that information about us is being shared widely throughout the world. With dangerous people that we don't know and we have no control over and and and it has created wedges in our society. And a second issue is fraud. We, we don't know for sure but we the best estimates are that somewhere about $60 billion or more of advertising dollars online are being stolen and used for who knows what purposes, but mainly we must assume nefarious purposes by organized by unfriendly governments. And the sad part is there's virtually no there are no penalties for being an online ad fraudster. Nobody keeps track of who's doing what there's no registers international registry of fraudsters where criminals go to tell us how much money they've stolen. And we don't know what's going on with that money but we can assume it's probably used for drugs. It's probably used by unfriendly governments to do things that we don't like in our in our societies. And, you know, we, we can't know for sure because the whole online ecosystem is so murky and so hard to understand what's going on that even the people who participated in it every day don't know what's going on. So it's there's that part of it and the the other part that you mentioned Louise is that our, our industry itself the leaders of our the so called leaders of our industry seem to turn a blind eye to it and I think we are. We are sleepwalking into a nightmare, you know, there is so much information being collected about us and shared with so many people that we don't know. But we do know we're starting to know what happens when when marketers have all this information, you know, we know historically. Political entities when governments knew everything about us knew who we talked to knew what we said knew where we went and where we were at all times. This was very dangerous for individuals. So it wasn't that long ago that the KGB and the Stasi and the Gestapo knew everything about everyone in their societies, and we know what that led to we know we don't know what happens when marketers have all this information, but we're starting to learn. And it's not healthy and it's not going any place good, I think, and we need to be a little more careful about how we're doing business in the advertising industry because we are collecting way too much information about individuals. It's dangerous and it's not healthy for democratic institutions. I'm saying a few comments that you're preaching to the converted here Bob so we've got a lot of like minded people joining us today at the start of the book when you're talking about ad tech and targeting ads. You say that the ad industry made a number of disingenuous assertions that the free internet is reliant on surveillance for revenue and you say no, we're reliant on advertising not surveillance. And that they say tracking is necessary for relevant ads and you say no 80% of us will certainly figures in the US choose not to be tracked. So there's a lot of claims being put out there that you feel are not accurate. We have to acknowledge that the money for the online ad for the money for the web is provided by advertising to a to a great extent that's where websites. That's how they can provide us information and entertainment and communication options like this for free is because they make money from advertising. But they don't make money from tracking the advert the media industry has been supported by advertising for decades without tracking people. And we have proven to be very very good at at targeting advertising at people without tracking them. So the idea that somehow the online industry is different from the rest of me of the media and needs to spy on people in order to do advertising effectively, I think is disingenuous. I think it's not true. And, but that's the excuse they use. And there's a lot of technical terms when we start talking about this area of, well, I'm saying surveillance does feel very KGB but there's also you talk about RTB real time bidding. You talk about the illegality of pop ups and how fines just aren't relevant when the companies Google, Facebook, Amazon, they're so big that finders really don't have any relevance to them. Yeah, I'm going to get my numbers wrong here but it's about like this. This week, Google was fined $397 million for its illegal tracking of people. And this is a $1.3 trillion company being fined $397 million, which is about the equivalent of a $1.3 million company being fined $391. So, as you can see these fines are a joke to these companies. It's just the cost of doing business. They do their criminal activities. They get fine and they move on. And there isn't, there will not be any consequences to these fines until these people are either made to pay really substantial money by themselves, not corporately, but personally, or until someone goes to jail. Then the laws will start to be enforced, then the laws will start to be abided by right now. They really don't care. It's not that big a deal to them to pay, you know, a tiny little fine by their standards and keep on doing what they're doing. And that comparison in the percentage with the figure that you stated just really makes it shocking what I loved about the book and anyone who's familiar with Bob's work or with his blog will know that he doesn't mince his words. And that really is almost sort of the joy of the book that you're just so sort of sure of your feelings about it. You say that tracking based ad tech industry is a criminal racket of epic proportions. I mean, it's dramatic words, but it's a dramatic situation. When you talk actually in the second section about ad fraud. Yeah, you open quite early on and you say that online advertising is so complex. It's indecipherable to almost everyone. Yeah, there and you know maybe there are 10 people in the world who really understand what's going on under the hood of programmatic advertising. The rest of we think we know what's going on, but we don't. And it's so complex. You have to, if you're buying programmatic advertising, and you want to see what's actually happening, you have to be either a computer scientist or software engineer to get under the hood. Every website that the programmatic system is putting your ads on and get under the hood and look at the code to see what are you really talking to people or you're talking to bots. Are you really on a website or are you on something that looks like a web that's fooling you into thinking it's a website. I just studied by the ISPA the Incorporated Society of British advertisers last year or maybe it was 2020 found that the average online advertiser who uses the programmatic ad system and is a quality advertiser. You will find their ads. The programmatic system places their ads on average on 40,000 websites. Now, how in the world are you supposed to look at 40,000 websites to see if your ad actually ran if it's actually a website or if actual people came there. It's an impossibility. So what happens is, instead of getting firsthand knowledge of what's happening with your advertising budget in programmatic advertising, you get reports. And the reports are often generated by the DSPs and the SSPs, and they are completely untrustworthy in my opinion. In the book I wrote about what I call an unintentional research project in which some people found that billions of ads that were supposed to be run in one place were run in completely other places for nine months for major brands and none of the brands knew it. Now, presumably over that nine month period, they were getting reports telling them that their ads were running well and that they were getting the value that they were expecting to get from their ads. And it all turned out to be bullshit. It was all a lie. So, not only is the buying of advertising online hard to keep track of in a rational sense, we rely on reports that are unreliable to tell us that we're getting good stuff. So the whole thing is very opaque, very hard to know what's going on. And it's, there's a lot of money being thrown away by brands who don't realize how much fraud, and how much money is is is not being used in a efficient and effective way, programmatically. I mean, those facts are quite shocking and this confusion and people not being able to understand really even the field they're working in reminded me so much of when I've read about finance financial packages that were created and that really they were working them every day but didn't actually understand how it was going on. Very good analogy, you know, when we had the subprime mortgage explosion in 2008 up until the time that Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. Everyone thought it was great. You know, this week, you know, FTX every this guy was a hero a billionaire genius. All of a sudden it turns out he was a fraud. And nobody knew about it and in the differences in the in the subprime mortgage issue. And in the FTX issue with cryptocurrencies, there's a big event. And the, like, Lehman goes out of business and FTX files for bankruptcy. And there's a big event that tells us all. Oh, this was a scam. Now I get it. In the online advertising world. There's never a big event like that. It's just one brand after another is wondering how come my stuff. I read all these miracles in the trade press about how effective this is. How come my stuff isn't that effective. How come I'm not. How come these miracles don't apply to me. And it's quite and nobody wants to publicize their failures. So there's no real big event that tells everyone. Oh, this is bullshit. Yeah. When you're talking about the fraud in the book, you quote a web security company and they said, yeah, that there's more traffic on the web from malignant bots, then from human beings and. Yeah, it's amazing. And further on, you say that online fraud has overtaken credit card fraud. I mean, they're just just amazing facts to be shared in this way. Yeah, there are there are three kinds of activities on the web. There's benign bots and benign bots or bots that just are, you know, finding out data for, you know, media people and they don't do any harm. Checking on stuff. And there's malignant bots, people, you know, trying to get money from us for, you know, commit fraud. And then there's human activity. And there, there's more activity among malignant bots than among humans on the web, which is. It's an absolute mindblower. But these people are researchers and you have to give them some credit for knowing what's going on. And you mentioned before the dollar spend. You also state another thing in the middle of this book. A&A say that of 200 billion dollar ad spend on programmatic advertising in the US. Only 60 billion reaches a human. They're still talking about this business and not, I mean, it's just they're extraordinary figures aren't they Bob. Yes, they are. And 70% evaporates, which just made me laugh. Nobody knows where the other 140 billion go now it is presumed and once again I'm going to go back to the ISBA in the UK they have calculated that 50% of all programmatic ad dollars go to middlemen. And then there's the other 20% or so that is probably going to fraud. We don't know for sure, but, you know, 70% is disappearing and nobody knows where. So it's, it's, it's a mess. And people on this call today must be sort of scratching their heads and just saying how and why is this able to carry on. But as you say, the prosecution for ad fraud is non existent. Yeah, there's no penalties for it essentially nobody very rarely does anyone get prosecuted for ad fraud. And if they do. So let's say we find out that that in North Korea, or in Russia, there are fraudsters stealing. Tens of billions of dollars from the online ecosystem. What are we going to do about it? It's not it's probably not even against the law there. So what are we going to do. There are no penalties for it and no remedies for victims. And I think you possibly touched on this before but this is the case that I bought the pants off people with but it's the famous Chase bank story that you have in your book, which is, I don't know if I'll get this right. They reduced they looked at their ad spend and they reduce the ad sites from $400,000. I can't remember what the period of time was to 5,000 quite a reduction reduced by you say 99% and they saw no difference in their performance. It wasn't dollars it was sites. They were 100,000. They were advertising on 400,000 sites. Yeah, they reduced it to 5000 sites and so no difference. So in other words, 99% of the sites that they were using were probably contributing nothing but an interesting one about the dollar value. I don't remember if this is in the book or not, but the Uber was spending $150 million a year on online advertising, and they took away two thirds of the money and found no difference in effectiveness and and that was due to what is called attribution fraud, where sites that were claiming to be sending customers to Uber actually weren't they were finding customers who went to Uber, and then taking credit for those customers having gone their post facto. So the section from the book that I just want to refer to and I think sorry this is the story you were alluding to earlier on in our conversation is the information from analytics. I can't remember the name of guys. In 2022, they discovered that publishing company were publishing online ads in the wrong places. Billions of adverts had run in the wrong places but not a single brand notice their ads were not where they were supposed to be and we're not talking about small companies here. We're not talking about Nike at it, we're talking about Ford, Starbucks, not one of them had got in touch to say where are our ads. Supposedly sophisticated advertisers had no idea that their ads were not running where they were supposed to be running for nine months. Billions of ads. The, the brand people didn't know it, the media people didn't know it, the. Nobody knew it. And, and, you know, you have to assume that they were getting reports saying, yeah, oh, our ads are ready. Oh, look how good we're getting this and we're getting that. We've all seen those reports. And, you know, these researchers just stumbled on this by accident. They stumbled on this and you'd think it would make huge waves in the advertising and you'd think they would have been headlines in campaign magazine and in, and in the business section of newspapers and in advertising age here in the US and nothing. It was like a whisper. It wasn't a big deal. So what happens is what we're reading in the ad trade press, what we, what we read in the business section of newspapers, what we see on television business reports, and what we listen to in webinars and, you know, conferences like this is the point one of case histories that are successful. The 99.9% of people who don't have usually successful marketing and advertising, they shut up. They don't want their, they don't want their failures to be broadcast and publicized. So all we hear are the very small tip of the iceberg success stories. That's what we read about in the trade publication. We wonder how come we're not how come these miracles don't work for us. And the answer is because they're two or three standard deviations from normal. The, you know, the real story in marketing is usually the untold story. It's the story of the mass number of marketers who aren't having spectacular results. The only results we hear about are the spectacular ones. We've talked about general advertising, but there's no doubt that the thread throughout a lot of your book is your strong feelings about Facebook. Yeah. And towards the end of the book in the third section you talk a lot about Facebook fakery. Yeah. And as you say, tracking is essential to these big three Facebook, Amazon, Google, because I mean, essentially you say they own web advertising. So, they don't just own web advertising, they own the web. I mean, the web was supposed to be a democratizing influence on society. If you go back 10 or 15 years and you read the literature of our industry. The web was going to change everything everyone was going to be able to speak to everyone and you know the big company, the advantage of being a big company was going to be taken away because anyone could. Well, it has had the exact opposite effect. It has concentrated so much power into the hands of so few people. You know, basically, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, you know, a few more. They have so much power now that they can snub their nose at governments. They don't care what government regulators say. Yeah, find me see what I care about that. So, we have a, we have too much power in too few hands. We have too much power in the hands of too few companies organizations and particularly one industry, the technology industry. And it's not healthy. We all know the sort of woes that are going on in the Twitter verse at the moment. You do talk about Twitter, in particular, looking at Twitter bots where you say that 10% of Twitter accounts were bought. I mean, I think we're not now that we're you know we're reading about all time we're not surprised to read that particular fact but I think the fact that really concerned me was when it's sunk in. You know, talking back about Facebook, even Facebook doesn't have control over the data it holds and the disorder in its own house which is really worrying. Yeah, we see, you know, everything that we've ever been told about privacy, about data privacy and data security in the fullness of time has turned out to be complete bullshit. None of it's none of it's true. And these big companies are making tons of money from it. It's and no one is controlling it. And Facebook is my favorite target because they're the biggest liars. I mean, their lives are so obvious. And so it's amazing to me, the things that they say in public that are such obvious lies. I can only imagine what they tell their clients in private. If in public. I mean, in the book I some claims about who their audiences are that, you know, one example in the US they say they reach. I think it's 41 million people between the ages of 20 and 29. Well, only 31 million people exist between that age. How do they reach 41 million of them. That's an amazing achievement on their part, but they do lies like this all the time. And get away with it in public. You can only imagine what they say in private to their naive customers. There's lots of comments there in the chat the amazement at some of the things we're talking about a couple saying that they're going to order the book you will enjoy it. And the nice thing about, I'm sorry. Can I plug the book for a second? Of course. The nice thing about it is it's only 100 pages. I didn't want to do like a scholarly academic 500 page things that bores everyone to death. Instead, I wanted to make it more impressionistic so you can read about this essay and that essay and this is and that and you can get a sense for what's going on without having to to slog through 500 pages of details. So I'm hoping it's more accessible to people like me who are impatient. I want to get to the heart of the issue. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it definitely is. It's a slim book, but it's, it's all meat. It's, you know, there's there's no nonsense in there. So, towards the end, obviously, you know, you're put forward your argument. And in your final summary, you say it comes down to two words ban tracking. Tracking is the problem. And it's the first thing, you know, the problems of the web. Can't be solved. You can't just snap your fingers and it's all going to go away. But the first thing that has to happen. If we are going to solve some of these problems. The first thing that has to happen is we have to ban tracking. We can no longer allow these companies to follow us everywhere we go without our permission. And keep track of us and have secret files on us that we know nothing about. And that we can't access that has to end if that ends. A lot of these problems become attenuated. And from there, we can make some significant changes but until tracking is banned. This is going to continue in my opinion. So I'm going to start coming to your question some of the questions that have been posted that people have joined us for this chat so if you've got any questions for Bob do pop them in there and we'll try to get to all of them. And try to keep them easy please. No difficult questions that that was my deal with Louise said, I promise you Bob. Finally, before I finish up with you, Bob. Do you ever feel a little sort of alone in your very, very big argument, you know, very big task taking on the world with this problem. I used to when I first started writing about this like 12 years ago, I was considered an idiot. I was out of touch. I was a Luddite dinosaur or didn't understand it. You know, and for kind of 10 years I was that way I was the idiot in the corner screaming while everyone was saying would you shut up, you know, but in the last five years or so I think what I was screaming about has come to pass and has been shown to be true that I no longer feel alone. I think there are a substantial number. You know, not as many as I would like, but a substantial number of people who are coming to the same conclusions that I came to, which is that this is very dangerous and we need to do something. And unfortunately, we have regulators and legislators who are busy with their own egos and their own personal problems to really take much of this seriously, although I do have to say over there in Europe. There is a lot more sensitivity to this issue, a lot more maturity about this issue than there is here in the States. So I am, I'm not completely without hope that we can do something. I just, I'm, you know, I've been yelling about this for a long time and I'd love to see a little more movement toward some sensible policies than we currently have. And it is something I presume that you think it's for government to intervene. I would love if they didn't intervene. I would love if we were mature enough. If we were responsible enough as an industry to do it ourselves, but clearly we are not. And we've had the chance and we have done absolutely nothing. And so it's time for mom and dad to step in and say, you know, you got to stop these bad habits you have. I'm not, I'm not the kind of person who believes that governments need to be involved in every aspect of our lives. I, that's not really my point of view about most things. But in this case we have proved to be completely irresponsible and someone has to someone has to take the lead on this and it ain't going to be us. Okay, well it's been really great picking your, your brains and talking to my tiny little brain. After having read the book and I was so delighted when you agreed to join me. So I'm just going to turn to the questions now, and there's a question from harmony. Harmony is actually a friend of mine from behavioral science club harmony are very welcome here for this 42 courses speakers event. And you put a couple of questions in the chat so harmony I'd love it if you would join us there now and put your question to Bob, you're very welcome harmony. Hi, Louise. Thank you Bob. Yeah, this is great as I said before you are preaching to the choir sort of have this map of all of these things that have gone wrong, you know, really, for me, that I'd say 2016 with the, you know, the Cambridge analytical situation, which really using all of this data. You know, it was really sort of creepy I don't think that that really came to light as much as it, as it should have but I suppose for me when I think about tracking and all of the sort of glitzy and glamorous technology in a way I mean it's really exciting you know. I do have taken a couple of online advertising classes and one was with this guy in Norway who does these heat maps you know and he's quite active on LinkedIn I mean, it's really exciting to kind of see what you know you think. I mean, when someone is looking at the image and you can kind of follow along and it's, I wonder to what extent the excitement and almost a voyeurism, you know, let's be frank I mean when we have these types of positions and we're with access to this really sensitive conversation I wonder if that's part of the problem, you know that the people within the industry themselves aren't sort of, you know, sort of self, maybe managing their own, because it is exciting. I think as well from like an individual level I mean I wonder if you know we all can kind of see the benefits of so much of the technology and we all just sort of we don't want to, we don't want to sort of try to separate it and say well yes I like this part of technology. And there's this general acceptance of it as you were saying governments. I think even governments are overwhelmed by it you know we sort of saw Mark Zuckerberg being interviewed and you know they just kept you know, Capital Hills is completely incompetent in terms of being able to see an FTX, you know I'm on a bandwagon with that and our behavioral science group really like, come on guys. You love Bob's recent newsletter harmony on that subject. I'm going to read that for sure. Would you like to address the question there now Bob. Yeah, the we have fallen in love with the technology. And we have forgotten about what some of the unintended consequences of the technology have been. And yeah, it's exciting to see the heat maps and then this and then that. But since when did the convenience of marketers become more important than the integrity of democratic institutions. The answer is, not even close. And we need to protect our individual rights and liberties from these people who may be getting a huge charge out of following everything we do, but have no right to do that, in my opinion. And we need to get them off our backs. Yeah, well stated. Thank you. Thanks. Harmony, you sound like a yank are you. I am I'm from San Francisco originally. Get out of here. I transplant. Yeah. Oh, wonderful. Thanks. Thanks harmony. Little bit of bonding there with Bob. So I'm just going into the chat there Ron has said he's ordered the book well done Ron. Yeah, I think that Glenn there now has said he'll definitely be reading the book Bob Marissa saying she now needs to go and read the case studies there's some great, great research studies in the book and Philip saying it's crazy that no one talks about this or knows anything about it and I mean that is kind of obviously that's the problem Bob but what you say is that the reason nobody talks about it is because there's people working in that area don't like to admit that they don't understand the technology they're dealing with. There's that and also there's the fact that they make money from it now look if you're if you're at age magazine of your campaign magazine, or if you're I don't know what the magazines over where you are are at week magazine. Most of your conferences are sponsored by Google and Facebook and Amazon and Apple and all the ad tech companies, you don't want to piss them off. You don't want to have, you don't want to invite me to come there and talk to your conference and piss off the people who are sponsoring you. So you don't hear that and you don't see it in their in the magazines and you don't see it in the newsletter. Here's and here's another amazing statistic. Facebook did a study in 2018 Facebook executives themselves they wanted to know what effect their algorithms had on their on their users. And they did a study and they found out that about two thirds of people who joined extremist groups on Facebook. Join those groups because they were sent there by Facebook as recommended groups that they should join two thirds of people who joined extremist groups of all stripes were sent there by Facebook's algorithms and where where do the algorithms derive their information from tracking from the from the data they collect from tracking. So, prima facie evidence that the wedges being driven into society by extremist organizations are being substantially and significantly achieved through the use of algorithms by social websites. So the question now in the chat from del blaze I don't know if you're still with us, del, and you're talking about dealing with secondary data. Would you like to put the question yourself to Bob, or will I read the question then if you're still with us still. I'll just start you can unmute yourself if you want to join me. And dealing with secondary data usually provided by these tech giants. It's usually best to counter check by conducting a primary research to rule out the possibility of deviations being presented as normal. I think we, you know, we, we sympathize and understand in terms of doing counter checking. But as you say Bob the problem with the research that we're given is these figures are so enormous that it turns out that even the people with it don't seem to understand it. It's just this, you know, the big mass of confusion. Yeah, you know, I'm not, I'm not an I'm an advertising. I'm a copywriter. I'm not an expert on data. I'm not an expert on research. But what I do know is that a lot of what passes for research in our field is highly questionable. And you have to be very careful about whose research you believe and what research you believe. And, you know, you, if you're an advertiser, you need a really smart research person to tell you what's real and what's bullshit. You know, that's my point of view. I could never do that. I don't have training and research, you know, I'm a writer. But I always try to surround myself with people who I thought knew their field well and could tell me what was real and what was not real. Because in the advertising business, you know, creatively, we know there's good creative work and there's bad creative work. But we don't assign the same kind of attributes to marketing and research and media. There's good media and bad media. There's good research and bad research. There's good marketing ideas and bad marketing ideas. And you have to have people who really know what they're doing to advise if you're a decision maker to advise you on what to believe and what to do. Ron, you've got a question in the chat. I can see you there now still with us Ron, would you like to unmute yourself and put your nice succinct question to Bob. Okay, thanks very much. I've got a lot of questions, an awful lot of questions. And I'm sure your book will help me understand quite a lot of aspects of this. I suppose apocalyptically, if nothing is done, where does this all lead? What's the worst case scenario before we find out what the best case scenario is? Worst case scenario, I can only talk for what I see here in the US. I really don't know what, I don't want to pretend to be an expert on things I had no knowledge of. But here in the US, worst case scenario is civil war. We are, we are, we are driving so many people apart through the collection of data and integrating that data into algorithms and algorithms that are used to to create different realities for different groups of people. You know, your Facebook page is completely different from my Facebook page. It's based on what Facebook thinks you're going to be interested in. And my Facebook page is based on what Facebook thinks I'm going to be interested in. And your Facebook page tends to reinforce your prejudices. Yeah, with, with collections to people and stories that are going to engage you and keep you on the site. And my page is going to do the exact same thing for me. And so I am, I am learning different facts than you are learning. They may not all be facts, but they're presented as facts by the people who are who we are being connected to. At some point there will be there will be a tipping point at which we can no longer speak rationally to one another. And that has quickly approached here in the US is very hard. There used to be a time, you know, I'm a very old guy, and there was a time I can remember when conservatives and liberals could, you know, people of goodwill could have a, you know, could disagree in a in a civil fashion. That's gone. Now people just yell at each other and call each other names. And that's not healthy. And so, you know, the apocalyptic version of that here in the US, I think, is some kind of civil war. It may not be the kind of civil war we're used to where, you know, we're shooting at each other and maybe the kind of civil war where, you know, with our system of government is so screwed up. 50 states and these states may do this kind of thing. Those states may do that kind of, you know, that a different kind of civil war than we used to. Worldwide the apocalyptic, you know, the really bad part is that governments become more and more authoritarian they know more and more about us. You know, the world becomes like China is now where everyone is watched every minute of the day where you are rated on your, on your, I don't know how they would describe it, your loyalty to the to the ruling government, and they're following everything you're doing they're seeing every where you go they, they are watching everything you say online and reading everything you write online. You know that globally that's an apocalyptic problem. Thanks, thanks very much Ron it's somber somber thoughts indeed thank you for joining us there now Ron. Yeah I'm a real, I'm a fun guy. I'm coming towards the end of the session now. And Bob, maybe I could ask you to leave us with something a little bit more hopeful in in what area of this, are you hopeful that we are either making progress or that you feel we can start to make progress. I'm hopeful from what I am seeing in Europe, sadly here in the States. There's very little to make me hopeful, but I have been asked to speak to groups over in Europe. I've spoken to members of the British Parliament. I've spoken to a group at the at the EU. It's called the executive something. It's the it's the upper level of the of the EU Parliament it's. And I, you know, the thing that is hopeful is when I speak to people about this, when I speak to people like you guys about this, everyone seems to agree that it's a problem. It's to agree that we have to do something about it. We just haven't coalesced into a group that has the power, or the means to make something happen. Regulatory bodies and the legislative bodies have passed regulations that are hopeful about this. The problem is they haven't been enforced regulation without enforcement. It may as well not be regulation at all. And, you know, we see and when they are enforced they're enforced in such ways that the that the criminals don't pay much, you know, they pay a little fine and they move on it's not it doesn't really hurt them to break the law. It doesn't really hurt that we have to make it hurt. And if we can make it hurt, then things will change. Well, thank you so much, Bob. It's been an absolute honor to speak with you here today, and it's been so great to have an opportunity to bring your work to bring out scan to people's attention because as I say when I read it I was just blown away and bored the pants off everybody talking about it. But I've really enjoyed talking with you today. I hope you won't mind me telling everybody that we had a little chat about your dog before we started the conversation. We bonded chatting about dogs, Bob's dog's not very well today so we wish well to Bob's dog. But we do thank all of you for taking the time in your busy day to join us. I hope you've enjoyed our conversation. Thank you to our founder, Chris Rawlinson for letting me host this event for 42 courses, and I hope that you will join us again for other talks. So thank you so much Bob if you'd like to just say goodbye to everybody and we'll close the event. Louise, thank you for having me on and to everyone who joined today and anyone who's going to listen to this or view it. Thank you very much. And I appreciate your interest in this issue, and I hope you'll join me in trying to do something about it. Thanks so much. Bob, thanks everybody who joined us. Have a good afternoon, morning, evening, wherever you are and do join us for another event. Bye now.