The Jordan Harbinger Show
1135: Sandra Matz | How Algorithms Read and Reveal the Real You
Tue, 01 Apr 2025
Companies harvest 6GB of your data hourly. Psychologist Sandra Matz explains how they predict everything from depression to politics—and how to fight back.Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1135What We Discuss with Sandra Matz:Companies collect ~6GB of data per hour on individuals through social media, credit cards, smartphones, and location tracking, enabling predictions about personality, politics, and mental health.Facebook identified depressed teenagers in 2015 and sold this information to advertisers rather than providing support, prioritizing profit over well-being.Algorithms need just 300 likes to know someone better than their spouse, while facial recognition can determine sexual orientation with 81% accuracy from facial features alone."Anonymized" data isn't truly anonymous — three credit card transactions can uniquely identify a person, revealing unintentional information beyond our curated online personas.Data co-ops offer a practical solution for regaining control. MS patients in Europe and Uber drivers in the US have formed co-ops to collectively manage their data, allowing them to benefit from data aggregation while maintaining ownership and directing outcomes toward their shared interests rather than corporate profit.And much more...And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/dealsSign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom!Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What is the focus of Sandra Matz's discussion on algorithms and data?
vacation and everything that's going on, you don't explicitly intentionally use first person pronouns more when you're not feeling great. It's just something that leaks to the other side and leaks into your language.
That's interesting. So in theory, that happens when we're talking to people in real life also, or is this mostly online communication?
Yeah. No, it's also talking in real life. It's a pretty substantial effect. I think 40 times more than when you're not feeling depressed or emotionally distressed.
40 times more.
It's 40%. It's not 40 times.
That's interesting. That's unmistakable. Yeah. It's like pretty substantial. Wow. So in theory, even a smart TV or my phone, which is listening, even if I don't want it to be, or my Amazon Alexa thing, that could tell me if I'm depressed just by hearing what I'm talking about in the house or overhearing a phone conversation.
Yeah, it's just like this passive listening into not just what you're saying, but how you're saying it.
You mentioned in the book that within 300 likes of me liking things on photos or whatever, the platform knows me better than my spouse. 65 likes, it knows me better than my friends. That doesn't seem like that much.
It's so little, right? So I remember when my colleagues published a study, I think the average, and this is 10 years ago now, the average number of likes was 230. So back in the day, the computer was already better than everybody except for the spouse. And you can very easily project into the here and now where you have a lot more data, you have a lot more sophisticated models.
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Chapter 2: How can companies predict personal traits and mental health using data?
This is like one of the topics that I study is can we predict someone's income, someone's socioeconomic standing based on what they post? And again, you see the obvious ones like the rich people post about luxury vacations and brands. Yeah, that makes sense.
But you also see that people who have lower socioeconomic status or lower levels of income, they are, first of all, much more focused on the present. And they're also much more focused on the self. And it's not that they're, again, like these narcissists that just only can focus on the here and now.
It's just freaking damn hard to think about the future in anything other than how do you make your ends meet if you don't have that much money. So there's these subtle cues that we can parse out when we look at what they talk about that are actually interesting beyond just prediction.
How the rich and poor talk online is actually quite fascinating. The idea that people who have lower socioeconomic status or people who are really having trouble making ends meet, can we just say poor? If you can't make ends meet, you're not doing so well.
I mean, I actually feel like that if we use labels, labels matter. And I know why people don't like them, but it's most of the time I think you don't like them because they make them feel uncomfortable. No, you should feel uncomfortable because there's people who are poor and it's just a freaking hard life.
to live it's tough and I never thought about that because of course if I saw somebody who only talked about themselves and things they were doing that day it would seem to me that they were not thinking long term because of some character defect or they're not smart enough or something like that but now of course it makes total sense that if you can't think far enough in advance because you're just trying to literally feed your kids or you don't have gas to get to work and
And you're that poor. It's not necessarily a character defect or you having screwed up your life. Rich people, is it really that obvious that they just talk about luxury brands and vacations? Or are there some more subtle cues that out people as high socioeconomic status?
Because I can't name one single time where I've been like just getting back from my business class flight to Turkey and staying at a five star hotel. Here's my dinner. I just don't do that.
Yeah, some of them are more subtle, right? It's oftentimes the opposite. So if poor people talk about the present, you might be like more future focused. So it's always a contrast the way that these models work. Even the fact that you talk about going to the Seychelles or like an exotic place just means that you don't have to be bragging about going to the five-star hotel on your next vacation.
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