this week, the business behind social media influencers. agents, marketing, and of course, money. plus, cozy games. the video game's industry tries a softer approach. and bringing policing into the 21st century, with the ceo of peragon technologies. that's this week on "press: here." good morning, everyone. i'm scott mcgrew. i can't think of any word that's

more internety than "influencer," like an instagram influencer, someone who spends hours creating content, trying to convince somebody else to buy something. but really, they're nothing new. they're just modern day commercials. not that different than what don draper would have done in the previous century. influencers are a major industry. it's an industry that caught the attention of "glamour" magazine's stephanie mcneal who studies the phenomenon from her home in new york, which my goodness, that is loud, stephanie. she wrote about the phenomenon in a new book "swipe up for more, include the unfiltered lives of influencers." i think the major thing to talk about is influencing is such a major industry. we're talking about things like -- they have staff and production schedules. >> absolutely. there are influencers who have

multiple assistants who their entire job is just to answer their dms. up to ten people who their entire job is just to answer their dms. i mean, if that's not building an economy, i don't know what is. >> and they'll have agents, as well. i kind of think of influencers and maybe, you know, its past influencers as kind of the young person that wants a free hotel room, and i'll write about it on instagram sort of thing. but influencers have agents. it's that big. >> absolutely. and i think that is a good thing, because i think in the beginning of the industry, what we were seeing was a lot of these young people, especially young women, who were thrust into a situation where they were suddenly negotiating $100,000 deals with major corporations, and they didn't have anyone to ask about anything. they didn't have anyone to say

hey, am i getting screwed over here, is this a good deal? and so i think that's an indication of the maturation of the industry, that there are agents and managers who step in and say okay, you want to work with target, is this a good deal, like let's kind of make sure this is all kosher. >> almost like the music industry as it started out. o.g. influencers, so-called mommy bloggers, heather armstrong comes to mind. she passed away recently. curiously, you make a note of this in your book, all those women are from utah. >> yeah, utah is really the silicon valley of mommy bloggers. that's how they see it, as well. the people who really built the mommy blogger industry, quote unquote, they really see their pocket in utah as being analogous to the silicon valley and how it nurtured and grew early tech startups.

the corner of utah where so many of these early mormon mommy bloggers live really did nurture this corner stone of what is now a multibillion dollar industry. >> one of the considerations to anyone that would want to become an influencer or who is now, there are legal requirements. if you're going to promote a product, you have to disclose that, right? but i mean, lindsay lohan, naomi campbell and others were warned by the ftc they were breaking the rules. >> yeah. i think that the thing with the ftc rules is for many years, they were not very strictly enforced. i think it was all very nebulous for a really long time. i think now there are a lot of things in place to ensure that if you're seeing an ad, there are clear markers that it's an ad. of course, some people don't follow the rules, and they all face consequences for that.

but you have to remember that up until a few years ago, there was nothing built into the design of instagram, where you could flag on the platform it was an ad. so you can understand how that could become a murky situation. if i go on instagram, i will hit a button and it will say it's an ad. >> do you see a day in which a corporation essentially grassroots its own influencer, that it's somebody that comes out of nowhere but we find out had been on the target payroll all along, i'm choosing target as a random example, not making an accusation. >> i think if that happened, i think it would be hilarious. >> you think it would be caught pretty early, huh? >> i don't know. i guess it depends on how organic they can be. but target doesn't really need homegrown influencers, because every single influencer already

loves target, so they're good. there was an incident a few years ago where there was some sort of smaller hardware store where a person had gone viral on tiktok or instagram, and they had turned out to kind of be this plant for the hardware store. but everyone thought it was just kind of funny and were like, good for you, props to you. >> now, what about the influence that this has on young people? i mean, you go on instagram and everyone in their 20s seems to have a $5,000 fashion purse, that kind of thing. not everyone can live that way. that is not how real people live. >> no, that's not how real people live. one of the interesting things about influencers is, it is very much demock atizing fashion in an interesting way, whereas, you know, i work for a women's fashion magazine, i love fashion

magazines, but typically back in the day, you don't flip open "vogue" and see amazon picks for $10. and now you can follow a fashion influencer, if you want, who does thrifting content, who does amazon or target content. so there is -- obviously, there are influencers who, you know, a young person could follow and feel bad because they can't afford designer things. but you can always find someone who is in your budget. >> lastly, advice that you would have for anyone who wanted to become an influencer? you know, i would imagine one piece of good advice is find something that other people aren't doing. don't do eye shadow or purses, do something else that is more niche than maybe that industry is not being represented. >> i think that's one of the things again about influencers, if you look over the past decade or so of society or marketing or brands, influencers have really

changed who products are marketed to. and where people get inspiration in a way that has made brands change. i think in a good way. you look at the beauty industry for example. it was really a lot of the early beauty bloggers who pushed, you know, i don't have a perfect face, i don't always -- i might have acne scars or a break out, and that's okay. you know, we see major corporations follow suit in their own advertising, at least it's very clear to me. >> that makes sense. stephanie mcneal, author of "swipe up," i appreciate you being with us this morning. "press: here" will be right back.

good morning, everyone. i'm scott mcgrew. police officers use a lot of

technology, automatic license plate leaders, body worn cameras, even something as simple as writing a ticket involves a tablet and portable printer. but here's the problem, those systems don't talk to each other. they live in entirely different computers. but if those could be combined, police work could move faster. let's say there's a minor traffic accident in the same moment that a nearby bank was being robbed. maybe the responding officers, body worn camera just happens to catch the images of the bad guy in the bank. combining the accident report with the body worn camera might look something like this. this is software made by peragrin technologies. nick noon is the ceo of the company, which is used by a number of city agencies in california. nick, good morning. i think first and foremost, i think a lot of civilians thought

police officers could already do that, right? i mean, it's something out of the movies. >> yeah, it's a common belief and it's not a crazy belief. you know, there's an enormous amount of data that sits in public safety agent sis and police departments. the reality is the data that these officers and personnel need is typically sitting inside of the agency already. so they have access to it. but the data isn't presented in a format that they can understand. >> we sa that many years ago with 9/11. i want to talk about that later, the siloing. but i saw one again administrations where the -- they do that in movies all the time. the fire chief says show me on the map.

but you would think all of this sort of data, which is already available, is already being combined. but it's not. >> yeah. what we find is that the job of collecting data, of putting sensors in place or putting data inside of a storage system is the -- not the hard job. the hard job is trying to find ways to correlate it in meaningful ways. so the technology that's been deployed inside of pub live safety agencies has been good at collecting that data, but not as good at securing or am analyzing it in one place. >> one illustration, i leave it was in livermore, police found a disoriented man, he knew only his first name. but investigators asked the computer, you know, show me who owns homes within a couple of square miles with this first name and they figured out where he came from. >> it's very common. i think that the -- it's most

common that that data exists, but it's completely unavailable when the officer needs it. what we find is that so often the officer needs that information in near realtime. and it's not just about having as much information as possible. often it's about trying to act as precisely as possible. sometimes that means doing nothing or finding ways for other people to respond. >> and then educating city leaders that maybe they don't know that this data can be combined. you presented recently to the city of antioch in northern california, i'm going to guess some of those city counsel members who have gotten used to paying for license plate readers had no idea those things could not be combined in any reasonable way. >> we feel really excited about creating more interaction and commune kagsz between council members, community members and police departments. one of the historical problems

that we have seen is the data that sits inside law enforcement and public safety agencies is usually very sensitive. so the security necessary to be able to share partial bits of information, and often as much information as possible with city councils and elected officials and community members, takes so much time to be able to parse through that data and make sure that all the privacy and the regulatory requirements are compliant. >> and the privacy is an interesting and security is an interesting point, because it brings up to what i was alluding to earlier. we all learned post 9/11, obviously your software couldn't have solved this, but we heard about how one set of fbi agents were suspicious about a buvenlg of guys trying -- bunch of guys trying to learn to play airplanes on one side of the country, then somebody else

saying i think they're going to use a plane but they couldn't connect the dots. then we end up with that kid in massachusetts who, allegedly, gave away so many secrets because he could access it. there's an incredible balance between making sure those who need the sensitive data can get it, and those who shouldn't be seeing it don't see it. >> and we find this really motivating, because it hits on the heart of why we built our technology, trying to thread that needle between enabling operations and off multiagency, multijurisdictional types of operations or investigative processes that involve municipalities, regions, counties, and very often the federal government, as well. walking into one of these operation centers, it's very common to see many different disciplines and types of departments, all trying to interact together. and making sure that everyone can see exactly and only what they're allowing to see, while being able to get all the

information that they need to be able to drive their processes forward is critical and very motivating to our team. >> you know, the unique person way of doing policing where you have everything on a very local level works very well, except, you know, the city of richmond may not know what the city of san pablo, which is next door, they may not know they're looking for the same guy. >> it's true. very often they might be looking for the same person at the exact same moment in time and they don't have any signal that there's another person that's trying to collaborate on this same case. or maybe there are two cases that are open at the same time, and two different people don't realize that if they were to connect the dots, they would be able to help each other. >> one agency has a piece of information that would fin tish problem for the other agency. you cam from palantir that the fbi uses. >> heavily in the department of

defense and national security space with the u.s. federal government and allied countries. many of the engineers and myself have come out of that world actually. >> about ten years ago on this show, we did a piece about predictive policing, sending cops to the scene. essentially before the scene of the crime before the criminal shows up. but santa cruz was one of the cities that was one of the very first to experiment wit and later banned the practice. this is not what you're doing, right? but could it be used in predictive policing? >> that's correct. it's not what we're doing. but what we have seen in law enforcement, there have been evolutions of strategies to try to not just respond to crime, but prevent crime. the ultimate holy grail. i think there was a rush about 10, 15 years ago toward a concept called critic of policing, that's evolved into other concepts in policing. intelligence led policing, community led policing, and there's a lot of thought leadership inside of academic

institutions and think tanks on the east and west coasts, trying to advance a lot of these concepts. we have avoided the concept of predictive policing in its entirety. we find that having a human in the loop is necessary. and what we try to do is seven the data to the people who can make human judgment calls. often what we find is that those people don't have access to the data when they need it. >> yeah, i think that's the most important thing. com stead dates back, but it's the idea of combining all these bits of data that may make a huge difference. >> we find that comparative statistics, trying to analyze what's happening now relative to what happened yesterday or the week before or the year before is a very common way to analyze performance for a public safety

agency. and even the act of trying to compare what happened today to this time last year, those reports can be 30 days late or more. typically, the process is to get that data are very static. so the time it takes to put that data together has historically been very, very slow. but the strategy and the concepts behind it have been really strong. so we try to automate a lot of those manual processes so that things like comstead you mentioned become much more accessible. so much so that we now see cities and counties adopting similar types of strategies, not just the public safety and law enforcement agencies. >> i heard one officer, somebody said that the most important tool once you have the peregrine technologies is a swivel chair, because you can look at all the screens and discover so many different things. >> it's surprising to see what the creative minds can do when they are applied against the technology we build, and we feel

humbled to learn from them. frankly, all of the learning that inform the engineering work we do out in the valley here are from the frontlines. so we try to embed side by side and be in the chair next door. >> nick noone, i appreciate you being with us. ceo of peregrine, and "press: here" will be back in just a moment.

welcome back to "press: here." we wrap up this week's show with something the industry is calling cozy games. video games that are not about killing or racing or scoring touchdowns, but more simple things, like star do valley or animal crossing. this is animal crossing with no specific goal. you don't win a round or beat an opponent. kennedy rose, a former lawyer, talks about cozy gaming with her nearly 1/3 of a million

subscribers. kennedy, who goes by the nickname cozy k online joins me now. you know, let's start with what is a cozy game? what is the definition as you understand it? >> yeah. i like to think of cozy gaming as kind of the antithesis or pushback to the competitive games we were talking about, the shooters, things like that. and those are kind of have been the most prominent in the gaming space. i think there's a time and place for those, too. but cozy games are for those that want to sit back, relax, and take part in something, usually at pretty low stakes. playing out a wholesome story, building up a town farming, gardening, solving puzzles, things like that. >> easy going, i always laugh when i see someone in the movies and they're supposed to be playing a video game, and they're just mashing buttons like mad. i guess there are a few games that are like that, but this is -- these are more thoughtful, right? you don't have to take action

right away. you can think about what you're going to do, or just simply enjoy what is on screen. >> absolutely, exactly. >> i'm going to guess this is more popular with women, is that a fair statement? >> yeah. i would say that there are some cozy games that are popular across the board. but looking at cozy games as an entire genre, i think it brings women into the fold a little bit more. it tends to tap into skills. i think people socialized as women. they have been encouraged to foster that community building, decor and design, but i think it's also just more accessible than other types of gaming, competitive shooters tend to have a bit more toxic environments. all these tend to be classically pretty heated, and i think tend to exclude women a lot. and so cozy gaming is the opposite of that. it's also pretty solitary, so i think a lot of people in the cozy gaming community are very welcoming. they want to welcome people in. so for women who maybe were

encouraged to game in their youth and are taking a peek into the gaming world in adulthood, they are finding this to be a little more welcoming. >> one of the og cozy games would have been the sims. when it came out, it was almost hard to describe to people. what do you do? you don't do anything. well, what's the point? well, there isn't a point. >> exactly, exactly. >> fair enough. now, a lot of people discovered -- i've been playing video games since atari and nintendo. but i think people discovered video games that hadn't played them before during the pandemic, right? you just ran out of things to do, and at least a video game is something you can download. >> yeah. absolutely. i definitely got more into it during the pandemic, and i think for a lot of people it was kind of a form of self-care, a new hobby. it was something to turn your brain off for a little bit and focus on something with a little

more whimsy and light heartedness and something to build towards and you're stuck at home. but now it's kind of transformed into a real lifestyle for some people. i think it's now a routine hoppy. it's something that they can do when they get home from work and they just want to relax and shift into a different head space. so i think it's a really nice thing to come from the pandemic. >> i mentioned animal crossing. can you give people an idea what other games are out there? >> i have two different categories. one that is kind of stimulating, maybe gets you out of the house. one of those for me is a newer game called paradot. you have this augmented reality pet, and you can take care of it at home. i like it gets you out of the house and you can walk around with them. i think that's just so, so cute. and then, another favorite of mine, i like to cozy up on the couch and get a blanket, warm

cup of tea, animal crossing and this one is like farming, story lines to uncover. so very fun. >> and the gaming industry has noticed this. it's not like they're dragging, kicking and screaming. there's money in this and they noticed the genre. >> absolutely, which i personally love, as someone who has been gaming my whole life. it started with harvest moon, and now that there are so many more games out there for cozy gamers, it's great. it can bring a lot more people into the fold and get more people interested into gaming that might not have considered a hobby they would be interested in. >> stay rti started you used to lawyer and now you are a tiktoker. tell me about that. >> i just had to take the leap of faith.

i spent my whole life working to be a lawyer. that was my identity. i was like, this is who i am, i'm a lawyer. and i just had to follow the passion is what it was. i just had so much joy and passion in this. and so that's what i'm doing now. it was a hard decision, though. >> people can find you on tiktok, it's cozy.game. >> yep. >> and cozy k, as the nickname. kennedy rose, thank you for joining us. "press: here" will be back.

that's our show for this week. my thanks to my guests and thank you for making us part of your sunday morning.

>> jon: if english football has a cornerstone fixture, one that stands above the rest regardless of current fortunes, then this is the probably it two most successful clubs in the history of the game in this country. liverpool in red immediately on front foot with timberlake winning a corner inside 16 seconds.simikas winnin a corner inside 16 s