If that's the clif that I think it is, then he's one of the guys at half past human, which has been doing a very interesting project for the last oh, decade or so, where they send web bots, very similar to google's, out onto the web, crawling through all the forums and social media and whatnot, grabbing up all the text they can find about literally everything.
Then it gets run through some kind of weird social quantum something whatever algorithm, and predicts the future based on what people are talking about. It's better than a coin flip accurate, if I recall correctly, and it's really very interesting.