0:15

Pushkin. I

0:20

want to start this episode by telling you just

0:23

the very beginning of a story I recently

0:25

heard about. A guy named

0:27

Alex Cogan born in nineteen

0:29

eighty six into a Jewish family in the Soviet

0:32

Union. After

0:34

the collapse in nineteen ninety one, the government

0:36

loses control and Jews are even less

0:38

safe than before. Alex's

0:41

dad starts getting death threats, so

0:44

he up and moves his entire family four

0:47

generations of Cogan's, to New York City.

0:50

In nineteen ninety four, Alex

0:52

enter's first grade in a Brooklyn public school.

0:56

He's conspicuous, way

0:58

taller than the other kids. He speaks

1:00

no English. He's

1:02

also got a talent from math and science.

1:06

Once his teachers can understand him, they

1:09

think he has the makings of a gifted physicist.

1:12

Life's not hard for him, but as

1:14

he grows up, he begins to see that it isn't

1:16

always easy for everybody else. Six

1:20

months after they've arrived in the United States,

1:22

his great grandmother had jumped from their apartment

1:24

window to her death. His parents,

1:27

the loves of each other's lives,

1:29

split up. Alex cries

1:31

every night until they get back together. He

1:35

enters high school and one of his close

1:37

friends attempts suicide, another

1:40

becomes clinically depressed. Alex

1:42

begins to read psychology. He's

1:45

a math and science kid, but

1:48

he's getting more and more curious about human

1:50

nature. And

1:52

the first time I met him, and I really remember it very

1:54

distinctly, because he almost

1:56

always wore these giant basketball shorts no

1:59

matter what the weather. You know, he's terribly

2:01

dressed, like a lot of Berkeley undergrads, and

2:03

you know, and basketball shoes. That's

2:06

Daker Keltner, the psychologist

2:08

at the University of California, Berkeley who

2:11

runs something called the Greater Good Science Center

2:13

where they study human emotion. We

2:15

heard from him in episode one. Alex

2:19

Cogan was a shambolic six foot four

2:21

inch freshman back in two thousand and five when

2:23

he knocked on Daker's office door and

2:26

said he'd like for Daker to teach him. Emotions

2:29

fascinated him. He'd

2:32

come to cal to study physics, but

2:34

he'd been thinking about love, about

2:36

the distinction between loving

2:39

and being loved. He wanted to

2:41

study it the way you'd study a quark. And

2:44

Alex came in and he said, you know, I have seven

2:46

kinds of love. That I'm going to put people into.

2:49

I was like, wow, that's interesting.

2:52

And then there are twelve variations

2:55

of I forgot what the other

2:58

factor was that or set of conditions

3:00

that he wanted to create, And there are eighty four different

3:02

conditions in his study. So he's going to study seven

3:05

different kinds of love, and he's going

3:07

to study all these different variables that would

3:09

maybe predict the force

3:12

of the love, the power of the love exactly.

3:14

So he's about to make glove more complicated

3:16

than it's ever been made. So it sounds

3:18

like, right, he was gonna

3:20

confound our understanding of love. Daker

3:23

talks Alex out of that idea,

3:25

but this kid is so smart and original

3:28

and full of energy, and so

3:30

Daker takes him in and it isn't

3:32

long before Alex is finding things to do

3:35

that no one else is doing. For

3:37

instance, the thing that he does after they discover

3:39

a gene it's associated with human

3:41

kindness. And Alex did this

3:43

cool paper where he showed if

3:46

you present videotapes of people

3:48

who have that gene or this variant

3:50

of a gene that makes them kind

3:53

and I am an observer and I see one

3:55

of those people for twenty seconds on video.

3:58

I trust them, right, I'm like this guy.

4:00

I go to battle at this guy, right, I

4:02

trust this guy. By the time Alex

4:05

graduates from cal he's established

4:07

himself as the most promising student in

4:09

the entire psychology department and

4:12

the most unusual. Just

4:14

this big, sweet natured guy with

4:16

a serious talent for math and statistics

4:19

and a desire to study huge questions

4:22

like what is love? When

4:24

he left and he's so unconventional,

4:26

Michael, he could have gone to any

4:29

graduate program in the country, and he chooses

4:31

the University of Hong Kong. I'm what because

4:33

he met this woman or got engaged and

4:35

fell in love? Yeah, fell in love. But

4:37

Daker and Alex stay in touch. They

4:40

collaborate on a few papers. They're

4:42

both interested in big questions about human

4:44

nature. At the same time, social

4:47

media has started to create a new way to study

4:49

those questions. In

4:51

late twenty twelve, Facebook

4:54

invites Daker to visit and asks

4:56

him to create a bunch of new emojis, ones

4:58

that better convey actual emotions.

5:01

When Daker sees what Facebook knows about

5:03

its users, he's blown away.

5:06

This could be the greatest data source that will ever EXI

5:10

and it would help us answer

5:12

questions from the scientific perspective, like

5:15

how does disease spread in

5:18

some neighborhoods but not others? What

5:20

predicts heart attacks? Where

5:23

does hate crime? Where is it likely to

5:25

happen? Right? That was all tractable

5:27

with the data that they had. Meanwhile,

5:29

Alex had moved to England to teach

5:31

at Cambridge University. He was still

5:34

researching the same stuff, the positive

5:36

emotions, and he too was seeing

5:38

possibilities in the new social media data.

5:41

And I was at Facebook doing my consulting

5:43

work and I saw Alex there.

5:45

I was like, what are you doing here? And

5:48

he's everywhere, you know, So he's like, oh, I'm working

5:50

on this other project and he told me about it. Alex

5:53

Cogan told Daker that he wanted to

5:55

use Facebook to study things

5:57

like love and happiness. For

5:59

example, you might be able to take a fairly small

6:02

sample of data, say the likes

6:04

of ten thousand Facebook users, to

6:06

make discoveries about those emotions

6:09

entire countries. The math

6:11

was complicated enough the Dacker himself

6:14

didn't fully understand it. He then forgot

6:16

all about it until one day

6:18

a year or so later, when Alex

6:21

Cogan called him up. He calls me after

6:23

Trump's elected and he says,

6:25

I think I've done something that

6:28

was part of this election. And

6:30

I was like, okay, well, let's talk what is it? And

6:32

he said, I created this mechanism

6:34

that was purchased and

6:38

used in the Trump campaign. He

6:40

was worried that he actually had had some effect, or that

6:42

he'd be perceived to have had some effect. I

6:44

don't think he made that distinction. I just

6:47

think he thought, oh now, Alex

6:49

Cogan sensed that he might have a problem.

6:51

He just had no idea how big it was

6:54

going to be. I'm

7:03

Michael Lewis, and this

7:05

is Against the Rules, a show

7:07

about the decline of the human referee in American

7:10

life and what that's doing to

7:12

our idea of fairness today.

7:15

I want to talk about an entire species

7:17

of refs, one that's nearing

7:19

extinction, whom no one

7:21

will miss until it's too late.

7:27

I used to be a referee in the big leagues

7:30

of dictionaries. The American

7:32

Heritage. You've heard of it. The

7:34

American Heritage has something called the usage

7:36

Panel, and I was on it, along

7:38

with a couple of hundred other word people. Every

7:41

year we get this mass email asking

7:43

us to judge the latest word controversies

7:47

how certain words should be defined, or

7:49

spelled or pronounced. English

7:51

is always changing, and the dictionary wanted to keep up

7:53

with the times and sometimes resist them.

7:56

Was it okay to use unique to mean unusual?

7:59

Should you say banal or banal or

8:02

both? This year I got

8:04

a different sort of email, saying I've been

8:06

fired. They fired the whole

8:08

panel, so I didn't take it personally, but

8:11

I still want to know why. As far

8:13

as I could see, we've done nothing wrong. Our

8:15

definitions were still definitive. I

8:18

call the guy who'd been my boss as

8:21

head of the usage panel. What did you do? I

8:24

advised on people

8:26

to include on the usage

8:29

panel. Occasionally people die, and or

8:31

occasionally people would simply not respond to the questionnaire

8:34

for several years running, and we'd want to replace

8:36

them. His name is Stephen Pinker. Yes,

8:39

that's Stephen Pinker, Harvard psychologist

8:42

and author of many best selling books. In

8:45

the case of disputed usage,

8:48

where people wonder what

8:51

is the correct use? Can I use decimate

8:54

to mean destroy

8:56

most of, or, as rumor has

8:58

it should only mean destroy one tenth of? Or

9:02

what's the best way to use epicenter. Is it

9:04

just the center of something or does it have to

9:06

mean propagating outward? Of course,

9:08

if you want to know what a center means, you can now just google

9:10

it. The Internet has been bad

9:12

for dictionaries. They don't sell

9:14

the way they used to. But the Internet

9:16

doesn't explain why our panel was fired. We

9:19

didn't cost the dictionary a dime. We

9:22

all work for free. Why did

9:24

they cut it? You know, I haven't

9:26

gotten to the bottom of this. Maybe

9:29

I'll just let someone else chase this one down. I

9:31

mentioned this whole situation because it's not unique,

9:34

which, by the way, should only be used

9:36

to mean one of a kind. Nothing

9:38

can be very unique, or most

9:41

unique, or even rather unique.

9:43

A thing can be either banal or banal.

9:46

But it's either unique or it's not

9:49

anyway. The death of the word referee is not even

9:51

all that unusual. They're a member of

9:53

the species of refs that the world now has

9:55

no use for. The culture refs,

9:58

the people who referee are most basic

10:00

interactions how we should talk, who

10:02

we should trust, or whom we should trust.

10:06

No one particularly mourns their death until

10:09

they really need one.

10:15

Our bags. We are

10:17

in a suburb of Dallas,

10:21

at the home of Brian Garner, who

10:23

has set himself up as a referee of the English

10:25

language. When and what should

10:27

you hyphenate? He's the author of M.

10:30

Garner's Modern English Usage. Why

10:32

people shouldn't use flaunt when they mean flout.

10:35

We've been standing out of here for three or four minutes and there's

10:37

no sign of life. We're gonna go knock on his door. All right,

10:39

all right? What's the difference

10:41

between species and spurious?

10:44

Does it really matter if you, at this

10:46

very moment are filled with angst or

10:49

angst? We're

10:53

a weird g. Garner's Usage manual

10:55

is now more than twelve hundred pages long.

10:58

The late novelist David Foster Wallace called

11:00

it a work of genius. This book is so big.

11:04

Did you bring your copy? No? I have xerox

11:06

those pages that I want, just the front. Yeah,

11:09

it wouldn't fit. You don't

11:11

really expect to find guardians of the

11:13

English language in Dallas, Texas. Then

11:16

again, you don't really expect to find them anywhere.

11:18

That's why I've bothered to find him. It's

11:21

like flying to Indonesia to see the

11:23

last of the Sumatran rhinos, and

11:25

so here We are between a giant

11:28

golf course of a lawn and

11:30

a monticello of red bricks

11:33

and doric columns. We're

11:36

prank in the right place, Michael

11:38

Lewis, Ryan Garner, very good to meet you. Thank

11:41

you for letting us in truth. Are

11:43

we welcome? Garner's house does

11:45

have a kitchen and bathrooms, almost

11:47

like a normal house, but it feels

11:49

like an excuse for him to live in what amounts

11:51

to a massive library. Floors

11:54

of books with little ladders so you can climb

11:56

up and reach them. Thousands upon

11:58

thousands of mostly very old books

12:01

about the English language. I've

12:03

had my coffee all round. It

12:08

looks like a Robber Baron's collection

12:10

of books, except they look like they've

12:12

been read. They look like they

12:15

aren't. They aren't book spot by the yard,

12:17

and they also have plastic covers

12:19

on them, which is a little unusual.

12:22

How many Usage

12:25

Experts books do you have in

12:27

this library? I mean, how many different? He

12:31

published his first Usage Guide back in

12:33

nineteen ninety eight, partly as a protest

12:36

against the way people talked on TV, which

12:38

sounds a bit snooty, but Gardner's

12:41

genius was not to set himself up as some

12:43

kind of elite speaking down to the illiterate

12:45

masses. His judgments

12:47

felt like common sense. They were

12:49

relied on data. He classified

12:52

any change in the language into five stages,

12:54

ranging from weird new usage to a

12:57

totally accepted new use of the word. He

13:00

had lots of information on how people were

13:02

actually speaking and writing the English

13:04

language. So this is

13:07

Webster's first dictionary

13:09

six and this just kind of shows the evolution

13:11

over the nineteenth century. But I have

13:14

so upstairs. These

13:16

are books on writing, a

13:18

beginning all the way over here,

13:22

so that this whole, that whole wall

13:25

is linguistics,

13:27

and look on usage and writing. I

13:30

think I just assume that anybody who went this

13:32

far out of his way to tell other people

13:34

how to speak and write must have something wrong

13:36

with him. That if you tracked his interest

13:39

back to its source, you'd finally

13:41

arrive at the desire to feel superior.

13:44

But that's not Garner. His source

13:46

energy isn't snobbery. It's

13:48

outrage at an idea

13:51

cooked up by academic linguistics,

13:53

an idea he had encountered back as a student

13:56

at the University of Texas descriptivism.

13:59

It was called a

14:01

native speaker of English cannot make a mistake,

14:05

and it's so fact though

14:07

if a native speaker says it, it is

14:09

correct. That

14:12

is a very extreme position

14:14

to take, and I think an indefensible one, and one

14:16

that I have pretty much set my face

14:18

against. He set his face

14:20

against descriptivism, and his face

14:23

is set against it. Still. Do you

14:25

consider yourself a referee? Yes?

14:30

Yeah, I'm making

14:34

judgment calls about and

14:37

there is a lot of judgment involved, But I'm

14:39

trying to be a helpful

14:41

guide to writers

14:43

and speakers of English. We're

14:45

now up in a balcony gazing down at an

14:47

amphitheater of books about the

14:49

English language. He's got a whole

14:52

other collection of books out back where

14:54

the poolhouse should be, in a building

14:56

that's an exact replica of the room

14:58

in England in which the Oxford English Dictionary

15:00

was created. I pulled down an

15:02

especially decrepit looking book by

15:05

someone I've never heard of, Lindley

15:07

Murray. Murray, but

15:10

there's kind of a hero of mine. Interesting

15:12

guy. He was a New York lawyer

15:15

in seventeen eighty four. He moved to York,

15:18

England because he didn't like the Revolution, and

15:21

a lot of Americans actually moved

15:24

to England because they didn't appreciate

15:27

what was going on. Lynn Manuel and Miranda

15:29

left that out of Hamilton. I

15:31

guess so, and so these

15:33

two shelves are whole various ambitions

15:36

of Murray's Grammar. Yeah, and Brian

15:38

Garner seems to have all of them. So

15:40

Murray. In seventeen ninety five he stopped

15:43

practicing law and he wrote Murray's

15:45

English Grammar for a Quaker

15:48

girls school in York, and it became

15:50

the best selling book in

15:53

the English language other

15:55

than the Bible for the first

15:58

fifty years of the nineteenth century. He

16:00

sold over thirteen million copies

16:03

of his English Grammar. Every household

16:06

needed an English Grammar

16:08

and a Bible thirteen

16:11

million copies. The joint

16:13

population of Great Britain in the United

16:15

States in eighteen hundred was only fifteen

16:18

million, But back then people

16:20

threw money at language refs. Noah

16:22

Webster got rich from his dictionary, so

16:25

did Fowler and Follet and Partridge and

16:27

scores of others from their grammars

16:29

and usage guides. Strunk and White

16:32

have sold ten million copies of this style

16:34

manual. There was a time

16:37

not long ago when a writer could get paid to

16:39

write about how to write, and the

16:41

American Heritage Dictionary used to brag

16:43

about his usage panel. But

16:46

Brian Garner is in the wrong century. How

16:49

many copies of Garner's Modern English

16:51

usage is sold, I don't know exactly,

16:54

but it's fewer that hauled and paltry.

16:56

Brian Garner has a really nice house, but

16:59

his usage manual doesn't pay his mortgage.

17:01

He gives writing seminars for lawyers. The

17:04

rest of his market has mostly vanished. I

17:07

mentioned Barnes and Noble, but I haven't

17:10

singled anybody out in particular, although

17:12

I kind of did when the first

17:15

two editions of my Usage

17:17

book came out. Usage Book has passed

17:19

a we're not going to stalk it. I

17:21

mean that has a major effect,

17:24

and they said, no, we've made the decision that

17:26

really this category is defunct. The

17:29

usage book is a defunct category. I

17:31

grab another one of his old books and flip through

17:33

it. Some nineteenth century guide

17:35

to pronunciation. The

17:37

idea that anyone would write, much less

17:40

pay money for a pronunciation guide,

17:42

well, it's preposterous and preposterous.

17:46

It is an interesting fact, and one not

17:48

sufficiently realized that a person who has

17:50

a pronunciation of his own for a word

17:52

is very apt to take it for granted that he

17:55

hears all others has pronounced it in the same manner,

17:57

when in fact his own method is

17:59

entirely peculiar to himself.

18:03

It doesn't

18:06

make true at Also, talking about making people incredibly

18:08

uncomfortable, fearful of what was coming

18:10

out of their mouths, that's what he's doing. People

18:12

used to feel uneasy about how they use the language.

18:15

They didn't want to sound stupid or uneducated.

18:18

Now they feel uneasy about anyone who would presume

18:20

to judge how they're using the language,

18:23

and old anxiety has been replaced by something else,

18:26

a suspicion of the individual ref People

18:29

still judge other people by what they say and how

18:31

they say it, but they do it differently, without

18:34

reference to a higher authority, but to

18:36

the crowd. My own bank here

18:38

in Dallas, every

18:40

time there would be in any activity

18:42

on one of my accounts, I'd get an email message

18:45

dear dear mister Garner semicohen

18:49

And I called

18:52

my banker and I said, by the way, you know,

18:54

you got hundreds of these things, presumably thousands

18:57

going out by the day, dear customer,

18:59

semicolon, And I

19:03

said, you know, it's got to be either comma or a

19:05

colon. He said, could you put that in writing? And

19:08

I said, or I'll even give you some authorities, and

19:11

I cited Garner's Modern English usage

19:13

and a

19:16

couple of other authorities

19:18

on this point of punctuation. It's a pretty

19:20

elementary point. Yep, he

19:22

did that. I mean, who else is there

19:24

to site? But the incorrectly

19:26

punctuated letters just kept coming. Still.

19:29

I was getting dozens every week of dear

19:31

mister Garner semicolon and and it was

19:33

I was about to change banks over this, because

19:35

it's it's it's a little upsetting to

19:37

think I'm doing business with

19:41

people who are doing

19:44

something so egregiously bad.

19:47

And they didn't change it for about

19:49

a month, and so I called him and I said, what's going on? He

19:51

said, well, you know, I showed

19:53

it to some of the people here

19:55

at the bank, but we have a dispute about whether it should

19:57

be a semicolon or a colon,

20:00

and so we just left it. But

20:02

that that is a demotic view. Well, your your

20:04

opinion is as good as mine. Anybody's

20:06

opinion is as good as somebody else. Demotic.

20:10

Now, there is a word derived

20:13

from an ancient Greek word meaning popular.

20:17

That's how the language is generally refereed

20:20

by popular opinion. Inside

20:22

Garner's bank, by popular opinion,

20:25

it was okay to send out letters teeming

20:27

with semicolons that didn't belong. It's

20:30

obviously not that big a deal. I

20:32

mean, you can still understand where

20:34

the bank was trying to say. Plus,

20:37

it's sort of freeing to rid ourselves

20:39

of this expert language ref

20:42

this annoying little schoolmarmie

20:44

voice in your head. On

20:46

the other hand, what happens when that

20:49

little voice ceases to exist? And

20:51

not just that little voice, but the other

20:53

little voices like it. I'm

21:00

Margaret Sullivan and I was the

21:03

public editor of the New York Times. And

21:05

what's a public editor? I just asked

21:07

that to loosen her up. I knew the answer. The

21:09

public editor is the ombudsman,

21:12

the neutral party inside the news organization

21:15

whose job is to make judgments

21:17

about the news in the same

21:19

possibly irritating way that Brian

21:22

Garner makes judgments about the language,

21:25

to call out the paper when it screws up. Sullivan

21:28

did that at the New York Times from two thousand and

21:30

twelve until the spring of two thousand

21:32

and sixteen. When she left

21:35

a year later, the Times just got rid of its public

21:37

editor altogether. So I would love

21:39

for you to explain to me the

21:42

importance of ombudsman why

21:44

they exist in the first place. So,

21:47

for example, and this is not the only role,

21:49

but let's just say someone thinks

21:51

a correction should be made in a news

21:53

story and the

21:55

people who are in charge of that say, well,

21:58

nope, we're not going to do that because we're

22:00

convinced it's right. So then they could

22:02

come to the ombudsman and say,

22:06

what do you think here? The

22:08

thing about the is that it has

22:10

to be independent. I

22:13

had no editor. I mean I had a copy

22:15

editor, and I end the My copy editor great

22:17

person would say to me, are you sure you want

22:19

to say it that way? Or don't you think

22:22

going a little too far there? But he

22:24

couldn't tell me not to do it. Sullivan

22:27

was not just a good ombudsman. She

22:29

was a famously good one. She made

22:31

a big deal about reporters who let sources

22:33

approve their quotes. She called

22:35

out The Times for its policies allowing anonymous

22:38

sources, especially in stories

22:40

about national politics. Everyone

22:42

in the news room read and feared her, and

22:45

that probably prevented a lot of distorted

22:47

or unfair stuff from ever

22:49

getting into print. But the

22:51

role she played is dying. The Washington

22:53

Post got rid of their ombudsman in two and

22:56

thirteen, and the New York Times

22:58

in twenty seventeen. Even

23:00

ESPN had one and got rid

23:02

of it. And why so,

23:05

why has it been in decline? If

23:07

you ask the media organizations, the news

23:09

organizations who have discontinued

23:12

their ombudsperson

23:14

rolls, they would say, almost

23:17

to a person, they would say, it's

23:19

not necessary anymore because there's

23:22

so much criticism in the digital

23:24

world on Twitter

23:26

and elsewhere. There's so many voices,

23:29

there's so many ways to get a complaint or

23:31

a point of view out there that we don't

23:33

need to have someone that we pay to

23:36

criticize us. Internally, you

23:38

don't need a news reff anymore because

23:41

in the new media market, the crowd

23:43

can do the reffing. The Times only

23:45

created the ombudsman roll back in two thousand

23:47

and three. The reasoning then

23:50

was the modern media market, the Internet,

23:52

cable TV, the speeding

23:54

up in the news cycle that was all creating

23:57

pressures that led to some really sensational

23:59

screw ups by the New York Times. They

24:01

printed a bunch of stories on the front page by

24:04

a reporter named Jason Blair. He

24:06

later confessed that he just made up quotes

24:08

an entire scenes. They printed

24:10

stories saying that Sodom Hussein possessed weapons

24:13

of mass destruction when he didn't.

24:15

Did you while you were there? Was there? Did

24:18

you have a sense that there was a decline in the

24:21

need for you to do

24:23

this job? Was there? Where? Were there like less

24:25

things coming in? Oh? No more if

24:27

anything? But there was this belief

24:29

in the air that the crowd could

24:32

do the job. And why

24:34

pay a genuinely independent news referee

24:37

when you could get the crowd to do the job

24:39

for free? Do you ever read

24:42

it? Does any anything ever cause

24:44

a story to smell for you? You go, there's

24:46

something wrong. It's the kind of thing that if

24:49

I were there in my job, I'd be getting emails

24:51

about Oh, yes, absolutely, you

24:53

can see those coming a mile

24:55

away. Now

25:00

I'm going to finish the story of Alex Cogan,

25:03

the young psychologist born in the Soviet

25:05

Union who started out in physics and

25:07

ended up in love along

25:11

with a bunch of other researchers and app builders. He'd

25:13

signed an agreement with Facebook to

25:15

study its users. It

25:18

wasn't cheap to do. Alex

25:20

paid the subjects of his studies through some

25:22

survey company. He asked permission

25:24

to let him study overall patterns

25:27

of what they liked and how they used

25:29

emojis. He hoped that the

25:31

data might yield all kinds of insights or

25:34

help address the odd questions that Alex had

25:36

a talent for raising, like what

25:39

is the difference between loving and being

25:41

loved? Fast

25:44

forward to i'd say winter

25:47

of twenty fourteen, and one

25:49

of the PhD students in my department at

25:51

Cambridge says, Hey, I've been consulting for

25:53

this company. They'd really love

25:55

to meet you and get like a little consulting

25:58

help from you. Would you be interesting? I'm like, sure,

26:00

meet Alex Cogan, student

26:03

of Love. The big

26:05

cary for me here was that they were going to

26:07

pay for a really big data collection. So

26:10

they're going to pay something like eight

26:12

hundred thousand dollars so we could get all

26:14

this data and I could keep it to do my research.

26:17

And that was really exciting to me because hey,

26:19

this was a really fast way

26:21

to get a really nice grant. So

26:24

I set up a meeting with this company called cl

26:26

which would eventually become Cambridge Analytica.

26:29

Yes, that Cambridge Analytica.

26:32

It has nothing to do with Cambridge University.

26:35

It was just a little known political consulting

26:37

firm trying to horn in on the lucrative business

26:40

of advising presidential campaigns. Yeah,

26:43

so we're really looking at page legs. And

26:45

the reason we focused it on page likes was

26:47

there's a few papers published at that point

26:50

that showed that, hey, you could take people's

26:52

page legs and use them to

26:54

predict their personalities with some level

26:56

of accuracy. The company

26:58

asked Alex if he could classify people

27:00

by five personality traits extra

27:03

version, agreeableness, openness,

27:06

and so on use their Facebook

27:08

data to herman which little personality

27:10

buckets they fell into kind

27:12

of routine stuff for him. Would

27:15

caught Alex's interest was the chance to

27:17

make other studies of the same people. Why

27:19

do you need that much money to collect the data paying

27:21

participants. So the way we usually recruit

27:24

participants, as would say like, hey, please

27:26

answer twenty minutes of questionnaires for us, and

27:28

we'll give you a few dollars for your time. And

27:31

in this case we got something like two hundred

27:34

thousand people to go and give

27:36

us twenty minutes of their time, and we paid them around

27:38

four bucks each. He

27:42

didn't even need to go find these people. They

27:44

found him through websites where

27:46

people offered to be lab rats for researchers

27:49

in exchange for cash or prizes. Alex

27:52

gave them cash. They gave

27:54

Alex access to their Facebook data, which

27:56

I guess tells you that a lot of people are happy to put

27:58

a price on their privacy. Anyway,

28:01

Cambridge Analytica's idea wasn't even all

28:03

that original. The Obama

28:05

campaign claimed to have done the same thing with Facebook

28:08

data back into twelve, though

28:10

on a smaller scale. But

28:12

Alex figured out pretty quickly just how

28:15

hard it was to do what his client wanted.

28:18

You couldn't really predict much about people

28:20

using their Facebook data, or

28:22

at least he couldn't. We

28:25

started asking the question of like, well, how often

28:27

are we right? And so there's

28:29

five personality dimensions, and we

28:31

said, like, okay, for one percentage

28:33

of people, do we get all five

28:35

personality categories correct?

28:38

We found it was like one percent. How

28:40

did you even check that? Though? How do you find out

28:42

whether someone is an extrovert?

28:45

The two hundred thousands that provided

28:47

us to the personality scores, because

28:49

those terms of thousand people to authorize that app

28:51

filled out the personality quiz, and that would

28:54

be like, okay, let's go

28:56

and see how these people actually answered, and

28:58

let's see what we predicted and we could compare it. So,

29:00

assuming they know their personality and

29:03

that was right, you got it right one percent of

29:05

the time. One percent of time. I'm

29:08

going to break that down for you. Cambridge

29:10

Analytica had Alex Cogan collecting

29:13

and compiling Facebook data

29:16

in a way that was incredibly useless.

29:19

I think we got halfway through the project and realize,

29:21

you know, this probably doesn't work that well.

29:24

But at that point, you know, we're contractorally

29:26

obligated to give them the data and they

29:28

were still interested. But here was the crazy

29:31

thing. The consulting firm didn't

29:33

care whether it worked or it didn't. They're

29:35

getting paid pots of money by Ted Cruz's

29:38

presidential campaign, who were trying

29:40

to reach voters on social media.

29:42

The Cruise campaign didn't seem to know that this stuff

29:44

didn't work. With a heavy

29:47

heart, but

29:49

with boundless optimism. Then

29:52

Ted Cruz lost the Republican

29:54

primary to Donald Trump, we

29:58

are suspending our campaign. Cambridge

30:00

Analytica had used Alex's useless

30:02

predictions to help the loser to lose.

30:05

Now amazingly, they sold

30:07

their services to the winner. Alex

30:10

never learned whether the Trump campaign actually

30:12

ever used his data, but in the

30:14

end that didn't matter. And

30:16

when Donald Trump became president, a

30:19

lot of folks thought incredible had happened.

30:22

So they started looking for incredible explanations.

30:25

Could the same data have been

30:27

possibly used when this selection?

30:29

Because like, how else could this possibly have happened?

30:31

So folks are looking for, like, where's the

30:33

evil genius that could have possibly

30:36

caused all this? That

30:39

was the moment Alex called his old teacher,

30:41

Daker Keltner, who gave him which

30:43

sounded like good advice. I told him like

30:45

key below profile and just

30:48

try to stay out of the conversation. And

30:50

that advice mostly worked right

30:52

up until early twenty and eighteen. First,

30:55

our chief business correspondent Rebecca Jarvis

30:57

has the latest. He's the scientist

31:00

at the heart of the Facebook privacy scandal,

31:02

and then the drama unfolded a researcher

31:05

at the University of Cambridge. They finally

31:07

realized that I was worn in the

31:09

Soviet Union to collect the

31:11

data of millions of ali About

31:19

a week before the stories break, the New

31:22

York Times and The Guardian email me with

31:24

a bunch of questions about like the project

31:27

and also whether I might be a Russian spy. Now,

31:30

I didn't want to ask them, like, guys, if

31:33

I am actually a Russian spy, do you think? Like

31:35

a direct question was going to trip me up, And I'm

31:37

gonna say, you got me, Yes, I'm a Russian spy.

31:40

It's now April twenty and eighteen.

31:43

Alex Cogan's thinking, surely

31:46

someone will step in and sort this out, some

31:48

neutral third party, some grown

31:50

up inside the New York Times. Maybe

31:53

someone would just stop and think about it.

31:56

He was an academic using

31:58

some political consulting money to

32:00

make useless predictions about people's personalities,

32:03

while also funding his own studies on the side.

32:07

He signed this agreement with Facebook,

32:09

the one that's spelled out how he could interact

32:11

with its users, and the company was

32:13

okay with everything he'd been doing. Facebook

32:16

had explicitly agreed to let him use

32:18

Facebook data not just for academic

32:21

research, but for commerce if he could

32:23

find some business use for it. When

32:26

reporters called him, he'd say, look

32:28

at the agreement. Call Facebook, they'll tell

32:30

you the truth. But

32:32

it's clear now that we didn't do enough to

32:35

prevent these tools from being used for harm

32:37

as well, and that goes for fake

32:39

news, for foreign interference and elections,

32:41

and hate speech, as well as

32:43

developers and data privacy. That's

32:46

Mark Zuckerberg on TV, not

32:48

looking like he wants to tell anybody the truth. Facebook

32:51

goes on the defensive. They

32:54

do a press release basically say like

32:56

we've banned Kim John Letaca, they we've

32:58

banned Cogan. They basically also

33:01

say that you know, Cogan here told

33:03

us it was for academocra research and that's why

33:05

we let him do it, which wasn't true at all. We

33:07

need to make sure that people aren't you using it to harm

33:09

other people. Facebook wanted people to believe it

33:11

was a victim of this data thief, when

33:14

in fact, it had given Alex's permission to do exactly

33:16

what he did. But then Facebook

33:19

was created to be an unrefereed space.

33:22

It allowed its users to do and say pretty

33:24

much whatever they pleased and took

33:26

no responsibility for the consequences.

33:29

Now, the world was furious with Facebook

33:32

for not refing itself, and

33:34

so it panicked and look for

33:36

someone else to blame. Alex

33:38

Cogan had set out in life to study our positive

33:40

emotions. He now got his lesson in

33:42

the other kind, anger mistrust.

33:46

All these reporters were now calling him to ask

33:49

these very weird, hostile questions,

33:51

like why it changed his last name after

33:54

he'd gotten married. We

33:56

wanted to find something that

33:59

symbolize both our religious sides or a scientific

34:01

sites, because we're both scientists and religious,

34:04

and we landed this idea of light

34:07

and they're like, oh, spectrum like

34:09

and then we heard the last name Specter, and I'm like, oh, that's

34:11

really cool, let's do that. So we change your

34:13

last name to Specter. Bad

34:16

luck hab it. Specter is also

34:18

the evil organization from James Bond.

34:21

I got a lot of questions from

34:24

a lot of journalists saying like, Hey,

34:26

this whole Specter thing is mighty suspicious.

34:31

I just say this that if you're planning

34:33

to do something sinister, if you're

34:35

even vaguely considering the possibility,

34:38

the last thing you should do is change

34:41

your last name to Specter. It's

34:44

like naming a restaurant sam

34:46

and Ella. Maybe that's just me. All

34:49

the little details of Alex Cogan's

34:51

life had now become evidence

34:53

for the prosecution. No

34:56

one even had to come out and say that Alex

34:58

Cogan was a spy. The Guardian

35:01

ran graphics and little arrows pointing

35:04

from a picture of red Square to a

35:06

picture of Alex Cogan. What

35:09

the Russia connection? I woke up that

35:12

day too, like two hundred emails

35:14

from pretty much every outlet in the world. CNNs

35:18

starts trying to track me down, Like

35:20

I started giving phone calls from like my old

35:22

house in San Francisco that CNN is like poking

35:24

around trying to find me, and then

35:26

they show up at my door. The

35:29

story of Alex Cogan and Cambridge

35:31

Analytica went viral before

35:34

it ever really got checked for whether it

35:36

made any sense. It was refed

35:38

by the crowd. The crowd

35:41

just decided that it liked the story and

35:43

ran with it. The

35:45

US government started knocking my door. We got,

35:48

you know, questions from the US

35:50

Senate, the House, and

35:52

etc. Etc. The British

35:55

Parliament reached out and I learned you can't

35:57

really talk to the government as a private citizen.

36:00

So like financially like completely wiped

36:02

me out and like massive debt. Now

36:04

in terms of the legal bills, as

36:07

far as the academic career, pretty

36:09

much over. A promising academic

36:11

career went poof, just like

36:14

that. All he's got left

36:16

is the possibility of writing a memoir of the experience

36:19

and a lawsuit against Facebook, accusing

36:22

the company of defamation, which he filed

36:24

a few months after we spoke. I

36:28

met with a guy who is

36:31

doing a documentary about all of this, and he's like,

36:33

you know, it's crazy. I was warned,

36:35

and I'm not gonna tell you by who, but it's somebody prominence. But

36:38

I was warned when I'm talking to

36:40

you to be really careful because you're a trained

36:42

covert agent from Russia and you would

36:45

out my phone. I

36:49

think of Alex Cogan as a curious kind

36:52

of victim, even if he refuses

36:54

to sound anything but cheery about his situation.

36:57

He's what happens when the refs are banished from

36:59

the news, when people are encouraged

37:02

to believe whatever it is they want to believe. It's

37:05

not that the news was once perfectly refereed

37:07

and now it's not, or that there

37:09

weren't ever fake stories, or that people

37:11

haven't always believed all kinds of bullshit.

37:15

But there's an obvious antidote, the

37:17

neutral third party, the independent

37:20

authority, the referee

37:22

who makes it more difficult, if

37:25

only just a little bit, for an easy

37:27

lie to replace a complicated truth.

37:31

Yet the job doesn't exist. The

37:34

market doesn't want some neutral third party

37:36

interfering with our ability to create our own

37:38

truths, to render our own

37:40

meanings, to construct our own

37:43

realities as

37:45

we decline, stage

37:47

by stage against

38:00

the Rules. Is brought to you by Pushkin

38:02

Industries. The show's produced by

38:04

Audrey Dilling and Catherine Girardote,

38:07

with research assistance from Zoe Oliver Gray

38:09

and Beth Johnson. Our

38:12

editor is Julia Barton. Mia

38:15

Lobell is our executive producer. Our

38:18

theme was composed by Nick Burttell, with additional

38:20

scoring by Seth Samuel, mastering

38:23

by Jason Gambrel. Our

38:25

show was recorded by Tofa Ruth at

38:28

Northgate Studios at UC Berkeley.

38:31

Special thanks to our founders, Jacob Weisberg

38:34

and Malcolm Gladwell.

38:55

Do you mean an example of the state something that's at

38:57

stage one now? Using

39:02

climatic in the sense

39:04

climactic, this was the

39:06

climatic point of the play.

39:09

Well climate yeah,

39:13

they're both words. I absolutely

39:17

u and if you

39:19

if you take the phrase so anti climactic

39:22

is the word is an anti climax.

39:25

But if you search anti

39:28

climatic versus anti

39:30

climactic, the ratio

39:33

and that's the you have to contextualize these searches.

39:35

There's no reason to use anti climatic

39:38

at all. But it's twenty eight

39:40

to one in print sources anti

39:43

climactic in favor of anti

39:45

climactic. But the fact that the other

39:47

one appears once every twenty

39:49

eight times, that yeah,

39:51

it is. So this is like linguistic

39:54

epidemiology. It

39:56

begins to spread. A lot of us

39:58

have snakes in the

40:00

grass. We call them garter

40:02

snakes, and garter snakes

40:05

have little stripes on them that look

40:07

like garters. But a lot of people people

40:09

misheard that and started saying garden snake.

40:11

They thought it was it's a garden it's a register, regular,

40:14

harmless garden snake. Well

40:16

it's a garter snake. That

40:19

is uh wow,

40:22

Well that's a problem. That's eight to one because if that

40:24

snake in the garden is a rattlesnake, that's

40:27

right, there could be a real I've

40:29

got I've got a garden snake out there. Oh

40:31

good, I don't have to wear any protective

40:33

clothing. I'll go catch it. Well, you know that

40:36

these are problems people

40:38

would say you and I just made that up. Give

40:40

me an example of the stage stage four

40:43

um misspelling minuscule as

40:45

if it were miniskirt minuscules m

40:47

I n us culi. But

40:49

that's two to one in print. Now or

40:53

anti vinin. Now here's one anti

40:56

vinen. If you get bitten by not

40:58

a garter snake, but by a rattlesnake,

41:01

you need anti vinin v E

41:03

N I N. But the

41:06

noun for what the snake puts

41:08

into you is them, And so a

41:10

lot of people you

41:12

know this is is it really worth

41:15

preserving? I don't know. It's

41:17

traditional English anti venin,

41:19

and it comes from a Latin form.

41:23

But people have started saying anti venom,

41:26

and that one is one

41:28

point two to one in favor of anti

41:30

venom. But that's one where I continue

41:33

to recommend the traditional form

41:35

anti vinin. So you go into

41:37

the garden and you pick up the snake because you think

41:39

it's a garden snake, and you're a bit by the rattlesnake,

41:42

and you go you're bitten. You're bitten

41:44

by the bit, thank you very much, bitten by the rattlesnake,

41:46

and you're taking to the hospital and by the time they figure

41:48

out what you're trying to ask for, because you're asking for

41:50

anti venom and they don't have any, you're

41:53

dead. Yeah, because you mispronounced. Sorry, we're not

41:55

giving you any. All we have is anti vinin.

41:58

We don't have any anti venom. And

42:00

by the way, I don't normally correct people, but

42:02

forgive me for that that bitten thing,

42:04

Thank you very much. Sure,