Speaker 1: Pushkin. I want to start this episode by telling you
Speaker 1: just the very beginning of a story I recently heard about.
Speaker 1: A guy named Alex Cogan born in nineteen eighty six
Speaker 1: into a Jewish family in the Soviet Union. After the
Speaker 1: collapse in nineteen ninety one, the government loses control and
Speaker 1: Jews are even less safe than before. Alex's dad starts
Speaker 1: getting death threats, so he up and moves his entire
Speaker 1: family four generations of Cogan's, to New York City. In
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety four, Alex enter's first grade in a Brooklyn
Speaker 1: public school. He's conspicuous, way taller than the other kids.
Speaker 1: He speaks no English. He's also got a talent from
Speaker 1: math and science. Once his teachers can understand him, they
Speaker 1: think he has the makings of a gifted physicist. Life's
Speaker 1: not hard for him, but as he grows up, he
Speaker 1: begins to see that it isn't always easy for everybody else.
Speaker 1: Six months after they've arrived in the United States, his
Speaker 1: great grandmother had jumped from their apartment window to her death.
Speaker 1: His parents, the loves of each other's lives, split up.
Speaker 1: Alex cries every night until they get back together. He
Speaker 1: enters high school and one of his close friends attempts suicide,
Speaker 1: another becomes clinically depressed. Alex begins to read psychology. He's
Speaker 1: a math and science kid, but he's getting more and
Speaker 1: more curious about human nature. And the first time I
Speaker 1: met him, and I really remember it very distinctly, because
Speaker 1: he almost always wore these giant basketball shorts no matter
Speaker 1: what the weather. You know, he's terribly dressed, like a
Speaker 1: lot of Berkeley undergrads, and you know, and basketball shoes.
Speaker 1: That's Daker Keltner, the psychologist at the University of California,
Speaker 1: Berkeley who runs something called the Greater Good Science Center
Speaker 1: where they study human emotion. We heard from him in
Speaker 1: episode one. Alex Cogan was a shambolic six foot four
Speaker 1: inch freshman back in two thousand and five when he
Speaker 1: knocked on Daker's office door and said he'd like for
Speaker 1: Daker to teach him. Emotions fascinated him. He'd come to
Speaker 1: cal to study physics, but he'd been thinking about love,
Speaker 1: about the distinction between loving and being loved. He wanted
Speaker 1: to study it the way you'd study a quark. And
Speaker 1: Alex came in and he said, you know, I have
Speaker 1: seven kinds of love. That I'm going to put people into.
Speaker 1: I was like, wow, that's interesting. And then there are
Speaker 1: twelve variations of I forgot what the other factor was
Speaker 1: that or set of conditions that he wanted to create,
Speaker 1: And there are eighty four different conditions in his study.
Speaker 1: So he's going to study seven different kinds of love,
Speaker 1: and he's going to study all these different variables that
Speaker 1: would maybe predict the force of the love, the power
Speaker 1: of the love exactly. So he's about to make glove
Speaker 1: more complicated than it's ever been made. So it sounds like, right,
Speaker 1: he was gonna confound our understanding of love. Daker talks
Speaker 1: Alex out of that idea, but this kid is so
Speaker 1: smart and original and full of energy, and so Daker
Speaker 1: takes him in and it isn't long before Alex is
Speaker 1: finding things to do that no one else is doing.
Speaker 1: For instance, the thing that he does after they discover
Speaker 1: a gene it's associated with human kindness. And Alex did
Speaker 1: this cool paper where he showed if you present videotapes
Speaker 1: of people who have that gene or this variant of
Speaker 1: a gene that makes them kind and I am an
Speaker 1: observer and I see one of those people for twenty
Speaker 1: seconds on video. I trust them, right, I'm like this guy.
Speaker 1: I go to battle at this guy, right, I trust
Speaker 1: this guy. By the time Alex graduates from cal he's
Speaker 1: established himself as the most promising student in the entire
Speaker 1: psychology department and the most unusual. Just this big, sweet
Speaker 1: natured guy with a serious talent for math and statistics
Speaker 1: and a desire to study huge questions like what is love?
Speaker 1: When he left and he's so unconventional, Michael, he could
Speaker 1: have gone to any graduate program in the country, and
Speaker 1: he chooses the University of Hong Kong. I'm what because
Speaker 1: he met this woman or got engaged and fell in love? Yeah,
Speaker 1: fell in love. But Daker and Alex stay in touch.
Speaker 1: They collaborate on a few papers. They're both interested in
Speaker 1: big questions about human nature. At the same time, social
Speaker 1: media has started to create a new way to study
Speaker 1: those questions. In late twenty twelve, Facebook invites Daker to
Speaker 1: visit and asks him to create a bunch of new emojis,
Speaker 1: ones that better convey actual emotions. When Daker sees what
Speaker 1: Facebook knows about its users, he's blown away. This could
Speaker 1: be the greatest data source that will ever EXI and
Speaker 1: it would help us answer questions from the scientific perspective,
Speaker 1: like how does disease spread in some neighborhoods but not others?
Speaker 1: What predicts heart attacks? Where does hate crime? Where is
Speaker 1: it likely to happen? Right? That was all tractable with
Speaker 1: the data that they had. Meanwhile, Alex had moved to
Speaker 1: England to teach at Cambridge University. He was still researching
Speaker 1: the same stuff, the positive emotions, and he too was
Speaker 1: seeing possibilities in the new social media data. And I
Speaker 1: was at Facebook doing my consulting work and I saw
Speaker 1: Alex there. I was like, what are you doing here?
Speaker 1: And he's everywhere, you know, So he's like, oh, I'm
Speaker 1: working on this other project and he told me about it.
Speaker 1: Alex Cogan told Daker that he wanted to use Facebook
Speaker 1: to study things like love and happiness. For example, you
Speaker 1: might be able to take a fairly small sample of data,
Speaker 1: say the likes of ten thousand Facebook users, to make
Speaker 1: discoveries about those emotions entire countries. The math was complicated
Speaker 1: enough the Dacker himself didn't fully understand it. He then
Speaker 1: forgot all about it until one day a year or
Speaker 1: so later, when Alex Cogan called him up. He calls
Speaker 1: me after Trump's elected and he says, I think I've
Speaker 1: done something that was part of this election. And I
Speaker 1: was like, okay, well, let's talk what is it? And
Speaker 1: he said, I created this mechanism that was purchased and
Speaker 1: used in the Trump campaign. He was worried that he
Speaker 1: actually had had some effect, or that he'd be perceived
Speaker 1: to have had some effect. I don't think he made
Speaker 1: that distinction. I just think he thought, oh now, Alex
Speaker 1: Cogan sensed that he might have a problem. He just
Speaker 1: had no idea how big it was going to be.
Speaker 1: I'm Michael Lewis, and this is Against the Rules, a
Speaker 1: show about the decline of the human referee in American
Speaker 1: life and what that's doing to our idea of fairness today.
Speaker 1: I want to talk about an entire species of refs,
Speaker 1: one that's nearing extinction, whom no one will miss until
Speaker 1: it's too late. I used to be a referee in
Speaker 1: the big leagues of dictionaries. The American Heritage. You've heard
Speaker 1: of it. The American Heritage has something called the usage Panel,
Speaker 1: and I was on it, along with a couple of
Speaker 1: hundred other word people. Every year we get this mass
Speaker 1: email asking us to judge the latest word controversies how
Speaker 1: certain words should be defined, or spelled or pronounced. English
Speaker 1: is always changing, and the dictionary wanted to keep up
Speaker 1: with the times and sometimes resist them. Was it okay
Speaker 1: to use unique to mean unusual? Should you say banal
Speaker 1: or banal or both? This year I got a different
Speaker 1: sort of email, saying I've been fired. They fired the
Speaker 1: whole panel, so I didn't take it personally, but I
Speaker 1: still want to know why. As far as I could see,
Speaker 1: we've done nothing wrong. Our definitions were still definitive. I
Speaker 1: call the guy who'd been my boss as head of
Speaker 1: the usage panel. What did you do? I advised on
Speaker 1: people to include on the usage panel. Occasionally people die,
Speaker 1: and or occasionally people would simply not respond to the
Speaker 1: questionnaire for several years running, and we'd want to replace them.
Speaker 1: His name is Stephen Pinker. Yes, that's Stephen Pinker, Harvard
Speaker 1: psychologist and author of many best selling books. In the
Speaker 1: case of disputed usage, where people wonder what is the
Speaker 1: correct use? Can I use decimate to mean destroy most of, or,
Speaker 1: as rumor has it should only mean destroy one tenth of?
Speaker 1: Or what's the best way to use epicenter. Is it
Speaker 1: just the center of something or does it have to
Speaker 1: mean propagating outward? Of course, if you want to know
Speaker 1: what a center means, you can now just google it.
Speaker 1: The Internet has been bad for dictionaries. They don't sell
Speaker 1: the way they used to. But the Internet doesn't explain
Speaker 1: why our panel was fired. We didn't cost the dictionary
Speaker 1: a dime. We all work for free. Why did they
Speaker 1: cut it? You know, I haven't gotten to the bottom
Speaker 1: of this. Maybe I'll just let someone else chase this
Speaker 1: one down. I mentioned this whole situation because it's not unique, which,
Speaker 1: by the way, should only be used to mean one
Speaker 1: of a kind. Nothing can be very unique, or most unique,
Speaker 1: or even rather unique. A thing can be either banal
Speaker 1: or banal. But it's either unique or it's not anyway.
Speaker 1: The death of the word referee is not even all
Speaker 1: that unusual. They're a member of the species of refs
Speaker 1: that the world now has no use for. The culture refs,
Speaker 1: the people who referee are most basic interactions how we
Speaker 1: should talk, who we should trust, or whom we should trust.
Speaker 1: No one particularly mourns their death until they really need one.
Speaker 1: Our bags. We are in a suburb of Dallas, at
Speaker 1: the home of Brian Garner, who has set himself up
Speaker 1: as a referee of the English language. When and what
Speaker 1: should you hyphenate? He's the author of M. Garner's Modern
Speaker 1: English Usage. Why people shouldn't use flaunt when they mean flout.
Speaker 1: We've been standing out of here for three or four
Speaker 1: minutes and there's no sign of life. We're gonna go
Speaker 1: knock on his door. All right, all right? What's the
Speaker 1: difference between species and spurious? Does it really matter if you,
Speaker 1: at this very moment are filled with angst or angst?
Speaker 1: We're a weird g. Garner's Usage manual is now more
Speaker 1: than twelve hundred pages long. The late novelist David Foster
Speaker 1: Wallace called it a work of genius. This book is
Speaker 1: so big. Did you bring your copy? No? I have
Speaker 1: xerox those pages that I want, just the front. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it wouldn't fit. You don't really expect to find guardians
Speaker 1: of the English language in Dallas, Texas. Then again, you
Speaker 1: don't really expect to find them anywhere. That's why I've
Speaker 1: bothered to find him. It's like flying to Indonesia to
Speaker 1: see the last of the Sumatran rhinos, and so here
Speaker 1: We are between a giant golf course of a lawn
Speaker 1: and a monticello of red bricks and doric columns. We're
Speaker 1: prank in the right place, Michael Lewis, Ryan Garner, very
Speaker 1: good to meet you. Thank you for letting us in truth.
Speaker 1: Are we welcome? Garner's house does have a kitchen and bathrooms,
Speaker 1: almost like a normal house, but it feels like an
Speaker 1: excuse for him to live in what amounts to a
Speaker 1: massive library. Floors of books with little ladders so you
Speaker 1: can climb up and reach them. Thousands upon thousands of
Speaker 1: mostly very old books about the English language. I've had
Speaker 1: my coffee all round. It looks like a Robber Baron's
Speaker 1: collection of books, except they look like they've been read.
Speaker 1: They look like they aren't. They aren't book spot by
Speaker 1: the yard, and they also have plastic covers on them,
Speaker 1: which is a little unusual. How many Usage Experts books
Speaker 1: do you have in this library? I mean, how many different?
Speaker 1: He published his first Usage Guide back in nineteen ninety eight,
Speaker 1: partly as a protest against the way people talked on TV,
Speaker 1: which sounds a bit snooty, but Gardner's genius was not
Speaker 1: to set himself up as some kind of elite speaking
Speaker 1: down to the illiterate masses. His judgments felt like common sense.
Speaker 1: They were relied on data. He classified any change in
Speaker 1: the language into five stages, ranging from weird new usage
Speaker 1: to a totally accepted new use of the word. He
Speaker 1: had lots of information on how people were actually speaking
Speaker 1: and writing the English language. So this is Webster's first
Speaker 1: dictionary six and this just kind of shows the evolution
Speaker 1: over the nineteenth century. But I have so upstairs. These
Speaker 1: are books on writing, a beginning all the way over here,
Speaker 1: so that this whole, that whole wall is linguistics, and
Speaker 1: look on usage and writing. I think I just assume
Speaker 1: that anybody who went this far out of his way
Speaker 1: to tell other people how to speak and write must
Speaker 1: have something wrong with him. That if you tracked his
Speaker 1: interest back to its source, you'd finally arrive at the
Speaker 1: desire to feel superior. But that's not Garner. His source
Speaker 1: energy isn't snobbery. It's outrage at an idea cooked up
Speaker 1: by academic linguistics, an idea he had encountered back as
Speaker 1: a student at the University of Texas descriptivism. It was
Speaker 1: called a native speaker of English cannot make a mistake,
Speaker 1: and it's so fact though if a native speaker says it,
Speaker 1: it is correct. That is a very extreme position to take,
Speaker 1: and I think an indefensible one, and one that I
Speaker 1: have pretty much set my face against. He set his
Speaker 1: face against descriptivism, and his face is set against it. Still.
Speaker 1: Do you consider yourself a referee? Yes? Yeah, I'm making
Speaker 1: judgment calls about and there is a lot of judgment involved,
Speaker 1: But I'm trying to be a helpful guide to writers
Speaker 1: and speakers of English. We're now up in a balcony
Speaker 1: gazing down at an amphitheater of books about the English language.
Speaker 1: He's got a whole other collection of books out back
Speaker 1: where the poolhouse should be, in a building that's an
Speaker 1: exact replica of the room in England in which the
Speaker 1: Oxford English Dictionary was created. I pulled down an especially
Speaker 1: decrepit looking book by someone I've never heard of, Lindley Murray. Murray,
Speaker 1: but there's kind of a hero of mine. Interesting guy.
Speaker 1: He was a New York lawyer in seventeen eighty four.
Speaker 1: He moved to York, England because he didn't like the Revolution,
Speaker 1: and a lot of Americans actually moved to England because
Speaker 1: they didn't appreciate what was going on. Lynn Manuel and
Speaker 1: Miranda left that out of Hamilton. I guess so, and
Speaker 1: so these two shelves are whole various ambitions of Murray's Grammar. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and Brian Garner seems to have all of them. So Murray.
Speaker 1: In seventeen ninety five he stopped practicing law and he
Speaker 1: wrote Murray's English Grammar for a Quaker girls school in York,
Speaker 1: and it became the best selling book in the English
Speaker 1: language other than the Bible for the first fifty years
Speaker 1: of the nineteenth century. He sold over thirteen million copies
Speaker 1: of his English Grammar. Every household needed an English Grammar
Speaker 1: and a Bible thirteen million copies. The joint population of
Speaker 1: Great Britain in the United States in eighteen hundred was
Speaker 1: only fifteen million, But back then people threw money at
Speaker 1: language refs. Noah Webster got rich from his dictionary, so
Speaker 1: did Fowler and Follet and Partridge and scores of others
Speaker 1: from their grammars and usage guides. Strunk and White have
Speaker 1: sold ten million copies of this style manual. There was
Speaker 1: a time not long ago when a writer could get
Speaker 1: paid to write about how to write, and the American
Speaker 1: Heritage Dictionary used to brag about his usage panel. But
Speaker 1: Brian Garner is in the wrong century. How many copies
Speaker 1: of Garner's Modern English usage is sold, I don't know exactly,
Speaker 1: but it's fewer that hauled and paltry. Brian Garner has
Speaker 1: a really nice house, but his usage manual doesn't pay
Speaker 1: his mortgage. He gives writing seminars for lawyers. The rest
Speaker 1: of his market has mostly vanished. I mentioned Barnes and Noble,
Speaker 1: but I haven't singled anybody out in particular, although I
Speaker 1: kind of did when the first two editions of my
Speaker 1: Usage book came out. Usage Book has passed a we're
Speaker 1: not going to stalk it. I mean that has a
Speaker 1: major effect, and they said, no, we've made the decision
Speaker 1: that really this category is defunct. The usage book is
Speaker 1: a defunct category. I grab another one of his old
Speaker 1: books and flip through it. Some nineteenth century guide to pronunciation.
Speaker 1: The idea that anyone would write, much less pay money
Speaker 1: for a pronunciation guide, well, it's preposterous and preposterous. It
Speaker 1: is an interesting fact, and one not sufficiently realized that
Speaker 1: a person who has a pronunciation of his own for
Speaker 1: a word is very apt to take it for granted
Speaker 1: that he hears all others has pronounced it in the
Speaker 1: same manner, when in fact his own method is entirely
Speaker 1: peculiar to himself. It doesn't make true at Also, talking
Speaker 1: about making people incredibly uncomfortable, fearful of what was coming
Speaker 1: out of their mouths, that's what he's doing. People used
Speaker 1: to feel uneasy about how they use the language. They
Speaker 1: didn't want to sound stupid or uneducated. Now they feel
Speaker 1: uneasy about anyone who would presume to judge how they're
Speaker 1: using the language, and old anxiety has been replaced by
Speaker 1: something else, a suspicion of the individual ref People still
Speaker 1: judge other people by what they say and how they
Speaker 1: say it, but they do it differently, without reference to
Speaker 1: a higher authority, but to the crowd. My own bank
Speaker 1: here in Dallas, every time there would be in any
Speaker 1: activity on one of my accounts, I'd get an email
Speaker 1: message dear dear mister Garner semicohen And I called my
Speaker 1: banker and I said, by the way, you know, you
Speaker 1: got hundreds of these things, presumably thousands going out by
Speaker 1: the day, dear customer, semicolon, And I said, you know,
Speaker 1: it's got to be either comma or a colon. He said,
Speaker 1: could you put that in writing? And I said, or
Speaker 1: I'll even give you some authorities, and I cited Garner's
Speaker 1: Modern English usage and a couple of other authorities on
Speaker 1: this point of punctuation. It's a pretty elementary point. Yep,
Speaker 1: he did that. I mean, who else is there to site?
Speaker 1: But the incorrectly punctuated letters just kept coming. Still. I
Speaker 1: was getting dozens every week of dear mister Garner semicolon
Speaker 1: and and it was I was about to change banks
Speaker 1: over this, because it's it's it's a little upsetting to
Speaker 1: think I'm doing business with people who are doing something
Speaker 1: so egregiously bad. And they didn't change it for about
Speaker 1: a month, and so I called him and I said,
Speaker 1: what's going on? He said, well, you know, I showed
Speaker 1: it to some of the people here at the bank,
Speaker 1: but we have a dispute about whether it should be
Speaker 1: a semicolon or a colon, and so we just left it.
Speaker 1: But that that is a demotic view. Well, your your
Speaker 1: opinion is as good as mine. Anybody's opinion is as
Speaker 1: good as somebody else. Demotic. Now, there is a word
Speaker 1: derived from an ancient Greek word meaning popular. That's how
Speaker 1: the language is generally refereed by popular opinion. Inside Garner's bank,
Speaker 1: by popular opinion, it was okay to send out letters
Speaker 1: teeming with semicolons that didn't belong. It's obviously not that
Speaker 1: big a deal. I mean, you can still understand where
Speaker 1: the bank was trying to say. Plus, it's sort of
Speaker 1: freeing to rid ourselves of this expert language ref this
Speaker 1: annoying little schoolmarmie voice in your head. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: what happens when that little voice ceases to exist? And
Speaker 1: not just that little voice, but the other little voices
Speaker 1: like it. I'm Margaret Sullivan and I was the public
Speaker 1: editor of the New York Times. And what's a public editor?
Speaker 1: I just asked that to loosen her up. I knew
Speaker 1: the answer. The public editor is the ombudsman, the neutral
Speaker 1: party inside the news organization whose job is to make
Speaker 1: judgments about the news in the same possibly irritating way
Speaker 1: that Brian Garner makes judgments about the language, to call
Speaker 1: out the paper when it screws up. Sullivan did that
Speaker 1: at the New York Times from two thousand and twelve
Speaker 1: until the spring of two thousand and sixteen. When she
Speaker 1: left a year later, the Times just got rid of
Speaker 1: its public editor altogether. So I would love for you
Speaker 1: to explain to me the importance of ombudsman why they
Speaker 1: exist in the first place. So, for example, and this
Speaker 1: is not the only role, but let's just say someone
Speaker 1: thinks a correction should be made in a news story
Speaker 1: and the people who are in charge of that say, well, nope,
Speaker 1: we're not going to do that because we're convinced it's right.
Speaker 1: So then they could come to the ombudsman and say,
Speaker 1: what do you think here? The thing about the is
Speaker 1: that it has to be independent. I had no editor.
Speaker 1: I mean I had a copy editor, and I end
Speaker 1: the My copy editor great person would say to me,
Speaker 1: are you sure you want to say it that way?
Speaker 1: Or don't you think going a little too far there?
Speaker 1: But he couldn't tell me not to do it. Sullivan
Speaker 1: was not just a good ombudsman. She was a famously
Speaker 1: good one. She made a big deal about reporters who
Speaker 1: let sources approve their quotes. She called out The Times
Speaker 1: for its policies allowing anonymous sources, especially in stories about
Speaker 1: national politics. Everyone in the news room read and feared her,
Speaker 1: and that probably prevented a lot of distorted or unfair
Speaker 1: stuff from ever getting into print. But the role she
Speaker 1: played is dying. The Washington Post got rid of their
Speaker 1: ombudsman in two and thirteen, and the New York Times
Speaker 1: in twenty seventeen. Even ESPN had one and got rid
Speaker 1: of it. And why so, why has it been in decline?
Speaker 1: If you ask the media organizations, the news organizations who
Speaker 1: have discontinued their ombudsperson rolls, they would say, almost to
Speaker 1: a person, they would say, it's not necessary anymore because
Speaker 1: there's so much criticism in the digital world on Twitter
Speaker 1: and elsewhere. There's so many voices, there's so many ways
Speaker 1: to get a complaint or a point of view out
Speaker 1: there that we don't need to have someone that we
Speaker 1: pay to criticize us. Internally, you don't need a news
Speaker 1: reff anymore because in the new media market, the crowd
Speaker 1: can do the reffing. The Times only created the ombudsman
Speaker 1: roll back in two thousand and three. The reasoning then
Speaker 1: was the modern media market, the Internet, cable TV, the
Speaker 1: speeding up in the news cycle that was all creating
Speaker 1: pressures that led to some really sensational screw ups by
Speaker 1: the New York Times. They printed a bunch of stories
Speaker 1: on the front page by a reporter named Jason Blair.
Speaker 1: He later confessed that he just made up quotes an
Speaker 1: entire scenes. They printed stories saying that Sodom Hussein possessed
Speaker 1: weapons of mass destruction when he didn't. Did you while
Speaker 1: you were there? Was there? Did you have a sense
Speaker 1: that there was a decline in the need for you
Speaker 1: to do this job? Was there? Where? Were there like
Speaker 1: less things coming in? Oh? No more if anything? But
Speaker 1: there was this belief in the air that the crowd
Speaker 1: could do the job. And why pay a genuinely independent
Speaker 1: news referee when you could get the crowd to do
Speaker 1: the job for free? Do you ever read it? Does
Speaker 1: any anything ever cause a story to smell for you?
Speaker 1: You go, there's something wrong. It's the kind of thing
Speaker 1: that if I were there in my job, I'd be
Speaker 1: getting emails about Oh, yes, absolutely, you can see those
Speaker 1: coming a mile away. Now I'm going to finish the
Speaker 1: story of Alex Cogan, the young psychologist born in the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union who started out in physics and ended up
Speaker 1: in love along with a bunch of other researchers and
Speaker 1: app builders. He'd signed an agreement with Facebook to study
Speaker 1: its users. It wasn't cheap to do. Alex paid the
Speaker 1: subjects of his studies through some survey company. He asked
Speaker 1: permission to let him study overall patterns of what they
Speaker 1: liked and how they used emojis. He hoped that the
Speaker 1: data might yield all kinds of insights or help address
Speaker 1: the odd questions that Alex had a talent for raising,
Speaker 1: like what is the difference between loving and being loved?
Speaker 1: Fast forward to i'd say winter of twenty fourteen, and
Speaker 1: one of the PhD students in my department at Cambridge says, Hey,
Speaker 1: I've been consulting for this company. They'd really love to
Speaker 1: meet you and get like a little consulting help from you.
Speaker 1: Would you be interesting? I'm like, sure, meet Alex Cogan,
Speaker 1: student of Love. The big cary for me here was
Speaker 1: that they were going to pay for a really big
Speaker 1: data collection. So they're going to pay something like eight
Speaker 1: hundred thousand dollars so we could get all this data
Speaker 1: and I could keep it to do my research. And
Speaker 1: that was really exciting to me because hey, this was
Speaker 1: a really fast way to get a really nice grant.
Speaker 1: So I set up a meeting with this company called
Speaker 1: cl which would eventually become Cambridge Analytica. Yes, that Cambridge Analytica.
Speaker 1: It has nothing to do with Cambridge University. It was
Speaker 1: just a little known political consulting firm trying to horn
Speaker 1: in on the lucrative business of advising presidential campaigns. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we're really looking at page legs. And the reason
Speaker 1: we focused it on page likes was there's a few
Speaker 1: papers published at that point that showed that, hey, you
Speaker 1: could take people's page legs and use them to predict
Speaker 1: their personalities with some level of accuracy. The company asked
Speaker 1: Alex if he could classify people by five personality traits
Speaker 1: extra version, agreeableness, openness, and so on use their Facebook
Speaker 1: data to herman which little personality buckets they fell into
Speaker 1: kind of routine stuff for him. Would caught Alex's interest
Speaker 1: was the chance to make other studies of the same people.
Speaker 1: Why do you need that much money to collect the
Speaker 1: data paying participants. So the way we usually recruit participants,
Speaker 1: as would say like, hey, please answer twenty minutes of
Speaker 1: questionnaires for us, and we'll give you a few dollars
Speaker 1: for your time. And in this case we got something
Speaker 1: like two hundred thousand people to go and give us
Speaker 1: twenty minutes of their time, and we paid them around
Speaker 1: four bucks each. He didn't even need to go find
Speaker 1: these people. They found him through websites where people offered
Speaker 1: to be lab rats for researchers in exchange for cash
Speaker 1: or prizes. Alex gave them cash. They gave Alex access
Speaker 1: to their Facebook data, which I guess tells you that
Speaker 1: a lot of people are happy to put a price
Speaker 1: on their privacy. Anyway, Cambridge Analytica's idea wasn't even all
Speaker 1: that original. The Obama campaign claimed to have done the
Speaker 1: same thing with Facebook data back into twelve, though on
Speaker 1: a smaller scale. But Alex figured out pretty quickly just
Speaker 1: how hard it was to do what his client wanted.
Speaker 1: You couldn't really predict much about people using their Facebook data,
Speaker 1: or at least he couldn't. We started asking the question
Speaker 1: of like, well, how often are we right? And so
Speaker 1: there's five personality dimensions, and we said, like, okay, for
Speaker 1: one percentage of people, do we get all five personality
Speaker 1: categories correct? We found it was like one percent. How
Speaker 1: did you even check that? Though? How do you find
Speaker 1: out whether someone is an extrovert? The two hundred thousands
Speaker 1: that provided us to the personality scores, because those terms
Speaker 1: of thousand people to authorize that app filled out the
Speaker 1: personality quiz, and that would be like, okay, let's go
Speaker 1: and see how these people actually answered, and let's see
Speaker 1: what we predicted and we could compare it. So, assuming
Speaker 1: they know their personality and that was right, you got
Speaker 1: it right one percent of the time. One percent of time.
Speaker 1: I'm going to break that down for you. Cambridge Analytica
Speaker 1: had Alex Cogan collecting and compiling Facebook data in a
Speaker 1: way that was incredibly useless. I think we got halfway
Speaker 1: through the project and realize, you know, this probably doesn't
Speaker 1: work that well. But at that point, you know, we're
Speaker 1: contractorally obligated to give them the data and they were
Speaker 1: still interested. But here was the crazy thing. The consulting
Speaker 1: firm didn't care whether it worked or it didn't. They're
Speaker 1: getting paid pots of money by Ted Cruz's presidential campaign,
Speaker 1: who were trying to reach voters on social media. The
Speaker 1: Cruise campaign didn't seem to know that this stuff didn't work.
Speaker 1: With a heavy heart, but with boundless optimism. Then Ted
Speaker 1: Cruz lost the Republican primary to Donald Trump, we are
Speaker 1: suspending our campaign. Cambridge Analytica had used Alex's useless predictions
Speaker 1: to help the loser to lose. Now amazingly, they sold
Speaker 1: their services to the winner. Alex never learned whether the
Speaker 1: Trump campaign actually ever used his data, but in the
Speaker 1: end that didn't matter. And when Donald Trump became president,
Speaker 1: a lot of folks thought incredible had happened. So they
Speaker 1: started looking for incredible explanations. Could the same data have
Speaker 1: been possibly used when this selection? Because like, how else
Speaker 1: could this possibly have happened? So folks are looking for, like,
Speaker 1: where's the evil genius that could have possibly caused all this?
Speaker 1: That was the moment Alex called his old teacher, Daker Keltner,
Speaker 1: who gave him which sounded like good advice. I told
Speaker 1: him like key below profile and just try to stay
Speaker 1: out of the conversation. And that advice mostly worked right
Speaker 1: up until early twenty and eighteen. First, our chief business
Speaker 1: correspondent Rebecca Jarvis has the latest. He's the scientist at
Speaker 1: the heart of the Facebook privacy scandal, and then the
Speaker 1: drama unfolded a researcher at the University of Cambridge. They
Speaker 1: finally realized that I was worn in the Soviet Union
Speaker 1: to collect the data of millions of ali About a
Speaker 1: week before the stories break, the New York Times and
Speaker 1: The Guardian email me with a bunch of questions about
Speaker 1: like the project and also whether I might be a
Speaker 1: Russian spy. Now, I didn't want to ask them, like, guys,
Speaker 1: if I am actually a Russian spy, do you think?
Speaker 1: Like a direct question was going to trip me up,
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna say, you got me, Yes, I'm a
Speaker 1: Russian spy. It's now April twenty and eighteen. Alex Cogan's thinking,
Speaker 1: surely someone will step in and sort this out, some
Speaker 1: neutral third party, some grown up inside the New York Times.
Speaker 1: Maybe someone would just stop and think about it. He
Speaker 1: was an academic using some political consulting money to make
Speaker 1: useless predictions about people's personalities, while also funding his own
Speaker 1: studies on the side. He signed this agreement with Facebook,
Speaker 1: the one that's spelled out how he could interact with
Speaker 1: its users, and the company was okay with everything he'd
Speaker 1: been doing. Facebook had explicitly agreed to let him use
Speaker 1: Facebook data not just for academic research, but for commerce
Speaker 1: if he could find some business use for it. When
Speaker 1: reporters called him, he'd say, look at the agreement. Call Facebook,
Speaker 1: they'll tell you the truth. But it's clear now that
Speaker 1: we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being
Speaker 1: used for harm as well, and that goes for fake news,
Speaker 1: for foreign interference and elections, and hate speech, as well
Speaker 1: as developers and data privacy. That's Mark Zuckerberg on TV,
Speaker 1: not looking like he wants to tell anybody the truth.
Speaker 1: Facebook goes on the defensive. They do a press release
Speaker 1: basically say like we've banned Kim John Letaca, they we've
Speaker 1: banned Cogan. They basically also say that you know, Cogan
Speaker 1: here told us it was for academocra research and that's
Speaker 1: why we let him do it, which wasn't true at all.
Speaker 1: We need to make sure that people aren't you using
Speaker 1: it to harm other people. Facebook wanted people to believe
Speaker 1: it was a victim of this data thief, when in fact,
Speaker 1: it had given Alex's permission to do exactly what he did.
Speaker 1: But then Facebook was created to be an unrefereed space.
Speaker 1: It allowed its users to do and say pretty much
Speaker 1: whatever they pleased and took no responsibility for the consequences. Now,
Speaker 1: the world was furious with Facebook for not refing itself,
Speaker 1: and so it panicked and look for someone else to blame.
Speaker 1: Alex Cogan had set out in life to study our
Speaker 1: positive emotions. He now got his lesson in the other kind,
Speaker 1: anger mistrust. All these reporters were now calling him to
Speaker 1: ask these very weird, hostile questions, like why it changed
Speaker 1: his last name after he'd gotten married. We wanted to
Speaker 1: find something that symbolize both our religious sides or a
Speaker 1: scientific sites, because we're both scientists and religious, and we
Speaker 1: landed this idea of light and they're like, oh, spectrum
Speaker 1: like and then we heard the last name Specter, and
Speaker 1: I'm like, oh, that's really cool, let's do that. So
Speaker 1: we change your last name to Specter. Bad luck hab it.
Speaker 1: Specter is also the evil organization from James Bond. I
Speaker 1: got a lot of questions from a lot of journalists
Speaker 1: saying like, Hey, this whole Specter thing is mighty suspicious.
Speaker 1: I just say this that if you're planning to do
Speaker 1: something sinister, if you're even vaguely considering the possibility, the
Speaker 1: last thing you should do is change your last name
Speaker 1: to Specter. It's like naming a restaurant sam and Ella.
Speaker 1: Maybe that's just me. All the little details of Alex
Speaker 1: Cogan's life had now become evidence for the prosecution. No
Speaker 1: one even had to come out and say that Alex
Speaker 1: Cogan was a spy. The Guardian ran graphics and little
Speaker 1: arrows pointing from a picture of red Square to a
Speaker 1: picture of Alex Cogan. What the Russia connection? I woke
Speaker 1: up that day too, like two hundred emails from pretty
Speaker 1: much every outlet in the world. CNNs starts trying to
Speaker 1: track me down, Like I started giving phone calls from
Speaker 1: like my old house in San Francisco that CNN is
Speaker 1: like poking around trying to find me, and then they
Speaker 1: show up at my door. The story of Alex Cogan
Speaker 1: and Cambridge Analytica went viral before it ever really got
Speaker 1: checked for whether it made any sense. It was refed
Speaker 1: by the crowd. The crowd just decided that it liked
Speaker 1: the story and ran with it. The US government started
Speaker 1: knocking my door. We got, you know, questions from the
Speaker 1: US Senate, the House, and etc. Etc. The British Parliament
Speaker 1: reached out and I learned you can't really talk to
Speaker 1: the government as a private citizen. So like financially like
Speaker 1: completely wiped me out and like massive debt. Now in
Speaker 1: terms of the legal bills, as far as the academic career,
Speaker 1: pretty much over. A promising academic career went poof, just
Speaker 1: like that. All he's got left is the possibility of
Speaker 1: writing a memoir of the experience and a lawsuit against Facebook,
Speaker 1: accusing the company of defamation, which he filed a few
Speaker 1: months after we spoke. I met with a guy who
Speaker 1: is doing a documentary about all of this, and he's like,
Speaker 1: you know, it's crazy. I was warned, and I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna tell you by who, but it's somebody prominence. But
Speaker 1: I was warned when I'm talking to you to be
Speaker 1: really careful because you're a trained covert agent from Russia
Speaker 1: and you would out my phone. I think of Alex
Speaker 1: Cogan as a curious kind of victim, even if he
Speaker 1: refuses to sound anything but cheery about his situation. He's
Speaker 1: what happens when the refs are banished from the news,
Speaker 1: when people are encouraged to believe whatever it is they
Speaker 1: want to believe. It's not that the news was once
Speaker 1: perfectly refereed and now it's not, or that there weren't
Speaker 1: ever fake stories, or that people haven't always believed all
Speaker 1: kinds of bullshit. But there's an obvious antidote, the neutral
Speaker 1: third party, the independent authority, the referee who makes it
Speaker 1: more difficult, if only just a little bit, for an
Speaker 1: easy lie to replace a complicated truth. Yet the job
Speaker 1: doesn't exist. The market doesn't want some neutral third party
Speaker 1: interfering with our ability to create our own truths, to
Speaker 1: render our own meanings, to construct our own realities as
Speaker 1: we decline, stage by stage against the Rules. Is brought
Speaker 1: to you by Pushkin Industries. The show's produced by Audrey
Speaker 1: Dilling and Catherine Girardote, with research assistance from Zoe Oliver
Speaker 1: Gray and Beth Johnson. Our editor is Julia Barton. Mia
Speaker 1: Lobell is our executive producer. Our theme was composed by
Speaker 1: Nick Burttell, with additional scoring by Seth Samuel, mastering by
Speaker 1: Jason Gambrel. Our show was recorded by Tofa Ruth at
Speaker 1: Northgate Studios at UC Berkeley. Special thanks to our founders,
Speaker 1: Jacob Weisberg and Malcolm Gladwell. Do you mean an example
Speaker 1: of the state something that's at stage one now? Using
Speaker 1: climatic in the sense climactic, this was the climatic point
Speaker 1: of the play. Well climate yeah, they're both words. I
Speaker 1: absolutely u and if you if you take the phrase
Speaker 1: so anti climactic is the word is an anti climax.
Speaker 1: But if you search anti climatic versus anti climactic, the
Speaker 1: ratio and that's the you have to contextualize these searches.
Speaker 1: There's no reason to use anti climatic at all. But
Speaker 1: it's twenty eight to one in print sources anti climactic
Speaker 1: in favor of anti climactic. But the fact that the
Speaker 1: other one appears once every twenty eight times, that yeah,
Speaker 1: it is. So this is like linguistic epidemiology. It begins
Speaker 1: to spread. A lot of us have snakes in the grass.
Speaker 1: We call them garter snakes, and garter snakes have little
Speaker 1: stripes on them that look like garters. But a lot
Speaker 1: of people people misheard that and started saying garden snake.
Speaker 1: They thought it was it's a garden it's a register, regular,
Speaker 1: harmless garden snake. Well it's a garter snake. That is
Speaker 1: uh wow, Well that's a problem. That's eight to one
Speaker 1: because if that snake in the garden is a rattlesnake,
Speaker 1: that's right, there could be a real I've got I've
Speaker 1: got a garden snake out there. Oh good, I don't
Speaker 1: have to wear any protective clothing. I'll go catch it. Well,
Speaker 1: you know that these are problems people would say you
Speaker 1: and I just made that up. Give me an example
Speaker 1: of the stage stage four um misspelling minuscule as if
Speaker 1: it were miniskirt minuscules m I n us culi. But
Speaker 1: that's two to one in print. Now or anti vinin.
Speaker 1: Now here's one anti vinen. If you get bitten by
Speaker 1: not a garter snake, but by a rattlesnake, you need
Speaker 1: anti vinin v E N I N. But the noun
Speaker 1: for what the snake puts into you is them, And
Speaker 1: so a lot of people you know this is is
Speaker 1: it really worth preserving? I don't know. It's traditional English
Speaker 1: anti venin, and it comes from a Latin form. But
Speaker 1: people have started saying anti venom, and that one is
Speaker 1: one point two to one in favor of anti venom.
Speaker 1: But that's one where I continue to recommend the traditional
Speaker 1: form anti vinin. So you go into the garden and
Speaker 1: you pick up the snake because you think it's a
Speaker 1: garden snake, and you're a bit by the rattlesnake, and
Speaker 1: you go you're bitten. You're bitten by the bit, thank
Speaker 1: you very much, bitten by the rattlesnake, and you're taking
Speaker 1: to the hospital and by the time they figure out
Speaker 1: what you're trying to ask for, because you're asking for
Speaker 1: anti venom and they don't have any, you're dead. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because you mispronounced. Sorry, we're not giving you any. All
Speaker 1: we have is anti vinin. We don't have any anti venom.
Speaker 1: And by the way, I don't normally correct people, but
Speaker 1: forgive me for that that bitten thing, Thank you very much. Sure,