Explicit

The Alex Kogan Experience

Published Apr 16, 2019, 8:00 AM

Everyone hates grammar and ethics cops. Until they need one.

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

Against the Rules with Michael Lewis

Journalist and bestselling author Michael Lewis explores the figures in American life who rely on th 
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