The Alex Kogan Experience
Apr 16, 2019
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I want to start this episode by telling you just the very beginning of a story I recently heard about a guy named Alex kogan born in 1986 into a Jewish Family in the Soviet Union
► 00:00:16after the collapse in 1991 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 for generations of Cogan's to New York City
► 00:00:32in 1994 Alex enters 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 for Math and Science
► 00:00:48once 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
► 00:01:01six months after they'd 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 attempt suicide another becomes clinically depressed Alex begins to read psychology
► 00:01:27he's a math and science kid but he's getting more and more curious about human nature
► 00:01:34and the first time I met him and I really remember 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 basketball shoes that's dacher 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 1
► 00:02:00Alex kogan was a shambolic 6 foot 4 inch freshman back in 2005 when he knocked on dacres office door and said he'd like for Daiquiri 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 cork and Alex came in he said you know I have seven kinds of love that
► 00:02:29going to put people into I was like wow that's interesting and then there are 12 variations of I forgot what the other Factor was that are set of conditions that he want to create and there are 84 different conditions in his study so he's going to study seven different kinds of love and he's gonna stay all these different variables that would maybe predict right the force of the love ya power of the love exactly so he's about to make glove more complicated than it's ever been made so
► 00:03:00I was like right he was going to confound our understanding of love doctor talks Alex out of that idea but this kid is so smart and original and full of energy and so Decker 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 that's associated with human kindness and Alex did the school paper where he showed if you present videotapes of
► 00:03:29who 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 20 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 me
► 00:04:00and statistics and a desire to study huge questions like what is love when he left and he so unconventional Michael he could have gone to any graduate program in the country and he chooses the University of Hong Kong Mike what because he met this woman or got engaged and fell in love Yeah fell in love but doctor 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
► 00:04:29create a new way to study those questions
► 00:04:33in late 2012 Facebook invites Daiquiri to visit and asks him to create a bunch of new emojis ones that better convey actual emotions when Dakar C's would Facebook knows about its users he's Blown Away
► 00:04:48this could be the greatest data source that will ever exist 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 the data that they had meanwhile Alex had moved to England to teach a Cambridge University he was still researching the same stuff the positive emotions
► 00:05:18and 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 you know and he's everywhere you know so it's like I'm working on this other project and he told me about it Alex kogan told dagger 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 10,000 Facebook users
► 00:05:48make discoveries about those emotions in entire countries the math was complicated enough the doctor himself didn't fully understand it he then forgot all about it until one day a year or so later when Alex kogan called him up he calls me after Trump selected and he says I think I've done something that was part of this election as like okay well let's talk what is it and he said I created this mechanism that was purchased
► 00:06:18and used in the Trump campaign he was awarded a actually it had some effect or that he'd be perceived to have had some effect I don't think he made that distinction I said I just think he thought oh no Alex kogan sense that he might have a problem he just had no idea how big it was going to be I'm Michael Lewis
► 00:06:46and 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 who no one will miss until it's too late
► 00:07:09I 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
► 00:07:33English 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 fire 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
► 00:08:00I call the guy who'd been my boss as head of the usage panel what did you do hey I advised on people to include on the usage panel occasionally people died and or occasionally people would simply not respond to the questionnaire for several years running and we want to replace them his name is Steven Pinker yes that Steven Pinker Harvard psychologist and author of many best-selling books
► 00:08:27in the case of disputed usage where people wonder what is the correct use can I use decimate to mean destroy most of or has rumor has it should only need destroy one tenth of or what's the best way to use epicenter is it just the the center of something or does it have to mean propagating outward of course if you want to know what epicenter means you can now just Google it The Internet's been bad for dictionaries they
► 00:08:56sell 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 a rather unique I think Anne
► 00:09:26either 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 there are member of the species of refs that the world now has no use for the culture refs the people who referee our most basic interactions how we should talk who we should trust or whom we should trust
► 00:09:48no one particularly Mourns their death until they really need one
► 00:09:58we 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 - eight he's the author of Garner's Modern English usage why people shouldn't use flaunt when they mean flout we've been standing out here for three or four minutes and there's no sign of life we're gonna go knock on his door all right
► 00:10:22what's the difference between species and spurious does it really matter if you at this very moment are filled with angst or angst
► 00:10:35Garner's usage manual is now more than 1,200 pages long the late novelist David Foster Wallace called it a work of Genius you bring your copy no I have zero rocks those pages that I want a front yeah 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
► 00:11:02it'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
► 00:11:18we're praying we in the right place Michael Lewis trying to Garner very good to meet you thank you for letting us intrude at you 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 already good
► 00:11:49it looks like a robber barons collection of books except they look like they've been read they look like that 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 we have me different you let me show you
► 00:12:13he published his first usage guide back in 1998 partly as a protest against the way people talked on TV which sounds a bit snooty but garnish 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 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
► 00:12:43how people were actually speaking and writing the English language so this is Webster's first dictionary 1906 and this just kind of shows the evolution over the 19th 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
► 00:13:08linguistics and let's go 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 track his interest back to its source it finally arrived at the desire to feel superior but that's not Garner his Source energy isn't snobbery it's outraged at an idea cooked up by academic Linguistics and idea he'd encountered back as a student at the
► 00:13:38history of Texas descriptivism it was called
► 00:13:42a native speaker of English cannot make a mistake and if so facto 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 in his face is set against it still do you consider yourself a referee
► 00:14:10yes
► 00:14:12yeah 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 pool house should be in a building that's an exact replica of the room in England in which the Oxford English Dictionary
► 00:14:42Gary was created I pulled down an especially decrepit looking book by someone I've never heard of Lindley Marie now Lily Marie but is kind of a hero of mine interesting guy he was a New York lawyer in 1784 he moved to York England because he didn't like the revolution huh and a lot of Americans actually moved to England because they didn't appreciate what was going on lin-manuel Miranda left that out of
► 00:15:12Hamilton I guess so and so these two shelves are all various editions Murray's grammar yeah and Brian Garner seems to have all of them so Marie in 1795 you stop practicing law and he wrote Murray's English grammar for a Quaker girls school in York and it became the best-selling book
► 00:15:34in the English language other than the Bible for the first 50 years of the nineteenth Century oh my God yes sold over 13 million copies of his English grammar every household needed an English grammar and a Bible 13 million copies The Joint population of Great Britain in the United States in 1800 was only 15 million
► 00:16:01but back then people threw money at language refs Noah Webster got rich from his dictionary so did Fowler and Follett and Partridge and scores of others from their grammars and usage guides Strunk and white have sold 10 million copies of this style manual there was a time not long ago when a rider could get paid to write about how to write and the American Heritage dictionary used to brag about its usage panel but Brian Garner is in the wrong century
► 00:16:30how many copies of Garner's Modern English usage of sold I don't know exactly but it's fewer than home 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 use
► 00:17:00because pass a we're not going to stock 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 19th century guide to pronunciation
► 00:17:19the 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 realize 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 pronounce it in the same manner but in fact his own method is entirely peculiar to himself is true does it it also talked about
► 00:17:49people incredibly uncomfortable and fearful of what's coming out of their mouths right 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 an old anxiety has been replaced by something else a suspicion of the individual Raph
► 00:18:10people 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 they would be in any activity on one of my accounts I get an email message dear dear mr. Garner semicolon and I called my banker I said by the way you know you got hundreds of these think presumably thousands going out by the day
► 00:18:40your customer semicolon and I said you know it's got to be either comma or a Cohen he said could you put that in writing and I said sure I'll even give you some authorities and I cited Garner's Modern English usage and a cup couple of other Authorities on this point punctuation it's pretty Elementary Point yep he did that I mean who else is there to say
► 00:19:07but the incorrectly punctuated letters just kept coming still I was getting dozens every week of dear mr. Garner semicolon and and it was I was about to change Banks over this because it 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
► 00:19:37here at the bank but we have a dispute about whether it should be a semicolon or a colon and so we just left it
► 00:19:44but that that is a domotic view your opinion is as good as mine anybody's opinion is as good as somebody else
► 00:19:51demotic now there is a word derived from an ancient Greek word meaning popular
► 00:19:59that's how the language is generally refereed by popular opinion inside Garner's Bank by popular opinion it was okay to send out letters teaming with semi-colons that didn't belong it's obviously not that big a deal I mean you can still understand with the bank was trying to say plus it's sort of freeing to rid ourselves of this expert language ref this annoying little school marmee voice in your head on the other
► 00:20:29what happens when that little voice ceases to exist and not just that little voice but the other little voice is like it
► 00:20:42I'm Margaret Sullivan and I was the public editor of the New York Times what's a public editor I just ask 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
► 00:21:07to call out the paper when it screws up Sullivan did that at the New York Times from 2012 until the spring of 2016 when she left a year later the times just got rid of its public editor all together so I would love for you to explain to me the importance of Ombudsman why they exist in the first place hmm so for example and this is not the only role but let's just say someone thinks a correction should be made in a new story and
► 00:21:36and the people who are in charge of that say well no 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 job is that it's it has to be independent I had no editor I mean I had a copy editor and I and the my copy editor great person would say to me you sure you want to say it that way or don't you think going a little too far there but he
► 00:22:06and 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 Newsroom red and feared her and that probably prevented a lot of distorted or unfair stuff from ever getting into print but the role she played his dying The Washington Post got rid of their
► 00:22:36Ombudsman in 2013 and the New York Times in 2017 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 ombuds person 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
► 00:23:07on 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 ref anymore because in the New Media Market the crowd can do the reffing the times only created the Ombudsman roll back in 2003 the reasoning then was the modern media Market the internet cable TV the speeding up
► 00:23:36the 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 Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction when he didn't did you while you were there was there did you have a sense that those are the Klein in in the need for for you to do this job was their life where they
► 00:24:06I like less things coming in 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 anything ever cause a story to smell for you you go there's something wrong here well 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
► 00:24:36mile away
► 00:24:42now I'm going to finish the story of Alex kogan the young psychologist born in the Soviet Union who started out in physics and ended up in love
► 00:24:52along with a bunch of other researchers and app Builders hit 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
► 00:25:22and being loved
► 00:25:25thus far too I'd say winter of 2014 and one of the PhD students in my department of Cambridge says hey I've been Consulting for this company the really love to meet you and get like a little Consulting help from you would you be interested in like sure meet Alex kogan Student Of Love
► 00:25:46the big carry for me here was that they were going to pay for really big data collection effort 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 SEL which would eventually become came General Attica yes that Cambridge analytical it has nothing to do with Cambridge
► 00:26:16diversity 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 likes and the reason we focused on that page likes was there's a few papers published at that point that showed that hey you could take people's page likes and use them to predict their personalities with some level of accuracy
► 00:26:39the company asked Alex if he could classify people by five personality traits extraversion agreeableness openness and so on use their Facebook data to determine which little personality buckets they fell into kind of routine stuff for him would caught Alex is interest was the chance to make other studies of the same people why do you need that much money to collect the data pane participants so the way we usually recruit participants is we say like hey please answer 20
► 00:27:09of questionnaires for us and we'll give you a few dollars for your time and in this case we got something like 200,000 people to go and give us 20 minutes of their time and we paid them around for bucks each he didn't even need to go find these people they found him through websites where people offer 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
► 00:27:39a lot of people are happy to put a price on their privacy anyway Cambridge analytic has idea wasn't even all that original the Obama campaign claimed to have done the same thing with Facebook data back in 2012 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
► 00:28:06we 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 what percentage of people do we get all five personality categories correct we found it was like 1% how did you even check that there how do you find out whether someone is an extrovert the 200 thousands that provided us the personality scores because those terms of thousand people to authorize the app filled out the personality quiz and that would be like oh
► 00:28:36okay let's go and see how these people actually answered let's see what we predicted and we could compare so assuming they know their personality that was right you got it right 1% of the time 1% of time I'm going to break that down for you Cambridge analytic ahead Alex kogan 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
► 00:29:06at that point you know we're contractually 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 are trying to reach voters on social media the Cruz campaign didn't seem to know that this stuff didn't work with a heavy heart
► 00:29:31but with boundless optimism then Ted Cruz lost the Republican primary to Donald Trump
► 00:29:39we are suspending our campaign Cambridge analytic ahead used Alex's useless predictions to help the loser to lose now amazingly they sold their services to the winter
► 00:29:51Alex never learn whether the Trump campaign actually ever used as data but in the end that didn't matter and when Donald Trump became president a lot of folks thought the incredible had happens so they started looking for incredible explanations this same data have been possibly used to when this election 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
► 00:30:20that was the moment Alice called his old teacher dacher Keltner who gave him with sounded like good advice I told him I'd keep a low profile and just try to stay out of the conversation and that advice mostly worked right up until early 2018 first our chief business correspondent Rebecca Jarvis has the latest he's this scientist at the heart of the Facebook privacy Scandal and then the drama unfolded researcher at the University of Cambridge finally
► 00:30:49I realized that I was born in the Soviet Union
► 00:31:01about 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 did 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 going to say you got me yes I'm a Russian spy
► 00:31:22it's now April 2018 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'd signed this agreement with Facebook the one that's spelled
► 00:31:52out how we could interact with its users and the company was okay with everything had been doing Facebook had explicitly agreed to let him use Facebook data and not just for academic research but for Commerce if he could find some business use for it
► 00:32:07when reporters called him he'd say look at the agreement call Facebook they'll tell you the truth
► 00:32:14but 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 in 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 Came John Letter car they've bands Cogan they basically also say that you know
► 00:32:44Logan here told us it was for academic 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 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 permission to do exactly what he did
► 00:33:00but then Facebook was created to be a nun refereed space it allowed its users to do and say pretty much whatever they please and took no responsibility for the consequences now the world was furious with Facebook for not reffing itself and so it panicked and look for someone else to blame Alex kogan is 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
► 00:33:30calling him to ask these very weird hostile questions like why you changed his last name after he got married
► 00:33:38we wanted to find something that symbolize both are religious sides are no scientific sites because we're both scientists and religious and we landed this idea of light and they're like oh spectrum is like light and then we heard the last name Specter like oh that's really cool let's do that so we change your last name to Spector bad luck have it Spectre is also the evil organization from James Bond
► 00:34:03I got a lot of questions from a lot of journalists saying like hey this whole Spectra thing is mighty suspicious
► 00:34:12I 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
► 00:34:25it's like naming a restaurant salmonella maybe that's just me all the little details of Alex Cogan's life had now become evidence for the prosecution
► 00:34:38no one even had to come out and say that Alex kogan was a spy the guardian ran graphics and little arrows pointing from a picture of Red Square to a picture of Alex Cogan
► 00:34:50what the Russia connection I woke up that day or two like 200 emails from pretty much every Outlet in the world CNN's starts trying to track me down like I started getting 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 kogan and Cambridge analytical went viral before it ever really got checked for whether it made any sense
► 00:35:20is raft by the crowd the crowd just decided that it like the story and ran with it
► 00:35:27the US government started to knock on my door we got you know questions from the US Senate the house and etcetera Etc the 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 the as far as their academic career pretty much over a promising academic career went poof just like that
► 00:35:57all 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
► 00:36:10I 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 going to tell you about who but it's somebody prominence but I was warrant when I'm talking to you to be really careful because you're a trained covert agent from Russia and you attack my phone
► 00:36:31I 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
► 00:36:57but 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
► 00:37:13yet 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
► 00:37:26as we decline stage by stage
► 00:37:41against the rules is brought to you by Pushkin Industries the shows produced by Audrey dilling and Catherine Jared oh with research assistance from Zoe Oliver gray and Beth Johnson our editor is Julia Barton Mia Lobel is our executive producer our theme was composed by Nick brutal with additional scoring by Seth Samuel mastering by Jason Gambrell
► 00:38:07I show was recorded by Topher Ruth at Northgate Studios at UC Berkeley special thanks to our Founders Jacob Weisberg and Malcolm Gladwell
► 00:38:37give me an example of the state something that had stage one now using climatic in the sense climactic this was the climatic point of the play well I'm it yeah yeah they're both words I know idea absolutely horrible and if you if you take the phrase so anti-climactic is the word is an anti-climax
► 00:39:07but if you search
► 00:39:09anti-climatic versus anti-climactic the ratio and that's the you have to contextualize the researchers there's no reason to use anti-climatic at all but it's 28 to one in print sources 28 favorite anti-climactic in favor of anticlimactic but the fact that the other one appears once every 28 times you shocked that it yeah it is so this is like linguistic epidemiology it begins to spread
► 00:39:39a 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 Miss heard that and started saying garden snake they thought it was it's a guard that's a register regular harmless garden snake well it's a garter snake that is wow well that's a problem that's 8 to 1 because at that snake in the garden is a rattlesnake that's right
► 00:40:09they could be a real I've got a 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 well you know I just made that up give me an example of the stage 4 stage for misspelling minuscule as if it were miniskirt minuscule is MI and u.s. see you Ellie but that's two to one in print now or
► 00:40:35antivenin now here's one antivenin if you get bitten by not a garter snake but by a rattlesnake you need antivenin ve ni n but the noun for what the snake puts into you is Venom and so a lot of people you know this is is it really worth preserving I don't know its traditional English antivenin and it comes from a Latin form
► 00:41:05but people have started saying Anti-Venom and that one is one point two to one in favor of antivenom but that's one where I continue to recommend the traditional form antivenin so you go into the garden and you pick up the snake because you think it's a garden snake in your bit by the rattlesnake and you go like you're bitten you're bitten you out of it thank you very much bitten by the rattlesnake and you're taken 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
► 00:41:35you're dead yeah because you mispronounce it sorry we're not giving you any all we have is antivenin we don't have any Anti-Venom and with other way I don't normally correct people but forgive me for that it's all right I've that bitten thing thank you very much sure