The Alex Kogan Experience

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
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

(00:38):
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.

(00:59):
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

(01:22):
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

(01:45):
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.

(02:06):
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

(02:26):
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.

(02:49):
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

(03:13):
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

(03:34):
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

(03:56):
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

(04:19):
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.

(04:40):
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

(05:02):
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

(05:24):
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

(05:44):
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

(06:07):
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

(06:30):
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

(06:52):
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.

(07:15):
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,

(07:37):
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

(07:57):
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

(08:18):
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

(08:41):
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?

(09:01):
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

(09:24):
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

(09:45):
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.

(10:06):
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

(10:27):
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?

(10:52):
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

(11:13):
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

(11:36):
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

(11:59):
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,

(12:20):
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

(12:42):
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

(13:02):
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

(13:27):
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

(13:51):
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,

(14:14):
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,

(14:38):
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

(14:59):
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,

(15:20):
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.

(15:41):
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

(16:03):
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

(16:25):
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

(16:46):
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,

(17:08):
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

(17:29):
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

(17:50):
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

(18:10):
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

(18:31):
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

(18:52):
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

(19:18):
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

(19:44):
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

(20:04):
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

(20:26):
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,

(20:48):
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

(21:08):
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

(21:28):
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

(21:51):
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.

(22:14):
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

(22:36):
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

(22:58):
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

(23:21):
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

(23:43):
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.

(24:06):
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

(24:28):
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

(24:50):
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

(25:12):
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

(25:34):
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

(25:56):
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

(26:17):
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

(26:39):
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

(27:03):
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,

(27:24):
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

(27:47):
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

(28:10):
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

(28:32):
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

(28:56):
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

(29:16):
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,

(29:39):
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

(30:03):
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

(30:26):
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

(30:48):
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

(31:11):
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,

(31:32):
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

(31:56):
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

(32:18):
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,

(32:40):
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

(33:02):
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

(33:24):
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

(33:48):
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

(34:09):
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.

(34:31):
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

(34:56):
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

(35:18):
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

(35:38):
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

(36:01):
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,

(36:21):
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

(36:44):
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

(37:06):
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

(37:27):
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

(38:01):
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

(38:23):
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

(38:56):
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

(39:20):
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

(39:44):
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

(40:06):
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,

(40:26):
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

(40:49):
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

(41:10):
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.

(41:31):
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,

(41:54):
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,