663: How I Read It

The BBC's Chicago is a American life. You can call me Jasper. Jasper. Jasper with an E.

Jasper. Yeah. OK. And it's good to hear.

Yeah. Jasper and Carter. Are there actual names? Yeah.

Yeah. It's not a joke. Pedro Jurgensen and Jasper Sunness. This is the person they've ever agreed to an interview about this thing that they created or even identified themselves as the creator of that thing.

This thing they made up, they said it all began back in 2015. They were basically hanging out, kind of together. It's wrong with Facebook, bored. Bill Kishapur this?

I work. Is it supposed to be working? Because you had a lot of free time at the job? No, no, no, we were working all the time working.

It's probably during the last break. I like that one of you said yes. And I'm saying no. They're working in radio.

They're not so in your way. Anyway, they noticed on their friends with feeds, very common. People were posting lots of inspirational images with inspirational words. And it kind of looked like there was a system behind the whole thing.

It kind of felt like a machine should be able to do this. Yeah. Yeah, I wrote what could probably make an inspirational quote. Every other so formulaic.

Every day might not be a good day, but there's good in every day. If you felt that yesterday, stand up today. See what you're getting ahead? It's getting started.

Jasper and Carter said the program computer would be able to generate inspirational sentences and paste them onto stock photos of beaches and certain nights and people during the distance. And what's interesting is how quickly the program kind of took on a mind of its own. Like the first they said the computer really did generate a very typical kind of predictable inspirational quotes. They said that wasn't terribly difficult.

But it's a bit of a category. And how they're string together a wider variety of sentences. They're kind of saying that it started to crank out. It started to evolve.

It's got a random, they got funnier and darker. And I can't only resell this, but the two actually something kind of profound about starting to take on a personality that it actually has now. I can remember very well the moment we were looking at the quotes. And it wasn't what we had imagined.

It felt like something that we hadn't created really. I think some of these on my laptop. Here's one. OK, so each one is a quote on top of some kind of a negative image.

This one, the picture is a nighttime sky. I don't know if that's the aurora reality. And the word say, love is an animal eating brain. This one here is a quote about a coin.

It says, everything but it's a job. Think of it as health insurance. Which people definitely feel some people about the jobs. I love this one.

OK, so this is a picture of Big Ben. It says, when you're eating dinner, don't forget that everything everyone will someday be gone forever. I want to have this kind of cold water in the face. We have to reality.

People across the cheeks are quality to them. There's one that says this is a man under a starry sky. It says your time on earth is random. Women offers a bit sparkler.

It says simply your average. A man stands on shore. It says don't spoil yourself. It's not worth it.

Most of them are not like that. The picture of a spiral galaxy. It says, all you need in order to travel Mars is a boy and a flag. Which is a certain way.

It's actually kind of true. These are all maybe a machine they may buy a bot. And a certain number of them do seem like gibberish. And education can be like an angry child.

What does that mean? Or be fine. Systematize. Salsa.

Infinity. It's like OK. But surprising, they're not going to make sense. They seem to have something on their mind.

They have something to say. So everybody is basically just another term for potential spurware. Life on Earth is just one long commercial for sperm. You're an eating one on electric fence.

It could be the mistake of a lifetime. Which that's true. Norinise your night. Go operate and fight your common adversary.

Mass a serial. Every death, death, death. Because it's wondering how does this really work. How do you get a machine that does not understand what words mean?

That does not understand what it's saying at all. How do you get to turn out sayings? That means something to us. And now that these guys have been professional programmer, they're studied in school, pet or taught himself to code years before.

And you may have just sent a grab bag of standard programming tools. And you explain the recipe for inspirational publicas. So right now we're in the studio in Oslo. And the sun is shining outside.

But the drapes are pulled down. So if I say something like, you have to pull the drapes up to see the sun. It kind of makes sense in a practical way. However, as soon as you put something like that, it's one of the beautiful, like rapid start speaking to you on a different level.

The applicable of the drapes to see the sun is like, it sounds like the cure for depression when it's put in the right picture. It's just like a very practical, normal thing to say really. Another thing that I noticed in my situation was saying, they were juxtapositions, opposite, glued into the same sense. So like things put up against each other.

So there are no limits to what you can accomplish. Except the limits you place on your own thinking. So that's like just limits as the key word. Another just like the words in the turn around after comments.

There's two par sentences. They can make pretty obvious, but still it feels inspirational when you put it on a nice picture. We can't even do this. The way to really set it just imitation.

The rather it imitates the sense structure and the kinds of words that appear in real inspirational quotes on the internet, if it's a thousand inspirational quotes. The first of course, there's a little buggy. The other grammar was a little mess. Here's an early example.

I can ask everyone here. It's don't be jealous of spilled life. Just jump. Don't be jealous of spilled life.

Life. Oh, why? Don't be jealous of spilled life. Just jump.

It's kind of got the structure in the way, but the words don't make any sense. It just becomes random like gibberish. How does it get to it one way? If one expects a friendship, one has to prepare for a volcano.

Well, what you notice for sure is that expect and prepare our words to go well together. And does it know friendship and volcano will go together? That's just totally random. That goes together for you?

It does kind of go together. Yeah. It's the same when you have a friend you have to prepare for the bad times when things get explosive. Yeah.

Well, that's you adding that. That's not in the other way. Is it the same thing about the inspirational quotes? That's actually going to be taken as inspirational by somebody.

Like, for instance, don't let nightmares get away from infinity. You're kind of realized. So you're making them inspirational yourself or wants to try to give them meaning. So they start making sense in a way.

It's not like nightmares. Don't let nightmares get away from infinity. To me that saying, like, don't let the things that you're scared of, you know, get in the way of like the big life you're trying to create for yourself. Yeah.

Yeah. See, but I didn't like when you said that people started for me to make the same. I heard something else like in the quotes. Yeah.

You guys really aren't just writing those? No, no, no, no. There's too many. Everything is done.

We do get like sometimes people all these. There's no way this is about people with saying comments and stuff like that. But it's we don't go in another time. Let me know down.

In fact, they go on to the website. We're going to review it. 60 people run the site at the same time right then clicking away and generating quotes. Wait a minute.

It's over half million people a month. And they say that they are surprised sometimes when they're talking something funny or kind of big way profound. Occasionally it's blowing my mind really. Like, I don't know how we came up with that.

It's weird that you can get to something profound out of a machine that's actually just generating random words in sentence structures that you give it at. Absolutely. Yeah, it's totally weird. It makes humans seem pathetic.

That sounds like something about the same. Do you want to be confused by the words? Do you know what I mean? It's like, oh, really?

We are so primitive that like a machine can randomly throw together words in a sentence structure. And then I had to say like looking at the books and they were like, yeah, that's actually true. Well, it sort of doesn't necessarily mean that we're pathetic. I mean, it also is a lot of credit to you as a reader just how much you add to something when you see it.

How much of the things that you see is actually your contribution. Well, they're in a radio show. We're sort of just having people. They're pretending to be documents as words on paper.

And how they read it. What they read into it really comes from now. And they have strong reactions that they inspire about, I might say. It's not what the words say.

It's what they say to you. That words so much. Anyway, see what it was. One, the very tosses out there.

So just found this out that since 1990s, if you got into college and you decided to pretend to college at lots of schools, you can look at your own admissions file. Like see what the admission people said about you when you're applying. If Nancy schools are hard to get into, you can try to figure out why they decided to admit you in the first place, which I was going to do. But the downside is you might find something you didn't want to see.

And they have to deal with that. Then we'll just to wave on Harvard student. That happened to. At Harvard, going to see your admission file is not only got caught up in something much bigger.

As you might have heard, Harvard's being sued for allegedly discriminating against Asians. Asian applicants with high DPA's and test scores have a lower acceptance rate than other students with the same numbers. Harvard does consider students based on the apply as one of many factors. The group that's suing them once and does not do anything else together.

It's a group called Students for Fair Admissions. They're trying to get rid of affirmative action all across the country. In this case, it's likely to be appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court. Alex John is a junior co-president of the Chinese Student Association.

I met him the first week of the child. He's all leading Harvard in the lawsuit because Harvard is on his side of keeping affirmative action. For him, it was a moral decision. Like, of course, the first year, getting rid of affirmative action is bad.

So he wrote a statement for an immigrant brief and got his student group designed on to another one. Friends of his relaying at their admission files, so Alex decided to go as well. partly because he was curious how his files back up against the claims made in the lawsuit. But also, he just wanted to see how he got in.

He always wanted to find out. I'm really curious about the interview point because I just feel like that's what it is. We have a really good interview with a really old experience alumni. The way this usually works, you meet with an alumni volunteer for an hour or so in a coffee shop or wherever, in your hometown.

Alex is from Portland, Oregon. He had an exceptional interview. It lasted two hours. Then, even more unusual, his interview was at a second meeting.

He did a whole thing where he ran through all my extracurriculars, I kind of like tallied up hours and stuff. He was very rigorous, even like, after some contact or references, which apparently he wasn't supposed to do. But he was like really, really good at it. He wanted to have everything on the table for him to advocate for me.

Alex wanted to know, did this I give me in? The alumni interview was important at Harvard because usually it's the only face-to-face contact as well as an applicant. And admissions officers use it plus other information to assign applicants to something called a personal reading. The person on reading is actually the part of the lawsuit.

It's basically a rating of your personality. The words Harvard uses to describe what they're looking for, I think it's like leadership, courage, sense of humor, and for lessons. It's like they wanted to fill the school with future senators, per-key, birth, and birth, and birth when there's many legal bond types. Students for fair admissions says the person on reading is where the discrimination happens, where an employee plays a vice-week then.

Because at Harvard, each applicants get lower personal reading and weight applicants. Harvard does not dispute those numbers, but says they don't consider an applicant's race when assigning the personal reading. The couple days after I met him, Alex called me from a study lounge. He just found a C.A.

file. He sat with 15 other kids around the table at the register office and aged through it. He wasn't allowed to take a file with him, but could take pictures on his own. He's rolled through the photos and read parts of it to me.

Let me take a quick look. The first sheet is like the Harvard stores. So they have like some weird coding jargon that I don't really understand. I'll probably look up later because it's a bit.

We got quickly to the part he was curious about. The report from his alumni interviewer, which was the most remarkable part of his file. For starters, it was long. Like my interview wrote like five pages of those, which I think is kind of unusual.

It is. Everyone else I checked with the only two pages. Reading through Alex saw that his interviewer Jim McAndlish was really going to the bathroom. He told Alex that he was one of the best candidates he met in more than 20 years of interviewing.

Though Alex learned a lot of Jim's their own is the extra interview, the references he called. That was Jim checking into whether or not Alex was revealed. It seemed like he was skeptical of a lot of stuff I did. I was concerned about like this rather than a builder mentality.

I wanted to verify whether I did what Jim was about that they worked. Like when Alex said he worked on homelessness at the youth commission. Jim wondered, is he just saying not because he was a good enough woman, and rather than represent disadvantaged people? He said, is this perfect for MIT mechanical engineer playing me?

Perfect for MIT, I guess is code for Jim called up Alex's supervisor at the youth commission. No, no, Alex didn't even care about homelessness. And worked there even more than he went on. Alex read Jim's interview notes and he mattered effectively.

Then pause to note this one section. Oh, Jim's interesting, unfortunately. Jim was writing about a conversation he had with that supervisor. Apparently he asked not just about Alex, but about Alex's mom too.

He writes, he's far from the stereotype, quote, tiger mother. His mom is supportive but not directed. I guess he's like a student. He's on my mom.

What do you feel about that? How do you feel about that characterization, mom? I mean, through, she's supportive and not directed. She puts me, she puts me on a bit like I thought I sort of let me push into the direction I want to.

Is it weird to you at all that the interviewer's point to stereotypes that you aren't? Is he a perfect for MIT engineer playing me or does he have a tiger mom? Oh yeah. That's a good point.

As soon as I asked the question, I felt like I overset. Like I was planting the idea and Alex had something racial was going on. But when I heard tiger mother, I thought there's the implicit bias that I was talking about in the lawsuit. And it way more explicit from than I was expecting.

Alex did have a strange feeling about it, even if he wasn't sure exactly why. Yeah, that is really weird. I guess the kind of goes into a narrative of like the agent happened after the screws I think to be considered viable for something I do. In other words, if you want to get into Harvard, don't be too Asian.

I mean, I don't know if my motivations are. My motivations are. My motivations are. Maybe the interviews like I should distinguish information from other agents.

Or you're going to talk over many studies about it. Yeah. There's another thing like this in existence. Another spot where he points to an agent stereotype and says it doesn't fit Alex.

It has to do with the fact that Alex is quiet, which is a stereotype about agent students. One actually, the Harvard was called out for using a 1990 federal investigation. This case, Jim passed it as a plus. He writes, Alex is reserved, quietly confident, uses language frugally, but effectively.

There is no teenage applause. Perfect for MIT engineer, by the way, also plays into a stereotype. The agent is only being interested in science and math. This one did a bother Alex though, since he literally wanted to be an engineer when he was playing.

But that's the target of other parts. It's definitely interesting. I know what the monoclonal type of type of type of type of type of type of type of type that you're trying to screw with. What do you realize you're about?

The reason for why I do things. Yeah. How do you feel about that? I don't know.

So he actually has a Chinese wife. Mm-hmm. Is he Chinese? He's not Chinese.

He's a very American. He grew up very American. You know, with Harvard during the time, he was like four or five people. Like baseball.

On the baseball team. Okay. Yeah. I think he's a good attention.

But I think he might just be a little more old fashioned. Alex actually knows Jim pretty well. They kept in touch after his interview. Their family became friends.

Alex's mom helped teach Jim's wife how to drive. He gets dinner with Jim whenever he's back home. Alex left their conversation feeling pretty fine about what he read. But then he stepped back into a campus car in the force field of the lawsuit, where anything to do with race and bias and admissions felt hypercharged.

One of the biggest ways of the lawsuit has taken up Harvard is that certain statistics are now public. Like, the school said that without a firm direction, one out of two black kids went get in. Latino kids, they lose one out of three. Kids whose parents went to Harvard, who are, by the way, mostly white, have a seven times better chance of getting in than regular kids.

As making students ask questions they rather not about how they got in. It's uncomfortable. I talked to two black students who chose not to see their files as well. Both were worried it would say, let's take her because she's black.

They didn't think it would, but still. One of them had the request one open on her computer for more than a week before she decided, now maybe you're here. For Asian students, the question is the opposite. It's not am I here because of my race, but am I here inside of it?

As trying to people's race, I'll go up to level 10. One of Alex's friends were on Facebook about a comment in her file. She's a bright student, but what does English as her mother write students? To her, this was racially coded.

When she read it she saw, she seemed smart, but is there anything that makes her different from other Asian students? Well, if that was racially coded outside, you should be mine. He texted them close friends from his freshman year to Chinese class. I sent a couple of screen grabs from my admissions files, so I was like, I hear them, I can't make it this off my mind.

I didn't react this wrong until after I saw this stuff online, and I'm starting to feel pretty sure about it. What was the part that was troubling to you? My main trouble was like, oh, if you like, you need to prove that I'm not like other Asians, too, the image is office. And that's what it takes to get in nowadays.

Most other cultures, I just talked about an hour and a half, but Jim was like, he's like in a background check, you know? Like, why did he feel the need to do a regular subject of a background check? Alex's friends saw his green grab saying Tiger mom and perfect for my D&T engineer, and texted him back. Oh my God, and that's kind of horrible.

Tiger mom was actually a lot more explicit than any of the examples of bias I came up with the trial. It was really a fight over statistics and economic models, but a few stereotypes did come up. They were subtle. Things like Harvard were referring to Asian applicants as one-dimensional, or book smart.

Alex wanted to see what Jim was actually thinking when he wrote Tiger mother. See if it really was a racial thing, like his friends were saying. I couldn't really call it. Alex gave a call and was unfortunate to me.

First, they had double a little bit. Alex tells Jim about how he was doing his own, he mentioned the novel he co-wrote for the status quo. I read it, and I totally regret that I did not respond. Yeah.

It was very well done, Jim says. He talked about the lawsuit, and before Alex came to bring up Tiger moms, Jim volunteers' is going to deal with implicit bias admissions. He's been thinking about the effect of the interview with biases. from a place like Oregon.

The interviewers is a companion. And we know they are stereotypes. I'm just curious how that plays out. If you have an expectation that an Asian interviewee is going to have a draft personality or an eek and mild, you may play into your stereotype and not develop a rapport that would defeat the stereotype or at least resistant.

So you're in a really great area of human nature. Jim, of course, went above and beyond to spend the time at Alex to get that rapport. To make sure he really understood Alex as an individual, not to write him off immediately. I was actually kind of curious about some stuff.

You wrote like five pages of notes. It's probably a few thousand words at least. Yeah. And most of that was in the personal quality section when I was like, I'm not scared about reading.

Okay. So here I am right on the edge. What'd I say? I'd be like, I can't wait.

It takes another eight minutes for Alex to get there to bring it up. Take your mom. You mentioned that. You asked her about my hands.

Yeah. I'm trying to figure out whether or not you were basically driven by the parents in any way. You used the term, tie your mother. Like saying, come on, it's like not like that.

It's like very much like really like cage of parenting. So why about that? And it's like a little unexpected. Well, recall I was one.

I live with one. Jim saying he's talking about his wife who is Chinese. They have a young daughter. I live with a tiger one.

And fight it all the time. Do you think that's a particularly Chinese thing? I think the Chinese on the west side have a very definite strong influence that way. West side.

Jim's talking about the well-fier side of where he announced lived. No question. Yeah. Huh.

So you were like, so because we're me as kind of like, if you had a Chinese applicant, would you kind of need to just like, do you have to perhaps their parent or their mom? Was that right? If I saw somebody Alex that had their fingers in a lot of pies, and I had no way to ascertain the depth of what they were doing, what I'm looking for and looks for was the person who is thriving on their own that is self-motivated. And it isn't just Chinese.

I use that term because I didn't even talk to him. Amy Dan wrote the Joy-Lub, apparently after the conversation. Jim's wife told them that she did not also write battle him at the tiger mother. That was Amy Jua.

His wife offered it by hand the book. But anybody I interview, I'm suspicious. The longer I did it, the more suspicious I was. After doing these interviews for 20 years, Jim was not naive to get puffing up their extracurriculars.

He was getting coached on how to act in the interview. He was saying he was tough on everyone. I got to Jim later. He didn't want to be recorded, but he was open about what he wrote.

He told me, yeah, part of what he was doing was overtly pointing out to the admissions officers that Alex was different from other Chinese American delegates. That this young man did not fit whenever he said he or the admissions officers may have. And his no-holds barge strategy to get Alex in. It seemed to work.

The first reviewer who went through Alex's file before his interview wrote, Hope he'll announce an interview can add. The next reviewer saw Jim's report, then wrote, the first reviewer to get the first reviewer to get the first reviewer. Besides his write-up, Jim gave Alex a personal reading of one, the highest possible score. He gave Alex one across all categories.

The official admissions officers were not as abusive. They gave him a two-way personal reading, two-series of the rest. wrote that his personal qualities seemed to be still evolving. After that, my question was that if you had a bit of a positive review, that I probably wouldn't have done it, which kind of interesting thought.

That's a question. I mean, you were at the top of everything. Yeah. That's a question.

Yeah. Yeah, I really appreciate it. I'll let you, you did. Well, I appreciate you.

So, how was the york? I wanted to talk about Alex's number, I'm not in the classes he came as far. Jim starts and I'm going to start you about his kid before telling Alex. Okay, turn that record off.

I met up with Alex again after that phone call. He wasn't totally satisfied by it. That didn't get the gravity of Tiger Mother. I didn't find it all the way through.

But he had no hard feelings. So when Alex bought more about Tiger Mother, he realized it was not just the use of the term that I'm telling him. But also the assumption that it was about the first place. Something that Harvard wanted to make sure none of it's even sad.

Like the idea that that Tiger mom would even be, like I know it is a thing in our culture for a lot of parents, but also it's weird that there's a fixation on that by neurocosity. Like also questions like, why does it matter if your parents push you in that way? Is that not part of your upbringing and who you are now? It's just like there seems to be these very negative connotations about the way agents are raised, the way that you hate growing up.

And it seems like there's just very deeply ingrained prejudice and misunderstanding. Alex personally was grateful for when his mom pushed him and he was younger. I remember at high school my mom was like, give me a lot of pressure, like, make sure you catch with teachers, and talk to them during great time. So I think it's no you, because it's really important to have to write your own decisions.

And I didn't want to do it, but I guess I had to. Your mom was on the ball. Yeah, she's really on top of stuff. Which is really good because she did it without telling me.

She's really good mom. In race-con and I was like, I don't know if someone would still always call him yummy. But he didn't write about any of that in personal essay. Instead, it's about how he transforms from a lonely elementary school kid playing video games by himself.

To big man on campus at high school. You didn't talk about race in the essay. That's not the topic. It doesn't mention race at all.

Is that part of the subject of what you were writing? Looking back on it. Probably. Yeah.

In high school I had a lot of internalized hatred about being Asian. I had this whole perception that I needed different shape myself. So I think one of my views was that, oh, we aren't seen. It's also goes like myself being really conscious of the system or my architectural biases.

So I was like, oh, I probably need to show that. I had been social. I had been a leader having these cool things. I was thinking, I took me that might be that while you were preparing your application, you were making some similar-ish calculations.

Maybe what Jim was making. Yeah. That like, not I wanted different shape myself from all the applicants that I extra wanted different shape myself from other Asian applicants. Probably.

And again, like, looking back, I don't like it in the same way that I don't like. If Jim would have had to, like, talk me up just for the nation. Like, I don't like that. I wrote it in that way if it was because of that.

I asked Alex if what he saw in his file shifted his position at all in the lawsuit. No, he said. I was like, oh, this is like, what? The Asian is like, in other words, even when you make it in one of the fanciest colleges in the world.

When you finally feel like people see who you are, your whole complicated self. Just one word or phrase can snap you out of it. Remind you, right. Right.

This is how they see me. This is how it really works. And we'll just want to produce this in our show. Coming up.

What is new, dog? Fails to impress. Stake your orders in New York. What is your offer?

That's a minute. We've got a video. We've got a video. We've got a video.

We've got a video. We've got a video. We've got a video. We've got a video.

We're going to go to our program continues. This is my collection. I have a glass of detail. How I read it.

The stories of people with words and a page, words and screen. I see something at the rest of us might not always see. We've got a two hour show. I'm just going to see if the entire bot can come up with a title.

If it's a title, I'm pushing the button and things flashing. And this picture of a tree in the night sky. It says, no, that you are unprecedentedly negative. Which I have to say, that's actually a shockingly decent title for the act that we're meant to do.

We're going to call it side effects main quick accuracy. Or whatever they came up with. And then the bot actually get a regular job. Okay.

I do know that you're unprecedentedly negative. We're gonna produce a bit of a customer. So I'm just going to come across this kind of amazing collection of documents on a government website. These documents, letters and emails like thousands of them.

They're part of the usual machinery of bureaucratic decision-making. But David's also more than them. I found these letters about four clicks deep on a website for the Department of Financial Services for the State of New York. I was thinking around looking for some numbers on different story.

And there they were. Page after page of detail, handwritten letters and emails, going on at length and great passion and precision about their health insurance plans. They'd been buying them for the Affordable Care Act Obamacare. And every year, the plans were getting more expensive.

And not just by a little. I printed these letters out. They filled two binders. And I read them all.

There's something about the intimacy of these letters that makes them hard to stop reading. You can feel people sitting down to write them in their homes, coming face to face with cost of their insurance, and just searching for the right words. Some are desperate. Some are exhausted.

Some people are funny. Is this record of our fellow citizens shouting into the abyss? And they got to me. And this way, the news story is about this never happened.

These are people reacting to a situation that would drive anyone crazy. The first year of 2015, the cost of their plans increased 6% on average. Okay. Next year, they went up again by 7%.

Then the next year, up again by 17%. Then the next year, another 15%. That's a 50% increase over just 4 years. So if you're being 12,000 dollars a year at the start for your family, the price might go up to 18,000.

And recently, people were writing this year. Is it like prices were going to go up again? Insurance companies wanted to raise prices another 24%. So for a family that started at 12,000, that would bring you to $22,000 a year for insurance.

People were not pleased. The approach is varied. They were the I'm a serious person. This is a serious letter about a serious matter one.

You're a sir or sometimes you're a son of a madam, or to whom they concern it again. And then something like this one. A premium rate hike is unconscionable. I'm a call that's such significant premium increase as being sought after my first year of coverage.

There's clearly no connection from public. I've just ran your late to this requested rating for a mediocre coverage. It's a formal. Another letter I will pray for an acceptable solution of this horrible situation.

And that good sense, good will, and fairness prevail. But honestly, those are the minority. This one's more typical. Are you freaking kidding me about laying the rate at $88.29 per month?

That was in all caps. And then there's this one. If this happens, I will drop this land and company faster than Snoop Dogg drops it like it's hot. That was basically the whole email.

Another started, ha ha ha, this is a joke, which was a common thought. Is this a joke? I don't think any additional comments are needed. That person that went on to get quite a number of comments.

The reason all these people took time to write to our state government about this is that in New York, like in a lot of states actually, when a health insurance company wants to charge people more money, they can't just do it. For policies that are sold directly to individuals, as these were on the Affordable Care Act exchanges, the insurance company has to get approval from government regulators' raises prices. And in New York, health insurance companies have to be really clear they are proposing raising their rates. They have to send out a letter to everyone who has their insurance, so they want to raise their prices.

Exactly how much. And for the end of the letter, they have to stick in this paragraph. It feels kind of for fun to read. Dimensions there is a 30-day public comment period.

It gives an address on a website. So, you know, if you want any comments or questions, they can write to the state in New York. Which they do. This year, New York got 754 letters in 30 days.

Most states, as far as I can tell, not to go out of their way to make these letters public. But New York does. Some of their carefully scans them all, organized them, and put them on the line. I went through the letters from your past.

The government has blacked out people's names to protect their privacy. But sometimes, you get this little window in someone's life. One person is a bloody teacher in Long Island, and the mother said their husband died. Another was contemplating a new replacement, I wasn't paying.

One wrote that the family just got in the back of vacation. You can kind of imagine the person finding the notice of reading, and then sitting down in total anger to write. Maybe not even taking their code off. You can feel people struggling with the fact that a bunch of keyboard keys do not seem adequate to express their emotions.

They're just leaving it there for a while. Thinking, there, that's about right. I'm reading these letters, which could day. I realized it is not just names that are getting blacked out.

Other things too. Where the blank do people get off raising health insurance almost $200 a month? You have to be blank kidding me. You blank, but you know that already.

Which made me wonder about this other letter. It was entirely blacked out. People were so angry. It was like reading Yelp reviews for a bad restaurant.

But where the meal cost $20,000. And in some cases, you don't even get to eat it. Which of course is an age insurance, but still. I don't like writing these letters as I feel like a ranting old man when they're wrote.

But between watching premiums rise out of control and seeing the insurance I have not covered actual cost, I am that ranting fool. His insurance company wanted to raise rates by 40%. One question, a lot of people have. Why were prices going up so much?

I don't get to raise one person, but why should they? Nobody got back to these people with an explanation. So if any of you later writers are listening, here's what happened. When you want to care exchanges launched in 2013, the premiums for that first year were a lot lower.

And after a rest start, things seem to be working. People who couldn't afford health care suddenly could. And in some cases, there were lots of options to choose from. Let's say a grizzly bear ski from the zoo.

Now let's say he gave you a hug. You might be eating some health care right about them. This is an ad for health insurance company called Oscar. It launched around this time.

It's animated. Children's book style. Which can I just say, I admire the ingenuity of this advertising strategy. It's better than you should have insurance in case you get cancer.

Forget a car accident. Which honestly is what I think about. I never thought about getting hugged by a well-meaning bear. Within later visits me with a get-well-blue.

It says, I'm sorry. It's much better. Introducing Oscar. Individual health insurance is simple, intuitive, and maybe even fun.

So you can focus on the important things. Like staying healthy. We're Oscar. A new kind of health insurance company.

The next year Oscar, like most insurance companies on the exchanges, raise their rates. I thought getting somebody older later to see what reaction was back then. Stop counting money. I'm not sure if you're old.

Do not raise my premium. Not too big on Oscar, but I think it's a new insurance company. People hope things might be different. In the years since 2013, insurance companies in New York and around the country raise their prices on the Obamacare exchanges.

You know, I said from the beginning, let Obamacare implode. That of course is President Trump with his diagnosis of what was going on. Or maybe it was prescription if we wanted to happen. Let Obamacare implode.

According to a Congress who studied these things and frankly the insurance companies themselves, the exchanges were not imploding. What was going on was that the insurance companies had set premiums to low at the beginning. Some combination of wanting to attract customers and genuinely not knowing how sicker healthy people the sign that we're going to be. So the price is happening going on to correct for that.

But contrary to Trump's claim, the exchange is unlikely to implode. Unless of course someone did something to make that happen. The individual mandate is being repealed. Here's that someone who took the same someone before.

President Trump. This was last year just after the Republican passed the tax bill. Back in the middle was this other thing that did not get a lot of attention. They had done away with a mandate to buy health insurance.

This was a key part of Obamacare. The thing that was supposed to encourage people to sign up, even if they were healthy. That was gone. That was part of the tax bill.

We didn't want to bring it off. I told people specifically, be quiet with the fake news media because I don't want them talking too much about it. Because I didn't know how people have it. Now that it's approved, I can say the individual mandate will help care.

Will you have to pay not to have insurance. So think about when you pay not to have insurance. The individual mandate has been repealed. When this happens, the health insurance company is going, oh, they ran the numbers.

I predicted that a bunch of healthy people would drop it like a tie, go with them insurance. Meaning the remaining pool of people would be sicker. And so premiums would have to rise again. That is what was driving a lot of the requested pricing increases here.

And all those letters beg me to say to New York to somehow stop it. This one letters to me. The only part because the person wasn't demanding anything. It was just explaining.

It was from a woman who's husband and died. So she was getting a little money from Social Security. But still having to work. Quote, I do not live above my means.

I can't. The expenses of living leave me little to spend on luxury items, such as eating out, going to a movie, or taking a vacation. It seems to see everything going up. Car insurance, I drive a 14 year old car that is starting to need more costly repairs.

Groceries, cable, electric, rent. When this insurance was first introduced, it was called affordable. For whom? I have worked since I was 16.

Mine is a few years I was home raising children. I have faithfully paid my taxes every year. At this point in time, I'm in a loss on what to do. I am so discouraged.

There's not much more I can give up just before to live. Can you suggest any options? Thanks for your time. I wonder if anyone read these letters.

And if they made a difference. You get a lot of mail. I get a lot of mail. I get a lot of mail that I never even see.

There's lots of mail that's addressed to me. This is Maria Vullo. The department of financial services for State of the Order. Anybody have some questions?

I'm going to read all these letters and the other she receives. Probably not the best you've ever done. Do you want to see what you've spoken about? These are all the...

Okay, sure. We receive comments from the public on a whole number of issues. We believe in the receipt of public comments. Am I staff reviews them all?

I ask them about it. I'm literally just curious. Do you ever read these? Some I do.

I read through all of these. I found them really interesting. I mean, like some of them are funny. Some of them are sad.

A lot of them are just really angry. Like, some people have to become a right in my hand. I receive this letter and have been so upset since some of them are for pages. They're like, what if it was your mother?

Help. Cannot pay what I have now. I will say that this year... First thing to be in here is Richard Lkonti.

He was in a room for the interview. He had the communication department. This year in particular, the tone definitely was angry. Not I knew.

I would hear from Ron and my team on a one-on-one-one-one-one-one-one-one-one-one-one-one-one-one-one-one-one-one-one-one. Daily bass is saying you have to see these letters. People are angry. Did you read anything?