I'm Alan Alder, and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

It's funny to make data an emotional topic, and I was not expecting, actually, to have this emotional response to meeting these folks, some of whom I regard is really quite heroic.

On the villain side, I had several encounters with Facebook executives who were showing a complete disregard for the ethics

of data, including one case where an executive crossed his fingers and said, I hope Mark Zuckerberg

can get away with pulling the wool over everyone's eyes and getting away with these privacy

violations.

That's Justin Evans, who's written a book called The Little Book of Data,

with a generously long subtitle,

Understanding the Powerful Analytics that Fuel AI,

Make or Break Careers, and Could Just End Up Saving the World.

Yes, it actually is all that.

And making it a fun conversation dedicated to connecting and communicating

is Justin's telling of the stories of data scientists whose work has moved him,

sometimes to tears.

So, Justin, I love first sentences and books, and yours is a beaut.

You say, is it weird that I cried so much writing a book about data?

I thought that would be a grabber.

It grabbed me.

People think about the topic of data and expected to be dry and esoteric and complicated,

and I wanted to show my vulnerability and my emotional side right off the bat.

You know, the framing of the book is, having worked in data for 20 years, I wanted to codify the, call it the 1020 core ideas that I had learned about data,

and I wanted to communicate those core ideas to the non-expert. And in doing that, I knew that it would be

...