Little Happier: After Enron’s Downfall, a Massive Trove of Private Emails Were Made Public. Researchers Learned a Lot, and So Did I.

Happier with Gretchen Rubin

Gretchen Rubin / The Onward Project

Education, Health & Fitness, Self-improvement

4.7 • 13K Ratings

🗓️ 2 August 2021

⏱️ 4 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The fascinating history of the “Enron Corpus,” the trove of private emails that were made public in the wake of the collapse of the energy company Enron, reminds me never to write anything in an email that I wouldn’t want to see made public. Get in touch: @gretchenrubin; [email protected] Get in touch on Instagram: @GretchenRubin Get the podcast show notes by email every week here: http://gretchenrubin.com/#newsletter Order a copy of Gretchen’s new book OUTER ORDER, INNER CALM here: http://outerorderinnercalmbook.com Leave a voicemail message on: 774-277-9336 For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to happiercast.com/sponsors. Happier with Gretchen Rubin is part of ‘The Onward Project,’ a family of podcasts brought together by Gretchen Rubin—all about how to make your life better. Check out the other Onward Project podcasts—Do The Thing, Side Hustle School, Happier in Hollywood and Everything Happens with Kate Bowler. If you liked this episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and tell your friends! To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's tough to stick with workout routines and making time to hit the gym is sometimes even harder.
0:05.0	That's why Peloton offers options that fit into your day with thousands of on-demand classes,
0:09.9	so you can work out when it's right for you. Peloton goes beyond just the bike,
0:14.0	offering classes like yoga, strength training, hit and boxing. Let Peloton help you achieve your
0:19.6	fitness goals. Try Peloton risk-free with a 30-day home trial. New members only, not available in
0:25.1	remote location, see additional terms at onepeloton.com slash home trial. I'm Gretchen Rubin and this is
0:32.0	a little happier. I love to listen to podcasts and by chance over the past year, I listened to two
0:39.3	podcast episodes that talked about the same trove of data, the N-RON corpus. N-RON was an enormous,
0:48.7	famous and successful energy trading company based in Houston that perpetrated one of the biggest
0:54.7	accounting frauds in history. In 2001, it collapsed and top executives were convicted of fraud,
1:01.6	estimated losses totaled $74 billion. In 2001, as part of its investigation of N-RON,
1:10.0	the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission sees the email folders of about 150 mostly high-ranking
1:16.9	N-RON employees and decided to release the emails online. This archive includes hundreds of
1:24.7	thousands of emails and is one of the biggest collections of private emails turned public.
1:30.5	In 2003, a researcher at MIT paid $10,000 for the material, which became known as the N-RON corpus.
1:38.1	And people began to put it in order and clean it up so that it could be used by researchers.
1:42.8	It has been used extensively for all kinds of purposes. It was used to study how people put their
1:49.5	emails in folders to study about who connects with whom it works, to develop a compliance
1:54.9	bot to alert writers if they're writing something that might get them in trouble, to study what
1:59.2	level of formality people use in emails and when and why, to study patterns and using greetings or
2:05.1	not to train spam filtering and so on. And in this data, people's emails can be read all their
2:15.1	ordinary exchanges about work and about their own private lives. And sometimes they write about
	...

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