David Cooper (host)

Associate Principal French horn player for the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

David, it's been a joy having you on the show.

Hey, what a pleasure, David.

Thank you for having me.

hello happy hump day welcome to the last show you'll learn a lot on tonight's program here are some of the topics we'll cover do you remember when movies and tv shows had real dogs horses even the occasional bear stealing scenes from humans now our furry friends are all pixels did cgi eat lassie in 10 minutes time we'll ask are animal actors going extinct or just being rendered

then the results are in based on a scientific study when is the appropriate time to stop eating before bed midnight snackers you'll want to brace yourself it's not in the order of minutes it's in the order of hours that later in the hour those are some of the topics we'll hit on the night show there will be more you will learn more but for now as ever let's dive in

On the internet, newspaper websites, when they introduced user comments, that promised a productive global conversation, right?

Well, sometimes those comments feel like someone is throwing a chair in the first five seconds.

They can get ugly.

They can get angry.

And it turns out the earliest people to comment on a thread might actually be the angriest.

I'm here with someone who has researched just this.

He is a communication studies professor at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

His name is Ben Clark.

Ben, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

So you looked at a large number of online comments, some many, many millions.

What instincts did you have going in about what the angry, rude, hateful comments might be?

Did that surprise you that the first few comments that showed up were in fact the most angry, the most hateful?

Now, can the first comment being hateful, can that be sort of a tone setter for the entire conversation that goes on after that?