Imagine engineering a social experiment in 1990 designed to change how people argue online, watching it enter the Oxford English Dictionary, and then spending decades trying to stop the world from using it wrong. This episode profiles attorney and author Mike Godwin, the man behind the internet's most famous axiom about historical analogies. It sets the scene on Usenet newsgroups accessed by dial-up modems, where Godwin noticed that heated text debates on any topic escalated into casual comparisons to the Third Reich, and feared this hyperbole would erode collective understanding of the Holocaust's horror.

Rather than scolding users, Godwin drew on the emerging theory of memetics to craft a catchy pseudoscientific law that would replicate across message boards like an immune response, a speed bump in a school zone as the hosts describe it.  ...