Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hi there, it's Michael Lewis here. You probably know
Speaker 1: that Against the Rules is the first podcast that I've
Speaker 1: ever done, and it probably shows. So I appreciate all
Speaker 1: of you first sticking with it. The first season's over,
Speaker 1: but we want to give you something a little extra
Speaker 1: as a token of appreciation. The writer, Malcolm Gladwell, and
Speaker 1: I had a conversation back in April of twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: when Against the Rules had just launched. We met in
Speaker 1: front of a live audience at the ninety two Street Why,
Speaker 1: which is this great center of culture and Jewish life
Speaker 1: on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. We had a
Speaker 1: big crowd and the whole thing was a lot of
Speaker 1: fun to do, and we talked about how I got
Speaker 1: interested in not just podcasting, but the quandary of referees
Speaker 1: in American life. We want to give you a little
Speaker 1: peak behind the curtain of producing this show, and also
Speaker 1: a glimpse of the next season of Malcolm's podcast, Revisionist History.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, thank you, Thank you Malcolm for doing this.
Speaker 1: Thank you. My apologies to the audience. I'm the reason
Speaker 1: this is late. I was on subway, yep that I
Speaker 1: feel like no further explanations needed. Michael, I feel like
Speaker 1: every time you do some new project, do you trot
Speaker 1: me out to interview you. And I feel like this
Speaker 1: is like my fourth time doing this. But I've done
Speaker 1: it as much for you, you've done it for me,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to have to do it in September. Apparently, yeah,
Speaker 1: you might have to do it in September. Last time
Speaker 1: we were on the stage, I feel I mortally offended you,
Speaker 1: and I got all kinds of angry, not angry, but
Speaker 1: kind of Several friends of mine who might actually be
Speaker 1: here tonight sent me emails saying chiding me from my
Speaker 1: I didn't add it. I you know, I pursued particular
Speaker 1: lines of uncomfortable inquiry with too much vigor. So I'm
Speaker 1: gonna very not I'm gonna be nice this evening. Nasty
Speaker 1: Malcolms didn't put aside, and we're just gonna get nice. Malcolm. Um,
Speaker 1: let's talk about uh. Just for the record, I don't
Speaker 1: remember any of that well you, but that's that. That
Speaker 1: is I really don't remember any of that. That is
Speaker 1: your great charm is a pleasure to speak with you.
Speaker 1: That is a great charm of genius. I do think
Speaker 1: that you have an ability to sell the most unbelievable bullshit.
Speaker 1: And and and you that you did it. You did
Speaker 1: it with me the last time. And I don't want
Speaker 1: to see just I was offended in any way. But
Speaker 1: Jesus Christ, Malcolm, what do you think you're doing? No, No,
Speaker 1: you're just You're this just proving to the world what
Speaker 1: a what a fantastic wasp you are. That you and
Speaker 1: by the way, you're probably the only wasp in his room.
Speaker 1: Your ability to kind of like Nazi and dismissed and
Speaker 1: explain away conflict is quite extraordinary. Let's get I've spent
Speaker 1: much of my life as the only wasp in the room. Yeah.
Speaker 1: In fact, you're it'll be on your It'll be your tombstone.
Speaker 1: Toyoy I wrote. I wrote this piece for the New
Speaker 1: Republic called Toy Gooy, and it was about being the
Speaker 1: toy boy, about being the one boy in every Jewish institution.
Speaker 1: It made everybody feel comfortable. Uh, nobody cared what I
Speaker 1: thought about Israel. H I could I could work on Passover?
Speaker 1: You know I played that role. But all right, so
Speaker 1: what do you want to talk about? Um? Well, this
Speaker 1: wonderful podcast of yours um and I wanted to start
Speaker 1: with obvious questions that you're going to get it. Every
Speaker 1: time you do any kind of media, they're gonna ask
Speaker 1: you this question, So I thought i'd start with it. Um,
Speaker 1: this transition from writer to podcaster? How was it? What
Speaker 1: you persuaded me? This was a lot easier than it was.
Speaker 1: You really did, which is a lot. It was a
Speaker 1: total lie. So the short answer is it was a
Speaker 1: lot harder than I imagined it to be, but a
Speaker 1: lot more fun than I imagined it to be. And
Speaker 1: it was different, and it was I came to the
Speaker 1: conclusion that some stories are better told in this medium
Speaker 1: than in a book form. For me anyway. Um, And
Speaker 1: you have this great gift to be I've said this
Speaker 1: too many times. You have this great gift of taking
Speaker 1: ideas and giving them the qualities of actions that you
Speaker 1: don't actually even need a character. All you need is
Speaker 1: your ideas to play with on the page, and the
Speaker 1: people become almost incidental. Uh. And I'm not sure I
Speaker 1: meant it is but no, but but it's it. And
Speaker 1: it's Uh. You create the feeling of narrative even without
Speaker 1: the conventional ingredients of a narrative. I can't do that um.
Speaker 1: When I write what is essentially essays material, it reads
Speaker 1: like an essay if I don't have a main character,
Speaker 1: if I don't have a kind of drama that I'm
Speaker 1: playing out. And this, this idea was naturally kind of sash.
Speaker 1: It was a series of it's seventy pieces around a theme,
Speaker 1: and as a book, I don't think it would have cohered.
Speaker 1: But so one of the cool things I found was
Speaker 1: this the voice pulls. Your voice is able to pull
Speaker 1: an audience through a story, even if there's not exactly
Speaker 1: a story, even if it's even if it's not as
Speaker 1: the materials, not as unified as you would like it
Speaker 1: to be. If it was on the page, I found
Speaker 1: it's it's just it's interestingly then they all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: you can hear the character's voices, you know, when you
Speaker 1: put somebody in quotation marks. No matter what you do
Speaker 1: around it, making that getting that sound off the page,
Speaker 1: you can't completely reproduce it. And we have characters who
Speaker 1: just come to life their voices, just just bring them,
Speaker 1: you have to do any work at all. And so
Speaker 1: that was interesting to me. Are you saying to go
Speaker 1: back to I order you to dwell a little bit
Speaker 1: on that idea that there are certain ideas, certain stories
Speaker 1: you that you can only tell this way in a podcast.
Speaker 1: What did you need? So maybe should I just first
Speaker 1: just explained what the podcast is, because it's just came
Speaker 1: out yesterday in the first episode. So it's called Against
Speaker 1: the Rules, and it's about referees in American life. Um,
Speaker 1: and it's the general argument is that the human referee
Speaker 1: is on the run or under assault wherever you wherever
Speaker 1: you turn, except in the cases where the ref's been
Speaker 1: bought by one side, and then he might be very
Speaker 1: comfortably ensconced in a rig system. But um, the there
Speaker 1: wasn't for me. There wasn't one story I wanted to tell.
Speaker 1: There are whole bunch of stories I wanted to tell,
Speaker 1: and they would have felt in an in a book
Speaker 1: like either like a separate story or a digression, a
Speaker 1: long digression, I think, Um, And I wanted to play
Speaker 1: with the argument and I wanted to play with the
Speaker 1: subject matter. But I didn't I didn't have one person
Speaker 1: or I didn't have you know, normally, what I have
Speaker 1: is either either I have I have a main character
Speaker 1: who can teach the audience, and I you know, I
Speaker 1: had seven or eight characters here, and that would have
Speaker 1: been it would have been hard to structure as a
Speaker 1: conventional narrative. So it was interesting to be able to
Speaker 1: do it. This. The other big difference, um is book
Speaker 1: writing is really an individual sport. I mean, it is
Speaker 1: just it's just you and the This is definitely it.
Speaker 1: I don't know how you found it, but for me
Speaker 1: it was completely a team sport. It was and it
Speaker 1: was fabulous. I mean, the editor, the people who were
Speaker 1: Nick Brittell, who made the music, the producers that you know,
Speaker 1: they were all intimately involved to the extent that in
Speaker 1: a couple of cases the producers wouldn't did a couple
Speaker 1: of the interviews. And that was having to having to
Speaker 1: both make work with other people was I think healthy
Speaker 1: for me, but also having to because I don't often
Speaker 1: have to do it, um, but having to satisfy them
Speaker 1: in the course of doing that was interesting. Normally I'm
Speaker 1: just SAT's find me uh. And they were hard to
Speaker 1: satisfy you. They were hard to please uh, And that
Speaker 1: was that was just it was interesting to have that
Speaker 1: friction in my life. Did you feel like pleasing them
Speaker 1: entailed compromises? No, entailed me learning what the hell I
Speaker 1: was doing. I mean that I really that they were
Speaker 1: right and I was wrong. Most kinds of things were
Speaker 1: you wrong about? Well? Did my argument make sense to them?
Speaker 1: Saying that that's a simple one? But but it was.
Speaker 1: Much of it was just structural. It was kind of
Speaker 1: like like what I whether there was, it was just there.
Speaker 1: They had a better sense than I did. I learned
Speaker 1: pretty quickly. But they had better sense than than I
Speaker 1: did about what someone who was just taking it in
Speaker 1: here would tolerate from me, in the way of a
Speaker 1: way of digression, in the way of uh odd structured
Speaker 1: to story, in the way of starting something and not
Speaker 1: coming back to it for fifteen minutes, what I had
Speaker 1: to do to accommodate to make sure that I didn't
Speaker 1: lose the audience. They also had a much better sense
Speaker 1: of what I could leave on the cutting room floor
Speaker 1: that I all my scripts and it was it was
Speaker 1: more like it was also writing a book than writing
Speaker 1: a screenplay, which I've done. It was kind of in
Speaker 1: between all the all the original scripts were twice as
Speaker 1: long as they needed to be, and there was all
Speaker 1: stuff that I didn't see you could remove, and they saw.
Speaker 1: They were really good at seeing which you could pull out.
Speaker 1: So that was different, just having that kind of collaboration.
Speaker 1: But the you know, I this I when I'm moving
Speaker 1: through the world looking for things I'm going to do.
Speaker 1: H you know, somebody will catch my eye and I'll
Speaker 1: open a folder on it and not knowing where it
Speaker 1: will go. When I have stacks of Manila folders beside
Speaker 1: and shelves beside my desk, and a decade ago, two
Speaker 1: things happened that sort of triggered this interest in ref
Speaker 1: and I never knew what I was gonna do with
Speaker 1: and the folder got thicker and thicker, but it never
Speaker 1: emerged as a narrative. And then this medium comes along
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden I could Oh, I had
Speaker 1: no idea. This was something a long time in the
Speaker 1: Do you remember what the initial trigger it was for
Speaker 1: the interest in refereen? Yeah, yeah, yeah, there two things.
Speaker 1: It was right after the financial crisis, and I was
Speaker 1: I'd just been put in charge of the Albany Berkeley
Speaker 1: Girls Softball League travel ball teams, and my job was
Speaker 1: to take these little girls from Berkeley, the all stars
Speaker 1: from the league at age eight, ten, twelve, and fourteen,
Speaker 1: and get them into shape so they could go over
Speaker 1: the hill and compete against Republicans, and my predecessor had
Speaker 1: not done a very good job of it. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I went to I took it seriously. And so my
Speaker 1: girls were playing. And the first time I started, when
Speaker 1: I opened the file, it started with this. It was
Speaker 1: our first tournament. It was a little place called Rona Park,
Speaker 1: and it was it was a night game, and there
Speaker 1: were a bunch of nine year old girls on the
Speaker 1: field and maybe fifty parents in the stands, and it
Speaker 1: was close, and one of our girls slid into home
Speaker 1: plate to tie the game at the top of the
Speaker 1: last inning, and the Ronert Park, the opposing team's coach
Speaker 1: came out of the dugout and started started cursing up
Speaker 1: and down at the umpire who called our little girl's safe.
Speaker 1: I mean, the language was just unbelievable. And their whole
Speaker 1: fan side started screaming at the umpire. And you know,
Speaker 1: no one on our side, none of the little girls
Speaker 1: and our dug I had ever heard the word fuck.
Speaker 1: And they were they were in awe. They were watching
Speaker 1: this they'd never seen. I kind of loved it because
Speaker 1: it was great. I loved that they could see how
Speaker 1: grown ups actually behaved instead of how, instead of how
Speaker 1: Berkeley parents after the day. But this thing escalated on
Speaker 1: the field, and the coach didn't back down, and the
Speaker 1: umpire didn't back down. The umpire was a woman, and
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, the Berkeley parents started getting raged.
Speaker 1: And so you looked around and everybody's screaming at everybody,
Speaker 1: and most of the people screaming at the umpire. Um
Speaker 1: there was a great Berkeley moment when this voice cut
Speaker 1: through the night and this woman screamed with horrible modeling
Speaker 1: for our children, but beyond But except for that, it
Speaker 1: was like, you idiot, you askhole, you you know, you're
Speaker 1: safe out, you know. And and the umpire finally, the
Speaker 1: coach finally through. The coach out, so you're out. But
Speaker 1: it was his ballpark, so he says, okay, you can
Speaker 1: throw me on he steps outside. He says, I'm now
Speaker 1: no longer in the position of coach. I'm now in
Speaker 1: the position of director of this facility, and you're fired.
Speaker 1: So so he is now at nine o'clock at night,
Speaker 1: and the malls are up in the in the lights,
Speaker 1: and everybody's jaws on the floor that they just fired
Speaker 1: the only umpire. So the game can't actually go on,
Speaker 1: and she doesn't know what to do. She's actually just
Speaker 1: because hey, and just walks out into the parking lot.
Speaker 1: Everybody's just standing on the field. And I thought, this
Speaker 1: is my moment when I'm spoke in the position of authority.
Speaker 1: What am? I sort of followed her out into the
Speaker 1: parking lot and she was weeping, U and uh. I
Speaker 1: went up to her and I kind of like put
Speaker 1: my arm around it as before me too, you know,
Speaker 1: and it was okay to kind of console in a
Speaker 1: Biden like manner, and uh and I said, you know,
Speaker 1: I said, you know, you know, you don't you don't
Speaker 1: have to take that. You know, you really should go back.
Speaker 1: And I said. It was like, is there anybody you
Speaker 1: can call? And she says, yeah, there's an umpire association.
Speaker 1: And it was it was nine o'clock in California. It
Speaker 1: was unbelievable that there was anybody where this place was.
Speaker 1: She gets the umpire Association down the line and they say,
Speaker 1: he can't fire you. We're gonna call the guy who's
Speaker 1: the head of the thing that ended, the head of
Speaker 1: the facility, and we'll get him fired. You go back
Speaker 1: and finished the umpiring and she went right back in
Speaker 1: and threw him out, and the game went on. But
Speaker 1: and then on I started to watch these poor people
Speaker 1: who were who were brought out to umpire nine year
Speaker 1: old girls games, and they were on the on the
Speaker 1: receiving end of constant abuse. And my first question is
Speaker 1: why would anybody even do that job? But my second
Speaker 1: reaction was why why do people behave that way towards umpires.
Speaker 1: I've never felt that way towards umpires. Why do they
Speaker 1: Why do people take out so much of their fury
Speaker 1: on them? Why is that so hard that job? So
Speaker 1: this happens that as I've finished the Big Short and
Speaker 1: and I'm watching what's going on on Wall Street in
Speaker 1: the on the back end of the financial crisis, and
Speaker 1: one way of looking at the financial crisis was as
Speaker 1: an umpiring problem, that refering problem. Uh. There was a
Speaker 1: breakdown of several refering roles, but that one of the
Speaker 1: big ones was the credit rating agencies Moodies and Standard
Speaker 1: and Poor especially passed with refeing. The sec the securities
Speaker 1: that Wall Street brings to market now totally failed. They
Speaker 1: totally failed for a very good, simple reason. They were
Speaker 1: being paid by the people who created the subprime mortgage bonds.
Speaker 1: They were rating, they were on the take, they were
Speaker 1: being paid. It's like being played by one of the players.
Speaker 1: And this umpire briefly was flayed in public, but basically
Speaker 1: was allowed to go right back to doing what they
Speaker 1: were doing without any reform whatsoever. And so I had
Speaker 1: this umpiring file with two umpires, two kinds of umpires.
Speaker 1: One was a very nice woman with some spine, who
Speaker 1: was just trying to do her best and make sure
Speaker 1: the game was paid played fairly, and she was being
Speaker 1: made miserable. And the other were these umpires on Wall
Speaker 1: Street who who were doing their job and a kind
Speaker 1: of who had horrible incentives and were not They were
Speaker 1: not agents of fairness, and the society was enabling them
Speaker 1: to keep going even though they orchestrated, helped to orchestrate
Speaker 1: this horrible calamity. And I just started at that point.
Speaker 1: So I think, you know, like, why do some umpires
Speaker 1: some umpires and positions of strength and wire some umpires
Speaker 1: and position of weakness. First thought, what I was going
Speaker 1: to do is write a sitcom about umpires. It just
Speaker 1: set in the world a girl's softball. But I really
Speaker 1: had no idea. It was gonna do with the material,
Speaker 1: and I just started to accumulate material. And then Jacob Weisberg,
Speaker 1: you're co founder of Pushkin Industries, and I are on
Speaker 1: the hiking trail the year and a half ago when
Speaker 1: we just started talking about this subject, and he said,
Speaker 1: you know, it could work as a podcast. And by
Speaker 1: the time we started, when you start thinking about the
Speaker 1: subject and start looking, when you start looking for referees,
Speaker 1: you see them everywhere. I mean that there was It
Speaker 1: end up being seven episodes, but could have been fifteen.
Speaker 1: And there was a kind of like there was some
Speaker 1: arguments to be teased out, but you had to move
Speaker 1: around in a somewhat haphazard fashion that the podcast structure
Speaker 1: really lets you do. Yeah, can I can? I ask you?
Speaker 1: I want to go back for a second A kind
Speaker 1: of writer early question in this file, after that experience
Speaker 1: with your daughter's baseball team, how much did you like
Speaker 1: write a big how much did you write about that evening?
Speaker 1: I wrote a paragraph about the evening, but that's stuck
Speaker 1: it in the file, and I put on the outside
Speaker 1: of it um umps and uh and chased it and
Speaker 1: I made notes to like I would check at the
Speaker 1: tournament the girls tournaments. I would follow the umpire back
Speaker 1: to his car. They a lot of these guys live
Speaker 1: out of their cars and just talk to him a
Speaker 1: little bit about why they did what they did. Um
Speaker 1: and I saw I'd make notes based on those conversations,
Speaker 1: and I just I was just kind of I just
Speaker 1: kind of Sometimes I open one of these files and
Speaker 1: nothing goes in it. It's just umps. Stick it up
Speaker 1: on the shelf. Maybe that's a subject I will pursue,
Speaker 1: but it just seems to me. I mean, you and
Speaker 1: the more you watch it, if you back away from
Speaker 1: and look at the way this society treats people. It
Speaker 1: just in sports, in the umpiring role, it's bizarre. You know,
Speaker 1: you go to a basketball arena and eighteen thousand people
Speaker 1: are chanting in unison ref you suck, I mean the
Speaker 1: the but there aren't eighteen thousand people on the other
Speaker 1: side who are saying, thank you for making the calls
Speaker 1: on my in our favor. I mean, it's like nobody's
Speaker 1: nobody's ever thanking this person for the cheating he's supposedly
Speaker 1: doing on behalf of the other team of the other
Speaker 1: and the people see in this person injustice where it
Speaker 1: doesn't exist this person has this ability to generate an
Speaker 1: outrage that's out of all proportion to UH to like
Speaker 1: how he's behaving, and um, it's sort of like he
Speaker 1: ends up he ends up at the center of UH.
Speaker 1: I mean, he ends up as a character generally kind
Speaker 1: of unexplored, one of the things that end up on
Speaker 1: the cutting room floor. I interviewed Daryl Morey, who is
Speaker 1: the the Houston Rockets Gym, who I adore, who had
Speaker 1: lots that done, lots of studies about about referees, knew
Speaker 1: their tendencies, knew like where home court advantage was worse
Speaker 1: because the referees are better because referees more like they
Speaker 1: give the home team to call. Had done all his
Speaker 1: work on referees, and I asked him, have you ever
Speaker 1: met him they ever met one of them? No, you know,
Speaker 1: it never even occurred to me that I should actually
Speaker 1: go meet one of these guys and talk to one
Speaker 1: of these guys, that they were completely unexplored characters. Why,
Speaker 1: you know, it's interesting to go back to the paradigm
Speaker 1: you have between the Wall Street people and the Baseball
Speaker 1: Little League Baseball umpires. In one case, the operating assumption
Speaker 1: is the I can influence the rep if I try
Speaker 1: and intimidate her, if I abuse her. In the other case,
Speaker 1: the notion is that I simply buy them off, that
Speaker 1: it was I I do an exaggerated form of charming them. Yes,
Speaker 1: and I'm always wondered why those roles aren't reversed. So
Speaker 1: are there NBA coaches who try to charm referees? And
Speaker 1: are there businesses who who or business people who explicitly
Speaker 1: try and essentially scream at the government referee? So? Um,
Speaker 1: the answer the first question is surprisingly few. Um the
Speaker 1: NBA players that you can't really get the players, even
Speaker 1: the former players won't talk about the rest because they're
Speaker 1: just get in trouble. Um. But Shane Battier, who's a
Speaker 1: friend who played in the NBA for many years, said
Speaker 1: to me it amazed him that no one, ever, how
Speaker 1: seldom people tried to actually be nice to the refs.
Speaker 1: And that's what his strategy was, to be nice to
Speaker 1: the rest of He thought that was an original strategy.
Speaker 1: So the but the the the but but the answer
Speaker 1: the answer in the NBA is one of the reasons
Speaker 1: everybody's really even angrier at the refs, even though the
Speaker 1: refs are getting better is that the refs are getting better.
Speaker 1: They're harder. It's harder to charm and harder and impossible
Speaker 1: to intimidate. They're holding themselves to these objective standard is
Speaker 1: and they're judged by these objective standards and the stuff
Speaker 1: that's going on around them. They're more and more impervious too.
Speaker 1: Um uh. The so the second part is, are there
Speaker 1: do it with browbeating? Feel like Mark Cuban was an
Speaker 1: example the sec Yeah, uh so I think the browbeating
Speaker 1: works in private. Uh but but but what it's so
Speaker 1: much better if you can just buy the reff you know,
Speaker 1: I mean that if you if you look at uh,
Speaker 1: if you look at the way I mean the rate
Speaker 1: that that was, that's such a sweet rather than going
Speaker 1: and scream at moodies and standard and poor that you're
Speaker 1: separate mortgage behinds a triple A, so much better just
Speaker 1: to slip them some money to make, you know, to
Speaker 1: create that incentive so that they're more likely to smile
Speaker 1: upon the securities. But so anyway, this whole thing come,
Speaker 1: it's an interesting The subject got more interesting to me
Speaker 1: and it became more real in the presidential election because
Speaker 1: all because they say the two campaigns that had a
Speaker 1: real energy about them was Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump's campaign,
Speaker 1: and that bottom of both campaigns was the systems rigged.
Speaker 1: That that that it was all about UH referees having
Speaker 1: not done their job. And there was some justice to
Speaker 1: those charges, but that and that's why I thought, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe we could maybe there's maybe this is worth trying
Speaker 1: to do, and it was. We'll have more of my
Speaker 1: conversation with Malcolm Gladwell at the ninety two Streety in
Speaker 1: New York after this break. We're now back with more
Speaker 1: of my conversation with Malcolm Gladwell. I wanted to compare
Speaker 1: notes with Malcolm, who's been podcasting for a while. If
Speaker 1: you listen closely, you'll hear a little bit about what's
Speaker 1: to come in the next season of his show, Revisionist History.
Speaker 1: When you when you made those initial observations about umps
Speaker 1: umpires referees, um, did you think you were examining an
Speaker 1: age old problem or a new problem. The thing that
Speaker 1: I loved about the first episode that came out yesterday
Speaker 1: was I kept on. I was thinking, oh, this is interesting,
Speaker 1: and Michael's going to tell me why we've always had
Speaker 1: this problem. But then you told me no, no, no no, no, no,
Speaker 1: this is new for really really interesting reasons. And that
Speaker 1: was the turn where you cooked me in and that
Speaker 1: that was a non obvious turn. I feel like if
Speaker 1: I had done this story, I would have blown it
Speaker 1: because I would have just tried to prove to you
Speaker 1: to have been around forever and that's not interesting. Actually, well,
Speaker 1: that the refs have been abused forever. Yeah, I would
Speaker 1: have said, oh, you know, what you're observing is something
Speaker 1: the Romans did you know? I would have done that,
Speaker 1: some ludicrous move like that. But the thing I was
Speaker 1: genuinely so prized by the turn where we learn it's
Speaker 1: new and why why it's new? So sports is such
Speaker 1: a wonderful laboratory just because so clean in so many ways.
Speaker 1: But it's new, and it's it's it's it's new ish
Speaker 1: in that the NBA, when Adam Silver became commissioner, he
Speaker 1: backup for the first episode is about the refs, about
Speaker 1: an actual sports ref The only episode in the series
Speaker 1: it's about sports is the first is the first episode,
Speaker 1: and it's about it professional basketball refs um And what
Speaker 1: was interesting to me about that subject is if you,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think it's just just kind of generally
Speaker 1: true sports, combination of technology and unaware and transparency is
Speaker 1: forcing all the umpire and the refereeing to get better. Um.
Speaker 1: And you would think that would cause everybody to appreciate
Speaker 1: the refs more or at least protest them less. Uh,
Speaker 1: But that's not happening, um, especially not happening in basketball.
Speaker 1: It's got from the point of view the refs, it's
Speaker 1: getting worse and worse. It's sort of like more likely
Speaker 1: to need a bodyguard hard to the arena, more likely
Speaker 1: to have really ugly things said in the stand out
Speaker 1: of the stands, more likely to have to throw star
Speaker 1: players out of the game because of things they do
Speaker 1: and say. At the same time, the refereing is clearly
Speaker 1: more objectively accurate. And the thing that do you remember
Speaker 1: Kurt Schilling to pitch up. So there was a moment
Speaker 1: which told you what kind of why objective refereing might
Speaker 1: end up creating a lot of anger in sports. Major
Speaker 1: League Baseball introduced pitch track machines into ball the ballparks,
Speaker 1: and that's the machine that shows you where the strike
Speaker 1: zone is. And up to the point they introduced these machines,
Speaker 1: the strike zone is entirely a subjective matter. What the
Speaker 1: umpire thinks is a strike and there's no real way
Speaker 1: to check him. Now they have measured the strike zone,
Speaker 1: they can determine if the umpire has been after the fact,
Speaker 1: if the umpire has been calling accurately or not, and
Speaker 1: he he's graded on his accuracy he's measured against the machine.
Speaker 1: So there's been this in decades since they've introduced those machines.
Speaker 1: There's been in pressure on these umpires to conform to
Speaker 1: the stint, to the machines accuracy and the way. And
Speaker 1: they have and they'll brag, I only got one wrong.
Speaker 1: You know now, Why they even keep the umpires there
Speaker 1: is another question because the machine could just do it.
Speaker 1: But but the umpires started to change the way they
Speaker 1: call the game in response to the machine, meaning they
Speaker 1: became more accurate. You think everybody would think that was
Speaker 1: a good thing. Kurt Schilling came out of a ball
Speaker 1: game early when he was a pitcher. I can't remember
Speaker 1: who was pitching for the time. He was in the
Speaker 1: Red Sex. I think he might have been with the Diamondbacks.
Speaker 1: Furious because it's performance he had not performed well, went
Speaker 1: into the dugout grabbed a bat and went and destroyed
Speaker 1: the pitch track machine and they find him fifty thousand
Speaker 1: dollars and he and he was angry because the umpire
Speaker 1: used to give him calls that were not strikes before
Speaker 1: they introduced this machine, and he no longer was given
Speaker 1: that privilege. He no longer had the advantages that are
Speaker 1: naturally accorded the stars. And something like that is what's
Speaker 1: going on in basketball. And what's happening in basketball is
Speaker 1: they've tried to introduce a similar spirit of objectivity, and
Speaker 1: they've done it in many different ways. They have they've
Speaker 1: built this five years ago, if for fifteen million dollars,
Speaker 1: they built this replay center in Secaucus, New Jersey, which
Speaker 1: is the site of the first episode of the podcast,
Speaker 1: fifteen million dollars to run direct fiber optic cables to
Speaker 1: every basketball NBA basketball arena in the each arena there
Speaker 1: I don't know a dozen cameras anyway, trying to get
Speaker 1: every angle on the court. And this room in Secaucus
Speaker 1: is one hundred and ten television screens showing the all
Speaker 1: the angles on every court in the NBA. And that's
Speaker 1: all it shows. And so you can't watch, you know,
Speaker 1: you can't watch Homeland on it. You can't. You can't
Speaker 1: do anything with these TVs except watch whatever happens to
Speaker 1: walk onto that basketball court wherever it is. And they're guys,
Speaker 1: they're professional referees in there every night during the season,
Speaker 1: double checking the calls of the actual refs on the
Speaker 1: floor in case the refs make mistakes. And the refs
Speaker 1: themselves are now graded and they're showing their mistakes after
Speaker 1: the game. They have the opportunity to check their mistakes
Speaker 1: if they if they check their judgments, and that's sure,
Speaker 1: they're right. They're trained and evaluated in all kinds of
Speaker 1: ways they've never been before. They are the hiring process
Speaker 1: is more professional. It's just like Gotten used to be
Speaker 1: an all boys network. Like half a dozen of the
Speaker 1: refs twenty five years ago came with the same high school.
Speaker 1: It was just a bunch of kind of chubby white guys,
Speaker 1: mainly Catholic Philly from film Philly. That's right. And now
Speaker 1: you've got they've broaden out that, they've broadened out the
Speaker 1: town search. They got to get in shape. They used
Speaker 1: to be fat, right, everybody else in America is getting
Speaker 1: fatter and the rests are getting better shaped. Uh, Now
Speaker 1: they're buff and and and they're training. They're trained, they're
Speaker 1: being taught about all their biases, the kind of biases
Speaker 1: that kind of in Taversky taught us about. But also
Speaker 1: you know that they're more likely to give the home
Speaker 1: team the call, or they have racial bias that they've
Speaker 1: taught and they've taught to correct for all this stuff.
Speaker 1: How could it be anything but better? But getting better
Speaker 1: does not mean making is not making people happy, it's
Speaker 1: inflaming that. It's it's partly inflaming the situation. So is
Speaker 1: it a mistake stars don't like it? Is it a
Speaker 1: mistake to get better? Then? I mean, is there some choice?
Speaker 1: The world's changed. The problem is now the fans can
Speaker 1: not only see in real time that a mistake might
Speaker 1: have been made, they can see for sure on the
Speaker 1: JumboTron that a mistake was made or might have been made,
Speaker 1: and they can then and then they can captured on
Speaker 1: their phones, and they can tweet it, and they have
Speaker 1: a they have material for outrage. And it's not just
Speaker 1: the fans, the players and so the sense of grievance,
Speaker 1: even though the reason for grievance is clearly declining. The
Speaker 1: reasons for grievance. It is clearly declining. Um, the feelings
Speaker 1: of grievance are going through the roof. So it's becoming
Speaker 1: more fair on a basketball court, but people feel it's
Speaker 1: less fair. Yeah, but I don't think you could fix
Speaker 1: it by making the referees even worse than they are, well,
Speaker 1: they used to be. You know, remember the phrase that
Speaker 1: was common in basketball, the makeup call. Yeah, that's a
Speaker 1: blogny like it. You know that it presumes you know
Speaker 1: you made a mistake. If you know you made a mistake,
Speaker 1: then don't make it u no, no, no no, no, no,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, wait a minute. Whatever. The notion of
Speaker 1: the makeup call was to address precisely the problem you're
Speaker 1: talking about. That other everybody's that some team is outraged.
Speaker 1: And then so the reason that you don't get quite
Speaker 1: as outraged as you I'm talking about in the past,
Speaker 1: the old system. You think you think that it is,
Speaker 1: you think you know the ref as a human being,
Speaker 1: and you say, oh, he will understand that he blew
Speaker 1: that call, and he'll make it up for me in
Speaker 1: some subtle way, and that will so that diminishes my
Speaker 1: sense of outrage. In a perfect world where these guys
Speaker 1: are like robots, so making the right which increasingly are there.
Speaker 1: It's amazing how good they are now. So when they
Speaker 1: on those rare occasions when they do make a mistake,
Speaker 1: there's no expectation of a makeup call. No, that's right.
Speaker 1: So is that I mean there are I mean I
Speaker 1: because I wonder about the I agree with you you
Speaker 1: can never go back. But I feel like when you
Speaker 1: sort of roboticize refereeing in sports, what you've done is
Speaker 1: you've disrupted the narrative of the sport. That you're drawn
Speaker 1: to the sports because it's a story and stories. It
Speaker 1: used to be that the blown calls were part of
Speaker 1: the narrative, not a good part of the narrative. Sure,
Speaker 1: they're part of like what makes the get if the
Speaker 1: game just went smoothly from beginning to end. Or you
Speaker 1: don't want referee era. It's not a positive thing to
Speaker 1: have referee era. It's you to minimize it. You can
Speaker 1: still have a glorious narrative on in any kind of
Speaker 1: conscious without a referee. I think the messiness of the
Speaker 1: sport is one of the things that you think. You
Speaker 1: think the more referee the better. No, No, I'm saying
Speaker 1: that there that we operated for many years around a
Speaker 1: narrative about sports that included the notion of refereere we've
Speaker 1: taken that out. And what we've done is we've disrupted
Speaker 1: the narrative. Maybe we're just going through a period of
Speaker 1: time where we're I think that's right. I think that's true.
Speaker 1: That's partly true, but it's also I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: there's a whole bunch of things going on at once.
Speaker 1: One is that everybody can see the era and replay
Speaker 1: it and focus on it and organize around it in
Speaker 1: ways they couldn't before. Another is that the nature of
Speaker 1: the improvement of the refereeing is it's removing privilege from
Speaker 1: people who can naturally protest the loudest, the stars, and
Speaker 1: they're used to getting the calls, and they're not get
Speaker 1: they can't get the calls in the same way. It's also,
Speaker 1: you know, there was if you go back ten years
Speaker 1: in the NBA, home court advantage was a much bigger deal.
Speaker 1: And it was, and there were studies that were done
Speaker 1: to the source of home court advantage was referee era.
Speaker 1: It was like the referees trying to tilt towards a
Speaker 1: home crowd just to appease them. Now, now, it's not
Speaker 1: that big a deal. But who's pissed about that? The
Speaker 1: people who are in the arena, the people who think
Speaker 1: they should get an advantage because it's their home court. Um,
Speaker 1: but I think against the Even bigger than this is.
Speaker 1: There's the backdrop to all of this is people are
Speaker 1: more and more aware or have a greater and greater
Speaker 1: sense that there's no such thing as neutrality. That there's
Speaker 1: like people are biased. We are we you know. That's
Speaker 1: even though in the case of referees the opposite is true.
Speaker 1: They are now less biased. They are less there, even
Speaker 1: though they're there and they're they've been made aware of
Speaker 1: their biases every which way and try to work against them. Um, everybody,
Speaker 1: it's in the air that, uh, you know, a white
Speaker 1: guy won't be fair. It's fair to a black guy,
Speaker 1: is to a white guy. It's in the air that
Speaker 1: the condom and diversky stuff that people make those kind
Speaker 1: of mistakes. It's in the air that they are they
Speaker 1: favor the home home team, or they favor stars, So
Speaker 1: that there is even as there's a less reason for
Speaker 1: cynicism about what's going on inside the mind of a
Speaker 1: professional NBA referee. There's more awareness, awareness of the reasons
Speaker 1: for cynicism about people's judgment, referee judgment generally. That I mean,
Speaker 1: one of the takeaways from the common Diversky stuff is
Speaker 1: that nobody's like nobody's judgments. You know, everybody's judgments is
Speaker 1: systematically flawed. It was interesting, is the Yes, it is
Speaker 1: the process of investigating. What the process of investigating bias
Speaker 1: does is more than any thing, alert us to the
Speaker 1: uncomfortable fact that there was a lot of bias there
Speaker 1: that we didn't even think about. That's right, we had
Speaker 1: no idea just how unfair at all used to be.
Speaker 1: I was that. This reminds me yesterday I was for
Speaker 1: one of my podcast episodes. I'm hanging out with the
Speaker 1: folks who make the L set, who construct the L set, Oh,
Speaker 1: and they do these biased tests. So they have practice questions,
Speaker 1: which do you all take when you take the L
Speaker 1: set is one set that's all practice questions, and they
Speaker 1: look to see whether different groups have different patterns of
Speaker 1: answering questions correctly, which is something I would never have
Speaker 1: thought about. So there was a question they showed me,
Speaker 1: and it's just this random question about some literary figure
Speaker 1: in the seventeenth century and C, which is the wrong answer.
Speaker 1: All the smartest women taken the test thought was the
Speaker 1: correct answer, Like fifty percent of them got it, said
Speaker 1: it was C and it wasn't c. D which is
Speaker 1: the right answer, was overwhelmingly the male choice fifty percent
Speaker 1: of the band. So here's a question that has so
Speaker 1: there's patterns in the errors in the eras, there's a
Speaker 1: massive pattern in the air, and there's nothing obvious. And
Speaker 1: if they find the pattern in the air, or do
Speaker 1: they think there's something wrong with the question, they throw
Speaker 1: the question out. And I said them, well, what is
Speaker 1: it about this totally anadine question about seventeenth century litter
Speaker 1: that caused all these really smart female test takers to
Speaker 1: answer see? And they're like, no idea. I thought, no clue.
Speaker 1: It just doesn't work like that process. The minute I
Speaker 1: hear that, I think, oh my god, this thing is
Speaker 1: rigged in ways I hadn't even thought, right, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: So like it's the same process now I'm alert. Before
Speaker 1: I was like, well, it's an intelligence test. So you know,
Speaker 1: you and I both made this turn into this new medium,
Speaker 1: your fears ahead of me. How have you found what
Speaker 1: do you find the differences are from writing this prose
Speaker 1: on the page. Well, it's funny, I've gone in the
Speaker 1: opposite because I don't write books that are character driven
Speaker 1: as much. Now in this medium, I'm really into the
Speaker 1: character driven, So I like, I'm drawn to the fact
Speaker 1: that I can bring these characters to life in a
Speaker 1: way because I'm not ask I don't I you know,
Speaker 1: I'm not being falsely modest. I'm not nearly as good
Speaker 1: as you at bringing individuals to life on the page.
Speaker 1: But if I can get tape, then I can do that.
Speaker 1: I feel like, like I you know, and you can
Speaker 1: capture interactions like there's in one of my episodes for
Speaker 1: next season. I have these two women who are sisters
Speaker 1: who wrote a book together, a really good work of history,
Speaker 1: largely so they can hang out with each other. This
Speaker 1: one has been one is like seventy one is sixty five,
Speaker 1: and they're so insanely charming, and all you do is
Speaker 1: just run the tape and you're in love with it.
Speaker 1: You're in love with them. It doesn't matter what happens next.
Speaker 1: It is like, it is amazing the difference when you
Speaker 1: can hear a person's voice that we have an episode
Speaker 1: at the second episode which you actually edited. Um, it's
Speaker 1: about how hard it is to create a referee, even
Speaker 1: when you clearly need a referee, and it's about the
Speaker 1: Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But we have a woman who
Speaker 1: is who is just crushed by student Oh my god,
Speaker 1: and to the point where she's a She is a
Speaker 1: public school teacher who with a with a couple of
Speaker 1: little kids, whom whose student loan servicer has basically deceived
Speaker 1: her from from even knowing really about for years, for
Speaker 1: years knowing about a program that Congress created to relieve
Speaker 1: her student loan debt because it paid them to keep
Speaker 1: her in the student in the in the debt. And
Speaker 1: to the point where her she grind has been grinding
Speaker 1: her teeth so badly at night that five of her
Speaker 1: teeth have fallen out, and she's now won't smile. And
Speaker 1: if if I told the story, just if I just
Speaker 1: told the story, you might think I've had my thumb
Speaker 1: on the scale. You wouldn't quite believe it, Like you
Speaker 1: think I was exaggerating. But when she just tells it straight,
Speaker 1: you're weeping, I mean, and there's no question the sincerity
Speaker 1: just just it just jumps out of the off off
Speaker 1: the tape in a way, in a way that I
Speaker 1: would have to try to persuade the reader of uh
Speaker 1: and I don't just you just let her speak and
Speaker 1: it's magnificent, incredibly moving. What can't you do in the
Speaker 1: podcast form? So talk about that story? Did you where?
Speaker 1: There must be limitations. I can't do things you don't
Speaker 1: have tape off. That's the that's the problem. You got
Speaker 1: to go out and interview. You have to have the thing.
Speaker 1: If if it's you just talking, it's far less less
Speaker 1: persuasive than if you've got some someone else you you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's um so that it's it's a constraint. That's
Speaker 1: worse with TV when you have to have the pictures.
Speaker 1: But you can only do so much with your own
Speaker 1: words in this in the narrative form, I think, um so,
Speaker 1: that's your constrained there, uh um But what can't you do?
Speaker 1: Like what stories? When it gets complicated? Yes, it gets hard.
Speaker 1: I could not. So it's hard. It was hard, very
Speaker 1: hard to explain. I didn't even really explain, but I
Speaker 1: tried to explain a collateralized debt obligation in the big
Speaker 1: short it's the most complicated thing I've ever tried to
Speaker 1: explain to anybody and uh, I can't do that. That's
Speaker 1: not possible in a podcast. You couldn't do it in
Speaker 1: a podcast. Uh, you just you just couldn't. I mean
Speaker 1: people would have collision that people listening as they're driving
Speaker 1: would be having crashes on the highway and you you
Speaker 1: you um so because the reader can go back or
Speaker 1: the reader can get slow down, the reader can the
Speaker 1: reader can can paste themselves through an explanation. Um. What
Speaker 1: always breaks my heart is where you finally find the
Speaker 1: person who you think can explain the thing it's going
Speaker 1: to give you tape, and then they're boring, which in
Speaker 1: a book it doesn't matter, right in a book, like
Speaker 1: I feel like that's that is one of your geniuses
Speaker 1: as a writer is you have clearly in your life
Speaker 1: made lots supporting people seem really fascinating. But so I
Speaker 1: would put it in so I'd put it in a
Speaker 1: different way. You're absolutely right that that people's voices kill
Speaker 1: them as characters. Um that you you, you're, you're, You're
Speaker 1: talking to them for five minutes and you think that
Speaker 1: voice just won't works. It's not gonna work. You know,
Speaker 1: there are people in this world. Who I mean, it's
Speaker 1: an amazing it's almost a superpower. Who have an ability
Speaker 1: to walk into a room and kill all interest in
Speaker 1: the room. I mean that I had. I had an
Speaker 1: uncle who had this capacity, and it was he was
Speaker 1: a great guy, and he did really interesting stuff. But
Speaker 1: the minute he opened his mouth, it was like it
Speaker 1: reels like everybody's gasping for air. There's no oxygen in there.
Speaker 1: And it was just incredibly dull, and it was dullless
Speaker 1: listening to him, and you were just relieved when he
Speaker 1: someone else, someone else threw themselves on that hand grenade
Speaker 1: and and the the So it is true that you
Speaker 1: can take that person in print and bring him to life. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I could make my uncle really great in print, but
Speaker 1: but I could not the minute the minute someone heard
Speaker 1: him speak, you'd lose. They wouldn't believe anything you said
Speaker 1: about him, if you know what. The one trick that
Speaker 1: I found, though, is sometimes you think someone's going to
Speaker 1: be boring, but it's because you're in book interview mode
Speaker 1: and podcast interview mode is quite different than what you
Speaker 1: really want to do when you're interviewing someone on a
Speaker 1: podcast is you want them to speculate and free associate.
Speaker 1: So you want to push them. You don't want them
Speaker 1: giving when you're doing when you're doing the book interview there,
Speaker 1: you want them to describe in detail, you know, a
Speaker 1: to ze how this works. Did you walk me through?
Speaker 1: You always use that walk me through. You never say
Speaker 1: walk me through in the podcast interview. What you say
Speaker 1: is what about like imagine this? And then they at
Speaker 1: a certain point they kind of get it. They realize that, oh,
Speaker 1: which is like, it's play, It's play, right, Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: really true, That's really true. I've had this once with
Speaker 1: this love this interview for this one of my podcasts
Speaker 1: with this guy who was a OBGA and researcher in Philadelphia,
Speaker 1: and he gets he's in the weeds on some new
Speaker 1: kind of contraceptive, deep in the weeds, and I realized, no,
Speaker 1: this is usable. He starts talking about the endometrium. The
Speaker 1: endometrium is not working in podcast for him, and you know, follicles,
Speaker 1: and then he sort of says something and I was like,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, this thing you're talking about, why is
Speaker 1: that a contraceptive. He goes, oh, it's not a contraceptive.
Speaker 1: And he goes on this long, insanely interesting totally hypothetical
Speaker 1: thing about oh, I wouldn't calling a contraceptive, I called
Speaker 1: something else. And he gives you this long riff about
Speaker 1: how it's actually this other thing over here, and like
Speaker 1: it's just he just came alive. So because he was,
Speaker 1: this is absolutely right. And we have an episode of
Speaker 1: three is about refs in the culture, like language refs,
Speaker 1: people people who write who are usage panel members and
Speaker 1: dictionaries who they've all been let go, and the people
Speaker 1: who used to write kind of usage manuals. And I
Speaker 1: was we were I was talking to a guy named
Speaker 1: Brian Garner who's one of the characters in the in
Speaker 1: the episode, and he's he's the author of a book
Speaker 1: called uh Garner's Modern English Usage. I think that's what
Speaker 1: it's called. It's twelve hundred pages. It's actually riveting. But
Speaker 1: nobody but at Barnes and Noble told him a decade
Speaker 1: ago it's a defunct category. All of his heroes, their
Speaker 1: books sold millions of copies. There were times where there
Speaker 1: was a time when when the language ref occupied occupied
Speaker 1: a bigger role than he does now. Now now the
Speaker 1: crowd refs the language in and nobody wants to hear
Speaker 1: from the snood um, but he's a great snood. And
Speaker 1: he was just talking about like where are the culture
Speaker 1: is gone, and how he's daily outraged by things, uh,
Speaker 1: that he just can't believe that we're we're becoming this.
Speaker 1: And he said, I got a letter from my bank.
Speaker 1: It said dear mister Garner, semicolon. And he was off
Speaker 1: for like like like for like ten minutes on on
Speaker 1: I called my bank manager. I said, there's a mistake.
Speaker 1: It says dear mister Garner, semicolon. And he says it's
Speaker 1: either a colon or a comma. And the bank manager said, um,
Speaker 1: could you write us a letter about that? And he said,
Speaker 1: so I wrote them a letter and I did, you've
Speaker 1: come to the right place, and wrote wrote I said,
Speaker 1: I wrote them a letter and I cited all the authorities,
Speaker 1: including Garner's modern English usage about where you don't put
Speaker 1: a semicolon after dear mister Garner. And they they they
Speaker 1: wrote him back and said, um, we're keeping the semicolon.
Speaker 1: And and he called him, he said, how he's and
Speaker 1: now he's just off. I could not. I didn't need
Speaker 1: to be there anymore. Right, He's just he's like in
Speaker 1: his own world this is an outrage, uh, and he's
Speaker 1: for him it's genocide. I mean, that's that's that he's
Speaker 1: a code read. There's a there's a certain uh quality
Speaker 1: of delight that that's that's what we're talking about then,
Speaker 1: Only it's conversational delight. You don't you don't get It's
Speaker 1: really hard to get delight off the page. You get
Speaker 1: delight when you're in a conversation with someone and they
Speaker 1: go on in some unexpected direction and you sort of
Speaker 1: understand that something fabuless is coming down the pike. You're
Speaker 1: kind of waiting for it, and they sort of take
Speaker 1: on that's what you're and those I was trying to
Speaker 1: prod people a little bit in the direction of going
Speaker 1: off just to see what happens. Yeah, and the good
Speaker 1: ones will understand that they've been given life, but they're
Speaker 1: playing a game with you. Yes. Yeah. Stay with us
Speaker 1: for some more conversational delight with Malcolm Gladwell. We're back
Speaker 1: with more of me and Malcolm Gladwell in conversation at
Speaker 1: the ninety two Street why his new company, Pushkin Industries
Speaker 1: is the production house behind Against the Rules, And I
Speaker 1: couldn't help but tease him a little bit about something.
Speaker 1: The crew there told me. It's funny that the producers
Speaker 1: when they came to me in the first place, they said, please,
Speaker 1: please don't be like Malcolm and and try to tape
Speaker 1: your own stuff. The first season almost of Malcolm's podcast
Speaker 1: almost killed us. Nonsense, they're you know what they are.
Speaker 1: I know they're out there, they're they are these they're purists,
Speaker 1: right they there. They come from NPR, which is like
Speaker 1: the cathedral on the Hill of Sound. Yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: the Gothic cathedral where and they sit and they study
Speaker 1: their scripture and then they go into the cloisters and
Speaker 1: they take a vow of silence and then they listen
Speaker 1: to pure audio, you know, in the evenings Like that's
Speaker 1: not the real world I'm living in. I'm not I'm
Speaker 1: not in the monastery. I'm no. So I don't listen
Speaker 1: to them, and they don't listen to you. Wait. Um,
Speaker 1: so we have questions, We have questions. Um, we actually
Speaker 1: we have quite a lot of time. Um when I
Speaker 1: had some other Um, oh, I want to talk to
Speaker 1: you about uh, falling in love. Um it's we talked
Speaker 1: ab us a little bit. I you're talking about about
Speaker 1: this because you're in your fiction, in your nonfiction, in
Speaker 1: your books, you fall in love with characters. And then
Speaker 1: you were saying that in the podcast you're doing a
Speaker 1: different kind of slightly different storytelling where you're having many voices.
Speaker 1: Does that impair your Are we going to get the
Speaker 1: classic Michael Lewis character who we fall in love along
Speaker 1: with you? And if we're not, does that sort of
Speaker 1: are you a little bit sad about not having people
Speaker 1: to fall in love with? You have people to fall
Speaker 1: in love with, it's just they're they're they're in a
Speaker 1: single episode. I just don't live with them for the
Speaker 1: whole series. Yeah, I fell in love with Alex Cogan.
Speaker 1: Alex Cogan is he was the academic responsible for the
Speaker 1: work that supposedly allowed Cambridge Analytica to get Donald Trump elected. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and in fact it's all bullshit. In his work was useless.
Speaker 1: This real story there is that it's amazing that Cambridge
Speaker 1: analytic ha persuaded anybody they knew anything that was useful. Hustle.
Speaker 1: It's a hustle. It's a hustle, right, yes, and every
Speaker 1: a lot of people wanted to believe that that's why
Speaker 1: Donald Trump was elected because they needed a reason why
Speaker 1: don't wait, what episode is this? This is three. This
Speaker 1: is actually part of episode three. So it's what's the
Speaker 1: what's the largest story. The largest story is the kline
Speaker 1: of kind of these culture resting. So it's it's language refs,
Speaker 1: it's um budgsman, it's referees in the newsroom. So how
Speaker 1: this story ever got to the front page of the
Speaker 1: New York Times is part of it. But but he's
Speaker 1: built up as the main character of the thing, and
Speaker 1: in a very similar way to a character that you
Speaker 1: would fall in love with it in a magazine piece. Um,
Speaker 1: so this is totally in some ways it's it's it's
Speaker 1: easier to sell the characters because you can hear them.
Speaker 1: You can see why you you you should fall in
Speaker 1: love with him. Um, you've Ken Feinberg, don't you showing up?
Speaker 1: How many people here? Uh, you can't really see it.
Speaker 1: I wonder how many people heren know who Ken Feinberg is.
Speaker 1: Ken Feinberg should be a household name. Ken Feinberg was
Speaker 1: an ordinary lawyer when he was brought in in the
Speaker 1: early eighties to try to resolve the dispute between Vietnam
Speaker 1: veterans and the chemical companies that made agent Orange, and
Speaker 1: Vietnam veterans had, without a whole lot of evidence, had
Speaker 1: brought a suit saying that that this this chemical that
Speaker 1: was spread across the jungles of Vietnam was responsible for
Speaker 1: all these health problems that they were having. And the
Speaker 1: case had lingered in the courts for I don't know
Speaker 1: seven or eight years, and judges had despaired of resolving it,
Speaker 1: and a judge asked this young lawyer, Ken Feinberg, to
Speaker 1: see if he could negotiate outside of the court a
Speaker 1: solution resolution to the between the vets and the companies.
Speaker 1: And six weeks he had the thing done, and he
Speaker 1: was on the front page of every newspaper in the country,
Speaker 1: and his career then just went. He all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: he became America's referee. So he's he's brought in to
Speaker 1: adjudicate these disputes. And um, the question was like two questions,
Speaker 1: Like what are we gonna do when he dies? Because
Speaker 1: he seems to be brought in. I mean, he's like
Speaker 1: he's like the Forrest Gump of of of American tragedy
Speaker 1: and and but the second it is like what what
Speaker 1: what is it about him? Like? And I don't want
Speaker 1: to give away the story. But he there were he
Speaker 1: had a theory of himself and his wife had a
Speaker 1: different theory of him, and the wife's was right. Uh
Speaker 1: but but but you but his theory of his wife's
Speaker 1: theory you can hear kind of proven just in the
Speaker 1: sound of his voice. Oh voice, it is. It's unbelievable.
Speaker 1: So so it's so good that I think it's all
Speaker 1: the voice. So it's so, it's so it could be
Speaker 1: the voice. It's part. It's the righteousness in the voice.
Speaker 1: It's the it's a Boston accent, like you cannot believe.
Speaker 1: And so the episode opens with the passage Um in
Speaker 1: the Bible, Solomon resolving the dispute between the two women,
Speaker 1: each of whom is claiming the baby is hers, and
Speaker 1: Solomon just about to cut the baby in two, and um,
Speaker 1: Feinberg's voices. So we were gonna have an actor read that.
Speaker 1: We had the Fiers voice was so we just had
Speaker 1: Feinberg read the Bible, and it was like it felt
Speaker 1: like God was reading the Bible. Uh. And so you
Speaker 1: the the it's so this form, you know, this form.
Speaker 1: It's just nice to have a different way to tell
Speaker 1: a story and a different way to get to an audience.
Speaker 1: I don't I don't regard this as like a substitute
Speaker 1: for writing books, but it is. It's different and it's interesting.
Speaker 1: I don't know you found when you write it. No
Speaker 1: matter how conversational your writing style is, it is not
Speaker 1: conversational that how people talk is so different from how
Speaker 1: any writer writes. That you have to learn how to
Speaker 1: write your own dialogue. That is so kind of interesting. Anyway,
Speaker 1: thanks for doing this, Michael, thank you. Pleasure being with
Speaker 1: you again. Yes, thanks for listening to this live bonus
Speaker 1: episode of Against the Rules. I want to thank especially
Speaker 1: Malcolm Gladwell and his team at Pushkin Industries and the
Speaker 1: ninety two Street Why for hosting our conversation. I'm off
Speaker 1: now to my secret hiding place. We'll try to figure
Speaker 1: out how to keep you entertained next year. You can
Speaker 1: follow Pushkin Pods on social media if you want to
Speaker 1: keep track of when I'm back on the feed. I
Speaker 1: hope it's soon. I don't know each and every one
Speaker 1: of you, but you've been a great audience, the best
Speaker 1: a writer could ask for.