Speaker 1: Pushkin. So we're walking across a parking lot in Secaucus,
Speaker 1: New Jersey. We're surrounded by concrete, nothing green. It took
Speaker 1: a lot to get me to this place. Their chain
Speaker 1: hotel and motels in someone's idea of the wall. But
Speaker 1: I have a hunch, a suspicion about the crisis that
Speaker 1: we find ourselves in. It's filled with cheap chain restaurants
Speaker 1: and we're surrounded on all sides by freeways. It's like
Speaker 1: what people think about when they tell jokes about New Jersey.
Speaker 1: I think you can see what's going on right here
Speaker 1: in Secaucus, and we're approaching a four story rectangular, otherwise
Speaker 1: nondescript concrete building. There's a discreete little sign here that
Speaker 1: says NBA and shows a logo with a basketball player
Speaker 1: inside a recent concession to the world. We live in
Speaker 1: the Replay Center, a place where basketball referees review the
Speaker 1: calls made by other basketball referees in real time to
Speaker 1: minimize referee error. The Replay Center was built to persuade
Speaker 1: people that life was fair. I'm Michael Lewis, and this
Speaker 1: is against the rules. It's a show about We'll give
Speaker 1: me just a minute to get to that it doesn't
Speaker 1: get beji or doesn't. It's like this is a place
Speaker 1: where brown is an exciting color and the door is locked.
Speaker 1: All right now for me, this story really begins not
Speaker 1: in Secaucus, but in Berkeley, California, with my eleven year
Speaker 1: old son. His name's Walker, Walker Lewis. He plays on
Speaker 1: a basketball team run if you can believe it, by
Speaker 1: a Japanese Buddhist temple. My son isn't a Buddhist. The
Speaker 1: most of the time you could pass for one. He
Speaker 1: has no conflict with his teachers, or his classmates, or
Speaker 1: his Japanese Buddhist teammates. I wouldn't say his mind is
Speaker 1: exactly pure, but usually it's calm. The exception is when
Speaker 1: he deals with reffs, even Buddhist reffs. Anytime a reff
Speaker 1: blows the whistle on him, he throws up his arms
Speaker 1: in astonishment, and he jumps up and down with his
Speaker 1: little fist balled up in his mouth clenched tight. Everyone
Speaker 1: knows just how much injustice he's suffering. Then he marches
Speaker 1: off with a scowl, and he doesn't get over it.
Speaker 1: After a game this season, he gets into the car
Speaker 1: and starts bitching and moaning, all over again. How did
Speaker 1: it make you feel when the ref made those calls?
Speaker 1: Very mad? Do you feel any better now? No, tell
Speaker 1: me how it feels. It feels like someone keeps poking
Speaker 1: you in the back of the shoulder and then saying, foul, foul, foul, foul.
Speaker 1: Have you ever fouled out in your career? No? Did
Speaker 1: you know that you were a risk of felling out? Guess?
Speaker 1: But I also knew if I did, it would be
Speaker 1: unfair because I knew that he was calling the stupidest fouls.
Speaker 1: He'll look back and say, oh, I was being huge asshole.
Speaker 1: Clay with the steel playing a full race? How's he
Speaker 1: trying to catch him? Be cast? Play with him very degree.
Speaker 1: The thing is, I know why my son does what
Speaker 1: he does. He thinks he's Clay Thompson, the all star
Speaker 1: shooting guard of the Golden State Warriors. They research back
Speaker 1: the tops of three potters. When Clay hits a three,
Speaker 1: Clay pounds his chest and points to the sky. And
Speaker 1: so when Walker Lewis hits at three, he too pounds
Speaker 1: his chest and points to the sky. I think we
Speaker 1: got a technical foul as well, Clay. It's very unusual
Speaker 1: when Clay's called for a fowl, he scowls and throws
Speaker 1: up his arms in astonishment, and sometimes even says something
Speaker 1: to the ref that gets him slapped with the technicals owl.
Speaker 1: He only had one regular season, and Clay's the famously
Speaker 1: most laid back All Star in the entire National Basketball Association.
Speaker 1: Something has happened in the relationship between referees and players
Speaker 1: over the last I guess year or two. That's Ramona Shelburne.
Speaker 1: She's covered the NBA for the last decade for ESPN.
Speaker 1: It's been quite frankly ugly. This year. One of the
Speaker 1: Warriors headbutted a reth another chucked his disgusting mouthguard off
Speaker 1: a ref's chest. Raymond Careful, who's already has a technical game,
Speaker 1: and some of the stuff I've seen, I mean, when
Speaker 1: Draymond Green is getting fined for calling Laurena holecap and
Speaker 1: can we cuss on your podcast? I think we already
Speaker 1: have you know, a fucking bitch, like like when when
Speaker 1: he is saying that to a female referee and getting
Speaker 1: fined and suspended for that, man, that's next level and
Speaker 1: I haven't seen that before this season. It's the Stars
Speaker 1: now who are really pushing the issue, right, it's Kevin
Speaker 1: Durant getting thrown out of games, it's Steph Curry getting
Speaker 1: thrown out. Warriors completely unraveled. In a single season. Bad
Speaker 1: behavior got various Golden State Warriors tossed out of ten
Speaker 1: different basketball games. Kevin Durant, their best player, tie a
Speaker 1: league record by getting tossed from five games, all by himself.
Speaker 1: The men who coached the Stars aren't much better. Even
Speaker 1: Steve Kerr, the Warriors famously decent, civic minded coach, I
Speaker 1: can snap, I can completely lose it if you back
Speaker 1: away from the Golden State Warriors. I mean, they are
Speaker 1: exemplars of the way people should behave, especially your stars.
Speaker 1: They're like impeccably behave people. I'm so pleased to have
Speaker 1: my son emulating your players. The only time they have
Speaker 1: problems really is with referees. Yeah, I can't imagine you
Speaker 1: in your life have another relationship like you have with referees. No,
Speaker 1: you're right, You're right. I would never say the things
Speaker 1: that I do to referees to a person in normal life.
Speaker 1: It happens two or three times a year, and I've
Speaker 1: been caught on camera. You know, amfing a ref and
Speaker 1: you know my daughter will send me a text like that,
Speaker 1: what are you doing? It's all over Twitter. I can
Speaker 1: read your lips. This is embarrassed and I'm embarrassed. So
Speaker 1: why is that? You know? It's a sense of right
Speaker 1: or wrong, you know, and I feel like there's like
Speaker 1: this personal offense, like something unfair is happening, which brings
Speaker 1: me to my hunch it has to do with referees,
Speaker 1: and not just basketball referees. The people everywhere charged not
Speaker 1: just with enforcing rules, but with preserving a sense of
Speaker 1: fairness on Wall Street, in the news, in courts of law,
Speaker 1: in the many little disputes that pock mark everyday life.
Speaker 1: There are many different kinds of refs, and most of
Speaker 1: them are into some kind of attack. So maybe it's
Speaker 1: not that surprising that Americans one day woke up and
Speaker 1: thrilled to the message that life was unfair. You know,
Speaker 1: the system is rigged, sged acmom, banking system is rigged,
Speaker 1: and ystem. There's a lot of things that are rigged
Speaker 1: in this world of ours, not to fairness that we
Speaker 1: grew up believing that a miracle was about, which brings
Speaker 1: me to what this show is about the people whose
Speaker 1: job it is to maximize fairness, not just in sports,
Speaker 1: but most everywhere. What's happening to them tells us a
Speaker 1: lot about what's happening to us. You have to listen closely,
Speaker 1: but you can hear that same chant in a lot
Speaker 1: of American life. Ref you suck. Here we go back
Speaker 1: at the NBA's offices in Secaucus, New Jersey. Someone eventually
Speaker 1: came and unlocked the door, and then they led me
Speaker 1: down a hall filled with a lot of old basketball stuff,
Speaker 1: jerseys and bobble heads and basketballs and posters of Michael Jordan.
Speaker 1: The Replay Center was the ultimate man cave. It's also
Speaker 1: the latest weapon in the battle for fairness. So this place,
Speaker 1: just on first of you, is amazing. It's wall to
Speaker 1: wall screens, one hundred and ten of them. What's on
Speaker 1: them is whatever is captured by all the cameras in
Speaker 1: twenty nine NBA arenas across the country. This isn't the
Speaker 1: broadcast video with commercials and commentary. The screens here don't
Speaker 1: even have the scores of the games on them were
Speaker 1: the names of the teams playing. And they're muted. Which
Speaker 1: you hear is referees staring at basketball games, which you
Speaker 1: see is nothing but angles on professional basketball courts. Nobody's
Speaker 1: on a walk in here and walk down and said
Speaker 1: this polaby sucks. And I'm not going to say it
Speaker 1: sucks either. That's Joe Borgia, who designed the center back
Speaker 1: in twenty fourteen and now runs it. Before he volunteered
Speaker 1: for a secaucus duty, he refereed NBA games. His father
Speaker 1: was an NBA ref before him, with a break in
Speaker 1: the late sixties. A. Borgia has been reffing professional basketball
Speaker 1: games since nineteen forty six. If you went back to
Speaker 1: your dad at the beginning of his career and said
Speaker 1: this is what it's going to look like. What do
Speaker 1: you think he'd have said? If I told him we
Speaker 1: would have replay? He turnover and it is great. Forget
Speaker 1: about a replay center. Is that right? Oh? Absolutely? You see,
Speaker 1: the refs used to insist on their authority at any rate.
Speaker 1: Everyone agreed that there was no better way to ensure
Speaker 1: the fairness of the game than to let the ref
Speaker 1: play God. The replay center is an admission the ref
Speaker 1: is not God, that he makes mistakes. I think the
Speaker 1: mention of replay. None of us liked it when we
Speaker 1: first heard it. It's unnecessary, evil, it's necessary. You have
Speaker 1: to have it today. Everything's tape. Now everyone pays more
Speaker 1: attention to the referee's mistakes, so the NBA has to
Speaker 1: as well. Now, when a ref thinks he might have
Speaker 1: screwed up some call or didn't get a good look
Speaker 1: at the action, he twirls his fingers in the air.
Speaker 1: That's the signal to the ref and the replay center,
Speaker 1: who goes to work reviewing the tape looking for the
Speaker 1: best angle to figure out what actually happened. That's the
Speaker 1: thing is everybody can see it now exactly. You can't
Speaker 1: have them be in a better position to judge the
Speaker 1: game than the referees. The replay centers what allows refs
Speaker 1: on a basketball court to change their calls. A lot
Speaker 1: of those calls are subjective, like whether one player fouled another.
Speaker 1: The rests on the court still make most of those
Speaker 1: calls themselves. The exception is when the foul is flagranting. Sure, duke,
Speaker 1: we're gonna give me two good angles. That's the first one.
Speaker 1: The other one's going to give you. There's blood on
Speaker 1: the screws. Kevin Love's front tooth got knocked in. Love
Speaker 1: plays for the Cleveland Cavaliers and the question is did
Speaker 1: the guy who popped him in the mouth do it intentionally?
Speaker 1: It's a sebasketball point, Kevin Lug happens to move into
Speaker 1: where the guy's elbow was going on. The refs need
Speaker 1: to decide if the violence was not just excessive but unsportsmanlike,
Speaker 1: which sounds our keg because we sort of lost the concept.
Speaker 1: So the blood doesn't sweat the decision. Huh. Listen, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of contacts, a lot of its acres that
Speaker 1: the players all stand around scratching themselves while the refs
Speaker 1: put on headsets and talked to the replay center. We're
Speaker 1: looking for the unnatchural. Did he throw his elbow out?
Speaker 1: So the fo the fouls on cavil up correct. I
Speaker 1: thought he was outside his move. He was moving. Its late,
Speaker 1: Come on, you gotta be quick. One days stuck on
Speaker 1: the blood coming out of his mouth. Yeah, it's the
Speaker 1: whole thing. Only takes thirty seconds, thirty seconds in which players, fans,
Speaker 1: coaches get even more pissed off at the rest for
Speaker 1: taking so long. The only thing stopping the replay center
Speaker 1: from checking every decision is that it slows the game down.
Speaker 1: Here in Secaucus is still trying to figure out how
Speaker 1: they might talk to the refs as they run up
Speaker 1: and down the court, because if they could do that,
Speaker 1: they could just fix every call on the fly. The
Speaker 1: Special Forces we found that we actually used a chip
Speaker 1: over the bowler that worked off the vibration of the bone.
Speaker 1: Believe or not. Wead that we got a handful of
Speaker 1: Gene League referees molded and we tested that to wear
Speaker 1: a chip over their molar. But it wasn't good enough
Speaker 1: because they didn't know where the voice was coming from.
Speaker 1: It was just a voice in their heads. They didn't
Speaker 1: know where it was. This is actually insane the time
Speaker 1: and money now being spent to ensure the fairness of what,
Speaker 1: after all, is just a basketball game. A jillion miles
Speaker 1: a fiber optic cable connect this room directly to the
Speaker 1: NBA arenas around the country, all for two calls again
Speaker 1: at two goals a game. Fifteen million dollars to build
Speaker 1: this room to get two goals right the game. But
Speaker 1: you gotta do it, You gotta do it. Can I
Speaker 1: just pause here a moment just to consider what the
Speaker 1: NBA has done in the past few years to improve
Speaker 1: the calls. For example, they brought in serious managers to
Speaker 1: hire and train the refs. Joe Borgia calls his boss
Speaker 1: the general because she's actually a general and an Air
Speaker 1: Force pilot. Her name is Michelle Johnson, and before she
Speaker 1: supervised NBA refs, she ran the Air Force Academy. It
Speaker 1: sounds like overkill to use a general to make sure
Speaker 1: a basketball games are well reft, but the NBA thought
Speaker 1: it needed overkill, or at least Adam Silver, the NBA Commissioner, did,
Speaker 1: if people don't believe that the league office is unbiased
Speaker 1: and that the officials are unbiased, you're gonna have a problem,
Speaker 1: regardless of the accuracy of the calls. Silver took over
Speaker 1: in twenty fourteen and also hired Joe Borge to create
Speaker 1: the Replay Center. Since then, the NBA Commission has taken
Speaker 1: a ridiculous amount of grief for trying to improve justice
Speaker 1: in basketball. There are a group of people who think
Speaker 1: that without the sort of transparency that we see in
Speaker 1: this day and age, that it enabled certain officials and
Speaker 1: maybe with a touch of frontier justice, to overall create
Speaker 1: more of a fair environment. Even if that were true,
Speaker 1: and I'm not sure it is, those days are over,
Speaker 1: and I think it's whether it's in sports or other
Speaker 1: walks of life that you cannot turn the clock back
Speaker 1: on transparency. So here's what else Silver has done. He's
Speaker 1: broad in the pool of people from which refs are selected.
Speaker 1: They used to be mostly white men, mostly from the
Speaker 1: same background. At one point fifteen years ago, four NBA
Speaker 1: refs came from the same high school. He's hired more
Speaker 1: black refs and female refs. He's insisted that referees be
Speaker 1: physically fit so they can get into position to see
Speaker 1: all the plays. While everyone else in AMA is getting fatter,
Speaker 1: the rests are getting buff. They're also now getting new
Speaker 1: feedback on all their bad calls. Silver decided to publish
Speaker 1: the mistakes made by every reff in the last two
Speaker 1: minutes of every game so everyone could see them. He
Speaker 1: gives the teams and the refs a private document listing
Speaker 1: every refereeing mistake. All this new data on refs means
Speaker 1: that we and they know all sorts of strange things
Speaker 1: about their minds. For instance, we now know that their
Speaker 1: calls have tended to favor whichever team's losing. Their calls
Speaker 1: also favor the home team. Some large part of home
Speaker 1: court advantage is just the refs. The analytics department of
Speaker 1: the Houston Rockets has even done a study that shows
Speaker 1: that the home team that gets the best calls is
Speaker 1: the Utah Jazz. Why Utah? Who knows? But you can
Speaker 1: be sure that someone will figure that out. There's now
Speaker 1: basically a small army of geeks analyzing all this new data. Look,
Speaker 1: I don't really like writing papers about sports. I'm pre
Speaker 1: feder write them about the economy. That's Justin Wolfers, a
Speaker 1: behavioral economist at the University of Michigan and the co
Speaker 1: author of a paper about NBA refs. But the thing is,
Speaker 1: this is a domain where the NBA referees have tremendous
Speaker 1: incentives not to make the wrong call. Every era they
Speaker 1: make is tracked. Those eras determine whether they get more games.
Speaker 1: Those games determine how much they get paid. This is
Speaker 1: arguably the most analyzed workforce in the country. Basketball referees
Speaker 1: are now picked apart in ways that not long ago
Speaker 1: would have seemed preposterous, not just for the fairness of
Speaker 1: their calls, but for their unconscious behavior. Wolfers took years
Speaker 1: of data from every NBA game. Then he set out
Speaker 1: to look for evidence of the reff's racial bias. The
Speaker 1: question here isn't whether people are anti black or anti white,
Speaker 1: but whether there's an in group bias. So, if a
Speaker 1: predominantly black team is playing and the refereeing crew is
Speaker 1: predominantly white, they're more fouls called against them than on
Speaker 1: nights when the same team is playing with the dominantly
Speaker 1: blank refereeing crew. And it turns out the answers yes.
Speaker 1: Wolfers wrote his paper back in two thousand and seven,
Speaker 1: before this new age of referee transparency. Well, it was
Speaker 1: a bit of a lesson for me. You can probably
Speaker 1: tell by my accident, Michael. I'm an Australian, you know.
Speaker 1: I thought it was an interesting piece of social science.
Speaker 1: It turned out the New York Times put it on
Speaker 1: the front page and the NBA wasn't happy. The commissioner
Speaker 1: at the time attacked the study and embarrassed the league
Speaker 1: by trying and failing to refute its findings. This morning
Speaker 1: we'll hear from the NBA Commissioner, David Stern. Our referees
Speaker 1: are the most reviewed, most ranked, and most rated, and
Speaker 1: that's why we take exception to what the Times did here.
Speaker 1: That's Stern on NPR in two thousand and seven. The
Speaker 1: result of all this coverage, every single referee was made
Speaker 1: aware of his unconscious bias. When the dust settled, Justin
Speaker 1: Wolfers was curious to know if his paper had had
Speaker 1: any effect. He made another study of referees after the
Speaker 1: controversy he'd created, and guess what demonstration study that we
Speaker 1: did seems to suggest that that form of racial bias
Speaker 1: is gone away. He has no idea why. Maybe simply
Speaker 1: making the refs aware of the problem was enough to
Speaker 1: correct it. But in the end this became a case
Speaker 1: study not in ref ineptitude but ref reform. NBA refs
Speaker 1: have achieved what police forces can only dream of, race blindness.
Speaker 1: The refs have no choice. The world's now too good
Speaker 1: at seeing their mistakes. Look, there's no way any basketball
Speaker 1: referee is going to be perfect. But there's also no
Speaker 1: way these refs or anything but more accurate than they've
Speaker 1: ever been. I mean, even home court advantage means less
Speaker 1: than it used to, and yet these refs are treated
Speaker 1: as if they're trying to rig the games. Does the
Speaker 1: sound of those eighteen thousand people screaming at you, are
Speaker 1: booing you, does it sound any different than it sounded
Speaker 1: when you started in nineteen ninety one. Yeah, there's there's
Speaker 1: a little more anger involved, and you know it used
Speaker 1: to be sort of the garden variety. You're terrible, you
Speaker 1: suck any of those kinds of terms. That's Monte McCutcheon,
Speaker 1: who recently quit reffing NBA games to serve as a
Speaker 1: kind of life coach to the other NBA refs to
Speaker 1: talk them through their problems. Now, you know, people do
Speaker 1: their research. They things are out there on the internet.
Speaker 1: They know your record with their team. They they've done
Speaker 1: all there's all these sights on all these different they
Speaker 1: know personal things about you. Oh sure, of course, some
Speaker 1: death threats are made from time to time in playoff series,
Speaker 1: and you'll get security all the way to both the
Speaker 1: hotel and then the hotel the next morning out to
Speaker 1: the airport. They security to the hotel not every night,
Speaker 1: but when those threats are are a known factor that
Speaker 1: has happened in my career, security to your car is
Speaker 1: mandatory every night. Yep. These days refs need bodyguards to
Speaker 1: escape after the game. Here are people who are mostly
Speaker 1: just trying to do these extremely difficult jobs as well
Speaker 1: as they can, and at some point you feel this
Speaker 1: question rising up in you, in me. It rose up
Speaker 1: while I was talking to Ramona Shelburne, the ESPN reporter.
Speaker 1: Why would anybody want to be a ref Seriously? I
Speaker 1: wonder that too. Man. You know, they're not allowed to
Speaker 1: say anything. They're not allowed to explain themselves, they're not
Speaker 1: allowed to defend themselves. Look, obviously, they get paid. They
Speaker 1: started one hundred and fifty grand a year, and if
Speaker 1: they're great at their job and work extra games, they
Speaker 1: can make as much as five hundred. But there are
Speaker 1: lots of ways to get paid without spending half your
Speaker 1: life in hotel rooms and the other half being insulted
Speaker 1: by arenas filled with crazy people. Do you think the
Speaker 1: refereeing has gotten worse or better? I actually think it's
Speaker 1: gotten better. Of course it's gotten better. How could it
Speaker 1: not have. The mystery is why the stars and the
Speaker 1: coaches and the fans act as if it's gotten worse.
Speaker 1: I have a hundred about that too, which you'll hear
Speaker 1: in a minute. Okay, So Sacramentals checking in right sore
Speaker 1: ten Oclos on an hour before Clippers. So Golden Stag
Speaker 1: will check in and the Clippers will check in about
Speaker 1: the nine thirty I'm back with Joe Borgia in the
Speaker 1: replay center. The refs here sit dressed in black, staring
Speaker 1: at screens, waiting for a signal from somewhere in America.
Speaker 1: The end of games is when they get most involved,
Speaker 1: because that's when fans and coaches and players are most
Speaker 1: likely to accuse some ref of having made the mistake
Speaker 1: that change the outcome. Of course, a mistake at the
Speaker 1: beginning has just as much effect on a game as
Speaker 1: a mistake at the end. But the end is what
Speaker 1: people notice and get outraged about, so the justice at
Speaker 1: the end of the game must be more exact than
Speaker 1: it is at the beginning. These replay center refs have
Speaker 1: video technicians with them who can freeze a moment on screen,
Speaker 1: then zoom out or zoom in so that the entire
Speaker 1: screen contains only a player's fingertips or his toes. Here
Speaker 1: you just scroll through tiny slivers of the game, not
Speaker 1: the game itself, the slivers where injustices might occur. I mean, goodness, graces.
Speaker 1: If you don't have slow motion in here or freeze frame,
Speaker 1: it's very difficult. Of course, in slow motion you can
Speaker 1: see things that the naked eye misses. Magicians sometimes perform
Speaker 1: during halftimes of the NBA games. When Joe Borgi slows
Speaker 1: it down, he can see how they do their tricks.
Speaker 1: It's kind of the same thing with the players, exactly,
Speaker 1: I can go with sixtieth of a second at a time.
Speaker 1: He's going to pick a lot of little things. So
Speaker 1: what these players are getting good at is creating optical illusions.
Speaker 1: And then it comes to sort the sort of things
Speaker 1: that a magician does well. Isn't flopping an optical illusion.
Speaker 1: Flopping is what they call it when a player pretends
Speaker 1: to have been knocked over by another player. Tricking the
Speaker 1: refs into making bad calls is now considered a skill. Okay,
Speaker 1: replay sing on gimma, so you just hit a game?
Speaker 1: Ref in Houston twirls his fingers in the air. Some
Speaker 1: players hit a three point shot at the buzzer or
Speaker 1: has he The Houston reff wants to know if the
Speaker 1: player's toe was on the three point line and if
Speaker 1: he got off the shot before the buzzer. It's just
Speaker 1: now that Joe says I can work the equipment, can I?
Speaker 1: Just the truth is, I'm not a big equipment guy.
Speaker 1: My first step when something needs to be assembled or
Speaker 1: operated is to call someone and say I'll pay whatever
Speaker 1: it costs. I start twisting dials just to see what happens.
Speaker 1: They appear to cause the picture to zoom in and out.
Speaker 1: Watch the referee on the bottom of the screen. There's
Speaker 1: your SI. Yeah, you got to see that. You have
Speaker 1: to see the referee doing that? Are you? Someone may
Speaker 1: say something. There's a lot of subjectivity in refee, but
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of the questions that arise on a
Speaker 1: basketball court have objective answers, like who touched the ball
Speaker 1: last before it went out of bounds? Or was there
Speaker 1: still time on the clock before the shot left the
Speaker 1: player's hands. This is one of those. Did the player's
Speaker 1: foot touch the three point line when he leapt for
Speaker 1: his shot? Did the ball leave his fingertips before the
Speaker 1: buzzer sounded one of the dials, or maybe it's actually
Speaker 1: a joystick. Lets me choose which angle of the court
Speaker 1: I see. I need to find one still frame with
Speaker 1: the shooter's foot in it and another with the clock
Speaker 1: in it. Then I need to freeze the picture in
Speaker 1: the one sixtieth of a second that the ball left
Speaker 1: the shooter's fingertips just then I realized I have no
Speaker 1: idea who the player is. I don't even know which
Speaker 1: team he's on. All I know is he's in Houston.
Speaker 1: Can I get it here? All the same, it's pretty
Speaker 1: much yeah, Houston still waiting on me. I didn't. I
Speaker 1: think it occurred to me at that moment that they
Speaker 1: were possibly actually using what I was doing, and that
Speaker 1: because it was a little bit of anxiety. The coaches
Speaker 1: get to stop the game with pointless timeouts. The advertisers
Speaker 1: get to stop the game to sell beer. But when
Speaker 1: a ref stops a game to make it more fair,
Speaker 1: the crowd booze and the announcers launch attacks on them.
Speaker 1: It's not enough to be right, You've got to be fast.
Speaker 1: Borgia tracks the average response time of the replay refs.
Speaker 1: It's between twenty and thirty seconds. Okay, the replay under
Speaker 1: official confirmed successful. Three point you got it right? The
Speaker 1: problems dealt with I think it is, But right away
Speaker 1: another one comes up on a bunch of screens showing
Speaker 1: one arena. All these people are jumping around and hollering
Speaker 1: at refs. The ruckets appears to be confined to Cleveland,
Speaker 1: but in here it feels like the entire universe is disturbed.
Speaker 1: It turns out Lebron James is upset. He's arguing there,
Speaker 1: he goes roun is going from ref to ref. He
Speaker 1: seems to know which refs to are with. Yeah, they're
Speaker 1: talking about goalten, so they're talking about they're talking about it.
Speaker 1: I think they might change that James is James. Any
Speaker 1: other guy had the best angle? Do you think that
Speaker 1: Lebron James has any effect doing that? The ref in
Speaker 1: Cleveland is not twirling his finger. There's no signal to
Speaker 1: us to do anything in the replay center. Lebron's drama,
Speaker 1: strictly speaking, is pointless. It's strange the way these players argue.
Speaker 1: They must think that if they make life unpleasant enough
Speaker 1: for the ref, he'll think twice before the next call.
Speaker 1: It's then that it occurs to me, just looking around
Speaker 1: the room at one hundred and ten TV screens, I've
Speaker 1: had a hard time following the games, never mind the scores.
Speaker 1: I sometimes don't even know which teams are playing. But
Speaker 1: every time a player gets up into a referees phase,
Speaker 1: I've recognized the player. And I actually don't know that
Speaker 1: many NBA players, but I know all the ones who
Speaker 1: pitch these hissy fits because the only players getting up
Speaker 1: into the faces of the refs are the famous players
Speaker 1: or the coaches who protect them. Ramona Shelburne put her
Speaker 1: finger on it. The more aggressive behavior towards reffs isn't
Speaker 1: coming from every player, It's coming from the stars. So
Speaker 1: we just got really interested in a very simple question
Speaker 1: of does this sense of being privileged make you disobey
Speaker 1: the rules of the road or the laws of the land.
Speaker 1: That's Daker Keltner. He's a professor of psychology at cal
Speaker 1: Berkeley and someone who wonders about the effect inequality has
Speaker 1: on people's behavior. It experience I had at Berkeley whereas
Speaker 1: riding my bike up this hill and I got to
Speaker 1: the four away stop sign and I was halfway through
Speaker 1: this Fouraway stops sign and this guy in a black
Speaker 1: Mercedes rolled through the stop sign. Is halfway there is
Speaker 1: a foot away from me, about to take me out,
Speaker 1: and he's on a cell phone. And I looked at him.
Speaker 1: I was ready to take him on, like all right, buddy,
Speaker 1: this is it. And what was most telling about this
Speaker 1: whole experience was he looked at me as if I
Speaker 1: was in the wrong and I should get out of
Speaker 1: his way, and you know, even though I'd made it
Speaker 1: through the stop sign first. So Daker in a colleague
Speaker 1: dreamed up this weird experiment. They hid two Berkeley undergraduates
Speaker 1: in the bushes near four way stop signs. The undergrads
Speaker 1: noted the makes of all cars coming through the intersection
Speaker 1: assigned them numbers one to five according to their market value.
Speaker 1: A new Mercedes was a five, a Honda was a three,
Speaker 1: and an old Pacer was a one. We positioned a
Speaker 1: Berkeley undergrad by a pedestrian zone, and we make sure
Speaker 1: they look like they want to cross the street right,
Speaker 1: and they're sort of leaning into the pedest zone where
Speaker 1: it's required by California law to stop. It's a game
Speaker 1: of one on one at the California crosswalk, one car
Speaker 1: versus one pedestrian, and zero percent of the drivers of
Speaker 1: poor cars zoom through the pedestrian zone. They all stop,
Speaker 1: and forty some odd percent, forty five percent of the
Speaker 1: drivers of the fives of rich cars blaze through the
Speaker 1: pedestrian zone and just say the rules don't apply to me.
Speaker 1: I'll carry on. This one study led to a bunch
Speaker 1: of others that showed basically the same pattern of human behavior.
Speaker 1: Another experiment, we bring people to the lab and as
Speaker 1: they're leaving, there's this big bowl of candy and it's
Speaker 1: like and it says on it for the children of
Speaker 1: the Institute of Human Development on the bowl, and we say, oh,
Speaker 1: you gonna take a candy or two if as you're leaving,
Speaker 1: and well to we count up how many candies they
Speaker 1: take after they leave the experiment. Privileged people grab a
Speaker 1: big handful of candy compared to poorer people. So let's
Speaker 1: turn the conversation something much more important. Basketball, most important
Speaker 1: of all. In the last five or six years, the
Speaker 1: NBA has embarked on essentially a dramatic reform of refereing.
Speaker 1: At the same time, the friction between the players and
Speaker 1: some of the owners and some of the coaches and
Speaker 1: the refs is going through the roof. The source of
Speaker 1: the outrage is the star players. The people are getting
Speaker 1: thrown out of games, or Kevin Durant and Steph Curry
Speaker 1: and James Harden and the Warriors, the most famous team
Speaker 1: ever to walk on the court, are the chief culprits
Speaker 1: exhibit a and bad behavior towards refs. So you got
Speaker 1: this weird combination. Yeah, that's fascinating. You know, I still
Speaker 1: remember being a Lakers fan, you know, the great Magic
Speaker 1: Johnson teams and watching Larry Bird do his nine step
Speaker 1: layup and I'm like, come on, make the call. You know.
Speaker 1: Larry Bird was like Lebron the New Mercedes of his day.
Speaker 1: He played with certain assumptions about the rules and how
Speaker 1: they apply to him. For most players of his era,
Speaker 1: two steps counted as traveling. The inequality on a basketball
Speaker 1: court is more found, it's profound, and it's more profound
Speaker 1: there wasn't Larry Bird's era. Larry Bird was a millionaire.
Speaker 1: Lebron James might be a billionaire, and these guys are
Speaker 1: global franchises. Yeah, so you've got, in a funny way,
Speaker 1: a microcosm. It's an odd microcosm on a basketball court
Speaker 1: of what's going on in the largest society. The NBA
Speaker 1: is set out to ref the game more objectively, more accurately,
Speaker 1: more fairly. This has enraged the stars and their fans
Speaker 1: and coaches. You want to know why, the more objectivity
Speaker 1: there is, the less power they have. Objective refs eliminate
Speaker 1: some of their privilege. The stars can't get the calls anymore.
Speaker 1: Just because they're stars, or anyway not as often. Lebron
Speaker 1: James and Kevin Durant and Steph Curry and Clay Thompson,
Speaker 1: they'll all survive better refs because they're actually just better
Speaker 1: than everyone else. They don't need unfairness to win. But
Speaker 1: what happens where there are no replay centers, where there's
Speaker 1: no hope for pure objectivity or technology to improve calls,
Speaker 1: where the refs can no longer defend themselves from the stars.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the reason for our show. I think American
Speaker 1: life just now has at least one thing in common
Speaker 1: with basketball. The authority of its referees is under attack.
Speaker 1: And when you have a weak referee, you have a
Speaker 1: big problem. Because a weak referee is a referee who
Speaker 1: can be bought, or intimidated or just simply ignored. A
Speaker 1: situation goes from being more or less well refereed to
Speaker 1: more or less not. Then one day you wake up
Speaker 1: in a world that seems not just unfair, but actually
Speaker 1: sort of rigged. That is, it's incapable of becoming fair
Speaker 1: because the people who benefit from the unfairness have the
Speaker 1: power to preserve it. Boom, do you do you flip
Speaker 1: a switch in one hundred and ten screens go dark.
Speaker 1: Um all the law small screens you got to do manually.
Speaker 1: The big TVs, we got the remote. For most nights,
Speaker 1: Joe Borgia stays at the replay center until almost two
Speaker 1: in the morning, just him and a couple of refs,
Speaker 1: staring at tiny slivers of basketball games, trying to impose
Speaker 1: justice on powerful people who don't want it. I am nuts.
Speaker 1: That's another story. Got admit you do. Now you have
Speaker 1: to be partially one hundred percent negative business. That's why
Speaker 1: my son doesn't want to write that. I don't like
Speaker 1: people yelling at me. One day, a young Borgia naturally
Speaker 1: becomes a referee, the next he doesn't. One day, most
Speaker 1: people think the refs are more or less fair, or
Speaker 1: at any rate, they don't spend a lot of time
Speaker 1: blaming them for all their problems. The next day they
Speaker 1: wake up to radical inequality. The people on top, the elites,
Speaker 1: I think they're special. They behave as people do when
Speaker 1: they think they're special. Young people emulate them without even
Speaker 1: thinking about it. They just assume that's how you act
Speaker 1: if you're a star or want to be. My first
Speaker 1: question is why when you hit a three point shot,
Speaker 1: which you often do. Why in the past have you
Speaker 1: pounded your chest and pointed to the sky? I did
Speaker 1: it because of people on the MBA and the IMBA
Speaker 1: did it? What do you think they're doing? Like? What
Speaker 1: does it mean? I don't know? Just like I'm cool.
Speaker 1: Do you believe in God? No? I knew it would it?
Speaker 1: I mean now I know what it meant, but no,
Speaker 1: I don't. So what does it mean? Basically, it's like,
Speaker 1: thank you God for hitting a three point shot? Do
Speaker 1: you do you think God was responsible when Clay Thompson
Speaker 1: hit a three point shot? To be honest, if God
Speaker 1: was watching over everybody whenever they hit a three point shot,
Speaker 1: I don't think that he would be able to like
Speaker 1: actually make them make the shot. So do you have
Speaker 1: anything you'd like to say to the referees of the
Speaker 1: world before we turn this recording off? Don't pick sides
Speaker 1: unless it's my side. Thank you. I'm Michael Lewis. Thanks
Speaker 1: for listening to Against the Rules. It's our first episode.
Speaker 1: We've got a lot more to come. Against the Rules
Speaker 1: is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. The show's produced
Speaker 1: by Audrey Dilling and Catherine Garedo, with research assistance from
Speaker 1: Zoe Oliver Gray. Our editor is Julia Barton Mia Lobell
Speaker 1: as our executive producer. Our theme was composed by Nick Brittell,
Speaker 1: with additional scoring by Seth Samuel, mastering by Jason Gambrel.
Speaker 1: Our show was recorded at Northgate Studios in Berkeley by
Speaker 1: TOFA Ruth. Special thanks to our founders Jacob Weisberg and
Speaker 1: Malcolm Gladwell