Against the Rules: Michael Lewis in Conversation with Malcolm Gladwell

Michael I feel like every time you do some new project you trot me out to interview you and I feel like this is like my fourth time doing this but I've done it as much for you you've done it for me and I'm gonna have to do it in September apparently yeah you might have to do it September last time we were on the stage I I feel I mortally offended you and I got all kinds of angry not angry but kind of several friends of mine who might actually be here tonight sent me emails saying ship chiding me from I I didn't let it I died you know I pursued particular lines of uncomfortable inquiry with too much vigor so I'm going nah I'm gonna be nice this evening nasty Malcolm has been put aside and we're we're just gonna get nice Malcolm let's talk about just for the record yeah I don't remember any of that well you but that that is I really don't remember any of that that is your great always a pleasure to speak with you that is a great charm ingenious I do think you have an ability to sell the most unbelievable and and and you that you did it you did it with me the last time and I don't want to suggest I was offended in any way but Jesus Christ Malcolm what do you think you're doing what no no you're just you're this just proving to the world what a what a fantastic wasp you are that and by the way you're probably the only one in this room your abilities are kind of like Nazi and dismiss and explain away conflict is quite extraordinary let's get I've spent much of my life is the only wasp in the road yeah in fact your it'll be on your it'll be your tube stone toy boy he was only lost I'm in every room I wrote I wrote this piece for the New Republic called toy boy and it was about being the toy boy about being the one in every Jewish institution it made everybody feel comfortable yeah nobody cared what I thought about Israel I could I could work on Passover I played that role all right so we won't talk about well this wonderful podcast of yours and I wanted to start with audience questions that you're gonna get every time you do any kind of media they could ask you this question so I thought I'd start with it this transition from rider to podcaster how was it what you persuaded me this was a lot easier than it was and you really did which was a lot it was a total lie so the short answer is it was a lot harder than I imagined it to be but a lot more fun than I imagined it to be and it was different and it was the I came to the conclusion that some stories are better told in this medium than in a book form for me anyway I'm you have this great gift to be I've said this to you many times you have this great gift of taking ideas and giving them the qualities of actions you you don't actually even need a character all you need is your ideas to play with on the page and the people become almost incidental and it's a come on but no I but but it's it and it's you create the feeling of narrative even without the conventional ingredients of a narrative I can't do that when I write what is essentially SAS material it it reads like an essay if I don't have a main character if I don't have a drama that I'm playing and this this idea was naturally kind of si ish it was a series of it's 70 pieces around a theme and as a book I don't think it would have cohered but so one of the cool things I found was this the voice pulls your voice is able to pull an audience through a story even if there's not exactly a story even if it's even it's not as the material is not as unified as you would like it to be if it was on the page I found it's it's just it's interesting I mean they also you can hear the characters voices you know when you put something in quotation marks no matter what you do around it making that getting that sound off the page you can't completely reproduce it and we have characters who just come to life their voices just just bring them you have to do any work at all and so that was interesting to me you think back to I worried you to dwell a little bit on that idea that there are certain ideas certain stories you that you can only tell this way in a podcast what did you know maybe sure I just first this explained with the podcast is because it's just came out yesterday in their first episode so it's called against the rules and it's about referees in American life and it it's the general argument is that the human referee is on the run or under assault wherever you wherever you turn except in the cases where the refs been bought by one side and then he might be very comfortably ensconced in a rigged system but the the there wasn't for me there wasn't one story I wanted to tell there a whole bunch of stories I wanted to tell and they would have felt in a net in a book like even like a separate story or a digression a long digression I think and I wanted to play with the argument and I wanted to play with the subject matter but I did I didn't have one person or I didn't you know normally what I have is either either I have a main character who can teach the audience and I you know I had seven or eight characters here and that would have been it would have been hard to structure as a conventional narrative so it was interesting to be able to do it this way the other big difference is book riding is really an individual sport I mean it is just it's just you and the this is definitely I don't know how you found it but for me it was completely a team sport it was and it was fabulous I mean the editor that people who Nick Patel who made the music the producers the you know they were all intimately involved in to the extent that in a couple of cases the producers went and did a couple of the interviews and that was having to having to both make work with other people as he was I mean healthy for me but also having to because I don't often have to do it but having to satisfy them in the course of doing that was interesting normally I'm just satisfying me and they were hard to satisfy you know they were hard to please and that was it that was it was interest you have that friction in my life did you feel like pleasing them entailed compromises no no entailed me learning what the hell I was doing I mean I really that they were right and I was wrong most kinds of things were you wrong about well did my argument make sense to them sitting there that's a simple one but it was much of it was just structural was kind of like like what I whether the it was it was just there they had a better sense than I did I've learned pretty quickly but a better sense than what than I did about what someone who was just taking it in here would tolerate from me in the way of a way of digression in the way of odd structured the story in the way of starting something and not coming back to it for 15 minutes what I had to do to accommodate to make sure that didn't lose the audience they also had a much better sense of what I could leave on the cutting room floor that I all my scripts and it was it was more like it was less I writing a book than writing a screenplay make sure that which I've done it was kind of in between all all the original scripts were twice as long as they needed to be and they were there was all stuff that I didn't see you could remove and they saw they were really good at seeing which you could pull out so this that was different just having a couple that kind of collaboration but the you know I decided simply I when I'm moving through the world looking for things I'm going to do you know something will catch my eye and I'll open a folder on it and not knowing where it will go and I have stacks of manila folders beside and shelves beside my desk and a decade ago two things happen that sort of triggered this interest in referees and I never knew what I was going to do within the folder got thicker and thicker but it never emerged as a narrative and then this medium comes along and I all of a sudden I could oh I had no idea this was something a long time and do you remember what the initial trigger was for the interest in reference yeah yeah yeah they're two things it was right after the financial crisis and I was I just been put in charge of the Albany Berkeley girls softball league travel ball teams and my job was to take these little girls from Berkeley the all-stars from the league at age 8 10 12 and 14 and and get them into shape so they could go over the hill and compete against Republicans and and my predecessor had not done a very good job of it yeah and I went to I took it seriously and so my my girls were playing and the first time I started I when I opened the file and it started with this it was our first tournament there's a little place called Rohnert Park and it was a it was a night game and they were a bunch of nine year old girls on the field and maybe fifty parents in the stands and it was close and one of our girls slid into home plate to tie the game the top of the last inning and the Rohnert Park the opposing team's coach came out of the dugout and started started cursing up and down at the umpire who called our little girl safe I mean the language was just unbelievable and their whole fan sites are screaming at the umpire and uh you know no one on our side none of the little girls in our diet had ever heard the word and they were just they were in awe they were watching this they never seen I kind of loved it because it was great I love that they could see how grown-ups actually behaved instead of how instead of how Berkeley parents after they but but this thing escalated on the field and the coach didn't back down and the umpire didn't back down the umpire was a woman and all of a sudden the Berkeley parents started getting raged and so you looked around and everybody's screaming at everybody most of the people screaming at the umpire there was a great Berkeley moment when this voice cut through the night and she this woman screamed what horrible modeling for our children but beyond good except for that it was like you idiot you you know you're safe out you know and and the umpire finally the coach finds through the coach out so you're out but it was his ballpark so he says okay you can throw me out he steps outside he says I'm now no longer in the position of coach I'm now in the position of Director of this facility and you're fired so so he is now nine o'clock at night and the malls are up in the in the lights and everybody's jaws on the floor that they just fire the only umpire so the game can't actually go on and she doesn't know what to do she's actually just because okay and just walks out into the parking lot everybody's just standing on the field and I thought this is my moment when I'm spelling a position of authority what am i a sore followed her out into the parking lot and she was weeping and I went up to her and I kind of put my arm around this before me too you know and okay that kind of console in a Biden like manner and and I said I said you know you know you know you don't have to take that you know you really should go back and I said it was like is there anybody you can call and she says yeah there's an umpire Association and it was there's nine o'clock in California it was unbelievable there was anybody aware this place was she gets the umpire says yes down the line and they say he can't fire you we're gonna call the guy who's the head of the thing that head of the facility and we'll get him fired you go back and finish my umpiring and she went right back in and threw him out and and the game went on but from then on I started to watch these poor people who were brought out to umpire nine-year-old girls games and they were on the receiving end of constant abuse and my first question was why would anybody even do that job but my second reaction was like why do people behave that way towards umpires I've never felt that way towards umpires why do people take out so much of their fury on them why is that so hard that job so this happens that he as I've finished the big short and and I'm watching what's going on on Wall Street in the back end of the financial crisis and one way of looking at the financial crisis was as an umpire in problem that reffering problem there there was a breakdown of several refereeing roles but the bit one of the big ones was the credit rating agencies Moody's is standard for especially past with refereeing the securities of that Wall Street brings to market now totally failed they totally fail for a very good simple reason they were being paid by the people who created the subprime mortgage bonds they were rated they were on the tank they were being paid as I being played by one of the players and this umpire briefly was played in public but basically was allowed to go right back to doing what they were doing without any reform whatsoever and so I had this umpiring file with two umpires two kinds of umpires one was a very nice woman with some spine who was just trying to do her best and make sure the game was paid for play fairly and she was being made miserable and the other were these umpires on Wall Street who who were doing their job in a kind of who had horrible incentives and and we're not they were not agents of fairness and the society was enabling them to keep going even though they orchestrated helped to orchestrate this horrible calamity and I just started at that point so I think you know like why do some umpires why are some empowers and positions of strength and why are some umpire as in position of weakness first thought what I was gonna do is write a sitcom about empires it just said in the world of girl softball but I really had no idea was gonna do the material and I just started to accumulate material and the Jacob Weisberg your co-founder of Pushkin industries and I are on a hiking trail the year and a half ago and we just started talking about this subject he said you know it could work as a podcast and by the time we sort of when you start thinking about the subject and start looking we start looking for referees you see them everywhere yeah I mean that there was it end up being seven episodes but could have been fifteen and there was a kind of like there was some arguments to be teased out but you had to move around in a somewhat haphazard fashion that the podcast structure really lets you do ya gonna go back for a second a kind of right early question in this file after that experience with your daughter's baseball team how much did you like write a big how much did you write about the that evening I wrote a paragraph about the evening stuck it in the file and I put on the outside of it pumps and and chased it and I made notes to like I would check at the tournament of the girls tournaments I would follow the umpire back to his car they a lot of these guys live out of their cars and just talk to him a little bit about why they did what they did the and I started make notes based on those conversations and I just I was just kind of just kind of sometimes I open ways fast and nothing goes in it it's just humps stick it up on the shelf maybe that's a subject I will pursue but it just seems to me and then you might and the more you watch it if you back away from and look at the way this society treats people it just in sports in the umpiring role it's bizarre you know you go to a basketball arena and 18,000 people are chanting in unison ref you suck I mean the the the but there aren't 18,000 people on the other side who are saying thank you for making the calls on my movor I mean it's like nobody's nobody's ever thanking this person for the cheating he's supposedly doing on behalf of the other team of the other and people that people see in this person injustice where it doesn't exist this person has this ability to generate an outrage that's out of all proportion to to like how he's behaving and like he ends up he ends up at the center of I mean he ends up as a character generally kind of unexplored I know one of the things that end up on the cutting room floor I interviewed Daryl Morey who is the the Houston Rockets GM who I adore who had lots of done lots of studies about Empire about referees knew their tendencies knew like where home court advantage was worse because the referees are better because referees more likely give the the the home team the call had done all this work on referees and I asked him have you ever met him you ever met one of them no you know never even occurred to me that I we should actually go meet one of these guys and talk to one of these guys that they were a completely the unexplored characters y-you know it's interesting to go back to the paradigm you have between the Wall Street people and baseball little league baseball umpires in one case the operating assumption is the eye can influence the ref if I try and intimidate her if I abuse her in the other case the notion is that I simply buy them off it was I have an exaggerated form of charming them yes and I'm always wondered why those roles aren't reversed so are there n ba coaches who try to charm referees and are there businesses who or business people who explicitly try and essentially scream at the government referee so the answer the first question is surprisingly few the NBA players that you can't really get the players even the former players won't talk about the rest because he just get in trouble but Shane Battier who's a friend who played in the NBA for many years said to me it amazed him that no one ever how seldom people tried to actually be nice to the refs and that's what his strategy was to be nice to the rest we thought that was an original strategy so the but the the but but the answer the answer in the NBA is one of the reasons everybody's really even angry or at the refs even though the refs are getting better is that the refs are getting better their heart is harder to charm and harder and impossible to intimidate they're holding themselves to these objective standards and they're judged by these objective standards and the stuff that's going on around them they're more and more impervious to the so the second part is are there do is it worth brow beating yes like Mark Cuban was an example tried to browbeat the SEC so I think the browbeating works in private but but but what it's so much better if you can just by the ref you know I mean that if you if you look it if you look at the way I mean the rate that that was that's such a sweet is rather than going and scream at Moody's and Standard and Poor's your subprime mortgage behinds a triple-a so much better just to slip them some money to make you know to create that incentive so that they're more likely to smile upon the securities but so anyway this whole thing company it it's interesting the subject got more interesting to me and it became more real in the presidential election because ever all because they say the two campaigns that had a real energy about them as Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump's campaign and that bottom of both campaigns was the system's rigged that that that it was all about referees having not done their job and there was some justice to those charges but that and that's why I thought you know maybe we could maybe there's maybe this is worth trying to do yeah when you when you made those initial observations about humps umpires for fries did you think you were examining an age-old problem or a new problem the thing that I loved about the first episode that came out yesterday was I kept on I was thinking oh this is interesting and Michaels gonna tell me why we've always had this problem but then you told me no no no no this is new for really really interesting reasons and that was the turn where you cooked me in and then that was a non-obvious term I feel like if I had done this story I would have blown it because I would have just tried to prove to you to be around forever and that's not interesting actually well that the that the refs have been abused forever yeah I would have said oh you know what you're observing is something the Romans did you know I I would have done that some ludicrous move like that but the thing I was genuinely surprised by the turn where we learn its new and why why it's new so sports is such a wonderful laboratory just because so clean in so many ways but it's new and it's in its it's it's new ish in that the NBA when Adam silver became Commissioner but back up for the first episode is about about the rest about an actual sports ref the only episode in the series it's about sports is the is the first episode is about it professional basketball refs and what's it what was interesting to me about that subject is if you I mean it's just just kind of generally true in sports combination of Technology and an aware and transparency is forcing all the umpire and the referee to get better and you would think that would cause everybody to appreciate the refs more or at least protest them less but that's not happening especially not happening in basketball it's got from the point of view of the refs it's getting worse and worse it's sort of like more likely to need a bodyguard to the arena more likely to have really ugly things set in the stand out of the stands more likely to have to throw star players out of the game because of things they do and say at the same time the referee the refereeing is clearly more objectively accurate and the the thing that do you remember Curt Schilling to pitch up so this was there was a moment we told you what kind of why objective refereeing might end up creating a lot of anger in sports Major League Baseball introduced pitch track machines into ball the ballparks and that's the machine that shows you where the strike zone is and up to the point they introduced these machines the strike zone is entirely a subjective matter with the umpire thinks is a strike and there's no real way to check in now they have measured the strike zone they can determine if the umpire has been after the fact if the umpire has been calling accurately or not and he he's graded on his accuracy he's measured against the Machine so there's been this in the decades since they've introduced those machines there's been in pressure on these umpires to conform to the state to them to the the machines accuracy and their way and and they have and they'll brag I only got one wrong you know now why they even keep the umpires there is another question because the machine could just do it but but the umpires started to change the way they call the game in response to the machine meaning they became more active you think everybody would think that was a good thing curt schilling came out of the ball game early when he's a pitcher I can't remember who he's pitching for the time either but in the Red Sox I think he might've been with the Diamondbacks furious because his before he did not perform well went into the dugout grabbed a bat and went and destroyed the pitch track machine and they they find him $50,000 and he and he was angry because the umpire used to give him calls that were not strikes before they introduced this machine and he no longer was given that privilege he no longer had the advantages that are naturally accorded the stars and something like that is what's going on in basketball and what's happened in basketball is it's they even tried to introduce a similar spirit of objectivity and they've done it in many different ways they have they built this five years ago at for 15 million dollars they built this replay Center in Secaucus New Jersey which is the site of the first episode of the podcast 15 million dollars to to run direct fiber-optic cables to to every basket NBA basketball arena in the each arena their I don't know a dozen cameras anyway trying to get every angle on the court and this room in Secaucus is a hundred and ten television screens showing the all the angles on every court in the NBA and that's all it shows and so you can't watch you know you can't watch homeland on it you can't you can't do anything with these TVs except watch whatever happens to walk onto that basketball court wherever it is and they're guys they're professional referees in there every night during the season double-checking the calls of the actual refs on the floor in case the refs make mistakes and the refs themselves are now graded and they're shown their mistakes after the game then the opportunity to check their mistakes if they if they check their judgments and that's sure they're right they're trained and evaluated in all kinds of ways they've never been before they are the the hiring process is more professional it's just like gotten used to be an old boys network like half a dozen of the refs 25 years ago okay with the same high school it was just a bunch of kind of chubby white guys mainly Catholic filling from the relevance in Philly that's right and and now you gotta broaden out that they've broadened out the Talent Search they got to get in shape they used to be fat right everybody else in America is getting fatter and the wrestler get in better shape now they're buff and and and and they're trained they're trained they they're being taught about all their biases the kind of biases the condiment Tversky taught us about but also you know that they're more likely to give the home team the call or they have racial bias that they're taught and they've talked to correct for all this stuff how could they be anything but better but getting better does not mean making is not making people happy yeah it's inflaming it's it's partly inflaming the situation so is it a mistake stars don't like it is it a mistake to get better then I mean is there some choice the world's changed the problem is now the fans can not only see in real time that a mistake might have been made they can see for sure on the jumbotron that a mistake was made or more might have been made and they can then and they can capture it on their phones and they can tweet it and they they have a they have material for outrage mm-hmm and if the the not just the fans the players and so the the sense of grievance even though the reason for grievance is clearly declining the reasons for grievance are CLE is clearly declining the feelings of grievance are going through the roof so it's becoming more fair on the basketball court but people feel it's less fair yeah and but I don't think you could fix it by making the referees even worse than they are oh there used to be you know remember the phrase that was common in basketball the makeup call yeah that's baloney like if you know you better presumes you know you made a mistake if you know you made a mistake then don't make it the notion of the makeup call was to address precisely the problem you're talking about that other everybody's that what some team is outraged and then so the reason that you don't get quite as outraged as you I'm talking about in the past the old system you know you think that this is you think you know the ref is a human being and you say oh he'll understand that he blew the call and he'll make it up for me in some subtle way and that will so that diminishes my sense of outrage in a perfect world where these guys are like robots are making the right which is generally they're increasingly are there it's amazing how good they are now so when they on those rare occasions when they do make a mistake there's no expectation of a makeup call no that's right so is that I mean there are I mean I cuz I wonder about the I agree with you you can never go back but I feel like when you sort of roboticize refereeing in sports what you've done is you've disrupted the narrative of the sport that you're drawn to the sports because it's a story and stories it used to be that the blown calls were part of the narrative not a good part of the narrative sure they are part of like what makes the good if the game just went smoothly from beginning to end you are you you don't want referee era it's not a positive thing to have referee era it's you want to minimize it you're you can still have a glorious narrative on a Ennis in in any kind of contest without a referee I guess the messiness of the sport is one of the things that you think you think more referee era the better no no I'm saying that there that we operated for many years around a narrative about sports that included the notion of referee error we've taken that out and what we've done is we've disrupted the narrative maybe we're just going through a period of time where I think that's right and I think that's true partly true and it's also I mean you know there's a whole bunch of things going on at once one is that everybody can see the Ihram and replay it and focus on it and organize around it in ways they they they couldn't before another is that the nature of the improvement of the refereeing is its removing privilege from people who can naturally protest the loudest the stars and and they used to getting the calls and then acha they can't get the calls in the same way it's also I you know there was if you go back ten years in the NBA home court advantage was a much bigger deal and it was and there were studies that were done to though the source of home court avenge was referee era it was like the referees trying to kill towards a home crowd just to appease them now now it's not that big a deal but who's pissed about that the people who are in the arena the people who think they should get an advantage because it's their own Court but I think against the even bigger than this is there's the backdrop to all of this is people are more and more aware or have a greater greater sense that there's no such thing as neutrality that there's like people are biased you we we you know even know in the case of referees the opposite is true they are now less biased there are left there even though they're there and there they've been made aware of their biases every which way and try to work against them everybody it's in the air that up you know a white guy won't be fair it's fair to a black guy is is to a white guy it's in the air that that the condiment to burski stuff that that people make those kind of mistakes it's in the air that they are they favor the home home team or they favor stars so that is it even as theirs are less reason for cynicism about what's going on inside the mind of a professional an NBA referee there's more awareness awareness of the reasons for cynicism about people's judgement referee judgment generally yeah that I wanted to take aways from the comment diversity stuff is that nobody's like nobody's judgments you know everybody's judgments is systematically flawed it was interesting as the yes it is the process of investigating what the process of investigating bias does is more than anything alert us to the uncomfortable fact that there was a lot of bias there that we didn't even think about that's right we had no idea just how unfair it all used to be I was at this reminds me yesterday I was for my podcast episodes I'm hanging out with the folks who make the LSAT to construct the LSAT ooh and they do these biased tests so they have practice questions which do you all take when you take the LSAT is one set fits all practice questions and they look to see whether different groups have different patterns of answering questions correctly which sue me I would never have thought about so there was a question they showed me is this random question about some literary figure in the 17th century and which is the wrong answer all the smartest women taking the test thought was the correct answer like 50% of them got a said it was C it wasn't C D which is the right answer was overwhelmingly the male choice 50% of the bands so here's a question that has so there's patterns in the error is in the air is there's a massive pattern in the air and there's nothing obvious and if they find the pattern in the air they think there's something wrong with the question they throw the question out I said well what is it about this totally anodyne question about 17th century literature that caused all these really smart female test takers to answer see right and then no idea no clue it just doesn't work yeah like that process the minute I hear that I think oh my god this thing is rigged in ways I hadn't even thought right right yeah so like it's the same process now I'm alert before I was like well it's telling stuff so you know you you and I both made this turn into this new medium you're fewer heroes out of me how have you found what do you find the differences are from writing dis prose on the page well it's funny I've gone in the opposite because I don't write books that are character driven as much all right now in this medium I'm really into the character driven so I like I'm drawn to the fact that I can bring these characters to life in a way because I'm not as I don't I you know I'm not being falsely modest I'm not nearly as good as you at bringing individuals to life on the page but if I can get tape then I can do that I feel like in like I you know and you can capture interactions like there's in one of my episodes this next season I have these two women who are sisters who wrote a book together a really good book of history largely so they could hang out with each other this one has been what is like 71 is 65 and they're so insanely charming and all you do is just run the tape and you're in love with it you're in love with them it doesn't matter what happens next it is like it is amazing the difference when you can hear a person's voice that we we have an episode at the second episode which you actually edited it's about how hard it is to create a referee even when you clearly need a referee and this it's about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau but we have a woman who is who was just crushed by student loan I got that man to the point where she's a she's a she is a public schoolteacher who with a couple of little kids who whose student loan servicer has basically deceived her from from even knowing really about for years for years knowing about a program that Congress created to relieve our student loan debt because it paid them to keep her in the student in the in the debt and to the point where her she grind has been grinding her teeth so badly tonight that five of her teeth have fallen out and she's now won't smile and if I told the story just if I just told the story you you might think I've had my thumb on the scale you wouldn't quite believe it like you'd think I was exaggerating but when she just tells it straight you're weeping I mean and and there's no question the sincerity just just it just jumps out of the off off the tape in a way in a way that I would have to try to persuade the reader of and I don't I just you just let her speak and it's magnificent incredibly moving yeah that that episode this is the next one yeah I remember I came to one of your table reads it was very still early stages I just thought that I was that's it slayed me that well I was furious just listening to that woman talk in her to calm tones about basically how the failure of not just that kind of the venality of the referee in this case basically has ruined her life well the absence of a referee reality the finality of the financial system that that she landed in the middle of but but that episode so so another example I wouldn't that material it would still be in a manila folder next to my desk it starts as I just a folder labeled consumer finance and that starts because 18 months ago I started getting calls every morning from Citigroup saying I owed them $15,000 that I that I had Renee that I had taken out a credit card and and Michael Lewis owed City and they would call I was getting the kids ready for school making breakfast and this happened like 50 times I mean 50 times that when are you gonna pay us back the money and so I've never had any business at all with Citigroup did you never never borrowed anything they've had a credit or anything and the next thing I know I'm getting letters from I know from American Express saying that now they won't let me use my American Express card because I didn't pay Citigroup I have bad debt on my on my credit report and I started to kind of dig into it and someone had someone had got my social security number and given a phony address in Miami and duped Citigroup into lending them $16,000 on a credit card and then ran away and I couldn't understand why this was my responsibility to like fix then everybody's telling me I'm a victim of identity theft but I don't do anything you know I was still me and it seemed to me that's I guess I was thinking like how screwed up this world of consumer finance is that that I can be now I can be hounded for something I had nothing whatsoever do with because this bank is stupid enough to lend $16,000 and someone who sort of pretends to be me and I started to keep a file on all the weird things in consumer finance and it ended up in this podcast and and this and I had a comedy in my case but most of what happens is tragedy and we were looking for this woman's story ended up being a way to kind of play out that material to what can't you do in the podcast form so talk about that story did you whether there must be limitations I can't do things you don't have tape of that's that's the problem you got to go out and interview you have to have the thing if it's you just talking it's far allure less less persuasive and if you've got some someone else you you know it's it's so that it's it's a constraint that's worse with TV when you have to have that the pictures but you can only do so much with your own words in this in the narrative form I think so that's your constrain there but what can't you do like what stories when it gets complicated yes it gets hard I could not so it's hardly was very hard to explain I didn't even really explain but I tried to explain a collateralized debt obligation in the big short its most complicated thing I've ever tried to explain to anybody and that's not possible in a pumpkin you could not do it in a podcast you just you just couldn't I mean you people would have collision the people listening as they're driving would be having crashes on the highway and you you you so the because the the reader can go back or the reader can slow down the reader can the reader can pace themselves through an explanation what always breaks my heart is where you finally find the person who you think can explain the thing it's good to give you tape and then they're boring which in the book it doesn't matter right in a book like I feel like what sir that is one of your geniuses as a writer is you have clearly in your life made lots of boring people seem really fascinating but so I'd put it in anyway so I'd put it a different way you're absolutely right that that people's voices kill them as characters you you you're you're all you're talking to them for five minutes and you think that voice just won't work not working it's not gonna work you know yeah if there are people in this world who admits anime it's almost at a superpower who have an ability to walk into a room and kill all interest in the room I mean it I had I had an uncle who had this capacity and it was he was a great guy and he did really interesting stuff but the minute he opened his mouth it was like it reals like everybody's gasping for air there's no oxygen in there and he was just incredibly dull and it was Dulles listening to him and you were just relieved when he someone else someone else threw themselves on that hand grenade and and the the so it is true that you can take that person in print and bring him to life yeah I can make my uncle really great inherent but but I could not the minute the minute someone heard him speak you'd lose yeah they wouldn't believe anything you said about it you know what I the one trick that I found though is sometimes you think someone's going to be boring but it's because you're in book interview mode and podcast interview boat is quite different that what you really want to do when you're interviewing someone on the podcast is you want them to speculate and free-associate so you want to push them you don't want them giving when you're doing when you're doing the book interview there you want them to describe in detail you know A to Z how this works yes do did you walk me through you always use F walk me through how doesn't you never say walk me through in the podcast interview what you say is what about like imagine this and then the certain point they kind of get it they realize that oh we're just like it's play it's play right yeah no that's really true that's really true there's no I'd had this once with this love I dis interview for this one of my podcasts with this guy who was a ob/gyn researcher in Philadelphia and he gets he's in the weeds on some new kind of contraceptive deep in the weeds and I realize none of this is useable he starts talking about the endometrium the endometrium is not working in podcast for him and you know follicles and then he sort of says something and I was like wait a minute this thing you're talking about why is that a contraceptive he goes poets not a contraceptive and he goes on this long insanely interesting totally hypothetical thing about oh I wouldn't go on a contraceptive I called something else I think you this long riff about how it's actually this other thing over here and like it's just he just came alive so because he was oh this is absolutely right and we had an episode 3 is about refs in in the culture like language rest people who people who write who are usage panel members and dictionaries who've been they've all been let go and the people who used to write kind of usage manuals and I was taught we were I was talking to a guy named Brian Garner who's one of the characters in the in the episode and he's the author of a book called Garner's modern English usage I think that's what's called it's twelve hundred pages it's actually riveting but nobody but at Barnes & Noble told him a decade ago it's a defunct category yeah all of his heroes their books sold millions of copies there were times where there was a time when when the language ref occupied had occupied a bigger role than he does now the crowd refs the language in a and and nobody wants to hear from this nude but he's a great snoot and he was just talking about like where the culture is gone and how he's daily outraged by things that he just can't believe that we're becoming this and he said I got a letter from my bag that said dear mr. garner semicolon and he was off for like like like for like ten minutes on on I called my bank manager I said there's a mistake it says dear mr. garner semicolon yeah and and he says it's either a colon or a comma and the bank manager said could you write us a letter about that yeah and he said so I wrote them a letter and I was he did you've come to the right place yeah wrote wrote I said I wrote them a letter and I cited all the authorities including Garner's modern English usage about where you don't put a semicolon after dear mr. Garner and they they they wrote him back and said we're keeping the semicolon and and he called me sit down how can he and now he's just off I couldn't I didn't need to be there anymore right he's just he's like in his own world this is an outrage and he's for him it's genocide I mean they they said that's this is that he's a CodeRed and he says he calls the bank manager he says he says like no you know you're sending out probably millions of these letters with a semicolon and and you got to stop and they said no we they said we went around the bank and we asked everybody for their opinion about it and and and it was split half the people thought the semicolon was alright and a half the people didn't and so we're just keeping the semicolon he said that's the problem the problem is you don't ask everybody you come to the ref and but you he that that I don't know what it is two or three minutes of tape in gotcha but you could never have I could never have just put it on the page in the same way and you would not have heard his growing sense of just indignation at what has become of our country like this was like this is the inner microcosm everything that was wrong with America yeah it's or there's a there's a certain quality of delight that we're talking about that only it's conversational delight you know you don't get it's really hard to get delight off the page you get delight when you're in a conversation with someone and they go on set in some unexpected direction and you sort of understand that something fabulous is coming down the pike you're kind of waiting for it yeah and they take on that's what you're yeah and I those I was trying to prod people a little bit in the direction of going off just to see what happens yeah and the good ones will like understand that they've been given life but they're playing a game with you yes I did a interview with this guy who's a from a new season who is a retired history teacher from Groton who midway through his tenure at Groton his specialty is colonial history decides that the British were right and the Americans were wrong in the world he's like he's at Groton his kids are all Americans red-blooded Americans right and he has decided that this seminal event in his region was has been called the wrong way by historians and he goes into the archives of the insurance archives in Boston at the Boston Academy of somesuch and he's the first guy to do this cuz he realizes the key issue is forgive me for taking a stage here but good the key issue is how many of the Patriots were actually smugglers they're just criminals trying to smuggle in tea and they're pretending it's about rights but it's not it's it's about if the British cut the taxes on tea as they want to do it'll put them out of business so they're really upset this coming T tax cut and his whole point is they're mostly smugglers it's like they pretended to be merchants or not merchants there's much how do I know this he says well I went into the archives and I realized the only place they wouldn't lie is to their insurer of course so you look in the insurance records from 17 you know 65 and you see if I have a shipment of tea it's coming from like wherever Holland where are my ports of call did ice did I I'm supposed to stop in London pay the duty switch to an English ship and bring it to England these guys are stopping in like the Orkney Islands like they're not it's not legit so he goes to he proves and like he has this kind of sense of like he's getting more and more more he's like it's not a war of independence it's a civil war between the guys who want to follow the law and the smugglers and it's like but and I you realize that an entire like generations of Groton kids got this so finally I said I was like like you this you this was just the line in the gratin history department that that you were guys are gonna call the waters were and he was like no just me it's like everyone else was on to the Civil War I was still doing the war it was like it's a magical so how did you how did you find him he wrote a book called smugglers and Patriots we just been out of print for like so long which I don't know how I found it but he was so he was so delighted what I called it because I'm sure he was published I think was published in the 70s I mean they were like two left on like that rare book website and I read it it's like so I I called him up because I would be delighted to talk to you flew to Palm Springs his message hasn't quite taken it's like he was been he's been waiting you know thinking about the stories is to pay the long game like to him waiting 40 years for the phone no that's not no no this me weirdest we've been living this life for 200 years but he was so it was amazing yeah a whole time you're just checking your tape recorder to make sure it's it's on and roll like all your only concern at this point is like god if I miss this so the producer it's funny the producers when they came to me in the first place they said please please don't be like Malcolm and and try to tape your own stuff the first season almost of Malcolm's podcast almost killed us there are purists right they they're they come from NPR which is like the cathedral on the of sound yeah it's like the Gothic cathedral where and they sit and they study their scripture and then they go into the cloisters and they take a vow of silence and then they listen to pure audio you know in the evenings like that's not the real world I'm living in I'm not I'm not in the monastery so I don't listen to them and they don't listen to you wait so we have questions we have questions we actually have quite a lot of time oh I won't talk to you about falling in love it's we talked about a little bit I want you to talk a little more what about this because you are in your fiction in your nonfiction in your books you fall in love with characters and then you were saying that in the podcast you're doing a different kind of slightly different storytelling what you're having many voices does that impair your are we gonna get the classic Michael Lewis character who we fall in love along with you and if we're not does that sort of are you a little bit sad about not having people to fall in love if you have people to fall in love with it's just they're up there they're in a single episode I just don't live with him for the whole series yeah I fell in love with Alex Cogan Alex Cogan is which episode is he they all kind of start to blend together after a while but he there's there's so we he is he was the the academic responsible for the work it's supposedly allowed Cambridge analytic to get Donald Trump elected yeah and in fact it's all and the IVA his work was useless the this this real story there is that it's amazing that Cambridge analytical persuaded anybody they knew anything that was useful hustle it's a hustle it's a hustle right got that yes and everyone a lot of people wanted to believe that that's why Donald Trump was elected because they needed a reason why don't wait what episode is this this is 3 this is actually part of episode 3 so is what's the what's the largest or the largest story is a decline of kind of these culture wrestling so it's it's language refs its ombudsman its referees in the newsroom so how this story ever got to the front page of the New York Times is it's part of it but he's built up as the main character of the thing and in a very similar way to a character that you would fall in love with in a magazine piece yeah so this is totally in some ways it's it's it's easier to sell the characters because you can hear them you can see why you you're you should fall in love with him you you've ken feinberg don't you showing up yeah so you know you know it's it's funny if one one of the things I was thinking about how we ended up with the characters we ended up with across the series it's all people whose lives were one way or another severely disrupted by by the assault on the referee ken feinberg is how many people here I can't really see it but I wonder how people here we know who ken feinberg is okay ken feinberg should be a household name but Ken Feinberg was an ordinary lawyer when he was brought in in the early 80s to try to resolve the dispute between Vietnam veterans and the chemical companies had made Agent Orange in Vietnam veteran said without a whole lot of evidence I had brought a suit saying that this this chemical that was sprayed across the jungles of Vietnam was responsible for all these health problems that they are having and the case had lingered in the courts for seven or eight years and judges had despaired of resolving it and a judge asked this young lawyer can find berg to see if he could negotiate outside of the court a solution resolution to the between the vets and the companies and in six weeks he had the thing done he was on the front page of every newspaper in the country and his career then just went mmm he all of a sudden he became America's referee he was brought in he was brought in when in a funny way whenever too much public attention was being focused on a dispute and the legal system was likely to leave everybody feeling a little dissatisfied about the fairness of the thing so he was he was he was in response he was responsible for the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund and had unbelievable powers Congress gave him unbelievable powers I mean normally when people's lives are lost in that way and there's a compensation fund the way you calculate the compensation is lost earnings and you had a bunch of bond traders in in the World Trade Center along with Busboys and if you'd had done it the way the legal system would have done it you'd have given the families of bond traders 30 million dollars and you know given the families of Busboys 200 thousand dollars and he came in and he said no nobody's getting more than 6 million and nobody's kind of getting less than a million he made it more even and he somehow managed to do that and meet individually with every family of every single victim and and leave everybody feeling like it was more or less done fairly he was respond to the of the BP oil spill Victims Compensation Fund whenever there's been a mass shooting in this country there's some fund is arisen up and he's been being brought in to to administer the fund he was after the financial crisis Congress appointed him in the tarp administrator and his job was to negotiate down the salaries or determined not to negotiate down to determine the salaries of Wall Street CEOs he was slashing them by 90% kind of thing so he's he's brought in to adjudicate these disputes and the question was like to questions like what are we gonna do when he dies because he seems to be brought Emmys like these like the Forrest Gump of American tragedy and and but the second it's like what what what is it about him like and I don't want to give away the story but he there were he had a theory of himself and his wife had a different theory of him and the wife's was right but but but you but his theory of his wife's theory you can hear kind of proven just in the sound of his voice Oh his voice is it's unbelievable so so the it's so good that I think it's all the voice so it's so it's so it could be the voice it's poison it's the righteousness in the voice it's the and it's a Boston accent like you cannot believe and so the episode opens with the passage in the bible the solomon resolving the dispute between the two women each of whom is claiming the baby is hers and he saw him and just about to cut the baby into and fibrous voices so we would have an actor read that we had the five his voice was so good we just had Feinberg read the Bible and it was it felt like God was reading the Bible and so you may the it's so this for you know yeah it's form it's just nice to have a different way to tell a story and a different way to get to an audience I don't I don't regard this as like a substitute for writing books but it is it's different and it's interesting I don't way you thought when you write it no matter how conversational your writing style is it is not conversational that how people talk is so different from how any writer writes that you have to learn how to write your your own dialogue that is so kind of interesting anyway I feel like I'm just resting you got a stack of questions from people in the audience I want those from the offstage I know Feinberg I met him because he I'm parenthetically on the board of some nonprofit Apaches on the board and is that there are other lawyers on the I'm not a lawyer I've see but there are a number of lawyers on the board and they have these lawyer things with a disagree on stuff so you have ken Feinberg so honking in that Boston Voice and these other guys who were like they're all versions are is like the super white shoe guy and then there's the super aggressive something then there's Ken from Boston and I feel like the Boston thing it's so huge because he wouldn't it gives him this weird sort of cultural legitimacy because he's not he's local he's local he's so local he's like the guy from down the street who's really smart but he's like still from down the street and you he's confusing because he sounds like he's Catholic but he's Jewish he's in that he's in that does that crossover speaking of which you know he just got dragged in by the Catholic Church to resolve all of the disputes with people but with the people were all all like anybody who's been abused by a priest in America and they're millions of them apparently it will be soon seeing meeting with Ken Feinberg decide how much cycle like there's not millions yeah oh no yeah that's right you think it's you think it's all hoaxes I don't think it's all of us I don't think there's million was exists exaggeration but but but but so let's be fair to the Catholics but find that one of the great things that voice you hear that voice and it sounds like a fighting voice it sounds like a Boston Street fighting voice yeah but his trick is he doesn't fight with anybody he's so he he is it's beneath him is beneath the role of ken feinberg the character of ken feinberg to enter into any dispute as a participant rather than as the neutral that he was referring the kids own from the age of like him he was the referee that they would pick on the playground to ref the games his wife says his wife says that's it we've been married forty eight years and we've never had a fight and I said there's no way that's true there's no way you've never had a dispute she said you know I've had a fight I've had thousands of them he and he's just won't do it he won't any because he goes of course you don't do that you just don't do it but he's got this it's a combination of you think he's coming at you but he's coming at you is this ferocious neutral and and it just it just it's a it's a superpower wait does he have any views about who is success it would be I asked him he said whoever it is it's born not made you can't train it so the answer is no he doesn't have a person in mind but what was interesting is he thought a lot of the qualities the thing that qualities made someone good at this he said they've met people who are good at this sort of thing it's not things you don't go to dispute resolution school and learn how to do it there are character traits he felt he said that's not a popular view but that he thinks that they're just kind of character traits that are very hard to teach or to get people to do you think is it that when people confront ken feinberg in that setting do they think is it that they think he's smarter than them tougher them them fairer than them what's the thing that they think he's worthy of resolving their dispute I think he may think he's they if they do a little googling which they are probably always do they find that often he doesn't take he refuses to take pay for them like the 911 he thinks it's a patriotic duty to to go to Sandy Hook and figure out how you compensate the victims fairly and so he has gent what he has his genuine moral authority and they sense it and like genuine integrity and they sense it and and that a whole bunch of other skills we get into but which episode is that five is that all about Ken Feinberg it's it's like how to be a ref you know it's half of it is about my friend not Rob and I are who is the illustration of how not to be a ref all right baseball rider who got thrust in the role of being the Commissioner of the West Coast of a bit of an amateur would bat baseball league in the Pacific Northwest where all the teams are owned by rich guys and they hired him on the basis of an after-dinner speech thinking he'd be a great face for the league without telling him that his real job was to resolve the endless disputes between these rich owners of the teams and when I I was out with him one night and I never said he's like calm sweet guy and like doesn't want to fight anybody and he got he got put in the role being the neutral of the Feinberg role and it it took three months for him to be the most the most unhappy man on the planet with Rhodes with with like the version of road rage but in without outside of a car like he was constantly and he hated the people he was trying to he had everybody whose disputes he was in the middle of and I think most people you put people in the middle of disputes and they react differently depending on who he was so Rob was sort of explaining he's he's bounced off Feinberg as an example of how not to do it or who not to be what kind of person who doesn't quite work in this role this one but otherwise what most of it's about whatever we have a limited amount of time left and I feel guilty for not having looked at any of these questions so let's see if any of them well slim pickins but who first one who is the ref who is the referee of sexual morality in the era of me - it's a really good question a really good question we need one right in fact that came up that came up in the greenroom of CBS this morning this morning because they were arguing on the air about Biden but Gayle King and Noor O'Donnell were both saying like I know men who say they won't have they won't have lunch with a woman now I I don't want men not to feel like they can't hug me without that they were they were turning on that it was Jody Kanter who was coming to with her newspaper piece that she reported on the subject yeah and it was like it came up outside like who who decides and what we have right now is ref by mob right it's it's mom it's a it's a mob situation so that's would you like to do the job you know it would be an interesting person if we put a Feinberg in the role of this I'm funny because I realize in one of those I'm doing a bunch of of episodes in my upcoming season on that ask the question of how to descent how do ya it's all about he's no sensitive on the subject of Catholics it's all about what the Jesuits can teach us about how to disgraceful II dissent and still remain a member of your institution and I feel like that is this quality that has been lost in all of this so not just disagree with someone but dissent within your group yeah how do I disagree with you without tearing down the whole house and so if you think about someone who's within church like the Catholic Church which is both both hierarchical highly hierarchical with the you know with a boss man to boss men and but at the same time is home to enormous amount of disagreement right they're arguing about everything all the time and they managed to persist for 2,000 years now they're keeping all that in balance and they've developed really sophisticated ideas about how do I'd respectfully disagree with you and there's something really lovely trying to kind of to try and explain that because I don't think we're good at that anymore that's sort of the and part of it you know to it just gonna get links Pray Love in a really lovely way with what you're exploring in your podcast because they have a ref right does the Pope and some of them are really good raps some of them terrible some of them are mediocre but they accept his judgment they accept his judgment yeah and part of part of I think a strong healthy culture is accepting the judgment of the ref even when you know the ref is gonna make mistakes sometimes yeah that's that's and that's something we're having increasingly difficulty doing that we focus on the mistakes even when they're making fewer mistakes so we made the role very difficult to play at a time when the role is increasingly critical and would people are slow to see that attacking the ref is attacking fairness so it's it's uh so you're right it's a it's it's robust because they have in part because they tolerate a lot of error oh yeah and and dissent and and but they all kind of manage to make it most of the time it's interesting episode six is about judges I know we got to go where we're actually ten minutes past our dinner reservation so we're really late but elegant I'll let you what it's a it's a funny thought did you talk to judge the episode six is about judges and a kind of strange assault on judicial independence is going on right now and it's kind it's a different sort of a self and you would get in say a totalitarian regime where the government comes up from on top and says you're gonna just rule you're you're an extension of the government did the judges judges never will never rule against the government the the the feeling with judges the now is the the threat to independence is is the total intolerance of particular decisions that judges being recalled for single decision where it's never happened before judge is getting death threats the president going after judges because they don't like one thing the judge is done it's if all of this I guess all to say that the fragility of the raft is partly a function of a decline in kind of tolerance of and tolerance for a certain amount of disagreement anyway thanks for doing this Michael thank you pleasure being with you again you

Channel: 92nd Street Y

Views: 61,095

Rating: 4.8061676 out of 5

Keywords: 92Y, 92nd Street Y, malcolm gladwell, michael lewis, fairness, equality, podcast, against the rules

Id: OlobbmeO03A

Length: 71min 0sec (4260 seconds)

Published: Fri May 31 2019