May 21, 2019 • 54 mins
Around the launch of Against the Rules, Michael spoke with his friend and co-producer, the author Malcolm Gladwell, at the 92Y in New York. Hear them talk about podcasting, referees, and the magic of “conversational delight.”
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hi there, it's Michael Lewis here. You probably know
that Against the Rules is the first podcast that I've
ever done, and it probably shows. So I appreciate all
of you first sticking with it. The first season's over,
but we want to give you something a little extra
as a token of appreciation. The writer, Malcolm Gladwell, and
(00:40):
I had a conversation back in April of twenty nineteen,
when Against the Rules had just launched. We met in
front of a live audience at the ninety two Street Why,
which is this great center of culture and Jewish life
on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. We had a
big crowd and the whole thing was a lot of
fun to do, and we talked about how I got
(01:00):
interested in not just podcasting, but the quandary of referees
in American life. We want to give you a little
peak behind the curtain of producing this show, and also
a glimpse of the next season of Malcolm's podcast, Revisionist History.
(01:21):
Yeah right, thank you, Thank you Malcolm for doing this.
Thank you. My apologies to the audience. I'm the reason
this is late. I was on subway, yep that I
feel like no further explanations needed. Michael, I feel like
every time you do some new project, do you trot
(01:44):
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 going to have to do it in September. Apparently, yeah,
you might have to do it in September. Last time
we were on the stage, 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
(02:05):
here tonight sent me emails saying chiding me from my
I didn't add it. I you know, I pursued particular
lines of uncomfortable inquiry with too much vigor. So I'm
gonna very not I'm gonna be nice this evening. Nasty
Malcolms didn't put aside, and we're just gonna get nice. Malcolm. Um,
let's talk about uh. Just for the record, I don't
(02:29):
remember any of that well you, but that's that. That
is I really don't remember any of that. That is
your great charm is a pleasure to speak with you.
That is a great charm of genius. I do think
that you have an ability to sell the most unbelievable bullshit.
And and and you that you did it. You did
it with me the last time. And I don't want
to see just I was offended in any way. But
(02:50):
Jesus Christ, Malcolm, what do you think you're doing? No, No,
you're just You're this just proving to the world what
a what a fantastic wasp you are. That you and
by the way, you're probably the only wasp in his room.
Your ability to kind of like Nazi and dismissed and
explain away conflict is quite extraordinary. Let's get I've spent
(03:14):
much of my life as the only wasp in the room. Yeah.
In fact, you're it'll be on your It'll be your tombstone.
Toyoy I wrote. I wrote this piece for the New
Republic called Toy Gooy, and it was about being the
toy boy, about being the one boy in every Jewish institution.
It made everybody feel comfortable. Uh, nobody cared what I
thought about Israel. H I could I could work on Passover?
(03:39):
You know I played that role. But all right, so
what do you want to talk about? Um? Well, this
wonderful podcast of yours um and I wanted to start
with obvious questions that you're going to get it. Every
time you do any kind of media, they're gonna ask
you this question, So I thought i'd start with it. Um,
this transition from writer to podcaster? How was it? What
(04:05):
you persuaded me? This was a lot easier than it was.
You really did, which is 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 I came to the
conclusion that some stories are better told in this medium
(04:26):
than in a book form. For me anyway. Um, And
you have this great gift to be I've said this
too many times. You have this great gift of taking
ideas and giving them the qualities of actions that 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. Uh. And I'm not sure I
(04:46):
meant it is but no, but but it's it. And
it's Uh. You create the feeling of narrative even without
the conventional ingredients of a narrative. I can't do that um.
When I write what is essentially essays material, it reads
like an essay if I don't have a main character,
if I don't have a kind of drama that I'm
(05:06):
playing out. And this, this idea was naturally kind of sash.
It was a series of it's seventy 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
(05:27):
an audience through a story, even if there's not exactly
a story, even if it's even if it's not as
the materials, 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 interestingly then they all of a sudden,
you can hear the character's voices, you know, when you
put somebody in quotation marks. No matter what you do
around it, making that getting that sound off the page,
(05:50):
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. Are you saying to go
back to I order 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.
(06:12):
What did you need? So maybe should I just first
just explained what the podcast is, because it's just came
out yesterday in the first episode. So it's called Against
the Rules, and it's about referees in American life. Um,
and 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 ref's been
(06:35):
bought by one side, and then he might be very
comfortably ensconced in a rig system. But um, the there
wasn't for me. There wasn't one story I wanted to tell.
There are whole bunch of stories I wanted to tell,
and they would have felt in an in a book
like either like a separate story or a digression, a
long digression, I think, Um, And I wanted to play
(06:59):
with the argument and I wanted to play with the
subject matter. But I didn't I didn't have one person
or I didn't have you know, normally, what I have
is either either I have 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
(07:21):
do it. This. The other big difference, um is book
writing is really an individual sport. I mean, it is
just it's just you and the This is definitely it.
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, the people who were
(07:41):
Nick Brittell, who made the music, the producers that you know,
they were all intimately involved to the extent that in
a couple of cases the producers wouldn't did a couple
of the interviews. And that was having to having to
both make work with other people was I think healthy
for me, but also having to because I don't often
(08:02):
have to do it, um, but having to satisfy them
in the course of doing that was interesting. Normally I'm
just SAT's find me uh. And they were hard to
satisfy you. They were hard to please uh, And that
was that was just it was interesting to have that
friction in my life. Did you feel like pleasing them
(08:22):
entailed compromises? No, entailed me learning what the hell I
was doing. I mean that 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?
Saying that that's a simple one? But but it was.
(08:42):
Much of it was just structural. It was kind of
like like what I whether there was, it was just there.
They had a better sense than I did. I learned
pretty quickly. But they had better sense than than I
did about what someone who was just taking it in
here would tolerate from me, in the way of a
(09:05):
way of digression, in the way of uh odd structured
to story, in the way of starting something and not
coming back to it for fifteen minutes, what I had
to do to accommodate to make sure that I 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
(09:27):
more like it was also writing a book than writing
a screenplay, which I've done. It was kind of in
between all the all the original scripts were twice as
long as they needed to be, and 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 that was different, just having that kind of collaboration.
(09:49):
But the you know, I this I when I'm moving
through the world looking for things I'm going to do.
H you know, somebody will catch my eye and I'll
open a folder on it and not knowing where it
will go. When I have stacks of Manila folders beside
and shelves beside my desk, and a decade ago, two
things happened that sort of triggered this interest in ref
and I never knew what I was gonna do with
(10:10):
and the folder got thicker and thicker, but it never
emerged as a narrative. And then this medium comes along
and all of a sudden I could Oh, I had
no idea. This was something a long time in the
Do you remember what the initial trigger it was for
the interest in refereen? Yeah, yeah, yeah, there two things.
It was right after the financial crisis, and I was
I'd just been put in charge of the Albany Berkeley
(10:32):
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 eight, ten, twelve, and fourteen,
and get them into shape so they could go over
the hill and compete against Republicans, and my predecessor had
(10:53):
not done a very good job of it. Yeah, and
I went to I took it seriously. And so my
girls were playing. And the first time I started, when
I opened the file, it started with this. It was
our first tournament. It was a little place called Rona Park,
and it was it was a night game, and there
were a bunch of nine year old girls on the
(11:13):
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 at the top of the
last inning, and the Ronert 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's safe.
(11:35):
I mean, the language was just unbelievable. And their whole
fan side started screaming at the umpire. And you know,
no one on our side, none of the little girls
and our dug I had ever heard the word fuck.
And they were they were in awe. They were watching
this they'd never seen. I kind of loved it because
it was great. I loved that they could see how
grown ups actually behaved instead of how, instead of how
(11:58):
Berkeley parents after the day. 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,
and most of the people screaming at the umpire. Um
(12:19):
there was a great Berkeley moment when this voice cut
through the night and this woman screamed with horrible modeling
for our children, but beyond But except for that, it
was like, you idiot, you askhole, you you know, you're
safe out, you know. And and the umpire finally, the
coach finally through. The coach out, so you're out. But
(12:40):
it was his ballpark, so he says, okay, you can
throw me on 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 at 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 fired
(13:01):
the only umpire. So the game can't actually go on,
and she doesn't know what to do. She's actually just
because hey, 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 spoke in the position of authority.
What am? I sort of followed her out into the
parking lot and she was weeping, U and uh. I
(13:22):
went up to her and I kind of like put
my arm around it as before me too, you know,
and it was okay to kind of console in a
Biden like manner, and uh and I said, you know,
I said, you know, you know, you don't you don't
have to take that. You know, you really should go back.
And I said. It was like, is there anybody you
(13:43):
can call? And she says, yeah, there's an umpire association.
And it was it was nine o'clock in California. It
was unbelievable that there was anybody where this place was.
She gets the umpire Association 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 ended, the head of
the facility, and we'll get him fired. You go back
and finished the umpiring and she went right back in
(14:04):
and threw him out, and the game went on. But
and then on I started to watch these poor people
who were who were brought out to umpire nine year
old girls games, and they were on the on the
receiving end of constant abuse. And my first question is
why would anybody even do that job? But my second
(14:25):
reaction was why why do people behave that way towards umpires.
I've never felt that way towards umpires. Why do they
Why do people take out so much of their fury
on them? Why is that so hard that job? So
this happens that as I've finished the Big Short and
and I'm watching what's going on on Wall Street in
(14:45):
the on the back end of the financial crisis, and
one way of looking at the financial crisis was as
an umpiring problem, that refering problem. Uh. There was a
breakdown of several refering roles, but that one of the
big ones was the credit rating agencies Moodies and Standard
and Poor especially passed with refeing. The sec the securities
(15:06):
that Wall Street brings to market now totally failed. They
totally failed for a very good, simple reason. They were
being paid by the people who created the subprime mortgage bonds.
They were rating, they were on the take, they were
being paid. It's like being played by one of the players.
And this umpire briefly was flayed in public, but basically
(15:32):
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 played fairly, and she was being
(15:53):
made miserable. And the other were these umpires on Wall
Street who who were doing their job and a kind
of who had horrible incentives and were 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.
(16:13):
So I think, you know, like, why do some umpires
some umpires and positions of strength and wire some umpires
and position of weakness. First thought, what I was going
to do is write a sitcom about umpires. It just
set in the world a girl's softball. But I really
had no idea. It was gonna do with the material,
and I just started to accumulate material. And then Jacob Weisberg,
(16:34):
you're co founder of Pushkin Industries, and I are on
the hiking trail the year and a half ago when
we just started talking about this subject, and he said,
you know, it could work as a podcast. And by
the time we started, when you start thinking about the
subject and start looking, when you start looking for referees,
you see them everywhere. I mean that there was It
end up being seven episodes, but could have been fifteen.
(16:56):
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. Yeah, can I can? I ask you?
I want to go back for a second A kind
of writer early question in this file, after that experience
(17:16):
with your daughter's baseball team, how much did you like
write a big how much did you write about that evening?
I wrote a paragraph about the evening, but that's stuck
it in the file, and I put on the outside
of it um umps and uh and chased it and
I made notes to like I would check at the
(17:37):
tournament 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. Um
and I saw I'd make notes based on those conversations,
and I just I was just kind of I just
kind of Sometimes I open one of these files and
nothing goes in it. It's just umps. Stick it up
(17:58):
on the shelf. Maybe that's a subject I will pursue,
but it just seems to me. I mean, you 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 eighteen thousand people
are chanting in unison ref you suck, I mean the
(18:20):
the but there aren't eighteen thousand people on the other
side who are saying, thank you for making the calls
on my in our favor. 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 the people see in this person injustice where it
(18:42):
doesn't exist this person has this ability to generate an
outrage that's out of all proportion to UH to like
how he's behaving, and um, it's sort of like he
ends up he ends up at the center of UH.
I mean, he ends up as a character generally kind
of unexplored, one of the things that end up on
(19:04):
the cutting room floor. I interviewed Daryl Morey, who is
the the Houston Rockets Gym, who I adore, who had
lots that done, lots of studies about about referees, knew
their tendencies, knew like where home court advantage was worse
because the referees are better because referees more like they
give the home team to call. Had done all his
work on referees, and I asked him, have you ever
(19:26):
met him they ever met one of them? No, you know,
it never even occurred to me that I should actually
go meet one of these guys and talk to one
of these guys, that they were completely unexplored characters. Why,
you know, it's interesting to go back to the paradigm
you have between the Wall Street people and the Baseball
(19:46):
Little League Baseball umpires. In one case, the operating assumption
is the I can influence the rep if I try
and intimidate her, if I abuse her. In the other case,
the notion is that I simply buy them off, that
it was I I do an exaggerated form of charming them. Yes,
and I'm always wondered why those roles aren't reversed. So
(20:10):
are there NBA coaches who try to charm referees? And
are there businesses who who or business people who explicitly
try and essentially scream at the government referee? So? Um,
the answer the first question is surprisingly few. Um the
NBA players that you can't really get the players, even
(20:32):
the former players won't talk about the rest because they're
just get in trouble. Um. 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 of He thought that was an original strategy.
So the but the the the but but the answer
(20:55):
the answer in the NBA is one of the reasons
everybody's really even angrier at the refs, even though the
refs are getting better is that the refs are getting better.
They're harder. It's harder to charm and harder and impossible
to intimidate. They're holding themselves to these objective standard is
and they're judged by these objective standards and the stuff
that's going on around them. They're more and more impervious too.
Um uh. The so the second part is, are there
(21:22):
do it with browbeating? Feel like Mark Cuban was an
example the sec Yeah, uh so I think the browbeating
works in private. Uh but but but what it's so
much better if you can just buy the reff you know,
I mean that if you if you look at uh,
if you look at the way I mean the rate
(21:43):
that that was, that's such a sweet rather than going
and scream at moodies and standard and poor that you're
separate 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 come,
it's an interesting The subject got more interesting to me
(22:06):
and it became more real in the presidential election because
all because they say the two campaigns that had a
real energy about them was Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump's campaign,
and that bottom of both campaigns was the systems rigged.
That that that it was all about UH referees having
not done their job. And there was some justice to
(22:27):
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, and it was. We'll have more of my
conversation with Malcolm Gladwell at the ninety two Streety in
New York after this break. We're now back with more
(22:48):
of my conversation with Malcolm Gladwell. I wanted to compare
notes with Malcolm, who's been podcasting for a while. If
you listen closely, you'll hear a little bit about what's
to come in the next season of his show, Revisionist History.
When you when you made those initial observations about umps
umpires referees, um, did you think you were examining an
(23:11):
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 Michael's going to tell me why we've always had
this problem. But then you told me no, no, no no, no, no,
this is new for really really interesting reasons. And that
(23:33):
was the turn where you cooked me in and that
that was a non obvious turn. 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 have been around forever and that's not interesting. Actually, well,
that the refs have been abused forever. Yeah, I would
have said, oh, you know, what you're observing is something
(23:54):
the Romans did you know? I would have done that,
some ludicrous move like that. But the thing I was
genuinely so prized by the turn where we learn it's
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 it's it's it's new ish
in that the NBA, when Adam Silver became commissioner, he
(24:20):
backup for the first episode is about the refs, about
an actual sports ref The only episode in the series
it's about sports is the first is the first episode,
and it's about it professional basketball refs um And what
was interesting to me about that subject is if you,
(24:41):
I mean, I think it's just just kind of generally
true sports, combination of technology and unaware and transparency is
forcing all the umpire and the refereeing to get better. Um.
And you would think that would cause everybody to appreciate
the refs more or at least protest them less. Uh,
But that's not happening, um, especially not happening in basketball.
(25:04):
It's got from the point of view the refs, it's
getting worse and worse. It's sort of like more likely
to need a bodyguard hard to the arena, more likely
to have really ugly things said 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 refereing is clearly
more objectively accurate. And the thing that do you remember
(25:31):
Kurt Schilling to pitch up. So there was a moment
which told you what kind of why objective refereing 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
(25:51):
zone is. And up to the point they introduced these machines,
the strike zone is entirely a subjective matter. What the
umpire thinks is a strike and there's no real way
to check him. 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.
(26:14):
So there's been this in decades since they've introduced those machines.
There's been in pressure on these umpires to conform to
the stint, to the machines accuracy and the way. 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
(26:38):
call the game in response to the machine, meaning they
became more accurate. You think everybody would think that was
a good thing. Kurt Schilling came out of a ball
game early when he was a pitcher. I can't remember
who was pitching for the time. He was in the
Red Sex. I think he might have been with the Diamondbacks.
Furious because it's performance he had not performed well, went
into the dugout grabbed a bat and went and destroyed
(27:01):
the pitch track machine and they find him fifty thousand
dollars 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
(27:25):
going on in basketball. And what's happening in basketball is
they've tried to introduce a similar spirit of objectivity, and
they've done it in many different ways. They have they've
built this five years ago, if for fifteen million dollars,
they built this replay center in Secaucus, New Jersey, which
is the site of the first episode of the podcast,
(27:45):
fifteen million dollars to run direct fiber optic cables to
every basketball NBA basketball arena in the each arena there
I don't know a dozen cameras anyway, trying to get
every angle on the court. And this room in Secaucus
is one hundred and ten television screens showing the all
(28:09):
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
(28:31):
floor in case the refs make mistakes. And the refs
themselves are now graded and they're showing their mistakes after
the game. They have 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 hiring process
(28:51):
is more professional. It's just like Gotten used to be
an all boys network. Like half a dozen of the
refs twenty five years ago came with the same high school.
It was just a bunch of kind of chubby white guys,
mainly Catholic Philly from film Philly. That's right. And now
you've got they've broaden out that, they've broadened out the
town search. They got to get in shape. They used
to be fat, right, everybody else in America is getting
(29:14):
fatter and the rests are getting better shaped. Uh, Now
they're buff and and and they're training. They're trained, they're
being taught about all their biases, the kind of biases
that kind of in Taversky 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've
taught and they've taught to correct for all this stuff.
How could it be anything but better? But getting better
(29:35):
does not mean making is not making people happy, it's
inflaming that. 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
(29:56):
JumboTron that a mistake was made or might have been made,
and they can then and then they can captured on
their phones, and they can tweet it, and they have
a they have material for outrage. And it's not just
the fans, the players and so the sense of grievance,
(30:17):
even though the reason for grievance is clearly declining. The
reasons for grievance. It is clearly declining. Um, the feelings
of grievance are going through the roof. So it's becoming
more fair on a basketball court, but people feel it's
less fair. Yeah, but I don't think you could fix
it by making the referees even worse than they are, well,
they used to be. You know, remember the phrase that
(30:39):
was common in basketball, the makeup call. Yeah, that's a
blogny like it. You know that it presumes you know
you made a mistake. If you know you made a mistake,
then don't make it u no, no, no no, no, no,
wait a minute, wait a minute. Whatever. The notion of
the makeup call was to address precisely the problem you're
talking about. That other everybody's that some team is outraged.
And then so the reason that you don't get quite
(31:00):
as outraged as you I'm talking about in the past,
the old system. You think you think that it is,
you think you know the ref as a human being,
and you say, oh, he will understand that he blew
that 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, so making the right which increasingly are there.
(31:23):
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
because 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
(31:44):
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're part of like what makes the get if the
game just went smoothly from beginning to end. Or you
don't want referee era. It's not a positive thing to
(32:07):
have referee era. It's you to minimize it. You can
still have a glorious narrative on in any kind of
conscious without a referee. I think the messiness of the
sport is one of the things that you think. You
think the more referee the better. No, No, I'm saying
that there that we operated for many years around a
(32:28):
narrative about sports that included the notion of refereere 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 we're I think that's right. I think that's true.
That's partly true, but 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 era and replay
(32:49):
it and focus on it and organize around it in
ways they couldn't before. Another is that the nature of
the improvement of the refereeing is it's removing privilege from
people who can naturally protest the loudest, the stars, and
they're used to getting the calls, and they're not get
they can't get the calls in the same way. It's also,
(33:09):
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 the source of home court advantage was referee era.
It was like the referees trying to tilt 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 home court. Um,
(33:32):
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 and greater
sense that there's no such thing as neutrality. That there's
like people are biased. We are we you know. That's
even though in the case of referees the opposite is true.
They are now less biased. They are less there, even
(33:53):
though they're there and they're they've been made aware of
their biases every which way and try to work against them. Um, everybody,
it's in the air that, uh, you know, a white
guy won't be fair. It's fair to a black guy,
is to a white guy. It's in the air that
the condom and diversky stuff that people make those kind
of mistakes. It's in the air that they are they
(34:15):
favor the home home team, or they favor stars, So
that there is even as there's a less reason for
cynicism about what's going on inside the mind of a
professional NBA referee. There's more awareness, awareness of the reasons
for cynicism about people's judgment, referee judgment generally. That I mean,
(34:36):
one of the takeaways from the common Diversky stuff is
that nobody's like nobody's judgments. You know, everybody's judgments is
systematically flawed. It was interesting, is the Yes, it is
the process of investigating. What the process of investigating bias
does is more than any thing, alert us to the
uncomfortable fact that there was a lot of bias there
(34:57):
that we didn't even think about. That's right, we had
no idea just how unfair at all used to be.
I was that. This reminds me yesterday I was for
one of my podcast episodes. I'm hanging out with the
folks who make the L set, who construct the L set, Oh,
and they do these biased tests. So they have practice questions,
which do you all take when you take the L
set is one set that's all practice questions, and they
(35:18):
look to see whether different groups have different patterns of
answering questions correctly, which is something I would never have
thought about. So there was a question they showed me,
and it's just this random question about some literary figure
in the seventeenth century and C, which is the wrong answer.
All the smartest women taken the test thought was the
(35:39):
correct answer, Like fifty percent of them got it, said
it was C and it wasn't c. D which is
the right answer, was overwhelmingly the male choice fifty percent
of the band. So here's a question that has so
there's patterns in the errors in the eras, there's a
massive pattern in the air, and there's nothing obvious. And
if they find the pattern in the air, or do
(36:00):
they think there's something wrong with the question, they throw
the question out. And I said them, well, what is
it about this totally anadine question about seventeenth century litter
that caused all these really smart female test takers to
answer see? And they're like, no idea. I thought, no clue.
It just doesn't work like that process. The minute I
(36:22):
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 an intelligence test. So you know,
you and I both made this turn into this new medium,
your fears ahead of me. How have you found what
do you find the differences are from writing this prose
on the page. Well, it's funny, I've gone in the
(36:46):
opposite because I don't write books that are character driven
as much. 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 ask I don't I you know,
(37:06):
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, like I you know, and you can
capture interactions like there's in one of my episodes for
next season. I have these two women who are sisters
who wrote a book together, a really good work of history,
(37:28):
largely so they can hang out with each other. This
one has been one is like seventy one is sixty five,
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 have an episode
at the second episode which you actually edited. Um, it's
(37:50):
about how hard it is to create a referee, even
when you clearly need a referee, and it's about the
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But we have a woman who
is who is just crushed by student Oh my god,
and to the point where she's a She is a
public school teacher who with a with a couple of
little kids, whom whose student loan servicer has basically deceived
(38:11):
her from from even knowing really about for years, for
years knowing about a program that Congress created to relieve
her 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 at night that five of her
teeth have fallen out, and she's now won't smile. And
if if I told the story, just if I just
(38:34):
told the story, you might think I've had my thumb
on the scale. You wouldn't quite believe it, Like you
think I was exaggerating. But when she just tells it straight,
you're weeping, I mean, 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
(38:55):
would have to try to persuade the reader of uh
and I don't just you just let her speak and
it's magnificent, incredibly moving. What can't you do in the
podcast form? So talk about that story? Did you where?
There must be limitations. I can't do things you don't
have tape off. That's the that's the problem. You got
to go out and interview. You have to have the thing.
(39:17):
If if it's you just talking, it's far less less
persuasive than if you've got some someone else you you know,
it's it's um so that it's it's a constraint. That's
worse with TV when you have to have the pictures.
But you can only do so much with your own
(39:37):
words in this in the narrative form, I think, um so,
that's your constrained there, uh um But what can't you do?
Like what stories? When it gets complicated? Yes, it gets hard.
I could not. So it's hard. It was hard, very
hard to explain. I didn't even really explain, but I
(39:59):
tried to explain a collateralized debt obligation in the big
short it's the most complicated thing I've ever tried to
explain to anybody and uh, I can't do that. That's
not possible in a podcast. You couldn't do it in
a podcast. Uh, you just you just couldn't. I mean
people would have collision that people listening as they're driving
would be having crashes on the highway and you you
you um so because the reader can go back or
(40:24):
the reader can get slow down, the reader can the
reader can can paste themselves through an explanation. Um. What
always breaks my heart is where you finally find the
person who you think can explain the thing it's going
to give you tape, and then they're boring, which in
a book it doesn't matter, right in a book, like
I feel like that's that is one of your geniuses
(40:46):
as a writer is you have clearly in your life
made lots supporting people seem really fascinating. But so I
would put it in so I'd put it in a
different way. You're absolutely right that that people's voices kill
them as characters. Um that you you, you're, you're, You're
talking to them for five minutes and you think that
(41:08):
voice just won't works. It's not gonna work. You know,
there are people in this world. Who I mean, it's
an amazing it's almost a superpower. Who have an ability
to walk into a room and kill all interest in
the room. I mean that 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
(41:30):
reels like everybody's gasping for air. There's no oxygen in there.
And it was just incredibly dull, and it was dullless
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,
(41:51):
I could make my uncle really great in print, but
but I could not the minute the minute someone heard
him speak, you'd lose. They wouldn't believe anything you said
about him, if you know what. 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
(42:12):
and podcast interview mode is quite different than what you
really want to do when you're interviewing someone on a
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 ze how this works. Did you walk me through?
(42:36):
You always use that walk me through. You never say
walk me through in the podcast interview. What you say
is what about like imagine this? And then they at
a certain point they kind of get it. They realize that, oh,
which is like, it's play, It's play, right, Yeah, that's
really true, That's really true. I've had this once with
this love this interview for this one of my podcasts
(42:58):
with this guy who was a OBGA and researcher in Philadelphia,
and he gets he's in the weeds on some new
kind of contraceptive, deep in the weeds, and I realized, no,
this is usable. 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,
(43:19):
wait a minute, this thing you're talking about, why is
that a contraceptive. He goes, oh, it's not a contraceptive.
And he goes on this long, insanely interesting totally hypothetical
thing about oh, I wouldn't calling a contraceptive, I called
something else. And he gives 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,
this is absolutely right. And we have an episode of
(43:42):
three is about refs in the culture, like language refs,
people people who write who are usage panel members and
dictionaries who they've all been let go, and the people
who used to write kind of usage manuals. And I
was we were I was talking to a guy named
Brian Garner who's one of the characters in the in
(44:03):
the episode, and he's he's the author of a book
called uh Garner's Modern English Usage. I think that's what
it's called. It's twelve hundred pages. It's actually riveting. But
nobody but at Barnes and Noble told him a decade
ago it's a defunct category. All of his heroes, their
books sold millions of copies. There were times where there
(44:23):
was a time when when the language ref occupied occupied
a bigger role than he does now. Now now the
crowd refs the language in and nobody wants to hear
from the snood um, but he's a great snood. And
he was just talking about like where are the culture
is gone, and how he's daily outraged by things, uh,
(44:47):
that he just can't believe that we're we're becoming this.
And he said, I got a letter from my bank.
It said dear mister 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.
(45:08):
It says dear mister Garner, semicolon. And he says it's
either a colon or a comma. And the bank manager said, um,
could you write us a letter about that? And he said,
so I wrote them a letter and I did, you've
come to the right place, and 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
(45:30):
a semicolon after dear mister Garner. And they they they
wrote him back and said, um, we're keeping the semicolon.
And and he called him, he said, how he's and
now he's just off. I could not. I didn't need
to be there anymore. Right, He's just he's like in
his own world this is an outrage, uh, and he's
(45:51):
for him it's genocide. I mean, that's that's that he's
a code read. There's a there's a certain uh quality
of delight that that's that's what we're talking about then,
Only it's conversational delight. You don't 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 in some unexpected direction and you sort of
(46:14):
understand that something fabuless is coming down the pike. You're
kind of waiting for it, and they sort of take
on that's what you're and 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 understand that they've been given life, but they're
playing a game with you. Yes. Yeah. Stay with us
(46:34):
for some more conversational delight with Malcolm Gladwell. We're back
with more of me and Malcolm Gladwell in conversation at
the ninety two Street why his new company, Pushkin Industries
is the production house behind Against the Rules, And I
(46:57):
couldn't help but tease him a little bit about something.
The crew there told me. It's funny that 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. Nonsense, they're you know what they are.
(47:17):
I know they're out there, they're they are these they're purists,
right they there. They come from NPR, which is like
the cathedral on the Hill 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
(47:40):
not the real world I'm living in. I'm not I'm
not in the monastery. I'm no. So I don't listen
to them, and they don't listen to you. Wait. Um,
so we have questions, We have questions. Um, we actually
we have quite a lot of time. Um when I
had some other Um, oh, I want to talk to
(48:02):
you about uh, falling in love. Um it's we talked
ab us a little bit. I you're talking about about
this because you're 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 where you're having many voices.
(48:23):
Does that impair your Are we going to 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 with? You have people to fall
in love with, it's just they're they're they're in a
single episode. I just don't live with them for the
(48:45):
whole series. Yeah, I fell in love with Alex Cogan.
Alex Cogan is he was the academic responsible for the
work that supposedly allowed Cambridge Analytica to get Donald Trump elected. Yeah,
and in fact it's all bullshit. In his work was useless.
(49:06):
This real story there is that it's amazing that Cambridge
analytic ha persuaded anybody they knew anything that was useful. Hustle.
It's a hustle. It's a hustle, right, yes, and every
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 three. This
is actually part of episode three. So it's what's the
(49:28):
what's the largest story. The largest story is the kline
of kind of these culture resting. So it's it's language refs,
it's um budgsman, it's referees in the newsroom. So how
this story ever got to the front page of the
New York Times is part of it. But but he's
built up as the main character of the thing, and
in a very similar way to a character that you
(49:51):
would fall in love with it in a magazine piece. Um,
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 you should fall in
love with him. Um, you've Ken Feinberg, don't you showing up?
How many people here? Uh, you can't really see it.
(50:12):
I wonder how many people heren know who Ken Feinberg is.
Ken Feinberg should be a household name. Ken Feinberg was
an ordinary lawyer when he was brought in in the
early eighties to try to resolve the dispute between Vietnam
veterans and the chemical companies that made agent Orange, and
(50:33):
Vietnam veterans had, without a whole lot of evidence, had
brought a suit saying that that this this chemical that
was spread across the jungles of Vietnam was responsible for
all these health problems that they were having. And the
case had lingered in the courts for I don't know
seven or eight years, and judges had despaired of resolving it,
(50:54):
and a judge asked this young lawyer, Ken Feinberg, to
see if he could negotiate outside of the court a
solution resolution to the between the vets and the companies.
And six weeks he had the thing done, and he
was on the front page of every newspaper in the country,
and his career then just went. He all of a sudden,
(51:16):
he became America's referee. So he's he's brought in to
adjudicate these disputes. And um, the question was like two questions,
Like what are we gonna do when he dies? Because
he seems to be brought in. I mean, he's like
he's like the Forrest Gump of of of American tragedy
and and but the second it is like what what
(51:36):
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. Uh
but but but you but his theory of his wife's
theory you can hear kind of proven just in the
(51:59):
sound of his voice. Oh voice, it is. It's unbelievable.
So so 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 part. It's the righteousness in the voice.
It's the it's a Boston accent, like you cannot believe.
And so the episode opens with the passage Um in
(52:23):
the Bible, Solomon resolving the dispute between the two women,
each of whom is claiming the baby is hers, and
Solomon just about to cut the baby in two, and um,
Feinberg's voices. So we were gonna have an actor read that.
We had the Fiers voice was so we just had
Feinberg read the Bible, and it was like it felt
like God was reading the Bible. Uh. And so you
(52:46):
the the it's so this form, you know, this 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 know you found when you write it. No
matter how conversational your writing style is, it is not
(53:08):
conversational that how people talk is so different from how
any writer writes. That you have to learn how to
write your own dialogue. That is so kind of interesting. Anyway,
thanks for doing this, Michael, thank you. Pleasure being with
you again. Yes, thanks for listening to this live bonus
(53:35):
episode of Against the Rules. I want to thank especially
Malcolm Gladwell and his team at Pushkin Industries and the
ninety two Street Why for hosting our conversation. I'm off
now to my secret hiding place. We'll try to figure
out how to keep you entertained next year. You can
follow Pushkin Pods on social media if you want to
(53:56):
keep track of when I'm back on the feed. I
hope it's soon. I don't know each and every one
of you, but you've been a great audience, the best
a writer could ask for.
Pushkin. Hi there, it's Michael Lewis here. You probably know
that Against the Rules is the first podcast that I've
ever done, and it probably shows. So I appreciate all
of you first sticking with it. The first season's over,
but we want to give you something a little extra
as a token of appreciation. The writer, Malcolm Gladwell, and
(00:40):
I had a conversation back in April of twenty nineteen,
when Against the Rules had just launched. We met in
front of a live audience at the ninety two Street Why,
which is this great center of culture and Jewish life
on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. We had a
big crowd and the whole thing was a lot of
fun to do, and we talked about how I got
(01:00):
interested in not just podcasting, but the quandary of referees
in American life. We want to give you a little
peak behind the curtain of producing this show, and also
a glimpse of the next season of Malcolm's podcast, Revisionist History.
(01:21):
Yeah right, thank you, Thank you Malcolm for doing this.
Thank you. My apologies to the audience. I'm the reason
this is late. I was on subway, yep that I
feel like no further explanations needed. Michael, I feel like
every time you do some new project, do you trot
(01:44):
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 going to have to do it in September. Apparently, yeah,
you might have to do it in September. Last time
we were on the stage, 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
(02:05):
here tonight sent me emails saying chiding me from my
I didn't add it. I you know, I pursued particular
lines of uncomfortable inquiry with too much vigor. So I'm
gonna very not I'm gonna be nice this evening. Nasty
Malcolms didn't put aside, and we're just gonna get nice. Malcolm. Um,
let's talk about uh. Just for the record, I don't
(02:29):
remember any of that well you, but that's that. That
is I really don't remember any of that. That is
your great charm is a pleasure to speak with you.
That is a great charm of genius. I do think
that you have an ability to sell the most unbelievable bullshit.
And and and you that you did it. You did
it with me the last time. And I don't want
to see just I was offended in any way. But
(02:50):
Jesus Christ, Malcolm, what do you think you're doing? No, No,
you're just You're this just proving to the world what
a what a fantastic wasp you are. That you and
by the way, you're probably the only wasp in his room.
Your ability to kind of like Nazi and dismissed and
explain away conflict is quite extraordinary. Let's get I've spent
(03:14):
much of my life as the only wasp in the room. Yeah.
In fact, you're it'll be on your It'll be your tombstone.
Toyoy I wrote. I wrote this piece for the New
Republic called Toy Gooy, and it was about being the
toy boy, about being the one boy in every Jewish institution.
It made everybody feel comfortable. Uh, nobody cared what I
thought about Israel. H I could I could work on Passover?
(03:39):
You know I played that role. But all right, so
what do you want to talk about? Um? Well, this
wonderful podcast of yours um and I wanted to start
with obvious questions that you're going to get it. Every
time you do any kind of media, they're gonna ask
you this question, So I thought i'd start with it. Um,
this transition from writer to podcaster? How was it? What
(04:05):
you persuaded me? This was a lot easier than it was.
You really did, which is 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 I came to the
conclusion that some stories are better told in this medium
(04:26):
than in a book form. For me anyway. Um, And
you have this great gift to be I've said this
too many times. You have this great gift of taking
ideas and giving them the qualities of actions that 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. Uh. And I'm not sure I
(04:46):
meant it is but no, but but it's it. And
it's Uh. You create the feeling of narrative even without
the conventional ingredients of a narrative. I can't do that um.
When I write what is essentially essays material, it reads
like an essay if I don't have a main character,
if I don't have a kind of drama that I'm
(05:06):
playing out. And this, this idea was naturally kind of sash.
It was a series of it's seventy 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
(05:27):
an audience through a story, even if there's not exactly
a story, even if it's even if it's not as
the materials, 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 interestingly then they all of a sudden,
you can hear the character's voices, you know, when you
put somebody in quotation marks. No matter what you do
around it, making that getting that sound off the page,
(05:50):
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. Are you saying to go
back to I order 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.
(06:12):
What did you need? So maybe should I just first
just explained what the podcast is, because it's just came
out yesterday in the first episode. So it's called Against
the Rules, and it's about referees in American life. Um,
and 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 ref's been
(06:35):
bought by one side, and then he might be very
comfortably ensconced in a rig system. But um, the there
wasn't for me. There wasn't one story I wanted to tell.
There are whole bunch of stories I wanted to tell,
and they would have felt in an in a book
like either like a separate story or a digression, a
long digression, I think, Um, And I wanted to play
(06:59):
with the argument and I wanted to play with the
subject matter. But I didn't I didn't have one person
or I didn't have you know, normally, what I have
is either either I have 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
(07:21):
do it. This. The other big difference, um is book
writing is really an individual sport. I mean, it is
just it's just you and the This is definitely it.
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, the people who were
(07:41):
Nick Brittell, who made the music, the producers that you know,
they were all intimately involved to the extent that in
a couple of cases the producers wouldn't did a couple
of the interviews. And that was having to having to
both make work with other people was I think healthy
for me, but also having to because I don't often
(08:02):
have to do it, um, but having to satisfy them
in the course of doing that was interesting. Normally I'm
just SAT's find me uh. And they were hard to
satisfy you. They were hard to please uh, And that
was that was just it was interesting to have that
friction in my life. Did you feel like pleasing them
(08:22):
entailed compromises? No, entailed me learning what the hell I
was doing. I mean that 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?
Saying that that's a simple one? But but it was.
(08:42):
Much of it was just structural. It was kind of
like like what I whether there was, it was just there.
They had a better sense than I did. I learned
pretty quickly. But they had better sense than than I
did about what someone who was just taking it in
here would tolerate from me, in the way of a
(09:05):
way of digression, in the way of uh odd structured
to story, in the way of starting something and not
coming back to it for fifteen minutes, what I had
to do to accommodate to make sure that I 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
(09:27):
more like it was also writing a book than writing
a screenplay, which I've done. It was kind of in
between all the all the original scripts were twice as
long as they needed to be, and 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 that was different, just having that kind of collaboration.
(09:49):
But the you know, I this I when I'm moving
through the world looking for things I'm going to do.
H you know, somebody will catch my eye and I'll
open a folder on it and not knowing where it
will go. When I have stacks of Manila folders beside
and shelves beside my desk, and a decade ago, two
things happened that sort of triggered this interest in ref
and I never knew what I was gonna do with
(10:10):
and the folder got thicker and thicker, but it never
emerged as a narrative. And then this medium comes along
and all of a sudden I could Oh, I had
no idea. This was something a long time in the
Do you remember what the initial trigger it was for
the interest in refereen? Yeah, yeah, yeah, there two things.
It was right after the financial crisis, and I was
I'd just been put in charge of the Albany Berkeley
(10:32):
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 eight, ten, twelve, and fourteen,
and get them into shape so they could go over
the hill and compete against Republicans, and my predecessor had
(10:53):
not done a very good job of it. Yeah, and
I went to I took it seriously. And so my
girls were playing. And the first time I started, when
I opened the file, it started with this. It was
our first tournament. It was a little place called Rona Park,
and it was it was a night game, and there
were a bunch of nine year old girls on the
(11:13):
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 at the top of the
last inning, and the Ronert 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's safe.
(11:35):
I mean, the language was just unbelievable. And their whole
fan side started screaming at the umpire. And you know,
no one on our side, none of the little girls
and our dug I had ever heard the word fuck.
And they were they were in awe. They were watching
this they'd never seen. I kind of loved it because
it was great. I loved that they could see how
grown ups actually behaved instead of how, instead of how
(11:58):
Berkeley parents after the day. 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,
and most of the people screaming at the umpire. Um
(12:19):
there was a great Berkeley moment when this voice cut
through the night and this woman screamed with horrible modeling
for our children, but beyond But except for that, it
was like, you idiot, you askhole, you you know, you're
safe out, you know. And and the umpire finally, the
coach finally through. The coach out, so you're out. But
(12:40):
it was his ballpark, so he says, okay, you can
throw me on 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 at 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 fired
(13:01):
the only umpire. So the game can't actually go on,
and she doesn't know what to do. She's actually just
because hey, 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 spoke in the position of authority.
What am? I sort of followed her out into the
parking lot and she was weeping, U and uh. I
(13:22):
went up to her and I kind of like put
my arm around it as before me too, you know,
and it was okay to kind of console in a
Biden like manner, and uh and I said, you know,
I said, you know, you know, you don't you don't
have to take that. You know, you really should go back.
And I said. It was like, is there anybody you
(13:43):
can call? And she says, yeah, there's an umpire association.
And it was it was nine o'clock in California. It
was unbelievable that there was anybody where this place was.
She gets the umpire Association 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 ended, the head of
the facility, and we'll get him fired. You go back
and finished the umpiring and she went right back in
(14:04):
and threw him out, and the game went on. But
and then on I started to watch these poor people
who were who were brought out to umpire nine year
old girls games, and they were on the on the
receiving end of constant abuse. And my first question is
why would anybody even do that job? But my second
(14:25):
reaction was why why do people behave that way towards umpires.
I've never felt that way towards umpires. Why do they
Why do people take out so much of their fury
on them? Why is that so hard that job? So
this happens that as I've finished the Big Short and
and I'm watching what's going on on Wall Street in
(14:45):
the on the back end of the financial crisis, and
one way of looking at the financial crisis was as
an umpiring problem, that refering problem. Uh. There was a
breakdown of several refering roles, but that one of the
big ones was the credit rating agencies Moodies and Standard
and Poor especially passed with refeing. The sec the securities
(15:06):
that Wall Street brings to market now totally failed. They
totally failed for a very good, simple reason. They were
being paid by the people who created the subprime mortgage bonds.
They were rating, they were on the take, they were
being paid. It's like being played by one of the players.
And this umpire briefly was flayed in public, but basically
(15:32):
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 played fairly, and she was being
(15:53):
made miserable. And the other were these umpires on Wall
Street who who were doing their job and a kind
of who had horrible incentives and were 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.
(16:13):
So I think, you know, like, why do some umpires
some umpires and positions of strength and wire some umpires
and position of weakness. First thought, what I was going
to do is write a sitcom about umpires. It just
set in the world a girl's softball. But I really
had no idea. It was gonna do with the material,
and I just started to accumulate material. And then Jacob Weisberg,
(16:34):
you're co founder of Pushkin Industries, and I are on
the hiking trail the year and a half ago when
we just started talking about this subject, and he said,
you know, it could work as a podcast. And by
the time we started, when you start thinking about the
subject and start looking, when you start looking for referees,
you see them everywhere. I mean that there was It
end up being seven episodes, but could have been fifteen.
(16:56):
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. Yeah, can I can? I ask you?
I want to go back for a second A kind
of writer early question in this file, after that experience
(17:16):
with your daughter's baseball team, how much did you like
write a big how much did you write about that evening?
I wrote a paragraph about the evening, but that's stuck
it in the file, and I put on the outside
of it um umps and uh and chased it and
I made notes to like I would check at the
(17:37):
tournament 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. Um
and I saw I'd make notes based on those conversations,
and I just I was just kind of I just
kind of Sometimes I open one of these files and
nothing goes in it. It's just umps. Stick it up
(17:58):
on the shelf. Maybe that's a subject I will pursue,
but it just seems to me. I mean, you 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 eighteen thousand people
are chanting in unison ref you suck, I mean the
(18:20):
the but there aren't eighteen thousand people on the other
side who are saying, thank you for making the calls
on my in our favor. 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 the people see in this person injustice where it
(18:42):
doesn't exist this person has this ability to generate an
outrage that's out of all proportion to UH to like
how he's behaving, and um, it's sort of like he
ends up he ends up at the center of UH.
I mean, he ends up as a character generally kind
of unexplored, one of the things that end up on
(19:04):
the cutting room floor. I interviewed Daryl Morey, who is
the the Houston Rockets Gym, who I adore, who had
lots that done, lots of studies about about referees, knew
their tendencies, knew like where home court advantage was worse
because the referees are better because referees more like they
give the home team to call. Had done all his
work on referees, and I asked him, have you ever
(19:26):
met him they ever met one of them? No, you know,
it never even occurred to me that I should actually
go meet one of these guys and talk to one
of these guys, that they were completely unexplored characters. Why,
you know, it's interesting to go back to the paradigm
you have between the Wall Street people and the Baseball
(19:46):
Little League Baseball umpires. In one case, the operating assumption
is the I can influence the rep if I try
and intimidate her, if I abuse her. In the other case,
the notion is that I simply buy them off, that
it was I I do an exaggerated form of charming them. Yes,
and I'm always wondered why those roles aren't reversed. So
(20:10):
are there NBA coaches who try to charm referees? And
are there businesses who who or business people who explicitly
try and essentially scream at the government referee? So? Um,
the answer the first question is surprisingly few. Um the
NBA players that you can't really get the players, even
(20:32):
the former players won't talk about the rest because they're
just get in trouble. Um. 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 of He thought that was an original strategy.
So the but the the the but but the answer
(20:55):
the answer in the NBA is one of the reasons
everybody's really even angrier at the refs, even though the
refs are getting better is that the refs are getting better.
They're harder. It's harder to charm and harder and impossible
to intimidate. They're holding themselves to these objective standard is
and they're judged by these objective standards and the stuff
that's going on around them. They're more and more impervious too.
Um uh. The so the second part is, are there
(21:22):
do it with browbeating? Feel like Mark Cuban was an
example the sec Yeah, uh so I think the browbeating
works in private. Uh but but but what it's so
much better if you can just buy the reff you know,
I mean that if you if you look at uh,
if you look at the way I mean the rate
(21:43):
that that was, that's such a sweet rather than going
and scream at moodies and standard and poor that you're
separate 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 come,
it's an interesting The subject got more interesting to me
(22:06):
and it became more real in the presidential election because
all because they say the two campaigns that had a
real energy about them was Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump's campaign,
and that bottom of both campaigns was the systems rigged.
That that that it was all about UH referees having
not done their job. And there was some justice to
(22:27):
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, and it was. We'll have more of my
conversation with Malcolm Gladwell at the ninety two Streety in
New York after this break. We're now back with more
(22:48):
of my conversation with Malcolm Gladwell. I wanted to compare
notes with Malcolm, who's been podcasting for a while. If
you listen closely, you'll hear a little bit about what's
to come in the next season of his show, Revisionist History.
When you when you made those initial observations about umps
umpires referees, um, did you think you were examining an
(23:11):
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 Michael's going to tell me why we've always had
this problem. But then you told me no, no, no no, no, no,
this is new for really really interesting reasons. And that
(23:33):
was the turn where you cooked me in and that
that was a non obvious turn. 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 have been around forever and that's not interesting. Actually, well,
that the refs have been abused forever. Yeah, I would
have said, oh, you know, what you're observing is something
(23:54):
the Romans did you know? I would have done that,
some ludicrous move like that. But the thing I was
genuinely so prized by the turn where we learn it's
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 it's it's it's new ish
in that the NBA, when Adam Silver became commissioner, he
(24:20):
backup for the first episode is about the refs, about
an actual sports ref The only episode in the series
it's about sports is the first is the first episode,
and it's about it professional basketball refs um And what
was interesting to me about that subject is if you,
(24:41):
I mean, I think it's just just kind of generally
true sports, combination of technology and unaware and transparency is
forcing all the umpire and the refereeing to get better. Um.
And you would think that would cause everybody to appreciate
the refs more or at least protest them less. Uh,
But that's not happening, um, especially not happening in basketball.
(25:04):
It's got from the point of view the refs, it's
getting worse and worse. It's sort of like more likely
to need a bodyguard hard to the arena, more likely
to have really ugly things said 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 refereing is clearly
more objectively accurate. And the thing that do you remember
(25:31):
Kurt Schilling to pitch up. So there was a moment
which told you what kind of why objective refereing 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
(25:51):
zone is. And up to the point they introduced these machines,
the strike zone is entirely a subjective matter. What the
umpire thinks is a strike and there's no real way
to check him. 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.
(26:14):
So there's been this in decades since they've introduced those machines.
There's been in pressure on these umpires to conform to
the stint, to the machines accuracy and the way. 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
(26:38):
call the game in response to the machine, meaning they
became more accurate. You think everybody would think that was
a good thing. Kurt Schilling came out of a ball
game early when he was a pitcher. I can't remember
who was pitching for the time. He was in the
Red Sex. I think he might have been with the Diamondbacks.
Furious because it's performance he had not performed well, went
into the dugout grabbed a bat and went and destroyed
(27:01):
the pitch track machine and they find him fifty thousand
dollars 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
(27:25):
going on in basketball. And what's happening in basketball is
they've tried to introduce a similar spirit of objectivity, and
they've done it in many different ways. They have they've
built this five years ago, if for fifteen million dollars,
they built this replay center in Secaucus, New Jersey, which
is the site of the first episode of the podcast,
(27:45):
fifteen million dollars to run direct fiber optic cables to
every basketball NBA basketball arena in the each arena there
I don't know a dozen cameras anyway, trying to get
every angle on the court. And this room in Secaucus
is one hundred and ten television screens showing the all
(28:09):
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
(28:31):
floor in case the refs make mistakes. And the refs
themselves are now graded and they're showing their mistakes after
the game. They have 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 hiring process
(28:51):
is more professional. It's just like Gotten used to be
an all boys network. Like half a dozen of the
refs twenty five years ago came with the same high school.
It was just a bunch of kind of chubby white guys,
mainly Catholic Philly from film Philly. That's right. And now
you've got they've broaden out that, they've broadened out the
town search. They got to get in shape. They used
to be fat, right, everybody else in America is getting
(29:14):
fatter and the rests are getting better shaped. Uh, Now
they're buff and and and they're training. They're trained, they're
being taught about all their biases, the kind of biases
that kind of in Taversky 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've
taught and they've taught to correct for all this stuff.
How could it be anything but better? But getting better
(29:35):
does not mean making is not making people happy, it's
inflaming that. 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
(29:56):
JumboTron that a mistake was made or might have been made,
and they can then and then they can captured on
their phones, and they can tweet it, and they have
a they have material for outrage. And it's not just
the fans, the players and so the sense of grievance,
(30:17):
even though the reason for grievance is clearly declining. The
reasons for grievance. It is clearly declining. Um, the feelings
of grievance are going through the roof. So it's becoming
more fair on a basketball court, but people feel it's
less fair. Yeah, but I don't think you could fix
it by making the referees even worse than they are, well,
they used to be. You know, remember the phrase that
(30:39):
was common in basketball, the makeup call. Yeah, that's a
blogny like it. You know that it presumes you know
you made a mistake. If you know you made a mistake,
then don't make it u no, no, no no, no, no,
wait a minute, wait a minute. Whatever. The notion of
the makeup call was to address precisely the problem you're
talking about. That other everybody's that some team is outraged.
And then so the reason that you don't get quite
(31:00):
as outraged as you I'm talking about in the past,
the old system. You think you think that it is,
you think you know the ref as a human being,
and you say, oh, he will understand that he blew
that 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, so making the right which increasingly are there.
(31:23):
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
because 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
(31:44):
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're part of like what makes the get if the
game just went smoothly from beginning to end. Or you
don't want referee era. It's not a positive thing to
(32:07):
have referee era. It's you to minimize it. You can
still have a glorious narrative on in any kind of
conscious without a referee. I think the messiness of the
sport is one of the things that you think. You
think the more referee the better. No, No, I'm saying
that there that we operated for many years around a
(32:28):
narrative about sports that included the notion of refereere 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 we're I think that's right. I think that's true.
That's partly true, but 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 era and replay
(32:49):
it and focus on it and organize around it in
ways they couldn't before. Another is that the nature of
the improvement of the refereeing is it's removing privilege from
people who can naturally protest the loudest, the stars, and
they're used to getting the calls, and they're not get
they can't get the calls in the same way. It's also,
(33:09):
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 the source of home court advantage was referee era.
It was like the referees trying to tilt 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 home court. Um,
(33:32):
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 and greater
sense that there's no such thing as neutrality. That there's
like people are biased. We are we you know. That's
even though in the case of referees the opposite is true.
They are now less biased. They are less there, even
(33:53):
though they're there and they're they've been made aware of
their biases every which way and try to work against them. Um, everybody,
it's in the air that, uh, you know, a white
guy won't be fair. It's fair to a black guy,
is to a white guy. It's in the air that
the condom and diversky stuff that people make those kind
of mistakes. It's in the air that they are they
(34:15):
favor the home home team, or they favor stars, So
that there is even as there's a less reason for
cynicism about what's going on inside the mind of a
professional NBA referee. There's more awareness, awareness of the reasons
for cynicism about people's judgment, referee judgment generally. That I mean,
(34:36):
one of the takeaways from the common Diversky stuff is
that nobody's like nobody's judgments. You know, everybody's judgments is
systematically flawed. It was interesting, is the Yes, it is
the process of investigating. What the process of investigating bias
does is more than any thing, alert us to the
uncomfortable fact that there was a lot of bias there
(34:57):
that we didn't even think about. That's right, we had
no idea just how unfair at all used to be.
I was that. This reminds me yesterday I was for
one of my podcast episodes. I'm hanging out with the
folks who make the L set, who construct the L set, Oh,
and they do these biased tests. So they have practice questions,
which do you all take when you take the L
set is one set that's all practice questions, and they
(35:18):
look to see whether different groups have different patterns of
answering questions correctly, which is something I would never have
thought about. So there was a question they showed me,
and it's just this random question about some literary figure
in the seventeenth century and C, which is the wrong answer.
All the smartest women taken the test thought was the
(35:39):
correct answer, Like fifty percent of them got it, said
it was C and it wasn't c. D which is
the right answer, was overwhelmingly the male choice fifty percent
of the band. So here's a question that has so
there's patterns in the errors in the eras, there's a
massive pattern in the air, and there's nothing obvious. And
if they find the pattern in the air, or do
(36:00):
they think there's something wrong with the question, they throw
the question out. And I said them, well, what is
it about this totally anadine question about seventeenth century litter
that caused all these really smart female test takers to
answer see? And they're like, no idea. I thought, no clue.
It just doesn't work like that process. The minute I
(36:22):
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 an intelligence test. So you know,
you and I both made this turn into this new medium,
your fears ahead of me. How have you found what
do you find the differences are from writing this prose
on the page. Well, it's funny, I've gone in the
(36:46):
opposite because I don't write books that are character driven
as much. 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 ask I don't I you know,
(37:06):
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, like I you know, and you can
capture interactions like there's in one of my episodes for
next season. I have these two women who are sisters
who wrote a book together, a really good work of history,
(37:28):
largely so they can hang out with each other. This
one has been one is like seventy one is sixty five,
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 have an episode
at the second episode which you actually edited. Um, it's
(37:50):
about how hard it is to create a referee, even
when you clearly need a referee, and it's about the
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But we have a woman who
is who is just crushed by student Oh my god,
and to the point where she's a She is a
public school teacher who with a with a couple of
little kids, whom whose student loan servicer has basically deceived
(38:11):
her from from even knowing really about for years, for
years knowing about a program that Congress created to relieve
her 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 at night that five of her
teeth have fallen out, and she's now won't smile. And
if if I told the story, just if I just
(38:34):
told the story, you might think I've had my thumb
on the scale. You wouldn't quite believe it, Like you
think I was exaggerating. But when she just tells it straight,
you're weeping, I mean, 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
(38:55):
would have to try to persuade the reader of uh
and I don't just you just let her speak and
it's magnificent, incredibly moving. What can't you do in the
podcast form? So talk about that story? Did you where?
There must be limitations. I can't do things you don't
have tape off. That's the that's the problem. You got
to go out and interview. You have to have the thing.
(39:17):
If if it's you just talking, it's far less less
persuasive than if you've got some someone else you you know,
it's it's um so that it's it's a constraint. That's
worse with TV when you have to have the pictures.
But you can only do so much with your own
(39:37):
words in this in the narrative form, I think, um so,
that's your constrained there, uh um But what can't you do?
Like what stories? When it gets complicated? Yes, it gets hard.
I could not. So it's hard. It was hard, very
hard to explain. I didn't even really explain, but I
(39:59):
tried to explain a collateralized debt obligation in the big
short it's the most complicated thing I've ever tried to
explain to anybody and uh, I can't do that. That's
not possible in a podcast. You couldn't do it in
a podcast. Uh, you just you just couldn't. I mean
people would have collision that people listening as they're driving
would be having crashes on the highway and you you
you um so because the reader can go back or
(40:24):
the reader can get slow down, the reader can the
reader can can paste themselves through an explanation. Um. What
always breaks my heart is where you finally find the
person who you think can explain the thing it's going
to give you tape, and then they're boring, which in
a book it doesn't matter, right in a book, like
I feel like that's that is one of your geniuses
(40:46):
as a writer is you have clearly in your life
made lots supporting people seem really fascinating. But so I
would put it in so I'd put it in a
different way. You're absolutely right that that people's voices kill
them as characters. Um that you you, you're, you're, You're
talking to them for five minutes and you think that
(41:08):
voice just won't works. It's not gonna work. You know,
there are people in this world. Who I mean, it's
an amazing it's almost a superpower. Who have an ability
to walk into a room and kill all interest in
the room. I mean that 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
(41:30):
reels like everybody's gasping for air. There's no oxygen in there.
And it was just incredibly dull, and it was dullless
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,
(41:51):
I could make my uncle really great in print, but
but I could not the minute the minute someone heard
him speak, you'd lose. They wouldn't believe anything you said
about him, if you know what. 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
(42:12):
and podcast interview mode is quite different than what you
really want to do when you're interviewing someone on a
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 ze how this works. Did you walk me through?
(42:36):
You always use that walk me through. You never say
walk me through in the podcast interview. What you say
is what about like imagine this? And then they at
a certain point they kind of get it. They realize that, oh,
which is like, it's play, It's play, right, Yeah, that's
really true, That's really true. I've had this once with
this love this interview for this one of my podcasts
(42:58):
with this guy who was a OBGA and researcher in Philadelphia,
and he gets he's in the weeds on some new
kind of contraceptive, deep in the weeds, and I realized, no,
this is usable. 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,
(43:19):
wait a minute, this thing you're talking about, why is
that a contraceptive. He goes, oh, it's not a contraceptive.
And he goes on this long, insanely interesting totally hypothetical
thing about oh, I wouldn't calling a contraceptive, I called
something else. And he gives 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,
this is absolutely right. And we have an episode of
(43:42):
three is about refs in the culture, like language refs,
people people who write who are usage panel members and
dictionaries who they've all been let go, and the people
who used to write kind of usage manuals. And I
was we were I was talking to a guy named
Brian Garner who's one of the characters in the in
(44:03):
the episode, and he's he's the author of a book
called uh Garner's Modern English Usage. I think that's what
it's called. It's twelve hundred pages. It's actually riveting. But
nobody but at Barnes and Noble told him a decade
ago it's a defunct category. All of his heroes, their
books sold millions of copies. There were times where there
(44:23):
was a time when when the language ref occupied occupied
a bigger role than he does now. Now now the
crowd refs the language in and nobody wants to hear
from the snood um, but he's a great snood. And
he was just talking about like where are the culture
is gone, and how he's daily outraged by things, uh,
(44:47):
that he just can't believe that we're we're becoming this.
And he said, I got a letter from my bank.
It said dear mister 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.
(45:08):
It says dear mister Garner, semicolon. And he says it's
either a colon or a comma. And the bank manager said, um,
could you write us a letter about that? And he said,
so I wrote them a letter and I did, you've
come to the right place, and 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
(45:30):
a semicolon after dear mister Garner. And they they they
wrote him back and said, um, we're keeping the semicolon.
And and he called him, he said, how he's and
now he's just off. I could not. I didn't need
to be there anymore. Right, He's just he's like in
his own world this is an outrage, uh, and he's
(45:51):
for him it's genocide. I mean, that's that's that he's
a code read. There's a there's a certain uh quality
of delight that that's that's what we're talking about then,
Only it's conversational delight. You don't 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 in some unexpected direction and you sort of
(46:14):
understand that something fabuless is coming down the pike. You're
kind of waiting for it, and they sort of take
on that's what you're and 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 understand that they've been given life, but they're
playing a game with you. Yes. Yeah. Stay with us
(46:34):
for some more conversational delight with Malcolm Gladwell. We're back
with more of me and Malcolm Gladwell in conversation at
the ninety two Street why his new company, Pushkin Industries
is the production house behind Against the Rules, And I
(46:57):
couldn't help but tease him a little bit about something.
The crew there told me. It's funny that 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. Nonsense, they're you know what they are.
(47:17):
I know they're out there, they're they are these they're purists,
right they there. They come from NPR, which is like
the cathedral on the Hill 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
(47:40):
not the real world I'm living in. I'm not I'm
not in the monastery. I'm no. So I don't listen
to them, and they don't listen to you. Wait. Um,
so we have questions, We have questions. Um, we actually
we have quite a lot of time. Um when I
had some other Um, oh, I want to talk to
(48:02):
you about uh, falling in love. Um it's we talked
ab us a little bit. I you're talking about about
this because you're 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 where you're having many voices.
(48:23):
Does that impair your Are we going to 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 with? You have people to fall
in love with, it's just they're they're they're in a
single episode. I just don't live with them for the
(48:45):
whole series. Yeah, I fell in love with Alex Cogan.
Alex Cogan is he was the academic responsible for the
work that supposedly allowed Cambridge Analytica to get Donald Trump elected. Yeah,
and in fact it's all bullshit. In his work was useless.
(49:06):
This real story there is that it's amazing that Cambridge
analytic ha persuaded anybody they knew anything that was useful. Hustle.
It's a hustle. It's a hustle, right, yes, and every
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 three. This
is actually part of episode three. So it's what's the
(49:28):
what's the largest story. The largest story is the kline
of kind of these culture resting. So it's it's language refs,
it's um budgsman, it's referees in the newsroom. So how
this story ever got to the front page of the
New York Times is part of it. But but he's
built up as the main character of the thing, and
in a very similar way to a character that you
(49:51):
would fall in love with it in a magazine piece. Um,
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 you should fall in
love with him. Um, you've Ken Feinberg, don't you showing up?
How many people here? Uh, you can't really see it.
(50:12):
I wonder how many people heren know who Ken Feinberg is.
Ken Feinberg should be a household name. Ken Feinberg was
an ordinary lawyer when he was brought in in the
early eighties to try to resolve the dispute between Vietnam
veterans and the chemical companies that made agent Orange, and
(50:33):
Vietnam veterans had, without a whole lot of evidence, had
brought a suit saying that that this this chemical that
was spread across the jungles of Vietnam was responsible for
all these health problems that they were having. And the
case had lingered in the courts for I don't know
seven or eight years, and judges had despaired of resolving it,
(50:54):
and a judge asked this young lawyer, Ken Feinberg, to
see if he could negotiate outside of the court a
solution resolution to the between the vets and the companies.
And six weeks he had the thing done, and he
was on the front page of every newspaper in the country,
and his career then just went. He all of a sudden,
(51:16):
he became America's referee. So he's he's brought in to
adjudicate these disputes. And um, the question was like two questions,
Like what are we gonna do when he dies? Because
he seems to be brought in. I mean, he's like
he's like the Forrest Gump of of of American tragedy
and and but the second it is like what what
(51:36):
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. Uh
but but but you but his theory of his wife's
theory you can hear kind of proven just in the
(51:59):
sound of his voice. Oh voice, it is. It's unbelievable.
So so 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 part. It's the righteousness in the voice.
It's the it's a Boston accent, like you cannot believe.
And so the episode opens with the passage Um in
(52:23):
the Bible, Solomon resolving the dispute between the two women,
each of whom is claiming the baby is hers, and
Solomon just about to cut the baby in two, and um,
Feinberg's voices. So we were gonna have an actor read that.
We had the Fiers voice was so we just had
Feinberg read the Bible, and it was like it felt
like God was reading the Bible. Uh. And so you
(52:46):
the the it's so this form, you know, this 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 know you found when you write it. No
matter how conversational your writing style is, it is not
(53:08):
conversational that how people talk is so different from how
any writer writes. That you have to learn how to
write your own dialogue. That is so kind of interesting. Anyway,
thanks for doing this, Michael, thank you. Pleasure being with
you again. Yes, thanks for listening to this live bonus
(53:35):
episode of Against the Rules. I want to thank especially
Malcolm Gladwell and his team at Pushkin Industries and the
ninety two Street Why for hosting our conversation. I'm off
now to my secret hiding place. We'll try to figure
out how to keep you entertained next year. You can
follow Pushkin Pods on social media if you want to
(53:56):
keep track of when I'm back on the feed. I
hope it's soon. I don't know each and every one
of you, but you've been a great audience, the best
a writer could ask for.
Host
Michael Lewis
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