The Neutral

What kind of person makes a neutral referee? It’s not the kind of person you think.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Now, two women who were harlots came to the
king and stood before him, and one woman said, oh,
my Lord, this woman and I dwell in the same house,
and I gave birth while she was in the house.

(00:35):
Then it happened Old Testament, first King's three sixteen. There
are these two women, one whose baby has died, the
other whose baby is still alive. Each claims the living
baby as her own. They go to the new King
Solomon and ask him to sort it all out. In

(00:59):
the night, this woman's child died because she lay upon it.
Wherefore she removed my son from beside me while I slipped,
and they'd had dead child wild against marbles Chila. This
is from the somewhat less than classic film Solomon and Sheba.
The women are shushed by King Solomon played by Yule

(01:19):
Brenner in whatever they use for spray tan in nineteen
fifty nine. The living child is mine, the dead is yours.
The dead is yours, the living mine. Bring the infant forward.
A guard puts the baby down, and then yule Brenner
tells him to draw his sword, divide the child into

(01:40):
two parts. Give half to the one woman, half to
the other. Many close ups of people looking horrified. Here,
Oh no, if it must be give the child to her,
that it may not be slay divided, it should be
neither has nor mine as non fiction is not totally believable.

(02:06):
I mean, why would either woman want to see the
baby cut in half? Even the liar wants a live baby,
not a dead one. But Solomon's such a good character.
No one cares make your son mother, He's surely yours
would rather have surrendered him to another than to seem harmed. Now,

(02:27):
at last, I have seen a judgment of Solomon, and
your wisdom amazes me. That's Sheba. The ladies do love
the wisdom, even if it isn't all that wise. Solomon's
trick only works if the baby thief is suddenly happy
to see it killed and stupid enough to show it. Otherwise,
he's got nothing worse than nothing to save face. He'd

(02:49):
probably need to go through with it and cut a
totally innocent baby in half and then wears it. Leave
him as the guy who began his reign as the
king of Israel by cutting babies in half. Still, if
referees have an origin story, this is it, and it's
got two ideas buried inside. And all Israel heard of
the judgment which the king had rendered, and they feared

(03:12):
the king, for they saw that the wisdom of God
was in him to administer justice. That's the last line
of the story and the first idea. The job of
the referee is so hard to do that doing it
really well is a sign of divine inspiration. Another idea

(03:34):
is sort of taken for granted right from the start,
that the job needs to be done at all, that
when two squabbling human beings go looking for justice, they
should turn to some other human being to act as
a neutral third party, as if human beings weren't the
problem in the first place. But people are just no
good at resolving their own conflicts. Any parent of more

(03:55):
than one child knows this, so does every teacher, a lawyer,
and cop. We just take it for granted that we
need legal systems, both formal and informal, and we just
assume that some totally innocent third party will want to
help us to resolve even our most petty disputes. We
never ask why should someone with no real interest in

(04:17):
our conflicts be better at refereeing them than we are.
And we also don't ask would actually make someone good
at this job no one wants. I'm Michael Lewis and
This is Against the Rules, a show about the attack

(04:38):
on the authority of referees in American life and what
that's doing to our idea of fairness. A few months ago,
I was at a bar in Washington, d C. With
a friend of mine who's a sports writer, Rob Nyer.

(05:01):
He's the opposite of what you think of when you
think of sports writer. Quiet, well mannered, almost shy. He's
a fan, but he's never fanatical. He's like his writing, cool, analytical, detached.
But then at the bar, his cell phone rang. He

(05:21):
looked at the number, got all agitated. All I hate
my life. I hate these people who keep calling me,
but I have to take this one. I'd never seen
him like this. He spent twenty minutes pacing around outside
on his phone, came back a total wreck, angry, distracted,

(05:42):
incapable of pleasure. It was this new job he'd taken,
he said, As commissioner of an amateur baseball league, I
would travel around, visit every team eleven ballparks, which is
for most baseball fans, that's sort of a dream come true.
Why would I not agree to all of that. It
was known as the West Coast League. The teams were

(06:04):
all owned by rich guys. They had persuaded Rob to
become the league's public face, it's symbolic leader. These rich
guys love the game. Rob loved the game. What could
go wrong? Well, it turned out that these owners argued
amongst themselves a lot. Their coaches and players fought with
each other too, and everyone fought with the umpires. They

(06:27):
expected Rob, as commissioner, to get in the middle of
all these fights and referee them. But the rich guys
hated to be refereed unless the call went their way.
That's what the phone call had been about. In the
Washington Bar, yet another dispute. The umpire reported that the
head coach poked him with his finger, and this was

(06:49):
the second time that this head coach had been suspended.
The first time he had sprayed, whether inadvertently or not,
the rules don't make a distinction. Sprayed with saliva an umpire,
so he was suspended at that time, and then just
a couple of weeks later reported the according to the

(07:10):
umpire's report, poked the umpire. Unfortunately, the video was inconclusive,
so I felt like I had to take the umpire's
report at face value. Rob suspended the head coach again,
thus pissing off the owner, who blamed the whole thing
on the umpire, with whom he now thought Rob was
in some sort of secret alliance. For his part, Rob

(07:33):
couldn't see what he'd done to deserve this. No one
asked if he had some special talent for refing other
people's disputes. They just sort of assumed he'd figure it out,
which he was trying to do. You have to as
a league, you you have to have an incredibly compelling
reason to dispute the report or the integrity of an umpire.

(07:54):
Otherwise you just lose control. Anarchy. That night in the bar,
that was when Rob had realized that he was losing control,
that in this amateur baseball league it was anarchy. I
had just covered two days after the fact that the
head coach actually did not serve his suspension. So yes,

(08:16):
I mean I was apoplectic because you what am I
supposed to do? Now? So what did you do to him?
I suspended the owner for three games and levied a
relatively small fine. And how did he respond to that? Not? Well, no,
not well at all. The owner had screamed at him,

(08:38):
accused him of somehow being on the take from another
team's owner. But Rob was just doing his job enforcing
the rules, which sounds simple, right, I mean, Solomon did it.
But it turns out there's a great deal of ambiguity
in the rules. For example, there is a rule against

(09:00):
prolonging an argument after an injection, but there's no definition
of prolonging. And now I have to go read all
these things and watch video and try to make some
sort of reasonable determination, and almost invariably neither side is
happy ultimately with my decision. What kind of person would

(09:20):
enjoy being in the middle, Well, my it's a good question.
I keep getting this sneaking suspicion that there are at
least a few people in the league who actually enjoy conflict,
who thrive on it. I don't know if that's true.

(09:43):
Maybe they can't help themselves, and maybe the conflict makes
them as miserable as it makes me. I don't know,
And I've actually tried to reason with people, these people
who seem to enjoy it, because there's a part of
me the things they can't be having fun yelling at you,
can they of course they can. People love to scream
it refs. They do it all the time. And the

(10:06):
same people who love to scream it refs also just
sort of a zoom. The ref's job is to sit
there and take it. I told Rob all this, but
it didn't seem to make him any happier. So I
asked him was there anything he liked about his new job? Oh? No, no,
why not? How at the end of the day, how
do you feel good knowing that someone is upset with

(10:31):
you and might be questioning your integrity. Rob had clearly
never been a ref, and he was learning that he
wasn't cut out for it. I probably couldn't be an
umpire because my first reaction would probably be to start fighting.
So you'd just be out there. You'd be out there
throwing sledgehammer punches at the people who came up to

(10:53):
argue with you. Well, I wouldn't be good at throwing punches,
but yes, I would be throwing punches. The first time
someone got inchest from my face and started screaming profanities
at me, I would lose it. I mean, I have
road rage issues, Not that I've ever done anything, but
but I have that impulse so they need to find
a different kind of person to do this job. Well,
I don't want to fire myself, but I would recommend
someone else. Yeah. Sure, I've watched Rob work for years

(11:17):
on a book and overcome all sorts of obstacles. But
just a few months into his career as a referee,
he's already looking to quit hand the job to someone else.
But to whom I mean that generally, not just in baseball,
In all the places where disputes need resolving, the job
obviously needs doing, maybe more than ever, But what sort

(11:39):
of person can do it? Back in nineteen seventy nine,
a huge number of Vietnam vets filed a lawsuit against
Monsanto and Dow Chemical and other companies that had manufactured

(12:00):
a herbicide called Agent Orange. Millions of gallons of the
stuff had been dumped under the Vietnamese jungles to kill
the plant cover used by the Vietcong. Thousands of vets
exposed to agent Orange believed it was responsible for their
various health problems. They didn't have much evidence, but the
companies wanted to settle just to end the whole thing.

(12:22):
That effort kicked around the courts for five years, but
no one could find a solution that would satisfy everyone.
Then the judge decided to see if he could find
a solution outside the American legal system, to appoint an
outside mediator, special master the courts called it. And I

(12:43):
just got a telephone call out of the clear blue
from a federal judge in Brooklyn, New York. Did he
explain to you why he thought you'd be good at
that job? Yes, he said, You've got the personality for it.
The young lawyer's name was and Is ken Feinberg. A

(13:05):
case that went unresolved for half a decade, he settled
in six weeks. A legend was born. I changed my life.
It changed my professional life. You see. Once I got
AIGs in Orange resolved and it was on the front
page of every newspaper in the United States, I started
getting a flood of calls. Was there any any experience

(13:30):
in your life before this that was like this where
you could say, all, I've been in this kind of
situation before. No. I had been in high school and college.
I had been an actor on the stage. I had
thought that I might end up on Broadway. When I
went to law school in nineteen seventy there was no

(13:52):
course in mediation or arbitration. There's nothing like that. But
there was this role that needed to be played in
American life. It just hadn't been written yet. Feinberg created
it by sheer force of personality. He wound up running
the nine to eleven Victims Compensation Fund and met personally

(14:15):
with the families of the three thousand people who were killed.
He ran the fund to compensate victims of the BP
oil spill. After the two thousand and eight financial crisis,
the United States Congress gave Ken Feinberg sole authority to
determine the pay of the CEOs of the banks that
had been bailed out by government money. And that's just

(14:37):
the start. The Paul snight Club in Orlando, Florida, when
the terrorists attack, they raised and asked me to distribute
thirty million. The harvest, Las Vegas shootings from the Mandalay Hotel.
I killed fifty nine people. They raised thirty million. Distribute
that money Sandy Hook. They asked me to go up

(14:59):
to Sandy Hook and decide how should we distribute the money.
The Pittsburgh Tree of Life Synagogue shootings the next day,
the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies in Pittsburgh, call, how do
we distribute this money? It is astounding. One hundred thousand

(15:20):
people after those Boston Marathon bombings sent in money unsolicited,
you know, and Mayhem Nino and Governor Patrick said, ken,
you're from Massachusetts, you grew up here. We want you
to design and administer a compensation program. Four dead, two
hundred and forty runners are observers at the finish line, injured,

(15:45):
sixteen single amputees, two double amputees. Sixty one million distribute
the money. The mass shooting in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado.
The thousands of disputes after Hurricane Katrina between insurance companies
and homeowners who are covered for wind but not flood damage.

(16:07):
And they retained me to set up a mediation program.
Any whole owner wants to participate, voluntarily, Come on in.
Feinberg will be the neutral. The neutral, This magical extra
legal character, this gifted referee who drops into a situation
where people are traumatized, a situation that also might easily

(16:29):
become ugly and public, and he resolves it quietly, privately,
and hardly anyone says anything about it, or even knows
who he is, or just how much power he's wielded.
That's why victims Advocate John Fia wants everyone who is
eligible to sign up. We have lost forty two people

(16:52):
this year alone to nine eleven lady chancers. This will
provide money to victims families. In all of these programs,
you have some discretion, but you have to exercise it wisely,
because the public and the victims are all circling. How
you strike the balance between paying people enough for their

(17:13):
loss example Pete nine to eleven and not paying them
too much. So you couldn't so in dolling out the money,
you couldn't actually reflect just pure expected earnings. You couldn't.
You couldn't. The law wisely said, and finebergs shall consider
expected earnings. And then there's another clause that says, and

(17:37):
he will see to it that justice is done well.
That gave me the opening to bring down the top
and bring up the bottom so that the gap between
the stockbroker who died and the bus boy who died
was not to Why what was the difference, the monetary
difference between what would have happened if you just had

(17:58):
a raw, cold calculation of lost earnings and what you
actually did. Oh I think some people I don't know
how many, but I think some widows or widowers, I
should say, would have maybe got thirty five million dollars
in tax to pay it, money which I reduced to
no more than six and would about on the other end.
And on the other end, some people might have got

(18:19):
two hundred thousand dollars, and I increased the bottom to
up over a million dollars. He turned thirty five million
dollars into six for the family of a bond trader,
and two hundred thousand dollars into a million for the
family of a bus boy, all by himself for free.
Feinberg refused to be paid for his work settling the

(18:41):
nine to eleven victims Compensation Fund. He doesn't take money
after mass shootings either. He just feels it's his duty
to do the job. And hardly anybody complains about the results.
Of course, plaintiff lawyers don't like it, but about the
only principled objection to Ken Feinberg comes from legal scholars
who worry that his success makes a mockery of the

(19:03):
legal system. Like this guy. I'm Eric Posner, and I'm
a professor of law at the University of Chicago. In
his writing, Posners raise questions about the role that Ken
Fineberg plays. So the legal system doesn't always reflect people's
ordinary moral intuitions about how dispute should be solved. To

(19:25):
give me an example, it's like a concrete example or
two of outcomes the legal system might generate that would
violate common sense notions of fairness. So suppose you're driving
your automobile and you run over a wealthy person and
kill him. His family sues, you may have to pay

(19:46):
damages equal to his lost income, which could be millions
of dollars. And then someone else runs over a poor
person and the poor person's family sues, and the damages
that are awarded might just be a few hundred thousand
dollars or less, just like what might have happened after

(20:06):
nine to eleven if Fineberg hadn't been there. Because of
this legal rule that compensates victims in their families based
on their lost income, that values people's lives by how
much money they make, and it looks quite unfair because
it's as if the law is saying that the wealthy
person's life is worth a lot and the poor person's

(20:26):
life is worth not that much. And that's very much
inconsistent with our moral intuitions about equality. This disconnect between
the common sense notion of what's fair and with the
legal system produces is allowed to sort of chug along
until there's a big spotlight thrown on it, like there

(20:47):
was in nine to eleven. Right, So the legal system
can chug along as long as you people aren't paying
too much attention to it. But when there is some
kind of massive public spotlight on the particular conflict that
the law is supposed to deal with, people see how

(21:07):
it operates out of context, and they can get very angry.
I love this idea that the only reason the legal
system works is that people don't pay attention to it,
that when they do pay attention to it, they're shocked
by its unfairness. That the stability of the entire society
depends on people not looking too closely at its foundation,

(21:27):
because when they do, they get seriously pissed off. And
then the system, you know, our system of law and politics,
has to address this anger in some way. This anger
is a political problem that the legal system is really
not set up to address. And that's when ken Feinberg appears.

(21:48):
When the anger hits a certain point when people are
chucking beer cans onto the field and deciding the game
is rigged. Feinberg descends by parachute, and the arena goes quiet,
and just about everybody accepts his judgment, and just about
everybody agrees it's fair. So so what Ken Feinberg really

(22:11):
is as a political solution, That's exactly what he is.
He's a political solution. A legal scholar looks at ken
Feinberg and asks, why do we turn to this one
guy time and again to dispense justice? And why is
that justice so obviously different from what our legal system
might supply. I'm interested in a different question. I look

(22:34):
at ken Feinberg and ask, how the hell does he
do it? I mean, how does any citizen of this fractious, unreasonable, entitled,
moronic country persuaded to come together and agree on anything?
Do they be asking how you're doing that? I don't
really think that. Most people who ask me to do this,

(22:56):
they don't really prole very much as to how it
gets done. They like the results. Right, the time has
come to ask him how he does it? So, I
see you're a talker, But I loved your book, The
One on Wall Street. I went to visit Ken Feinberg

(23:17):
at his apartment in the suburbs of Washington, DC. Nice place,
not a money person's place, not extravagant. His wife diets
with us on the sofa beside us. They're both in
their seventies, their kids all grown up and gone. They've
earned the right to move to some beach. Let the
world find another referee. But they haven't moved since we

(23:39):
last spoke. I'm now resolving all of these Catholic priest
abuse cases in New York and Pennsylvania. We are the
Codinal Dolan in New York and the Archbishop in Philadelphia
came and basically said to me, you know, this is
one situation where the Jews have to bail out the Catholics,

(24:01):
and we've been resolving all these cases. Just how you
want to spend your golden years refing the dispute between
the Catholic Church and however many Americans have been abused
by its employees. But this is clearly Feinberg's idea. I
was about to say fun but that's not quite right.
It's more like his idea of where he needs to be.

(24:21):
Like Finburg GPS, if at any given moment, you want
to know where Ken Fineburg is. Just go looking for
the most upsetting public controversy. You'll find him in the
middle of it. As the neutral and the church came
and said, basically, will you meet with individual victims voluntarily
if they don't want to, they don't have to, and

(24:42):
we'll pay for it. We'll compensate them for the damage
we did, horrible damage, I mean penetration, a sodomy rape
going back forty years or more. And we've resolve virtually
all of the cases in New York. How many were there, Well,
we know voluntarily that fifteen hundred people came forward in

(25:07):
five dioceses in New York. Oh and fourteen hundred and
ninety seven of the fifteen hundred we resolved. The victims
don't have to accept Feinberger's judgment, and yet they do.
But why, I mean, why do these controversies always find
him or he them? And how is it that he

(25:29):
always and I mean always gets to a resolution. Well,
I think that there are a couple of characteristics. Don't
underestimate the importance of empathy, the perception that you're trying
to get into that person's shoes and understand the damage,

(25:51):
and I think the ability to listen. I've learned the
hard way. Don't try and express too much empathy. It
is perceived as hollow. You're not in my shoes, mister Feinberg.
You're a higher gun. You can empathize and express support

(26:15):
without saying things like I've said in my early years,
I know how you feel. I said that one to
one person who lost a son in the World's the
Pentagon nine eleven attacks. Eighty three year old man buried
his son and he said, mister Fiber, you're telling me
you know how I feel. You have no idea how

(26:39):
I feel, and it sounds pretentious. And I'm just telling you.
You've got a tough job. But in the future, people
like you listening to them. They do. It's very odd
for someone who talks. If you're a talker too, you
learn right. Yes, so most people are talker, don't listen.
You learn to listen. Sometimes I think that all people

(27:00):
who are really good at what they do are like magicians.
Asking them how they do it is rude. They don't
really want to tell you. They shouldn't tell you because
if they tell you, they ruin the trick. But Ken Feinberg,
he took money away from guys who ran Wall Street banks.
I don't know how anyone does that. I thought that

(27:23):
in cutting the pay of the CFO of City Bank,
I would go to the CFO and say you don't
need three cars, and you don't need a home on
Lone Island in the summer, and therefore I'm going to
cut your pay by eight and you get pushedback. I

(27:46):
figured about who you to tell me what I need?
You get victimology. I love these Wall Street victims. You
get the CFOs saying you're cutting me by eighty percent.
You have made a determination of my self worth. When

(28:08):
I look in the mirror in the morning, I'm not
thinking about two cars. If you cut my pay, you
are telling me I'm not worth what I was getting.
They said this kind of thing. Oh my goodness, this
was a curveball. This was a curveball. You see. It's

(28:28):
not about material gain. If you dare come to me
and say I'm only worth twenty percent of what I
was worth last year, you have made a determination that
my life is meaningless, that I'm only worth a fraction

(28:50):
of what I thought i'm worth. What's your response to this.
I'm not a rabbi or a priest, you kind of
are No, Yeah, Feinberg doesn't want to go there. Part
of his job, as he sees it, is to resist
the temptation to make anything personal, to expect some connection
with the people on the other end of his work.
I put it this way, Never take on one of

(29:11):
these assignments and expect thank you, gratitude, appreciation. It never
ever happens. Never. The most STU can hope for is resignation.
And why is that, Well, because you know, if you're

(29:32):
worried about stuff like that, you're going to split the baby.
You can't worry about how you'll be perceived post mediation,
just like a referee in a basketball game can't be
worried about how the a team or a player will
feel about that referee based on a call that he
made or she made. You just have to do your

(29:54):
job and have enough sense of self. He's been doing
this work for forty years now. He's interacted with countless
victims and perpetrators of tragedies. It feels incredib personal, but
no one stays in touch with Ken Feinberg. One nine

(30:15):
eleven victims sent me flowers on the nine to eleven
date for about fifteen years one. And I think it's
very important to deliberately push people away and say, this
is a horrible chapter. Move on as best you can.
It's not easy, and I'm not minimizing it, but move

(30:38):
on as best you can. Don't look back to this
program or to me or the money. Just move on.
And so you push them away. Oh, absolutely, deliberately push
them away. I gotta say I don't feel pushed away,
at least not sitting on Feinberg's couch. But I notice

(30:58):
he's got me on the edge of my seat, wondering
when he's going to erupt and fill the air with
exclamation points. He's obviously got several traits that make him
good at what he does. I can think of at
least four, none of which he mentions until I pester
him a bit. This is our second interview, by the way,
so I'm actually repasting him. And you told me it

(31:19):
was a throwaway line at the end of our interview.
We did that. You actually hit refereed. Uh. You umpired
baseball games in the eighth grade maybe, and refereed basketball
games in high school. Uh. And I couldn't believe you
buried that that's you buried the lead, as they say
in the newsroom, when you were a kid, How did
you discover this interest in being in that role? He

(31:42):
likes being in charge. That's Ken's wife, d D. She
knows the first quality ego. He likes being in charge. Yeah,
but he But but you've got to be shrewd about
how you're in charge because otherwise people take away the
privilege es. No, they aren't exclusive qualities, but you've got

(32:04):
If you don't pick the teams fairly, you won't be
allowed to pick the teams next time. Second quality political sense, shrewdness,
a kind of esp about disputes, a nose for those
that can be refereed and those that cannot. For example,
somebody says, you know, why don't you get the Israelis

(32:26):
and the Arabs to sit down and you can get
them t yes in the Middle East? And I would
say that, I say to people, that's not true. I
wouldn't take on that assignment. You cannot get to us
and that assignment because for one thing, you can't get
the right people at the table to get to us.
You sit down, as I read the newspapers, you sit
down with a group of Arabs and say, well, they

(32:47):
don't get to yes with Israel, and the Arabs may
say yes, they can't deliver their own group people. So
I mean, that's a typical assignment where I would say, no,
thank you, Ken, why don't you mediate resolution of congressional polarization,
let's get inner room, and why don't you help them
get to yes? Possible? It would want me, Actually, they

(33:13):
would want him. He just wouldn't want them because in
those situations he'd lose something more than his time, he'd
lose a sense of who he is. That's the third quality.
Fineberg has a kind of total immersion in the role
of Ken Feinberg. How many kids do you have? Three?
And how they're How old are they today? Forty one,

(33:38):
thirty nine, and thirty six? So when they were a
little and they were growing up, what role did he
play in disputes in the household? You got it, You
nailed it right on the head. I was I was
the mom who stayed at home with kids, and he
was the one who just walked in the house at
the end of the day, and I had him settled disputes.
We'd sit at the dinner table and we would hold court.

(34:00):
Was he good? Yeah, he was good. So you know
what's interesting this is I think that I shy from
conflict because I have like two modes. It's either we're
in a fist fight or we're just getting along. I
don't have them. I'm very bad at the middle ground.
My wife's army about this all the time, right, And

(34:20):
so it's it's I don't like people shouting at me.
I don't like people upset with me. I respond very
badly to it. So when I'm put in the middle
of a dispute, I don't usually respond that well to it.
I have trouble remaining neutral and keeping myself out of it.
And it sounds like you just don't sound like you
really don't. You know, when I try to draw Ken

(34:42):
Feinberg out about himself, he's either already got a story
at hand, or he acts like he hasn't heard the question.
So we're lucky as wife's here. On the flip side,
we've been married forty three years. We've never had a fight.
I've had a lot of arguments, but we have never
had one. But he doesn't engage. You've never had a

(35:06):
fight away, but there won't be confrontation it's a lot
of self control at his partner. There can't be many
married couples in America who've been married more than a
few years. I'm arguing, I'm getting agitated and raising my voice,
and you know, I just can't and he won't give

(35:28):
you anything back. To enter into a dispute as their participant,
even with his family, would be a violation of his
inner nature or at least some pact he's made with
himself to stay removed apart the neutral. A character who's
maybe just a little bit feared. That's the fourth quality.

(35:48):
Fineberg has a willingness to intimidate, not with force, but
with force of character. And all Israel heard of the
judgment which the king had rendered, and they feared the king,
for they saw that the wisdom of God was in
him to administer justice. Okay, so it was my idea

(36:11):
to have Ken Feinberg read the Bible. But it's a
funny choice of words. They feared the king not because
he threatened them, but because of what his disapproval said
about them, because he's righteous righteousness. It's not really something
you can learn if you're looking to hire someone to

(36:34):
be a mediator. What qualities do you look for I mean,
I take a minority view. I think I believe that
mediators are born, not made. I don't think you can
train somebody to be an effective mediator. They either have
the talent and the personality or they don't. Either the
wisdom of God is in them or it isn't. So

(37:01):
we're doing a podcast on referees and people mediators and
people who kind of resolve conflicts. And so we were
we were ye for recess to talk to the fifth
grades because they're the ones they were, you know in battle.
Were you, I assume if you're sixth rade this year?
But did you? Did you? Were you the kind of

(37:21):
person who got involved in other people's conflicts last year?
I mean, it depends on what we were doing. I
would often solve the conflicts, is how I was playing,
because like that's just what I like to do. But
you know, so it depends if I'm yeah, I do
like to do it, but it depends if I am
playing the sport, like if I'm playing, if I'm not
playing all just like today out of it just because

(37:43):
like I don't know why. So what do you like
about the peace process and getting involved in two people
who are violating it. Um. I mean, I guess it's
just um, it's just um. I just feel proud because
then it's like seeing their faces they're like, okay, okay, yeah,

(38:05):
you know you actually it actually works. Yeah, it works sometimes.
I'm Michael Lewis. Thanks for listening to Against the Rules.
Against the Rules is brought to you by Pushkin Industries.
The show is produced by Audrey Dilling and Kathin and Girardo,

(38:28):
with research assistance from Zoe, Oliver Gray and Beth Johnson.
Our editor is Julia Barton. Mia Lobelle is our executive producer.
Our theme was composed by Nick Brittel, with additional scoring
by Seth Samuel, mastering by Jason Gambrel. Our show was
recorded by Tofa Ruth at Northgate Studios in Berkeley. Special

(38:50):
thanks to our founders, Jacob Weisberg and Malcolm Gladwell.