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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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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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? 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 the angles on every court in the NBA. And that's all it shows. And so you can't watch, you know, you can't watch Homeland on it. You can't. You can't do anything with these TVs except watch whatever happens to walk onto that basketball court wherever it is. And they're guys, they're professional referees in there every night during the season, double checking the calls of the actual refs on the floor in case the refs make mistakes. And the refs themselves are now graded and they're 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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? 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.