Athenahealth was just another healthcare provider facing the biggest problem US doctors face: not treating patients, but getting insurance companies to pay their bills. But then the company figured out how to fix the problem, by recognizing an overlooked expert toiling in the hospital basement.
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Pushkin. The first time I since we all had a serious problem that might one day lead to our doom was when I was working on Wall Street. The problem had to do with experts. People making important decisions had no idea who they should listen to or who they shouldn't, even when millions of dollars were at stake. I was a twenty five year old art history major with zero training in finance. Then I got hired to work on Wall Street, where I got paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to persuade professional money managers to do things with millions of dollars. Obviously, I had no real idea what to do with money, yet I was taken as the expert. Hello, and welcome once again to this is Wall Street here on wmi N Radio. Today's special guest is Michael Lewis. He's the author of The Money Culture and former bond trader for Solomon Brother. What's in the future for yourself? I know you're a pretty young man, aren't you. I just turned thirty one. That young well feel and all would say so it feels old. In nineteen eighty nine, I wrote a book called Liars Poker, in which I explained how I and a lot of other people on Wall Street got paid a bunch of money to give advice that was either wrong or pointless. In this book, I proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was not a financial expert. And yet when I hit the road to sell liars poker, people still ask me what should I do with my money? From the Midwest, especially for some reason, from Ohio, I am inundated with letters from young people who have treated everything I've written is sort of a how to manual, and it's almost that they can't conceive as a book as anything but advice and self help. All my books are the same in one crude way. I start out knowing very little about the subject. I go find actual experts, people who know stuff, and write stories about them. To my mind, all I'm doing is describing great characters in some interesting situation a financial crisis, a professional sport and turmoil, a pandemic. Yeah. I learn some things about those situations, but pretty much everything I know about, say, the origins of the two thousand and eight financial crisis, I know from the people I've written about. They are the experts. I'm just a guy who writes books about them. Still, the pressure from me to swan around as the true expert is incredible. Do you think that's what they believe? Well, that's not true right now, but I think do I think they believe that after they pass this legislation that will be true? Yes, I do think that. I do believe that. I think that it's flattering to be treated as the guy with the answers, more than flattering, seductive. But still, after a book comes out, I usually find myself thinking, why on earth are you asking me? Ask the people who told me everything I know. I pick him because I thought we should all be listening to them. They're the ones you should ask why were they unable to convince those in power to do something sooner? And I think the answer is that this particular threat, when you're on TV, you can never just say I don't know. But but beyond that, I mean, with a threat like this, he almost requires you can't say I don't know because you're the expert, and you're the expert because you're on TV that you're dealing with You're dealing with an invisible enemy that replicates exponentially, and by the time I'm Michael Lewis. Welcome back to season three of Against the Rules, where we explore unfairness in American life by looking at what's happened to various characters in American life. Our first season was about referees, Our second was about coaches. This season's about experts. We're going to tell seven stories about them. Each contains a clue to a mystery at the heart of American life. How come a society so great at creating knowledge is so bad at using it. How can we know more and more yet behave as if we know less and less. How can one people be so incredibly smart and so breathtakingly moronic? The experts are terrible. The Pandemics taught us a bunch of things. That bosses missed the office more than their employees, That our centers for disease control aren't very good at controlling disease. That these United States aren't all that interested in being united even in a crisis. Mister President, Please listen to your public health experts instead of denigrating them. But the Pandemics also taught us something about experts. How fraught our relationship with him has become, how hard it is for us to decide who they are and how to use them, even when it's a matter of life and death. But who cares what I think. I'm not an expert. I just find the people who are. Hi. I'm Todd Park, healthcare and tech entrepreneur and former public servant. Case in point. I've been in the succession of situations of great opportunity or great crisis and had to help figure out what to do very quickly. Todd Parks created three different billion dollar companies. He solved some very big problems on behalf of the American government. But he built his career on a single insight that the experts you most need are often not who you think they are. Just finding the expert can be incredibly difficult, especially when all hell is breaking loose called blue back. In nineteen ninety seven, Todd was a consultant fresh out of the Harvard Business School. Like a lot of people who go by the name of consultant, he didn't really want to be a consultant, so he went looking for a business idea, a problem to solve. He and another consultant, who was married to a midwife, nurse and training settled on a really big idea. The beginning of life, specifically pregnancy. To the eyes of a male management consultant in nineteen ninety seven, pregnancy is conducted in the United States seemed wildly inefficient. Women and their babies were having all kinds of expensive medical problems that could have been avoided with better prenatal care. By keeping women healthier during their pregnancies, you could also make childbirth less risky and cheaper. And so these two twenty four year old guys set out on this new mission. It was a bit weird. They weren't doctors, they didn't even have children. And essentially the whole idea is that you deploy a whole team of folks, not just the doctor, but surfinder's midwife, social worker, educator, case manager, nutritionist to love on a mom to be and get her the right care, including very importantly non clinical support. Todd and his partner named their company Athena Health. They hired a few more people much like themselves, smart young guys. They raised millions of dollars and used some of the money to buy a childbirth clinic in San Diego. It mainly served women especially prone to bad outcomes during pregnancy. Undocumented immigrants, for instance, The clinic was the test case for Athene of Health. If it worked, the company would create a lot more of them. So you know, now, all of a literally overnight, we are now on the hook for payroll, rent, all of this stuff and the revenue. That's Bob Gatewood. Todd had hired him to help. So almost immediately we started hemorrhaging money. You know, claims were going out, but no money was coming in. The first pregnancy clinic was supposed to be like the first McDonald's or Starbucks proof of concept. The concept never had a chance because they couldn't get insurance companies to pay them to make pregnancy cheaper and better. In fact, they couldn't really get anyone to pay them for anything. Did you have any sense that was going to be a problem when you started. No, we thought, oh, billing is a solved problem. Everybody knows how to do that. The interesting thing is that electronic health records, the young entrepreneurs had thought they'd bought a business with they'd really bought was a crisis and a cause. We then said, okay, this is a very special practice. It's the public health safety net for so many women in San Diego County. We must save this practice. We cannot allow this practice to sink beneath the surface of the sea. And so we got plug all the stops and fight and figure out how to keep this thing afloat. So you go from like whiz bang entrepreneur who's going to build a huge company on the basis of an idea, to being philanthropist trying to save the safety net for San Diego County. That's exactly right. But in order to save the safety net, Todd Park realized he and his partners had to solve the problem that hadn't even occurred to them, the problem of not getting paid by the health insurance system. Those system is maybe too kind a word for it. Essentially, what's happened in the United States is that you've got a lot of different health insurance companies and they have invented a lot of different kinds of health insurance products HMO Ppo pos m bas pos pos pos, all right, and then like employers like to customize those just for them. So there's like the ge version of the HMO based pos product for Wisconsin. There's not even an alternate universe. With the design of the US health insurance system makes sense, you could not build it to be more confusing. But now that system was Todd's problem. There are countless called them insurance packages, like different flavors of insurance that have probleagate across the country, each of which has different rules associated with it with respect to how to build them. And these rules are really poorly documented. They're very opaque, they're changing all the time, and medical doctors and medical officers have no idea what they are right, so they'll basically put together a claim to bill for their medical office visit. They'll send in the claim and it will get rejected. No one insurance company set out to create the confusion, but no one had any incentive to clear it up. I mean, the harder it was for doctors to figure out how to get insurance companies to pay them, the less the insurance companies ultimately paid out to the doctors. Todd Park now knows this because his last resort clinic full of pregnant women, is getting buried under unpaid bills. The payers send back this thing called explanation of benefits, which is really kind of misstormers doesn't really explain anything, says, here's your claim. It was denied for denial code zero five B and you look at the code at in the legend at the bottom of the EOB and you know it says something like, you know, insufficient documentation or something like something incredibly vague and not helpful. So then you pick up the phone and you call the health insurance company and get some port animals who also has no idea what that code means. Right as a super frustrating Right. But the problem is there is a knowledge base of rules at the payer that's totally opaque to the doctor and frankly pretty opaque to the payer, so they don't even know their own rules exactly. Todd and his fellow company founders needed an expert, someone who had mastered all the rules created by America's health insurance companies, someone who knew how to get those companies to pay a bill. Bob Gatewood kept seeing artifacts of this expertise. Every one of these doing offices we walked into. Every single screen monitor was covered in sticky nose like the whole margin of the monitor, and so we would always point at the sticky notes and ask the person what's that, and she would say, and most often a sheet she would say, Oh, that's you know that reminds me that if a midwife does the delivery, I have to put a c Z modifier on the code or you know. Here, This one reminds me that ETNA only reimburses for a gim visit every eighteen months, not twelve months. So I got to remember not to schedule an ETNA patient too soon. And there were thousands and thousands and thousands of these things. Medical billing had become so complicated that hospitals were now employing a medical biller for each and every doctor. Todd and Bob noticed the successful medical billers were all of a type. Gladys they called her super type, a you know, won't let anything pass her, likes to hold people accountable for their mistakes, and it's just kind of pissed all the time, like angry that they're not getting paid what they should. So at that moment, given what you're you've just learned about just how critical Gladys is and how important like the business succeeds or fails on whether Gladys is on vacation or Gladys is. This strike you how odd it is that Gladdis isn't valued. Well, that's part of why she's pissed probably unless you know, sometimes Gladys was the wife of the surgeon, right right, they were all women. I'm not but I'm not being sexist. No, No, every single one we met was a woman. But yeah, there were a lot of pissed off Gladyses who felt undervalued. By the late nineteen nineties, the financial fate of entire hospitals turned on Gladys. It occurred to Bob and Todd Park that they stumbled under a better business idea, find the best Gladdys in the world. If she actually existed. If I had found you when you were I don't know, twelve years old and asked you what you were going to be when you grew up, what might you have said? I was going to be an accountant. This is Sue Henderson medical biller. Seriously, it's very very, very very exciting. And the reason was math was just so simple for me. Everything about it was so incredibly logical, and it just seemed a great path for me. You killed your dreams early. I was very practical and I'm an very very organized individual, probably leaning a little bit on the OCD side, and so in accounting there isn't any gray. So if you're doing the books, then it's a penny off. It's wrong someplace. You have to figure out where that penny is, and you can't just take it and tape it into the books and then close them. Sue Henderson discovered medical billing almost by accident back in the nineteen eighties. Accounting had captured her imagination. Medical billing she found even more thrilling, which was in and of itself kind of amazing. You know, medical billers generally are housed in basements I'm not exaggerating of hospitals or practices without a window, and they're not appreciated. And it's kind of fascinating because if you didn't have medical billers, you can render all the services you want, and if you're never going to get paid, you're gonna go out of business. They're definitely unappreciated across the board. How do you explain that, given what you just said, that you're going to go out of business if your medical biller is no good? Because I don't think that I shouldn't say I don't think. I know. Doctors are not financial people. They care about patients. That's what they care about. The doctor. Sue works for it don't really get what she does or how she does it. They just leave her alone to play what is about to become a very high stakes game. So when you first get into medical billing, medical billing isn't anything like as complicated as is going to become correct. A lot of medical billers were overwhelmed by the complexity, but Sue kind of liked it. She sat in the basement of a hospital in northern Massachusetts, but is ready to fly. When would have been the first time where you walked into a job and you increased the receipts because you were billing better. Well, that definitely would have been Holy Family Hospital. And with when and when would that have been? That would be in the middle of my career nineteen eighties, in the eighties, Ye, in the eighties. Yeah, And so that's a moment where you walk in and just by virtue of your command of the complexity, you're able to generate more payment to the hospital. It was a combination of complexity, and it was a combination of looking at a department that was just so unbelievably mismanaged. They had a quarter of a million dollars in unapplied payments from the Medicaid system sitting. What does that mean? What does that mean? The moment I asked the question, I knew I didn't actually want to know the answer. Well, okay, so what happens is Medicaid is sending you all of these payments and you don't have a claim to which they can to be applied. So either you didn't send that claim out. The details of what Sue Henderson does, well, even she has trouble making it sound interesting, and she's more interested in the details than perhaps anyone in the world. What's the secret to getting the revenue getting the money out of the insurance? Unfortunately, is playing by their rules. That's the unfortunate part. There's simply now no way around that. And so if they're saying you need a modifier fifty five, you need a modifier fifty five period, end of sentence, there's no way around it, and it's just playing by their rules. What's a modifier fifty five? I don't actually care about a modifier fifty five. The modifier fifty five would be a second I won't describe it exactly, but it would be a second procedure code that is appropriate with the initial procedure code. So it's there. They are hundreds of versions of this problem with medical billing where there's some nitty detail that if you leave it off, you just don't get paid. There are thousands of them, and over time they were basically in your head. There were a lot of them in my head. Did you have you run across anybody, any medical billers who who felt like you're equal? Oh, that's a very I can't answer that question because because I'm I'm quite sure there are. I'm quite sure there are there are other people is equally knowledgeable. Absolutely, I don't know. You just haven't met them. I haven't met them. Over two decades in windowless rooms in clinics and hospitals in the Greater Boston area, Sue Henderson makes herself not just valuable, but close to irreplaceable. Then, in the summer of nineteen ninety nine, she sees a want ad on monster dot Com for a medical biller from a startup called Athena Health, based in San Diego but with an office in Boston. It's Todd Park, struggling startup. Sue applies, She gets an interview, they reject her, but a few weeks later they call her back with a bizarre request. He wasn't offering me a job. He was asking me, could I come for lunch to meet with some potential investors that were coming, so that they could kind of convince these investors that they had somebody who knew what he or she was doing and convinced them that this was a good idea to invest in the company. So they were bringing you on as an expert in medical billing to demonstrate to investors they knew about medical billing. Yep. So I said, okay, you don't burn your bridges. So I went over and we had lunch in the little restaurant and I sat there for an hour and a half, having lunch and being grilled by these investors about what I knew about medical billing, as though I had already been hired. And I did this three times. I didn't get paid for anything except I had a lovely free lunch, And finally, at the end of the three lunch process, Bob Gatewood called and said, we'd really like to hire you. Apparently I had convinced everybody I knew what the heck I was doing. Of course she knew, and of course Todd and Bob could see that they needed her, and if they could just bottle her expertise, she might make everyone rich. Welcome back to against the rules, we shall, I take it without the storm. There's no reason why we shall unless the dance blob. There's a strange British play written in the early nineteen hundreds called The Admirable Creighton. It was written by jam Barry, who's more famous for Peter Pan. I only saw it once, but I've never been able to get it out of my head. In The Admirable Creighton, an upper class British family is shipwrecked. They all wash up on a deserted island, along with their butler named Creighton h Okay, then town a transport and bring it back with him. Good my Lord. After the shipwreck, the butler, Crichton, behaves at first as he always has. He bows and scrapes and speaks only when spoken to. But on the island he's the only one who has any idea how to survive. The nobility or forced to admit it and defer to him lest they starve, and by the end he's king of the island. The British Lord is Crichton's slave, and his daughters are the Butler's harem in waiting, and the Lord is freaking out. I should give the honors, and you want abate them with the deepest respect, my lord. The reason I can't get the admirable Crichton out of my head is because it's about the arbitrariness of social status and the way that status can disguise people's value. Athena Health is his own little island. Todd parks washed up on it with Sue Anderson. But he's a first a bit unclear about how to maximize her value. So he called his brother. Tyd called me up and said, can you we need some help? Can you help me? And so I said, of course, because when your older brother calls you, you basically say yes. This is Ed Park. He was just then a twenty two year old graduate of Harvard, where he'd run the computer science club. And so I packed up all my things and no drove in my ten year old Taylor camera in a three day sprint out west to join him in San Diego. It wouldn't have been a startup if there wasn't a story about an old Toyota camera. Once Ed stopped driving, he took a long, hard look at the health insurance industry. We went through and we tried to figure out what are all these rules, and then we pretty quickly figured out that the rules weren't written down anywhere. The only people who knew the rules were people who would actually worked in the industry and had been incredibly observant for the last five years, people like Sue Henderson, or perhaps no one but Sue Henderson. Anyway, Todd ned figured out that what Ed needed to do was go into a room with Sue to see if he could replicate her brain in computer code. And so Ed drove his camera back to the Boston suburbs. I still remember the offices that we were working in. There were these tiny little offices, I think, with the requisite three or four people to an office. She's sort of the next office over, and I was heads down coding, and that was like, what do I need to code to make this thing work? And so her job was to basically help us get paid, and my job was to try and figure out how to write a bunch of code to make it so that we could start doing it in a way that was semi replicable. For her part, Sue was struck by just how much was in her head that was not in theirs. Yeah, I think, and probably Eddie would, and he's going to kill me because I call him Eddie all the time. I think that Eddie probably understood the fact that they had all his complexities. But I think that he thought, with all of these brilliant programmers, that they could figure it out all by themselves, that they could just figure it out. It was a few days into it when Sue realized that Ed and I really had no idea what we were doing. So she sets astounished, just like boys, shut up, I'm gonna give you a little lesson, and she taught us about like how the accounting works. Bob Gatewood is remembering the day on the island when it became clear who was the admirable Crichton. Well after she gave us that lesson, and we're like, oh, yes, we will follow you. We are your grasshoppers. And so, you know, she was basically the product manager at that point, so she, you know, she would tell us what the system needed to do and we would go do it. And we bought her hay hold, did you tell you about Hazel the big print? So we got her a big claims print and she named it after her mother. So we have a gladys a Hazel in the suit. So I was sitting in one room, Sue was sitting out over in the next room. And every day I would code something and put it out there, and then you know that evening Sue would yell at me and so about something or other. I did in sort of say like, you can't, like I don't understand what you're doing. You can't do that, And I'm like, what do you mean. Then she would basically explain to me that, like, you need to make sure that the procedure code with the highest charge amount is put first on the claim because the insurance companies will like sometimes pay the first line in the claim and not the second, third, and fourth lines and the claim. So I'm like, I didn't know that. Great, I'll do that, and so then I would change it and then it would be that way from then on. This went on and on end on, not for weeks or months, for years. The first three years, ed Park worked eighteen hours a day. He had a sleeping bag and slept under his desk. By day he had listened to Sue. By night, he had turned what was in Sue's head into software. In the morning. I would kind of wake up at six or so, go to the bathroom. You know that. Do you remember that pink soap, that the clear pink soap that you sometimes get from from those dispensers from a long time ago. I basically take that stuff runs from my hair like you know, shampoo and the sink, and go back to my desk and keep programming. So that was That's the kind of life I led. This weird new version of a theme of health now totally depends on the value of one woman's expertise, even though no one else had ever seen special value in Sue Henderson or considered the stuff in her head and expertise in a funny way, that's why there's money to be made here. Up until now, no one, not even really Sue herself, has figured out how valuable Sue is. If I basically had asked her to go into the middle of a room and basically gave her a stack of paper and said, please write out everything you know about billing, she would not have produced the things that were necessary for us to be successful. Instead, she'd had a set of experiences such that when she got placed into a sort of situation, which I often did. I'd put her into a situation where somebody didn't make sense right. Then she would basically say she would immediately recognize that something was wrong, and she'd basically searched her database, her head and said and ask herself, why is this wrong? The smart young Harvard graduates are trying to fix a big problem in the healthcare system, but what they're really doing is exploiting the world's inability to see the expert. It's expert blindness. Sue had a sense of moral indignation when something was wrong, right, And so there are some people who are essentially the unsung experts. But you get them into a room and you present them with something wrong and they won't tell you right, like they're trying to read the room. They're trying to figure out what you think the answers should be, and they don't tell you that, like you're full of crap. Right. Sue did not have that problem. If she thought it was wrong, she would say, Eddie, I think you're wrong, and she would tell me in no. In certain terms, you get this sense that there are certain things in the world. In particular for Sue was medical billing, for which they have a sense of moral indignation that they can't hide. She cared a lot, Yes, she cared a lot. Did you at any point think or wonder if there was someone who was even better than Sue at this or did you think all along, Wow, we probably have the best. I couldn't conceive of anyone who knew more than her Like I would say, it was three or four years until we got to the point where it was clear that we had something that did justice to the knowledge in her head. The content of Sue Henderson's mind became a five billion dollars software company. It has been one month since Athena Health announced the deal to be acquired by Veritas Capital, and Sue got a bit rich. But in the bargain, she saved the US economy a small fortune. By selling medical billing software to doctor's offices, Athena Health changed the US healthcare system. Doctors would never again need their own medical biller. A single biller can now handle ten doctors. That biller is now in effect, Sue Henderson, Many of our doctors basically said to us, look, you saved my career. I would have gone out of business if it hadn't been for you guys. But maybe the most telling response to the power of Sue Henderson came from a big health insurance company. Or anyway, that's what Todd Park thought. So I get a call one day from a very powerful, very sophisticated national health insurance company, right way above average in terms of it technical and operational prowess. The insurance company had a bizarre request. They said, we'd like to license your rules engine from you. I said, I can't do that. I can't tell you what your competitors insurance rules are. They said, no, no, no, we want to license our own rules from you. The insurance company itself didn't understand why it paid some medical claims and not others. It was relieved that someone had figured it out. I said, well, let me get this straight. You want to license your own billing rules from us? They said yes. I said, okay, it's a little crazy. Can you just explain to me why? They said, well, look, you know, I mean, we have a bunch of different systems. We bought a bunch of different insurers. You know, there's a ton of spaghetti code in these disparate systems, and we don't really know what the hell's in there. That's incredible. It's incredible, right, it's incredible. And after that one insurance coming to that, did you find others also wanting to do it? Or we we said we said we was too weird, we couldn't do it, Okay. To recap this invisible woman becomes an expert in a subject no one really thinks of as especially important or even really a subject, and her expertise changes a massive industry in retrospect or At any moment, were you surprised by your value, like your value to this new business. I don't think most of the time that I realized my value. I think I was enjoying what I was doing, and I don't think that I was thinking, Wow, I'm I'm pretty valuable here and if I left, they'd be in big trouble. Sue Henderson's Todd Park's first business. But if you ask Todd Park, that was only the second most important things she did for him. The most important thing she did for him was to lead him to a bigger idea about where to find experts, especially in a crisis. Sue doesn't run the healthcare system. She doesn't run a hospital system, but she doesn't run a physician group. She doesn't run an insurance company, right, but she has an incredibly good sense on the ground of what is going on and an instinct for what to do to make things better. Right, So in the healthcare system, she is absolutely an L six the L six, the level six, the person six levels down from the top, the admirable cretens. That insight became Todd's new obsession that you might never find the expert who knows what you badly need to know because she's buried under some big organization or system. She has no status. She might have a voice, but no one hears it. After his experience with Sue Henderson, Todd Park basically became known as the guy who could find experts where no one else thought to look. During his first term in office, President Obama addressed the American people. Hello, everybody, I want to talk with you about a new consumer website, healthcare dot gov. It's a good resource for understanding the new law, and it offers a few simple tools to help you take your healthcare into your own hands. Obamacare Americans were now suddenly eligible to sign up for a new health insurance marketplace online. On October first, twenty thirteen, billions of uninsured Americans are going online. This is healthcare dot Gov. Hope to enroll in the Obamacare exchanges, but the websites have been experiencing technical glitches. Medical that's the sound of a crisis. Healthcare dot gov has crashed. It's not just embarrassing, it's a political disaster. After weeks of ignoring it, the White House finally admitting what everyone already knew. Healthcare dot gov is a mess. The White House is scrambling to find someone, anyone who can fix this nightmare. Obama has by now brought Todd Park in as Chief Technology Officer for the Department of Health and Human Services. We basically went to CMS, the agency in charge of healthcare dot gov that have been working it's heart out since the site went live in October twenty thirteen. Todd found that the people in charge didn't actually know why the site had crashed or how to fix it. Neither did the people right under the people in charge or the people right under them. We went down another layer, and then another layer, five layers down basically, and then we finally got to layer six, which is where all the contractors were who were working on the site, and found a really really difficult and tough situation. But long story short, at that layer and the layer beneath that layer, right, folks working for the people in charge of the contractors, and folks actually one layer beneath that found people who really understood at least part of the picture right and had deep domain expertise and had an instinct about what to do. Why the Obama administration hadn't found the people who knew how to fix their website on their own is a question for another day, But this kind of thing seems to happen over and over again. After the healthcare dot gov debacle. Todd always sent his tech teams into any crisis with a specific instruction find the l six I remember actually report out from one of the teams. They had been deployed to the State Department because I believe it was the visa processing system of America that had broken, and that was a huge problem obviously, And so he said, what did you do? He said, well, I went seven layers down and found two contractors who actually knew what the problem was. And he said, all I did was basically say, Okay, I'm going to take your solution and deliver it seven layers up and basically tell the people in charge, this technical fix needs to be executed. And it was, and then America was able to process visas again. Have you ever asked yourself why you stumbled upon this pattern as opposed to someone else? Oh, I don't think I am you in identifying the pattern. I guarantee you there are L sixes in your space and your organization, right. And the key to your success in addressing a problem or tapping into an opportunity is not you. It's not you, It is actually someone else and L six And you have to have the wisdom of your job is to find the L six and let them rock and roll. Find the L six Not the officially important person, not the public person, the person on TV, not the person that seems like he knows what he's talking about. No, you need to find the person who spent the last twenty years stuffed inside some basement without windows, quietly learning things, and who as a result, might not be very good at advertising themselves or what they know. There are some experts who, forever reason are really terrible explaining what is going on and what to do, either because they're just really terrible explaining or because they're not clear thinkers, or because they want to keep the secret sauce for themselves. In any given situation, you think it will be obvious who the expert is, it won't. We'll go right along believing that the people who happen to be on top are the most important people until we sense we cannot afford to believe that anymore, until say, some crisis arises, and just to survive, you need to find someone who actually knows the answer to your question. Against the Rules is written and hosted by me Michael Lewis and produced by Catherine Girardo and Lydia Jeancott. Julia Barton is our editor, with additional editing by Audrey Dilling. Beth Johnson is our fact checker, and Mia Lobell executive produces. Our music is created by John Evans and Thias Bossi of Stellwagon Symphonette. We record our show at Berkeley Advanced Media Studios, expertly helmed by tofer Ruth, Thanks also to Jacob Weisberg, Heather fag John Snars, Carly Migliori, Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Morrano, Royston Beserve, Daniela La Khan, Mary Beth Smith, and Jason Gambrel. Against the Rules is a production of Pushkin Industries. Keep in touch, sign up for Pushkin's newsletter at pushkin dot Fm, or follow at Pushkin Pods. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. In case you missed it, I recently recorded a new unabridged audiobook edition of my first book, Liars Poker. It's about Wall Street and how it became the place it is. You can buy the new Liars Poker audiobook at Pushkin dot fm slash Liar's Poker. You could also buy it at Audible or wherever audio books are sold