Against the Rules Wraps Season One
Highlights from Michael Lewis’ first foray into podcasting
In April, Pushkin Industries launched a brand new podcast with Michael Lewis, called Against the Rules. The show takes a searing look at what’s happened to fairness — in financial markets, newsrooms, basketball games, courts of law and more. Michael asks what’s happening to a world where everyone loves to hate the referee.
This season took on referees of all types, including sports, grammar and ethics, art, consumer products, judges, the stock exchange and more. In our bonus episode, out now, Malcolm Gladwell chats with Michael live at New York’s 92nd Street Y about podcasting, referees and the magic of “conversational delight.”
To celebrate the end of the season, we pulled out excerpts from the conversation that highlight the roots of the show, and how podcasting differs from writing. Then, we asked the Pushkin Industries team what it was like to make Against the Rules. Read on for more.
Michael, on what inspired the idea for the show
It was right after the financial crisis and I’d just been put in charge of the my daughter’s softball league. The opposing team’s coach came out of the dugout and started cursing up and down at the umpire who called her little girl safe. The language was just unbelievable. And their whole fan side started screaming at the umpire. None of the girls in our dugout had ever heard the word ‘fuck’, and they were in awe. It escalated on the field, the coach didn’t back down, and the umpire didn’t back down. From then on, I started to watch these poor people who were brought out to umpire nine-year-old girls’ games, on the receiving end of constant abuse. And my first question was, why would anybody even do that job? But my second reaction was, why do people behave that way towards the umpires? By the time you start thinking about the subject and start looking for referees, you see them everywhere. The show ended up being seven episodes but could have been 15.
Michael, on what makes the audio medium different from books
There’s something about hearing a person’s voice. There’s information, not just what they say but how they say it, that you get across in this medium that I fell in love with. I love that you can hear the sounds I heard, which enables you to feel what I felt hearing the story, much more easily than my prose would. Take the example of Katy, from episode two. The more you hear her, the more you think every word coming out of her mouth is true. If I had tried to write about her, it would sound either a little saccharine or like I was selling the reader too hard on her status as a victim. The reader, I think, would’ve been skeptical. We let Katie tell her story and there’s not a dry eye in the house, right?
If I just told the story, you might think I had my thumb on the scale. You wouldn’t quite believe it. You’d think I was exaggerating. But when [Katy] just tells it straight, you’re weeping and there’s no question the sincerity, it just jumps off the tape in a way that I would have to try to persuade a reader of. I just let her speak and it’s magnificent. Incredibly moving. -Michael
Michael, on the transition from writer to podcaster
It was a lot harder than I imagined it to be, but a lot more fun too. I came to the conclusion that some stories are better told in this medium than in book form. When I write what is essentially essay-ish material, it reads like an essay; I don’t have a main character or a drama that I’m playing out. The idea [for Against the Rules] was naturally essay-ish. It was a series of seven pieces around a theme; as a book, I don’t think it would have cohered. One of the cool things I found was this: your voice is able to pull an audience through a story, even if the material is not as unified as you’d like. The other big difference is, book writing is really an individual sport. It’s just you. [The podcast] was a team sport. And it was fabulous. The editor, the composers and the producers, were all intimately involved — to the extent that in a couple of cases, they did the interviews. Having to work with other people was healthy for me.
They had better sense than I did about what [a listener] would tolerate from me, in the sense of digression, odd story structure, starting something and not coming back to it for 15 minutes. [They knew] what I had to accommodate to make sure I didn’t lose the audience. They also had a much better sense of what I could leave on the cutting room floor. All the original scripts were twice as long as they needed to be, and they were really good at seeing what to pull out.
Michael, on what he can’t do in the podcast form
I can’t do things we don’t have tape of. That’s the problem. If it’s you just talking, it’s far less persuasive than if you’ve got some someone else. But, what stories can’t you do? When it gets complicated, it gets hard. The collateralized debt obligation in The Big Short is the most complicated thing I’ve ever tried to explain to anybody. You could not do it in a podcast. You just couldn’t. People listening while driving would have crashes on the highway. The reader can go back, slow down, pace themselves through an explanation.
“Part of a strong, healthy culture is accepting the judgment of the ref, even when the ref is going to make mistakes sometimes. We’re having increased difficulty doing that. We focus on the mistake even when they’re making fewer mistakes. We made the role very difficult to play at a time when it’s increasingly critical. People are slow to see that attacking the ref is attacking fairness. It’s all to say that the fragility of the ref is partly a function of decline in tolerance for a certain amount of disagreement.” -Michael
Notes from the Pushkin team
Producer Audrey Dilling
The hardest thing about making the show is also my favorite thing about the show: it’s about ideas. Ideas don’t usually come with tidy narratives, so the challenge is to create those narratives and make them interesting and entertaining enough to keep listeners interested and willing to follow you anywhere. If you can pull it off, then you get to compare CEO pay consultants to art authenticators or LeBron James to a luxury vehicle. And that’s just fun.
The top behind-the-scenes highlight for me was dropping into a Warriors’ practice and having an excuse to watch and record Steph Curry practice free-throws for a couple minutes — and then meeting Steve Kerr.
My biggest takeaway from working with Michael is how important it is to continue to believe in your ideas, even as they undergo massive iteration, and to keep the faith that at some point the right form will emerge. I think his positivity about the process is the root of his success and thankfully makes his producers’ lives much more enjoyable!
Editor Julia Barton
Michael is a very humble person for a best-selling author. He really wanted to learn the craft of audio storytelling — and, of course, mastered it in no time. But he also taught us a lot about fresh ways to approach this form, because he didn’t have the same habits we’ve acquired in audio production. One thing: we could not get him to stop crumpling each page of the script after narration, though. Once he figured out he get away with that, he couldn’t stop, even if it meant fishing through the trash for a page we needed him to go over again. I think he was going for the strike zone. Next time we’ll keep stats.
Producer Catherine Girardeau
Some of my most favorite memories are Michael having lightbulb moments about podcasting. Like when he was in studio recording voice tracks, and said something like, “ I’m becoming so conscious of how I emphasize every word! Like now when I’m on stage interviewing someone, I edit myself as I’m talking!”
Working with Michael in the field was a pleasure. He would have a little trepidation about me showing up with a roller bag full of recording gear, but once I got everything rigged up Michael really got into it, staging standups and scenes like he had been doing this forever.
Story meetings at Michael’s house often involved a seemingly impromptu, very athletic group hike in the Berkeley hills. For our first meeting we dressed professionally, i.e. non-hiking shoes — but luckily I had earthquake shoes in the car to change into so I could huff up the hills, trying my best to keep up with Michael and Jacob Weisberg. Most of the important decisions were made not around Michael’s bespoke, single-slab rare wood, specially-shaped conference table, but in twos and threes out on the trail.
There was a very funny moment recording at grammarian Bryan Garner‘s antebellum estate and personal library in Dallas. We were in the scriptorium — a room garner had specially built to model Noah Webster’s vault where he kept his dictionaries — and Bryan Garner actually corrected Michael’s grammar. Everyone recovered. It’s on the tape, episode five.
