00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.
00:00:18
Speaker 2: Hey there, it's Michael Lewis here talking about my new book, Blockers. Very briefly, it's about the collision between the Trump administration and the civil service. And it's about the people who got in the way on matters of principle with what the Trump administration was trying to do. It's about mission-driven people, people who are finding a life or found a life for themselves that's much more than just about themselves. and who I think in many ways are the best among us. And it sort of asks the question, if these people no longer belong in our government, what does it say about us? So stay tuned until the end of this episode for a preview. So we're walking across a parking lot in Secaucus, New Jersey. We're surrounded by concrete, nothing green. It took a lot to get me to this place. They're chain hotel and motels in someone's idea of a mall.
00:01:19
Speaker 3: But I have a hunch, a suspicion, about the crisis that we find ourselves in.
00:01:25
Speaker 2: It's filled with cheap chain restaurants, and we're surrounded on all sides by freeways. It's like what people think about when they tell jokes about New Jersey. I think you can see what's going on right here in Secaucus. And we're approaching a four-story, rectangular, otherwise nondescript concrete building. There's a discreet little sign here that says NBA and shows a logo with a basketball player.
00:01:57
Speaker 3: Inside, a recent concession to the world we live in.
00:02:01
Speaker 2: The Replay Center, a place where basketball referees review the calls made by other basketball referees in real time.
00:02:10
Speaker 3: To minimize referee error.
00:02:13
Speaker 2: The replay center was built to persuade people that life was fair.
00:02:27
Speaker 3: I'm Michael Lewis, and this is Against the Rules. It's a show about.
00:02:34
Speaker 2: Well, give me just a minute to get to that.
00:02:35
Speaker 3: This is peak beige.
00:02:41
Speaker 2: It doesn't get beiger, does it? It's like, this is a place where brown is an exciting color. And the door is locked. All right, now I don't know what to.
00:02:59
Speaker 3: Do.
00:02:59
Speaker 4: Now what do we do?
00:03:02
Speaker 5: All right.
00:03:07
Speaker 2: For me, this story really begins not in Secaucus, but in Berkeley, California, with my 11-year-old son.
00:03:14
Speaker 3: His name's Walker, Walker Lewis.
00:03:17
Speaker 2: He plays on a basketball team run, if you can believe it, by a Japanese Buddhist temple. My son isn't a Buddhist, though most of the time he could pass for one. He has no conflict with his teachers or his classmates or his Japanese Buddhist teammates. I wouldn't say his mind is exactly pure, but usually it's calm The exception is when he deals with refs, even Buddhist refs. Anytime a ref blows the whistle on him, he throws up his arms in astonishment. Then he jumps up and down with his little fist balled up and his mouth clenched tight, so everyone knows just how much injustice he's suffering. Then he marches off with a scowl, and he doesn't get over it. After a game this season, he gets into the car and starts bitching and moaning all over again.
00:04:05
Speaker 3: How did it make you feel when the ref made those calls?
00:04:08
Speaker 1: Very mad.
00:04:10
Speaker 3: Do you feel any better now?
00:04:12
Speaker 6: No.
00:04:13
Speaker 3: Tell me how it feels.
00:04:17
Speaker 7: Feels like someone keeps poking you in the back of the shoulder and then saying.
00:04:22
Speaker 1: Foul, foul, foul, foul.
00:04:25
Speaker 3: Have you ever fouled out in your career?
00:04:27
Speaker 1: No.
00:04:28
Speaker 3: Did you know that you were at risk of fouling out?
00:04:30
Speaker 7: Yes, but I also knew if I did, it would be unfair because I knew that he was calling the stupidest fouls. He'll look back and say.
00:04:42
Speaker 5: Oh, I was being a huge asshole.
00:04:52
Speaker 2: The thing is, I know why my son does what he does. He thinks he's Klay Thompson, the all-star shooting guard of the Golden State Warriors.
00:05:01
Speaker 4: When Klay hits a three....
00:05:05
Speaker 3: Clay pounds his chest and points to the sky.
00:05:09
Speaker 2: And so when Walker Lewis hits a three, he too pounds his chest and points to the sky.
00:05:15
Speaker 1: I think we had a technical foul as well.
00:05:19
Speaker 3: Clay. Very unusual.
00:05:22
Speaker 2: When Clay's called for a foul, he scowls and throws up his arms in astonishment and sometimes even says something to the ref that gets him slapped with a technical foul.
00:05:32
Speaker 5: He only had one during the entire regular season.
00:05:36
Speaker 2: And Klay's the famously most laid-back all-star in the entire National Basketball Association.
00:05:42
Speaker 8: Something has happened in the relationship between referees and players over the last, I guess, year or two.
00:05:48
Speaker 2: That's Ramona Shelburne. She's covered the NBA for the last decade for ESPN.
00:05:52
Speaker 8: It's been, quite frankly, ugly this year.
00:05:56
Speaker 2: One of the Warriors head-butted a ref. Another chucked his disgusting mouthguard off a ref's chest.
00:06:03
Speaker 1: Draymond's got to be careful. He already has a technical.
00:06:07
Speaker 4: And Curry has been thrown out of the game.
00:06:09
Speaker 8: And some of the stuff I've seen, I mean, when Draymond Green is getting fined for calling Lauren a hold cap, can we cuss on your podcast?
00:06:18
Speaker 3: I think we already have.
00:06:20
Speaker 8: You know, a fucking bitch? Like, when he is saying that to a female referee and getting fined and suspended for that? Man, that's next level. And I haven't seen that before this season. It's the stars now who are really pushing the issue, right? It's Kevin Durant getting thrown out of games. It's Steph Curry getting thrown out.
00:06:47
Speaker 2: In a single season, bad behavior got various Golden State Warriors tossed out of 10 different basketball games. Kevin Durant, their best player, tied a league record by getting tossed from five games all by himself. The men who coach the Stars aren't much better. Even Steve Kerr, the Warriors' famously decent, civic-minded coach.
00:07:09
Speaker 9: I can snap. I can completely lose it.
00:07:11
Speaker 2: If you back away from the Golden State Warriors, I mean, they're exemplars of the way people should behave. Especially your Stars, they're like impeccably behaved people. I'm so pleased to have my son emulating... your players the only time they have problems really is with referees yeah i can't imagine you in your life have another relationship like you have with referees.
00:07:35
Speaker 9: No you're right you're right i would never say the things that i do to referees to a person in normal life it happens two or three times a year you know i've been caught on camera you know mf'ing a ref and And, you know, my daughter will send me a text like, Dad, what are you doing?
00:07:51
Speaker 1: It's all over Twitter. I can read your lips. This is embarrassing.
00:07:54
Speaker 10: And I'm embarrassed.
00:07:56
Speaker 9: So why is that? You know, it's a sense of right or wrong. You know, I feel like there's like this personal offense, like something unfair is happening.
00:08:08
Speaker 2: Which brings me to my hunch. It has to do with referees and not just basketball referees. The people everywhere charged not just with enforcing rules, but with preserving a sense of fairness. On Wall Street, in the news, in courts of law, in the many little disputes that pockmark everyday life. There are many different kinds of refs, and most of them are under some kind of attack. So maybe it's not that surprising that Americans one day woke up and thrilled to the message that life was unfair.
00:08:42
Speaker 4: You know, the system, folks, is rigged. It's a rigged system.
00:08:45
Speaker 5: A rigged economy.
00:08:47
Speaker 4: The banking system is rigged. A rigged system. There's a lot of things that are rigged in this world of ours.
00:08:53
Speaker 11: Not the fairness that we grew up believing that America was about.
00:08:58
Speaker 3: Which brings me to what this show is about.
00:09:03
Speaker 2: The people whose job it is to maximize fairness, not just in sports, but most everywhere. What's happening to them tells us a lot about what's happening to us. You have to listen closely, but you can hear that same chant in a lot of American life.
00:09:27
Speaker 3: Ref, you suck. Here we go.
00:09:53
Speaker 2: Back at the NBA's offices in Secaucus, New Jersey. Someone eventually came and unlocked the door. And then they led me down a hall filled with a lot of old basketball stuff. Jerseys and bobbleheads and basketballs and posters of Michael Jordan.
00:10:08
Speaker 3: The replay section.
00:10:09
Speaker 2: Was the ultimate man cave.
00:10:14
Speaker 3: It's also the latest weapon in the battle for fairness.
00:10:17
Speaker 2: So this place just on first.
00:10:20
Speaker 3: View is amazing. It's wall-to-wall screens, 110 of them.
00:10:25
Speaker 2: What's on them is whatever is captured by all the cameras in 29 NBA arenas across the country. This isn't the broadcast video with commercials and commentary. The screens here don't even have the scores of the games on them or the names of the teams playing, and they're muted. What you hear is referees staring at basketball games. What you see is nothing but angles on professional basketball courts.
00:10:50
Speaker 1: Nobody's ever walked in here and walked out and said, this place sucks.
00:10:54
Speaker 2: And I'm not going to say it sucks either. That's Joe Borgia, who designed the center back in 2014 and now runs it. Before he volunteered for Secaucus duty, he refereed NBA games. His father was an NBA ref before him. With a break in the late 60s, Borgia has been reffing professional basketball games since 1946.
00:11:15
Speaker 3: If you went.
00:11:17
Speaker 2: Back to your dad at the beginning of his career and said, this is what it's going to look like, what do you think he would have said?
00:11:23
Speaker 1: If I told him we would have replay, he'd turn over in his grave. Forget about a replay center. Is that right? Oh, absolutely.
00:11:29
Speaker 2: You see, the refs used to insist on their authority. At any rate, everyone agreed that there was no better way to ensure the fairness of the game than to let the ref play God. The replay center is an admission that the ref is not God, that he makes mistakes.
00:11:45
Speaker 1: I think the mention of replay, none of us liked it when we first heard it. It's a necessary evil. It's necessary. You have to have it today.
00:11:55
Speaker 2: Everything's taped now. Everyone pays more attention to the referee's mistakes. So the NBA has to as well. Now, when a ref thinks he might have screwed up some call or didn't get a good look at the action, he twirls his fingers in the air. That's the signal to the ref in the replay center who goes to work, reviewing the tape, looking for the best angle to figure out what actually happened.
00:12:21
Speaker 3: That's the thing, is everybody can see it now.
00:12:23
Speaker 1: Exactly.
00:12:23
Speaker 2: You can't have them be in a better position to judge the game than the referees.
00:12:27
Speaker 1: Absolutely.
00:12:28
Speaker 2: The replay center is what allows refs on a basketball court to change their calls. A lot of those calls are subjective, like whether one player fouled another. The refs on the court still make most of those calls themselves. The exception is when the foul is flagrant.
00:12:44
Speaker 1: Sure, Duke, we're going to give you two good angles, all right?
00:12:48
Speaker 11: That's the first one.
00:12:48
Speaker 1: The other one's going to give you a better look.
00:12:50
Speaker 3: There's blood on the screens.
00:12:52
Speaker 2: Kevin Love's front tooth got knocked in. Love plays for the Cleveland Cavaliers, and the question is, did the guy who popped him in the mouth do it intentionally?
00:13:01
Speaker 1: It's just a basketball play, and Kevin Love happens to move in to where the guy's elbow was going up.
00:13:06
Speaker 2: The refs need to decide if the violence was not just excessive, but unsportsmanlike, which sounds archaic.
00:13:13
Speaker 3: Because we sort of lost the concept. So the blood doesn't sway the decision?
00:13:17
Speaker 7: No, it doesn't.
00:13:18
Speaker 1: Listen, there's a lot of contact, so a lot of it's accidental. That was accidental. Possible flagger?
00:13:24
Speaker 2: The players all stand around scratching themselves while the refs put on headsets and talk to the replay center.
00:13:29
Speaker 1: We're looking for the unnatural. Did he throw his elbow out?
00:13:32
Speaker 3: So the foul was on Kevin Love. Correct.
00:13:36
Speaker 1: I thought he was outside. He was moving. He was moving. It was late. Come on, you've got to be quick on these.
00:13:40
Speaker 3: He's stuck on the blood coming out of his mouth.
00:13:41
Speaker 1: Yeah. It's ugly.
00:13:43
Speaker 2: The whole thing only takes 30 seconds. 30 seconds in which players, fans, coaches get even more pissed off at the refs for taking so long. The only thing stopping the replay center from checking every decision is that it slows the game down. Here in Secaucus, they're still trying to figure out how they might talk to the refs as they run up and down the court, because if they could do that, they could just fix every call on the fly.
00:14:08
Speaker 1: Special forces, we found out, we actually used a chip over the molar that worked off the vibration of the bone. Believe it or not, we did. We got a handful of G League referees molded, and we tested that.
00:14:22
Speaker 3: To wear a chip over their molar.
00:14:24
Speaker 1: But it wasn't good enough because they didn't know where the voice was coming from.
00:14:32
Speaker 3: It was just a voice in their heads?
00:14:33
Speaker 1: They didn't know where it was. Was that a coach talking to me?
00:14:36
Speaker 3: This is actually insane.
00:14:38
Speaker 2: The time and money now being spent to ensure the fairness of what, after all, is just a basketball game. A jillion miles of fiber optic cable connect this room directly to the NBA arenas around the country, all for two calls a game.
00:14:51
Speaker 1: At two calls a game. Fifteen million dollars to build this room to get two calls right a game. But you got to do it. You got to do it.
00:15:01
Speaker 3: Can I just pause here a moment?
00:15:04
Speaker 2: Just to consider what the NBA has done in the past few years to improve the calls. For example, they brought in serious managers to hire and train the refs. Joe Borgia calls his boss the General, because she's actually a General and an Air Force pilot. Her name is Michelle Johnson, and before she supervised NBA refs, she ran the Air Force Academy. It sounds like overkill to use a General to make sure basketball games are well-reffed. but the NBA thought it needed overkill. Or at least Adam Silver, the NBA commissioner, did.
00:15:38
Speaker 11: If people don't believe that the league office is unbiased and that the officials are unbiased, you're going to have a problem regardless of the accuracy of the calls.
00:15:47
Speaker 2: Silver took over in 2014 and also hired Joe Borgia to create the replay center. Since then, the NBA commissioner has taken a ridiculous amount of grief for trying to improve justice in basketball.
00:15:59
Speaker 11: There are a group of people who think that without the sort of transparency that we see in this day and age, that it enabled certain officials, and maybe with a touch of frontier justice, to overall create more of a fair environment. Even if that were true, and I'm not sure it is, those days are over. And I think it's whether it's in sports or other walks of life that you cannot turn the clock back on transparency.
00:16:27
Speaker 2: So here's what else Silver's done. He's broadened the pool of people from which refs are selected. They used to be mostly white men, mostly from the same background. At one point 15 years ago, four NBA refs came from the same high school. He's hired more black refs and female refs. He's insisted that referees be physically fit so they can get into position to see all the plays. While everyone else in America is getting fatter, the refs are getting buff. They're also now getting new feedback on all their bad calls. Silver decided to publish the mistakes made by every ref in the last two minutes of every game so everyone could see them. He gives the teams and the refs a private document listing every refereeing mistake.
00:17:11
Speaker 3: All this new.
00:17:11
Speaker 2: Data on refs means that we and they know all sorts of strange things about their minds. For instance, we now know that their calls have tended to favor whichever team's losing. Their calls also favor the home team. Some large part of home court advantage is just the refs. The analytics department of the Houston Rockets has even done a study that shows that the home team that gets the best calls is the Utah Jazz.
00:17:34
Speaker 3: Why Utah? Who knows?
00:17:37
Speaker 2: But you can be sure that someone will figure that out. There's now basically a small army of geeks analyzing all this new data.
00:17:46
Speaker 12: Look, I don't really like writing papers about sports. I prefer to write them about the economy.
00:17:50
Speaker 2: That's Justin Wolfers, a behavioral economist at the University of Michigan. and the co-author of a paper about NBA refs.
00:17:57
Speaker 12: But the thing is, this is a domain where the NBA referees have tremendous incentives not to make the wrong call. Every error they make is tracked. Those errors determine whether they get more games. Those games determine how much they get paid. This is arguably the most analyzed workforce in the country.
00:18:15
Speaker 2: Basketball referees are now picked apart in ways that not long ago would have seemed preposterous, not just for the fairness of their calls, but for their unconscious behavior. Wolfer's took years of data from every NBA game, then he set out to look for evidence of the ref's racial bias.
00:18:32
Speaker 12: The question here isn't whether people are anti-black or anti-white, but whether there's an in-group bias. So if a predominantly black team is playing and the refereeing crew is predominantly white, are there more fouls called against them than on nights when the same team is playing with a predominantly black refereeing crew? And it turns out the answer is yes.
00:18:55
Speaker 2: Wolfers wrote his paper back in 2007, before this new age of referee transparency.
00:19:01
Speaker 12: Well, it was a bit of a lesson for me. You can probably tell by my accent, Michael, I'm an Australian. I thought it was an interesting piece of social science. It turned out the New York Times put it on the front page.
00:19:12
Speaker 3: And the NBA wasn't happy.
00:19:14
Speaker 2: The commissioner at the time attacked the study and embarrassed the league by trying, and failing, to refute its findings.
00:19:21
Speaker 3: This morning we'll hear from the NBA commissioner, David Stern.
00:19:24
Speaker 4: Our referees are the most reviewed, most ranked, and most rated.
00:19:28
Speaker 3: And that's why we take exception to what the Times did here.
00:19:32
Speaker 2: That's Stern on NPR in 2007.
00:19:35
Speaker 3: The result of all this coverage?
00:19:37
Speaker 2: Every single referee was made aware of his unconscious bias. When the dust settled, Justin Wolfers was curious to know if his paper had had any effect. He made another study of referees after the controversy he'd created, and guess what?
00:19:51
Speaker 12: The most recent study we did seems to suggest that that form of racial bias has gone away.
00:19:56
Speaker 3: He has no idea why.
00:19:57
Speaker 2: Maybe simply making the refs aware of the problem was enough to correct it. But in the end, this became a case study, not in ref ineptitude, but ref reform. NBA refs have achieved what police forces can only dream of, race blindness. The refs have no choice but The world's now too good at seeing their mistakes. Look, there's no way any basketball referee is going to be perfect. But there's also no way these refs are anything but more accurate than they've ever been. I mean, even home court advantage means less than it used to. And yet these refs are treated as if they're trying to rig the games.
00:20:34
Speaker 3: Referees stop! Referees stop! Referees stop!
00:20:39
Speaker 5: Referees stop!
00:20:44
Speaker 2: Does the sound of those 18,000 people screaming at you or booing you, does it sound any different than it sounded when you started in 1991?
00:20:52
Speaker 13: Yeah, there's a little more anger involved. And, you know, it used to be sort of the garden variety.
00:20:58
Speaker 3: You're terrible.
00:20:59
Speaker 13: You suck.
00:21:00
Speaker 4: Any of those kinds of terms.
00:21:01
Speaker 2: That's Monty McCutcheon, who recently quit reffing NBA games to serve as a kind of life coach to the other NBA refs to talk them through their problems.
00:21:11
Speaker 10: Now, you know, People do their research. They, things are out there on the internet. They know your record with the, with their team. They, they've done all, there's all these sites on all these.
00:21:22
Speaker 3: Different, they know personal things about you.
00:21:24
Speaker 13: Oh, sure. Of course, some death threats are made from time to time in playoff series, and you'll get security all the way to, to both the hotel and then the hotel.
00:21:33
Speaker 10: The next morning out to the airport.
00:21:34
Speaker 3: That's security to the hotel.
00:21:36
Speaker 13: Not every night, but when those threats are, are a known factor, it has happened in my career.
00:21:41
Speaker 10: Security to your car is mandatory every night.
00:21:44
Speaker 11: Yep.
00:21:45
Speaker 2: These days, refs need bodyguards to escape after the game. Here are people who are mostly just trying to do these extremely difficult jobs as well as they can. And at some point, you feel this question rising up in you. In me, it rose up while I was talking to Ramona Shelburne, the ESPN reporter. Why would anybody want to be a ref?
00:22:05
Speaker 8: Seriously, I wonder that too, man. They're not allowed to say anything. They're not allowed to explain themselves. They're not allowed to defend themselves.
00:22:14
Speaker 2: Look, obviously they get paid. They start at $ 150, 000 a year, and if they're great at their job and work extra games, they can make as much as $ 500, 000. But there are lots of ways to get paid without spending half your life in hotel rooms and the other half being insulted by arenas filled with crazy people. Do you think the refereeing has gotten worse or better?
00:22:33
Speaker 8: I actually think it's gotten better.
00:22:35
Speaker 3: Of course it's gotten better. How could it not have?
00:22:38
Speaker 2: The mystery is why the stars and the coaches and the fans act as if it's gotten worse.
00:22:43
Speaker 3: I have a hunch about that, too, which you'll hear in a minute.
00:22:57
Speaker 1: Okay, so Sacramento's checking in right now. So they're at 10 o'clock, so an hour before... The Clippers, Golden State will check in, and the Clippers will check in about 9.30, roughly.
00:23:12
Speaker 2: I'm back with Joe Borgia in the replay center. The refs here sit dressed in black, staring at screens, waiting for a signal from somewhere in America. The end of games is when they get most involved, because that's when fans and coaches and players are most likely to accuse some ref of having made the mistake that changed the outcome. Of course, a mistake at the beginning has just as much effect on a game as a mistake at the end, but the end is what people notice and get outraged about. So the justice at the end of the game must be more exact than it is at the beginning.
00:23:48
Speaker 3: These replay center refs have video technicians with.
00:23:50
Speaker 2: Them who can freeze a moment on screen, then zoom out or zoom in so that the entire screen contains only a player's fingertips or his toes. Here you just scroll through tiny slivers of the game, not the game itself, the slivers where injustices might occur.
00:24:06
Speaker 1: I mean, goodness gracious, if you don't have slow motion in here, a freeze frame, it's very difficult.
00:24:12
Speaker 2: Of course, in slow motion, you can see things that the naked eye misses. Magicians sometimes perform during halftimes of the NBA games. When Joe Borges slows it down, he can see how they do their tricks. It's kind of the same thing with the players.
00:24:27
Speaker 1: Exactly. I can go a 60th of a second at a time. You're going to pick a lot of little things up.
00:24:31
Speaker 3: So what these players are getting good at is creating optical illusions.
00:24:35
Speaker 1: Of course.
00:24:36
Speaker 3: The sort of things that a magician does.
00:24:37
Speaker 1: Well, isn't flopping an optical illusion?
00:24:39
Speaker 2: Flopping is what they call it when a player pretends to have been knocked over by another player. Tricking the refs into making bad calls is now considered a skill.
00:24:48
Speaker 1: Okay, replay signal given, so you just hit it perfect.
00:24:51
Speaker 2: A game ref in Houston twirls his fingers in the air. Some players hit a three-point shot at the buzzer.
00:24:57
Speaker 3: Or has he?
00:24:59
Speaker 2: The Houston ref wants to know if the player's toe was on the three-point line and if he got off the shot before the buzzer.
00:25:06
Speaker 3: It's just now that Joe says I can work the equipment. Can I?
00:25:10
Speaker 1: Just don't hit the red on air.
00:25:16
Speaker 3: The truth is I'm not a big equipment guy.
00:25:19
Speaker 2: My first step when something needs to be assembled or operated is to call someone and say I'll pay whatever it costs. I start twisting dials just to see what happens. they appear to cause the picture to zoom in and out.
00:25:31
Speaker 1: Watch the referee on the bottom of the screen. There's your signal.
00:25:36
Speaker 3: You've got to see that. You have to see the referee doing that. Or someone may say something. There's a lot of subjectivity in refereeing.
00:25:45
Speaker 2: But a whole bunch of the questions that arise on a basketball court have objective answers.
00:25:50
Speaker 3: Like, who touched the ball last before it went out of bounds?
00:25:53
Speaker 2: Or, was there still time on the clock before the shot left the player's hands? This is one of those. Did the player's foot touch the three-point line when he leapt for his shot? Did the ball leave his fingertips before the buzzer sounded? One of the dials, or maybe it's actually a joystick, lets me choose which angle of the court I see. I need to find one still frame with the shooter's foot in it and another with a clock in it. Then I need to freeze the picture in the 160th of a second that the ball left the shooter's fingertips. Just then I realize, I have no idea who the player is. I don't even know which team he's on. All I know is he's in Houston.
00:26:37
Speaker 3: Can I get it here? Not quite.
00:26:39
Speaker 1: These are all the same.
00:26:40
Speaker 3: Oh, they are?
00:26:41
Speaker 1: Because it's pretty much. You didn't even know.
00:26:44
Speaker 3: Is Houston still waiting on me?
00:26:47
Speaker 2: I think it occurred to me at that moment that they were possibly actually using what I was doing.
00:26:52
Speaker 3: And that was a little bit of anxiety.
00:26:54
Speaker 2: The coaches get to stop the game with pointless timeouts. The advertisers get to stop the game to sell beer. But when a ref stops a game to make it more fair, the crowd boos, and the announcers launch attacks on them.
00:27:09
Speaker 3: It's not enough to be right. You've got to be fast.
00:27:12
Speaker 2: Borja tracks the average response time of the replay refs.
00:27:15
Speaker 3: It's between 20 and 30 seconds.
00:27:16
Speaker 1: Okay, the replay center official confirmed successful three-point basket. You got it.
00:27:23
Speaker 2: The problem's dealt with, or I think it is, but right away another one comes up. on a bunch of screens showing one arena. All these people are jumping around and hollering at refs. The ruckus appears to be confined to Cleveland, but in here it feels like the entire universe is disturbed.
00:27:41
Speaker 3: It turns out LeBron James is upset. He's arguing.
00:27:45
Speaker 1: There he goes.
00:27:46
Speaker 3: LeBron James going from ref to ref. He seems to know which refs to argue with.
00:27:51
Speaker 1: They're talking about goaltending. So they're talking about it. I think they might change. James and the other guy had the best angle.
00:28:02
Speaker 3: Do you think that LeBron James has any effect doing that?
00:28:08
Speaker 2: The ref in Cleveland is not twirling his finger. There's no signal to us to do anything in the replay center. LeBron's drama, strictly speaking, is pointless. It's strange the way these players argue. They must think that if they make life unpleasant enough for the ref, he'll think twice before the next call. It's then that it occurs to me, just looking around the room at 110 TV screens, I've had a hard time following the games, never mind the scores. I sometimes don't even know which teams are playing. But every time a player gets up into a referee's face, I've recognized the player. And I actually don't know that many NBA players, but I know all the ones who pitch these hissy fits. Because the only players getting up into the faces of the refs are the famous players, or the coaches who protect them. Ramona Shelburne put her finger on it. The more aggressive behavior towards refs isn't coming from every player. It's coming from the stars.
00:29:24
Speaker 6: So we just got really interested in a very simple question of does this sense of being privileged make you disobey the rules of the road or the laws of the land.
00:29:34
Speaker 2: That's Dacher Keltner. He's a professor of psychology at Cal Berkeley and someone who wonders about the effect inequality has on people's behavior.
00:29:42
Speaker 6: An experience I had in Berkeley where I was riding my bike up this hill and I got to the four-way stops and I was halfway through this four-way stop sign. And this guy in a black Mercedes rolls through the stop sign, is halfway there, is a foot away from me, about to take me out, and he's on his cell phone. And I looked at him, I was ready to take him on, like, all right, buddy, this is it. And what was most telling about this whole experience was he looked at me as if I was in the wrong and I should get out of his way, even though I had made it through the stop sign first.
00:30:20
Speaker 2: So Dacker and a colleague dreamed up this weird experiment. They hid two Berkeley undergraduates in the bushes near four-way stop signs. The undergrads noted the makes of all cars coming through the intersection, assigned them numbers, one to five, according to their market value. A new Mercedes was a five, a Honda was a three, and an old Pacer was a one.
00:30:43
Speaker 6: We positioned a Berkeley undergrad by a pedestrian zone, and we make sure they look like they want to cross the street, right? And they're sort of leaning into the pedestrian zone where it's required by California law to stop.
00:30:55
Speaker 2: It's a game of one-on-one at a California crosswalk. One car versus one pedestrian.
00:31:01
Speaker 6: And zero percent of the drivers of poor cars... zoom through the pedestrian zone, they all stop. And 40-some-odd percent, 45% of the drivers of the fives, the rich cars, blaze through the pedestrian zone and just say, the rules don't apply to me.
00:31:19
Speaker 3: I'll carry on. This one study led to a bunch of others that showed basically the same pattern of human behavior.
00:31:30
Speaker 6: Another experiment, we bring people to the lab, and as they're leaving... there's this big bowl of candy. And it says on it, for the children of the Institute of Human Development.
00:31:43
Speaker 1: On the bowl.
00:31:44
Speaker 6: And we say, oh, you're going to take a candy or two as you're leaving. And we count up how many candies they take after they leave the experiment. Privileged people grab a big handful of candy compared to poorer people.
00:31:55
Speaker 2: So let's turn the conversation to something much more important, which is basketball.
00:31:58
Speaker 1: Most important of all.
00:32:00
Speaker 2: In the last five or six years, the NBA has embarked on essentially everything A dramatic reform of refereeing. At the same time, the friction between the players and some of the owners and some of the coaches and the refs is going through the roof. The source of the outrage is the star players. The people getting thrown out of games are Kevin Durant and Steph Curry and James Harden. And the Warriors, the most famous team ever to walk on the court, are the chief culprits. Exhibit A in bad behavior towards refs. So you've got this weird combination.
00:32:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's fascinating.
00:32:34
Speaker 6: I still remember being a Lakers fan, you know, the great Magic Johnson teams, and watching Larry Bird do his nine-step layup.
00:32:41
Speaker 4: And I'm like, come on, make the call.
00:32:43
Speaker 2: Larry Bird was like LeBron, the new Mercedes of his day. He played with certain assumptions about the rules and how they applied to him. For most players of his era, two steps counted as traveling. The inequality on a basketball court is profound. And it's more profound than it was in Larry Bird's era. Larry Bird was a millionaire. LeBron James might be a billionaire.
00:33:04
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:33:05
Speaker 2: And these guys are global franchises.
00:33:08
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:33:08
Speaker 2: So you got, in a funny way, a microcosm. It's an odd microcosm on a basketball court. What's going on in the larger society? The NBA is set out to ref the game more objectively, more accurately, more fairly. This has enraged the stars and their fans and coaches. You want to know why? The more objectivity there is, the less power they have. Objective refs eliminate some of their privilege. The stars can't get the calls anymore just because they're stars.
00:33:41
Speaker 3: Or anyway, not as often.
00:33:43
Speaker 2: LeBron James and Kevin Durant and Steph Curry and Klay Thompson, they'll all survive better refs because they're actually just better than everyone else. They don't need unfairness to win. But what happens where there are no replay centers? Where there's no hope for pure objectivity or technology to improve calls? where the refs can no longer defend themselves from the stars. Welcome to the reason for our show. I think American life just now has at least one thing in common with basketball. The authority of its referees is under attack. And when you have a weak referee, you have a big problem. Because a weak referee is a referee who can be bought, or intimidated, or just simply ignored. a situation goes from being more or less well-refereed to more or less not. Then one day you wake up in a world that seems not just unfair, but actually sort of rigged. That is, it's incapable of becoming fair, because the people who benefit from the unfairness have the power to preserve it.
00:34:51
Speaker 1: Boom.
00:34:51
Speaker 2: Do you flip a switch and 110 screens go dark? Most nights, Joe Borgia stays at the replay center until almost 2 in the morning. Just him and a couple of refs staring at tiny slivers of basketball games, trying to impose justice on powerful people who don't want it.
00:35:17
Speaker 1: You do. Now, you have to be partially off. It's 100% negative business.
00:35:28
Speaker 3: 100% negative business.
00:35:29
Speaker 1: That's why my son doesn't want to ref. I don't like people yelling at me.
00:35:32
Speaker 3: One day, a young Borja naturally becomes a referee. The next, he doesn't.
00:35:39
Speaker 2: One day, most people think the refs are more or less fair. Or at any rate, they don't spend a lot of time blaming them for all their problems. The next day, they wake up to radical inequality. The people on top, the elites... think they're special. They behave as people do when they think they're special. Young people emulate them without even thinking about it. They just assume that's how you act if you're a star or wannabe. My first question is, why when you hit a three-point shot, which you often do, why in the past have you pounded your chest and pointed to the sky?
00:36:16
Speaker 7: I did it because the people on the NBA and the NBA did it.
00:36:20
Speaker 3: What do you think they're doing? What does it mean?
00:36:22
Speaker 7: I don't know, just like, I'm cool.
00:36:26
Speaker 3: Do you believe in God?
00:36:27
Speaker 1: No.
00:36:29
Speaker 7: I knew what it, I mean, now I know what it meant, but no, I don't.
00:36:32
Speaker 3: So what does it mean?
00:36:34
Speaker 7: Basically, it's like, thank you, God.
00:36:37
Speaker 2: For hitting a three-point shot? Do you think God was responsible when Clay Thompson hit a three-point shot?
00:36:43
Speaker 7: To be honest, if God was watching over everybody whenever they hit a three-point shot, I don't think that he would be able to actually make them make the shot.
00:36:58
Speaker 2: So do you have anything you'd like to say to the referees of the world before we turn this recording off?
00:37:03
Speaker 7: Don't pick sides, unless it's my side.
00:37:06
Speaker 3: Thank you. I'm Michael Lewis. Thanks for listening to Against the Rules.
00:37:18
Speaker 2: It's our first episode. We've got a lot more to come. Against the Rules is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. The show is produced by Audrey Dilling and Catherine Girardeau, with research assistance from Zoe Oliver-Gray. Our editor is Julia Barton. Mia Lobel is our executive producer. Our theme was composed by Nick Bertel, with additional scoring by Seth Samuel.
00:37:42
Speaker 3: Mastering by Jason Gambrell.
00:37:45
Speaker 2: Our show was recorded at Northgate Studios in Berkeley by Topher Ruth. Special thanks to our founders, Jacob Weisberg and Malcolm Gladwell.
00:38:07
Speaker 3: Part One. The Refs.
00:38:12
Speaker 2: The same year Trump's name was being plastered onto the side of the U.S. Institute of Peace, the East Wing of the White House was being torn down to build the President Donald J. Trump Ballroom, and the Kennedy Center was on its way to becoming the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. A foreign visa, government savings accounts for children, and a prescription drug program were also all being named for Trump. And White House staff had taken the trouble to redesign an annual pass to America's national parks with Trump's face on it. On the National Mall, a giant new Trump banner, paired with one of Abraham Lincoln's, rippled down the facade of the Department of Agriculture. Republicans in Congress were proposing bills to rename Dulles International Airport for Trump, carve Trump's face on Mount Rushmore, create both a $ 250 and $ 500 bill to honor Trump, make a federal holiday of Trump's birthday, and erect a triumphal arch taller than the Lincoln Memorial, nicknamed Arc de Trump. All of this was obviously kind of weird. No other president had ever used the office so energetically to promote his personal brand. But the environment had changed. It tolerated some new behaviors and discouraged some old ones. It took Tim Curry a surprisingly long time to see what this shift in the climate meant for him. At first, he assumed it meant nothing. During the first Trump administration, he'd been perfectly satisfied with his job. Those four years had felt to him much like the previous 21, at least until the very end. A Democrat would win the White House and ask Tim to inflict some new set of policies upon the federal workforce. A Republican would win the next time and ask Tim to inflict a nearly opposite set of policies. One day, no employee of the U.S. government was required to get the COVID vaccine. The next day, everyone was. Trump to Biden had been a jolt, but so were all the others. Those kind of jolts didn't bother Tim. For his deft management of the vaccine policy, he'd been given the country's highest civil service honor, the Presidential Distinguished Rank Award, conferred on only 1% of the Senior Executive Service, SES. But if they'd asked him to somehow extract the vaccines from the bodies of the entire federal workforce, he'd have done that too. Tim would joke that his job is to spend four years doing something and then spend the next four years undoing it, one colleague said. But he's okay with it. Tim worked in the Office of Personnel Management, OPM. His official title was Deputy Associate Director, Accountability and Workforce Relations. But that didn't help explain what he did all day. The small box he was in charge of, three levels down the OPM org chart, had changed names over the decades. But its two roles were probably as old as the nonpartisan civil service. It refereed disputes between government managers and workers. and oversaw negotiations between government agencies and unions. OPM was sort of a meta-agency, a handful of people who helped the people who helped the people. It was small and obscure and designed to kill the curiosity of all but the most hardcore good government types. But it offered the best perch inside the U.S. government to see and control all of it. Still, on their weekly calls, Tim's father would occasionally ask him, one more time, to explain his job. It took years for my dad to understand what I did, said Tim. He'd get confused and think I work for a union. Part of the problem, part of the reason it was hard to see what he did, was that so much of what he did was preventative. He was himself a kind of vaccine. If he did his job well, it meant that some massive workplace injustice or scandal didn't happen. He wasn't a lawyer, but he spent a lot of his time explaining laws to people. He wasn't an arbitrator, but he spent a lot of time being yelled at by both union leaders and the heads of federal agencies, and then, when they were finished yelling, selling both sides on a solution to the problem. It's hard to explain the connection between Tim's job and the speed with which you get your tax refund, said one former OPM political appointee, but there is a connection. Tim's needed for the government to work. Another political person described Tim Curry as OPM's bus person. Bus people, he explained, are people who if they are hit by a bus, the government stops working. All the political appointees, the temporary heads of the agencies installed by the president, came around to this opinion. Even the Trump political appointees, who in theory despise the federal government. The very people who would cook up Project 2025, the 900-page manifesto that proposed to dismantle the government, would also poke their heads into Tim's office to seek his help. They needed Tim Curry because Tim Curry was the only one inside the United States government that everyone in any particular dispute was happy to deal with.
Speaker 1: Pushkin.
00:00:18
Speaker 2: Hey there, it's Michael Lewis here talking about my new book, Blockers. Very briefly, it's about the collision between the Trump administration and the civil service. And it's about the people who got in the way on matters of principle with what the Trump administration was trying to do. It's about mission-driven people, people who are finding a life or found a life for themselves that's much more than just about themselves. and who I think in many ways are the best among us. And it sort of asks the question, if these people no longer belong in our government, what does it say about us? So stay tuned until the end of this episode for a preview. So we're walking across a parking lot in Secaucus, New Jersey. We're surrounded by concrete, nothing green. It took a lot to get me to this place. They're chain hotel and motels in someone's idea of a mall.
00:01:19
Speaker 3: But I have a hunch, a suspicion, about the crisis that we find ourselves in.
00:01:25
Speaker 2: It's filled with cheap chain restaurants, and we're surrounded on all sides by freeways. It's like what people think about when they tell jokes about New Jersey. I think you can see what's going on right here in Secaucus. And we're approaching a four-story, rectangular, otherwise nondescript concrete building. There's a discreet little sign here that says NBA and shows a logo with a basketball player.
00:01:57
Speaker 3: Inside, a recent concession to the world we live in.
00:02:01
Speaker 2: The Replay Center, a place where basketball referees review the calls made by other basketball referees in real time.
00:02:10
Speaker 3: To minimize referee error.
00:02:13
Speaker 2: The replay center was built to persuade people that life was fair.
00:02:27
Speaker 3: I'm Michael Lewis, and this is Against the Rules. It's a show about.
00:02:34
Speaker 2: Well, give me just a minute to get to that.
00:02:35
Speaker 3: This is peak beige.
00:02:41
Speaker 2: It doesn't get beiger, does it? It's like, this is a place where brown is an exciting color. And the door is locked. All right, now I don't know what to.
00:02:59
Speaker 3: Do.
00:02:59
Speaker 4: Now what do we do?
00:03:02
Speaker 5: All right.
00:03:07
Speaker 2: For me, this story really begins not in Secaucus, but in Berkeley, California, with my 11-year-old son.
00:03:14
Speaker 3: His name's Walker, Walker Lewis.
00:03:17
Speaker 2: He plays on a basketball team run, if you can believe it, by a Japanese Buddhist temple. My son isn't a Buddhist, though most of the time he could pass for one. He has no conflict with his teachers or his classmates or his Japanese Buddhist teammates. I wouldn't say his mind is exactly pure, but usually it's calm The exception is when he deals with refs, even Buddhist refs. Anytime a ref blows the whistle on him, he throws up his arms in astonishment. Then he jumps up and down with his little fist balled up and his mouth clenched tight, so everyone knows just how much injustice he's suffering. Then he marches off with a scowl, and he doesn't get over it. After a game this season, he gets into the car and starts bitching and moaning all over again.
00:04:05
Speaker 3: How did it make you feel when the ref made those calls?
00:04:08
Speaker 1: Very mad.
00:04:10
Speaker 3: Do you feel any better now?
00:04:12
Speaker 6: No.
00:04:13
Speaker 3: Tell me how it feels.
00:04:17
Speaker 7: Feels like someone keeps poking you in the back of the shoulder and then saying.
00:04:22
Speaker 1: Foul, foul, foul, foul.
00:04:25
Speaker 3: Have you ever fouled out in your career?
00:04:27
Speaker 1: No.
00:04:28
Speaker 3: Did you know that you were at risk of fouling out?
00:04:30
Speaker 7: Yes, but I also knew if I did, it would be unfair because I knew that he was calling the stupidest fouls. He'll look back and say.
00:04:42
Speaker 5: Oh, I was being a huge asshole.
00:04:52
Speaker 2: The thing is, I know why my son does what he does. He thinks he's Klay Thompson, the all-star shooting guard of the Golden State Warriors.
00:05:01
Speaker 4: When Klay hits a three....
00:05:05
Speaker 3: Clay pounds his chest and points to the sky.
00:05:09
Speaker 2: And so when Walker Lewis hits a three, he too pounds his chest and points to the sky.
00:05:15
Speaker 1: I think we had a technical foul as well.
00:05:19
Speaker 3: Clay. Very unusual.
00:05:22
Speaker 2: When Clay's called for a foul, he scowls and throws up his arms in astonishment and sometimes even says something to the ref that gets him slapped with a technical foul.
00:05:32
Speaker 5: He only had one during the entire regular season.
00:05:36
Speaker 2: And Klay's the famously most laid-back all-star in the entire National Basketball Association.
00:05:42
Speaker 8: Something has happened in the relationship between referees and players over the last, I guess, year or two.
00:05:48
Speaker 2: That's Ramona Shelburne. She's covered the NBA for the last decade for ESPN.
00:05:52
Speaker 8: It's been, quite frankly, ugly this year.
00:05:56
Speaker 2: One of the Warriors head-butted a ref. Another chucked his disgusting mouthguard off a ref's chest.
00:06:03
Speaker 1: Draymond's got to be careful. He already has a technical.
00:06:07
Speaker 4: And Curry has been thrown out of the game.
00:06:09
Speaker 8: And some of the stuff I've seen, I mean, when Draymond Green is getting fined for calling Lauren a hold cap, can we cuss on your podcast?
00:06:18
Speaker 3: I think we already have.
00:06:20
Speaker 8: You know, a fucking bitch? Like, when he is saying that to a female referee and getting fined and suspended for that? Man, that's next level. And I haven't seen that before this season. It's the stars now who are really pushing the issue, right? It's Kevin Durant getting thrown out of games. It's Steph Curry getting thrown out.
00:06:47
Speaker 2: In a single season, bad behavior got various Golden State Warriors tossed out of 10 different basketball games. Kevin Durant, their best player, tied a league record by getting tossed from five games all by himself. The men who coach the Stars aren't much better. Even Steve Kerr, the Warriors' famously decent, civic-minded coach.
00:07:09
Speaker 9: I can snap. I can completely lose it.
00:07:11
Speaker 2: If you back away from the Golden State Warriors, I mean, they're exemplars of the way people should behave. Especially your Stars, they're like impeccably behaved people. I'm so pleased to have my son emulating... your players the only time they have problems really is with referees yeah i can't imagine you in your life have another relationship like you have with referees.
00:07:35
Speaker 9: No you're right you're right i would never say the things that i do to referees to a person in normal life it happens two or three times a year you know i've been caught on camera you know mf'ing a ref and And, you know, my daughter will send me a text like, Dad, what are you doing?
00:07:51
Speaker 1: It's all over Twitter. I can read your lips. This is embarrassing.
00:07:54
Speaker 10: And I'm embarrassed.
00:07:56
Speaker 9: So why is that? You know, it's a sense of right or wrong. You know, I feel like there's like this personal offense, like something unfair is happening.
00:08:08
Speaker 2: Which brings me to my hunch. It has to do with referees and not just basketball referees. The people everywhere charged not just with enforcing rules, but with preserving a sense of fairness. On Wall Street, in the news, in courts of law, in the many little disputes that pockmark everyday life. There are many different kinds of refs, and most of them are under some kind of attack. So maybe it's not that surprising that Americans one day woke up and thrilled to the message that life was unfair.
00:08:42
Speaker 4: You know, the system, folks, is rigged. It's a rigged system.
00:08:45
Speaker 5: A rigged economy.
00:08:47
Speaker 4: The banking system is rigged. A rigged system. There's a lot of things that are rigged in this world of ours.
00:08:53
Speaker 11: Not the fairness that we grew up believing that America was about.
00:08:58
Speaker 3: Which brings me to what this show is about.
00:09:03
Speaker 2: The people whose job it is to maximize fairness, not just in sports, but most everywhere. What's happening to them tells us a lot about what's happening to us. You have to listen closely, but you can hear that same chant in a lot of American life.
00:09:27
Speaker 3: Ref, you suck. Here we go.
00:09:53
Speaker 2: Back at the NBA's offices in Secaucus, New Jersey. Someone eventually came and unlocked the door. And then they led me down a hall filled with a lot of old basketball stuff. Jerseys and bobbleheads and basketballs and posters of Michael Jordan.
00:10:08
Speaker 3: The replay section.
00:10:09
Speaker 2: Was the ultimate man cave.
00:10:14
Speaker 3: It's also the latest weapon in the battle for fairness.
00:10:17
Speaker 2: So this place just on first.
00:10:20
Speaker 3: View is amazing. It's wall-to-wall screens, 110 of them.
00:10:25
Speaker 2: What's on them is whatever is captured by all the cameras in 29 NBA arenas across the country. This isn't the broadcast video with commercials and commentary. The screens here don't even have the scores of the games on them or the names of the teams playing, and they're muted. What you hear is referees staring at basketball games. What you see is nothing but angles on professional basketball courts.
00:10:50
Speaker 1: Nobody's ever walked in here and walked out and said, this place sucks.
00:10:54
Speaker 2: And I'm not going to say it sucks either. That's Joe Borgia, who designed the center back in 2014 and now runs it. Before he volunteered for Secaucus duty, he refereed NBA games. His father was an NBA ref before him. With a break in the late 60s, Borgia has been reffing professional basketball games since 1946.
00:11:15
Speaker 3: If you went.
00:11:17
Speaker 2: Back to your dad at the beginning of his career and said, this is what it's going to look like, what do you think he would have said?
00:11:23
Speaker 1: If I told him we would have replay, he'd turn over in his grave. Forget about a replay center. Is that right? Oh, absolutely.
00:11:29
Speaker 2: You see, the refs used to insist on their authority. At any rate, everyone agreed that there was no better way to ensure the fairness of the game than to let the ref play God. The replay center is an admission that the ref is not God, that he makes mistakes.
00:11:45
Speaker 1: I think the mention of replay, none of us liked it when we first heard it. It's a necessary evil. It's necessary. You have to have it today.
00:11:55
Speaker 2: Everything's taped now. Everyone pays more attention to the referee's mistakes. So the NBA has to as well. Now, when a ref thinks he might have screwed up some call or didn't get a good look at the action, he twirls his fingers in the air. That's the signal to the ref in the replay center who goes to work, reviewing the tape, looking for the best angle to figure out what actually happened.
00:12:21
Speaker 3: That's the thing, is everybody can see it now.
00:12:23
Speaker 1: Exactly.
00:12:23
Speaker 2: You can't have them be in a better position to judge the game than the referees.
00:12:27
Speaker 1: Absolutely.
00:12:28
Speaker 2: The replay center is what allows refs on a basketball court to change their calls. A lot of those calls are subjective, like whether one player fouled another. The refs on the court still make most of those calls themselves. The exception is when the foul is flagrant.
00:12:44
Speaker 1: Sure, Duke, we're going to give you two good angles, all right?
00:12:48
Speaker 11: That's the first one.
00:12:48
Speaker 1: The other one's going to give you a better look.
00:12:50
Speaker 3: There's blood on the screens.
00:12:52
Speaker 2: Kevin Love's front tooth got knocked in. Love plays for the Cleveland Cavaliers, and the question is, did the guy who popped him in the mouth do it intentionally?
00:13:01
Speaker 1: It's just a basketball play, and Kevin Love happens to move in to where the guy's elbow was going up.
00:13:06
Speaker 2: The refs need to decide if the violence was not just excessive, but unsportsmanlike, which sounds archaic.
00:13:13
Speaker 3: Because we sort of lost the concept. So the blood doesn't sway the decision?
00:13:17
Speaker 7: No, it doesn't.
00:13:18
Speaker 1: Listen, there's a lot of contact, so a lot of it's accidental. That was accidental. Possible flagger?
00:13:24
Speaker 2: The players all stand around scratching themselves while the refs put on headsets and talk to the replay center.
00:13:29
Speaker 1: We're looking for the unnatural. Did he throw his elbow out?
00:13:32
Speaker 3: So the foul was on Kevin Love. Correct.
00:13:36
Speaker 1: I thought he was outside. He was moving. He was moving. It was late. Come on, you've got to be quick on these.
00:13:40
Speaker 3: He's stuck on the blood coming out of his mouth.
00:13:41
Speaker 1: Yeah. It's ugly.
00:13:43
Speaker 2: The whole thing only takes 30 seconds. 30 seconds in which players, fans, coaches get even more pissed off at the refs for taking so long. The only thing stopping the replay center from checking every decision is that it slows the game down. Here in Secaucus, they're still trying to figure out how they might talk to the refs as they run up and down the court, because if they could do that, they could just fix every call on the fly.
00:14:08
Speaker 1: Special forces, we found out, we actually used a chip over the molar that worked off the vibration of the bone. Believe it or not, we did. We got a handful of G League referees molded, and we tested that.
00:14:22
Speaker 3: To wear a chip over their molar.
00:14:24
Speaker 1: But it wasn't good enough because they didn't know where the voice was coming from.
00:14:32
Speaker 3: It was just a voice in their heads?
00:14:33
Speaker 1: They didn't know where it was. Was that a coach talking to me?
00:14:36
Speaker 3: This is actually insane.
00:14:38
Speaker 2: The time and money now being spent to ensure the fairness of what, after all, is just a basketball game. A jillion miles of fiber optic cable connect this room directly to the NBA arenas around the country, all for two calls a game.
00:14:51
Speaker 1: At two calls a game. Fifteen million dollars to build this room to get two calls right a game. But you got to do it. You got to do it.
00:15:01
Speaker 3: Can I just pause here a moment?
00:15:04
Speaker 2: Just to consider what the NBA has done in the past few years to improve the calls. For example, they brought in serious managers to hire and train the refs. Joe Borgia calls his boss the General, because she's actually a General and an Air Force pilot. Her name is Michelle Johnson, and before she supervised NBA refs, she ran the Air Force Academy. It sounds like overkill to use a General to make sure basketball games are well-reffed. but the NBA thought it needed overkill. Or at least Adam Silver, the NBA commissioner, did.
00:15:38
Speaker 11: If people don't believe that the league office is unbiased and that the officials are unbiased, you're going to have a problem regardless of the accuracy of the calls.
00:15:47
Speaker 2: Silver took over in 2014 and also hired Joe Borgia to create the replay center. Since then, the NBA commissioner has taken a ridiculous amount of grief for trying to improve justice in basketball.
00:15:59
Speaker 11: There are a group of people who think that without the sort of transparency that we see in this day and age, that it enabled certain officials, and maybe with a touch of frontier justice, to overall create more of a fair environment. Even if that were true, and I'm not sure it is, those days are over. And I think it's whether it's in sports or other walks of life that you cannot turn the clock back on transparency.
00:16:27
Speaker 2: So here's what else Silver's done. He's broadened the pool of people from which refs are selected. They used to be mostly white men, mostly from the same background. At one point 15 years ago, four NBA refs came from the same high school. He's hired more black refs and female refs. He's insisted that referees be physically fit so they can get into position to see all the plays. While everyone else in America is getting fatter, the refs are getting buff. They're also now getting new feedback on all their bad calls. Silver decided to publish the mistakes made by every ref in the last two minutes of every game so everyone could see them. He gives the teams and the refs a private document listing every refereeing mistake.
00:17:11
Speaker 3: All this new.
00:17:11
Speaker 2: Data on refs means that we and they know all sorts of strange things about their minds. For instance, we now know that their calls have tended to favor whichever team's losing. Their calls also favor the home team. Some large part of home court advantage is just the refs. The analytics department of the Houston Rockets has even done a study that shows that the home team that gets the best calls is the Utah Jazz.
00:17:34
Speaker 3: Why Utah? Who knows?
00:17:37
Speaker 2: But you can be sure that someone will figure that out. There's now basically a small army of geeks analyzing all this new data.
00:17:46
Speaker 12: Look, I don't really like writing papers about sports. I prefer to write them about the economy.
00:17:50
Speaker 2: That's Justin Wolfers, a behavioral economist at the University of Michigan. and the co-author of a paper about NBA refs.
00:17:57
Speaker 12: But the thing is, this is a domain where the NBA referees have tremendous incentives not to make the wrong call. Every error they make is tracked. Those errors determine whether they get more games. Those games determine how much they get paid. This is arguably the most analyzed workforce in the country.
00:18:15
Speaker 2: Basketball referees are now picked apart in ways that not long ago would have seemed preposterous, not just for the fairness of their calls, but for their unconscious behavior. Wolfer's took years of data from every NBA game, then he set out to look for evidence of the ref's racial bias.
00:18:32
Speaker 12: The question here isn't whether people are anti-black or anti-white, but whether there's an in-group bias. So if a predominantly black team is playing and the refereeing crew is predominantly white, are there more fouls called against them than on nights when the same team is playing with a predominantly black refereeing crew? And it turns out the answer is yes.
00:18:55
Speaker 2: Wolfers wrote his paper back in 2007, before this new age of referee transparency.
00:19:01
Speaker 12: Well, it was a bit of a lesson for me. You can probably tell by my accent, Michael, I'm an Australian. I thought it was an interesting piece of social science. It turned out the New York Times put it on the front page.
00:19:12
Speaker 3: And the NBA wasn't happy.
00:19:14
Speaker 2: The commissioner at the time attacked the study and embarrassed the league by trying, and failing, to refute its findings.
00:19:21
Speaker 3: This morning we'll hear from the NBA commissioner, David Stern.
00:19:24
Speaker 4: Our referees are the most reviewed, most ranked, and most rated.
00:19:28
Speaker 3: And that's why we take exception to what the Times did here.
00:19:32
Speaker 2: That's Stern on NPR in 2007.
00:19:35
Speaker 3: The result of all this coverage?
00:19:37
Speaker 2: Every single referee was made aware of his unconscious bias. When the dust settled, Justin Wolfers was curious to know if his paper had had any effect. He made another study of referees after the controversy he'd created, and guess what?
00:19:51
Speaker 12: The most recent study we did seems to suggest that that form of racial bias has gone away.
00:19:56
Speaker 3: He has no idea why.
00:19:57
Speaker 2: Maybe simply making the refs aware of the problem was enough to correct it. But in the end, this became a case study, not in ref ineptitude, but ref reform. NBA refs have achieved what police forces can only dream of, race blindness. The refs have no choice but The world's now too good at seeing their mistakes. Look, there's no way any basketball referee is going to be perfect. But there's also no way these refs are anything but more accurate than they've ever been. I mean, even home court advantage means less than it used to. And yet these refs are treated as if they're trying to rig the games.
00:20:34
Speaker 3: Referees stop! Referees stop! Referees stop!
00:20:39
Speaker 5: Referees stop!
00:20:44
Speaker 2: Does the sound of those 18,000 people screaming at you or booing you, does it sound any different than it sounded when you started in 1991?
00:20:52
Speaker 13: Yeah, there's a little more anger involved. And, you know, it used to be sort of the garden variety.
00:20:58
Speaker 3: You're terrible.
00:20:59
Speaker 13: You suck.
00:21:00
Speaker 4: Any of those kinds of terms.
00:21:01
Speaker 2: That's Monty McCutcheon, who recently quit reffing NBA games to serve as a kind of life coach to the other NBA refs to talk them through their problems.
00:21:11
Speaker 10: Now, you know, People do their research. They, things are out there on the internet. They know your record with the, with their team. They, they've done all, there's all these sites on all these.
00:21:22
Speaker 3: Different, they know personal things about you.
00:21:24
Speaker 13: Oh, sure. Of course, some death threats are made from time to time in playoff series, and you'll get security all the way to, to both the hotel and then the hotel.
00:21:33
Speaker 10: The next morning out to the airport.
00:21:34
Speaker 3: That's security to the hotel.
00:21:36
Speaker 13: Not every night, but when those threats are, are a known factor, it has happened in my career.
00:21:41
Speaker 10: Security to your car is mandatory every night.
00:21:44
Speaker 11: Yep.
00:21:45
Speaker 2: These days, refs need bodyguards to escape after the game. Here are people who are mostly just trying to do these extremely difficult jobs as well as they can. And at some point, you feel this question rising up in you. In me, it rose up while I was talking to Ramona Shelburne, the ESPN reporter. Why would anybody want to be a ref?
00:22:05
Speaker 8: Seriously, I wonder that too, man. They're not allowed to say anything. They're not allowed to explain themselves. They're not allowed to defend themselves.
00:22:14
Speaker 2: Look, obviously they get paid. They start at $ 150, 000 a year, and if they're great at their job and work extra games, they can make as much as $ 500, 000. But there are lots of ways to get paid without spending half your life in hotel rooms and the other half being insulted by arenas filled with crazy people. Do you think the refereeing has gotten worse or better?
00:22:33
Speaker 8: I actually think it's gotten better.
00:22:35
Speaker 3: Of course it's gotten better. How could it not have?
00:22:38
Speaker 2: The mystery is why the stars and the coaches and the fans act as if it's gotten worse.
00:22:43
Speaker 3: I have a hunch about that, too, which you'll hear in a minute.
00:22:57
Speaker 1: Okay, so Sacramento's checking in right now. So they're at 10 o'clock, so an hour before... The Clippers, Golden State will check in, and the Clippers will check in about 9.30, roughly.
00:23:12
Speaker 2: I'm back with Joe Borgia in the replay center. The refs here sit dressed in black, staring at screens, waiting for a signal from somewhere in America. The end of games is when they get most involved, because that's when fans and coaches and players are most likely to accuse some ref of having made the mistake that changed the outcome. Of course, a mistake at the beginning has just as much effect on a game as a mistake at the end, but the end is what people notice and get outraged about. So the justice at the end of the game must be more exact than it is at the beginning.
00:23:48
Speaker 3: These replay center refs have video technicians with.
00:23:50
Speaker 2: Them who can freeze a moment on screen, then zoom out or zoom in so that the entire screen contains only a player's fingertips or his toes. Here you just scroll through tiny slivers of the game, not the game itself, the slivers where injustices might occur.
00:24:06
Speaker 1: I mean, goodness gracious, if you don't have slow motion in here, a freeze frame, it's very difficult.
00:24:12
Speaker 2: Of course, in slow motion, you can see things that the naked eye misses. Magicians sometimes perform during halftimes of the NBA games. When Joe Borges slows it down, he can see how they do their tricks. It's kind of the same thing with the players.
00:24:27
Speaker 1: Exactly. I can go a 60th of a second at a time. You're going to pick a lot of little things up.
00:24:31
Speaker 3: So what these players are getting good at is creating optical illusions.
00:24:35
Speaker 1: Of course.
00:24:36
Speaker 3: The sort of things that a magician does.
00:24:37
Speaker 1: Well, isn't flopping an optical illusion?
00:24:39
Speaker 2: Flopping is what they call it when a player pretends to have been knocked over by another player. Tricking the refs into making bad calls is now considered a skill.
00:24:48
Speaker 1: Okay, replay signal given, so you just hit it perfect.
00:24:51
Speaker 2: A game ref in Houston twirls his fingers in the air. Some players hit a three-point shot at the buzzer.
00:24:57
Speaker 3: Or has he?
00:24:59
Speaker 2: The Houston ref wants to know if the player's toe was on the three-point line and if he got off the shot before the buzzer.
00:25:06
Speaker 3: It's just now that Joe says I can work the equipment. Can I?
00:25:10
Speaker 1: Just don't hit the red on air.
00:25:16
Speaker 3: The truth is I'm not a big equipment guy.
00:25:19
Speaker 2: My first step when something needs to be assembled or operated is to call someone and say I'll pay whatever it costs. I start twisting dials just to see what happens. they appear to cause the picture to zoom in and out.
00:25:31
Speaker 1: Watch the referee on the bottom of the screen. There's your signal.
00:25:36
Speaker 3: You've got to see that. You have to see the referee doing that. Or someone may say something. There's a lot of subjectivity in refereeing.
00:25:45
Speaker 2: But a whole bunch of the questions that arise on a basketball court have objective answers.
00:25:50
Speaker 3: Like, who touched the ball last before it went out of bounds?
00:25:53
Speaker 2: Or, was there still time on the clock before the shot left the player's hands? This is one of those. Did the player's foot touch the three-point line when he leapt for his shot? Did the ball leave his fingertips before the buzzer sounded? One of the dials, or maybe it's actually a joystick, lets me choose which angle of the court I see. I need to find one still frame with the shooter's foot in it and another with a clock in it. Then I need to freeze the picture in the 160th of a second that the ball left the shooter's fingertips. Just then I realize, I have no idea who the player is. I don't even know which team he's on. All I know is he's in Houston.
00:26:37
Speaker 3: Can I get it here? Not quite.
00:26:39
Speaker 1: These are all the same.
00:26:40
Speaker 3: Oh, they are?
00:26:41
Speaker 1: Because it's pretty much. You didn't even know.
00:26:44
Speaker 3: Is Houston still waiting on me?
00:26:47
Speaker 2: I think it occurred to me at that moment that they were possibly actually using what I was doing.
00:26:52
Speaker 3: And that was a little bit of anxiety.
00:26:54
Speaker 2: The coaches get to stop the game with pointless timeouts. The advertisers get to stop the game to sell beer. But when a ref stops a game to make it more fair, the crowd boos, and the announcers launch attacks on them.
00:27:09
Speaker 3: It's not enough to be right. You've got to be fast.
00:27:12
Speaker 2: Borja tracks the average response time of the replay refs.
00:27:15
Speaker 3: It's between 20 and 30 seconds.
00:27:16
Speaker 1: Okay, the replay center official confirmed successful three-point basket. You got it.
00:27:23
Speaker 2: The problem's dealt with, or I think it is, but right away another one comes up. on a bunch of screens showing one arena. All these people are jumping around and hollering at refs. The ruckus appears to be confined to Cleveland, but in here it feels like the entire universe is disturbed.
00:27:41
Speaker 3: It turns out LeBron James is upset. He's arguing.
00:27:45
Speaker 1: There he goes.
00:27:46
Speaker 3: LeBron James going from ref to ref. He seems to know which refs to argue with.
00:27:51
Speaker 1: They're talking about goaltending. So they're talking about it. I think they might change. James and the other guy had the best angle.
00:28:02
Speaker 3: Do you think that LeBron James has any effect doing that?
00:28:08
Speaker 2: The ref in Cleveland is not twirling his finger. There's no signal to us to do anything in the replay center. LeBron's drama, strictly speaking, is pointless. It's strange the way these players argue. They must think that if they make life unpleasant enough for the ref, he'll think twice before the next call. It's then that it occurs to me, just looking around the room at 110 TV screens, I've had a hard time following the games, never mind the scores. I sometimes don't even know which teams are playing. But every time a player gets up into a referee's face, I've recognized the player. And I actually don't know that many NBA players, but I know all the ones who pitch these hissy fits. Because the only players getting up into the faces of the refs are the famous players, or the coaches who protect them. Ramona Shelburne put her finger on it. The more aggressive behavior towards refs isn't coming from every player. It's coming from the stars.
00:29:24
Speaker 6: So we just got really interested in a very simple question of does this sense of being privileged make you disobey the rules of the road or the laws of the land.
00:29:34
Speaker 2: That's Dacher Keltner. He's a professor of psychology at Cal Berkeley and someone who wonders about the effect inequality has on people's behavior.
00:29:42
Speaker 6: An experience I had in Berkeley where I was riding my bike up this hill and I got to the four-way stops and I was halfway through this four-way stop sign. And this guy in a black Mercedes rolls through the stop sign, is halfway there, is a foot away from me, about to take me out, and he's on his cell phone. And I looked at him, I was ready to take him on, like, all right, buddy, this is it. And what was most telling about this whole experience was he looked at me as if I was in the wrong and I should get out of his way, even though I had made it through the stop sign first.
00:30:20
Speaker 2: So Dacker and a colleague dreamed up this weird experiment. They hid two Berkeley undergraduates in the bushes near four-way stop signs. The undergrads noted the makes of all cars coming through the intersection, assigned them numbers, one to five, according to their market value. A new Mercedes was a five, a Honda was a three, and an old Pacer was a one.
00:30:43
Speaker 6: We positioned a Berkeley undergrad by a pedestrian zone, and we make sure they look like they want to cross the street, right? And they're sort of leaning into the pedestrian zone where it's required by California law to stop.
00:30:55
Speaker 2: It's a game of one-on-one at a California crosswalk. One car versus one pedestrian.
00:31:01
Speaker 6: And zero percent of the drivers of poor cars... zoom through the pedestrian zone, they all stop. And 40-some-odd percent, 45% of the drivers of the fives, the rich cars, blaze through the pedestrian zone and just say, the rules don't apply to me.
00:31:19
Speaker 3: I'll carry on. This one study led to a bunch of others that showed basically the same pattern of human behavior.
00:31:30
Speaker 6: Another experiment, we bring people to the lab, and as they're leaving... there's this big bowl of candy. And it says on it, for the children of the Institute of Human Development.
00:31:43
Speaker 1: On the bowl.
00:31:44
Speaker 6: And we say, oh, you're going to take a candy or two as you're leaving. And we count up how many candies they take after they leave the experiment. Privileged people grab a big handful of candy compared to poorer people.
00:31:55
Speaker 2: So let's turn the conversation to something much more important, which is basketball.
00:31:58
Speaker 1: Most important of all.
00:32:00
Speaker 2: In the last five or six years, the NBA has embarked on essentially everything A dramatic reform of refereeing. At the same time, the friction between the players and some of the owners and some of the coaches and the refs is going through the roof. The source of the outrage is the star players. The people getting thrown out of games are Kevin Durant and Steph Curry and James Harden. And the Warriors, the most famous team ever to walk on the court, are the chief culprits. Exhibit A in bad behavior towards refs. So you've got this weird combination.
00:32:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's fascinating.
00:32:34
Speaker 6: I still remember being a Lakers fan, you know, the great Magic Johnson teams, and watching Larry Bird do his nine-step layup.
00:32:41
Speaker 4: And I'm like, come on, make the call.
00:32:43
Speaker 2: Larry Bird was like LeBron, the new Mercedes of his day. He played with certain assumptions about the rules and how they applied to him. For most players of his era, two steps counted as traveling. The inequality on a basketball court is profound. And it's more profound than it was in Larry Bird's era. Larry Bird was a millionaire. LeBron James might be a billionaire.
00:33:04
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:33:05
Speaker 2: And these guys are global franchises.
00:33:08
Speaker 4: Yeah.
00:33:08
Speaker 2: So you got, in a funny way, a microcosm. It's an odd microcosm on a basketball court. What's going on in the larger society? The NBA is set out to ref the game more objectively, more accurately, more fairly. This has enraged the stars and their fans and coaches. You want to know why? The more objectivity there is, the less power they have. Objective refs eliminate some of their privilege. The stars can't get the calls anymore just because they're stars.
00:33:41
Speaker 3: Or anyway, not as often.
00:33:43
Speaker 2: LeBron James and Kevin Durant and Steph Curry and Klay Thompson, they'll all survive better refs because they're actually just better than everyone else. They don't need unfairness to win. But what happens where there are no replay centers? Where there's no hope for pure objectivity or technology to improve calls? where the refs can no longer defend themselves from the stars. Welcome to the reason for our show. I think American life just now has at least one thing in common with basketball. The authority of its referees is under attack. And when you have a weak referee, you have a big problem. Because a weak referee is a referee who can be bought, or intimidated, or just simply ignored. a situation goes from being more or less well-refereed to more or less not. Then one day you wake up in a world that seems not just unfair, but actually sort of rigged. That is, it's incapable of becoming fair, because the people who benefit from the unfairness have the power to preserve it.
00:34:51
Speaker 1: Boom.
00:34:51
Speaker 2: Do you flip a switch and 110 screens go dark? Most nights, Joe Borgia stays at the replay center until almost 2 in the morning. Just him and a couple of refs staring at tiny slivers of basketball games, trying to impose justice on powerful people who don't want it.
00:35:17
Speaker 1: You do. Now, you have to be partially off. It's 100% negative business.
00:35:28
Speaker 3: 100% negative business.
00:35:29
Speaker 1: That's why my son doesn't want to ref. I don't like people yelling at me.
00:35:32
Speaker 3: One day, a young Borja naturally becomes a referee. The next, he doesn't.
00:35:39
Speaker 2: One day, most people think the refs are more or less fair. Or at any rate, they don't spend a lot of time blaming them for all their problems. The next day, they wake up to radical inequality. The people on top, the elites... think they're special. They behave as people do when they think they're special. Young people emulate them without even thinking about it. They just assume that's how you act if you're a star or wannabe. My first question is, why when you hit a three-point shot, which you often do, why in the past have you pounded your chest and pointed to the sky?
00:36:16
Speaker 7: I did it because the people on the NBA and the NBA did it.
00:36:20
Speaker 3: What do you think they're doing? What does it mean?
00:36:22
Speaker 7: I don't know, just like, I'm cool.
00:36:26
Speaker 3: Do you believe in God?
00:36:27
Speaker 1: No.
00:36:29
Speaker 7: I knew what it, I mean, now I know what it meant, but no, I don't.
00:36:32
Speaker 3: So what does it mean?
00:36:34
Speaker 7: Basically, it's like, thank you, God.
00:36:37
Speaker 2: For hitting a three-point shot? Do you think God was responsible when Clay Thompson hit a three-point shot?
00:36:43
Speaker 7: To be honest, if God was watching over everybody whenever they hit a three-point shot, I don't think that he would be able to actually make them make the shot.
00:36:58
Speaker 2: So do you have anything you'd like to say to the referees of the world before we turn this recording off?
00:37:03
Speaker 7: Don't pick sides, unless it's my side.
00:37:06
Speaker 3: Thank you. I'm Michael Lewis. Thanks for listening to Against the Rules.
00:37:18
Speaker 2: It's our first episode. We've got a lot more to come. Against the Rules is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. The show is produced by Audrey Dilling and Catherine Girardeau, with research assistance from Zoe Oliver-Gray. Our editor is Julia Barton. Mia Lobel is our executive producer. Our theme was composed by Nick Bertel, with additional scoring by Seth Samuel.
00:37:42
Speaker 3: Mastering by Jason Gambrell.
00:37:45
Speaker 2: Our show was recorded at Northgate Studios in Berkeley by Topher Ruth. Special thanks to our founders, Jacob Weisberg and Malcolm Gladwell.
00:38:07
Speaker 3: Part One. The Refs.
00:38:12
Speaker 2: The same year Trump's name was being plastered onto the side of the U.S. Institute of Peace, the East Wing of the White House was being torn down to build the President Donald J. Trump Ballroom, and the Kennedy Center was on its way to becoming the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. A foreign visa, government savings accounts for children, and a prescription drug program were also all being named for Trump. And White House staff had taken the trouble to redesign an annual pass to America's national parks with Trump's face on it. On the National Mall, a giant new Trump banner, paired with one of Abraham Lincoln's, rippled down the facade of the Department of Agriculture. Republicans in Congress were proposing bills to rename Dulles International Airport for Trump, carve Trump's face on Mount Rushmore, create both a $ 250 and $ 500 bill to honor Trump, make a federal holiday of Trump's birthday, and erect a triumphal arch taller than the Lincoln Memorial, nicknamed Arc de Trump. All of this was obviously kind of weird. No other president had ever used the office so energetically to promote his personal brand. But the environment had changed. It tolerated some new behaviors and discouraged some old ones. It took Tim Curry a surprisingly long time to see what this shift in the climate meant for him. At first, he assumed it meant nothing. During the first Trump administration, he'd been perfectly satisfied with his job. Those four years had felt to him much like the previous 21, at least until the very end. A Democrat would win the White House and ask Tim to inflict some new set of policies upon the federal workforce. A Republican would win the next time and ask Tim to inflict a nearly opposite set of policies. One day, no employee of the U.S. government was required to get the COVID vaccine. The next day, everyone was. Trump to Biden had been a jolt, but so were all the others. Those kind of jolts didn't bother Tim. For his deft management of the vaccine policy, he'd been given the country's highest civil service honor, the Presidential Distinguished Rank Award, conferred on only 1% of the Senior Executive Service, SES. But if they'd asked him to somehow extract the vaccines from the bodies of the entire federal workforce, he'd have done that too. Tim would joke that his job is to spend four years doing something and then spend the next four years undoing it, one colleague said. But he's okay with it. Tim worked in the Office of Personnel Management, OPM. His official title was Deputy Associate Director, Accountability and Workforce Relations. But that didn't help explain what he did all day. The small box he was in charge of, three levels down the OPM org chart, had changed names over the decades. But its two roles were probably as old as the nonpartisan civil service. It refereed disputes between government managers and workers. and oversaw negotiations between government agencies and unions. OPM was sort of a meta-agency, a handful of people who helped the people who helped the people. It was small and obscure and designed to kill the curiosity of all but the most hardcore good government types. But it offered the best perch inside the U.S. government to see and control all of it. Still, on their weekly calls, Tim's father would occasionally ask him, one more time, to explain his job. It took years for my dad to understand what I did, said Tim. He'd get confused and think I work for a union. Part of the problem, part of the reason it was hard to see what he did, was that so much of what he did was preventative. He was himself a kind of vaccine. If he did his job well, it meant that some massive workplace injustice or scandal didn't happen. He wasn't a lawyer, but he spent a lot of his time explaining laws to people. He wasn't an arbitrator, but he spent a lot of time being yelled at by both union leaders and the heads of federal agencies, and then, when they were finished yelling, selling both sides on a solution to the problem. It's hard to explain the connection between Tim's job and the speed with which you get your tax refund, said one former OPM political appointee, but there is a connection. Tim's needed for the government to work. Another political person described Tim Curry as OPM's bus person. Bus people, he explained, are people who if they are hit by a bus, the government stops working. All the political appointees, the temporary heads of the agencies installed by the president, came around to this opinion. Even the Trump political appointees, who in theory despise the federal government. The very people who would cook up Project 2025, the 900-page manifesto that proposed to dismantle the government, would also poke their heads into Tim's office to seek his help. They needed Tim Curry because Tim Curry was the only one inside the United States government that everyone in any particular dispute was happy to deal with.
