43 episodes
Against the Rules with Michael Lewis Pushkin
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- Society & Culture
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4.5 • 8.6K Ratings
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Journalist and bestselling author Michael Lewis takes a searing look at what’s happened to fairness in American life through the lens of people who depend on public trust. After exploring what’s happened to referees and coaches, the third season of Against the Rules tackles what’s happened to our trust in experts and expertise. An expert has probably saved your life more than once. So why is it so hard to judge who the real experts are? And why, once we’ve found them, do we struggle to listen to what experts have to say? In this season, we meet oceanographers and baseball writers, nurses and former gang members — people who don’t have a lot in common but the mixed blessing of their expertise.
iHeartMedia is the exclusive podcast partner of Pushkin Industries.
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Episode 1: Six Levels Down
Athenahealth was just another healthcare provider facing the biggest problem US doctors face: not treating patients, but getting insurance companies to pay their bills. But then the company figured out how to fix the problem, by recognizing an overlooked expert toiling in the hospital basement.
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REBROADCAST: The Hand of Leonardo
Season Three of Against the Rules continues in this feed next Tuesday. In the meantime, Michael Lewis has an update on one of the most popular episodes from his first season, about a painting that may or may not have been done by Leonardo.
If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts be sure to sign up for our email list at Pushkin.fm.
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Episode 2: The Art of the Untold Story
Why can’t we see the experts right in front of us, even when they're saving our lives? Maybe it's because the specialized knowledge of many experts defies good storytelling. We hear from a nonprofit trying to elevate the esoteric work of government experts, and we hear from one of their nominees. His work has changed the survival prospects for many lost at sea, but even those survivors have never heard his name.
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Programming Note
We’re hard at work now on episode 6. Check back here for it next Tuesday.
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Episode 3: Field of Ignorance
The right kind of expert, at the right time, can change everything. While working as a security guard at a pork-and-beans cannery in Kansas, Bill James started writing about baseball. But writing about it through the poetry of statistical analysis. It took a long time, but James's way of looking at the game changed more than just baseball.
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Episode 4: Respect the Polygon
Experts know more now than ever before. And we’re more critical of them than ever before, too. But one kind of expert really gets us riled up: the type who deals in probabilities. We hear from meteorologists, political forecasters, and even nurses about why calculating the odds is so hard, and why we all suffer the deadly consequences as a result.
If you’d like to keep up with the most recent news from this and other Pushkin podcasts be sure to sign up for our email list at Pushkin.fm.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Customer Reviews
Question
This is really a Q for tech support. Why are these episodes organized so strangely? I love Michael Lewis — I just listened to him narrate Liar’s Poker — but when I click on the most recent segment, I get a trailer for the podcast, and can’t find the current episode.
Season 2 episode 2 glorifies a Coach who hits people and breaks things
Before this episode I was a big fan of Lewis in general and this season focusing on coaching. Lewis praises his old baseball coach for teaching his players to always seek to be first and to never accept second place. Lewis explains how this Coach once violently broke a second place basketball trophy near the faces of the youth players to make this point. Lewis glorifies this violence as more than appropriate. Later Lewis tells a story of this coach’s younger life including when he punched out a very good player and his father laughing all the time.
Certainly that Coach had many good characteristics but failure to decry violence in youth sports is unacceptable to me and I think lewis should be ashamed. Violence in sports and macho attitudes of coaches is wrong. Would Lewis promote that youth players also destroy their second place trophies? I hope my critique gets to mr lewis and that he explain to his audience why he thought that punching an opponent (and his father) was funny and okay.
Shame on you Mr. Lewis.
Biased misinformation
Michael Lewis has written some great books on some interesting subjects and a few of the episodes in this series bring out his classic style. But Lewis has an extreme left bias and is unreliable on any topic with a political angle. His COVID episode criticizes a supposed expert who uses his credentials to get on major news outlets and influence public health to issue opinions based on premature scientific conclusions. The expert refuses to admit he’s wrong even as new evidence comes in. He seeks to suppress contrary opinions. As a result, the COVID response was mishandled. Dr. Fauci? No, a guy named Dr. Ioannides, whom Lewis accuses of all of this, while somehow never mentioning Fauci. Lewis is utterly oblivious to how he falls prey to that which he condemns because he’s so blinded by the blindness of the Berkeley bubble in which he lives.
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