672: No Fair!

David Kestenbaum

OK. So I brought the phone into class, and I set it up. And the kids started to use it immediately and with great enthusiasm.

David Kestenbaum

Catch that one? Nathan farted in my face, and I said, yuck, Nathan. But the real crime?

David Kestenbaum

I think there was enormous excitement just having a phone in the class. It was larger than they'd probably ever seen in their lives-- bright red with buttons on it. It was an old touch-tone phone. Everyone wanted to use it, even if they didn't have a tattle. Kids sang a song into it. One tried to order a pizza. Someone said, hi mom, please pick me up early.

David Kestenbaum

Several calls later, conscience heavy, that kid calls back.

David Kestenbaum

The tattle-phone was like a magic portal into one preschool classroom in America, which is kind of incredible. Like most parents I'll ask my kids, what happened in school today, and I get nothing. School is like this black box-- you drop them off, pick them up, and you have no idea what happens in between.

But now I had this phone. It was set up so it sent me the messages as they happened. It was funny listening to them from my desk. The portal into this classroom would open for a second, I get this little report from a kid, hear a little sound of the room, and then it would close-- sometimes for a while. Then the portal would open, I'd hear something, and then silence again. There were never any tattles between 1 and 3 o'clock, because that was nap time. Then they'd start again, these little dramas.

David Kestenbaum

"My friend Simone." It's always their friends who are bugging them.

David Kestenbaum

Can I just say, I'm not sure that one is actionable. You're pretending to sleep and complaining that someone is waking you up? I don't know.

David Kestenbaum

This is Kathleen Jones, the lead teacher in the class.

David Kestenbaum

There's actual scientific research on this. Kids know when something's unfair, some when they're just 12 months old. My kids weren't even walking then. And I know this is kind of obvious, but so many of the conflicts in this world come down to some version of what's going on in this classroom-- what's fair, how do you divide up something that there's a limited quantity of.

David Kestenbaum

I sometimes think that the main usefulness of numbers for my son Max, the whole reason he knows how to count, is score-keeping-- how many of something he has and how many his brother has. It's a weighing of the scales of justice, no matter how tiny.

David Kestenbaum

It gave the teachers the break they were looking for. I wanted to see if the kids thought it worked, whether the tattle-phone helped them deal with stuff. So the other weekend I interviewed a bunch of them-- which, I have to say, these were some of the weirder interviews I've done in my professional life. Bob Woodward, I know this isn't right, but I had to pay one interviewee a piece of gum. Another kid, Nicky, insisted on performing magic tricks before granting an interview. I did not have high expectations.

David Kestenbaum

Nicky then refused to talk about the phone at all. But others clearly used it a lot.

David Kestenbaum

That's Gabriel. This is Deenia.

David Kestenbaum

One girl's parents told me that they were on vacation staying at a hotel, which of course had a landline phone. And their daughter, Simone, said, look, a tattle-phone, as if there was some sort of national tattle-phone network, staffed around the clock by government workers entering everything into a database. My friend's kid Sean, who just turned 5 and who I adore, was the only one who could remember a tattle-worthy event from school in any detail. He whispered it to me. He was clearly kind of excited about this. His friend had kicked him.

It sounds like it might have been an accident. Sean stood up and acted out the whole thing in slow motion for me.

David Kestenbaum

Like it was a scene from an action movie. His friend was trying to kick the ceiling.

David Kestenbaum

A bunch of kids told me they felt good after talking to the tattle-phone, though the why it made them feel better, it took all my interviewing skills. This is Gabriel.

David Kestenbaum

One girl told me talking to the tattle-phone felt like eating ice cream.

It's nice to think that just getting something off your chest can solve a problem, that if you just release the fact of the injustice into the world you feel better. And sure, I think that can be true. But we had the phone in class for a month, and I did notice toward the end, we got fewer messages. They came in regularly, but not with the same energy.

It's possible the novelty was wearing off. I think there's something else going on as well. Before we put the phone in the class, I had it set up in my house, just to make sure it was working. My kids used it a couple of times. And then our younger son Max was complaining that his brother, Auggie, who's a year older, had pinched him.

Tell it to the tattle-phone, I said. It's not working, he told me. I picked the phone up worried that there was some technical glitch. But it was fine. It's working, Max. No, he said, it's not.

David Kestenbaum

It didn't stop Auggie pinching me. I know, Max. I know. Sometimes you want more than just to speak. You want actual justice.

Ira Glass

And that brings us to-- like, what are we, 12 minutes into the program-- it brings us to what we are doing today on our show. Today we have people, some of them young, some of them old, wanting justice, feeling a sense of injustice, on things as big as the constitutional foundation of our entire country and things as small as the question of whether a ball is in or out. And in all those cases, people young and old not trusting the system to deliver justice. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, Hoop Reams. The journalist Michael Lewis, who wrote Moneyball and The Big Short and lots of other books and who contributes to our program now and then, he was looking around at what's going on in America these days. And he noticed that one way you can describe the current moment that we're all living through is that Americans don't trust the refs-- in all walks of life. They don't trust their impartiality.

I'm talking about police, Supreme Court justices, journalists, the people who regulate the banks and Wall Street and student loans, the people setting medical costs, judges. So many people today feel the system is rigged. I mean, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump both ran on that. So many people feel that the figures of authority, charged with enforcing rules impartially, keeping everybody on a level playing field, that they're failing at their jobs. It's not fair.

Michael Lewis has not published this reporting that he's been doing on this in a new book. He's decided to make it into a podcast. They launched this week. It's called Against The Rules. And Michael has adapted a version of their very first episode for us to play for you right now. The first episode is about people not trusting the refs in the most literal sense of that. It's about basketball referees. Here's Michael Lewis.

Michael Lewis

For me, this story really begins with my 11-year-old son, Walker. He plays on a basketball team run 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 in what amounts to a Buddhist basketball game, anytime a ref blows the whistle on him, he throws up his arms in astonishment. Then he jumps up and down with his little fists 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.

Michael Lewis

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.

Michael Lewis

When Klay hits a three, Klay pounds his chest and points to the sky. And so when Walker Lewis hits a three, he too pounds his chest and points to the sky.

Michael Lewis

When Klay is 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.

Michael Lewis

And Klay's the famously most laid back all-star in the entire National Basketball Association.

Michael Lewis

That's Ramona Shelburne. She's covered the NBA for the last decade for ESPN.

Michael Lewis

One of the Warriors head-butted a ref. Another chucked his disgusting mouth guard off a ref's chest.

Michael Lewis

Last year, bad behavior got various Golden State Warriors tossed out of 10 different basketball games. Kevin Durant, their best player, got thrown out of five-- four more than he'd been thrown out of his entire career up to that point. The men who coach the stars aren't much better. Even Steve Kerr, the Warriors' famously decent, civic-minded coach--

Michael Lewis

The players get fined if they talk about the refs, so we won't be talking to them. But it's not just them or their coaches or my son who are treating refs in ways they'd never treat an ordinary person. It's the fans in every arena who spend meaningful amounts of their time looking for the refs' mistakes on the JumboTron. It's the cable sports channels playing and replaying the refs' mistakes so their viewers can tweet and retweet about them. It's this entire infrastructure, seemingly built to focus attention on whatever mistakes the refs make for the sole purpose of generating outrage.

Michael Lewis

If there's one thing that unites Americans just now, it's their belief that the refs suck-- which is weird, because they almost certainly suck less than ever before. Before you hate me for saying that, give me a moment to show why.

So we're walking across a parking lot in Secaucus, New Jersey. And there are chain hotels and motels in someone's idea of a mall. And we're surrounded on all sides by freeways. It's like what people think about when they tell jokes about New Jersey. 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. Inside, a recent concession to the world we live in-- the Replay Center, a place where basketball referees review the calls made by other basketball referees in real time, to minimize referee error. The Replay Center was built to persuade people that life was fair.

And the door is locked.

Someone eventually unlocks the door and leads me down a hall filled with a lot of old basketball stuff-- jerseys and bobbleheads and basketballs and posters of Michael Jordan. The Replay Center was the ultimate man cave--

Michael Lewis

It's also the latest weapon in the battle for fairness.

Michael Lewis

It's wall-to-wall screens, 110 of them. What's on them is whatever is captured by all the cameras in 29 NBA arenas across the country. They may have a screen somewhere with scores on it, but I didn't see it. And they're all muted. What you hear is referees staring at basketball games. What you see is nothing but angles on professional basketball courts.

Michael Lewis

That's Joe Borgia, who's run the center since 2014. 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, a Borgia has been reffing professional basketball games since 1946.

Michael Lewis

You see, the refs used to insist on their authority. And 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.

Michael Lewis

Everything is taped now. Everyone pays more attention to the referees' 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--

Michael Lewis

--he twirls his fingers in the air.

Michael Lewis

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.

Michael Lewis

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.

These Replay Center refs have video technicians with 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 sliver is where injustices might occur.

Michael Lewis

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 Borgia slows it down, he can see how they do their tricks. It's kind of the same thing with the players.

Michael Lewis

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.

Michael Lewis

There's blood on the screens. 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?

Michael Lewis

The refs need to decide if the violence was not just excessive but unsportsmanlike, which sounds archaic, because we've sort of lost the concept.

Michael Lewis

The players all stand around scratching themselves while the refs put on headsets and talk to the Replay Center.

Michael Lewis

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.

Michael Lewis

It's insane. The time and money now being spent to ensure the fairness of what, after all, is just a basketball game-- a bajillion miles of fiber optic cable connect this room directly to the NBA arenas around the country, all for two calls a game.

Michael Lewis

Can I just pause here a moment, just to consider what the NBA has done in the past few years to improve the calls? For example, they've brought in serious managers to hire and train the refs.

Joe Borgia calls his boss the general, because she actually was 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.

Michael Lewis

People watching at home are scrutinizing every call on their phones and their TVs. They had just enough information to be suspicious of the league.

Michael Lewis

Silver took over in 2014 and also hired Joe Borgia to run the Replay Center. Since then, he's taken a ridiculous amount of grief, just for trying to improve the justice on a basketball court.

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, 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.

All this new 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 is 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. Why Utah? Who knows? 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.

Michael Lewis

That's Justin Wolfers, a behavioral economist at the University of Michigan, and the co-author of a paper about NBA refs.

Michael Lewis

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. Wolfers took data from over a decade of NBA basketball games, more than 250,000 of them. Then he set out to look for evidence of the refs' racial bias.

Michael Lewis

Wolfers wrote his paper back in 2007, before this new age of referee transparency.

Michael Lewis

And the NBA wasn't happy. The commissioner at the time attacked the study and embarrassed the league by trying and failing to refute its findings.

Michael Lewis

That's Stern on NPR in 2007. The result of all this coverage, 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.

Michael Lewis

For a while anyway. He has no idea why. Maybe simply making the refs aware of the problem was enough to correct it. By the way, the NBA disputes this study too. But in the end, this became a case study-- not in ref ineptitude but in ref reform. NBA refs have now achieved what police forces can only dream of, though the refs have no choice. 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.

Michael Lewis

That's Monty McCutchen, who started reffing in 1993, and so got to see firsthand the effect that the arrival of the internet has had on referees.

Michael Lewis

One of the players hit a three point shot. McCutchen was giving the signal for three and running to beat the players back to the other end of the court when he realized he had lost his balance.

Michael Lewis

Erik is Erik Spoelstra, the Miami Heat coach.

Michael Lewis

He says that when he started out reffing, no one would have even noticed. And if they did, it wouldn't have mattered. That's changed.

Michael Lewis

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.

Michael Lewis

Look, obviously they get paid. They start at 150 grand a year. And if they're great at their job and work extra games, they can make as much as 500. 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.

Michael Lewis

Of course it's gotten better. How could it not have? The mystery is why the stars and the coaches and the fans act as if it's gotten worse. Sitting in the NBA replay center in Secaucus, New Jersey, I get a hunch about that. After I see all these people on all these TV screens 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. There's a reason for this. LeBron James is upset.

Michael Lewis

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.

Michael Lewis

You want to understand the way the refs are treated? Stop thinking of them as people just doing their best to try to make a game fair, and start thinking of them as haters.

Michael Lewis

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.

Michael Lewis

So Dacher 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.

Michael Lewis

It's a game of one-on-one at a California crosswalk-- one car versus one pedestrian.

Michael Lewis

This one study led to a bunch of others that showed basically the same pattern of human behavior.

Michael Lewis

For most players of his era, that would have counted as traveling. But 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.

The NBA has set out to ref the games more objectively, more accurately, more fairly. This has enraged the stars and their fans and coaches. You want to know why? Here's what I think.

The stars used to get more calls in their favor than they do now, just because they were stars. Objective refs have eliminated some of their privilege. The more objectivity there is, the less power they have. And to them, that's outrageous.

I think American life just now has at least one thing in common with basketball-- the authority of its referees is under attack. If people don't trust the refs, 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. Boom.

Michael Lewis

Most nights, Joe Borgia stays at the Replay Center until almost 2:00 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.

Michael Lewis

100% negative business.

Michael Lewis

One day a young Borgia naturally becomes a referee. The next, he doesn't. 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 want to be.

Ira Glass

Michael Lewis. His new podcast, Against The Rules, covers all kinds of institutions in America where people do not trust the refs anymore. It is made by Pushkin Industries. Find it wherever you get your podcasts.

Coming up, a teenager grapples with the document that's supposed to enforce fairness above all others. I'm talking about the United States Constitution. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, "No Fair," stories about people young and old all over our country feeling a sense of injustice, feeling wronged, and not getting satisfaction from the people in charge. We have arrived at Act Two of our program. Act Two, The Fairer Sex. And for this act, let's go to Broadway. There's a show right now that starts with this true story.

Ira Glass

This is Heidi Schreck in the show What the Constitution Means to Me. I loved this show. It's totally original in what it's about and in how it tells its story. It's very funny. It's a very patriotic show in this totally uncorny way.

In the show, Heidi Schreck recreates the idealistic speech that she gave at 15 that won her enough money to pay for her whole college education. And then she talks about the Constitution and about her own life. Our show today is about fairness, and Heidi Schreck, to be clear, says that her 15-year-old self definitely saw the Constitution as a powerful instrument enforcing fairness.

Ira Glass

When Heidi Schreck was publicizing her show, she did this interview with Tony Kushner, the playwright and the Pulitzer prize winner, probably best known for Angels in America. And in this interview, they had this interesting exchange. Kushner says to her that he thought that her show was partly about this thing that he has been writing about and thinking about ever since he wrote that movie about Abraham Lincoln a few years ago that Stephen Spielberg directed.

Kushner said that in his view, a central question of democracy is that there needs to be some kind of mystical bond holding everybody together. Lincoln talked about the mystic chords of memory and very consciously tried to pull everybody together into allegiance for the Union. But Kushner said that if you actually interrogate what the thing is that is actually pulling us together, it's really just a stack of paper, right? It's just an act of faith that we have with each other. And he pointed out that how, of course, everybody knows right now this act of faith, this feeling that we are all in this together and we are one people who can work things out together, that is in such short supply.

And the very idea of teenagers giving speeches about that stack of papers, about the Constitution, and its importance and its values, Kushner said-- I'm quoting here-- "It feels like an ethos of a not very distant and yet somehow very distant past, where people believe in fairness, that the superstructure that we've all sworn allegiance to, the Constitution, is going to create opportunities and possibilities." That really hit me when I read it. And I asked Heidi Schreck in our interview if she agreed that the America where she gave those speeches when she was 15 seemed very far away.

Ira Glass

Heidi Schreck. If you're visiting New York City, her show What the Constitution Means to Me, is running through July on Broadway. A little Constitutional footnote here-- after we recorded that interview, I learned that the 14th and Ninth Amendments did not really combine Wonder Twins style to decide Roe versus Wade. Technically, the 14th decided Roe, with the Ninth justifying an important precedent that's cited in the case.

[MUSIC - "THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND" BY SHARON JONES AND THE DAP-KINGS]

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Lina Misitzis and Ben Calhoun. The people who put our show together includes Aviva DeKornfeld, Jarrett Floyd, Damien Graef, Miki Meek, Stowe Nelson, Zoe Oliver-Grey, Nadia Reiman, Robyn Semien, Louis Sullivan, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, Nancy Updike, Julie Whitaker, and Diane Wu. Our managing editor is David Kestenbaum. Special thanks to David Jacob Weisberg, Nicole Capatasto, Matt Ross, Sarah Sgro, Lawrence Tribe, Sara Holdren and New York Magazine, Krys Jensen and everyone at the South Mountain YMCA where we set up the tattle-phone, Michael Radolinksy and the folks at Fete-phone, who made the phone that we used to record the kids' tattles.

Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to our archive of over 600 shows, or download the archive using the This American Life app. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, he said this thing the other day that is a perfect illustration why you should not combine micro-dosing with babysitting.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.