In which several people, including Rebecca Solnit, Katty Kay, and Maria Konnikova, help Michael understand the not-so-secret power of men to offer themselves up as experts, when they clearly are not.

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There’s one kind of expert whose role is enshrined in law: that of the expert witness, who’s called on to bolster one side of a case. But courtrooms are not great places for nuance. Overconfident expert testimony has been linked to countless wrongful convictions, especially in gang-related cases. Michael speaks with a new kind of expert witness: former gang members who struggle to counteract the testimony of police.

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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.

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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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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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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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In “Against the Rules,” journalist and bestselling author Michael Lewis takes a searing look at what’s happened to fairness—in financial markets, newsrooms, basketball games, courts of law, and much more. In Season 3, Michael tackles America’s expert problem. Why is it so hard to figure out who the real experts are? And why, once we’ve found them, are they so rarely the people calling the shots?

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After the surprise success of Liar’s Poker, publishers urged Michael Lewis to try his hand at fiction. It was a bad idea. But even award-winning fiction authors have struggled with failure. Michael speaks with Booker Prize-winning author George Saunders about the urge to imitate other writers, and what we all can learn from bad first drafts. We also hear why Saunders was identified early as a gifted student, while Michael Lewis was – emphatically – not.

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Michael Lewis did not rest long on his laurels after publishing Liar’s Poker. In the 1990s, he hit the presidential campaign trail, writing a series of magazine pieces. Some of his dispatches got adapted for audio by a then-new public radio show called “This American Life.” Michael speaks with the show’s creator, Ira Glass, about how they both found their voices as storytellers. Trigger warning: this episode contains vintage NPR sounds.

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Liar’s Poker is set on a Wall Street where women were the last hired and first fired — and that was probably the least of their worries. Is Wall Street today any better for women? Michael speaks with Anne Clarke Wolff, who was in the training class at Salomon Brothers a few years after him. She is starting an investment bank that will be majority owned and managed by women and minorities. The firm’s nickname? “Salomon Sisters.”

You can order the new Liar’s Poker audiobook at Pushkin.fm/LiarsPoker.

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