Quotes from Michael Lewis

He explained that the rating agencies were morally bankrupt and living in fear of becoming actually bankrupt.

For example, if you want to know the likelihood that the geese loitering near the LaGuardia Airport runway will cause your plane to crash-land in the Hudson River and the event will become the subject of a major motion picture, you go to see the undersecretary or deputy undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs, which oversees the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which handles the bewildering set of conflicts in America between people and animals.

After seeing a movie that dramatizes nuclear war, they worried more about nuclear war; indeed, they felt that it was more likely to happen. The sheer volatility of people's judgement of the odds--their sense of the odds could be changed by two hours in a movie theater--told you something about the reliability of the mechanism that judged those odds.

It wasn't that what first came to mind was always wrong; it was that its existence in your mind led you to feel more certain than you should be that it was correct.

Silicon Valley in the late 1990s was the closest that business has ever come to resembling a child's chemistry experiment.

When we walked down the aisle, they played Taco Bell's Canyon," Quinn says knowingly. (Named for its German composer, Johann TacoBell.)

I thought, Holy shit, who is paying attention?" Thus

the right word," Simpson said later. "He seemed completely intimidated by authority.

He didn't buy U.S. Treasury bonds, or stock in companies outside of Silicon Valley, or for that matter stock in anything outside the outrageously volatile Internet sector.

Analyzing baseball yields many numbers of interest and value. Yet far and away- far, far and away- the most critical number in all of baseball is 3: the three outs that define an inning. Until the third out, anything is possible; after it, nothing is. [Eric Walker]

think of baseball, because you don't

A year or so before he had bought and sold a million shares in @Home, and made a quick $45 million.

By early 2019 Max was worrying aloud that he might not have enough nominees for his awards show, and that the ones he did get would all have the same story: how they kept the government alive even after the president tried to kill it.

When someone says something, don't ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of." That was his intellectual instinct, his natural first step to the mental hoop: to take whatever someone had just said to him and try not to tear it down but to make sense of it.

It was as if he had been assigned to take apart a fiendishly complicated alarm clock to see why it wasn't working, only to discover that an important part of the clock was inside his own mind.

When, a few months later, Goldman Sachs announced it was setting aside $542,000 per employee for the 2006 bonus pool, he wrote again: "As a former gas station attendant, parking lot attendant, medical resident and current Goldman Sachs screwee, I am offended." In

But she kept saying how brilliant he was. And he's all she talked about. And I fell in love with the image my cousin had of Mokund Thapa. I wanted to be like Mokund Thapa. One

He'd always been just the way he was, a person who was happier counting than feeling his way through life.

some of this to a spectacular article about the construction and destruction of the World Trade Center towers by James Glanz and Eric Lipton, published in the New York Times Magazine a few days before the first anniversary of the attacks. William Poundstone's book Priceless offers a more detailed account of the sway room.

When you say, "Whoa! I knew I was good. But I didn't know I was this good." After that it became a complete obsession for me. I was going to go to an IIT. My dad would come into my room at three in the morning, and I'd be studying! He would say, "Swaroop, you must go to sleep, you know."' Kittu

I owe some of this to a spectacular article about the construction and destruction of the World Trade Center towers by James Glanz and Eric Lipton, published in the New York Times Magazine a few days before the first anniversary of the attacks. William Poundstone's book Priceless offers a more detailed account of the sway room.

He found a book called Human Error, by a British psychologist aptly named James Reason.

He had a taste for asking complicated questions, and for tracking the answers into whatever rabbit hole they might lead him. He had, in short, an obsessive streak. It wasn't until after he'd hired Schwall away from Bank of America to work for RBC that Brad noticed this side of Schwall. He should have seen it before, simply from Schwall's chosen role on Wall Street: product manager. A product manager, to be any good, had to be obsessive.

Morey had no way of knowing that people with a gift for using numbers to predict things would overrun professional sports management and everyplace else high-stakes decisions were being made