Quotes from Michael Lewis

An Olympic rowing career had left Porter Collins a bit inured to the pain of others, as he assumed they usually didn't know what pain was. "No

People only care about data when the shit hits the fan. 'Oh my God, what's going on??? We need data!

Kelly Heath had played second base in the Royals organization, and had exactly one major league at bat, in 1982, after the Royals regular second baseman, Frank White, decided in the middle of a game that his hemorrhoids were bothering him. As one of the other scouts put it, Kelly was the only player in history whose entire big league career was made possible by a single asshole. Chris Pittaro had played second base for

Prime Health, they called the new system. The new logo was the iconic image of U.S. Marines raising a flag over Iwo Jima, and the new motto, below the logo, was: So exclusive you fought to get in.

the CDC, under Robert Redfield, had been disgraced. It had let itself be used by the Trump administration to lead the United States in a direction opposite to the direction the United States had once led the world.

What happens when the people in charge of managing these risks, along with the experts who understand them, have no interest in them?

For that purpose, partly as the result of Ranieri's persistent lobbying, two new facilities had sprung up in the federal government alongside Ginnie Mae. They guaranteed the mortgages that did not qualify for the Ginnie Mae stamp. The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (called Freddie Mac) and the Federal National Mortgage Association (called Fannie Mae) between them, by giving their guarantees, were able to transform most home mortgages into government-backed bonds.

The company tied white and yellow and red ribbons to the prostitutes to indicate which ones were available to which men. After each sexual encounter the prostitute received a stamp on her arm to indicate how often she had been used. The Germans didn't just want hookers: they wanted hookers with rules. Perhaps

Peter Parker—when

began by pointing out the small mountain of research that suggested that expert judgment was less reliable than algorithms.

Joe could see that the CDC wasn't going to solve the problem. But there was a solution: the United States was by far the world's leader in microbiology research. It contained thousands of microbiology labs, run by private companies and universities and nonprofits, like the one he presided over at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. The thing to do, Joe decided, was to transform the Biohub into a COVID-19 testing center as quickly as possible—

After Volcker's speech, bonds became objects of speculation, a means of creating wealth rather than merely storing it. Overnight the bond market was transformed from a backwater into a casino.

United States, with a bit more than 4 percent of the world's population, had a bit more than 20 percent of its COVID-19 deaths.

The computer model gave the governor little choice but to shut down the entire state, and take responsibility for what should have been a national decision, because neither the Centers for Disease Control nor the president of the United States had the nerve to make it.

This completed the curious reversal in roles that occurred in the early 1980s, when thrifts became traders and traders thrifts.

Or how his soldiers, even in combat, refused to wear their helmets, claiming that the weather was too hot for them and "if a bullet is going to kill me, it has my name on it anyway." (To which Amos said, "What about all those bullets addressed 'To Whom It May Concern'?")

The relationship of the big Wall Street banks to the high-frequency traders, when you thought about it, was a bit like the relationship of the entire society to the big Wall Street banks. When things went well, the HFT guys took most of the gains; when things went badly, the HFT guys vanished and the banks took the losses.

The interest rate on the loans wasn't high enough to justify the risk of lending to this particular slice of the American population. It was as if the ordinary rules of finance had been suspended in response to a social problem. A thought crossed his mind: How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans.

Lawler discovered—and could not quite believe—that the CDC didn't plan to test any of the new arrivals unless they had a fever.

The RBC trading floor had what the staff liked to refer to as a "no-asshole rule"; if someone came in the door looking for a job and sounding like a typical Wall Street asshole, they wouldn't hire him, no matter how much money he said he could make the firm. There was even an expression used to describe the culture: "RBC nice.

nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.

Much later, he heard Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel laureate in physics, hold forth on seemingly every subject under the sun. After Gell-Man was done, Amos said, "You know, Murray, there is no one in the world who is as smart as you think you are." Once

Flu strains mutate all the time," she'd written on them. "What would we do if we didn't have the right vaccine in time?

The rhythm and the timing follows from the steps the quarterback takes.