Michael Lewis

A millisecond is one thousandth of a second

financial markets had changed, radically, the value of a millisecond.

On our walk I asked him how much it would take for him to sell FTX and go do something other than make money. He thought the question over. “One hundred and fifty billion dollars,” he finally said

When you asked Sam to describe a person’s appearance—­even a person he’d slept with—­he’d say, “I don’t really know how to answer that. I’m not good at judging how people look.”

Chess he’d have liked better if robot voices wired into the board hollered rule changes at random intervals. Knights are now rooks! All bishops must leave the board! Pawns can now fly! Or almost anything—­so long as the new rule forced all players to scrap whatever strategy they’d been pursuing and improvise another, better one. The games Sam loved allowed for only partial knowledge of any situation. Trading crypto was like that.

tells you something about Magic culture that tournament rules eventually included standards of personal hygiene, after players began to weaponize their body odor.

Approximately zero of MIT’s physics majors became physicists anymore. Most went to work for Google, or for high-­frequency trading firms. Jump Trading, Tower Research Capital, Hudson River Trading, Susquehanna International Group, Wolverine Trading, Jane Street Capital: all these Wall Street companies Sam had never heard of came to the job fair that year inside the MIT gym. And he became just a little curious about them.

. If you roll two six-­sided dice, what are the odds you get at least one three?

He started the game willing never to find the optimal coin so long as he found a good enough one. The game, he sensed, was testing his relationship to information: when he sought it, how he sought it, how he updated his beliefs in response to it.

“There were no right answers,” said Sam. “There were only wrong answers.”