Michael Lewis

So this is allowed.

No, I think this is more generally a problem, is people will do things with computers that they would never do as people.

Why are you looking at me?

Why are you looking at me when you say that?

It's such a strange story because it really is about

a group of people who are actually on Wall Street who figure out kind of around 2008 that the stock market is all of a sudden something funny is happening.

And it's not just the financial crisis.

It's all of a sudden they look at their screens and the stock market says it's, you know, you can buy 50,000 shares of Microsoft at $20 a share.

They go to buy it and it goes away.

It goes away and the stock price goes up.

And it's as if the market knows what they're going to do before they do it.

So it's one character.

It's a Canadian, a guy named Brad Katsuyama, who runs the stock market department at the Royal Bank of Canada.

Because he's Canadian, he has a sense of decency.

And...

And he's not like some radical.

I mean, he's a Wall Street guy.

He's not even really that much of a Wall Street guy.

He's kind of a Canadian guy.

I mean, it's odd that he's in this situation because he's conformist even by Canadian standards.