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Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

Michael Lewis makes an appearance in the courtroom ... Everyone's saying he seems to support Bankman-Fried

What happened there ??? The guy who calls out a lot of fraud, now can't see it?

I'm disappointed because I found his books enjoyable ... although maybe in retrospect I can't remember that much from them. Maybe he was never really calling them out, but just liked the story.

I know there have been a bunch of articles about this -- but what's the tl;dr ?

I guess he was always up close and personal with everyone, because that's how he got access to tell these interesting tales. And then you sort of compromise your own viewpoint

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I haven't read the book, I have read reviews and been listening to his podcast.

It seems that he likes SBF on a personal level, which I think is reasonable, but then it seems that he falls short of making strong statements about the fraud. I think people have interpreted this combination as an implicit support of SBF, where it could in fact just be that, publishing before the trial, Lewis didn't want to "call it" the wrong way and limit the relevance of his book.

I already found it odd to publish before the trial, the trial wpupd have been the perfect final chapter.

I suspect that to his (and his publishers' minds) the collapse itself is the finale, and the trial is a marketing campaign. The more press the trial gets, the more people are going to get curious to learn about the background and judge for themselves, and just in time a book about the company/SBF by an author who is notable for his ability to explain and humanize complicated business concepts to a general audience is right there on the front shelf at Barnes and Noble.

If anything, when the trial is over they re-release with an epilogue evaluating the trial.

There were at least 2 other books in the making, all by authors interested in SBF. There was no time to wait if one wanted to be first to market.

There'll be a revised edition. I suspect Lewis was in court partly to gather first-hand impressions for the new chapters on the trial.

Yes exactly! If he's going to pure entertainment value ... I mean this article itself is case in point.

It would probably be more than a chapter of material too.

I think since the GFC he has taken a bit of a turn in that he sees the traditional economy/financial markets/players as rigged against the little guy.. and taken a sort of oppositional defiance disorder approach to the whole thing.

So any Don Quixote will look like Robin Hood to him.

Flash Boys was just taking sides in a dispute with no real good guys, but the upstart/little guy to him was default "good guy". He took some more explicitly political positions in some of his other books. And now his SBF/FTX fanboyism falls under the same category that "the little guy" has to be the good guy.

The Big Short is probably his last great book / and film.

> the same category that "the little guy" has to be the good guy.

Definitely present in Moneyball where the A's are the good guys - they play a similar role as Burry, exploiting inefficiencies in the market created by the big, bad guys (e.g. the Yankees, or housing lenders), for profit.

Yes that's a fair assessment.

Through line of his books seem to be "little guy is good".

In many of the stories the little guy he valorizes is just another neutral actor in a zero sum game.

The Big Short it just so happens that the "little guy" who was right got to make money off fairly bad actors! I wouldn't say they were themselves "good", rather more neutral players in a financial market.

He now seems to have chosen a little guy (SBF/FTX) who were explicitly bad actors. Also interesting questions in the whole Blind Side story now.

Listen to his podcast (Against the Rules) from today and you can hear his take on the trial.

I also recommend his interview of Matt Levine (5 episodes ago) to get a good TLDR of the book. Here's my TLDR on the book after finishing it, which mirrors Levine's closely: Michael Lewis sees that Sam thinks he's above the rules and acted with wild disregard for risk because he thought he was smarter than everyone else. It was all illegal and will land him in jail for a long time. But, he did it because he thinks he's the smartest man who ever lived and has the best intentions, not because he sees himself as a crook.

It's a minor nuance, but an important one. It speaks more to the ego of founders and children of privilege, than to a criminal conspiracy. The articles you've read don't like that nuance, and call Lewis soft.

>What happened there ??? The guy who calls out a lot of fraud, now can't see it?

He calls it Fraud many times in his book and in his podcast. He just doesn't call it theft.

> Maybe he was never really calling them out, but just liked the story.

Hasn't Lewis said as much?

I haven't read his books, but I think he writes about people that he basically admires. He doesn't set out to destroy his subjects.

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