Michael Lewis's Blind Side | Hacker News Reader

Michael Lewis's Blind Side

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The purpose of a Michael Lewis book is not to tell you who the good guys & bad guys are. He has a way with storytelling and manages to get access to some serious players sometimes in fringes of the market that are not being written about elsewhere.

He has a bias for scrappy little guys vs big guys across his books, but the little guy, on balance, is not always the "good guy".

Often in the type of tales he writes, there is no good guy.. Sometimes it's just a bunch of guys at a poker table and one of them is going to go home with the money. I'd try not to derive any moral lessons from that.

I also do wonder why everyone wants to be told who is good & bad now rather than deciding on their own.

It is also an unrealistic ask that an author get close access to still living characters and then manage to write a book to tell you how bad that person is. They are unlikely to be able to find a subject willing to give them access on another book again.

The issue is Lewis going out of his way, in so many pubic forums, to present SBF as a good guy genius with only the best of intentions. At worst, as a good kid who made a couple of sad mistakes that you should forgive him for. Before and throughout SBF's trial, Lewis's biases were displayed more and more in his denials and ...fanciful interpretations and justifications of the things SBF did.

It is not that his book should have painted a bad guy as an unequivocal bad guy. It is that you cannot trust Lewis' accounting of events and people because of his known extreme bias in the matter; his descriptions of events and emotions at play during them are filtered through a very biased lens.

It can still be an entertaining read and story, it just can't be a trusted one.

Yeah completely fair to point out that in this particular case, Lewis is completely over the top in his support of SBF, even well past the point that his crimes are clear.

I really like his books, but Lewis also had this issue in Flash Boys. For half of the book, he writes about Aleynikov, someone accused by Goldman Sachs of stealing high-frequency trading code. Lewis writes a thorough and uncontested defense of Aleynikov. Around 3/4 of the way through the book, Lewis reveals that Aleynikov did actually transfer the computer code in question out of Goldman, but contests that this is immaterial because Aleynikov told Lewis that he'd taken it to contribute to open source efforts.

The prosecution for Aleynikov's crimes was definitely heavy-handed (and that in itself would have made a good book), but there's really no doubt that he transferred the code out of Goldman, breaking the law while doing so.

I've enjoyed Lewis's books, but I also noticed this about his unfaltering defense of Aleynikov. In one passage that stuck out to me, Lewis argued that Aleynikov was not guilty of taking anything important as Aleynikov claimed not to have taken any code related to specific strategies, only that code related to infrastructure, which arguably is the most important code that he could have taken. In other passages, Lewis used Aleynikov's defense, that he not only wanted to contribute to open source efforts, but that some of the Goldman Sachs code used open source code, so it should have been okay to take, as if high frequency trading infrastructure code was just floating around in the open source world in the early 2010s.

It wasn't the only issue with the book. Lewis also didn't seem to understand the dynamics of national best bid and offer, and that if a large market order was submitted, it will not be executed at the original nbbo necessarily because of nefarious activity, but because there are not enough bids or offers at the original nbbo to execute the buy or sell for every order at the original nbbo. So much of the book hinges on a misunderstanding of this idea. There is also no discussion of the fact that spreads and liquidity used to be worse prior to electronic market makers. Instead there's this idea that market makers are competing with institutional investors submitting large orders, when really, they are competing with other market markers/liquidity providers, such as how Goldman Sachs e-trading(where Aleynikov left) would have been competing with Teza Technologies (where Aleynikov was invited to). I think that either Brad Katsuyama, who seems to have fed much of the electronic trading related information to Lewis, was misled himself or was possibly intentionally misleading Lewis.

I don't imagine Kaysuyama is that naive, he just had a product to sell.

That product is a differentiated market that makes nbbo latency arb more difficult.

Agreed the big anti-HFT/electronic market making bias is funny since we now have decentralized market makers competing for penny spreads. Versus the alleged "more fair" world we are supposed to yearn for is the pre-RegNMS days of 25cent spreads guaranteed to a guy on the NYSE floor.

Where do people think their cheap/free trading commissions come from (that and PFOF).

Also the idea that large holders of assets should be able to de-risk (or put on risk) without market impact by buying/selling huge lots at the bid/ask is interesting. It's the opposite of defending the little guy. NBBO was put into place to protect small investors more if anything as the first 100 share lot is protected. There is no constitutional right to buy a million dollars of some midcap stock at the ask.

I agree. After reading Flash Boys, I started doubting the credibility of his previous works.

In flash Boys, Lewis asserted:

- Pushing confidential codes to a personal SVN hosting (or sending them to your personal email account) is perfectly fine.

- Deleting .bash_history is a normal practice.

- Also he clearly did not understand how GPL works.

Wes Big Short (or Money Ball) a legit work, or just a fun-to-read story?

I would check this out: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2023-... (https://archive.li/KDdls) It links to some deeper dives into issues with his other books.

Right, but a lot of this is also the purpose of fiction.

> The purpose of a Michael Lewis book is not to tell you who the good guys & bad guys are.

The purpose of most books (like this book or by a similar author or topic) is to sell books and entertain. The value to most readers is not knowing the truth but to be engaged and entertained. Similar to movies based on real events (which take liberties with happenings and story telling to make the movie interesting and watchable and profitable).

The true purpose of books is to subsidize Big Forestry via inflating sales of printing paper, subsidizing large economies of the pacific northwest and Canada, but no one is ready for that conversation.

Right, people who are complaining about his whitewashing are failing to see why his books are so successful in the first place. Had he told the story everyone wanted/expected, the book would have been forgotten.

I don’t really understand how this relates to the article. Nowhere does the author suggest that we should be spoon-fed moralisms. Instead, it argues that Lewis’s perspective and approach missed a fundamental part of the story he’s trying to tell. You don’t even need to read the article. It’s right there in the subheading: “Michael Lewis is not interested in how or why people make mistakes”

"I do wonder why everyone wants to be told who is good & bad rather than deciding on their own."

The gist I got from reading this "book review" is that the author works in "EA" and did not like Lewis' treatment of "EA" in the book.

It's got some strange comments like where he is telling us how FTX had someone running communications with zero experience in that field, then he quotes some programmer with a Twitter feed as a "finance writer".

Or when he mentions getting the opinion of his "Wall Street lawyer" friend and then seeking counsel from his "homeless friend" on apprently the same issue.

I read the book. SBF doesn't come across as a good guy (or a bad guy either). He comes across as a smart/dumbass, who doesn't understand probability and risk beyond the math level: given 51% odds of making the world better or 49% of destroying it, he says repeatedly "I would take the 51% odds every time". That to me, basically explained his entire, dumbass, business plan: just be slightly better at crypto at scale, assuming that's all you need to 'win'. No risk mitigation, no management whatever, because that's boring. Just keep playing until you win.

Now, that's not Evil with a capital "E", it's just dumb; in fact, criminally dumb because being a dumbass with other people's money (even if it turns out 100% of it can be recovered), is still fraud. SBF belongs in jail. Lewis' book, although not satisfying in the end, actually explained the whole FTX shitshow for me.

I have read many Lewis' books and admired his skills as a storyteller and stylist for decades. I found Going Infinite fun to read but less satisfying than The Big Short, Liar's Poker, Moneybag, etc.

As a good complement or even substitute, I highly recommend Zvi Mowshowitz's review[1] of Going Infinite. I have some familiarity with the trading world but virtually none in crypto. The book review is incredibly long but very rich in both micro details and macro perspective. Zvi seems to know what he's talking about as a former Jane Street employee who knew people in the book (including some acquaintance with SBF before he became SBF) and as a crypto trader.

[1]:https://thezvi.substack.com/p/book-review-going-infinite

Discussed a bit at the time:

Book Review: Going Infinite - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38014638 - Oct 2023 (24 comments)

In his podcast, Michael Lewis described his job as finding the expert in a topic and then making their understanding legible to the reader. Going Infinite demonstrates the weakness of this approach, which is that he is entirely too credulous and sympathetic once he has picked his “expert”. I have enjoyed a lot of his writing, so I hope in the future he makes more space for changing his initial impression and critique of his subject, perhaps he can start by reading The Undoing Project by noted author Michael Lewis.

I like Matt Levine's take on Going Infinite:

> Many of the reviews that I have read of the book complain that Lewis does not sufficiently explain that Bankman-Fried is Guilty and Bad, Actually, but that is not the book that he wanted to write or the one I want to read. He wanted to understand and explain Bankman-Fried’s psychology and tell a good story. If you want to read a moral condemnation of crypto theft, you can get that anywhere. You go to Michael Lewis for character and story.

Michael Lewis does characters, not subjects.

I have this problem with a lot of media in general these days, both fiction and non-fiction. Although it's enjoying a huge cultural resurgence today among young people, I feel like if American Psycho were to be made today, Bateman would have to be made comically evil with his faux liberal (to use the language of Bankman-Fried) 'woke shibboleths' left behind lest readers get mad that Bateman is being used as a tool to bash those beliefs -- ignoring the interesting commentary that Bateman actually uses it for status within his social circle and as a disguise for the person he really is.

You see this a lot in coverage of very contentious issues too. I'm purposefully not naming any directly here (I'm thinking of at least 3 varied topics where this is particularly bad), but there are a lot of very complicated, hot-button issues where if you read any article that goes against the 'established' narrative in a nuanced way, there are usually several paragraphs of throat-clearing where the writer feels the need to go "We all know x is important, for reasons 1, 2, and 3".

> that is not the book that he wanted to write or the one I want to read

Exactly this.

Then perhaps his books belong in the fiction section?

Okay, sure. But TFA isn’t about Lewis not condemning the Guilty and Bad SBF, it’s about Lewis falling short on his own terms.

> Lewis paints a portrait of Sam as singularly motivated by doing the EV-maximizing thing despite the social and emotional costs inflicted on others. But the real Sam in this story is not taking a hit to his reputation in order to maximize expectancy; he’s carelessly burning expectancy in the process of cultivating a reputation for punishing and humiliating his competition.

The “blind side” is that we don’t get the full illustration of SBF’s character, because it’s filtered through Lewis’s credulous reporting, lack of access to certain key players, and limited attention to the financial details of what was going on. This is particularly disappointing because these are precisely the things that Lewis is known for doing so well.

But the story is wrong, and so is the character!

SBF is both a fraudster and a fraud -- not an altruistic genius.

> spends most of his time playing video games

... badly. This to me is one of the funniest parts of the story. He wasn't even good at it[1][2].

[1]: https://milkyeggs.com/crypto/what-happened-at-alameda-resear...

[2]: https://www.ft.com/content/23ab2258-ce03-4fbb-a9b2-7d9ec6e3d...

He is bad at League, but that article framing it as some kind of mental disorder is grasping at straws. 20% of all League players are in the Bronze tier. I've probably played more League than SBF has and I'm still Silver. Why? Because I'm just trying to have fun with my friends. Not everyone is trying to climb the ladder. A lot of guitarists have been playing for years and only know the basic chords because that's all they want to play. There's nothing wrong with that.

The other examples the article points to that SBF has "fried his brain" are not compelling to me either. The author is attempting to explain how SBF could have lost all this money. I think the simplest explanation is that his "intellectual ability" has nothing to do with it, he's just a crook who thought he would get away with it.

This is a great, great article. I'm always interested in the Hindsight Bias: people say "oh, it was obvious it was fraud."

Well, not really. If you're one of those: tell us what opinions you have NOW that everyone else doesn't also have. That's the test: what do you see that isn't generally accepted?

What I especially like about this article is, in the "How can we do better?" section he tells you how you can avoid falling in with the conventional wisdom.

> I'm always interested in the Hindsight Bias: people say "oh, it was obvious it was fraud." Well, not really.

Well, I don't know about that. On one side, there were people who were convinced it was a fraud, some of which were very vocal and public about it. On the other side there were people who didn't care, or wanted to believe.

But there was not one serious and knowledgeable person who took a strong good look at FTX and concluded it was legit.

I think that's a tell.

well, if you thought "fraud" but didn't say so: still, no credits for you.

It’s so easy to say stuff like this in hindsight.

> But there was not one serious and knowledgeable person who took a strong good look at FTX and concluded it was legit.

Sequoia invested in FTX. Are we going to no-true-Scotsman them out?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

I had to look that up. I've heard the expression but didn't realize it was that much of a thing.

Exactly. "No one but a chump believed in FTX."

If you were a chump, you keep quiet and hope no one remembers and throws it back at you.

> Well, not really. If you're one of those: tell us what opinions you have NOW that everyone else doesn't also have. That's the test: what do you see that isn't generally accepted?

But it was generally accepted at the time that it was all a fraud. You didn't have to be some kind of bold contrarian visionary to see that, you just had to not be a chump. (I don't know what kind of answers you're looking for - Tether is also a fraud? AirBNB was always a scam? But those are just as uninteresting as calling out this crypto nonsense a few years back was)

> I don't know what kind of answers you're looking for

just the proof that someone's not just practicing Survivor Bias: "Yeah, I knew it all along."

I can dig through some lengthy HN debates about crypto back then. If you were one of the naysayers, congratulations. Plenty of people were not.

It’s kind of interesting to hear from someone who had a job offer from SBF until they asked questions, otherwise this could have been written by anyone months after the trial finished. Also I thought for sure the writer was going to mention the book, The Blind Side, where it appears possible that Lewis got the primary facts wrong because he trusted his source too much,but it’s only used for the title. For reference the NYTimes review of The Blind Side got it right 17 years ago where the primary sources for Lewis was his friend Tuohy and wife.

> It’s kind of interesting to hear from someone who had a job offer from SBF until they asked questions

Well the OP counters his own speculation (but even if he didn't who knows what really happened):

"(indeed, I was missing the domain knowledge and operations experience required for my role, as I had only ever been a trader)."

What's interesting about this is the tendency for people to assume the reason 'asked questions' as completely true.

The subtext here is that OP may not have been qualifies on paper, but nobody else was either (indeed, in a world where “grown-ups” are unnecessary, it may have been looked at as a positive)

What makes the Lewis story worse is that he was asked to vet SBF as part of investor due diligence

> ... A sharper Lewis would have evaluated Sam on his own terms, tracking his probabilities and interrogating how closely they aligned with reality. At a minimum, he should have pressed Sam on how he reached his probabilistic claims. When Sam asserts that the $4 million worth of Ripple that went missing in the early days of Alameda had an “80 percent chance” of eventually turning up, Lewis asks no further questions. ... Lewis’ failure to examine that 80 [percent claim] is especially jarring.

What sort of 'further questions' was Lewis supposed to ask sbf? Lewis began work on the book in Spring 2022. The missing Ripple/XRP tokens incident happened around April 2018 [1]. This is not even to mention the fact that the tokens did eventually turn up on their own, so Sam's "80 percent chance" hunch proved entirely correct in retrospect [2].

[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Going_Infinite_The_Rise...

[2] https://www.google.com/books/edition/Going_Infinite_The_Rise...

I liked The Big Short, movie and the book, as a story and also because the author claims that it's based on true events. Now after seeing Michael Lewis fumble all over the place about SBF I'm not sure about the latter anymore.

Maybe Michael Lewis got too attached to his subjects and was hoodwinked or maybe he knew it was not all true and went along with them because they made for a good story.

All in all he lost his credibility big time, at least among lay (i.e., outsiders of Wall Street) readers. Later I read somewhere on Twitter that apparently WS folks knew his book to be a BS anyway.

In the same vein Flash Boys is mostly about Brad Katsuyama starting IEX, and the evils of HFT. I wondered while reading it if there was another side to the story.

There absolutely is; in fact, most of the story is on the other side, and Katsuyama's premise doesn't even make much sense.

E.g., Flash Boys: Not So Fast is one example of another side. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/23570025

I wonder if Lewis is going through a rough patch professionally because of the recent tragedy he suffered — his daughter died in an automobile accident.

I would not be surprised if it made him more sympathetic to a “young kid” at this point in his life. That sort of thing is soul crushing.

Didn't know that, but yeah I could totally see that making Lewis more sympathetic.

I've never particularly liked SBF even before he imploded, but I don't want him spending the rest of his life in jail for a non-violent crime. I'd rather see him banned from finance and banking and sentenced to a million or so hours of teaching programming and computer science to underserved poor children, or something similarly constructive. He has these amazing skills that could be put work benefitting society, and instead we lock him away so the prison-industrial complex can profit. Such a waste, let's rethink that.

Does SBF have amazing skills in CS (or anything) to share?

EDIT: Looks like he graduated MIT with a physics degree, so I'd hope so. Then again, maybe we don't want con men teaching kids.

Well, amazing is relative. To underserved kids in poor school districts yeah his skills are probably amazing. And while an MIT Physics degree doesn't explicitly teach software engineering craftsmanship, his first employer Jane Street has high standards for that, and may have, depending on what he actually did there.

But compared to, say, Jeff Dean, his skills are garbage, tofu-dreg, and devoid of any real craftsmanshift or integrity. Pick your point on the continuum.

But I'd rather have high-skilled conmen like Sam, Michael Milken, etc. answering for their crimes and rehabilitating by helping others and being constructive, than wasting away in jail, and potentially teaching other criminals there, or becoming more criminal themselves.

What makes you think con men would actually be constructive and teach impressionable young people useful skills?

My guess is they'd exploit the situation for their own gain, even if only subconsciously. SBF was the face of Effective Altruism for a time.

Perhaps they can clean trash off highways or work soup kitchens.

It’s not violence by the literal definition of the word, but I’m not a fan of this particular point of view.

Financial crime at this scale absolutely causes people to die unless you think several billion dollars worth of resources is ineffective at keeping people alive.

The people who engage in fraud at this scale create far more human misery than your average mugger, though I think both should be adequately punished.

To what degree was the money lost by SBF/etc going to be put towards saving lives, versus the dreams of the average crypto person?

Well, a LOT of crypto investor are limited means and the least likely to be able to afford to lose it. Sure they shouldn’t have risked their life savings, but they aren’t getting ahead in normal ways so they hooked onto this rocket, and FTX was considered safe and above board for a long time.

There are real mental and physical impact to loss of majority of your wealth, which can lead to homelessness, exhaustion from working more to cover shortfalls, marital strife, abuse, suicide.

Considering this wasn’t just insiders like high net worth investors angel investing, but everyday people, yeah it hurts a lot of people in real ways. Probably a lot more than the Madoff crowd for example.

My view is that folks lost their life savings on crypto on FTX is only a more extreme version of those who lost their live savings on crypto on some other exchange. The fraud is terrible, but only exasperates the problems of those gambling with limited resources to absorb loses.

Do you routinely evaluate the contents of a wallet stolen by a mugger or of a car stolen by a carjacker in this way?

I do not. My comment was in response to the parent comment saying that financial crime “absolutely causes people to die” and “create far more misery than your average mugger”.

It seems pretty easy to figure out why taking the equivalent of a hundred million wallets creates more misery than taking one of them right.

A large number of people, less than the “hundred million” that you mention (Wikipedia says FTX had “over one million” customers [0]) lost their highly speculative investment. Yes it’s a crime, and yes it’s serious. All I’m asking for is some nuance.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTX

What’s the nuance, that if someone makes a “speculative investment” they deserve to have the money stolen more than if they walk down a “risky alley” or something?

It's more that, if you take a meaningful amount of money from N people, the likelihood of financial hardship putting someone in mortal danger (eg, by causing them to lose access to housing or medication, or causing them to be suicidally despondent because they've lost their ability to retire) approaches 1 as N increases. When N is high enough that there are multiple people in mortal danger - it becomes pretty likely that some of them succumb.

This is even discussed in the film version of The Big Short.

> The people who engage in fraud at this scale create far more human misery than your average mugger, though I think both should be adequately punished.

Not convinced. I lost about $50k to mortgage shennanigans and about $800 to being mugged. Guess which one gives me nightmares years down the line.

Mugging is a bad example because it's not just about financial theft but for a brief period a credible threat to your life itself, so the trauma is clearly bound to scar you for a long time.

Perhaps 800$ fraud on Amazon/Ebay is a more appropriate example.

The whole point was someone claiming that we should see large fraud as equivalent to violence. I don't think anyone's denying that a large fraud is worse than a small fraud, but that's not the point in dispute.

Agreed, violence has its own characteristics, and there certainly are qualitative differences.

But as Stalin said, quantity has a quality all its own. When you steal large amounts of money like SBF did it’s different, but that doesn’t make it better.

The recent book similarly made me question all of Lewis' books, which is unfortunate because I've read every one of his books and have been a fan for decades.

The latest book about SBF seems easy to fact check because the reporting, data, and primary evidence on the FTX saga has been so comprehensively available to everyone. I have followed the entire FTX saga like a soap opera and I cannot square Lewis' take with the vast evidence it contradicts.

On a side note, as someone very close to the industry, I can say The Big Short was spot on. It simplified things, but that is to be expected for a mass market publication. I hope this means most of his books were equally evidence based, and perhaps the quality has only recently suffered.

His books have always been a bit more entertainment than accurate retelling of history. Don’t think there is anything particularly wrong with that

I think many people will not read the book because of the reviews saying Lewis is compromised. But you should absolutely read the book. It's very good.

As Matt Levin says:

> You go to Michael Lewis for character and story.

It does give you an inside look at being on the ground at FTX in the days before and after the collapse and also spends a big part of the book on time at Jane Street, which fascinated me. Before this, all I knew was OCAML, and not the craziness of modern trading.

The big bet on Trump and the stock market election night 2016 is riveting. That insane idea SBF had, to pay Trump not to run again and talking to his people about it was also entertaining.

It's just not really a book explaining the fraud. It's a number of wild scenes from a strange person's life as it collapses. And yeah, it is probably a bit too sympathetic, but it's not shy about him being a weirdo, and EA people being all a bit strange, and Lewis trying to understand what is going on in this guys head.

Maybe you’re implying this — it’s an obvious omission — but his credibility should encourage us to read “character” and “story” for their evocative imagination and not, say, for fact.

Nope, not saying that. but the other person in the comments has a point:

> It is also an unrealistic ask that an author get close access to still living characters and then manage to write a book to tell you how bad that person is. They are unlikely to be able to find a subject willing to give them access on another book again.

So as a group I shouldn't take such authors as anything except entertainers?

Just expect they, like everyone, have a bias. Writers who do hit piece style things will portray things as bad and authors who do deep feature pieces will be positive because they each have a certain approach and bag of tricks and this has up and down sides.

A hit piece person would never spend months embedded with someone, so wont give a deep picture. A lewis will, but be appropriately stockholmed by the whole thing.

That inside the actors studio guy, he only interviews people about how great they are. You learn a lot, but it has a strong perspective. Others are combative and good at it. Styles shape form.

I read the book and was mostly disappointed.

SBF comes across as a fundamentally uninteresting and uncultured person who is very proud of not having any interests and not giving a shit about other people. Even his parents struggle to tell anything noteworthy or likable about him. Lewis seems to relish the massive challenge of turning him into a protagonist, but the reader doesn’t share in those rewards.

Also, trading stocks for a living is apparently just as boring as it sounds like. The descriptions of what Jane Street does made me feel somehow sorry for these people who are stuck making undiscerning myopic bets for their own sake instead of using their intellect for something productive.

In the end, Lewis tries a shock twist: what if the bankruptcy lawyers are the bad guys after all? It’s unsubstantiated by anything in the book and just comes across as desperation on his part to close the book with something more satisfactory than “it was all a tremendous waste of time and other people’s money.”

It's true, about the bankruptcy stuff at the end feeling a bit much. That's one of the many points where I felt he was being too sympathetic.

But I found the rest of it fascinating. It just wasn't about how SBF was bad. Even this review says the book is interesting and you'll read it one sitting.

A lot of the crazy scenes from Wallstreet that made lewis famous, when he wrote Liars poker are in this one transformed into a different world and that is interesting.

It's like look at absurdity and scale of what's happening here. But this time with nerds and gaming pcs, instead of Wallstreet and suits.

If you don't like narrative nonfiction about finance, thats zoomed in on a specific main character, well, you shouldnt read a Micheal Lewis book.

I must say I'm biased though, as I'm a fan of him as a writer.

I was looking forward to Michael Lewis’s book precisely because I wanted to see how these mistakes happened. Some of his other books were more like that.

Note read the CoffeeZilla YT podcast notes, a more interesting story and the facts are right all the time not just sometimes...better journalist on fin and fin crime than Lewis will ever be.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFQMnBA3CS502aghlcr0_aw

Like the Lewis book, I feel this review doesn't grapple with the basic fact that SBF's quasi-success is just as easy to replicate if you just model him as "psychopath" instead of "psychopath AND genius"

The first option doesn't make SBF interesting anymore

I'm not sure optimizing for interesting would help - it's hard to find genius in a story about building a crypto exchange then lying about it's financials.

Go ahead and read this book if you are fascinated by the psychology and character and life of Sam Bankman-Fried. I can't imagine a more boring subject--the man-baby is one of the most depressing public figures I have come across in my time in tech. I've seen his selfishness, self-absorption, and privilege many many times among startup founders. What Lewis is actually selling here and what he is always peddling in his books is a breezy, readable way to understand complex subjects for a readership who can't be bothered to learn the details, and crypto is a perfect candidate. His act is wearing thin, and The Blind Side exposed just how lazy his approach appears to be. He can pretend this book isn't about how clueless people like him can be taken in by a recognizable conman and sociopath, but that is what this book is about.

Agreed, that this book was written with a target audience in mind. (People who loved the blind side movie)

But, I also wonder how much of this is Lewis trying to avoid legal culpability. If he knew that the whole thing was a total scam and he didn't warn anyone but is now making millions of dollars of the story, the people who lost money in FTX may want to sue?

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