I really enjoy Michael Lewis' books. Moneyball is one of my favorite nonfiction books and I've really enjoyed a lot of his other titles including The Blind Side, The Big Short, The Undoing Project and The Fifth Risk. He always manages to find a really complicated topic and make it accessible to the average reader. This book is no exception, as it tackles and tries to explain the Sam Bankman-Fried / FTX scandal and the related confusion about cryptocurrency trading, exchanges, and blockchain technology. It's something that I'm admittedly not terribly familiar with beyond a layman's understanding, and this book did give me a bit of a better understanding of the underlying technology and what made it so appealing to so many people.

One of the things that I thought was interesting about this book isn't what was in the text as much as what was in the reception to it. Michael Lewis has been excoriated by some people for being "too soft" on Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF as many people call him) and for not doing a more hard-hitting piece of journalism on him. And, to be fair to those detractors, the book was not a hit piece on the poster boy for crypto, who defrauded investors of tens of billions of dollars and was found guilty of fraud, money laundering, conspiracy, and campaign finance law violations. Then again, that's not really what the book was about, so a lot of that falls into the, "You wrote this book instead of the one I, as a fan, wanted you to write" category of criticism.

What made the book fascinating, at least to me, was the level of access Michael Lewis was given. And he's mentioned this in interviews before. Michael Lewis is an award-winning author and financial journalist. He literally wrote the books on the lack of regulation and financial malfeasance that led to the Wall Street crises in the 90s and late 2000s. And somehow, knowing that pedigree, SBF basically gave him open access to his entire operation. Michael Lewis spent months following SBF around, asking him questions, prodding, etc. And, yes, the resulting book has a bit of an, "I'm an objective journalist watching this implode, my job is to stand back and watch it unfold and report on it" vibe to it... but that's what journalists do. I think Lewis was shocked at the amount of access he was given, and the lack of thought and logic that was applied by a guy handling billions of dollars of assets, but that's where Michael Lewis ultimately decided the story was... and it's an objectively good story.

If you're already up to speed on crypto and the SBF / FTX story, you're not going to learn a lot in this book that you didn't already know (except for some insider information and anecdotes about the life and times of SBF before he got arrested and is likely to spend the majority of his natural life in prison). But if crypto is something you're interested in understanding more about, or you're curious about what this Sam Bankman-Fried / FTX bankruptcy thing was all about, it's hard to do better than a Michael Lewis book in explaining it to you.

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Created Feb 25, 2024 at 2:02pm • Submit your own review...