Reality Defies Neat Narratives

In March, when Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of FTX, was sentenced to 25 years behind bars for stealing $8 billion from customers, many people saw it as just punishment for a two-faced poser who had spouted a lot of rot about altruism just to mask the rank odor of his relentless greed.

Michael Lewis, the famed author of Moneyball and The Big Short, was not one of those people.

Through his eyes, Sam didn’t look like a con man. He looked like an awkward but well-meaning kid who meant what he said about wanting to save the world and was undone not by avarice but by his “pathological ability to foist risk upon other people without asking their permission.” Michael is in a unique position to draw these conclusions. He spent the months leading up to and immediately following Sam’s downfall hovering over his shoulder, watching him operate, learning how he thought.

Michael wrote a book about it, Going Infinite, published last fall, right as the crypto wunderkind-turned-pariah began his trial. Now that it’s out in paperback and the dust has settled, we invited Michael onto the show to talk about why he was drawn to Sam in the first place, what he thinks of the critics who say he was too soft on him, and how we should reconcile our primal desire for simple narratives with the complexity of real life.

🎟️ Join us for a live taping of this show on Sept. 11 with Yuval Noah Harari. More details at https://nextbigideaclub.com/events

🏛️ Check out “The Canary,” Michael’s installment in the Washington Post’s new series “Who is government?”

🎁 Get 25% off a Next Big Idea Club subscription when you use the code PODCAST at https://nextbigideaclub.com/