multi-storied #28: Michael Lewis and Sam Bankman-Fried

A little while ago, I went to California to spend some time with Michael Lewis, who wrote “The Big Short” and “Moneyball” and “The Blind Side” and a dozen other books of a very particular kind. His heavensent talent is to find unsung heroes: clever people who are modestly known in their own fields but certainly not household names, but who are revolutionizing their corners of the world. He tells their stories with verve, but he also makes a kind of implicit prediction every time. His oddballs may think about their work in deviant ways, Lewis argues, but hindsight will prove them right.

Which made me wonder: What did he do with Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto entrepreneur he started shadowing in early 2022, and who unexpectedly (at least to Lewis) imploded in front of his eyes. SBF was arrested, extradited from his compound in the Bahamas to the US, and goes on trial today—the same day that Lewis’s book on him, “Going Infinite,” is being published Also the same that my Guardian LongRead on Lewis and his SBF project has dropped: here it is!

A profile of this kind is, all things considered, such a strange and artificial thing. There is indescribable value to being in the same room as Lewis: across a dinner table with him, or in his writing shed. (Dear god. That shed. Allow me to interrupt myself:

The shed, where we spent several afternoons talking, is the sort of space that any writer laboring away at his kitchen table instantly covets. Two walls are lined with chest-height bookshelves; there is a walnut desk, a well-padded armchair, and a daybed by a window, through which the California sunshine pours in. Lewis has sufficient room to park two mountain bikes and a treadmill here as well; a laptop perches on a board balanced on the treadmill’s handrails, so that he can respond to emails or attend to other busywork while on the move. In a little annexe, I found a shower and a kitchenette with a coffee maker. The shed felt like an excellent home for a writer to wait out the apocalypse without missing his daily cardio.

Anyway. Where was I?) At the same time, it isn’t as if I’m watching him at work, or being a fly on the wall the way Lewis himself often is. Everything of real value is being wrung out of our conversations. Which turns the physicality of our meetings—their locations, the activity—into set design. You put up scaffolding and unfurl a backdrop and put props together, and then let the dialogue unfold.

Lewis, of course, is seasoned at this kind of journalistic stagecraft, so he knew just what we should do during our time together:

I. A FILM PREMIERE

Friday evening outside the IFC Center theatre in Manhattan is nothing like the promenade in Cannes, so when a movie premieres here, the invitees have to cluster on the pavement, clutching their QR codes and dodging exasperated New Yorkers, until the doors open for the show. If a red carpet is present at all, it is likely to be just a small felt square of red, and one evening in mid-September, people took turns standing on that patch and eulogizing the late Tom Wolfe to a lonely camera. Wolfe, one of the lions of the daring, baroque writing movement of the 1960s and 1970s that he called “New Journalism,” was the subject of “Radical Wolfe,” the documentary premiering that day. The event attracted, from the sphere of American journalism, some of the great and the good, the already cancelled and the still valid: Charlie Rose, Gay Talese, Walter Isaacson, and Lewis himself. The film ran a tight, dutiful 76 minutes; it conveyed Wolfe’s use of New York liberals for target practice—but cautiously, so as not to unduly upset the New York liberals in its audience. When Peter Thiel, the conservative, blood-transfusing billionaire, appeared on the screen to declare his admiration for Wolfe, everyone snickered nervously.

After the film, Lewis joined the film’s director on a stage panel. “Radical Wolfe” is based only nominally on Lewis’s 2015 profile of Wolfe in Vanity Fair—a piece he pitched, he said, “because I wanted to write Tom’s obituary when he could still read it.”

I don’t know if it was because of the impending release of “Radical Wolfe,” or because Lewis truly considers Tom Wolfe to be the lodestar of his own career, but Wolfe came up a lot in our conversations. (Possibly the latter; Billy Beane, the hero of “Moneyball,” told me that when Lewis once lent him a copy of Wolfe’s “I am Charlotte Simmons,” its margins were filled with notes in Lewis’s barbed-wire handwriting.) Lewis himself pointed out to me how their lives rhymed. They were both young southern men who attended Ivy League universities—in Lewis’s case Princeton, where he studied art history and dithered over a choice of a career. After winding up at the London School of Economics, he joined the bond desk in the British branch of Salomon Brothers—the investment bank whose headquarters Wolfe visited in New York, around the same time, to research his first novel, “Bonfire of the Vanities.” That novel, skewering Wall Street’s bankers and traders, was published in October 1987, just as the stock market suffered a historic crash—and just as Lewis made up his mind to give up his $225,000-a-year job to write “Liar’s Poker.”

When his own book came out, in 1989, Lewis told me, Wolfe asked him to lunch in the pool room of the Four Seasons. “From the table they put at, I could see him coming down this long hallway, in his white suit and white hat and with his white umbrella,” Lewis said. Every eye at every table followed Wolfe’s stately progress, as if he were a cruise ship gliding into dock. Lewis remembered Wolfe’s advice about dealing with Hollywood studios wanting to film his book. “‘Here’s what you do,’ he said. ‘You drive across the country to Los Angeles, and you throw your book in, and you have them throw a sack of money out, and you take the money and go as fast as you can.’ You don’t want to have anything to do with those people.”

II. A FOOTBALL GAME

On our third day together, Lewis took me to Memorial Stadium, to watch the universities of Auburn and California face off in a game of American football. For the occasion, he changed into a slightly more formal pair of sweatpants than he otherwise wears. (On this point of difference, he would agree: Wolfe was a far nattier dresser.) Lewis’s son Walker brought along a friend; the four of us traipsed high up into the gunwale of the stadium, where Lewis had managed to get us box seats. He pointed to a tiny figure prowling the sidelines, wearing white headphones: Hugh Freeze, Auburn’s coach. Freeze had been one of Lewis’s characters in his book “The Blind Side,” but it was pure coincidence that Auburn happened to be in town when I was visiting, Lewis assured me. “I don’t want you to think all my weekends are like this,” he said with a laugh – populated, that is, by Michael Lewis figures flitting in and out of town. In the Bay Area and New York, he told me, “people know me for ‘The Big Short’ or ‘Liar’s Poker.’ But in middle America, and in the south, I’ll be talking to the guy next to me on a plane, and it’s ‘The Blind Side’ that he’ll know.”

This summer, “The Blind Side” suddenly became the most controversial thing Lewis has ever written. I won’t go into the details here—they’re all in the piece—but I’d gone to California thikning he’d be reluctant to talk about it. In fact, he kept bringing it up himself, while I wanted to defer the conversation until our fourth or fifth day together, so that we’d gotten to know each other and he’d open up more. Reader: he did.

III. A HIKE

One afternoon, we drove to Tilden Regional Park, not far from Lewis’s home, for a ramble. Again: a little theatre from Lewis. This was the very trail that Lewis and Sam Bankman-Fried walked in the autumn of 2021, when they’d first met. He’d taken a “60 Minutes” crew to the same trail just a few days before we went there, to film an interview for the publication of “Going Infinite.”

I suppose these location stunts of longform journalism are both useful and not. Sometimes I despair that we use them as mere set up: a paragraph describing a place or an activity, then onto the conversational recap! Other times, I remember the wisdom of an American magazine editor who once talked me through this. She told me that if you angle the set ups just so, they become something more—they become doorways into your material. And maybe a conversation gains some sort of psychic energy by being located in even a nominally meaningful place. Talking to Lewis about SBF on the park trail where it all began is very different from talking to him on Zoom.

Once again: the full profile of Michael Lewis is here! Tell your friends!