I blew through Going Infinite by Michael Lewis over the past month, and I have to say that I’m honestly a little disappointed? I was hoping to review what I learned about the book here, but I find myself unable to identify anything I know now that I did not know in January of 2023.

That’s not why I read Michael Lewis books. I came to love Michael Lewis after reading The Big Short in college. He seemed to have a way of explaining what, at the time, was an incredibly complicated situation with humor and an insider’s instinct. I learned about debt securitization and enjoyed it. I read Liar’s Poker and realized, wide-eyed, that Michael Lewis had really been there. Not only did he have the best account of the financial collapse, he had witnessed the birth of the monster with his own eyes. I even picked up Flash Boys and The New, New Thing and felt my confusion at these parts of the world I had never encountered subside.

I have a New Year’s Resolution against buying any new books that I can pick up from my library, but after Going Infinite came out, I still found it at every bookstore I encountered. I found it at the airport, I found it in Seattle, I asked book store employees where they kept it, but most of all I waited. And I read; I read the reviews, I listened to the interviews, I chuckled in anticipation at the anecdotes about Bayesian Shakespeare and Anna Wintour. And finally, after several month’s wait, I got my hands on it.

And I learned nothing.

Not entirely true. I learned that Sam Bankman-Fried, is, in fact, just as annoying as I imagined. Pathologically uninterested in anything outside his own mind, I was confirmed in my suspicion that the world’s crypto was taken in by someone who was so smart he did not think he had to do the boring stuff.

And to be fair, I learned that SBF has a selective attention deficit for anything that is not trading. Things like making sure you are not running an uninsured shadow bank. I no longer think that he is dumb per se. I just think that he does not pay attention to anything he has now but only to things he could have. And that is great for a trader. It’s terrible for an uninsured shadow banker.

But maybe more than anything, I learned I don’t need Michael Lewis to explain things anymore. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve grown in my understanding or if Going Infinite just didn’t explain things the same way The Big Short did. I keep recalling The Big Short’s explanation (albeit in the film) of CDO squareds. Cat shit wrapped in dogshit. But the thing is, that’s actually a pretty naïve description of something that is financially rather interesting. And I’m beginning to realize that Michael Lewis doesn’t write about finance, he writes about people, and maybe that’s enough. But it’s not why I read him.