'Look when nobody's looking': How author Michael Lewis uncovers hidden stories

On the heels of Going Infinite, his new book about beleaguered crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried, Michael Lewis talks with the BBC about storytelling, money and his singular approach to grief.

Michael Lewis looks into a bookstore, flush with his works. He says it "doesn't matter where the character is" – you follow the story. He has indeed been on a journey through his prolific non-fiction catalogue, narratives that have taken him to Wall Street and back again, Silicon Valley and even baseball stadiums and American football fields across the US. 

The best-selling author and long-time Vanity Fair contributor joins BBC correspondent Katty Kay on her series Influential for a candid conversation about his multi-decade storytelling career, plus his own major storyline: the tragic loss of his daughter, which left him grieving in unconventional ways.

Throughout the past three decades, Lewis, 64, has often found himself in the centre of important – sometimes controversial – conversations, with more than a dozen books that trace the intersection of business and culture. His charge: distilling complicated subjects to a wide audience, with a character-driven approach that turns oft-opaque issues into human-centric, thrilling stories.

He began with Liar's Poker in 1989, which pulled back the curtain on his hustle in the rocky, heady world of 1980s finance at high-profile investment firm Salomon Brothers. Many of his titles have rocketed to best-seller lists, including Moneyball, which unpacks the statistics-driven strategy to build a championship baseball team on a shoestring; and The Big Short, the tale of 2008's subprime mortgage crisis, told through dark, even haunting humour. (Both books ended up as blockbuster films.)

Kay points out Lewis often takes on "quite dense, quite nerdy" subject matter. He sees it somewhat less starkly. "I've gotten particularly interested in something and seen something about it that isn't obvious to the world in some way," he says.

Going straight for the details has always been his nature. Before becoming a writer, Lewis apprenticed as a cabinet maker, studied art history at Princeton University, worked at a prominent art dealership and guided wealthy American teenagers through Europe. As much as he loved the art world, he decided it wasn't sustainable, and pivoted to Wall Street – the experience he recounts in Liar's Poker.

In the back of his mind, however, he always knew he wanted to write. "It just starts with the character and a situation," says Lewis of his approach to finding stories. 

For his latest book, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, he found the perfect personality in Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency magnate who shot to prominence by founding crypto exchange FTX. "[Bankman-Fried was] a socially maladjusted human being, who most of human history would have found no particular use for," he says. "[He] went from being worth nothing to being worth 22-and-a-half billion dollars in 18 months, and then starts to change the world in all kinds of weird ways."

The author's timing could not have been more apt; on the day Going Infinite hit stores, Bankman-Fried went on trial for seven counts of fraud and money laundering, for which he was convicted in November 2023. The book yet again vaulted Lewis to the top of conversation in the business world; mixed in with glowing reviews were criticisms from voices in the crypto space, who say Lewis put a biased, positive spin on Bankman-Fried. Going Infinite "may be regarded as either the pinnacle or the nadir of his career", wrote Gideon Lewis-Kraus in The New Yorker.

"Do you ever feel that they got close to your heart or into your brain, and therefore it's hard to be objective about them?" Kay asks Lewis of the subjects he profiles.

"Yes. It's that almost always you develop a lot of feelings because there is feeling in the air after a while," he says, though he caveats this was not the case with Bankman-Fried. "I've had that problem with other subjects because I know how sensitive and easily wounded they might be."

Through his reporting approach, Lewis, indeed, sees many of the intimate details of their lives. 

"You don't just talk to them, you do things with them. You don't just have an interview, you play paddle tennis, or you go on a trip, or you accompany them to their meetings. You learn so much about people when you cooperate with them," he says. "The other trick is to force myself to look at the places where the character is least self-conscious, like your toenails. You know, it's not your face. You're thinking that's what people are looking at. Right? And so that's going to be very self-conscious. It's where you are thinking nobody's looking where it gets really interesting. I try to look when nobody's looking. I try to be where nobody is." 

In his personal life, Lewis has lived his own harrowing experiences. He had three children with his wife, iconic MTV news anchor and journalist Tabitha Soren. In 2021, their middle child, Dixie, died after a tragic car collision. When Kay asks how he honours Dixie's legacy, Lewis shares his philosophy on grief.  

"I have a peculiar way of dealing with the death of my child. From the beginning, there was a pretty serious gap between what people expected me to feel and how I felt," he says. "I'm realising there's a loss of love, that I don't feel guilt. I was a great dad, she had a great life and we loved each other. If you use the sports metaphor – which she would love to use – we left it all on the field, right? So, it wasn't like, OK, we lost, but it's not that we didn't try.' I kind of concluded that I think I have to approach this in a funny way, in the way I approach literary subjects."

He continues, "Everybody has an unusual circumstance, a unique circumstance. It's partly how you're wired, and it's partly what your relationship was with the person you lost and probably how they died … This is going to be an individual sport, me figuring out how to live with the grief."

After the loss of a child, "how do you get to gratitude?", asks Kay.

"The intensity of that pain I felt and still feel is in direct proportion to the power of the love I felt. I didn't just love my child – all three of my children, I feel the same way – I liked my child. It was a friendship and parenting relationship at the same time and I'm incredibly grateful I felt that way," says Lewis. "The grief is so pure, like the sadness, it's not these toxic emotions. It's not anger, there's not guilt there's not whatever it is that you regret – those kinds of things that kind of eat at you – sadness doesn't eat at you, tears and laughter go together. You're in a different emotional space, when you're in tears and laughter than you are with anger, resentment and guilt. I'm grateful that the relationship was such that she's left me with tears and laughter."

The experiences of both his personal and professional lives have led to a singular ability to weave narrative – and spot the next story worth sharing.

"Listen very carefully to the way people tell their stories. And you will learn a lot about them, you will notice patterns," he says. "My children all say I'm the luckiest person they've ever known. One of the things they say is, 'Whenever we go to a restaurant, there's always a parking spot for you right outside the restaurant.' You know why that is? It's because I look for the parking spot, and I assume it's going to be there. Most people think the spot right outside the restaurant is going be taken. But I think it's going to be there. It's the narrative that is important."

Kay's conversation with Lewis is the sixth in her revealing, nine-part interview series. New episodes premiere every Thursday at 22:30 ET on the BBC News channel, and will be available the following day on the BBC News YouTube channel. An audio version will be available wherever you get your podcasts.