Seeing those tarnished my whole opinion on Lewis, and I cannot disassociate it from the book at this point. Not because I am “not able to separate the art from the artist”, but because Lews was talking about the exact subject matter of the book in those interviews. All while providing enough clarifying extra detail to fully affirm to me that he is either seriously delusional or is just on the grift of caring more about writing an exciting story (instead of actually having a more factual take on things).
I had already got burned by one of his books before[0], but i took it as a one-off. The SBF one, and especially those interviews, sold me on the idea that this is how he just is. Which is sad, because his writing and plots and stories are genuinely good, but the problem is that they pretend to be almost journalism. I really hope he considers going all in on grounded-in-the-real-world fiction genre officially.
[0] That was with one of his earlier books, Flash Boys. It was kind of embarrassing to reread it years later, once I actually gained some literacy in what the markets actually were and the high level mechanisms of how they operate. The framing of characters and events in the book was not only extremely biased, the whole premise and the problem statement were hanging on the absolute worst bad faith takes that were a almost a foot into “this is not a straight up lie only on the most technical level” territory.
For example, the whole premise of the book was that banks would see 10,000 shares offered on 5 different exchanges. They'd go to buy 10,000, but only get filled on 2,000, and then cry foul. But people don't normally think like this. For example, if I wanted to sell my bike. I list it on Craigslist, Facebook and Next Door. If someone simultaneously contacted me through all three platforms, no one would expect that I was responsible for selling three bikes. Now, replace "bike" with "2,000 shares."