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I'm about 40% through Michael Lewis's book on Sam Bankman-Fried, and so far I find it intensely frustrating.
Yes, hindsight is no guide to what people knew or thought at the time, but putting what Lewis is describing with how Bankman-Fried operated is making me want to tear my hair out. Of course the guy isn't one bit interested in how other people feel or if he makes them feel bad, of course he's convinced that if out of 100 people, 99 say "black" and he says "white", he's right and they're wrong. But Lewis, even at this early point, is so clearly enamoured of Bankman-Fried that he can't bear to criticise him directly; even at the places where it finally looks like he'll have to admit "Yeah, Sammy-boy screwed that one up", at the last minute he swerves to how Bankman-Fried was actually in the right, or it wasn't his fault, or or or.
That being said, there is useful information here, if Lewis can't help white-knighting for Bankman-Fried he also can't help being the investigative author that he is. Armchair psychology is a dangerous pastime, but I have to say that my snap judgement of "So what is going on with SBF?" is that he's a child. He can't cope with boredom, and anything that doesn't interest him is dumped into the bin of "boring and irrelevant". There's indications that something was going on with him as a kid; possibly on the autism spectrum, possibly ADHD - that would account for the kind of stimming he does (bouncing his leg, fidgeting, as well as the after-the-fact knowledge that he was hopped up on stimulants). And yet his parents seem to have done nothing about it.
Oh, the parents. Wow, that's some description of the Bankman-Fried family life, and makes me understand even better why they were so greedy about stripping everything they could out of FTX/Alameda Resources as Sam's, and hence their, personal cash cow as described in the law suit against them. They seem to have (emotionally) neglected their kids and been totally incurious about them, or at least about Sam, but very conscious of their own adult interests as Stanford academics and liberal, Democrat, supporters.
Maybe I'm biased by where I'm currently working, but the description of kid Sam makes me wonder why the hell the parents weren't bringing him for psychological assessments? Maybe they were, and that part of the story isn't being told to Lewis by Bankman-Fried, but they just... weren't very much there, from what I'm reading:
If you take one thing away about explaining how and why Bankman-Fried acted the way he did, it's that line:
And so, as long as he does okay in school and doesn't get into trouble, he is just left to get along. They do put him into a fancier school since he's smart - and again, Lewis is good on that. Bankman-Fried is smart, but he's not super-smart, and he finds himself later on among kids who are just as smart as he is, or even smarter. And Bankman-Fried seems to have constructed his sense of self around always being right; everyone else can be dumb and stupid and boring and wrong, but he's right.
That's where Lewis frustrates me. He doesn't seem to see where he - or his hero, Sam - is contradicting himself. So the arts, for example English, are stupid and dumb and academic shell-games. (But his parents are academics - are they and their work, too, only engaged in "a bullshit distinction dreamed up by academics trying to justify the existence of their jobs"?). Having airily dismissed Shakespeare, later on Lewis gushes about a game Bankman-Fried and a colleague at Jane Street play, which shows how smart Bankman-Fried is: a bog-standard word game based on puns, which requires some quick thinking but isn't that extraordinary. And at another point in the book, we get Bankman-Fried dismissing any attempts by adults at nuance about religious beliefs as more bullshitting, that belief in God is a binary question, yes or no.
Hold on to that thought, because then later on we get Lewis tut-tutting at the co-founders who, not unnaturally, panicked over four million in a cryptocoin gone missing and want to tell the investors that money is lost. But Bankman-Fried wants to go ahead and keep trading because maybe it'll turn up, who's to say that it's not there? Now, "do we have the money?" is a pretty fucking binary question, yes or no, but this time Sammy-boy, in Lewis's telling, is all about the nuance or the inherently probabilistic situation.
So things like that, where Lewis or Bankman-Fried or both of them turn on a dime when it suits the narrative purpose for Bankman-Fried to be The One Guy Who Is Always Right, are very frustrating. But I can't say the book is bad, because yeah, it's helping me understand some of what was going on in Bankman-Fried's mind.
A guy with a low boredom threshold, very probably a couple of neurodevelopmental disorders that never got addressed in childhood because his parents were so out to lunch, who only cares about a set of things he finds fascinating and judges those around him by the same yardstick: if you like what he likes, then you get paid some of his attention. Anything else? He just ignores, because he learned as a kid that he could ignore the boring shit school and other places tried to instil in him, and get away with it. Hence why he plays video games while on video calls and similar behaviour, or why he says "yes" and then never shows up - he learned that the quickest way to get people to stop nagging was just agree with them, but you have no intention of doing the thing. No matter how Lewis tries to dress it up as some kind of constant calculation as to best use of time, "assign some non-zero probability to the proposed use of his time", what it really is, is Bankman-Fried lying because he doesn't care about you or making commitments you think he will carry out when he has no intention of doing so, because he can't see the point in trying to imagine what someone else might want.
And that's how you end up with a massive financial fraud trial - because he doesn't care about anyone else, since he can't manage to quite see other people as real or valuable, and he's a child who never grew up.
Not care about anyone? But what of all the EA stuff - is that a lie, too?
I think Bankman-Fried is a good example of what Chesterton said about modern philanthropy and Humanitarianism:
Bankman-Fried loves the theory because you can play all the number and math games with it, working out probabilities and maximum values and so forth. But humans as humans? Messy, confusing, boring and stupid.
Am now 46% of the way through the book and increasingly frustrated, because Lewis is so far up Bankman-Fried's backside. He pretty much describes Bankman-Fried deciding at this point (after the four co-founders leave) that he's going to keep lying to people to get them to stop criticising him because they now think he likes them, and Lewis writes about this as if its some amazing stroke of psychology by a genius who can read other people like open books but who they just can't understand with their puny little brains.
No, guy, the way to get people to trust you is to stop lying and being a deceitful shit, not to double down on it! Everything that happens from now on is inevitable thanks to Bankman-Fried having an inflated ego, no shred of scruples, and treating reality as if it's some kind of video game, but Lewis is still slobbering over his shoes about how poor Sammy-boy is just too pure for this fallen world.
I want to hit somebody. Everybody involved, except the EAs who got burned by Sammy-boy being a cheating no-good lying deceiver and got out early, and double the beating for Lewis.
EDIT: Even with all that being said, the book is still informative. Bankman-Fried's edge was that he got in first, but of course eventually the big boys followed and he couldn't compete with their own clout and resources, so he had to keep finding new ways to finagle the markets. He started off with the Kimchi Premium, but once that hole was plugged he had to find a new way to keep making the fast cash and he did that first with setting up Alameda Research for crypto trading, then as the big players in Wall Street trading became interested in this new money machine market and moved in, he created his own crypto exchange and token. So he survived and kept piling up the profits by jumping on to a new element of the market before the big guys moved in and took over, but naturally that couldn't last forever - FTX/Alameda Trading was just too small, never mind that they were (allegedly) making billions. That's why he was cosying up to Binance, and why CZ decided that if this was a good idea for Bankman-Fried, he'd turn down any alliance and do the same thing himself as a copy-cat.
EDIT: Three-quarters of the way through and it gets a lot better as we get into the meat of the collapse - basically because Bankman-Fried was a lying liar who never told anyone anything, refused to actually manage, dumped responsibility without information onto others and when it all came crashing down tried to displace the blame onto everyone else with his version of "I know nothing, it wasn't me". Even Lewis has to admit that his plan to resurrect FTX was stupid and unworkable, and that he was to blame because in the end he doesn't care about other people or see them as quite real, but Lewis still is convinced that the money wasn't really stolen or what have you, it's all mysteriously still there somehow in cyberspace, or maybe down the back of the sofa, if everyone just looks hard enough for it.
EDIT EDIT: Have just got to the part where John Ray appears and oh man, he's wonderful đ I don't care if Lewis thinks he has it in for Sammy-boy, finally there's an adult in the room!
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