by Zeke Faux

I enjoyed it. It was a nice counterpoint to Michael Lewis’ Going Infinite – some of the details are identical, right down to the chickpea korma SBF apparently liked for lunch. But SBF wasn’t truly the focus. The focus was Tether. He kept waiting for Tether to self-destruct, and it never really did. Except, of course, that everything kinda did.

Epilogue: “The technology was as old as WhatsApp or Uber, which had long since wormed their way into our everyday lives so thoroughly their nanmes had become verbs. But no one had invented a mainstream use for cryptocurrency. So many smart people had spent so many thousands of hours working on crypto – and yet shockingly little use had come of it.” Count me among them, I guess, for those dreamlike 10 months I spent at TechLab.

by Ursula Parrott

Extra-marital sex. Abortion. Substance abuse. Skepticism about the sexual revolution, and how it sure seems to just screw over women.

Is it the 1960s? The 1970s? No – it’s 1925.

Definitely a fascinating look at sex and the (newly) single girl and the city back in your grandmother’s day. It starts with our protagonist’s husband’s exit, and has a very nice twist of an ending, but the middle was too long and made me very impatient with Patricia’s endless, mindless promiscuity. And I wish the heroine could have been given a bit more going for her besides her looks – that got very tiring to read about too. I was super sick of hearing about her “creamy” shoulders, and super sick of every man she met gushing over her beauty.

Good lines:

“New York’s a jail to which, once committed, the sentence is for life; but it is such a well-furnished jail, one does not mind much.”

“Great Lovers – men who’ve known a hundred women, and boast of it – they remind me of the man who wanted to be a musician and so took one lesson on each instrument in the orchestra… He couldn’t play a tune on any of them in the end.”

by Michael Lewis

This book is getting a lot of flack for being fawning and credulous, because Lewis doesn’t tell a story of Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) as villain, It’s very interesting that parts 1 and 2 of this book were hashed out before the FTX collapse, when Lewis was merely shadowing SBF and trying to gather material for a possible book. He got his book. He unwittingly got a front-row seat to the “implosion.” But as the NYT review stated, you can see the original book peeking through.

I don’t mind any of this. I take it for what it is: Lewis’ real-time impressions of SBF and his crew.

The impressions are: Yes, SBF is… different. Caroline Ellison is an egoless spineless character without the foggiest idea how to run Alameda research. It’s painful seeing the personal memos she and SBF write to each other about basically whether or not they should fuck each other. (Answer: No, No, neither one of you should be sleeping with the other one.) The other characters were not as nailed down for me. Oh, except the therapist. There’s an actual therapist on the FTX campus who treats just about everyone. Other than that, there are a lot of people from the old Hong Kong office who moved to the Bahamas, and then there are the horde of faceless “effective altruists” who share SBF’s penthouse.

As an aside, the effective altruists sure are a weird lot. I was and am interested in EA as well as crypto, which makes me so into the SBF story. But at first my impression was that EA was basically about rating charities, so you can figure out which ones are really the most effective ones to donate to – and this is an unmitigated good, for sure! And maybe also about figuring out which interventions in the world are most effective at truly alleviating human suffering and saving lives, e.g. anti-malaria bed nets – also indubitably a very good thing! But now the EA crew as a whole has turned their attention to “existential risks” – climate change, asteroids, AI, and nuclear war – because the calculations state, an intervention that could potentially save ALL of humanity from extinction, protecting all those future lives, must trump anything you can possibly do here in the present for these measly 6-7 billion. I part company here.

But I digress, as is my wont. I loved having a book to read on the FTX collapse – I’m sure there will be many more to come.