Michael Lewis' latest III

I now take another look, perhaps our last look, at Michael Lewis' book about Sam Bankman-Fried. Once again, I will focus on a specific passage.

This time, that passage arises in the book's chapter six. In the ongoing story, it occurs when SBF is finally creating a crypto exchange, in Hong Kong in the go-go climate of early 2019. [It didn't move much of its operation o the Bahamas until September 2020.] Lewis is talking about the difference between the crypto religionists on the one hand and the "suits" from traditional financial institutions, coming into crypto as colonizers, on the other.

The higher crypto prices rose, the greater the flood into crypto of sober-minded people in suits that people like Zane [a religionist] found insufferable. ... The Goldman guys and the venture capitalists and the corporate lawyers turned crypto bros -- they were all part of this invasion of conventional people who wanted to make fast money without the kookiness that had made the fast money possible. The pseuds would seek common ground with the original crypto religionists by exhibiting their excitement about the technology. The blockchain! The blockchain is going to change everything! they'd say.

The substitution of "pseuds" for the near-homonym "suits" here is subtle and brilliant by way of pointing out that the religious advocates of crypto would presumably think that praising the technie genius of the blockchain was missing the point and was, so to speak, rank philistinism.

For many years I shared much about the worldview of the crypto religionists. And in recent years I have had the opportunity to talk to people involved in the industry on both sides of that rift. I can attest that it is as Lewis describes it.

In terms of SBF's development, the point Lewis is making here is that SBF was in a good position to play both sides of that rift. He was a veteran of one of the "sober minded institutions" referenced above, Jane Street Capital, a proprietary trading firm. [The one where a trader had taught a roomful of interns an important lesson -- for one of them a painful one -- with a bag of very tiny dice.] Yet he did not give off the vibes of the suits/pseuds. He gave off the vibes of someone who shared the dissatisfaction of the religionists, not toward government or central banks but toward the world as he found it generally.

There is much of interest in Lewis's discussion of SBF, as I hope I have conveyed in these posts. He has his usual expository skill and applies it to the many aspects of the story. There are other aspects that seem to elude his gifts, but I will allow them to elude this blog too, for the nonce.

I will only say, as several reviewers have noted, that Lewis does end up with an oddly sympathetic view of SBF. It arises in part from a point I mentioned yesterday, that an entrepreneur who generates a "reality distortion field" can be a productive thing. The reality distortions can help change reality for the better. With Steve Jobs, arguably, that worked out. With SBF, Lewis seems to think wistfully, it MIGHT have worked out, too. Alas, it did not.

Lewis' sympathy arises, too, from the sociological situation indicated by the passage italicized above. A lesser person might have felt defeated by such a schism: SBF worked both sides of it. How clever!

Well, maybe. But the phrase "too clever by half" occurs.

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Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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