non-fiction book notes

nixonland

rick perlstein

i didn't know you were allowed to write a history book with such a snarky, almost sardonic tone throughout. felt like the longest book ever, took me months to get through, though incredibly it doesn't even reach the "juicy" impeachment and resignation parts. the book ends right as nixon is reelected, however the watergate break-in has already happened.

overall nixon is a fascinating figure, possibly one of the presidents i'm most interested in. he was a lifelong political underdog, gifted with almost no natural charm or family wealth/connections like his perennial rivals (the kennedys, reagan), but managed to slog his way to the country's top office through sheer effort, guile, political maneuvering, and a superior understanding of underlying public opinion (his "silent majority"). what drove it all seemed to have been a genuine personal conviction that he was the best man for the job and that the country needed him, especially when it came to foreign policy, his pet topic.

despite his overwhelming "shifty politician" aura, he outworked and outplayed his opponents to eventually reach the presidency, but even in the country's highest political office he still felt like the underdog, under constant attack from the media and distracted from dealing with his precious foreign policy by domestic turmoil like the vietnam protests. there's obviously a lot about the vietnam war in the book, and my overall impression is that the war went on for so long almost exclusively due to politicians trying to save face in US domestic politics. the war didn't seem winnable almost from the start, but no president/political party was willing to take the reputational hit from being seen as the ones who "lost" the war, the only alternative was to try and negotiate a peace settlement generous enough that it could be played off as a victory, or at least not look like total capitulation. nixon especially clung to a desperate hope that perhaps the war could still be won with just one more huge troop escalation or extended bombing campaign, while at the same time adopting a "madman" persona in negotiations that he hoped might scare them into coming to the table for a settlement favorable to the US.

nixon was an incumbent running against a disorganized democratic party, so a big question is why did he feel the need to get up to shenanigans like watergate? it seems he was genuinely convinced that the fate of the country was on the line in the 1972 presidential election, that the country would fall into ruins if he let a democrat win, and as a result he was willing to do whatever it took to win. with his authorization (but cloaked under many layers of plausible deniability), the committee to re-elect the president (CREEP for short, you can't make this stuff up) assembled a group of young political operatives to spy on and sabotage democratic primary candidates. they were basically professional trolls, they called themselves the "ratfuckers" got up to antics (which they called "ratfucks") like spamming campaign offices with bogus calls and letters, or handing out flyers to hoboes that promised free food at expensive democratic donor luncheons. their objective was to get george mcgovern elected in the democratic primary as the presidential nominee, because it was believed he would be the easiest opponent to defeat in the election. the way they boosted him was by sabotaging every single campaign except for his, and in the end mcgovern ended up as the democratic nominee after a chaotic democratic convention (which became so divided in part with assistance from nixon's political maneuvering).

unfortunately, nixon's goons were loyal and unscrupulous politics guys rather than seasoned criminals, and when trying to do some spying on the democratic party they royally bungled the DNC HQ break-in at watergate and got caught. however, nixon's involvement would only come to light months down the line, and in the meantime nixon ended up winning re-election in a historic landslide carrying 49 states, including mcgovern's home state of south dakota. still, he was left feeling frustrated, the republican party didn't manage to get a majority in either chamber of congress. in the wake of his great victory nixon, the perpetual underdog, could be found cursing out massachusetts for having gone for mcgovern...

wonder boy

angel au-yeung and david jeans

the story of a truly american tragedy. hsieh was a born businessman, did everything right, went to harvard then already at the age of 25 finished the game and achieved "the american dream" by selling his bs dot com bubble company to microsoft for an obscene amount of money. the average person might be content to rest on their laurels at that point, but it's not in the nature of those kinds of ambitious entrepreneurs to settle down easily. he does the typical silicon valley thing and becomes a venture capitalist, which doesn't last very long until he goes all in on zappos (his new game+, basically), becoming the ceo and burning every last cent he has keeping it afloat during the dot com winter of the early noughties. after a decade of hard work and struggle, hsieh pulls it off once again and zappos was sold to amazon for over a billion dollars, after which he remains in the zappos CEO role but gradually steps away to focus on his other main interest: community building. this had been a theme for him throughout, with his big microsoft money hsieh had purchased a "party penthouse" and a bunch of units in a luxury condo building where for years he lived in a kind of college atmosphere with his friends, and he sought to recapture that energy after it had been lost to friends moving on and being forced to sell all the condos to keep zappos afloat. zappos itself was well-known for having a unique corporate culture, serving as a laboratory for hsieh's ideas.

ironically, despite his obsession with community and companionship, hsieh struggled with social anxiety, and it was his attempts to overcome it through drugs and alcohol that would eventually lead to his downfall. his eyes were initially opened to the social possibilities of taking drugs after being introduced to underground raves and burning man, though he would end up becoming most reliant on heavy drinking to stay hypersocial during his las vegas downtown revival phase. as his drinking came to the attention of friends and got extreme enough to start causing major health problems, he did manage to quit but replaced it with something that would end up being even worse for him: ketamine.

it turns out that one potential side-effect from ketamine abuse is psychosis, and as his usage continues his behavior becomes erratic and he displays clear signs of delusional thinking. a lot of his antics during his descent into madness are eerily similar to how my brother acts during his manic states, which almost always involve psychosis and delusions of grandeur.

...he was acting in a manic manner, appearing shirtless and shoeless in the frigid air, pacing around the trailers and tiny homes and ranting about new, strange ideas. He wants to start a new religion. He claimed he could morph his body into a gazelle and become one with nature and terrain. He was working toward unlocking the escape combination to the universe. If he could break out of this simulation controlled by artificial intelligence, he said to friends, he could become the new controller of the universe and heal everyone from all physical and mental maladies.

people aren't able to recognize what's happening to hsieh, however, because he's shielded by his money and his reputation as a slightly eccentric but effective and extremely successful businessman. so, when he made bold declarations like that he was going to "solve covid", it was possible to believe because it was something he just might be capable of. the money also gave hsieh the ability to more-or-less pay off people within his circle into looking the other way as he angrily cut off all his closest family and friends that were trying desperately to get him help instead of just giving into his delusions, which led to hsieh finding himself surrounded by a small clique of cynical yes-men who were mostly just mooching off his money. things got especially bad when hsieh moved to a secluded mansion in park city utah, where access by friends/family and the authorities was strictly limited by his new inner circle trying to protect their golden goose that at that point would dash off a check for millions of dollars for any random "business idea" that catered to his delusions. although they do their best to keep him secure and out of trouble in the park city mansion, they're still yes-men and going against him too much risks falling out of his good graces and having to get off the gravy train, so when he wants to go on the little trip that would end up leading to his accidental death, they don't say no...

can't hurt me

david goggins

don't be fooled - this is not some lame motivational self-help book, this is actually the grotesque memoir of a man whose abusive early childhood and experience growing up as the only black kid in small-town indiana messed him up in such a way that he now feels compelled to continually throw himself into torturous physical challenges despite chronic health issues and frequent unpreparedness. the only advantage he has over his competitors in various ultramarathons is that he is totally insane and will just keep going even if his limbs have been shredded down to nubs.

the first portion of the book, where he overcomes an abusive childhood, obesity, and a dead-end job as a pest controller to become a navy SEAL on its own could have easily been a nice motivational parable on its own, but unfortunately the book doesn't stop there and keeps going into the increasingly deranged and disturbing ultramarathon arc. at that point, goggins' life seems to fall into something of a vicious masochistic cycle that goes a little something like this: first, somebody contacts him and says "hey goggins, have you heard about this crazy new event? a group of disgruntled ultramarathoners who thinks ultramarathons are getting too easy have gotten together and created a new event called a superultramarathon, five times the distance and entirely uphill." everyone around goggins tells he shouldn't compete, it's a terrible idea. goggins initially agrees, after all he is still recovering from his last escapade, which wasn't nearly as difficult. but he can't get the superultramarathon out of his head, it haunts his dreams whispering "do me", and eventually he decides he's in. he trains for it by jogging to the grocery store every day, and picks up some new running shoes at costco the day before. then, the event starts, and for the first third or so everything goes great - he's feeling fine, he's making good time, he's invincible. then, a minor pain starts in one of his knees, over the course of dozens of miles eventually crescendoing to excruciating jolts of unadulterated agony that could fell an elk. each step is absolute misery, but he continues anyway because mentally he's completely gone - too gone, it turns out, because he consults his map and realizes he has accidentally run 50 miles in the wrong direction and has to backtrack. against all the odds, he makes it to the final stretch, and through sheer determination passes fearsome opponent speedy dan, who can only stand and stare slack-jawed at the ghoulish figure that just staggered past him and even seems to be speeding up going into the last miles. the finish line is coming up and there's nobody else ahead of him, could it possibly be? has he finally won for once? he crosses the finish line and finds out despite his effort, he came in third. second place was mrs. yoshitaka, a short middle-aged japanese housewife whose hobby is competing in long-distance races. unable to walk any further, goggins collapses, and is carried to bed in his nearby rental house, which he promptly soils because he can no longer control his bowels. he falls into a coma for two weeks, and after waking up, finds that he can barely walk due to unbearable knee pain. doctors investigate, and tell him "goggins, you have the knees of a 150 year old. your cartilage, in the few places it remains, is harder than bedrock. we are going to have to amputate." goggins begs the doctor for other options as though he's begging for his life, and the doctor says "well, there is this one specialist working on a highly-experimental knee replacement surgery, but it has a 95% chance of killing you, and even if it does work you will still only be able to hobble around on a cane." goggins immediately books an appointment with the specialist, goes in for the surgery, and the day after runs a half-marathon like nothing ever happened. the specialist is absolutely flabbergasted, he's never seen anything like it, it shouldn't even be possible to walk after going through that. then, somebody contacts goggins: "hey, have you heard about this? some superultramarathoners who think superultramarathons are too easy now have gotten together and created this new, even more extreme event called a superduperultramarathon..."

chaos monkeys

antonio garcia martinez

basically like if erlich bachmann from the show silicon valley wrote a memoir (and also lived on a boat). it starts off with martinez and two coworkers quitting their jobs at a stuffy sinking-ship tech company with terrible management to found a startup based vaguely around doing something with ads. martinez takes the role of the leader/ideas guy/networker, basically handling all the soft skills, going to meetings to try and get VC funding and whatnot. to his credit, he kind of cooks, they get into ycombinator and martinez attracts a bunch of attention for them by starting a silicon valley gossip blog, which he's eventually able to parlay into getting their 8-month old startup acquihired by twitter. then of course he almost torpedoes the entire thing by deciding he wants to work at facebook instead because they have a better "hacker" culture, somehow he manages to put together some kind of deal where that works out. naturally, he becomes unhappy at facebook, ties himself to a doomed project of his that becomes a personal crusade, and then sees the writing on the wall and quits before any of his equity vests...

conquest of the useless

werner herzog

i've been kind of obsessed with the movie fitzcarraldo, it's one of those rare projects where the process of its creation is almost more fascinating than the finished product. reality and fiction blend together - herzog is a real-life fitzcarraldo, a man who for the sake of art toils to accomplish the impossible feat of pulling a 300 ton steamship over a hill in the middle of the jungle. struggles within the film mirror struggles with the film production - getting financing, treacherous waters, dealing with the natives. it's fitting that herzog was almost forced to play fitzcarraldo himself after the original actor playing the role was forced to drop out, and probably would have had his last-ditch attempt of contacting kinski not panned out.

i'm not a habitual harvester of quotes, but herzog's turns of the phrase are so incredible (he sounds like a character in his movies) that in this case it yielded a rare bumper crop.

This brings to mind the image, the great metaphor, of the pig in Palermo, which I heard had fallen into a sewer shaft: it lived down there for two years, and continued to grow, surviving on the garbage that people threw down the shaft. and when they hauled the pig out, after it had completely blocked the drain, it was almost white, enormously fat, and had taken on the form of the shaft. It had turned into a kind of monumental, whitish grub, rectangular, cubic, and wobbly, an immense hunk of fat, which could move only its mouth to eat, while its legs had shrunk and retracted into the body fat.

To fail to embrace my dreams now would be a disgrace so great that sin itself would not be able to find a name for it.

I am thirty-eight now, and I have been through it all. My work has given me everything and taken everything from me. No one and nothing can throw me off course.

...and in the foreword I came upon the breathtakingly idiotic comment that the most blatantly unbelievable passages had been deleted- when in fact it is precisely the incredible elements that account for the beauty of the story, or rather opera as a genre, because those elements that cannot be accounted for even by the most exotic probability calculations appear in opera as the most natural, thanks to the powerful transformation of an entire world into music.

I recall experiencing a similar shiver of awe as a child in Sachrang, when I found a frayed piece of bright blue plastic that had floated down the brook and got caught on an overhanging branch. At the time I had never seen anything like it, and I kept it hidden for weeks, licked it, found it slightly stretchy, full of miraculous properties. Not until weeks later, when I had my fill of owning it, did I show it to anyone. Till and I discovered that when you held a burning match to it, it melted: it gave off black smoke and a nasty smell, but it was something we had never seen before, an emissary from a distant world high in the mountains along the upper reaches of the brook, where it vanished into gorges and there were no people. So where did it come from? Had it been blown into the mountains by the wind? I did not know, but I gave the plastic a name-what I do not recall. I do know it had a nice sound and was very secret, and since then I have often racked my brains, trying to remember that name, that word. I would give a lot to know it, but I do not, and I also do not have that delicate piece of weather-beaten plastic anymore. Having neither the secret word nor the plastic makes me poorer today than I was as a child.

Kinski gave me his screenplay to read, all six hundred pages of it; he wants me to direct the film. One glance at the script makes it clear that Kinski’s project is beyond repair. There is half a page of fucking, then half a page of fiddling-and so on, for six hundred pages. The whole thing adds up to one enormous Kinski ego trip. He will have to do this one himself.

Laplace is talking about leveling the slope to a mere 12 percent grade, but that would look like the narrow strip of land that forms an isthmus. I told him I would not allow that, because we would lose the central metaphor of the film. Metaphor for what, he asked. I said I did not know, just that it was a grand metaphor. Maybe, I said, it was just an image that is slumbering in all of us, and I happened to be the one to introduce him to a brother he had never met.

every man for himself and god against all

werner herzog

god, what a title. this is one book i might consider listening to as an audiobook someday because it's narrated by herzog himself, with his mesmerizing accent and cadence (after i wrote that, i encountered a chapter where herzog describes learning hypnosis and says he uses some of the vocal techniques in his documentary narration). it's a bit like sitting down and listening to herzog give an off-the-cuff monologue for hours (my dinner with herzog?), it's not particularly focused and tends to wander through time and topics with a conversational logic. the chapter divisions for the most part seem to be completely arbitrary. herzog's life as a whole is further evidence for the theory that if you have the right kind of energy or attitude, you draw insane characters and escapades to yourself like a magnet.

there is much herzog can't explain, like his attraction to certain images, or even why he got so deep into film. those hoping for deep introspective insights will be left wanting. although it's evident that herzog has been obsessed with filmmaking for his entire adult life, you will find no dramatic origin story or theory as to how his obsession developed, it remains a cosmic mystery. there is no sudden paradigm shift or moment of revelation, in fact herzog goes out of his way to mention how unimpressed he was with the very first films he saw as a child while living in the remote sachrang valley, or even as a young teen going to the cinema in munich. then, suddenly, he's devoted his life to filmmaking, working a bunch of different menial jobs while living like a miser to save up enough money to make a film, serially entering artistic competitions or grifting scholarships for more filmmaking money, stealing a camera from the local filmmaker's union. every single subject he becomes fixated on eventually becomes the inspiration for a film, striking images he once saw on his travels decades ago will be hunted down across vast distances of space and time if he thinks they are appropriate for a certain project. if he'd been born in a later generation, he would probably have become a respected niche youtuber.

I'd rather die than to go an analyst, because it's my view that something fundamentally wrong happens there. If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house will be uninhabitable. It's like that with your soul; if you light it up, shadows and darkness and all, people will become "uninhabitable." I am convinced that it's psychoanalysis - along with quite a few other mistakes- that has made the twentieth century so terrible. As far as I'm concerned, the twentieth century, in its entirety, was a mistake.

don't sleep there are snakes

daniel everett

this book is somewhere halfway between memoir and linguistic/anthropological study, similar to tristes tropiques. it's the author's 30-year experience studying/living with a secluded amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe called the pirahã, which are notable because it seems like they were placed on the earth exclusively to falsify every theory of universal human cultural and linguistic features that anthropologists and linguists have ever come up with. probably the closest we can come to simulating an encounter with aliens. it's astonishing how everett was able to come in and learn pirahã under those conditions, their language is an isolate with no surviving relatives and grammatical structures found in no other languages, even the most knowledgable pirahã knew no more than a handful of words in another language (portugese), and of course there was the vast cultural gap that had to be bridged as well.

"surely you're joking, mr. feynman!"

richard feynman

i think one problem with the modern science establishment is that it's become institutionalized to the point that someone like feynman could never get hired these days. his playful attitude, creative out-of-the-box thinking, instinct to distill and simplify topics rather than overcomplicate is the exact kind of thing missing these days, not to mention his constant involvement in seemingly-unrelated fields (mostly artistic) that lead to unexpected intellectual cross-pollination. many of the most important scientific theories in history came from serendipity: dumb luck, revelations from unexpected avenues, or thinking about things from a completely different perspective. is it possible to encourage/accelerate serendipity? i think yes, by pursuing curiosity wherever it takes you and expanding your mental surface area, in the exact manner feynman did. unfortunately nowadays the science bureaucracy is allergic to feynmanesque wild card characters, instead of selecting for effective scientists it's selecting for the best grant-writers and players of departmental political games. then of course the field is designed to crush ambition from the start by putting every new entrant through a years-long grinder of soul-crushing underpaid work on other people's projects.

the best option now for feynman characters is to go found their own startup or something, it's probably inevitable (like a sort of entropic law) that bureaucracies eventually bury themselves under so many layers of regulation and protocol that they cannot handle anything besides rigid comformists, illegible characters like feynman becoming completely incompatible with them. from the lack of fresh creative talent the organization eventually becomes ossified, best case scenario it doesn't get mismanaged into oblivion and continues rent-seeking on its original innovations for decades while sustaining a large employee population of college-educated drones just there for a stable paycheck to support their families.

lying for money

dan davies

the largest financial frauds all seem to have one unexpected thing in common: they never start out as frauds. they begin as legitimate business ventures to various extents, and then somewhere along the way something goes wrong. sometimes the business plan is flawed and so revenue starts faltering, sometimes expensive mistakes are made, but either way money is lost and the company finds itself in financial trouble. instead of fessing up to it, though, they try to hide it, and that's where the fraud starts to come in: forged documents, cooked books, misrepresentations to investors. the justification is usually that it's just a bit of temporary trouble, and if they can weather the storm by cheating a little bit to avoid spooking clients, banks, and investors, everything will be fine once they get back on their feet. in essence, "fake it till you make it". frequently, things never get better, and as time goes on the amount of lying required to keep the business from collapsing immediately increases day by day, digging the hole deeper. sometimes, the business model is fundamentally flawed, and there's no chance of fixing it because all the accounting is just filled with fake numbers that do not represent the real state of the business. usually it's only a sole individual or a handful of executives that keep the fraud going, totally alone in their knowledge, sometimes in charge of hundreds or thousands of other employees below them who are completely unaware. at some point there's no hope of ever returning to legitimacy, it's just a matter of keeping it up one day at a time until eventually you get caught, an extremely stressful situation. this is why usually, when it all comes out and the executives in charge of the fraud are confronted, their overall sensation is a feeling of relief. the thing is, it's a little bit scary just how easy it is to pull off a fraud in those circumstances, because the system isn't really set up to catch fraud at that scale. big companies trust each other a shocking amount, and are relatively easily fooled by even sloppy forgeries since they aren't neccessarily on the lookout for them.

the book also has some good overviews of various interesting historical frauds i hadn't heard of before, like the poyais scheme perpetrated in the early 19th century by gregor macgregor. macgregor invented a fictitious central american colony called "poyais", putting together an elaborate booklet describing it as a thriving colony in an edenic paradise where cash crops flourished and the rivers ran with gold. macgregor sold millions of fraudulent "poyais bonds", "exchanged" british pounds for worthless poyais dollars he had printed, and in the end 250 settlers even set out on an expedition to emigrate to the fictional territory. the ending is a bit grim because of course where poyais was supposed to be the settlers found nothing but treacherous uninhabited jungle, over half of them died before they managed to return to england.

going infinite

michael lewis

content warning: this is basically a largely-unedited dissertation i wrote a while back about sam bankman-fried/the fall of ftx based on this book and a number of other sources

devoted readers will recall that the only thing i've written about crypto was centered around a cube made of solid gold. this is why my jaw dropped when somehow another crypto-related metallic cube makes an appearance in this book:

The third and final item on the list of Sam's desires was the tungsten cube. The tungsten cube was a bit of a head-scratcher. The imaginations of crypto people everywhere, it turned out, had been gripped by tungsten cubes. Tungsten, the architects now learned, was the planet's trendiest dense metal. Crypto people were then memeing about "the intensity of the density." A company in the Midwest had supposedly created the world's biggest tungsten cube. A mere fourteen inches, it had cost a quarter of a million dollars and weighed two thousand pounds. Sam had apparently ordered up such a cube, flown it into the Bahamas, and wanted it displayed on a plinth in his mini-city. The architects never were shown Sam's dense and precious cube, but they nevertheless incorporated it into their drawings. "We designed a space for it," said Ian. That space was the big atrium in the city's main building. The tungsten cube would be the first thing a visitor to the global crypto empire would see. Rising from the sea of abstraction, the earth's most concrete object.

this is almost certainly the most popular out of the three crypto books i read, likely to be found right now in a display near the front of your local (non-used) bookstore or in the non-fiction section of airport newsstands. that’s because the author is michael lewis, arguably the biggest name in finance writing, responsible for blockbuster books that also become actual blockbusters like the big short, moneyball, and the blind side. usually this is the sort of thing i would avoid at all costs (even free), but the story-behind-the-story has an irresistible twist: michael lewis originally set out to write a hagiography of (at the time) crypto golden boy sam bankman-fried (aka sbf), who falls right into lewis’ pet subject of “outsider whiz kid nobody believes in who uses math or something to become super successful and revolutionize some industry”. however, turns out sbf f’d up big time and so lewis accidentally ended up with a front-row seat to his spectacular fall. the question on everyone’s mind: how does lewis handle it?

well, people are saying that this might be the book that torpedoes his reputation and discredits him for all eternity. why? lewis not-so-subtly comes out in support of SBF near the end of the book, which is not a good look in light of the recent revelations from the currently-ongoing trial of sbf. the most damning testimony and evidence so far seems to indicate sbf explicitly ordered his devs to program a backdoor that allowed his personal crypto trading firm alameda research to go into nearly-unlimited debt trading on FTX (and thus eating into the deposits put down by legitimate paying customers) and that he had alameda co-CEO (and unrequited lover) caroline ellison cook the books and make seven alternative doctored statements of alameda’s financial position to show to potential investors and lenders when they were in dire straits (sam and caroline have this wonderful relationship which included passing each other bullet-pointed memos of pros and cons of continuing their relationship. lewis doesn’t hold back and recreates many of them in all their lurid details, a highlight is one where sam of course puts “I really like fucking you” under the list “ARGUMENTS IN FAVOR”). you have to wonder why they didn’t wait until the trial was over to release the book, i mean the final outcome of the trial could have made a fitting final chapter. maybe the publisher pushed it out now in order to capitalize on the media hype from the trial. or maybe lewis, in spending weeks shadowing his subject and swallowing more of sam’s honeyed words than anyone besides his inner circle, grew so enamored with him that he not only wrote a book continuing to extoll him and defend him in the light of a catastrophic fall from grace, wanted the book to be released right now because he believed it could assist in exonerating sbf or at the very least could shield him from public scorn. from what i’ve heard, even in the light of damning evidence being revealed at sbf’s trial, lewis has doubled down on defending him in the media during his book tour for the book.

so what exactly does lewis say in the book? for starters, there’s very little ominous foreshadowing of future collapse in the early parts of the book besides a few offhand mentions in footnotes, and the whole thing could probably stand as it is pre-collapse. maybe lewis was just lazy, and he wrote all of that early on and didn’t want to change it. or, it could’ve been on purpose. however, despite no explicit foreshadowing, astute readers can still spot some warning signs in lewis’ descriptions of sam’s reckless behavior early in his career. the most telling story is from the early days of alameda research, which he quit a safe and renumerative career at a major wall street firm to pursue. millions of dollars of a cryptocurrency called ripple went missing, and the management team wanted to pause trading until they found out what had happened. they were concerned that there may have been bugs in the automated trading software, a flaw in the strategy, or perhaps it had simply been stolen by hackers or an insider. but through the entire incident, sam was very nonchalant and sounded almost careless about the missing money. this was because he was convinced that it would turn up eventually (he gave it an “80% chance”), and thought it was silly to stop trading and lose time exploiting the temporary market opportunities they had identified. then, the crypto market soured and regular trading started losing money, there was a huge argument among management and sam wouldn’t relent, and in the end his entire management team and half his investor money pulled out. it sounds very similar to what would happen later down the line with alameda research and FTX, but in this case there was a “happy” ending: without anyone to hold him back, sam’s gets to fully unleash his automated high-frequency trading system and starts making tons of money, and they even recover the missing crypto (it was a mixup with the exchange they had been sending some to). “He’d been right all along!” triumphantly declares the narration. moral of the story: his actions may look reckless and messy, but if you just give him time and Let Him Cook, sam comes through because he’s a certified Lewis Whiz Kid.

an episode that suspiciously isn’t mentioned in going infinite is lewis’ fawning onstage interview of sbf at a big crypto conference, which is covered in one of the other books i read, zeke faux’s number go up. faux writes:

Lewis looked like a prep school headmaster, wearing a blue blazer with peak lapels and a white button-down with blue accents, his floppy hair parted perfectly to the side. And as he started lavishing Bankman-Fried with praise, he sounded as if he was presenting a prize to his star pupil.

“Three years ago, nobody knew who you were. And now you’re sitting on the cover of magazines. And you’re a gazillionaire. And your business is like one of the fastest growing businesses in the history of the planet,” Lewis said, to applause from the crowd and giggles from his subject. “You’re breaking land-speed records. And I don’t think people are really noticing what’s happened, just how dramatic the revolution has become.”

As Lewis went on, Bankman-Fried tapped the toes of his silver New Balance sneakers, sometimes pressing his legs with his elbows as if to hold them still. It seemed like Lewis saw him as another one of the truth-telling, sytem-disrupting outsiders he liked to write about. But the author’s questions were so fawning, they seemed inappropriate for a journalist. Listening from the packed auditorium, I started to question whether Lewis was really writing a book, or if FTX had paid him to appear (Lewis later told me he had in fact come to report for his book and that he was not compensated.)

Lewis said he knew next to nothing about cryptocurrency. But he seemed quite confident that it was great. The writer said that, contrary to popular opinion, crypto was not well suited for crime. He posited that U.S. regulators were hostile to the industry because they’d been brainwashed or bought off by established Wall Street banks. I wondered if he simply hadn’t heard about the countless crypto scams, but the thought seemed preposterous. “You look at the existing financial system, then you look at what’s been built outside the existing financial system by crypto, and the crypto version is better,” Lewis said.

Not A Good Look Mr. Lewis, appearing in public visibly intoxicated on the Sam Juice.

as far as i can tell, lewis’ thesis is that ftx was never insolvent and that all the ftx money is still there somewhere. you might even call lewis an “FTX truther”. the money is just misplaced and waiting to be found in sam’s disorganized mess of random investments, shell corporations, bank accounts, and so on, but sam could find it if you just give him time. unfortunately, sam was pressured into declaring bankruptcy and signing away control against his will by his lily-livered coworkers and conniving lawyers looking for a huge bankruptcy management payday. at one point lewis does some basic napkin math and puts together a list of “Sam World” (combination of ftx, alameda, and all sam-affiliated companies) assets and liabilities to the best of his knowledge, and much like caroline’s cooked books, they come out 4 billion ahead. it’s important to remember that lewis is basing nearly all of his conclusions based off of what sam personally communicated to him.

lewis introduces john ray (the interim CEO brought in to clean up the bankruptcy mess) fairly favorably, he comes off as the hard-boiled detective coaxed out of retirement for one last job. he’s crude and pragmatic, with no time for bullshit or wiseguys. but almost right away, lewis turns on him and smears him as an out-of-touch boomer who doesn’t understand anything about how FTX works and who pigheadedly refuses to ask for help or communicate whatsoever with the only guy who does (sam). apparently ray took one look at a picture of sam and concluded “that boy just ain’t right”, deciding that there was no point working with him because he was a “crook”. in retrospect, his intuition seems to have been spot-on. he also has choice things to say about the other members of the inner circle:

on nishad singh -

He’s narrow, it’s tech, tech, tech. There’s never a problem he can’t solve. He’s not going to steal money. He’s not going to do anything wrong. But he has no idea what’s going on around him. You ask him for a steak and he puts his head up the bull’s ass.

on caroline ellison -

She’s as cold as ice. You have to buy words by the vowel. An obvious complete fucking weirdo.

as ray's investigation proceeds, lewis characterizes it like so:

Ray was inching toward an answer to the question I’d been asking from the day of the collapse: Where did all the money go? The answer was: nowhere. It was still there.

then, there's the final paragraph of the book, the note that lewis chooses to end the book on:

I’d come back after they’d all gone, to look for something. After searching the jungle huts I was prepared to agree with others that it, too, had been no more than a figment of the imagination. But there was one last place to check, an old storage unit that no one had bothered to go through. The facility was just off the road that Sam drove every day between the Albany resort and the jungle huts. To the naked eye, it wasn’t a place you’d store anything of value, just lines carved in the jungle by tired-looking buildings with corrugated metal fronts. But it was there that I found it. It was just inside one of the ten unmarked FTX sheds. The wooden create had been addressed to Ryan Salame. It must have been far too heavy to move farther into the unit, so they’d just dumped it right at the front. The tungsten cube.

the implication is clear: just like the missing cube, just like early alameda's lost ripple, FTX's missing customer funds are still there, waiting to be found.

the thing is, the facts are actually all there in the book, it's just that lewis has completely misinterpreted them. if you read between the lines carefully and consult a few other sources, you can still extract the "real" story of SBF and FTX from going infinite, which goes a little something like this:

SBF was born to two berkeley professors (one of them a professor of ethics, you can’t make this stuff up), as a child he was a loner with a melancholic disposition (literary term for “depression”). this seemed to be mainly because he was so precocious, already an atheist when all his peers were still worshipping at the altar of santa. in some ways he believes himself to be ahead of many adults as well, one major epiphany around the tender age of ten is when he discovers that many of them unironically believe in God. school is extremely boring for him but he gets perfect grades anyway, enough to go off to MIT. really the only thing he’s interested in is games or puzzles. he gets really into playing magic: the gathering and through it makes his only childhood friend, with whom he doesn’t do much except play magic (they end up getting good enough to go to nationals). it's never mentioned explicitly but to me “autism” seems written between every line.

at MIT, sam is just another aimless and dispassionate physics student until he happens to fall in with effective altruism. effective altruism is one of the modern replacements for the Grand Narrative and/or God tailored towards sensitive nerds. it is an evolved form of utilitarianism (already one of the most autistic ethical theories) that encourages its adherents to earn as much money as possible so that they can donate as much as they can to charity. the “effective” part stresses that that money should be used as efficiently as possible, saving the most lives at the least cost. although it positively reeks of optimalism, i can’t find much fault with it in theory (most charities are notoriously inefficient), however in practice it seems to be a great way to rationalize or justify runaway greed. also, of late the nerds seemed to have corrupted things by redirecting the vast majority of effective altruism money away from simple and concrete (but unsexy) initiatives like malaria nets and into nebulous organizations doing “research” and “advocacy” to help “prevent” various hypothetical sci-fi apocalypses (mostly AI). anyways, i think the appeal of effective altruism to sam and friends is that it’s a way to frame life as a sort of feel-good game with a measurable goal, scored in “dollars donated” or “lives saved”.

as a result of becoming an effective altruist, when he’s getting ready to graduate sam decides to interview at several wall street trading firms, who are always eager to snap up super smart math/physics grads for their complicated algorithmic trading strategies. jane street capital, where he eventually ends up working, seems to be a perfect fit for him from the start, since their interview process consists entirely of a whirlwind assortment of games and puzzles. he is their top recruit that year and ends up doing very well in the firm, since it turns out that quantitative trading is pretty much just a game or puzzle you play with real money and a rulebook consisting of US financial law and contract terms. the only trouble sam has is getting along with his coworkers, a situation he partially improves over time by agonizingly teaching himself to project appropriate facial expressions and avoid misunderstandings (remember what i said about autism?).

after his third year, he’s doing so well that he’s about to pull down a bonus of $1 million for the year, and the head honchos tell him in his annual review that in ten more years he could be looking at between $15 million to $75 million a year. but he’s still unhappy, tormented by the idea that this may not be the optimal path for him, that he could be doing way more good (making more money) doing something else. finally, he spots the opportunity he’s been looking for: the nascent crypto scene. as an MIT-educated wall street trading genius, he’s convinced that he can effectively pubstomp the emerging crypto scene, filled with midwits and grifters and still way too sketchy for respectable professionals like jane street to touch. with the modest conviction that it was going to make him a billionaire, he leaves jane street and new york to found a crypto trading firm in san francisco with a bunch of fellow effective altruists. this is where the story really begins, a third of the way through the book.

flash-forward a couple years later and sam's on top of the world, running FTX/alameda out of the bahamas with a bunch of hand-picked effective altruist nerd friends. sam does so well because he acts the part and presents a good story to respectable investors. he's not like all the other conmen and grifters in crypto, he's the MIT whiz kid who worked on wall street and is now bring his smarts to crypto, working to make it legit and even courting US regulators. to many, sbf looks like the long-awaited Adult in the Room for crypto, and they finally drop their guard enough to get in on it. turns out, on the inside it was all bullshit, complete disorganization and disarray behind the scenes at FTX.

like many villains, i don’t think sam ever thought he was the bad guy. unlike many crypto guys, i don’t think sam every intended to commit any sort of fraud or theft. alameda research got into a bad spot somehow, maybe it was due to a big bet that went bad (like the luna crash of early 2022 that vaporized billions of dollars and tanked other crypto firms), or maybe they got hacked big time. either way, they just needed a little bit of money (several billion dollars) to make it through a couple of months, by which time they could have easily made it all back because they’re very smart people. luckily, sam had easy access to a huge pile of money that people had trusted him with, the customer deposits at ftx. as long as everybody didn’t ask for their money back all at once, there’d be no harm no foul, it was strictly a temporary situation until they got back on their feet. of course, crypto, like banking, is a business that’s mostly built on confidence, so this also requires projecting an image of strength and not letting anybody outside the inner circle know that anything is wrong, which may involve a tiny bit of lying to investors, lenders, and customers, an act known to law enforcement as “fraud”. the “fake it till you make it” approach.

maybe if they had enough time it would have all worked out, and sam would have come out ahead like he had during the crisis in the early days of alameda. unfortunately, during this delicate time of temporarily-borrowing-customer-funds-without-permission, reckless sam trying to give off an aura of strength poked the wrong bear: rival exchange operator CZ. he made a snarky tweet about CZ’s reluctance (or perhaps inability) to step foot on US soil due to the legally-dubious nature of CZ’s exchange. but sam seemed to have forgotten that CZ held a major card in his pocket: approximately $500 million worth of FTT, a crypto “token” that was functionally equivalent to stock in FTX. CZ fired back where it hurt, and announced to his millions of followers that after “recent revelations” (a leaked document, purportedly listing alameda’s assets and liabilities that revealed it was heavily reliant on its own pile of FTT), he was going to be liquidating his position in FTT. as the price of FTT dipped, so did confidence in FTX, and the worst-case scenario occurred; everyone came asking for their money back at once. but they didn’t have enough of it left to pay everyone back because it had been loaned to alameda, who seemed to have (temporarily?) lost it continuing their underperforming trading strategies. and so FTX was forced to halt withdrawals and declare bankruptcy. oops! sam tried to cook but it was too late, all he had to work with was a slapped-together informal balance sheet full of, as matt levine characterized it, “howling ghosts”.

epilogue: sam bankman-fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison on march 28, 2024, after a disastrous trial performance, though eventually 100% of the money lost in FTX was recovered thanks to a rebound in the crypto market and sbf's lucky early investment in AI firm anthropic.

number go up

zeke faux

a rollicking romp through the wacky world of crypto at the height of the 2020-2022 covid crypto boom and its collapse. on a related note, now that crypto has booming again lately, i wonder if we're just doomed to rapidly cycle through crypto boom-bust cycles every two years forever now, each one bigger, more depraved and disconnected from reality than the last. it's a very effective survey, neither laser-focused on one charismatic figure like going infinite nor suffering from the limited access and travel budget that easy money seemed to have. if faux (pronounced like "fox", incidentally) closes off a chapter tracing something to the bahamas or switzerland or el salvador or the phillippines, you better believe you know where he'll be when the next chapter opens. his status as a reporter for bloomberg also seems to have opened more doors than it closed, i suppose despite all their anti-establishment bluster, the crypto community is still secretly desperate for recognition from the establishment.

the unfortunate thing is that despite his efforts, faux is unable to penetrate the shadowy heart of crypto he spends the whole book building up, the evil genuises pulling all the strings in the background. it's known as "tether", essentially the foundation upon which the modern crypto economy is built and largely responsible for much of its recent growth. tether effectively function like the central bank of crypto, a little ironic considering that one of the main crypto talking points is "decentralization" and i'm sure crypto guys frequently rant about abolishing the US central bank, the federal reserve. tether issues an eponymous cryptocurrency called tether, a "stablecoin" that's always supposed to be worth exactly $1, basically digital dollars. getting real money in or out of the crypto ecosystem is always the most difficult part, so tether functions as a kind of safe haven for people to store value in a dollar-denominated asset that isn't exposed to the volatility of crypto, while still remaining within the crypto ecosystem. it also acts as a common medium of exchange between different crypto exchanges and platforms, allowing for seamless transfers throughout the crypto ecosystem. as a result it is by far the most traded cryptocurrency, and most of the money entering or leaving the crypto economy does so via tether.

how does each tether always stay worth exactly a dollar? in theory it's quite simple: every tether is supposed to be backed 1:1 with dollars in tether's bank accounts. you give tether a dollar, they squirrel it away and then give you a tether in exchange; in reverse, you give them a tether and then they go in the back and retrieve a dollar for you. in practice this guarantee only applies to a select group of tether partners like big crypto exchanges and other high rollers, and the minimum conversion amount is $100k at a time. but, it's enough to keep the price stable at a dollar, since those big exchanges will always be happy to give you money for tethers. theoretically, it's a great business to be in for tether, they are basically just a bank without any of the big expenses like customer service, maintaining branches, or even paying interest. tether is free to take that huge pot of money, invest it in extremely safe liquid assets like US treasury bonds, and pocket all the interest, which even at low single digit percentage rates is still hundreds of millions of dollars on the tens of billions they're holding. it's pretty much free money.

the issue is, this organization that the entire crypto economy is built on the back of, crypto's single weakest point that would probably take down the majority of the crypto economy were it to collapse, is also probably the shadiest and most elusive financial organizations of its size in existence. nobody on the outside knows precisely where they keep the money and they refuse to release detailed balance sheets or be audited in any way, only issuing vague statements of assets that amount to "just trust us bro". it's not a small amount of money either, tether should have over $100 billion dollars somewhere, but nobody is exactly sure where. faux even wrote an article for bloomberg about it, tracing the insane history of tether from its creation by a child star from mighty ducks to its sale to a shady italian surgeon who banks in the bahamas with the co-creator of inspector gadget... and in the end, it proves nearly impossible for him to score an interview with any of the handful of tether insiders. the best he's able to do is briefly encounter tether ceo devasini at his wife's art opening in switzerland, but nothing at all comes of it.

the obvious conclusion for all this elusiveness (faux memorably describes tether as being "quilted out of red flags") is that perhaps tether's money isn't all there, tether either lost or stole the dollars they'd been given. or maybe they never existed in the first place, and they simply issued a bunch of tether tokens out of thin air and distributed them like a real central bank, thus gassing the crypto economy up to ludicrous highs far beyond all the money that has genuinely been put in...

note: i'm not sure if there's been any new revelations in the tether investigation since this was written 1-2 years ago

easy money

ben mckenzie "with" jacob silverman

easily the weakest of the three crypto collapse books i read during my binge, mainly because it contained by far the least original content and reporting. before he started research for the book, ben mckenzie had already made a name for himself as an outspoken critic of crypto on twitter, which naturally made the community highly suspicious of him. not even the fact that mckenzie is a fairly-famous tv actor was enough to salvage the situation, the crypto community's strong sensitivity to criticism seems to have overpowered their usual hunger for the smallest scraps of celebrity attention and recognition. the best mckenzie is able to do is barely eke out an uncomfortable hour-long interview with sam bankman-fried, who was well-known for taking interviews from pretty much anybody and everybody. mckenzie makes up for the lack of original content/reporting by filling the book with a lot of in-depth explanations about how various crypto rackets work which i suppose could serve as a good primer to the uninitiated, but i was already familiar with most of it so it was kind of a slog.

the signal and the noise

nate silver

a good introduction to forecasting (and how it usually doesn't work very well), though it's a little bit too basic if you've already read the kind of stuff i usually read. the first chapter is probably like the sixth or seventh explanation of the 2008 financial crisis i've read, and of course i was already well aware of the twist at the end of the good ol' deep blue vs. garry kasparov chess anecdote. some chapters did bring in some fresh material, especially the one on poker (the author is a part-time pro poker player). on the surface it might seem like an easy way to make a living if you're good at it but it's actually quite brutal, apparently the vast majority of winnings come from just the worst 20% of players or so, and if there isn't a constant stream of fresh "fish" (suckers) coming in and losing lots of money then it can turn into a grueling grind, especially stressful because you also have to constantly manage your psychological state and avoid going "on tilt" (playing bad because you're mad). plus, even if you play perfectly, there can be long dry streaks simply from having bad luck.

overall, my big takeaway is that forecasting sucks in almost every field besides weather forecasting, and it's such a difficult problem that there doesn't seem to be much hope for improvement outside of some deus ex machina like AI suddenly solving everything. i also learned one especially freaky thing: it probably isn't that shocking to hear that there is an inverse relationship between earthquake frequency and scale, e.g. tiny earthquakes are extremely common whereas megaquakes only come along once every century. by plotting known frequency/scale data on a log plot, it's possible to extrapolate and estimate the approximate magnitude and frequency of a hypothetical future gigaquake. but, it's also possible to do this with terrorist attacks, and plotting then extrapolating from 40 years of terrorist attacks up to the year 2000 predicts that an outlier attack the size of 9/11 is due...

the man who mistook his wife for a hat

oliver sacks

an erudite neurologist reflects and meditates on the most interesting and unusual cases he encountered over the course of his career. many are devastating, especially the "lost mariner" one. at times feels almost like a short story collection.

philosophy of the tourist

hiroki azuma

i knew this was going to be a keeper when only a chapter in, azuma felt the need to insert a long "supplement" defending his 2013 book Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant No. 1 Tourism Plan, a proposal to turn the site of the fukushima disaster into a tourist destination for "dark tourism". ultimately he was vindicated because a couple years ago i watched some of a netflix series called "dark tourist", and guess where the host went in one of the first episodes?