There’s an important lesson in SBF’s story. And that lesson has to do with boundaries.

The world we live in puts up fewer and fewer boundaries for us. There are fewer external boundaries than at any previous time in history. We can have any kind of sex life, for instance, and nobody cares. We can wear whatever we want or cover ourselves with piercings and tattoos according to our individual judgment. We can go on social media and gush out emotions. There are no externally imposed dietary boundaries. And so on and on.

The only boundaries we have are self-imposed. Nobody is coming to tell us to stop wasting time, money, energy, breath, etc. It’s up to us to build boundaries and defend them. Those few who get it and boundary up severely will be OK. The rest will be screwed.

Sam Bankman-Fried made an outrageous amount of money in a very short time and with minimal effort. He could have had a really nice life. But instead he lost everything and is going to jail. And the only reason is that he knew nothing about boundaries. He hemorrhaged money so fast it was impossible to cover the losses. Nobody ever told him about self-discipline, self-control, self-imposed routines and limits. Reading about his absolutely insane spending, I felt like surrounding myself with sofa cushions on all sides. The torrential gushing of this individual is uncomfortable to hear about, let alone imagine.

Different people will construct their boundaries out of different materials. The important thing is to do it. Find a structure to keep yourself in check and avoid becoming a human geyser like the poor, confused SBF.

To be clear, I’m incapable of understanding Bankman-Fried’s financial machinations and can’t pass judgment on their legality. I say he’s a poor excuse for a human because of his personal qualities, not his business decisions. He’s a guy who has an excellent brain for math. That’s all he is. He’s extraordinarily uneducated and just downright stupid in everything else. Yet he’s never been able to comprehend his limitations. He decided that his gift for math gives him the right to judge what’s good and what’s bad and refashion the world with his money.

Bankman-Fried has no humility, no desire to learn, and no self-awareness. Somebody referred to him in the comments to my previous post as “a financial narcissist”. That’s exactly what he is. A huffy, pouty narcissist who is unable to notice anything beyond his permanently wounded fee-fees.

It’s scary to observe these man-children with pots of money who, instead of just running their social media companies, launching rockets or selling crypto, start meddling in politics, buying elections, and refashioning society to make their extreme sexual and personal dysfunction stand out less.

What lies at fault here is our messed up understanding of intelligence. We don’t see the difference between hardware and software. Bankman-Fried has superior hardware that he got as a fluke of nature or a gift from God. But he never bothered to download any software onto his outstanding hardware. As a result, his brain produced defective results.

There are things that I have in common with Bankman-Fried, and that demonstrates that even people from different galaxies can find common ground.

For instance, he always played video games or worked on documents while speaking with people in Zoom or getting interviewed for live TV. Michael Lewis interprets this as meaning that Bankman-Fried was incapable of maintaining contact with other people. Like he was an almost non-verbal autistic who immediately switched off whenever people spoke to him.

But that’s not how it works. I don’t play videogames or work on documents during Zoom conversations to avoid hearing people. To the contrary, I do it because I want to hear. My brain is very busy and if I don’t occupy it, I’ll get distracted and miss everything the person on the other side of the screen is saying.

Lewis is simply projecting his own incapacity to maintain several open and active channels in his brain on Bankman-Fried.

Inside the dust jacket of the book about Sam Bankman-Fried, there is the organization chart of his businesses. It’s so funny, it’s like an illustration to an article about group IQ distributions. Top ten rows are all Asian names. Then some Anglo names appear with an odd Italian cropping up. And some Hispanics on the very bottom. And, unsurprisingly, a Jewish guy on top of it all.

People get freaked out about IQ but it’s silly because IQ doesn’t guarantee happiness. Mine is clearly much lower than Bankman-Fried’s. Some of the statistics games he played I can’t even comprehend, let alone play. But when I read the letters he exchanged with his girlfriend, God, those poor bastards were pathetic. Bankman-Fried was clinically miserable. Completely incapable of enjoying anything. My life is a fountain of joy compared to those of all these woke geniuses with their IQs, boatloads of money, and “polyamorous child-free socially conscious lifestyles”.