Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, by Michael Lewis

• Category: Non-fiction
• Rating: 4 out of 5
• Tags: Cryptocurrency, FTX, Private Equity, Sam Bankman-Fried
• How I learned about it: Review in The Globe and Mail

This is a story involving wildly odd characters, ridiculous amounts of money, extreme philanthropic goals, and either shocking carelessness or outright fraud.

Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) is at the center.  He wears his curly black hair in an unkempt, afro-like tangle, with cargo shorts, a t-shirt, and sagging athletic socks.  You’d never know from looking at him that his net worth was once in the billions.

SBF really was different from the other kids.  He says he has no trouble understanding other people and their emotions, but doesn’t feel happiness, and had to practice his facial expressions to show his feelings.  At the age of eight, he was critiquing arguments for a paper to be presented by his mother, a law professor at Stanford.  Hyper-rational, he questioned traditional assumptions.  Sam figured things out “by thinking about things for himself, without a whole lot of concern for the thoughts of others.”

Sam was eventually drawn to a from of utilitarianism called effective altruism (EA), described as a way to be better at doing good.  (See, for example, the book by Will MacAskill).  It made him wonder how he could have the biggest, positive impact on the world.  After graduating from MIT in physics and math, he got a job trading at a private equity firm.  The pay was high, in the hundreds of thousands after the first year.  They told him he’d be making between $15 million and $75 million dollars a year by his tenth year.  He was giving most of it to charities identified by the EA movement as very good at saving lives, but Sam wanted to do more, and his eye fell on cryptocurrency.  Assessing the price variations, he estimated he could make around a million dollars a day.

Sam started a private equity fund, hired some staff, attracted $25 million in capital, and was soon making half a million dollars a day.  But careful tracking of money just wasn’t of interest to him.  Once, $4 million of cryptocurrency went missing, and SBF’s blasé attitude was, “Don’t worry, it’ll turn up.”  It eventually did, but not before his whole management team and half the employees quit over this and other problems at the company.  Freed from the constraints of his more conservative staff members, Sam decided to let loose his new trading algorithm, and see whether it generated huge profits or bankrupted the company.  Incredibly, it worked.

The equity fund made lots of money, but after taxes, expenses, and distributions to investors, not much was left over for philanthropy.  Sam decided to go even bigger, by creating a crypto exchange.  This worked too, and in 2021 Forbes estimated Sam’s net worth to be at least $20 billion.  Apparently motivated by a genuine desire to improve the world, he spread large amounts of money around to see what worked.  He and his partners planned to make and distribute hundreds of billions of dollars to address existential risks to humanity – nuclear war, asteroid strikes, global pandemics, rogue AI.

It was not to be.  The price of crypto crashed, and investors wanted to withdraw their money, FTX suffered a liquidity crisis, money went missing, and Sam was arrested and extradited to the US, despite questions about jurisdiction.  Was there intentional fraud?  A jury thought so, and Sam waits to be sentenced.

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Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (in a Big Way), by Roma Agrawal

• Category: Non-fiction
• Rating: 2 out of 5
• Tags: Engineering, Inventions
• How I learned about it: Book reviews in Nature and Physics Today

A book about seven inventions that are fundamental to modern technology.  The Renaissance had its six “simple machines:” the lever, wheel, pulley, inclined plane, wedge and screw.  Agrawal’s modified list contains the inventions she believes “form the basis of the modern world.”  They are the nail, wheel, spring, magnet, lens, string and pump.

Variations on the basic inventions allows them to be used in a range of ways.  For example, nails can be modified into rivets, and wheels used to make pottery or for transportation.  Springs are found under compression and tension in everyday items from pens to cars.  Magnets don’t just stick things to your fridge; they’re also used in specialized low friction bearings.  Lenses allowed Leeuwenhoek to have the first look at microorganisms, and now let our smart phones take high quality photos.  String can be wound into rope or woven into fabric.  And pumps supply water to our homes as well as keeping patients alive on bypass machines while having heart surgery.

Agrawal takes care to show how engineering is connected to improvements in everyday life, and to highlight contributions made by scientists who may be less well-known in the west.  She concludes, “…far from being overwhelming and cold, engineering – past, present, and future – is stimulating, empowering, and human.”

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The Premonition: A Pandemic Story, by Michael Lewis

• Category: Non-fiction
• Rating: 4 out of 5
• Tags: Pandemics, Public Health
• How I learned about it: I heard the first chapter read by Michael Lewis on his podcast, “Against the Rules,” which is recommended.

I like Michael Lewis; he has a knack for enjoyable story-telling.  On the back cover of The Premonition, where some books have a list of reviewers’ recommendations, there is just one, from John Williams’ New York Times Book Review: “I would read an 800-page history of the stapler if he wrote it.”  After listening to his podcast, I might say I’d listen to a reading of the phone book if Michael Lewis read it.  He takes such delight in his stories; it sounds like he’s always about to burst into laughter at some absurd situation he’s just described.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States was ranked first in the world for pandemic preparedness.  Despite this, the US coronavirus death rate is far higher than in other large, wealthy countries.  How did this happen?  Michael Lewis tells the page-turner of a story about the researchers, policy advisors and public health representatives who saw what was coming and worked to prevent it.

There’s Bob Glass, a scientist at Sandia National Laboratories who built a model of how diseases spread, inspired and helped by his teenage daughter, who was working on a science fair project.  They found that closing schools had the biggest impact on reducing the spread of communicable disease.  If vaccines were in short supply, the counterintuitive model results showed that the best way to protect the vulnerable elderly was to vaccinate the closely-packed young.

Infectious disease experts, however, assumed that containment was impossible.  Not only did they not believe the results from models, but conventional wisdom based on the 1918 flu pandemic said that closing schools, banning large gatherings and restricting travel were all ineffective, and caused pointless hardship.  All that could be done was to isolate the ill and wait for a vaccine.  Carter Mecher, hired to help the George W. Bush White House develop a pandemic response, looked more closely at the data from 1918, and found that cities that imposed restrictions early had far fewer flu cases and deaths.  It wasn’t that containment didn’t work; it was that it worked best if done early.

Then there’s Charity Dean, former chief health officer for Santa Barbara County, and deputy state health officer of California when the pandemic hit.  She knew from experience that action was required before there was enough data to justify it – preventing the spread of catastrophic disease required a swift response, even if it later turned out to be a false alarm.  She also knew that the federal Centers for Disease Control would be no help in a crisis.  When she was Santa Barbara’s health officer, they disputed her authority to impose restrictions to prevent the spread of disease.  Then they said she’d be fired if she was wrong.

Sidelined by her boss at the start of the pandemic (“You’re scaring people”), Charity Dean nonetheless wound up writing a pandemic action plan for the country, with clear criteria for imposing increasing levels of restrictions as disease levels rose.

The US pandemic response was fragmented and plagued by fear of political repercussions.  Expert knowledge; accurate models; free, quick testing and genome sequencing; and rational protection plans were all ignored, saved only by the dedicated, nearly subversive actions of a dedicated few.  If governments had listened, could hundreds of thousands of deaths have been prevented?

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Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues, by Jonathan Kennedy

• Category: Non-fiction
• Rating: 3 out of 5
• Tags: Disease, Epidemics, History, Plague
• How I learned about it: Review in The Economist

Jonathan Kennedy’s simple thesis is that pathogens have had a much larger influence on the course of history than you might think.  According to the “great man” theory of history, “charismatic, brave, visionary individuals – almost all of them males – were seen as the driving force of history.”  An alternative theory asserts that the struggles of ordinary people were just as influential.  Kennedy offers a third viewpoint, in which microbes play a large part.

There are huge numbers of virus and bacteria particles in the world, and in your body.  Number of virus particles in one liter of seawater: 100 billion.  In one kilogram of dried soil: around a trillion.  There are at least 400 trillion viruses in the human body, plus 40 trillion bacteria.  Even more amazing, eight percent of DNA in humans comes from retrovirus DNA, transferred by ancient infections to human germ cells so the changes became heritable.  The gut microbiome affects overall health, and may influence mood by producing neurotransmitters like dopamine or serotonin.

But the biggest affect of microbes on human life has been from disease.  Death rates from diseases like plague and smallpox are routinely quoted as ranging from 30 to 60%, suggesting that our history and evolution has been driven by a fight against microbes.

Disease resistance developed in a tropical environment helps explain why Home Sapiens survived, while Neanderthals became extinct.  A “Neolithic Black Death,” an early version of the plague, accounts for a sudden population drop in Europe and Britain around 4900 years ago.  A disease outbreak probably (typhus or smallpox) killed large numbers in Athens, affecting the outcome of the Peloponnesian War.  Plagues contributed to the fall of Rome and the rise of Christianity.  During the Medieval period, plague (Yersinia pestis) killed 90 percent in Hebei, China in 1331, contributing to the rise of the Ming dynasty.  Then 60 percent in Europe and Britain died between 1346 and 1353, contributing to the replacement in Britain of feudalism by capitalism, and the end of the Middle Ages.

The discovery of the Americas by Europeans was devastating to the local populations: introduced diseases killed around 90%.  Smallpox caused death rates of 33-50%, salmonella up to 80%, influenza took 33%.  It was disease, not just superior arms, that allowed the Spanish to conquer the Aztecs and Incas, despite being vastly outnumbered.  The 500-year-old Mississippian Culture, the most advanced in North America, had vast cultivated fields, high population, large settlements, and temples on earthen mounds, but was mostly wiped out before Europeans even had a chance to see it.

Kennedy suggests that malaria has had a large effect on colonialism.  Malaria was brought to North America in the blood of African slaves, who had resistance to the disease.  Europeans didn’t, so couldn’t work, thus perpetuating slavery in the Caribbean, central America and southern US.  Malaria delayed the end of slavery, too: during the Civil War, “twice as many Northern troops died from disease as were killed in battle by Confederate guns.”  In Africa, Europeans couldn’t survive long, promoting extractive colonial practices rather than settlements.

Microbial diseases have had, and will continue to have, a devastating impact on human life.  The solution according to Kennedy is to invest in clean drinking water, sanitation, housing and poverty reduction for all.

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Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice, by Bill Browder

• Category: Non-fiction
• Rating: 4 out of 5
• Tags: Corruption, Investments, Russia
• How I learned about it: Recommended by a friend.

Bill Browder founded and operated Hermitage Capital, at one time the largest foreign investment fund in post-Soviet Russia.  There were incredible opportunities to invest in businesses at steep discounts as former state-owned companies were privatized.  Browder, living in Moscow, took full advantage of these opportunities, making huge profits for the investment fund.

Russian politicians and bureaucrats and their friends and relatives took full advantage, too.  Through intimidation, cronyism, bribes, influence, theft, and extortion, a group of powerful oligarchs emerged, controlling billions of dollars worth of companies.  Browder had invested in some of these companies, and had to fight to preserve the value of his investments.  He started to specialize in exposing corrupt business practices.  He’d invest in a company, deliver proof of the bad behaviour of its leaders to the authorities and the media, then earn a nice profit when the company was cleaned up.  He liked the alignment between earning money and helping the Russian economy.

Challenging Russian oligarchs is a dangerous business, but Browder got away with it as long as Vladimir Putin saw Browder’s activities as helping him to consolidate power.  That changed after Putin had the oligarchs on his side, and Browder became Putin’s enemy.  Browder’s visa was cancelled, his office was raided, his lawyers’ offices were raided, spurious charges and lawsuits were filed, and sham trials were held.  Ultimately, a tax lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky was arrested, held for nearly a year without trial, denied medical treatment, and beaten.  He died in custody.

Browder worked to get some measure of justice for Sergei, lobbying for sanctions against those responsible.  The Magnitsky Act “authorizes the U.S. government to sanction those foreign government officials worldwide that are human rights offenders, freeze their assets, and ban them from entering the U.S.”*  Similar legislation was enacted in Canada, the EU and the United Kingdom.

Filled with colourful characters, non-stop action, and gripping stories, Red Notice highlights the dangers of doing business in Russia today.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitsky_Act, 7 January 2024.

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The Inner Game of Tennis, by W. Timothy Gallwey

• Category: Non-fiction
• Rating: 4 out of 5
• Tags: Sports Psychology, Tennis
• How I learned about it: Discussed in Michael Lewis’s blog “Against the Rules”

I don’t play tennis, but I do like curling, and I’ve repeatedly been surprised by how much one’s mental state influences performance.  A happy and relaxed team member plays better than a tense, distracted, unhappy or angry one, and influences the whole team either positively or negatively.  There’s more to good shot making than a mechanical execution of the correct sequence of movements.  So I was intrigued to learn about Tim Gallwey’s insights into playing sports well.

“Every game is composed of two parts, an outer game, and an inner game.  [The inner game] takes place in the mind of the player, and it is played against such obstacles as lapses in concentration, nervousness, self-doubt, and self-condemnation.”

Anyone who’s tried to improve their performance in a sport will recognize the common problems discussed Gallwey.  You play well one day, but not the next, and aren’t sure why.  You know what to do, but have trouble doing it.  You do fine in practice, but tense up in competition.  The solution is to work on your inner game; your mental state.  “The secret to winning any game lies in not trying too hard. [The player] aims at the kind of spontaneous performance which occurs only when the mind is calm and seems at one with the body,” a state of “relaxed concentration.”  “Only when the mind is still, is one’s peak performance reached.”

While coaching tennis players, Gallwey noticed that verbal instruction cluttered the minds of the players, while visual demonstrations were quite effective.  He postulated that there are two parts to the mind, Self 1 and Self 2.  With verbal instruction, Self 1 was telling Self 2 what to do – keep your racket up, step here with your feet, etc.  With visual cues, Self 2 just did what was required to put the ball in the right place, and proper form came naturally.  Success required quieting Self 1, the analytic, directive part of the mind, getting it out of the way so Self 2 could do its job.

To quiet Self 1, Gallwey recommends using visual images as much as possible, instead of verbal instructions.  Trust Self 2 to do its job well, and learn to see the results of your activity without judgement.  This last idea has something in common with mindfulness meditation and Stoic philosophy:  letting go of judgement; seeing events as they are without a positive or negative valuation.

When Gallwey asks us to consider the question of what game we are really playing, it echoes a quote from Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: “The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself.”  Are we trying to prove we’re good at the game?  To have fun, to get fit, to win?  Or to remove your own inner obstacles to higher performance?  He might have said, “The real game you’re playing is the game against yourself.”

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Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge from Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic, by Simon Winchester

• Category: Non-fiction
• Rating: 3 out of 5
• Tags: Knowledge
• How I learned about it: Saw it in a book store.

Simon Winchester returns with a book about the history of acquiring and storing, but mostly about transmitting knowledge.  The book highlights how long a journey it’s been, and all that had to be invented to get to our modern era.  Rather than attempt to summarize the book, I’ll just list some of the inventions as food for thought.  As you read each item, think for a moment about the time, effort and ingenuity it took to create each one:

Language.  Writing.  Clay tablets.  Libraries.  Schools.  Papyrus, more portable and convenient than clay tablets.  Vellum and parchment.  Books, more accessible than scrolls.  Paper, easier to make than vellum.  The printing press.  Lending libraries (in my view, one of the best inventions ever, and the surest sign of a civilized society).   Radio.  Television.  Computers.  The internet and world wide web.  Google.  Wikipedia.

There’s a hierarchy from data to information through knowledge to wisdom.  Winchester wonders whether the amazingly easy access to knowledge provided by Google and Wikipedia devalues that knowledge, potentially making us less wise – perhaps the time and effort required to acquire knowledge in the past resulted in deeper understanding and wisdom.  More optimistically, he also allows for the possibility that, freed from trivial tasks, our minds will have more time to become “thoughtful, considerate, patient – and wise.”

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Tuesdays with Morrie: An old man, a young man, and life’s greatest lesson, by Mitch Albom

• Category: Non-fiction
• Rating: 4 out of 5
• Tags: Biography, ALS, Death, Dying, Illness
• How I learned about it: Recommended by a friend

The movie version of this book was recommended to me years ago by a good friend.  At the time I didn’t understand why it would be worth watching, but when I came across the title again recently, I decided to read the book.  I’m glad I did – this is one of those books that everyone should read.

Morrie Schwartz, dying of ALS, is visited by an old student: the author, Mitch Albom.  Expecting to find a sick, old man in need of cheering up, Mitch instead finds someone grateful for the time he’s been given to say goodbye, still caring about those around him.

Morrie goes straight to the big questions. “Have you found someone to share your heart with?  Are you giving to your community?  Are you at peace with yourself?  Are you trying to be as human as you can be?”

Then he talks about dying.  “Dying is only one thing to be sad over…living unhappily is something else.”  That’s because our culture teaches us the wrong things about what makes people happy.  It’s not about wealth, status or consumer goods.  Those don’t bring satisfaction; giving others your time does.

They embark on their last project together, their last thesis, and the book is the result.  Mitch notes the topics to be discussed: death, fear, aging, greed, marriage, family, society, forgiveness, a meaningful life.  Morrie provides advice about each one.

About death, recognize that it may come at any time.  Ask yourself each day, “Is today the day?  Am I ready?  Am I doing all I need to do?  Am I being the person I want to be?”  “Once you learn how to die,” he says, “you learn how to live.”

We need to learn to detach.  Let each emotion penetrate us fully, then let it go.  Say, “this is pain, or this is self-pity,” feel it, then put it aside.

We should embrace aging for the growth that it brings.  Understanding our own mortality makes us live a better life.  Learning how to die is learning how to live.  Fear of aging and death is really fear of having lived an unfulfilling life.  Morrie’s advice for a meaningful life includes loving others, devoting yourself to your community, and to something that gives you purpose and meaning.

Full of Morrie’s aphorisms, this book is a refreshingly open look at facing the inevitable.

 

 

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Younger You: Reduce Your Bio Age and Live Longer, Better, by Dr. Kara Fitzgerald with Kate Hanley

• Category: Non-fiction
• Rating: 3 out of 5
• Tags: Aging, Diet, Epigenetics, Health, Longevity, Nutrition
• How I learned about it: Recommended by a friend.

A recent pilot study has proven that significant, measurable improvements in epigenetic age markers can be obtained through diet, exercise and meditation.  The research paper that shows this is freely available here.  The book Younger You expands on the paper, and provides detailed advice for improving your biological age.

First, some background.  The difference between a person’s chronological age (time since birth) and their biological age provides a measure of how healthy they are.  The current gold standard for measuring biological age is the Horvath clock, which looks at chemicals attached to DNA in a process known as methylation.  A methyl group attached to selective chromosome sites can suppress expression of a gene; over time, the pattern of methylation changes, so some gene expression is suppressed as methyl groups are added, while others are promoted as methyl groups are removed.  The pattern can be detected by analysing DNA, and is highly correlated with chronological age.  The part that doesn’t match chronological age is a health indicator.

Amazingly, people in the study group who followed a specified eight-week program of diet, exercise and meditation showed an improvement in biological age of nearly two years compared to the start of the program.  The volume of vegetables in the diet is large at over seven cups a day (when measured raw and chopped), but no radical interventions are required.  It’s a significant result that deserves to be publicized.

I do have some quibbles about the book.  It was Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield who made a music video in space, not American Scott Kelly, and he sang David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” not a song called “Major Tom.”  All alcoholic spirits are low carb, so keeping carbs out of your diet is no reason to avoid grain-based spirits.  More seriously, Fitzgerald quotes the improvement in biological age from the treatment program as 3.23 years compared to the control group, but this true only because the control group’s biological age increased by 1.27 years over the course of the study.  According to the paper, “this within-group increase was not statistically significant.”  Only the statistically significant decrease in biological age within the treatment group is meaningful, and so the value of 1.96 years is the one that should be quoted.  Further, only half the treatment group saw any notable improvement.  It’s still an important result, but overblown claims and outright errors like these risk losing the confidence of the reader.

Similarly, Fitzgerald cites Dale Bredesen’s book “The End of Alzheimer’s” as an example of how dietary changes can improve health, but Bredesen’s claims have been debunked (https://www.redpenreviews.org/reviews/the-end-of-alzheimers-the-first-program-to-prevent-and-reverse-cognitive-decline/, https://memory.ucsf.edu/sites/memory.ucsf.edu/files/CanWeTrustTheEnd2020.pdf), highlighting the dangers of over-selling early scientific results in popular media.

Younger You isn’t just another book promoting veggies and exercise for good health, because it’s significant that eight weeks of lifestyle changes can make a measurable improvement in healthy gene expression.  The pilot study on which the book is based had only 43 men, and a later study put six women through the treatment program with similar results.  It would be interesting to see the results of a larger clinical trial.

 

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Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work, by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal

• Category: Non-fiction
• Rating: 3 out of 5
• Tags: Altered States, Consciousness, Flow, Meditation, Psychoactive Drugs
• How I learned about it: Browsing the Library catalogue

People throughout history have pursued altered states of consciousness.  They’ve done this using a range of methods including drugs, meditation, action requiring intense mental focus, and extreme risk-taking.  Those in power have just as consistently tried to restrict access to these altered states, through secrecy, law, or religious stricture, both to retain power and to keep people safe.  Now there are groups using altered states of consciousness to boost creativity, solve thorny problems, and improve performance.

They’re seeking a state of ecstasis.  Kotler and Wheal have a whole chapter about the meaning of the word.  A Google search will bring up definitions like “ecstasy, trance or rapture,” or a translation from the Greek, “to be or stand outside oneself, a removal to elsewhere.”  The authors focus on three types: “in-the-zone” flow states; contemplative states achieved using things like chanting, meditation, sexuality, and neuro-feedback; and psychedelic states using drugs.

Studies show lasting benefits to people who experience these altered states.  Terminal cancer patients given psilocybin found it to be a truly meaningful experience, lifting their moods and reducing fear of death.  For sufferers of PTSD, the benefits of a few rounds of treatment with MDMA (Ecstasy) lasts for years.  The flow state induced by physical activity like surfing helps, too, by getting sufferers out of their heads.  And meditation can allow those with PTSD to discontinue their prescriptions of anti-depressants.

The question arises, if altered mental states benefit the ill, what can they do for the healthy?  What if we use these techniques repeatedly, over a lifetime?  Can we enhance our best traits, cultivating gratitude, generosity, and creativity?  The answer seems to be yes; among the top five percent of adults on measures of maturity, capacity, empathy and flexibility, a “disproportionate number” have tried psychedelics and then made meditation, martial arts or other techniques to access altered states a regular part of their lives.  So it seems strange that psychedelics are allowed for the terminally ill, but they’re prohibited for everyone else.

The potential therapeutic and enhancing effects of many drugs, such as those developed by Alexander Shulgin, have been lost, or access to them delayed, by misguided efforts to protect the public.  The absurd levels to which the US government has taken the war on drugs is enough to make you believe in a conspiracy to keep the drugs secret for use in government brain washing and mind control programs.  For example, it’s illegal to possess the drug DMT in any amount.  Since the drug is produced naturally in humans, we’re all technically guilty of possession!

The revolution has progressed.  Mindfulness meditation is mainstream; half the people entering an office building carry a yoga mat.  Psychedelics, once strictly prohibited, are now allowed in research and therapeutic settings, and are being decriminalized in some jurisdictions.  Ecstasis through transcendent sex, once the preserve of tantric practitioners, was recently offered to the public by OneTaste’s courses in orgasmic meditation.  Using neural feedback devices, you can learn to quickly put your brain in a meditative state.  Altered states of consciousness are available, and can “lift us above normal awareness, and propel us further faster.”

 

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