Before Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in a federal prison for harassing clients of his failed Crypto exchange FTXhe spent a while with data expert and survey guru Nate Silver.
As Bankman-Fried prepared for his trial and faced the prospect of a long time behind bars, he was unsure whether he would take a plea deal, in accordance with Silver’s latest book. On the sidelines: The art of risking the whole lotwhich examines the risks, starting with Silver’s time as knowledgeable poker player, then the collapse of FTX, and at last considering whether AI will actually result in the top of the world.
For his tackle FTX, he conducted a series of previously unpublished interviews with the founder over Zoom, within the Bahamas where Bankman-Fried lived and FTX was headquartered, over dinner in Manhattan at three-star restaurant Eleven Madison Park, and at his parents’ home in Stanford, California, as he prepared for his ill-fated trial. Silver describes Bankman-Fried’s risk-taking and frame of mind during those fateful days, but in addition notes that he was reckless and seemingly unaware of the gravity of his actions.
“It’s the combination of his ability to not assess risk very well, to put it euphemistically – I mean, he’s terrible at it – and his willingness to put everything on the line, which was very destructive, and this bizarre cult of personality around him,” Silver said. Assets.
Throughout the book, he provides quite a few examples of Bankman-Fried’s unique combination of cockiness, delusions, and radical devotion to attempting to weigh the possibilities of the whole lot around him, which ultimately became his undoing.
“The irony is that Sam is actually not very good at assessing opportunities,” Silver said in an interview.
Ready to risk the whole lot
Bankman-Fried described his risk-taking on Silver with the analogy that anyone who doesn’t miss at the very least one flight arrives on the airport too early. This mentality led him to overextend himself on some crypto bets made by his trading firm Alameda Research. And once they didn’t pan out, he rushed to cover them with deposits from FTX customers, sparking the billion-dollar fraud that might land him in prison. FTX collapsed in 2022, but the remaining of the corporate agreed to pay 12.7 billion US dollars to victims who’ve lost money.
A representative for Bankman-Fried declined to comment.
According to Silver, Bankman-Fried couldn’t see any possibility that Bitcoin could fall. He “literally [said] “Hey, for those who’re not willing to take the chance of ruining your life, you then’re a wimp and also you’re doing something fallacious,” Silver added, recalling an interview before the events that led to his arrest.
In one other interview within the Bahamas in December 2022, after Bankman-Fried had already resigned as CEO of FTX and the corporate was sold to bankruptcy He had access to the stock exchange’s live trading records through his lawyers. “That can’t get out now,” Bankman-Fried told Silver.
A shocked Silver soon realized what Bankman-Fried was as much as: SBF envisioned FTX being reconnected to the network and he would play a central role in operations, so On the sting.
The “river” vs. the “village”
To Silver, Bankman-Fried was the last word risk-taker, a one that was frequently willing to risk the whole lot for even the smallest gain.
This made him the worst example of the variety of thinker often known as “the flow.” Silver describes analytically minded individuals who see the world primarily as a series of odds ratios and weigh almost every decision from the attitude of risk-reward and cost-benefit calculations.
The majority of the River is made up of a robust elite group, including hedge fund managers, enterprise capitalists, startup founders and skilled gamblers. River members, also often known as Riverians, include Peter Thiel, Marc Andreesen, Bill Ackman and Elon Musk – analytical, highly competitive, abstract thinkers who, in accordance with Silver, are likely to swim against the tide.
Vied for cultural and political power with the Riverians is “the village,” consisting of academics, media professionals and government officials who hold “decidedly left-leaning, Democratic Party-aligned political views,” Silver writes in his book.
The Village sees The River as a type of unbridled capitalism, while The River believes The Village has allowed the whole lot to be “swallowed by politics,” he said.
Silver, who openly admits he’s a member of the River group that’s involved within the Village, points out that neither group is made up of bizarre people. “Both tribes, the River and the Village groups, are both quite small. They are elite movements,” he explained. “They are elites fighting for influence – rather than money – mainly for influence on American political culture.”
Sam Altman and the risks of artificial intelligence
For someone with Silver’s risk appetite, the query of AI represents the head of cost-benefit evaluation. If a Riverian like Bankman-Fried could screw up a crypto exchange like that, “think of one that has a potentially civilization-changing technology like AI on its hands,” Silver wrote.
Proponents say AI could lead on to Utopiawhere poverty is eliminated, humanity finds healing for each disease, and all work is finished by machines, so that folks can spend their days lazily and luxuriate in their time. But sceptics say it could result in the destruction of human civilization. Silver is just not a pessimist himself, but he doesn’t dismiss their concerns either.
“To dismiss these concerns is ignorant,” Silver said in On the sting. “Ignorant of the scientific consensus, ignorant of the parameters of debate, ignorant and totally uninterested in humanity’s drive to push technological development to the limits – with no clear exceptions in human history.”
According to Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the advantages of AI are too great to disregard its risks. On the stingThe naysayers are “people who want to be pessimistic because then they’ll be cool,” he told Silver.
Meanwhile, Altman is “going full throttle,” reportedly looking for $7 trillion in funding for a brand new AI chip-making company and preparing to release OpenAI’s ChatGPT-5 model. soon. Figuring out exactly what Altman can be willing to risk is made difficult by River’s tendency to say outlandish things simply to get a response.
“Asking for $7 trillion is another kind of troll statement,” Silver said. “Actually, Sam Altman is totally in that troll camp.”
OpenAI didn’t reply to a request for comment.
The habit of eliciting a response from others found a soul mate in at the very least one other Riverian – Silver himself.
“I actually find his tweets pretty funny,” Silver said of Altman. “Maybe a little out of character for a CEO, but he’s a poster, which as a poster myself I kind of appreciate.”
