BOOK REVIEW: The Big Fail

The Big Fail – Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean – 423 pages

The Big Fail provides useful insights into how the same "financialization" scams that melted down the actual financial industry are proving to have the same devastating effects in the hospital and healthcare industries, for identical reasons. A key component of the analysis provided by authors Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean involves a detailed review of how America's response to the COVID-19 pandemic was uniquely flawed among supposedly sophisticated, modern, industrial democracies and how those unique flaws stemmed directly from the structure of our healthcare systems.

Whether leveraged buyout, private equity investing or some other term is used, the core point of The Big Fail is that a business model fixated on scaling up via borrowed money, squeezing labor costs and extracting management consulting fees may be highly profitable for the private equity firms but it is antithetical to providing quality care and is bankrupting the United States by delivering drastically sub-par care at drastically inflated costs. The book cements its point by focusing on five areas: the financialization of hospitals and nursing homes, pandemics and free market failures, rewarding flawed reimbursement policies, the hazards of mixing science / policy communication and social media and the spread of financialization to new schemes.

The Financialization of Hospitals

As the authors use the term, financialization involves the use of balance sheet manipulations such as selling off long-lived assets to "free up" cash to "reinvest" in modernizing the business and improving efficiency. According to Private Equity (PE) investors, this frees up "trapped" money in the entity, allows mundane tasks like building operations to be outsourced to low-cost providers and allows the cash to be "re-invested" in new equipment, etc. that makes the entity more efficient. Uh huh... In reality, such manipulations are performed to

• sell assets to a favored real estate investment trust (REIT)
• create revenue for that favored REIT and boost their performance numbers
• create a short term pile of cash
• extract exorbitant one-time management fees from that pile of cash for the PE owners
• saddle the entity with new lease expenses not previously required and far less cash to "re-invest"

As part of this analysis, the book goes back to the beginning of this process, with the formation of Health Care of America in 1967, which later renamed itself HCA. That name should ring a bell because it has been associated with billions of dollars in fraud charges over decades that weren't mere accounting flukes but the result of its core strategy for operations and growth. If you are interested in a brief thirteen minute YouTube documentary on the history of HCA, this video is highly recommended:

How KFC's War on Arby's Ruined American Healthcare. No, Seriously.

The book does a good job of explaining the underlying process and the damage it inflicts on patient care and public costs. More importantly, it revisits the theme throughout the book, making the point that the original strategy was first applied to hospitals, then to HMO and doctors consortiums (as a means of steering referrals for more profitable hospital care to member hospitals) then to nursing homes. The theme is visited again at the end of the book to point out that the next two areas of "care" now being targeted for the same model are mental health treatment centers and autism care facilities.

Pandemics and Free Market Failures

Healthcare related matters are only one area of many in which the rabid fixation on market "efficiency" as defined by narrow interests creates outcomes which benefit exclusively those same narrow interests. The core flaw with such fixations are that they distort the operation of a complex system with dozens of crucial variables by purposely controlling that system with a feedback loop driven by a SINGLE financial variable – profit. In doing so, the impact of other variables controlling equally important but unmeasured outcomes are ignored. This rigged feedback cycle even ignores other variables which can affect the almighty profitability but over a longer term ignored by the short-term biased feedback used. The Big Fail provides examples in two key areas of public health that were impacted during the pandemic by these failures of free markets.

The world was fortunate enough that research for over thirty five years prior to 2019 had led to a thorough understanding of messenger RNA (mRNA) and CRISPR chains within mRNA that act as "blank spaces" mRNA uses to incorporate new molecule chains when triggering T-cell immune responses for novel viruses. The rest of the world didn't know it but by late 2019, the perfect technology already existed for rapidly creating a vaccine to target a novel coronavirus to minimize deaths in a global pandemic. In fact, in Walter Issacson's book Codebreaker (see here for a review), he wrote that Moderna had the RNA pattern identified and sequenced within TWO DAYS of obtaining a sample in February of 2020 and had sample doses ready for clinical testing in THIRTY EIGHT DAYS.

Unfortunately, the biochemical knowhow alone was not sufficient for use in a pandemic. As The Big Fail points out, the vaccine business and larger pharmaceutical industry is not optimized for rapid delivery at world-wide scale of low-cost treatments for conditions that vanish instantly if the drug works. That mode of delivery requires vast infrastructure for manufacturing the doses, manufacturing hundreds of millions of sterile containers, performing the packaging then distributing the doses while honoring temperature limits and expiration dates that apply. The pharmaceutical industry is optimized for designing, manufacturing and dispensing medicines for a drastically simpler and vastly more profitable niche. A market for expensive drugs with high margins for low volumes of customers who need the drug for extended periods or preferably (for drug makers) for life. Doing so provides a consistent profit stream over at least seventeen years (until patents expire) to boost stock prices, doesn't require outlandish capacity and the product doesn't become instantly worthless after it solves a problem.

This fatal flaw in the pharmaceutical business model has been understood for decades yet attempts to mitigate it are continually hampered by short sightedness by elected officials when prioritizing funding in the healthcare realm. Despite having a sequenced vaccine within DAYS of obtaining a COVID-19 sample, the United States government had to chip in vast sums of money to assist drug makers in establishing manufacturing, packaging and distribution networks for the vaccines. Luckily, most of those logistical hurdles were solved – at least temporarily – during the timeframe that was required for clinical trials and evaluation of safety and efficacy. However, the US government spent over $31 billion dollars between April 2020 and 2023 assisting with prioritization of gear required for manufacturing, delivery logistics and guaranteed purchases of doses to guarantee profits for the makers. From that perspective, the intervention in the pharmaceutical market was similar to the need for government intervention during the 2008 meltdown. The federal government and Federal Reserve had to intervene to provide the liquidity needed by the economy so the key players could survive and continue to make money. In the vaccine economy, the government had to guarantee a market because corporations were unwilling to bet billions of their own to deliver a solution protecting the lives of their future customers.

And it isn't just large but critical investments that get starved because of a narrow focus on margins and profitability. The exact same factors triggered the massive shortages in so-called personal protection equipment (PPE) such as N95 masks, gloves and gowns required by front-line hospital workers and the larger public. The book cites the example of an American firm which attempted to step up and meet domestic demand for gloves with American plants during the MERS epidemic of 2012. The minute the crunch ended, all of the hospitals and healthcare firms BEGGING for masks at ten times the normal price resumed their volume deals with Chinese suppliers, leading the American firm to close its doors. The same thing happened during COVID. DOZENS of companies jumped into mask making hoping American hospitals would wise up and continue buying domestically. Nope. As soon as supply and demand balanced out in late 2020, hospitals began purchasing in volume from the cheapest suppliers, all in China, putting these same firms immediately out of business again. This is optimizing a variable that might mean PENNIES per mask but optimizing it in a way that maintains a dependency on predictable shipping ocean intervals and predictable behavior of a major US adversary. All factors that proved to be nearly insurmountable issues during the pandemic.

The book also delves into the black market behavior that overtook the market for nitrile surgical gloves. Raw materials required for nitrile gloves are not as universally available so manufacturing remained overseas. Hospitals lost millions of dollars attempting to buy "warehouses" of gloves at hefty premiums that turned out to be non-existent or (worse) consisting of USED gloves stuffed back into boxes. One anecdote related to this involved a special "task force" created by Trump's one-time point man, Jared Kushner, to identify sources and procure shipments. Kushner brought in a mate from college, they created a "war room" consisting of some phones, a few tables and a big screen TV tuned to Fox News and proceeded to secure exactly ZERO actual shipments of gloves over a two month period before the effort was abandoned.

The key lesson is that the fantasy that "Mr. Market" will help ensure supply meets demand is exactly that – fantasy. In a decentralized, worldwide market operating at zero margins and zero excess capacity, a lack of supply is more likely to drive widespread fraud than rapid supply corrections. It's easier to cheat someone in another country than ramp up production.

Rewarding Flawed Reimbursement Policies

A key point conveyed in The Big Fail is that even good-faith attempts to correct for past flaws in health care funding of hospitals and treatment are often worsening results for patients and communities while further enriching the corporations taking over vast portions of the healthcare ecosystem. Legislators and regulators fail to understand that prior decisions about rules for reimbursing medical care and measuring "efficiency" of delivery systems have been thoroughly gamed by healthcare companies. Any existing metric of efficiency or "health delivered" is already rigged to ensure maximum profits for owners, not value delivered to patients. Adopting new policies or attempting to correct for past flaws assuming these existing metrics reflect "value" only worsens the problem by rewarding the corporations who already rigged the game for profit.

Perhaps the cruelest example of the phenomena Nocera and McLean described involves the battle between so-called safety net hospitals and hospitals serving affluent areas. If a large corporation gains control of a collection of hospitals in an area, it self-imposes pressure to reduce costs by reducing hospital beds. Which hospital beds should be eliminated? The humane answer would be the beds that are vacant. The business answer is the beds producing the least revenue. Those are not the same answer. The actual decisions made invariably correspond to racial demographics in the hospitals' serving areas.

Beds in safety net hospitals are often near capacity but serving patients on Medicaid or unable to pay at all. Beds in affluent areas typically support expensive treatments for cancer, heart disease, organ transplants, etc. that are HIGHLY profitable. In the case of New York State, efforts to consolidate hospitals and reduce bed counts to reduce state Medicaid costs backfired, spectacularly. The safety net hospitals left remaining after consolidation serve an even higher percentage of Medicare / Medicaid patients but do so at higher cost because waits for beds delay treatment and treatment when finally provided is delivered via overloaded staffs who are LESS efficient than a properly staffed hospital.

The authors and those they interviewed for the book call this process for what it is. Structural racism. The cruelest outcome was stated by one doctor in the Chicago area interviewed by the authors:

The safety net hospitals where Ansell worked have busy trauma units, and the patients who die there often have their organs donated to save patients in the wealthy transplant centers across the city. "Yet," he noted, "in my twenty-seven years at those institutions, not one of my patients – or those of my colleagues – ever received a lifesaving organ transplant."

Another example. The CARES act passed in March 2020 threw $2.2 trillion dollars into the economy in the form of various injections of cash into different segments of the economy. That $2.2 trillion included $175 billion for hospitals but the formula to allocate those funds was based on REVENUE, not actual needs associated with actual COVID patients. Those crafting the legislation might have assumed REVENUE was as good a proxy as any to efficiently prorate out the $175 billion quicky based on public information and "do something." The result of this formulaic distribution was that the bulk of the money went to hospitals with higher shares of patients with private insurance which were FAR less likely to be exposed to COVID at that point. In contrast, safety net hospitals in urban areas got relatively little funding despite handling the brunt of patient counts at that point. The authors cite a New York Times story that found the sixty largest hospital chains in the country received $15 billion in benefits yet actually laid off staff during that period since virtually all elective procedures were curtailed.

The net result of this flawed fixation on "efficiency" is that Americans are getting the worst of all worlds. The lack of understanding of the current flaws in the system coupled with attempts to "optimize" the efficiency of new programs based on metrics that seem logical are in fact magnifying inequities in the delivery of care. These inequities are reducing the availability of care, driving up the cost of care and preventing the most effective types of care from being delivered to yield increases in actual health.

The Hazards of Mixing Science / Policy Communication and Social Media

The Big Fail devotes a significant portion of the book recounting the chaos injected into the pandemic response by elected officials and public health institutions. And for those concerned about any potential bias on the part of the authors, their analysis is withering for both Democratic and Republican politicians at the local, state and federal levels. The best illustration cited by the authors about how ultimately non-sensical public policy became about masks, mandatory vaccinations, public events and actual public safety was the case of Brooklyn Nets basketball player Kyrie Irving. Irving was coy about whether he had been vaccinated. The NBA did not require vaccinations but required its teams comply with local regulations. In Brooklyn, New York State law required pro sports players to be vaccinated but at that time did not require fans to be vaccinated. The book quotes writer Ross Barkan summarizing the insanity of the resulting situation: What is the science behind the unvaccinated Irving sitting in the stands to watch unvaccinated players from the 76ers or Heat shoot baskets while he's barred from playing? There is none."

In hindsight, there were many aspects of the pandemic response that had nothing to do with science. Here are a few of the more surprising findings in the book.

By the summer of 2020 when schools were agonizing over decisions to revert to in-school classes or continue remotely, only sixteen of the 142,000 Americans that had died at that point were under the age of sixteen. At that point, it wasn't known if the virus might have some delayed effect on children months or years later resulting in understandable concern but in terms of death and cases requiring hospitalization, children were a tiny fraction of the impacted population. At that point, more children were being killed in mass shootings than COVID. Yet many schools continued remote classes in the Fall of 2020, despite mounting evidence of different but far more concrete problems involving hunger, violence at home and tanking performance levels as at-risk children just drifted away from classes.

When clinical testing of the vaccines was extended to children, test results did not show any safety problem with the drug. Test results also didn't identify any worsening of severe symptoms requiring hospitalization or extended care. However, the test results also didn't show any reduction in TRANSMISSION of the disease. Kids might not get critically ill or die but the vaccines didn't reduce their ability to contract and transmit the disease to more vulnerable populations. Yet the drug makers and the government – the Biden Administration by that point – pushed a rollout of the vaccine to all children in that age bracket when those doses could have avoided more deaths and possibly more mutation of the virus had they been distributed abroad in poor countries.

The launch of the so-called bivalent booster in the Fall of 2022 might be the biggest shock. At the time of its approval by the FDA, the Moderna booster had only undergone a limited human trial among patients who only had "classic covid" or delta variants but it was confirmed to have produced antibodies. It had not been tested among a large contingent of patients with the omicron variant that became prevalent in Summer 2022. Approval for the Pfizer bivalent booster had been granted with no proof of antibody production in humans at all. Only eight mice.

As these themes are reiterated throughout the book's eighteen chapters, the key point made by the authors is that the following communication goals are mutually incompatible in a world driven by social media:

• communicating a simple, memorable message
• providing information that conveys appropriate nuance and uncertainty in a rapidly evolving "fact space"
• inspiring confidence through simplicity and consistency with a public that is objectively, grossly ignorant about basic statistics much less advanced topics in biology and economics

At one level, that's a giant smack on the nose to the ignorant public for demanding complex information be delivered in 256-byte epigrams and late night show punch lines. It's also a smack on the nose to elected politicians and leaders in the scientific and health communities. By treating the public as being unable to ever comprehend truth rather than merely being temporarily ignorant of it, officials consistently over-simplified reality, established sometimes-understandable flawed policies according to those over-simplified realities then clung to those flawed policies far longer than supported by new facts. Leaders were more interested in being perceived as decisive, consistent and confident rather than adaptive and responsive. That populist bravado led to tens of thousands of additional needless deaths, life-altering illness for more patients and drastically worsened prospects for millions of students whose academic progress was drastically, perhaps permanently, stunted.

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The Big Fail is highly recommended reading. Whether you're interested in some of the hidden mechanics and decisions during the pandemic phase of the covid era or interested in larger economic forces at work in healthcare that are impairing the larger US economy, useful insights abound through this book.

WTH

In God's Name?

Jesse Wigman wrote an editorial published in The New York Times on October 28, 2023 that addresses how a widespread failure of ethics within the legal profession not only originated the Trump election fraud but abetted it across multiple states and in Congress itself.

Trump's Lawyers Should have Known Better

The piece starts by recounting how similar concerns were raised after so many Nixon Administration lawyers were convicted in the Watergate scandal and triggered law schools to introduce required courses in ethical behavior. The question then asked by one of Nixon's own lawyers, John Dean, was "How in God's name could so many lawyers get involved in something like this?"

Precisely...

No, seriously. THAT'S THE ANSWER.

In God's name.

Jenna Ellis had this to say via social media on August 15, 2023 after being indicted in Georgia:

The Democrats and the Fulton County DA are criminalizing the practice of law. I am resolved to trust the Lord and I will simply continue to honor, praise, and serve Him. I deeply appreciate all of my friends who have reached out offering encouragement and support.

Continue to honor, praise and serve Him?

Jenna Ellis had this to say to the judge on October 18, 2023 while submitting her guilty plea in the case:

Thank you your honor for permission to address the court. As an attorney who is also a Christian, I take my responsibilities as a lawyer very seriously and I endeavor to be a person of sound moral and ethical character in all of my dealings. In the wake of the 2020 presidential election, I believed that challenging the results on behalf of President Trump should be pursued in a just and legal way. I endeavored to represent my client to the best of my ability. I relied upon others, including lawyers with many more years of experience, to provide me with true and reliable information, especially since my role involved speaking to the media and legislators in various states. What I did not do but should have done, your Honor, was to make sure the facts the other lawyers alleged to be true were, in fact, true. In the frenetic pace of attempting to raise challenges in several states, including Georgia, I failed to do my due diligence. I believe in and I value election integrity. If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-election challenges. I look back on this whole experience with deep remorse. For those failures, I have taken responsibility already before the Colorado Bar who censured me and I now take responsibility before this court and apologize to the people of Georgia.

A few days after pleading guilty, Jenna Ellis tacked on the following comment to a Bible quote in a social media post on October 25, 2023:

My faith is central to who I am and my sole identity. I will continue to share the truth of the Gospel of Christ and the biblical worldview on my radio broadcast and podcast, which I consider a ministry. This verse promises that God is always faithful and is the same yesterday, today, and forever..

Continue to share the truth?

The story doesn't look much better for Sidney Powell. Here is the link to the first story that appears in search results for "Sidney Powell Christian":

I Know Sidney Powell is Telling the Truth

Note that link points to a website acting as a trading hub of ideas for Christian ministers – the US Pastoral Council – and the actual commentary came from a different evangelical website called The Stream. This material is being passed around not only by the rank and file evangelical "sheep" but the "shepherds." Here's an excerpt:

Back in 2014, I worked freelance for a public relations firm in New York City. It was there that I met an unusual woman. I didn’t know many lawyers or Texans, but I knew better than to chalk up her qualities to either her profession or her home. It’s rare that I encounter someone who I’m afraid to argue with, because of her sheer brain power and towering personal rectitude. But this was such a person.

(snip)

I don’t have any evidence that Democrats used software invented in Venezuela to help socialist dictator Hugo Chavez steal elections. Or that the Soros-linked company Dominion was used by Democrats across multiple states to steal votes from Donald Trump to give to Joe Biden in the middle of the night, in just the strategic states where Trump was leading.

I don’t have that evidence, but the fact that Sidney Powell claims she does is enough to convince me. This is a woman who gave up years of income she could have earned in her profitable practice to write, print, and promote a book no publisher would touch. Its charges were too explosive, I imagine.

Well, with logic like that, it's no wonder thirty percent of the country has been lost to this flawed thinking. It's not thinking at all. It's transitive insanity. And the biographical blurb at the end of that article shows this willful know-nothingism isn't just focused on election law.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream, and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of God, Guns, & the Government.

In the case of Ken Chesebro, the story is a bit more mysterious. A review of his career indicates an abrupt change between 2014 and 2016. Prior to 2016, he had been a registered Democrat, had been married since 1994 and had operated his own law firm working off and on for various Democratic causes. The only flag multiple acquaintances can point to as a turning point is Chesebro's early $2200 investment in Bitcoin in 2010 which by 2014 was worth over $19 million dollars. He divorced his wife, moved to Puerto Rico, began donating money to Republican candidates and doing legal work for conservative issues beginning in 2016. Maybe Chesebro just eliminated the normal middleman and just focused directly on Mammon.

Why does evangelicalism seem to predisposition one to failures of due diligence?

Could it be that personification of ideas one fails to fully grasp into an invisible presence who hands out brownie points in the hereafter for doing its bidding in the here and now without asking any questions conditions one to ignore reality? Could it be that "faith" conditions one to dismiss the cognitive dissonance created when acts one performs blatantly contradict ethics one professes to follow because those acts serve some eternal purpose set forth by the voice no one else can hear but the faithful?

Or does fervent evangelicalism simply serve as a useful excuse to practice the ethics of the extenuating circumstance, allowing one to pick and choose actions every day based on convenience, comfort and riches and chalk up any contradictions to the mysteries of faith?

So-called evangelicals would be much better off for their own good spending LESS time preaching to the rest of us about what they BELIEVE and spending MORE time objectively analyzing the facts of a complex world that surround them. At a minimum, there are a few that would have spent a lot less on legal bills. The rest of us would be far better off if people spent more time pondering what can be KNOWN than what someone else tells them to BELIEVE.

WTH

America's Unique, Delusional Hellscape

This is what I think about after each mass shooting.

It's not just those killed. I worry that Americans have lapsed into a subliminal coping reaction that magically assumes all of the "wounded" in these shootings are raced to a hospital, have an emergency surgery, recoup in an ICU for a week, maybe a month, then somehow magically metamorphisize back into exactly the person they were before the shooting, like some Second Amendment Indestructable American Transformer.

That's NOT what happens after you are shot (possibly repeatedly) with a high velocity weapon. Many of these victims face massive, permanent damage to internal organs, bones, joints, etc. requiring multiple surgeries over time to correct or mitigate and months of searing pain in physical therapy to regain a FRACTION of their former capabilities. And these victims will spend the rest of their lives replaying what they witnessed in their head with a level of detail IMAX films can only dream of.

As everyone in the world except Americans figured out years / decades ago, there is nothing about this mayhem that is remotely required or inevitable in modern life. America is the ONLY industrialized nation on the planet that still faces this problem. Mass shootings aren't the cost of a free society with gun rights. Mass shootings are the cost of a collective psychosis among a subset of Americans who have perfected ways to terrorize politicians into blocking any actions to limit the availability of automatic weapons. The same bloc of politicians who also block any meaningful re-invention of a failed healthcare system that generates higher health COSTS than any peer country, produces lower health QUALITY across multiple measures and provides virtually no long term care for mental health issues.

If the 2017 shooting in Las Vegas that killed 60 people and wounded 413 wasn't enough to shock America into action, I'd rather not contemplate the scale of the act that WOULD finally jolt America out of this gun loving, delusional hellscape we currently occupy.

WTH

Immunity Versus Justice

On Tuesday, October 24 2023, two more actors in the Trump election fraud saga reached plea deals. Jenna Ellis pleaded guilty to charges in the Georgia State case and escaped with probation, fines and an essay assignment. Mark Meadows reached an agreement in the federal case regarding January 6 with Jack Smith and escaped prosecution entirely in exchange for testimony against Trump.

This daily drip, drip, drip between the Georgia case and the federal case is likely to be driving Trump further into a pit of despair and rage which may trigger other outbursts or public comments that could further cement his conviction. That's all good.

However, it is growing more disconcerting by the day to see each additional actor scoring nearly painless sentences or complete immunity as with Meadows. This need to offer this level of plea deal continues to puzzle. These cases are as air-tight as any blockbuster case in recent history. Having Meadows testify that he told Trump multiple times over multiple days and in multiple private/group contexts that Trump DID lose the election and the fraud claims were FALSE helps eliminate any doubt that Trump was correctly informed by advisors about the election. If Meadows has additional testimony showing Trump ALSO admitted actual defeat and ACTUAL understanding that his fraud charges were false, that's great but if Meadows is the only corroberating testimony to these facts, it is still "he said/he said." Maybe there's one other defendant who can also corroberate Trump's understanding over multiple days (what Trump was told AND what Trump himself believed). If so that will further cement charges against Trump.

But that's where the cost/benefit tradeoff goes astray. A criminal conviction requires

• proof of the actual act (actus reus)
• proof the defendant at the time of the act understood the act was a crime and intended to commit it (mens rea)

The actual facts around the EVENTS of this case are crystal clear. The net signal from these initial deals is that prosecutors in both the Georgia and federal cases are LASER focused on exhaustively proving the mental state of Trump -- what he was TOLD by others, what he BELIEVED internally, what he CONVEYED to others about his internal beliefs and whether he understood the actions he was taking were illegal -- and Trump alone. That is dangerous.

Given the overall crime involved -- conspiring to ALTER the (electoral) votes of MILLIONS of Americans in multiple states AND / OR simply scare the crap out of Congress in an attempt to spook them into IGNORING selected electoral votes -- it makes sense in isolation to nail any President who led or played a part in such a conspiracy. On the other hand, a President cannot implement a scam like this single-handedly. A President REQUIRES participation from a wide variety of "professionals" in multiple disciplines in multiple areas of government to pull it off. In this case, the President DID direct his subordinates to create this web of players to make the attempt.

At some point, when a defendant is a perpetual liar like Trump, it isn't clear anyone else's testimony about what Trump told them about what Trump was thinking means anything. The FACTS are that Trump led an effort over multiple MONTHS involving multiple acts his official White House counsel immediately declared to be illegal. Trump was kept informed on a nearly daily basis and added additional tactics as others hit dead ends. If that doesn't prove pre-meditation and conscious planning of a crime, I don't know what would ever satisfy that requirement.

The unique nature of this crime merits nearly EVERY participant in the crime doing SERIOUS jail time. Many of these players have access to PAC money which can cushion any financial penalty. They are all already ipso facto morally and ethically bankrupt so professional de-certification and shame means nothing. No one is going to hire these losers in their professional roles. The only thing that will get their attention and the attention of similar individuals who might participate in a future conspiracy is PRISON TIME.

Mark Meadows may have told Trump in private that Trump lost and that there was no election fraud. But he continued serving as his Chief of Staff -- SILENTLY -- for two months while agreeing to "schedule the meetings" and ordering pizza for the after-hours Oval Office meetings in which blatantly criminal plots were devised and tracked. If for no other actions, Mark Meadows deserves prison time for his conduct DURING the Capital riot, when Trump was hiding from his own staff to avoid being pressured to respond publicly to quell the violence. Meadows also couldn't be bothered to make another attempt to prod Trump to break out of his pout and act. It could be EASILY argued that Meadows did that because the longer the violence continued, the stronger the effect of fear would be on Congress which WOULD aid the goal of the plot. And whether Meadows understood the actual election result and whether vote fraud claims were bogus, no one has claimed Meadows still didn't want Trump to remain in office and that he resisted any of the tactics adopted to support that aim.

Also remember that Meadows burned documents in his White House office fireplace nearly every day from January 7 through to his last day in the West Wing. Those documents obviously weren't grocery lists and Christmas lists.

Maybe prosecutors will nail the big fish and at least that part of this endeavor will end well. To date, the results are less than satisfying.

WTH

Fear and Loathing in the Republican Party

The termination of Jim Jordan's Speaker candidacy and the Ken Chesebro plea deal provide two X-ray views into the internal rotten core of the Republican Party and the mindset of its members. Both views confirm the willingness of Republican voters to threaten violence against ANYONE – including elected officials – to support their adherents and positions. Both views confirm the level of calculations public figures – again, elected or otherwise – are having to perform about ANYTHING said in public about those same adherents or those that would prevent them from obtaining or retaining power.

Jim Jordan SHOULD have never been considered for the Speaker role, for numerous reasons. Primarily, he appears to have played a role with Trump's coup team in planning the procedural chaos of January 6, 2021. He subsequently refused to testify about his actions regarding January 6 under a subpoena issued by his own legislative body, the US House of Representatives, he wanted to lead. He has never written or contributed to a single bill that has been enacted into law during his entire tenure.

Yet THOSE factors weren't enough to keep him from being nominated for the role and frankly had no bearing on his inability to win. Jordan lost his bid for the Speaker role because his nihilist behavior over his entire career has alienated him from nearly every member of the House of either party. Yet even with THAT background, he came within sixteen votes of winning the Speakership and becoming third in succession to the Presidency. Why?

Jordan's flamethrowing and obstructionism are wildly popular with the MAGA malignant base within the Republican Party. While he is unable to pass legislation or provide meaningful enlightenment in any committee hearing, he provides voice to the crazies in the MAGA sect and triggers enough activism on the part of that sect to drive fear into every Republican of being tossed out of their job not by a Democrat in a general election but an even crazier Republican in a primary.

Once Jordan failed on three votes and still failed to get the message, the Republicans decided to hold an ANONYMOUS vote behind closed doors to take a true temperature of the fevered caucus. The result? Jordan couldn't win even HALF the votes of fellow Republicans. He LOST, only winning 86 supporters against 122 voting for other candidates. On his first ballot in the full house, he needed 217 total votes, there were 220 Republicans present and he only won 200 votes.

Consider that for a moment. When forced to act in public, only 20 Republicans had the courage to vote their conviction. In private, there were actually 122 who felt he had no business holding the job. Why? It isn't just because they feared being out-crazied in a primary. Many had fear of reprisals online or in person from extremists within the party. As it turns out, those fears were COMPLETELY justified. Many of the NO votes from the first round were immediately subjected to threatening phone calls or emails not only to their congressional office but to family members as well. As the vote staggered through two more attempts, extremists attempted to extort support via calls from Fox News and similar extremist agitprop entities to holdouts, even as the list grew from vote to vote. One Republican Representative, Ken Buck of Colorado, claims his MAGA-lovin' landlord sent an eviction notice for Buck's local field office. Maybe Buck might want to speak with a lawyer to investigate the legality of lease discrimination based on political affiliation.

In the case of Chesebro, he and his lawyer managed to negotiate a plea deal that eliminated all charges except a single charge of conspiring to submit false documents and escaped with no jail time, five years probation, a fine and a requirement to write an apology to the people of the State of Georgia for his offense. In exchange, he agreed to testify truthfully / fully to a set of facts in a written proffer agreement with the prosecution in all subsequent phases of the case. As with Powell who landed a similar sweetheart deal the day before (not even a criminal charge, just one misdemeanor), no word came out about whether Chesebro had simultaneously reached a similar agreement with prosecutor Jack Smith in the federal case in DC for the actual January 6 insurrection.

The Chesebro deal also exposes the level of crazy at work within the Republican Party. Chesebro's lawyer, Scott Grubman was interviewed by Katie Phang on MSNBC on October 21, a day after the plea deal was reached. He stated Chesebro's team was prepared to go to trial but the agreement made a tolerable outcome the most likely outcome and allowed Chesebro to end the risk to his freedom and be home with his family. At that point, Phang (an attorney) pushed back. Phang's point, condensed for copyright purposes and brevity, was this:

Your client just didn't plead guilty to filing a false document. He pled guilty to filing a document he knew was false that was the cornerstone of the overall RICO charge. Your client admitted the Big Lie was a lie and that everything he was doing wasn't right.

Grubman pushed back. Again, condensed for copyright purposes and brevity:

My client never believed the Big Lie. If you asked him today who won the 2020 election, he would say Joe Biden. He pled guilty to a felony charge but it was the RICO charge that implied he was the architect of the scheme and that charge was removed. Have your listeners think about this… If Mr. Chesebro WAS the architect of the fake elector scheme or some scheme to bring down democracy, would the District Attorney of Fulton County have offered him probation and first offender status? I think the answer is no and if you asked the DA, she would say no as well.

The most pertinent part of Grubman's response to this commentary came next:

While Mr. Chesebro did take responsibility for the false document charge, he did not implicate anyone else. He implicated himself in the false documents charge and while he is required to go testify if called by the state – and Mr. Chesebro is a man of his word and he will go testify truthfully if called by the state – the state's gonna have to decide if they think Mr. Chesebro's testimony will help them and if they believe it will help them, well they'll call him and he will testify. At the same time, if he is called by a defendant, he will come testify and testify truthfully.

At that point, Phang pushed back hard and reminded Grubman his client had to provide a recorded proffer as part of his deal and clearly the prosecution would not have cut him a deal if he didn't have something worthy of use in their case. She asked him what Chesebro had provided in that proffer. Grubman responded with this (exact quote here):

I'm not at liberty to say exactly what he said, but here's what I'm at liberty to say. Someone asked me earlier. If you were Donald Trump, would you be worried? And I could personally honestly answer no. It's not that Mr. Chesebro is trying to protect Donald Trump or anyone else, he's not. He's ready to move on with his life. But, I was there in the proffer. Again I'm not going to say what was said because it is a confidential proffer but I can say that I personally do not believe the state will call him to testify on their behalf. If they do and if I am wrong, Mr Chesebro will be there, he will testify truthfully. I were the state, I would not call.

As an aside, props to the defense counsel for drawing the distinction between a standalone charge of "simply" being involved in filing a fraudulent document to a government entity and a RICO conspiracy charge with much greater implications for others and much greater penalties. The counsel's argument is further aided by the fact that it is possibly correct, though just technically correct. Based on publicly available information, Chesebro drafted his email regarding the alternate elector approach on December 6, 2020. The film A Storm Foretold created by two French journalists following Roger Stone for weeks prior to and after the election shows Roger Stone dictating a nearly identical concept on a conference call on November 5, two days PRIOR to Biden being declared the official winner of the election and a full MONTH prior to Chesebro's December 6, 2020 memo.

While Grubman's point might win points for being technically correct, as Phang pointed out, it's a distinction without merit to the real case. In fact, Chesebro pled guilty to a charge involving a document that as of now appears to have created enough appearance of legal weight to convince others within the conspiracy and the rubes in multiple states outside the conspiracy that the alternate electors approach had a scholarly, legal background.

The real insight from Grubman's statements during this appearance comes from analyzing the tightrope he is walking when making such appearances. It is not wise to attempt to publicly walk back his client's guilty plea by saying he only said it to escape prison. The terms of his deal likely allow prosecutors to re-instate charges if such comments are made by Chesebro or his counsel. It's also not wise to divulge details of his proffer because first, the plea terms require them to be kept private and second, Chesebro is banned from any communication that could color the perspective of other defendants, potential witnesses or potential jurors.

Of course, a much larger motivation stems from the desire by Chesebro to avoid being SEEN doing anything that actively aids the prosecution and impairs the case of Donald Trump. If the MAGA crowd has no qualms about threatening the life of a sitting US Representative or US Senator or their family, they clearly would have no qualms about going after a paper-pushing lawyer whose testimony might slam the cell door on Trump. With this audience in mind, Grubman wasn't content with merely painting the normal picture of a felon wanting to put it all behind him and "spend time with the family" while finding some new leaf to turn over. Grubman likely appeared in order to attempt to weaken any impression of positive support for the prosecution, nearly crossing the line of painting a client with a plea deal as a hostile witness for the prosecutors who just gave him a plea deal. The stakes are that high for those appearing to thwart the aims of the MAGA fringe.

It's useful to reflect upon this dynamic for an extended period in the current environment. Since the horrific terrorist attack by Hamas on dozens of towns in Israel and the killing of thousands of Israelis and Palestinians in reactions back and forth, Americans seem completely perplexed about how two factions could settle into such deadly political extremes when the consequences are so obvious. For insight, all Americans but particularly Republicans should spend more time examining our own system.

American late night shows have had a field day compiling a litany of Republican elected officials saying the "inside words" outside as they describe their own party's failure to govern. Assume for a moment SOME portion of people calling themselves "Republican" are still actually Republican like yesteryear. Maybe not Ike-era Republican. Maybe not Ford-era Republican or even GHWB-era Republican. This exercise will be restricted to the mythical moderate Republican of the twenty first century.

You see your party leader actively inviting Vladimir Putin to tamper with American media regarding our elections.

You see your party leader and President explicitly extort the head of state of an American ally for dirt on a political opponent as that leader attempts to ramp up for an attack from Russia. The resulting domestic political distraction resulting from that criminal "perfect call" likely convinced Russia it could invade Ukraine in 2022 without any response from a distracted America.

After twenty months of brutal warfare, an American ally is not only pushing back a Russian attack but bankrupting our foe and exposing their military weakness for the world to see without costing a single American soldier's life for a mere $45 billion dollars in military aid. That's $45 billion out of $1.8 trillion in total defense spending. That's TWO POINT FIVE PERCENT. Those are easily the most effective dollars America has spent avoiding the fray while disabling an enemy since Lend-Lease.

You see your party disregarding lawful subpoenas regarding armed attacks on the actual Capital building.

You see your party questioning ANY military support for Ukraine, despite their success at repelling Russia without American troops involved.

You see a SINGLE MEMBER of your party denying routine promotions for HUNDREDS of crucial senior leaders throughout the military out of spite over a single policy.

You now see your party unable to identify any Speaker candidate capable of winning even a majority within your caucus much less 217 supporters in the entire House.

The choices facing these mythical traditional Republicans are vanishing by the hour. Those choices are:

1. Do nothing and leave the government paralyzed from initiating new spending for urgent aid packages for two allies and avoiding a debt ceiling shutdown days away.
2. Accept another extremist Speaker candidate and vote them in while holding your nose, hoping to pass urgent bills before an extremist votes to vacate the chair again.
3. Nominate a sane Republican Representative for Speaker and hope at least ten Democrats vote your way to yield a majority on the floor. Minimum qualification for this candidate for this scenario to have a prayer of happening is they cannot be an election denier and cannot have ties to any January 6, 2021 events.
4. Have enough Republicans vote for Hakeem Jeffries to win Speaker, share some power for the remainder of the session with Democrats and send a message to the Republican fringe that they are being quarantined from the levers of power in the Republican Party and Congress.

There are enough disaffected / confused voters on the center side of the Democratic spectrum that might be convinced to vote for any Republican with courage enough to reject the far right fringe and move to the middle. Enough to enact meaningful, problem-solving legislation that might deflate some of the anti-government rhetoric pushed by the fringe. As it stands, every political instinct any so-called moderate Republican is following is only feeding oxygen to the fire on the fringe of the party. Maybe the so-called moderates are already too engulfed in smoke to see that.

If none of these options are appealing, why are these mythical moderate Republican not responding by hitting the eject button? By doing the right thing over the remaining months of the term, accepting a primary defeat or general election defeat in 2024 and walking away on January 1, 2025? By RESIGNING now and publicly calling out the conduct and policies they can no longer tolerate? Staying in Congress while not only refusing to hold their own fringe to account but rewarding it with power through appeasement is surrendering crucial control over the entire country to a political sect that is probably only 33% of the Republican faction and probably only 13.2% of the entire population. If moderate Republicans are not smart enough to figure out how to use the existing party mechanisms to squelch this anti-democratic fringe, the ONLY honorable alternative is to exit the party and allow the opposing party to control the government long enough for a replacement party to replace the mutant Republican Party of the present.

WTH

Watch This Space: Empyreal Tastes

It appears Ron DeSantis has learned a great deal at the feet of his fellow Floridian, the mega-MAGA, megalomaniacal man of Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump. Since becoming Governor of Florida, DeSantis has developed a yen for some rather imperial accoutrements for his role. He has a special "State Guard" police force reporting to the Governor. He has a dedicated "elections police force" reporting to the Governor. And he's developed a yen for traveling via private jet. Everywhere.

The state of Florida bought a few small jets in early 2019 for use by top leaders after the prior governor Rick Scott had sold off the state's fleet during his term. Scott was worth somewhere north of $250 million while governor and owned his own planes ("God bless the child that's got his own..."). Unfortunately, those state planes acquired in 2019 are only for official state business and DeSantis has a great deal of non-state business to attend to across the country. That creates a dilemma for a man with NetJets / Ritz level expectations but a net worth closer to the Southwest / Ramada edge of the travel spectrum.

As several news outlets have been reporting for months, DeSantis latched onto an answer that seems very familiar. Since he is running for President and operates a political action committee named No Backing Down (NBD), the answer seems obvious:

1. have your PAC schedule and sponsor most of your out-of-state appearances
2. have the PAC pick up the tab for your private jet travel
3. rinse
4. repeat

It isn't totally clear this is legal according to campaign finance rules. In theory, PACs are supposed to be independent of specific candidate campaigns. One would assume an "event" hosted by a PAC interested in "issues" would invite multiple candidates to appear in order to spur open debate about that PAC's favorite issues. It isn't clear if that is the case with these events or if DeSantis is showing up as a solo act. When a candidate operates a PAC and is running for office and the candidate's PAC is paying his travel expenses to attend one of its events, the law is a bit murky, even if the ethics of such self-dealing are NOT murky at all to the average voter.

These are not just occasional flights getting reimbursed. In July, his campaign filings reported the following expenses:

• $179,000 on chartered planes
• $483,000 for services from a limited liability travel company
• $343,000 paid to same LLC by the No Backing Down PAC

That's not the whole story though. The Washington Post reported that BOTH Ron Desantis' presidential campaign AND his No Backing Down PAC made an "investment" in a "private transportation management company." The name of this company? Empyreal Jets. A pun on Imperial? Curiously, Empyreal seems to be a common word in the names of small companies, maybe because it might be pronounced imperial or maybe the owners don't know how to spell imperial. Regardless, the name seems perfectly suited for this situation.

The idea of a political campaign or a political action committee using donor funds for "investments" should make any American voter retch. The opportunities for self-dealing, money laundering and speculation are limitless. A candidate can curry favor with business owners with vastly more leverage than the candidate can afford on his own. (Ron DeSantis' entire net worth was about $345,000 in 2019. Now it is estimated at $1,500,000 after proceeds from a book deal.) Illicit investments in shady businesses can be laundered by donating money to a PAC or specific campaign which can then feed it into the target company for "consulting fees" or "miscellaneous IT services." A candidate touting controversial policies with material impacts to specific industries can "invest" in those industries and trigger material changes in their value by suddenly withdrawing from the race with timing only the candidate can predict.

The whole purpose of a campaign is to communicate ideas and positions on public matters that voters need to make specific selections in a specific election. All spending in a campaign should be one hundred percent focused on that goal. Any PAC operating on a perpetual timeline isn't trying to impact a specific race or issue, it's simply trying to become a think tank. Any campaign or PAC spending that could be categorized as an "investment" has nothing to do with helping voters. The efforts of DeSantis to subsidize his rather imperial traveling habits via political contributions communicates nothing about immigration policy, civil rights, trade policy, etc. It does speak volumes about DeSantis' true values – avoiding the masses as much as possible while traveling like the mogul he would very much like to be but can only dream of with a mere $1,500,000 net worth.

This is probably a space worth watching. Exorbitant travel expenses. Payments to vendors with a beneficial relationship to the spender. Presidential campaign donations. Possible mixing of state and personal business with Florida state taxpayer money and campaign funds. All the fixin's for a grift that even Trump might approve.

WTH

Missouri Republicans Adopt Presidential Caucus

For 2024, the Missouri Republican Party is adopting caucuses to select its candidates. What's not to like about caucuses? You get to inspect your fellow Republicans up close, eyeball to eyeball. Rather than getting in and out in about 10 minutes any time between 6:00am and 7:00pm, you get to arrive at your local county caucus at 10:00am and wait indefinitely until an overall choice is finalized. You get a chance to apply those herd forces to intimidate anyone not supporting the party line. The perfect approach for ensuring continued fealty to an increasingly extremist mindset with little chance of moderation.

Strangely, the Republican primary election was cancelled as part of an odd legislative measure that was supposedly intended to be followed by another bill to re-instate the primary but Republicans -- who hold overwhelming majorities in both the Missouri House and Senate -- couldn't pass the additional legislation in time to meet a deadline and thus had to stick with the caucus.

Does any of that sound remotely legitimate?

At least for 2024, it is possible the top motivation of Missouri State Republicans for adopting a caucus is either a) to put Missouri Republicans earlier on the scoreboard for their Dear Leader Trump or b) to ensure no revolt against Donald Trump is attempted. That seems unlikely given that no sane Republican candidate for President has emerged. It seems even more unlikely any "revolt" would come from within the Missouri Republican cave. I haven't heard a single WORD from a single Missouri elected Republican official at the state or federal expressing any concern about Trump's deepening legal woes, additional information about his breaches of national security regarding nuclear weapons or his appalling statements about Netanyahu or Hamas. Nope. Still 100% on board.

In the end, at least for 2024, this change is probably meaningless, both for Missouri Republicans and the country since it seems a 100% certainty that Missouri Republicans, like their idiot brethren around the country, seem hellbent on following Trump off a criminal and electoral cliff. However, this tactical shift again highlights how nearly every action undertaken by Republicans is profoundly anti-democratic, anti-participatory and exclusionary.

WTH

All Signs Point to Injustice

In proceedings on October 12, 2023 in the criminal case against Donald Trump regarding national security documents, Judge Aileen Cannon continued demonstrating undisputable incompetence and bias in favor of Trump. At issue in the proceedings are motions by the federal government to ensure two criminal defendants in the case -- Walt Nauta and Carlos de Oliveira -- are aware of a GLARING conflict of interest affecting their designated attorneys who ALSO represented other other parties who MAY be called to testify against them and merit cross examination.

Why are federal prosecutors so concerned about the competency and ethics of the lawyers for the defendants? In part, because it is part of the prosecuting attorney's professional ethics to do so and it is also of no interest to the federal government to spend time prosecuting parties to then see the prosecutions overturned because of incompetent defense attorneys. At a minimum, it wastes the public's money and the judiciary's limited resources to try a case in a way that can be immediately appealed for such obvious, avoidable process flaws.

Originally, the prosecutors filed motions stating they were not seeking the REMOVAL of these lawyers as counsel for the two defendants, only that they wanted a formal hearing to establish on the record that the defendants thoroughly understood the conflict of interest (as viewed by the prosecution) posed by their lawyers, presumably nullifying the defendants' ability to later claim defective counsel as justification for appeal or nullification of a guilty verdict.

In proceedings on October 12, federal prosecutors updated their prior filing and stated they wanted to exclude one of the lawyers, Stanley Woodward, from making closing arguments in the case if he was going to cross-examine one of his former clients, Yuscil Taveras. In response, Woodward replied he would have no problem attacking the credibility of his prior client Taveras in defense of his current clients and that he was puzzled why the prosecution had concerns and why the prosecution needed his client Walt Nauta to make a determination about his own counsel's potential conflict of interest now without knowing exactly how Nauta would fit into the larger case at trial.

Cannon apparently thought that was a very sophisticated question and chimed in with agreement, further expressing frustration at the prosecutors for this last-minute change and abruptly postponed the hearing. She admonished the prosecuting attorney, David Harbough, for "wasting the government's time" by making the request "without warning" and for failing to cite prior examples of cases handled by the Southern District of Florida to support the arguments in his filing.

The merits of the motion filed by prosecutors sound very logical. The reaction to the motion by Cannon sounds like incompetence. The root of the conflict of interest is this set of circumstances:

• Lawyer X previously represented Client Y
• X presumably has confidential info about Y that could incriminate Y
• X no longer represents Y but is still legally / ethically required to protect potential incriminating information about Y
• X now represents client Z
• Z undertook actions with Y that are involved with criminal charges
• X is required to fully defend Z to the utmost, which may include cross-examining prior client Y at trial
• even if client Z claims to understand that X might pull punches cross-examining Y which could result in a conviction of Z, they are not necessarily the only party harmed by this conflict of interest – if the case generates appeals because of this perceived conflict of interest, it wastes the time and resources of the government in achieving actual justice

In other words, this conflict of interest could lead the lawyer to protecting one client at the expense of the other – in a way where possibly only the lawyer will know who they favored. But the existence of that conflict creates doubt within the larger judicial process which depends upon believing defendants are being competently represented. That confidence is supposed to be part of the "beyond a reasonable doubt" criteria for obtaining a criminal conviction then meting out punishment.

Cannon's response to the original motion and the update submitted October 12 indicate that concern completely escapes her comprehension. She seems put out that the prosecution called an audible when she was expecting to make a determination that now forces her to do more thinking. Her concern that the updated filing didn't cite precedents from prior trials in the Southern District of Florida is a more nuanced issue. As a non-legal expert, it seems odd that each District within the federal judiciary refers solely to precedents and practices seen in its own courts. We are one country after all.

From coverage of the drama in the courtroom, it isn't clear if prosecutors made their generic points based on precedents in other courts without citing them or if they made no references to any district precedents anywhere in the country. Regardless of the scenario, chastising the prosecutor for "wasting time" for arguments which make PERFECT logical / ethical sense seems highly inappropriate. In the context of a trial where Cannon herself has wasted so much time tolerating bogus motions from Trump which have ZERO foundation in the underlying criminal law or normal proceures, Cannon's reprimand of the prosecutor in this circumstance speaks VOLUMES about her general incompetence and her bias in the case.

At this point, with this track record to date, it is not clear at all if this trial will reach trial, much less reach a just conclusion. Cannon's conduct to date seems like she is hellbent on finding any excuse for delay and is looking for rationales to cripple key elements of the case and its prosecution.

WTH

BOOK REVIEW: Going Infinite

Going Infinite – Michael Lewis – 254 pages

Michael Lewis has become a literary superstar specializing in a unique genre of reportage -- the psychological / financial / cultural post mortem. He published his first book Liar’s Poker in 1989 and it provided insights into the selective recruiting process adopted by Wall Street that created the original incarnation of what we would now term the “bro culture” of Wall Street. That culture, a combination of mathematical expertise, extreme risk-affinity and aggression, was instrumental in fueling widespread abuses in the junk bond market. The book described Lewis' experiences that started in 1984 and those patterns were already linked to infamous cases like those of Ivan Boesky and Michael Milkin before he even published it in 1989. The book didn’t explicitly forecast the round of “innovations” in financial engineering that resulted in the 2008 meltdown but reading Liar’s Poker NOW makes it clear how the testosterone-fueled, high-risk “bro culture” hired in the mid-1980s rose up to senior management and enabled exponentially more dangerous tactics that made the entire mortgage-backed security disaster not only likely but inevitable.

Since that first book thirty four years ago, Lewis has developed a seemingly unerring sense of where to dive next to find the next interesting story on how quirky personalities, unique insights, emerging market trends and good old fashioned greed and corruption manage to combine to produce the next management or economic meltdown. Going Infinite, just published on October 3, 2023, fits perfectly in the larger Lewis canon in terms of the subject matter and Lewis’ unique approach to gaining insight and telling the story. The book is highly recommended for its ability to convey the day to day vibe of working with the people at FTX and Alameda Research and how that vibe led to its collapse. Unfortunately, the book also fails at times to appropriately tie together scattered facts in the book into useful insights or states conclusions which partially conflict with his own exposition. Perhaps most curiously, the book misses a chance to close the circle from Liar's Poker to the present by identifying a common theme – attempts to leverage (pronounced "exploit") people with extreme but narrow talents within systems designed to magnify miniscule discrepancies and convert them into huge profits while ignoring crucial shortcomings in those same resources that create the potential for great harm, both to those individuals and society.

Michael Lewis as Forrest Gump

As previously mentioned, Michael Lewis has an uncanny knack for being near interesting stories and extracting riveting tales from them just as they come into focus for the entire world. How did he do it this time? A friend of his was considering a substantial private equity investment in FTX in late 2021. The friend had attempted to gain a sense of what Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the CEO of FTX (and essentially its sister firm Alameda Research) was like but could not find anyone that could convey an accurate sense of SBF as an executive or an individual. The friend asked Michael Lewis if he could arrange a meeting with SBF to get a better handle on his demeanor, his mien. Lewis agreed, contacted SBF (somehow) and arranged an initial meet and greet. From that initial conversation, Lewis gave his own friend an enthusiastic thumbs up but also established an ongoing relationship with SBF that led to ongoing in-person conversations from that point through the day of SBF’s ultimate arrest in his condo in the Bahamas in November of 2022.

It's worth summarizing this information... Michael Lewis met Sam Bankman-Fried at the request of a friend to conduct (essentially) due diligence on Sam Bankman-Fried as a person and leader of a business venture. After a single meeting and a walk at a local park, Lewis gave his friend an enthusiastic thumbs up to do business with SBF (though Lewis does not state if the friend ultimately invested or stayed out). Lewis' total exposure to SBF was from late 2021 to SBF's arrest on November 14, 2022, essentially the last year of the operation of FTX and Alameda Research.

More on this later.

The Bob Problem and the Neurodiverse

The book devotes an entire chapter entitled How to Think About Bob to providing background on a crucial aspect of the core thinking process of SBF in particular but of many “neurodiverse” people more generally. In explaining his general thinking pattern to the author, SBF described a scenario in which your best friend Bob attends a dinner party with 99 other people and one of those other guests winds up dead. Police have no DNA evidence, the home where the dinner party took place was sealed so the only thing that is known is that one of the remaining 99 killed #100. That means your best friend Bob has SOME chance of being a murderer. So how do you change your behavior regarding your best friend?

As the author recounts it, SBF’s approach is to avoid insisting on absolutes (“my friend COULD be a killer so begin avoiding him entirely” versus “I trust my friend, he couldn’t POSSIBLY be the murderer, make no changes”). Instead, model the problem, calculate the probabilities of the outcomes, identify the value of the consequences, multiply probability x value for each possibility, then use the immediate scenario at hand to pick a path and move on. If Bob wants you to join a conference call to explain something to a client, sure, no problem. If Bob wants to bring the wife over for a BBQ on Saturday with the kids, maybe not. Lewis seems to recognize there are limitations to when this approach can be effectively used but doesn't elaborate on what those might be or how SBF and his employees made such distinctions or ever tried making such distinctions.

In high stakes business situations, especially those with a fiduciary responsibility regarding Other People’s Money or Other People's Lives, this approach is highly inappropriate. The book includes several incidents where SBF or coworkers identified GLARING shortfalls in accounts and security flaws in their systems involving hundreds of millions or even BILLIONS of dollars that should have triggered “all hands on deck” investigations to identify, resolve and correct. Instead, this tendency to “quantify” and compartmentalize risk consistently led the entire firm to downplay and dismiss issues affecting their clients – issues whose magnitudes and the lack of diligence to correct reflect criminal incompetence.

The larger problem for the author is that by failing to address the consequences of this mindset in the case of FTX, Lewis also failed to truly define its origins, its mechanics and its implications in a larger society. Missing that connection seems odd for an author who caught on to an earlier generational version of the same problem in his first book. With the understanding and vocabulary of the 1980s, Liar’s Poker explicitly identified a process by which Wall Street firms were purposely recruiting a specific combination of mental ability and personality they could further train to essentially act as pit bulls on trading floors and (later) computerized trading exchanges. The goal at that time was to quantify previously opaque risks then make outsized bets to extract outsized profits from short term distortions in securities markets.

In the vocabulary of the 1980s, Lewis characterized these candidates as mathematically gifted but reflecting a very aggressive, arrogant, sexist frat boy attitude – a stereotype that today pervades both the financial industry and software industry as “bro culture.” Leadership at Wall Street firms in the 1980s already had the frat boy underpinning from the 1970s generation of new hires but recognized the value of leveraging “quants” so they began recruiting “quants” who were otherwise just like them – frat boys. 1980s Wall Street wasn’t worried about sexual harassment and #metoo blowback, they just wanted these recruits to constantly scan the markets for opportunities to arbitrage and exploit to create profits from nothing.

After nearly forty years, the “class of 1984” now runs Wall Street. Over that same period, concepts about learning and education have provided a new vocabulary to describe characteristics and tendencies of people who might have been seen as dysfunctional in the past. Terms like neurodiverse, ADHD, Asperger’s Syndrome, etc. have grown commonplace and companies looking for an edge in highly technical, highly computerized sectors have discovered value in people further away from "normal" on the neurotypical / neurodiverse gradient. SBF himself was recruited for an internship and selected – not because he arrived with a polished resume, a clean suit, an airtight "elevator speech" and an understanding of stock trading, but because he scored highly in special games devised to identify "game playing talent."

People with mathematical or engineering backgrounds have obviously spent more of their formal education completing coursework that emphasizes physical phenomena or business processes into building blocks interconnected by inputs and outputs. Those blocks and connections can directly map to mathematical models of variables, coeeficients, etc. Present such people nearly any system and some portion of their brain will immediately launch a thread that starts decomposing the system into components, connections between those components representing inputs and outputs and factors indicating how much “signal” gets from one box to another. It’s what they do… For most neurotypicals with a bent towards math or engineering, this “background thread” might only consume two percent of their “CPU” and they can quickly set aside even that distraction, engage in the “present” and, you know, interact like, well… a neurotypical person.

For those further on the scale away from neurotypical, the distraction factor of this background thread might be five or ten percent. And frankly, they might be better at that instant modeling than a neurotypical and they might ENJOY spending time just contemplating that system they just devised in their head. For those even further away from neurotypical, this “background processing” becomes another input into what can become ADHD and – again, because they are actually GOOD at it – it becomes more enjoyable than other processing tasks they may not be so good at or enjoy. At that point, this type of constant “system analysis” and optimization becomes a coping mechanism and can morph into debilitating distraction.

Imagine someone at this point on the neuro spectrum needing to drive from their house to a business located to their west which can be reached by going counterclockwise from Street A to Street B then Street C or they can drive clockwise from Street A to Street D to Street C. The CCW route has a slower speed limit but fewer lights but has a hill enroute. The CW route has more lights, but faster speed limits and no hills. Which way should they go? An “average” person will flip a mental coin, pick a route and think about other things. An “average” engineer might contemplate these variables, think through if they want to optimize for time, distance or miles per gallon while looking for their car keys, then still flip a mental coin and drive. Someone further on the spectrum will think about their model and how to optimize the route the entire time they are driving to the business and back. Someone WAAAAY on the spectrum might become nearly paralyzed and avoid making an actual decision entirely.

In software engineering, there’s a term for this… Premature optimization. Developers who possess an understanding of a wide range of components in the system can become attracted / distracted to the details for the very reason that they can understand them and spend too much mental energy optimizing them while losing sight of a much bigger picture. Losing sight of things like the function they are spending ten hours optimizing is only executed four percent of the time and the optimization is only saving fourteen microseconds but delaying delivery of a release that will earn his company four million dollars.

Lewis’ educational background is in art and archaeology as an undergraduate and economics at a masters level -- he would not probably describe himself as highly quantitative by training or interest. His reiteration of the description of SBF’s problem solving approach mentions it can have pitfalls but doesn’t delve into its origins to convey how it can lead to deluding compartmentalization of probabilities which should not be ignored. How would you feel about flying on a plane maintained by a mechanic with this approach to missing bolts? He also misses a likely link between this fixation on quantitative modeling of “soft” problems” and effective altruism.

Effective Altruism

Lewis devotes significant time on the concept of effective altruism (EA), covering its origins and its interpretation by many involved with FTX. In a nutshell, EA is a conceptual framework by which an individual can attempt to optimize the net value they provide to society by maximizing their WEALTH by leveraging their skills and earning potential then converting the WEALTH to effort through other means to yield desired results. As an exaggerated example, a person with a unique skill worth $1 million per year in salary wanting to feed the hungry in Africa is more effective at doing so by working the million dollar gig and donating $900,000 to a charity supporting farming than by booking a flight to Chad and single-handedly trying to plant a field of wheat. Idealistically, EA is an attempt to reconcile the completing desires to “do something meaningful for others” while avoiding the need to abandon what might be very unfulfilling but extremely lucrative employment.

EA was important to the FTX story because many of the key players had been exposed to the concept in college and, psychologically, bought into it heavily. In large part due to the meltdown of FTX, the concept of EA has attracted a great deal of attention and cynicism. Besides the possibility that the FTX actors espousing EA did so in good faith, Lewis did not cover two alternative explanations, which in fact may be somewhat related.

After the crash of FTX, some observers suggested that the constant references to EA by the key players at FTX was simply a ruse, a cynical ploy used by the uber-wealthy to justify continuing to make obscene amounts of money with a promise to later mete it out to the rest of us. It was beyond the purpose of Lewis’ book to critique EA from this perspective but it IS a worthy political and economic topic. The idea that Daddy Warbucks can be excused for accumulating a trillion dollar fortune by crushing competition, manipulating markets and operating monopolies because eventually he will donate the trillion dollars building libraries, funding universities, etc. doesn’t account for the loss of opportunity created by the inequality created over the shorter term, which may trigger ripple effects that far outweigh the pot of gold forty years out.

The angle that should have been in scope for Lewis to address as part of this book was the adoption of EA as a psychological coping and rationalization mechanism. EA seems to be extremely popular with the exact demographic staffing FTX and many other financial firms. This employee demographic works in highly technical fields that utilize complex processes with hundreds of continuously changing inputs. This demographic of employees designs systems to interact with those processes to leverage infinitesimally small asymmetries to create billions in profits. All without making a dent in any real societal problem. Because the thought processes that make EA so attractive philosophically are nearly perfectly aligned with the analysis skills Wall Street finds attractive, EA becomes a easy shorthand for recruiting.

In the case of the people at FTX, the descriptions Lewis provides of how key team members lived on a day to day basis definitely seemed to rule out the possibility that they were espousing EA as a cynical means of deflect attention from the outsized wealth they were accumulating on paper prior to the collapse. Though the firms moved from California to Hong Kong to Bermuda, the actual office locations and condos they worked and lived in were more like communes inside luxury suites rather than luxury suites. Lewis states he only saw SBF in a suit twice – when preparing to lobby Mitch McConnell in DC – and even then, SBF forgot he would need socks. Otherwise, he wore cargo shorts and a tee-shirt – THE SAME OUTFIT – nearly everywhere. After the team moved to Bermuda to condos on a beach, only one person ventured out to the beach... ONCE.

From the descriptions provided by Lewis, EA for FTX proved to be both a coping mechanism for a large group of people who did not have neurotypical decision making tools for processing the dichotomy of earning great wealth and lacking any plan for its use in their personal lives. It also became a self-selecting criteria as the firm grew and attracted the attention of future employees. Those already in the firm seemed to treat the very idea of EA as a shibboleth – mention that word in an interview and you must be one of us, you’ll fit in even if I have no idea what you do or what I need – which furthered the monoculture already present from inception. The fixation on EA by the leaders of EA thus REDUCED the chance of hiring more neurotypical staff who might have had more traditional business management skills for HR, auditing, security, etc. that could have balanced the firm’s talent pool.

Neurodiverse Dysfunction

The very term neurodiverse may not be terribly effective in attempting to describe the range of behaviors and abilities as they impact work in a business setting. One can be ND in a “good way” by being higher in a desired skill without being lower in some other desired skill. One can be ND in a “bad way” by lacking a desired skill while possessing many others. Or one can be ND by being extremely high in one skill while being lower than normal at many others. That results in a large area of gray that normal language descriptions might obscure.

The narrative in Going Infinite makes it very clear that a large number of the employees at all levels of FTX were – ahem -- “very” neurodiverse. To the point of obvious dysfunction. Lewis described examples of the gifts reflected in this neurodiversity and many physical manifestations but either didn’t pick up on or chose not to spend time describing some of the dysfunction. For example, SBF hired a younger MIT classmate, Gary Wang, as the Chief Technical Officer. According to SBF, Wang designed, coded and deployed FTX’s exchange platform in a single month. Sounds monumentally gifted, right? Well, maybe. But this is the same system which was hacked multiple times for losses of $200 million, $300 million and $600 million. The same system that exhibited a glitch which began incorrectly inflating an account within an Alameda system from $8 billion to $16 billion until someone spotted it and Wang fixed it. Ooops. But Wang barely spoke a word. To ANYONE. He would arrive to work, toil for twelve hours, then leave, without saying a word to anyone. Fortunately, he seems to have found his voice after pleading guilty and testifying in court against SBF.

The funniest part of the book stemmed from the description of interactions between "the EAs" as Lewis called them. There's no need to guess what interactions within the entire group were like. The types who sit next to each other and TEXT each other rather than having a conversation or risk (GASP) eye contact. After the collapse, the nerds at FTX became a meme for the press and public alike when photos of SBF, Caroline Ellison and others came out along with letters about how the collective decided they would not subject themselves to the limitations of traditional relationships and marriage.

The outside world was just then entertaining the most lurid fantasies about Sam's inner circle. Inevitably, word had got out that the effective altruists took a principled stand against monogomy. After that, a rumor spread that the spent half their time in the Orchid penthouse finding new ways to have sex with each other. Mostly what they had done with each other was play board games. In the heat of bughouse chess matches, they'd explore every possible combination and position; otherwise, not so much. But the confusion was understandable. They'd granted themselves hunting licenses without ever really wanting to learn how to handle a gun. Who does that?

You have to read that passage twice before realizing how funny that is.

SBF was a literal poster child of the most extreme stereotype one could imagine for a poorly adjusted neurodiverse adult. Beyond the wardrobe, random bathing, mad scientist hair and manic bouncing knee, SBF routinely played video games while meeting with the press or potential investors. Bizarrely, many on the other side of these exchanges observed this, chalked it up to condescension and concluded SBF was so brilliant, he could answer their naïve questions while multi-tasking on other more important stuff. This guy’s brilliant, hand him our $150 million! (That’s nearly a direct quote from Sequoia Capital, by the way…See https://www.privateequitywire.co.uk/sequoia-capital-apologises-150m-ftx-loss/)

What should have been discerned from these encounters was that SBF was completely addled by ADHD. He was not listening to their questions or concerns. He was only waiting for key words which told him it was time to talk, at which point he would spit out whatever point he wanted to make. In the mean time, he was physically compelled to distract his brain by playing puzzles and games. These are NOT the listening skills required of any executive at a firm handling billions of dollars in transactions per day.

The interactions between neurodiverse types and presumed nuerotypicals attempting to perform due diligence is one of the most striking gaps in the book. Remember, the book STARTED because of a request from a friend for a favor to meet SBF and essentially confirm if he was "for real" and if the business was for real. Like EVERY OTHER PARTY, Michael Lewis met SBF, had a longer period to talk with him than most, and became enamored with what he wanted to see in SBF with all of his grandiose ideas about effective altruism. Lewis, like every other investor in the companies, completely ignored numerous red flags about the BREADTH of business experience any of these players possessed. And despite literally being there the day it all ended and SBF was arrested, Lewis never came back to address his own due diligence failure on behalf of his friend. Maybe the friend wound up ignoring the thumbs up from Lewis and kept his money.

Even if people met SBF and his team and were somehow wowed by the effective altruism distraction, a very brief list of questions and demands could have burst that bubble of fantasy and led to a more appropriate conclusion:

1. What are the names and resumes of the people on your board?
2. Provide the name and resume of your CFO and let me talk with your CFO.
3. Provide the name and contact of your outside auditor.
4. Provide the name and resume of the person in charge of your network and data center security.
5. Provide a complete addresses of every owned, leased or rented location used for offices or data center operations in all countries.
6. Provide an overview of your trading system at a block diagram functional level and a physical level, identifying all locations where customer data is stored, public portal traffic is processed and your disaster recovery plan.

An incomplete or missing response to any of those questions should have been a red flag. An incomplete or missing response to three or more should have been a hell no.

As a final anecdote that conveys the emotional maturity of the man behind the entire enterprise, there is this. On December 12, 2022 as Bermuda police came to arrest SBF, there were two remaining FTX employees hanging around, attempting to help Sam and do their own searching of files to figure out what happened and how they might have been involved. As the police were cuffing SBF, the other FTX employees went to the condo room he was using as a bedroom to try to collect anything he might find of use so he could take it with him. While sorting through the room's contents, they found a keepsake box. Opening the box, they found a stuffed animal. The stuffed animal was named Manfred and had been kept by SBF since infancy. Lewis doesn't state it but essentially, Manfred is the Rosebud of the SBF story, the sole object in SBF's entire life to which he has maintained any attachment. Does this sound like a remotely well-adjusted person who should be operating a firm with billions of dollars of Other People’s Money?

Missing / Conflicting Analysis

The narrative in Going Infinite has multiple instances where Lewis seems to round up a cohesive set of facts then fails to link them together with an appropriate conclusion or makes references across the narrative that seem to conflict with each other – either in supporting a claim made by SBF or a conclusion reached by Lewis as author.

The book creates confusion about the cash flow and profitability of the Alameda and FTX operations over their lifetime. Alameda came first as a vehicle for making hedged trades across different cryptocurrencies across different exchanges. After an initial team panic triggered by a software glitch that "misplaced" $4 million dollars of coins from a trade only to appear weeks later, Alameda began executing millions of trades per day and racking up profits. Alameda subsequently supplied roughly $10 million dollars of cash to cover the start-up costs for FTX as a second entity. Yet later in the narrative, Lewis describes different meetings SBF held to solicit investors for capital to build FTX. But the company only had roughly fifty employees at that time. And later comments from the person who became employee #50 indicate Alameda / FTX was not necessarily paying competitive salaries. #50 told Lewis their FTX salary was eighty percent less than their prior Facebook salary. It was ninety five percent lower than another offer they declined from TikTok.

So was Alameda making profits or not? And why did FTX need so much capital up front with such a small payroll? At its peak, Alameda / FTX combined only employed about 400 people. Even if they were all pulling $250,000 salaries, that would be $100 million. SBF claimed Alameda earned $1 billion in 2021. Later documents leaked after the collapse showed tax records stating $388 million in net income for 2021. And they clearly weren’t paying everyone $250,000 / year. Lewis never steps back from these facts to reflect on the larger pattern of inattention to basic financial solvency between the two firms.

More curiously, Lewis collected notes from his discussions with FTX actors prior to the collapse, compiled his own back of the envelope estimate of the combined balance sheet of Alameda Research and FTX from inception to collapse and reached a very surprising conclusion… It’s possible that NO MONEY WAS EVER MISSING. This conclusion might be driven by large loans SBF took from the companies as future donations to charities or investments in other firms which in fact never saw fruition but never had accounting records corrected, making the location and status of the funds ambiguous or completely unknown. By Lewis' reckoning, he came within roughly $100 million dollars of finding "balance" when the original bankruptcy was triggered when the firm was thought to owe $8 billion to creditors. With another group of crypto assets held by FTX that John Jay and the bankruptcy court thought were near worthless actually priced at still-current market rates, the books added up nearly $1 billion in the black. Of course there are other facts scattered through the book that Lewis seemed to omit from his rough calculations, including another electronic theft of assets of $450 million that occurred during the final meltdown. Given the fact there were several $x00 million dollar "disappearances" from the exchange – at best due to bugs which Gary Wang fixed rather than inside theft – and given the poor accounting controls, it seems far more likely FTX was in fact insolvent by several billion.

Michael Lewis as Bob Woodward

One concern that has been expressed more frequently over the years regarding famed reporter Bob Woodward is that he has slowly lapsed into becoming a stenographer of his subjects. His bona fides as half of the duo that cracked Watergate created a dynamic where famous or infamous people approach HIM to write their story. Woodward agrees, takes audio notes on EVERYTHING, uses his fifty years of experience to second guess the material dumped in his lap but pretty much restricts his narrative to what can be filtered from that material. If a topic merits doing ADDITIONAL research independent of what the subject says, it doesn’t appear in the final draft.

After reading Going Infinite, I can’t help but ask if Michael Lewis is subconsciously adopting this same laid back approach to his material. Here are a few examples. The book describes how SBF hired his friend Gary Wang away from Google and how Wang coded what became their core trading system in a single month, entirely by himself. From that feat and statements of those in the company, Lewis concludes and relays to the reader that Wang was a coding savant. Well, was he? The system he coded experienced multiple glitches over time which resulted in transactions worth hundreds of millions of dollars to suddenly go missing – for weeks or months – before reappearing. It resulted in outside hackers stealing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tokens from accounts which were never recovered. So how good was he? Lewis never consulted outside experts to provide an alternate perspective about the integrity of the system from a logging, audit or security perspective. He never references any conversations with end-users of the platform who might have been able to provide insight on its ease of use, reliability, quirks and outright bugs as well.

In the same vein, Lewis relays to the reader accounts which imply that SBF and other key personnel in the two companies were not very adept coders. The narrative seems to imply that the extent of computer skills for most of the key players was limited to using computers for email, video conference calls, word processing and games. It isn’t important to Lewis’ story to know exactly who coded each line of the system but it is crucial to understand how development and bug fix work was assigned and how changes were tracked and who had permissions to update the code. The software of the FTX trading system essentially constitutes a crime scene, yet the details conveyed by Lewis essentially imply “silent Gary” was the only person that altered the system. It's possible, certainly with the types of players involved, but still not probable and merited more follow-through.

This lack of follow-through is particularly disconcerting because this very concept is addressed explicitly at the end of the book as Lewis talks with the interim CEO tasked with chasing down the missing billions. Lewis asks John Ray why he generally avoids talking with former leaders of the firms after he takes over. Ray’s rationale is that former players often have an axe to grind or a butt to protect (their own) so hints they provide are likely slanted. Ray believes it’s better to look at the firm’s carcass with unbiased eyes, even if those eyes lack some institutional knowledge about internal processes, politics, etc.

Lewis makes a point of identifying cases where Ray’s modus operandi results in the bankruptcy chasing a pointless lead but at the same time, Lewis seems comfortable using all of the comments provided by those same players to him during 2022 without running them by outsiders who might have a fresh perspective. More importantly, by the end of 2022, Lewis’ dealings with virtually everyone at FTX should have made it clear to him that all of them exhibited certain deficits of perception and expertise regarding basic business processes, accounting and even ethics, rendering many of their volunteered insights suspect.

The Ultimate Miss

The most surprising aspect of Going Infinite is the author’s failure to correlate his observations regarding the FTX crew of "neurodiverse", AE-fixated players with his observations from Liar’s Poker in 1989 and connect them as an inevitable progression. Lewis was there in 1984 as Wall Street first learned how to screen for a very specific combination of math skills, risk-taking behavior and aggression to institutionalize a new style of financial trading that was very successful at creating profits, if not always anything else of long term value for clients or the larger world.

Thirty four years after documenting that experience, Lewis saw a nearly identical dynamic trigger a very similar financial implosion. In the new case, the behavior selected eliminated the bro culture vibe but replaced it with a higher level of internal quantitative acuity which displaced other crucial areas of expertise. More importantly, this new mix of selection criteria was made easier to spot by having a near-perfect correlation to people fixated on "effective altruism". Moreover, this common blind spot was propagated through most of the company because the founder, SBF, found it easy to use interest in EA as an instant shibboleth during hiring and he did virtually all the leadership hiring. He wound up hiring an entire team who all had the same dysfunctions as himself. At best, the resulting monoculture was virtually guaranteed to miss warning signs that could have triggered course corrections. At worst, the resulting monoculture could have been exploited to trigger even greater losses had even one employee exercised more proactive criminal intent.

At its core, the model for operating FTX as a business is a curiously apt microcosm of the dangers of widescale adoption of artificial intelligence. FTX was founded by a person with greater than average gifts in selected disciplines amenable to computerization. That founder not only used computer modeling optimization concepts in organizing his own life, he used to them to select an entire team, resulting in a firm which built a complex system optimized for the requirements posed by its creators. But that list of requirements was woefully incomplete because the creators all exhibited nearly identical blind spots in their understanding of the complete problem. They stuck with what they thought they knew, bet heavily on it, enjoyed initial success that encouraged expansion then encountered inputs they were unable to imagine and their system failed. AI systems can and will exhibit the exact same failure mode. Any AI model attempting to process more inputs than a human can MAY synthesize additional "knowledge" to feed back into its "decisions" but such intelligence may still reflect the blind spots of the first humans who influenced its zero-generation incarnation and will still likely result in failures.

Going Infinite never makes these points directly in its narrative. However, it does provide a smoothly flowing narrative of a fascinating (in the train wreck sense) business and management failure that help make these larger realities easier to identify and apply in other contexts. For that, Going Infinite is worth a read.

WTH