SBF could justify anything. So could you.

Sam Bankman-Fried (of FTX crypto fame) could justify anything.

Any decision, no matter how ugly, he could tell you why it was the right thing to do.

And yes, we’re talking about the same guy, who blew through tens of billions of dollars of other people’s money, and is now serving 25 years. 

Here's the part that stuck with me:

Sam ran his whole life on a philosophy called effective altruism. The idea is you can be a good person, make the world better… by first making as much money as you can, then using it to do good.

It's a fine idea. Right up until you take it to the extreme, which he absolutely did.

Because once "make as much money as possible" becomes the noble goal, anything that makes money starts to look noble, too.

His employees even had a name for what he'd do. They called it Galaxy Brain.

Sam could string together a chain of logic to justify any action, no matter how heinous.

Should we take the customer money we're holding in custody and go invest it? Well… the ends justify the means, right? 

Should we borrow more than we can ever pay back? Sure. Since we're going to transform finance, it's worth it.

Over and over again, every terrible call had a beautiful reason attached.

If you spend enough time in business, you see this everywhere. People do horrible things, and they are always, always good at explaining why it was fine.

Go study the genuinely evil people in history. All of them concocted ways to justify what they were doing.

Evil people don't think they're evil. They’ve just built a justification good enough to fool themselves.

I don’t know if SBF was scheming to manipulate people, as I’ve never spoken to the guy and, frankly, don’t care much about his current excuses for his behavior. But he certainly was a natural at influencing the people around him.

Not everybody has those skills. I’m not a natural schmoozer at all.

But reading people and convincing them is most of the job of business. And it can be learned.

There are a million books out there on this stuff, but if you haven’t read Influence by Robert Cialdini, that’s the granddaddy of them all.

He actually wrote it to help you defend against manipulation. Though plenty of people read it as an instruction manual for the other side. It works either way, which really tells you something.

Worth a read. Don’t let a Galaxy Brain fool you.

Thanks,

Michael

P.S. This Thursday at 12 CT / 1 ET, my cofounder Franco and I are talking about 6 AI solutions every business needs. It’ll be super practical stuff you can set up in an afternoon (plus a roadmap of what you could build).

Come on out, or just RSVP and I’ll send you the recording afterwards.

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