Jeff John Roberts on being duped by Sam Bankman-Fried

It’s not a good feeling.  In July, I sat down with Sam Bankman-Fried for over an hour at a hotel overlooking Central Park, a meeting that would be the basis for a Fortune cover story.  I was charmed by his nerdy affect as SBF, unkempt in a T-shirt and bushy hair, as he twirled a fidget spinner and rattled off tidbits about everything from M&A strategy to the macroeconomy to the importance of trust in business deals.  It was all bullshit, of course, and I didn’t see through it.

[...]

[L]ike any good con man, SBF told us a story we wanted to hear and were eager to believe.  He styled himself as a trading genius who outgrew the elite quant firm Jane Street Capital, and who appeared to run circles around everyone else in the industry.  His pedigree was immaculate with a degree from MIT, parents who both teach at Stanford Law School, and personal connections to top power brokers in Washington, D.C.  SBF also discussed philosophy and poetry and took thoughtful positions on current issues like climate change and animal welfare—offering a more likable, human alternative to other crypto CEOs, whose libertarian views can come across as stark and unsettling.

~ Jeff John Roberts, "How SBF fooled everyone - including me," Fortune, November 14, 2022

(Roberts wrote the Fortune cover story, "The Next Warren Buffett?".)

Anthony Fauci starts to distance himself from his original lockdown advice

I don’t want people to think that any of us feel that staying locked down for a prolonged period of time is the way to go.

~ Anthony Fauci, CNBC interview, May 22, 2020

Ben Stein apologizes to Peter Schiff

Next, here’s a lesson I learned in a 12-step program and should have learned better: avoid contempt prior to investigation. When the financial stock meltdown started, I was on a television show with Peter Schiff of Euro Pacific Capital, who warned that Merrill Lynch could be in very bad shape. I glibly said that I thought that its problems were limited and that the stock was a buy. Mr. Schiff was completely right and I was wrong. I had no idea that Mother Merrill, where I have been a happy stockholder for years, had been turned into a such a wild house of high-stakes gambling. I apologize to Mr. Schiff for my dismissal of his views, which turned out to be far superior to mine in this area. (I could do without his acolytes sending me endless hate mail, though.)

~ Ben Stein, "Lessons From the Pits of Travel and Investment," The New York Times, December 9, 2008

Lowell Ponte comes to his senses about climate change and media fearmongering

But the Leftist press continues to quote bug and flower scientists about global warming - including doomsayers who three decades ago were predicting a fast-approaching, planet-freezing ice age. (I should know, being author of the 1976 Prentice-Hall bestselling climate book The Cooling.)

As you probably recognized, all such Leftist doomsaying - hothouse or ice age, wet or dry, population explosion or drastic decline - calls for the same remedy. We must have bigger government, more political regulation and control, higher taxes, and permit less individual and private sector liberty if we are to survive whatever is this year's fashionable danger.

~ Lowell Ponte, "Prophets of Doom," FrontPageMagazine.com, August 22, 2002