Name Stealer Scientology One Helluva Drug: Bankman-Fried And Zelensky Not Going To Jail....,

He didn't make the mistakes his predecessor Bernie Madoff made. 

1. He took great care to buy off the regime in power, acting as their bagman for the Ukro-Khazarian money laundering scheme. 

Maxine Waters just blew @SBF_FTX a kiss. Safe to say that went well.😘 pic.twitter.com/C8I90fdmqW

— chochaymon (@ElliottFryback) December 8, 2021

2. He took great care not to rip off his Khazarian co-religionists, who wield outsize influence in America (to the point where an outsider might legitimately assume it is an almost entirely Zionist country). 

And, of course, he must have a substantial amount of blackmail information about Bidencorp's Ukrainian money laundering scheme. 

He's either going to be allowed to flee to a non-extraditable exile - or - commit suicide by a bullet to the back of the head.

astral-codexten |  Tyler Cowen linked Milky Eggs’ excellent overview of the FTX crash. I’m unqualified to comment on any of the financial or regulatory aspects. But it turns out there’s a psychopharmacology angle, which I am qualified to talk about, so let’s go.

1: Was SBF Using A Medication That Can Cause Overspending And Compulsive Gambling As A Side Effect?

 

Probably yes, and maybe it could have had some small effect, but probably not as much as the people discussing it on Twitter think.

Milky Eggs reports a claim by an employee that Sam was on “a patch for designer stimulants that mainlined them into his blood to give him a constant buzz at all times”. This could be a hyperbolic description of Emsam, a patch form of the antidepressant/antiparkinsonian agent selegiline. The detectives at the @AutismCapital Twitter account found a photo of SBF, zoomed in on a scrap of paper on his desk, and recognized it as an Emsam wrapper.

 What’s the blue-green bottle to the left of the red circle?

Here the detectives on r/NootropicsDepot recognized it as their company’s old brand of adrafinil7. Adrafinil is a prodrug of modafinil, an unusual stimulant-like drug. That is, your body metabolizes adrafinil and turns it into modafinil after you take it.

So was SBF effectively on modafinil? Seems likely - many traders are. I won’t lie - modafinil is a good stimulant, during medical residency some doctors (including me) would use it to stay alert through the night shift. It’s not any better than Adderall or anything, just a bit different and easier to get.

Does it affect attitudes to risk? Hopefully you can already predict my answer to that question: all dopaminergics affect attitude to risk in complicated ways we don’t really understand, but for most people these effects will be too small to notice. There’s one case report of modafinil causing pathological gambling, and various contrived studies where neuroscientists investigate how modafinil shifts some technical parameter in a risk curve; these kinds of studies often don’t replicate. I think you can really just stick to your prior of “all dopaminergics affect risk curves in ways we don’t understand, but it’s usually fine when your job doesn’t require perfectly-tuned risk awareness”.

Except - was he taking the selegiline and adrafinil at the same time?

Selegiline prevents the body from breaking down dopamine. Modafinil works by preventing cells from reabsorbing dopamine. If you can’t break it down, and you can’t reabsorb it, what happens? Does it just build up forever until it explodes and you die?

This is what happens with serotonin. If you take a drug that prevents serotonin breakdown (like a traditional MAOI) and a drug that prevents serotonin reuptake (like an SSRI) at the same time, you definitely die. Lots of doctors have noticed that the MAOI + stimulant situation is pretty similar and decided you shouldn’t take these at the same time either. So some people following the FTX situation have wondered whether this combo might have been very dangerous - either to Sam’s health or to his risk-management ability.