Ambitious ghosts

Haunted by wunderkinds and alternative life paths

In “The Marvellous Boys of Palo Alto,” a book review that’s mostly something else, David Leavitt reflects on his childhood as the son of two Stanford professors. His family home was later purchased by the Bankman-Frieds—Stanford Law professors and the parents of Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency exchange FTX founder who was charged with over a dozen fraud and conspiracy counts relating to his company’s implosion. Sam Bankman-Fried is currently under house arrest with his parents in Palo Alto, in David Leavitt’s old home.

Leavitt met the elder Bankman-Frieds once, before FTX was founded. “Both of them struck me as intellectually restless and professionally ambitious in a way that reminded me of the adults I had known as a child—my parents’ friends and my friends’ parents,” Leavitt writes. “My memory of the hour or so that I spent with the Bankman-Frieds is tinged with an unease of which even now I have trouble locating the source.”

Intellectually restless; professionally ambitious. Tinged with unease.

There is something fascinating and chilling about this brief portrait. Without the context of FTX’s collapse and lingering questions surrounding the criminal charges, such a description might not warrant further thought. But it’s hard to resist working backwards and wondering what effect the Bankman-Frieds’ restlessness and ambition had on their son.

Indeed, it’s hard to resist wondering what effect this entire Palo Alto community, one of many neoliberal enclaves of privilege, had on Sam and his peers. After all, Sam Bankman-Fried is but one perceived wunderkind, one marvelous boy who turned out not to know what he was doing, with massive consequences.

Like Leavitt, I grew up amidst wunderkinds. Unlike Leavitt, I’m no wunderkind myself. Instead, perhaps in a subconscious attempt at self-preservation, I left that environment as soon as I felt I could.

Reading Leavitt’s portrait of the Bankman-Frieds brought me uncomfortably back into memories of some of my own parents’ distant friends; to an environment of striving, restlessness, and ambition. A place where everything was a contest, and nothing was good enough.

The California coast, not too far from Palo Alto. Film from March 2023.

In her latest podcast episode, Glennon Doyle discusses her ongoing recovery from an eating disorder. More specifically, she describes the process of confronting the truth many of us, and privileged white girls in particular, learn at a young age: that the only way to stay safe in this society is to limit and restrict and starve ourselves. To be thin, small, and hungry.

As a sober and queer person, Glennon has already done much to unlearn and question the status quo. Yet this latest journey through her recovery from disordered eating feels that much more foundational. Unlearning her eating disorder requires getting in touch with her long-repressed “chubby” former self; it requires getting to the core of “good girl” conditioning that underlies so much of Western culture.

It’s a heavy episode. But the takeaways—that the truest way to live is by feeling our way through foundational problems instead of intellectualizing them, and that ultimately we have to make our own prizes instead of accepting those presented by an unhealthy society—hit deep.

There’s a sickness in our culture that manifests in both anorexic Glennon Doyles and in wunderkind-fiasco Sam Bankman-Frieds. Imagine how both children were treated growing up. Imagine the messaging each got, and where it led them.

Glennon Doyle is also an ambitious over-achiever; restricting her food was in some ways just another manifestation of that. But an eating disorder turns the societal sickness inward. Believing you can outsmart financial regulations, or whatever was behind the FTX collapse, does the opposite: it turns the sickness outward, away from the wunderkind(s), at the expense of millions of people.

I wonder how Barbara Fried, Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother, fits into all this. The more I read about her, the more I see her as one version of my could-have-been multiverse. An ambitious legal scholar pursuing a second career as a fiction writer, whose research focuses on “distributive justice”—the concept of who should receive what, and how much of it, in a given society. It all sounds a bit familiar.

To be fair, my “Barbara Fried” multiverse door closed long ago. I lack the intellectual rigor to be a law professor even if that was still a goal (and it’s not).

But I hold some of her ambition. I have some restlessness and a desire for external validation. I’ve mostly purged this ambition from my work life by choosing an anti-competitive office and practice area. Yet it rears up elsewhere; most recently, in my personal writing. I see it in my hunger for more newsletter followers and in my desire for recognition and validation as a writer: whatever that means.

I’m critical of the Bankman-Frieds and other families of wunderkinds because I see how close I could have come to being like them—how close I could still get, if I’m not vigilant.

In one of the more powerful parts of her recent podcast episode, Glennon Doyle explains that her new goal is to come up with her own prize for self-worth instead of grasping for society’s prize, which was her thinness. She says that the only way to determine this new prize is to intuit it. Intellectualizing won’t work; instead, her brain is where she retreated for so long in an attempt to escape what her body was telling her.

The price of foregoing society’s prizes may well be a loss of external recognition: by honoring her inner needs, Doyle will have to give up the validation of being praised for her hunger. But as Ann Friedman wrote in “What Comes After Ambition?”, it seems a lot of us are arriving at similar conclusions. We don’t want to be sick anymore.

With the collapse of FTX, the Bankman-Frieds join a growing list of examples of the downsides of ambition. The fraud allegations are particularly jarring in light of FTX’s seemingly righteous claims of being based in “effective altruism,” a buzzy so-called social movement to maximize benefits for the most people. Looking back, FTX is a great example of how there are no shortcuts to societal change—especially not ones that involve venture capital backing some perceived marvelous boy.

Indeed, there are no shortcuts to anything worth having. Wisdom is earned through experience, not intellectualizing. It’s gained by feeling our way in the dark and communing with all versions of ourselves, however ugly.

I wonder what wunderkinds live in my old house, on my old block in a wealthy enclave of New York. I wonder what future tech scions and politicians walk the halls of my old schools. Gen Z already seems pretty different—maybe this outdated model really is changing. But still: I hope someone gives those kids the freedom to eat the Oreos, to sleep in on the weekends. The freedom to be ordinary, un-ambitious kids. Our world might very well depend on it.

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