Quoting Byrne Hobart:

the heart of a grift is that you get something that, in a technical sense, is what you paid for, but that is also not worth what you paid for it.

the broad categories of finance grift are:

1. A fancy-sounding high-fee wrapper on something that is trivial to implement manually, and
2. A strategy that looks good in backtests because it has some kind of nonlinear blow-up risk.

grifts tend to target the middle of whatever the relevant bell curve is. There are a lot more average people than non-average people, so the market is bigger. And their averageness makes it easier to reason about their motivations.[3] Targeting the average also enables the plausibly-deniable part of the grift: the fitness influencer really did sell you a product that meets the specifications, the inverse-vol note did disclose in its prospectus that it could blow up.

The pre-Internet white collar economy was basically a universal job guarantee for personable people. That’s increasingly going away, to be replaced with a more neoliberal attention economy with a more extreme distribution of outcomes. And one result of that is that it’s possible to craft an online persona as the top of funnel for some product.

the difference comes back to extroversion (as well as moral flexibility): a grift achieves a healthy ratio of customer lifetime value to customer acquisition cost by making sure customers pay as much as possible upfront and are cheap to replace. So an extrovert who thrives on having a new audience all the time will also prosper from a business model where everyone who is burned out by working with them is quickly replaced by someone new. This shows up in the high-fee finance grift in a very specific way: a high cost structure for a fund with a commoditized offering can fund a sales force that persuasively argues it’s not commoditized after all.