“I’m not a huge believer in people trying to slow me down,” Spiro told me recently over lunch in Miami, Visine in his pocket and his leg jiggling under the table. “There’s somebody I know who describes me as ‘irreverent.’ I think that’s accurate. I’m probably difficult to manage.” Yared Alula, Spiro’s friend and former law-school classmate, told me of Spiro, “He looks at any institution, any rule, as just an opening salvo in a negotiation.”
Spiro’s mother, Cynthia Kaplan, a clinical psychologist who specializes in child and adolescent trauma, noticed that her son was a debater from the start. “At eighteen months, he talked like he does now,” she said. “I remember him saying, ‘Actually, Mom,’ at that age.” He was the first of four children, and spent his early years in Manhattan, where his father, a dentist and an athlete, often brought Spiro along to weeknight basketball games.
Shortly before Spiro started kindergarten, his family moved to Wellesley, Massachusetts. Several years later, Spiro’s comfortable suburban life began to unravel—his parents split up, his mother was working long hours at a hospital, and his father was given a diagnosis of a degenerative neurological disorder, which eventually rendered him blind and unable to walk without assistance. Spiro was suddenly on his own much of the time. “I think he had to fend for himself a lot,” his mother told me. “He became more competitive, more determined in those years.”
When Spiro was in high school, his mother helped him get a job at McLean, the psychiatric hospital where she now worked. There, Spiro spent time with young people who had been given a diagnosis of a spectrum disorder, and was mentored by Shervert Frazier, a prominent psychiatrist who specialized in schizophrenia. Spiro decided to major in psychology at Tufts, and continued working with Frazier. One day, Spiro recalls, Frazier’s assistant told him, “You won’t shut up. You should go to…
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