Pushkin. Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making better decisions. I'm Maria Kanikova.
And I'm Nate Silver. Today on the show, we'll talk about the markets and how they're reacting to recent actions by President Trump. I you know, I'll just say this much. You know, I think that Cayman Islands bungalow I was hoping to buy has been undermined by the recent performance my Furrow and.
K On a brighter side, Nate, you might have a chance to go to an island off the coast of Mexico because after that we'll be talking about the return of Billy McFarland and Fire Festival Take two.
Can we pause the show so I can book my ticket right now?
Let's do it.
We're back. I have a I have a one way I I just want to stay there. I don't even want took a return flight. It's yeah, So we're now. I'm were now all a good gun prepared for Fire Festival too, And let's talk on a little bit of markets first.
So right now, as we are recording this, it is Tuesday, March fourth, and I'm saying that because Nate, you and I have both seen I mean the world has seen that economic news in this administration changes very quickly, so it's very important to put this in context. So today, Tuesday, Trump has announced tariffs twenty five percent across the board against Canada and Mexico, ten percent against China. Canada and China have announced their own retaliatory tariffs. The markets are
not happy. Let's talk about what is going on in people's heads kind of what is the decision calculus behind this?
Yeah, I mean it seems like markets are reacting negatively, which is perhaps pretty reasonable. I mean, there are various things going on, right, markets like we don't have a lot of that. I mean, you know, the stock market is not the economy, right. I think the stock market sometimes is a better measure of economic vibes, and it's a bit mixed. And if you survey, look at surveys of hiring managers and CEOs, I mean they're generally pretty
bullish on Trump. That's one of his bigger constituencies. But yeah, Look, according to Polymarket, which I'm an advisor, there is now a thirty eight percent chance of a United States recession this year in twenty twenty five. That's way up in recent days. It had been twenty two percent, which is kind of a base rate about one in five years.
You go into a recesion. The economy can't be forecasted very well more than about six months in advance, but roughly double to almost forty percent as a result of the terriffs, as a result of some consumer sentiment data, consumers who do not like the Joe Biden economy. According to the University of Michigan's Consumer Sentiment Index, it's now worse than it was last year, which was bad enough to get Biden out in Democrats. I guess Kamala Harris
eventually ousted from office. So people are reacting to this on different loves of the economy, right, and the goodwill that Trump has built up with Wall Street types. I think, you know, look, maybe there's some naive tea about people thinking they have a tear navi ta. I don't know
about people, but it's a fancy word. But like people were on Wall Street where I think naive about the fact that like a, I mean, Trump is a guy who I'm not sure you'd always say that he does what he says he's gonna do, but like he's pretty literal about things. There's some decoding and he said, yeah, I'm going to have tariffs and kinda a Mexaco beat up the kids and if if they'll give me their lunch money. And so the other countries are not happy about all of this. By the way, we mentioned this
last week. Friedrich Mertz, the new German chancellor elect, was like, I don't want have anything to do with the US anymore. Right, that seemed bad to me too. So other countries are noticing the domestic politics of you know, giving the bowl of your lunch money, so the different levels of this. But nobody likes this phenomenon.
No nobody likes this phenomenon. And I think the markets have you know, it's very funny because the markets, I think are yo yoing much more than usual because of the uncertainty and no one knows, you know, what the hell's going to happen, what Trump is actually going to do, because they really after the initial right, you remember they went down when back in February when Trump was saying, oh, We're going to have tariffs, and then they like rallied
and they more than rallied. They went crazy right when it was like, oh right, we always knew that they were going to not you know, not have the tariffs. They want to believe, right, Like I think that there's this market they want to believe in Trump. It's kind of what you were saying that Wall Street has been on his side and they want the markets to rally, and so they've taken every excuse to try to rally. And now it was like, oh shit, right the tariffs
are actually being implemented, and he said they're like done. Right, we've implemented the tariffs. That trade war has started. And part of me is like, guys, like you should have foreseen this, right, this should have been built in. You should have you should have known this was coming. So now we're seeing this huge correction. Actually NATTEK isn't a correction by the technical sense, so we've officially entered a correction. And the you know, the reason this is happening, I
think is because of this disconnect. Right, you want to believe in Trump and then he does something like this and you're like oops, shit, Like he said he was going to do it and then he actually did it. He didn't listen to reason because I think that people misunderstand that he's actually going to kind of listened to advisors. Listen to this and realize this is not the good thing that you think it is for the economy. Right. Inflation is going to go up, Prices are going to
go up. Uh, Tariffs on China not a good thing because prices are going to go up, you know, are our exports are going to suffer? There's there are so many downstream effects and people and saying, oh, he'll understand, and he won't actually do it, but he did it. I think a broader point, though, is that I actually, like, I think that Trump is misunderstanding kind of the game theory of what he's doing. So fundamentally, you know, we
talk about game theory a lot on this show. Fundamentally, what you want is, you know, you need in order to figure out the game and the strategy, you need to figure out what the payoff matrix is, right, Like that's number one, right, Like to know what game we're playing, you need to figure out, Okay, what are the payoffs? Right? What's the structure of the game, to figure out what quadrant do I want to land and what do I want to do? What do I want my policy to
actually accomplish? And in everything, So I think the economy is part of this. But we're seeing this with just Trump's America First policy in general, with him kind of burning alliances, with the you know, outrageous way that he behaved towards Zelonsky, like going back on US promises basically just bridges left and right and saying we don't need allies.
He's behaving as if, oh, we don't need we don't need Europe, we don't need China, we don't need Canada, we don't need Mexico, like America can do this alone. And I think that it's a misunderstanding of the payoff matrix.
I think that he actually doesn't understand that something that all Republican presidents have understood up until this point, which is that America First, you need the alliances in order for you know, security and American prosperity, that you actually can't go it alone and that you have you know that that's a fundamental miscalculation of the game that you're playing.
And he thinks that, you know, if I, if I try to bully everyone, then all of a sudden, you know, I'm going to be kind of king of the world. And that's not the way that it works. That's not the way that people respond, and I think that he's going to end up in the wrong quadrant, and unfortunately, you know, America with him. While while these policies are in place, and you'll see that in economic blowback, you'll see that, in political blowback, you'll see that probably in
a recent session. You'll see all sorts of downstream effects of these policies that I don't think. I certainly can't even begin to imagine what that's going to look like. But it does come from this misunderstanding of what truly America first would mean. Right, What do you need in order for in order to get into the quadrant where America is doing well? And thinking that you can do it by yourself by burning out bridges is wrong.
We're not asking Trump to put anyone other than America first, right, We're saying that, like Trump's first, of all, a lot of people is misunderstanding. Right. They assume that game theory only applies to zero some games, And I guess it's narrowly to the first problems in game theory concern primarily zero some games. But most games are cooperative games or they're mixed games, right where they're positive. Some we have if you and I are like negotiating together a contract.
Let's say a sponsor wanted to sponsor the show, but they want to negotiate with us like individually, and they had like a fixed pool of money. Right, so we both have cooperative and adversarial incentives. You know. On the one hand, we both lose if we do you know, let's do some ad really in the show, right, we both lose if the deal breaks up because we can't come to an agreement. The other hand, we might have some trade off between what you want and what I want.
You know. Most games are kind of more like that, right, And like the game of like international trade. If my country manufactures autos really well and your country has really nice coffee beans, just based on the factors of production in our respective markets. Like you know, if I'm shitty at making coffee, what country is bad at making coffee? Who's bad at making coffe? I mean, let's put Germany.
There's I don't think there's a second that Germany does not grow coffee, And I don't think that's ny.
Good at cars, bad at coffee. There you go, Yeah, the German. You don't want the Germans to make their own coffee of their own have you ever fucking like tacos in Germany? It's a disaster, right, we want Germany to import coffee and tacos and Zell pharmaceutical shit, and like cars and watches and all the things that Germans are you know, pillsner We want trade, right. That actually
is not zero sum, even in the prisoner's lembit. The most famous problem in game theory is actually about what happens when people cannot cooperate and they behave zero some because I think they're gonna be cheated.
Yep, exactly exactly. I think that's also a misunderstanding of the prisoner's dilemma. And by the way, game theory and we talk about the game the Prisoner's Dilemma a lot because that's kind of the most famous game, but game theory is not just the prisoner's dilemma. Right, So many people just think that, oh, game theory, prisoner's dilemma. No, there's so many coordination games. There's so many you know,
there's so many different games at play here. And you know what what Thomas Schulling could have got the Nobel Prize for was describing that, you know, all of these strategies are incredibly nuanced, and that you're like the madman's strategy is you know what happens when you act like a madman? Literally that you know you could You're capable of doing anything like sure, I'll rip out my steering wheel so that I can't actually have my car veer off course and I have to go straight. Sure I'm
going to drop the nukes. I could do anything. You know, it might work in a very very limited scenario, but it can also lead to the end of the world. And it's not a good strategy, right, Like, at the end of the day, that's not how you're going to accomplish your goals. That's not how you're going to put
yourself in the winning position. And so I would even argue, like, like you said, we're not saying put anyone but America first, Like, in order for America to prosper, you need to coordinate, you need to cooperate, you need to forge alliances, like
that is the backbone of the global order. And that's why America has been doing so well because it has had this sort of kind of benign influence and people have built up goodwill and that evaporates in a second, and then what happens, right, what happens when you try to be kind of the bully and the person who says, you know, do what I say or else, and people realize, oh,
we can't trust you. Right now, you're actually forcing people into exactly what you said with the prisoner's dilemma, where it's in both people's interests to try to coordinate, but you can't because you think that you're going to be cheated. You think that you cannot Actually you're not talking with a reliable partner. I mean, that's everything. We're also in a repeated game, right, this is not a one shot game. This is the global order. It's like repeated game. Reputation matters.
Reputation is crucial when you're playing a repeated game.
Yeah, and if you look at like empirical deviations from game theory, or maybe they're kind of like rational like on a deeper level, Right, there are two primary characteristics, which is that at first, people are actually more cooperative
in the prisoner's dilemma than game theory might predict. Right, they kind of assume, hey, without an explicit coordination, that we're all shared humanity and these people are probably gonna help a stranger out as a default maybe, right, But then when they feel betrayed, people really seek revenge, And you could argue it's rational over to some very long run period because that like if you seek revenge, even to your own destruction, then people will be much more
reluctant to fuck with you. But revenge seeking seems to be like very ingrained. And also like I've been trying to think about like the analogy of Canada and Mexico and what position they're in, and like, yeah, you can use anology of like they are are the bullies, but it's like more like, uh, they get it both ways though, right. They now just more like maybe you have like a boss.
There's a little bit of sexual harassing here and there, right, and you're like, well, do I want to like blow up my employment or cause a whole controversy by pointing out that this is inappropriate conduct? Right? But also like maybe they're like coworkers are like super concerned about this kind of thing, right, And the coworkers say, if you all sent er to the boss, we're going to disown you and ostracize you. So like you have like they're really kind of not in a good position either way.
It's talking about kind of tacklating with the least worst outcomes. This is not a good thing for Canada in Mexico. It makes all their options worse. By the way, some of the reason why the bullying, well he is bullying them is because like Canadian and Mexican imports are like two percent of US GDP each, like one and a half percent or something. We make a lot of our own stuff, where a big country of other trading partners, although that many of them are also under terrorists or
threat of teriffs. But you know, if we had to go it alone, it might be enough to put economy into a recession. But like for mexicoor Canada, if you shut off the borders, it would send them to a profound crisis. There might be spill over effects. But we are the more powerful entity in this scenario. But still yeah, even in poke, the big stack doesn't want to know. The big scessarily antagonize the short stack, and even the big stack would rather not get into unnecessary confrontations.
Absolutely, and if the big stack misplays that, so a lot of people once they get a big stack, they just they think that you're supposed to bully everyone right, you're supposed to raise every hand, especially if you're getting if you're on the bubble, which is the money point of the poker tournament or the final table, you know, they just go crazy and that's how they bust and lose their big stack, right, because people start seeing what
they're doing, they start fighting back, And small stacks have a ton of power, right because if you are a big stack who's constantly opening, and I have, say ten big blinds, I can shove on you. And if you're you know, once that happens a few times, you either have to fold right and there goes two big blinds or however much you raised, or you call me and I actually have a hand, and you lose ten big blinds, right, and now I'm suddenly a twenty big blind stack. And
this can happen over and over. And I've actually seen really big stacks just dwindle instead of becoming big when people realize that, oh, hey, I can push back here, right, I have a perfectly sized amount of chips to actually really be in a position to fight back because I can hurt you. And instead of a chip leader, you're going to go to medium sized stack.
Ye.
But yeah, no's that's a very big misconception. And just to go back to what you were saying a little bit, you were talking about the evolutionary sec of game theory, but there's actually also just some you know, straight up history of game theory when computers and different strategies were set up against each other to try to figure out, you know, what does the best. And first the first strategy that ended up doing well. So this goes back
to your kind of retaliatory thing is tit for tat? Right, So you start off cooperating and if you know, if the other person cooperates, you're in a cooperative loop, right, So you end up in this cooperative loop. Everyone's great. If they stop, then tit for tat, right, So if they defect, then you start to affecting, and all of a sudden, you know you're in a tit for tat strategy.
You're you're no longer in a cooperative roof. So that strategy one and then another strategy beat it, and that strategy was instead of tit for tat, tit for two tats. So basically, you you let that harassment go on a little bit, right, you give them a shot, So you don't affect immediately. You actually kind of wait because what if that defection was a mistake, right, what if there was what if there was something else going on? What
if you know, the person got distracted. Let's give people a better shot and tit for two tats ended up being the winning strategy, so that that was kind of the the thing that beat everyone, and you know, but clearly like at this point, we're not in that anymore because at some point you do have to retaliate and you're out of the cooperative spiral, and those strategies, by the way, do a lot worse, right, So those those are not winning strategies. So it's I think that's kind.
Of where we are. And we'll be right back after this break.
When you're talking about human nature. The other games that we should just talk about a little bit. There's a lot of work that's been done on things like the Dictator game.
Right.
The Dictator games say I have ten points, Nate, and I get to award them between you and me, and I can take all ten for myself, right, And people don't do that. People are actually and I can take eight for myself and give you two, or I can be like, oh, o get right, I'll take seven for myself. Final I'll give you three. But people end up being much more fair than you know, game theory would would predict, just in a pure self interested way. People end up,
you know, giving pretty equitable divisions. It's actually very close to like, Okay, i'll give you half and I'll keep half, because you know we're we're not monsters, and people are actually pretty generous in those types of situations, and especially if this is a repeat game, reputation repeat interactions are our first impulses, and to be like, I'm going to take it all for myself, even if I don't know that I'm going to be playing with you, because I
also think that it's reputation in your own head, right, you don't want to be you don't want to think of yourself as the type of person who's going to take all ten points for themselves and you know, just screw the other, the other person in this interaction. So I think we have there are some really interesting findings from those kinds of games where you see that, you know,
people's tendencies tend to be much nicer. But I think Trump would take ten and give you zero and say that that serves his long term interest, not realizing that that's going to piss you off. Right, You're not going to be happy when you get zero. You're not going to be happy when you get when he's like, okay, fine, you can have one, right, Like, you are also now going to be happy in that scenario, and that's going to have very real long term consequences.
Yeah, And the line between altruism and revenge, I think is actually often kind of thin, right. Yeah, you know you say, I am going to seek revenge to defend my people in my way of life, right, sacrificing yourself and maybe guying a hero or whatever. Right, Like, that's I think actually kind of part of the same instinct. And people don't like to be put in a place where they have fewer options. And this ship builds up
over time too. You know, maybe one reason why two tits for a tat this sounds like X rated.
I'm not the one who named it. I'm not the one who named these strategies. You don't want triple tits. I don't know what's going on there, but like, but like it's much harder to rebuild trust than to undo.
Yes, right, Yes, that's a fundamental point.
You know, if you're in a close relationship and you catch a partner cheating on you, then takes a lot of convincing that that won't happen again. Right, You might overlook the first one for whatever reasons, but like the second time, there's a fucking hope to like rebuild trust unless there's many years of you know, cooperative behavior potentially. So, like, I think Canada Mexico have like not been a rational say, and Trump is like erratic. Some might say he's a madman, right,
That has a sching different connotation in game theory. It can mean that, like because you're a predictable that can serve as an effective deterrent sometimes, right, But I think not in like this more kind of pedestrian territory of like,
because Trump is not threatening mutually assured destruction. Right if we completely cut off permanently imports of Canada and Mexico, that would hurt the economy a lot in the short run, but like America could survive that and eventually replaced the production, et cetera. So it's not like mutually assured destruction. But like, but he is erratic, maybe in the stupid now Jays before, like the the boss was having a bad day or was ambiguous, right, I mean Trump and JD. Vans, et
cetera sometimes try to maintain some degree of ambiguity. It's a I think one of the things they're better about, like say something outrageous but like not quite you know, but it said jokingly, right, And and the Libs always take it super literally when maybe they shouldn't, And so like they play with the ambiguity in the way. It's like, I think, a bit effective sometimes. But now you know, can of Mexico, Like, I mean, what are they supposed
to do? Right? Like you can't Like I just thought this was like there wasn't really even like a pretext or why we're re establishing the terrorist I think the market and I wrote this at the time, so this is not me in hindsight bias, right, I think the market at the time was naive to assume that like postponing these things for a month was a good sign, right, and that and that you know, the Trump of like the second term, seems much more determined to blow the
world order up. Right. Yeah, he's not bluffing as much. He's being advised by people who are maybe more deranged in some ways, I think, right, No, I mean I think it is.
It is kind of exactly what you're saying, blowing up the world order from the inside and you know, from the outside, because he's doing it both within the country and outside of its borders. Canada, Mexico not being irrational, China not being irrational at all, Ukraine not being irrational, because you know, the only way to kind of stop bullies is to is to grow a spine and to actually try to stand up and try to get them to honor their guarantees and to be like, hey, you know.
I Zolensky meeting was interesting.
I think it was probably one of the lowest points in American foreign policy and history. And it was tough televis.
It was a spect I mean, Zelensky did have this, you know, I put it like this, right, there was some element of pride. I'm not sure i'd say it's revenged, but he thinks that, like so first of all, he thinks that like deals involving Russia without security guarantees are and he was saying, like, look, Russia has violated these agreements so many times. They're not trustworthy at all. And I'm kind of like, aren't sitting here smiling and nodding
to sign this agreement that I want? Right, I'm listening to all this naive bullshit about Russia and Trump and JD Vance don't seem to don't seem to understand her. If they do understand it, I mean, Jady Vance is a they're all different, interrupt you.
For a second. Like Trump, I get okay, like he's just being an idiot, But like JD Vance went to ye law, like doesn't he know history? Like I thought that he would be a little bit smarter in terms of understanding that sucking up to Putin ain't it right?
I just I thought that, naively, perhaps that jd Bands would have a better grasp of the history and the game theoretical dynamics here and realize that to get where he wants to go, appeasing Putin is not I mean maybe in the immediate immediate term, so that he stays as VP. But I just, like, you know, seeing this makes him seem a lot dumber than I thought he was.
One thing Trump is very consistent about is that if you get in his bad side, unless there's some very naked pigic incentive to recooperate, right, Like you know, he doesn't give people a lot of room for discriminate. It was fasting, By the way, I would recommend watching the whole Trump Zelensky meeting and partet is of like the body language, and you see kind of like Zelensky is increasingly gently but less and less gently try suggests that
like Russia is not a reliable partner. And then you see Trump kind of who starts out like hit anyone on the back literally, right, do you see Trump's body language kind of change and he's like, I'm gonna give you your one time, right, tit? But if it's a double a tit tit right. But it's an example of how like like I'm not sure if he was acting narrowly rationally, right, you probably just have to suck it up.
If you're being narrowly rational and suck it up, and then later on you can yell at Trump on the phone or probably go through an intermediary or have Makarrubio
and the Ukrainian counterpart duke it out or whatever it else. Right, But like you know, I think he had like some trouble sucking up his pride and cowtowing to this bully who was who is you know, naive about like Russia's willingness to go along with these with these guarantees, right, And like I'd be like that, man, this is why, like this is I'd be a fair trouble fucking I'd be like, fuck, you know what, I've listened to this bullshit Donald for half an hour now, and like, give
me a fucking break, right, I'd do it in front of all the cameras, and like I would you know, my coundery probably get like nuked as a result. But like, but you can, you can respect Zelensky as a human being and also understands in a terrible position, and he's probably right on the merits, right, But like but like, at the same time, like.
I actually no, I disagree that he should have just sucked it up, because that's that's also that he's he's between a rock and a hard place, right he he needs he needs it, he needs help, right, But sucking it up with no security guarantees from the United States would have been I think also an absolute disaster and
a disaster for kind of the world order. So I think in a way what he did was more altruistic because he's kind of he's still trying to kind of stand up like put himself because Ukraine has been kind of the one thing that has been stopping World War three and Putin's takeover of Europe.
It's hard for people when they experience a worse thaning of their situation, their expected value to prefer right, It's hard people to distinguish between relatively more bad and relatively less bad options.
Right.
You know, you sometimes see like a poker player kind of like put money in at the end where they
don't think their opponent is bluffing. They're really disappointed by how the hands played out, right, and they kind of can't quite admit that their situation that they're worse than that, and they almost punish themselves and saying, Okay, I'll call against someone that if they kind of detach themselves from the situation, would say, yeah, that guy's never bluffing or bluffing half as often as he would need to be
to make that call correct. Right, Like that situation is is tough, Right, I mean, you're experiencing a loss of esteem. People are yelling at you and your country for things going badly. There are worse two I mean, I think people sometimes to estimate when you have an increase in your welfare, your EV and you have multiple good options.
People I think are also sometimes like not opportunistic enough about saying, Okay, really good option A is actually a lot better than merely pretty good option B, and you don't have a situation happened all that often, So like take time and think about that and maximize when you can, you know. But like, apart from you know, people are going to comparing good versus bad. Degrees of goodness versus degrees of badness are harder for people to deal with.
Yeah, for sure, for sure, And this is but I think that we're in a I think we can both agree that we're in a very bad situation right now and the game theory is not looking good and we're not in a very good cooperative spiral when it comes to anything, you know, economy, foreign policy. So let's let's see what happens. And yeah, let's see where we are next week on that note, day too, want to take a little break and talk about the fire festival rebirth.
Let's do it. Maria, So Nate, I was, you know.
I should not be shocked. I wrote a book about con artists and about how they operate and about you know, how the whole world works. But I was actually a little bit shocked to find out last week that Billy McFarland, who went to prison after he had tried to organize this music festival, the Fire Festival, sparked not one but two documentaries about it where he promised this luxurious getaway, you know, luxurious island, all this amazing stuff, and you
know it was a complete fraud and fiasco. No music, no food, no transportation, no housing, no no nothing. Anyway, dude went to jail partly for wire fraud. While he was in jail, by the way, he ended up starting a ticket selling business, which ended up getting him an even longer sentence because that was also fraudulent. So he just doesn't give up. He's now out. I think he served a little bit less than four years, and he has announced fire festival too.
Are you going this time a risky biz pop up there?
Exactly? It's going to be at play a fire on a Mexican island called Isla Muheres, the Island of Women.
I mean, it's not surprising why I think you'd say that, Like Billy for an in the podcast. I'm just kidding. It's not surprising that like the current artists would want to like try desperately to like run back the con right, I mean that seems like typical.
Absolutely, absolutely, And so he owes a lot of money, right, he owes millions of dollars for restitution for kind of the money lost in the Fire festival. And he is now, so, Nate, do you want to guess what the ticket prices? So there are two thousand tickets available to Fire Festival too, and there's a range of ticket prices. We're at a floor of one four hundred dollars and a ceiling of
one point one million dollars. And he is promising the exact same shit that he promised last time, that you're going to have an artist's palace, all this amazing stuff, VIP experiences. None of this has been built. And by the way, Mexican officials have said, hey, no one has applied for any permits, like, we don't know about this. I think we have zero applications for permits to do
this on isladness. And apparently even if you go to the GPS like little pin that he put on the website, it drops you into the ocean, which probably is much more par for the course than being dropped on the island itself. So that's actually probably the most truth telling part of all of this. It tells you exactly where you're going to go, and I will not be surprised. So normally I'm firmly, firmly on the side of victims.
I was firmly on the side of the victims of the fire fraud because you know, they didn't know it was going to be a fraud. At that point. It seemed, you know, there was John Rule, all of these people endorsing it, you know, who the hell knew who. Billy McFarland was like, if they want to spend money to go to this amazing experience on the island in the Bahamas, amazing, right, Like, that's good for them, Like these are not don't judge people because they want to go to a fancy music concert,
Like that's their prerogative. And some of these people had no money, right, Like, they saved up for a year to be able to go to be able to go there, So I was firmly on their side. However, if you buy tickets to Fire Festival too, I'm sorry, this is I'm going to go from I'm no longer going to be a victim advocate here. This is one of those you know, fool me once situations and fool me twice, like are you fucking kidding me? Like what are you thinking?
Like con artists, I think I've told you this before. They have suckers lists, so and you sell these for a lot of money, which is people who've fallen for phone scams, email scams, et cetera in the past, and these this is a very very valuable list because they're much more likely to fall forward again if they've already
fallen for it once. So the Fire Festival should have a sucker's list if anyone actually ends up doing this again, because if someone believes that, oh well, the first time, you know, he messed up, But this time it's really going to be great. Man, I've got I've got so many bridges to sell you. It's not even funny.
We want it be like all like New York magazine writers writing ironically detached profile pieces of this, but there's an audience for it. If I got a ticket for free, I would go. I would absolutely because there's a performance art element to this. Oh absolutely, I would if someone wants to sponsor me to go to the Fire Festival and write about it, maybe I'm not valuing my time and I'll do it.
I'll do it as you know. It's part of it's part of my uh, it's part of my background.
You know.
I wrote a book on con artists.
Book.
My next book is about cheating. I will happily go and cover the Fire Festival. So if anyone wants to sponsor me, please, I will not think you're a sucker for buying that ticket. But something tells me that I might not even get to go right, Like is this even going to happen right? Like there have been zero permits, Like he clearly wants to raise money so that you know, he can have money, and he just can't help himself.
What I know about con artists is that they do not go straight right like, they do not magically reform, especially like the ones on the level of Billy McFarland who have been doing this. There are people, you know who talked about his childhood. I was one of the talking heads on the documentaries, so so I kind of went into what went in deep with that this is a guy who's been doing this his whole life and has been misrepresenting himself his whole life. He's not looking
to become a successful entrepreneur, businessman, event planner. Like he's going to keep taking his money, and I just want to know, like who is willing to back him?
Right, Okay, they play advocate Sometimes people like psyche themselves out of that, like they do. Okay, it would be such an obvious con that like that exactly. Yeah, poper is sometimes true and sometimes like sometimes being caught bluffing and poker can deter people from bluffing again, right, I can't think of most other real world snaries, but that's it.
But that's very different because in poker, like bluffing is part of the game, right, and some people, so it's it's like you're still playing by the rules and when you call someone you're not, so it's it's it's a
little bit different. So I think that think about it. Actually, I think this is more like angle shooting and poker instead of bluffing, right, which if you're not a poker player, angle shooting is basically going right up until the edge, bending the rules, doing things that are like frankly kind of sleazy and scummy. But you're not technically cheating, and you're doing it to try to get information, to try to get a reaction out of your opponent, to try
to gain an edge in a scummy way. You're going right up until that point where you can actually be disqualified for it. People who are known angle shooters, they are known angle shooters. If you call them out on it, that is not going to make them less likely to angle shoot next time. They are going to try it again and see like, okay, well you know, nothing really happened, like let me see if I can do this again, right, like,
let me see if I can angle shoot again. And they keep doing it, even if they have known reputations for doing it. I think that that's the better analogy here, that we're dealing with someone who just doesn't give a fuck and and gets off on it and wants to be able to have this sort of image reputation because he's not doing this for the money, right like he
owes a lot of money. He was already in jail, And I think that I think the motivations here are are quite different, and and he's will he will keep trying it again. But as you say, you know, people do have this mentality of oh, well, it can't happen again, so this time I'm definitely okay, and you fall forward again, and yeah, our minds and our powers of rationalization are truly epic. I want to revisit this, Nate in you know, in a few months to see if Fire Festival two
is moving forward. And I will be very, very curious to know if we're going to have a second documentary made about fire to and the great fraud and how in the world did someone pay one point one million for the IP experience. On that note, dear listeners, Nate and I are going to go and try to find sponsorships to go and fly out to Fire Festival too, so that we can take a Risky Business podcast from the island of Les Mohetas. Let us know what you think of the show. Reach out to us at Risky
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Risky Business is hosted by me Maria Kannakova.
And by me Nate Silver. The show is a co production of Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia. This episode was produced by Isabelle Carter. Our associate producer is Gabriel Hunter Chang. Sally Helm is our editor, and our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein. Mixing by Sarah Bruguer.
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