15,911 words now (not including footnotes) (I edited a bit)

Hillary Clinton looking underwhelmed. Text: “Clinton clashes with Boebert over Pizzagate conspiracy questioning”

I’m amazed she only looks this disdainful.

Incidentally, the economics I describe above are also the business model of the smelly comic shop at the mall. As in: you can feed a family off this.

Entirely correct.

For a sense of the economics: cards from a booster pack sold as singles will usually bring in about $5. But a single ultra-rare foil card will often sell for $50 or more. Don’t need many of those to pay off that $200.

I’m sure they weren’t calibrating them at all. Could be that they had 2 scales, 1 for the store and 1 for home. But if you weigh the packs in the store first then take them home for the better scale and then return the ones that are the “wrong” weight, you can accomplish a lot.

I would dispute your second paragraph based on actual store footage I’ve seen.

The way people were doing this was sufficiently not tradecraft that it was in Reddit posts. They were going into Target/Walmart with digital scales and weighing the packs. (This was of course back when cards just sat on the store shelf.) How we thwarted them is the tradecraft.

Fair note. I should have specified I wasn’t trying to correct you but instead to provide some extra context for people reading along.

I will accept this from people on vacation, but I know that’s not who you’re talking about and your position on them is correct.

Accurate.

Imagine using the expression “elite human capital” and then immediately listing the biggest dorks on the planet.

And no, that story isn’t going in the book, because: tradecraft. Those aren’t my stories to tell.

This relates to a fun bit of tradecraft that I know about Pokemon cards and how we developed countermeasures to people trying to snipe packs with foil cards.

To your knowledge. But I was a loyal soldier in the Console Holy Wars of the early 2000s.

Fair note, but I would think distance was something you’d optimize for in this particular transaction.

I would have thought the pro move to be going to Mecca, not Riyadh, because no Muslim will bomb the Holy Sites and so that’s the one place you’re guaranteed to be safe from Iranian missiles.

Maybe it’s Riyadh because their customers are Westerners.

I am the worst person on earth. This is known.

Things behave funny at scale. That little anti-counterfeiting band adds a few grams.

Have you tried to raise money recently though. Turns out all those people who claimed to be geniuses with “balls of steel” were really just taking advantage of ZIRP and can’t do a goddamn thing without that cushion.

Folks keep using the term hedge fund but there aren’t as many of those in Dubai as one might think. Dubai has a lot of “wealth management” funds, which are far different. Those people don’t put their money in risky ventures, so they’re not about spotting risk. They’re about spotting easy profit.

Need to make sure you charter the right plane.

Correct. He is also the only person I know who can tell you the weight of a pallet of hundred dollar bills.

Speaking as a person who spent 16 years on the C-suite: confirmed.

I tell this story in more depth in my book but: not just hedge funds. I spent the week before the launch of Pokémon GO wargaming what would happen if Niantic went bankrupt after launch. Famously, that didn’t happen. My CFO felt this was wasting time because it don’t happen. But it could have.

This is a correct take. To your note about the size of the fee: my aforementioned friend makes VERY good money doing what he does.

The thing is, there are risks and there are risks, which I admit is kind of like Donald Rumsfeld’s known unknowns (a much more astute observation than most people realize).

Your observation, though, is apposite.

Accurate. I have a different friend who was the general counsel of a mine in Madagascar. He lives in Tokyo now, after his company got him and his wife out after a coup in (I believe) 2016. The private jet can take all sorts of forms, but it’s always available.

I have a friend whose job is what’s called in the trade “extraordinary rendition”. He told me yesterday that he’s getting a lot of calls.

People are making fun of this quote. It’s entirely accurate. I don’t exactly feel for these people, but I can see how it never entered their minds.