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Mike Pesca (3:33)

I don't know that the National Institutes.

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Mike Pesca (3:47)

It's about himss.

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Mike Pesca (4:39)

All in one place.

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Mike Pesca (5:14)

You know what you need to do?

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Mike Pesca (5:35)

Again, the flavor isn't cornbread.

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Mike Pesca (5:53)

Stress, relaxation, sleep.

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Mike Pesca (6:12)

Cornbread to think of the feeling of.

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Mike Pesca (6:25)

Right now.

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Sarah Heppala (6:44)

Good morning, Sarah Hepla.

Nancy Rommelman (6:46)

Good morning, Nancy Ramaman. I have a cold and my hair is dirty. How are you doing?

Sarah Heppala (6:50)

I'm good. Does the morning sun in my face show my age?

Nancy Rommelman (6:53)

A little bit.

Sarah Heppala (6:54)

A little bit. Well, that's all right, everybody. If you're not a paid subscriber yet, tell them, Sarah, what are they going to do?

Nancy Rommelman (7:00)

Oh, yeah, you got to subscribe to YouTube so that you can see Nancy's real age. It's. It's so high. It's so, so high.

Sarah Heppala (7:09)

No, you got.

Nancy Rommelman (7:10)

Oh, I'm sorry. What are they supposed to do? Become a subscribe to the YouTube channel and then you're going to kiss me and Kat Rosenfeld. It's going to be a makeup session.

Sarah Heppala (7:20)

We're going to start this again.

Nancy Rommelman (7:21)

No we're not. We're not. I'm doubling down. This is how it opens. I would be remiss if I didn't say that we had a Zoom hang this Sunday.

Sarah Heppala (7:31)

Oh, okay. I'm glad you reminded me of that. That's good. No, since she didn't pick up my cue, you should become a paid subscriber because it's my birthday in two days and that's going to be a birthday present to me. That's all I wanted to say. Sarah Heppala. That's it. Maybe I have to get our guest to say it. Mike, do you want to say it instead?

Mike Pesca (7:51)

Yeah. You led me away from your home.

Nancy Rommelman (7:53)

That's right.

Mike Pesca (7:54)

You saved me from being alone. You stole my heart. And that's what really hurts.

Sarah Heppala (7:57)

That's right.

Mike Pesca (7:59)

No one knows this. No one knows this. But when I was in college, I did stand up comedy. And my. One of my jokes, I did jokes about classic rock songs. And one of my jokes was Rod Stewart. Maggie Mae, when he sings it in concert, remember he sang it about a woman who was 50. Now Maggie Mae is 80 years old, and this is like 40 years old. So Maggie is dead. And I did a bit about Maggie walking around the nursing home about having sex with Rod Stewart. But what I'm saying is everything comes around. And of Rod Stewart's lyrics, it's better. You're an essay and glamour. Please, please. Pardon the grammar, which is not grammar and doesn't exactly rhyme.

Sarah Heppala (8:36)

We're here with Mike Pesca this morning, everybody. In case. In case nobody groked. And we're glad to be. Because just first of all, because we like Mike. We love Mike, the great Mike Pesca. But also because Sarah has a burning question. I. It's not burning me. It's like. It's like I have a small uti. Sarah has a big uti. It's really burning.

Nancy Rommelman (8:57)

God, this is our worst podcast. Mike. I'm sorry, you're on it. It's. It's.

Mike Pesca (9:03)

No, it's good. Knee jerk Nancy and Sarah Heppel is burning questions. And then we play the Sounder Burning questions. And then we have cranberry juice or something like that.

Nancy Rommelman (9:14)

I do have a burning UTI of a question.

Mike Pesca (9:16)

I'll be the cranberry.

Nancy Rommelman (9:17)

But before that, I'm going to do a brief overlong intro of our gu. Guest, if that's okay. Just to get everything.

Mike Pesca (9:24)

Interrupt it like Michael Lindsay.

Nancy Rommelman (9:26)

Oh, my God, please, would you please just fight?

Mike Pesca (9:28)

No, I'm not. That didn't happen. I was in college. Never Knew him. Why are you saying that? It's her, not me. It's her, right?

Nancy Rommelman (9:36)

It was amazing. I feel like I graduated into a new level of podcasting after that interview. Mike Pesca is the host of the Gist podcast.

Mike Pesca (9:46)

No, I'm not. Why would you say that's not true?

Nancy Rommelman (9:49)

I know that it's the longest running daily news podcast, but he's so many other things. A former sports broadcaster and NPR contributor, a one time Jeopardy Contestant, a standup comic, the most frequent male guest on Smokem, which makes him the voice of men, whether he likes it or not. He's part Italian, which means I'll have to ask him about Mario Cuomo. And he once did an NPR podcast called On Gambling with Mike Pesca, which means we'll probably have to talk about this sports gambling thing I've managed to learn nothing about. And we'll. We'll talk about other things. Maybe the great feminization, maybe hormones and testosterone and women's sex drives. We'll find out. It's always a cliffhanger when Mike Pesca is around. Mike Pesca. Welcome to smoke him if you got him.

Mike Pesca (10:38)

Thank you. I hope it's not a cliffhanger.

Hims Ad Voice (10:40)

Right.

Mike Pesca (10:40)

I hope to answer more questions than I give, but I want your burning questions. That's what I want. Your hunk of hunk of burning questions.

Nancy Rommelman (10:47)

It's true. I mean, I think my burning question goes like this. I keep seeing headlines that say sports betting scandal, and I keep deleting them. So I'm like, I don't need to learn about this. I don't need to learn about this. But it's one of these things that's. It's. I thought it was going to go away, and now it's cresting. And I'm getting to the point where I'm behind the news now, Mike. I am friends with sports broadcasters, but I am not a sports watcher myself. And so I grew up in the mold of rock songs and theater productions.

Mike Pesca (11:26)

Me too. And sports.

Nancy Rommelman (11:28)

Well, you're. But you're. You're a renaissance man. I'm a limited time only good time gal. I don't know what that meant. Anyway, what's going on? Why is there a sports betting scandal? And why should people that don't follow sports care about it? What part do you want to take first?

Mike Pesca (11:52)

All right. If I was to compose the lead of the story to hook the non I care about sports betting, I would say something like marked cards, X ray tables, fixed shuffling machines, an NBA hall of Famer The Mafia. These are the elements underlining the FBI's investigation and into the biggest sports betting scandal that could bring down billion dollar enterprises. So that's pretty good.

Nancy Rommelman (12:19)

I liked you. Honestly, it was the Mafia.

Mike Pesca (12:22)

It was the. There's still the Mafia. And when we say the Mafia, it wasn't like one or two connected guys in the indictment. Now this is the Cash Patel, FBI. So maybe they throw a lot of stuff in there. I hope these. I don't hope, but I hope they have more on these supposed Mafia guys than they do on Jim Comey. Anyway. Yeah, it's Lucchese, it's Gambino, it's Bonanno. It's all the Mafia. It's very good. Almost all the five families are there. Although I think one of the five families has been folded into another. I don't know, like, like Hardee's became. I don't know what did Hardee's become? They got folded into another. Carl's Jr. I think they come.

Nancy Rommelman (12:58)

I was going to say, I thought all the Mafia families owned restaurants, Italian restaurants at this point.

Mike Pesca (13:03)

Yeah, probably. I mean, they're in for a couple. Like they own pieces of Italian restaurants. We saw how Artie Buco got blown out and then, you know, Tony.

Nancy Rommelman (13:10)

Yeah, but do you remember when they were all in the pool in the porn business?

Mike Pesca (13:15)

Yes, because it was. And yeah, they owned the porn business out of Cleveland. Everything. And this is, this goes to gambling, right? Everything that was a vice. The Mafia saw a market opportunity and they got in there and they owned a lot of gay porn because that was even more of a vice. And then as America decided that our vices could be monetized for government income, the Mafia got pushed further and further aside. But I think what people don't realize, especially people who sold us on, well, we're going to have sports gambling and this will eliminate the Mafia. The Mafia still has a role and we'll see some of it in what's going on. And a big role that the Mafia has is they'll extend you credit. You know, you could bet, you could bet on an account. Unlike the sports gambling websites where you have to put your credit card down, you have to pre fund your accounts. So what happened here was, you know, when you bet on sports, you probably think, I'm going to bet on which team wins or loses. And you're probably vaguely aware that there are some variations to that. Like, do you know what a point spread is? Do you know what the over under is? You ever hear these phrases we use.

Nancy Rommelman (14:19)

Those terms, but we don't know what.

Mike Pesca (14:21)

They mean, we as a society. So the point spread is a way to give the worst team a few extra points to sort of even out the game. And that becomes an exploitable opportunity in that professional athletes really don't want to lose games on purpose. It's a pretty desperate and degraded person who does that. But it used to be you can convince them, hey, listen, you don't have to lose. You just have to win by fewer points than you might have otherwise. And this was a big sports betting scandal that Henry Hill of goodfellas fame, right? He was. He fixed some games with Boston College and he didn't convince the players to lose games. He convinced them to win by. Instead of 5, win by 3. Very hard to do. But players are open to that. Now. There's a type of bet, now that there's online gambling and a proliferation of types of bets where you can bet on an individual player's rebounds. You could bet. You can bet on. And this was. There was a baseball betting scandal. You can bet on if the next pitch is going to be a strike or a ball. And so pitchers would come into a game and they'd say, all right, I'll throw it in the dirt and make a friend of mine $10,000. Which is kind of a stupid thing to do because they got caught. But anyway, there's all this exposure for individual players to do really stupid things that they themselves control. Because that's another thing about sports.

Nancy Rommelman (15:43)

I thought about that. That taking a dive, this classic idea, you know, that. That might have, you know, controlled sports back in the day, but you can't really do it now has all these niche individuated narrative arcs where like a ball or a strike could. That. I did not know that. First of all.

Mike Pesca (16:01)

Yes. Yeah. And that's really exploitable. And another part of it is because players don't like to throw the game and they don't like to see themselves as corrupt, but they probably see themselves as in a corrupt system. They say to themselves, we get in the psychology and the economics of why they might throw a game. They say to themselves, look at all the money the leagues are making. Every third commercial is telling the fans to do it. How can there be an immorality? This is how you justify it to yourself. How can there be an immorality? A false. All I do is I know that this guy's hurt. I mean, he's walking around with a limp. He's not going to play. I just have to make a call or send a text and say, hey, guess what? LeBron's hurt. And that literally happened. LeBron's one of LeBron's best friends, a former player, part of his entourage, what I might call at this point a hanger on, or at this point a former hanger on.

Nancy Rommelman (16:51)

Right.

Mike Pesca (16:52)

Said LeBron's not going to play. Now with that information, the gamblers put their bets in. It doesn't affect the game. LeBron wasn't going to play anyway. All of these opportunities for bets, all of these places where you can bet all of these niche bets, they allow a crazy proliferation of exploitable and illegal activity. There's an exact analogy to when the great financial meltdown happened. And it didn't happen based on, you know, the basics of the economy. It happened based on complex financial instruments that because they were linked to other instruments that were linked to other instruments and mortgages. And the third tranche of, of these complex derivatives. This could bring down an industry in a similar way that all these avenues for bets are so complex that they allow perhaps for a real shakeup of sports betting and maybe even the NBA. And then there's this extra element which is fun, which is the Mafia had fixed poker games that some of these NBA stars were there as an inducement. Hey, look, it's Chauncey Billups. What a great guy. He is in the NBA hall of Fame. He's in this poker game. And they would lure individual fish, individual victims, John Doe number one in the indictment, into the games and they would use all these contraptions to fix the games and in this case, literally steal a million and a half dollars from this one guy.

Nancy Rommelman (18:21)

Oh my God. Okay, wait, so who's implicated? It's not just the Mafia. Like is this, is this stuff that's going on on DraftKings and places that I've heard about?

Mike Pesca (18:31)

Yeah, yeah. I don't think they name the betting platforms, but the online bets would have had to be made on big platforms that are DraftKings or the Hard Rock Platform or FanDuel or the ones that are legal everywhere in different states in the United States. The Mafia poker game, that was an in person game that took place in a couple locations in New York City. Pretty nice townhouse downtown, which the New York Times reports John Philip Souzel used to live in totally random detail that didn't even make it in the report. But the New York Times was like, we got to add something. So we have the John Philip Sousa detail. Three cheers for the red, white and corrupt.

Nancy Rommelman (19:12)

Yeah, look at you.

Mike Pesca (19:14)

So yeah. And they literally had an X ray table that could read the cards when it was on the table. And my favorite is the glasses and the contact lenses that could read a marked deck. Do you know what a marked.

Nancy Rommelman (19:26)

I do, yeah.

Mike Pesca (19:28)

Yeah. Have you ever seen a marked deck?

Nancy Rommelman (19:29)

I have not.

Mike Pesca (19:30)

It's really fascinating because. So, you know, picture the back of a deck of cards. There'll be a pattern, like a speckly pattern. And if you don't know to look for it, it just looks like random speckly patterns. But if you do, they'll be. Sometimes there'll be a wheel, and the wheel will have 12 different. Like a clock, maybe. And so one of the numbers of the clock or positions of the clock will be marked, and that will correlate to the number of the card. And then in a corner of the deck, there'll be different patterns, and then one of them will be a color, and that will be clubs, spades, hearts, or diamonds. But imagine that if it's not visible to the naked eye, if it's only visible with special contact lenses. Fascinating.

Nancy Rommelman (20:11)

This is. I'm looking forward to this Scorsese movie, definitely. But there's cultural trends in here that I would like to understand a little bit better, if that's okay. Nancy, I know you're gonna have a lot of things to say here, but I'm still catching up. One of the things I have to drop back and ask you about is I'm aware enough to know that Pete Rose was kept out of the hall of Fame because he bet on his own games. Am I correct?

Mike Pesca (20:37)

Yes.

Sarah Heppala (20:37)

Yes.

Nancy Rommelman (20:38)

And this was such a scandal that one of the great baseball players of all times has been denied proper placement in this hall of Honor. And yet we are now fast forwarding to a moment where betting is so normalized as to be, like, you know, rampant and worthy of this giant investigation. Can you help connect the dots to how we got here, like, for from there to here?

Mike Pesca (21:10)

Well, Pete Rose recently did something that did allow him to enter the hall of Fame. Do you know what that was?

Sarah Heppala (21:16)

He died.

Mike Pesca (21:17)

He died.

Nancy Rommelman (21:20)

Well, that always clears your record sometimes. Yeah, sometimes it opens it up anew, but sometimes it.

Mike Pesca (21:28)

Yeah, there's analysis that begins to pour in at that point. Or, you know, according to his will, his father's papers were to be burned, but his executor chose not to, and now we don't like him. Yeah. So Pete Rose did that at a time when there was a clear prohibition and also a cultural norm against gambling. And the commissioners then took A really hard line. And if you're a fan of Rose, you could say an overly harsh line. But he did something very wrong, which is even though he bet on his own team, it did. It was clearly against the rules, and it affected the outcome of games. Because if you're trying just to win that game instead of the whole season, as a manager should be, there are all sorts of things you can do, like overuse one player who might be hurt or might be tired instead of saving him for future endeavors.

Nancy Rommelman (22:16)

Gotcha.

Mike Pesca (22:16)

The reason. The reason that baseball especially is sensitive to this is that gambling almost undid the entire game. And this was the 1919 Black Sox scandal. And then they bring in the commissioner, Kennesaw Mountain Landis. Quick side note, I was very intent on naming my son Kennesaw Mountain. And my. My ex wife. My wife at the time, and I give her credit for this, this is the best thing she ever did, put her foot down and said, you will not be naming this our boy Kennesaw Mountain. So he is not Kennesaw.

Nancy Rommelman (22:48)

Yeah, that's the right call. The 1919. Is it red Sox or Black Sox? Red Sox.

Mike Pesca (22:55)

The team was the White Sox, but they became known as the Black Sox. Okay.

Nancy Rommelman (22:59)

The White Sox scandal. That sounds like a movie.

Sarah Heppala (23:02)

It was a movie. Eight Men out by John Sayles.

Nancy Rommelman (23:04)

I knew it.

Mike Pesca (23:05)

That's right.

Sarah Heppala (23:05)

Yep.

Mike Pesca (23:05)

Great. Really great movie.

Sarah Heppala (23:07)

Really great movie.

Mike Pesca (23:08)

Really great book by. Not Isaac Asimov. I forget the Asimov who wrote it. But it was so bad and it threatened the game so much and was an inspiration for at least a little part of the Great Gatsby. Right. Meyer Wolf was the mayor Lansky who fixed the games, that they were foursquare against this. They drum gambling out of the game. And gambling really became the worst thing you could do in baseball.

Nancy Rommelman (23:34)

Gotcha.

Mike Pesca (23:35)

They were up to all sorts of other nonsense with drug taking and with carousing, but not with gambling. And the other sports followed suit. And then online gambling, or the potential of online gambling presented itself. Now, before then, since gambling was controlled by the mafia, there wasn't real momentum to legalize it because it'd be very hard for a commissioner to say, well, what a commissioner, a capitalist commissioner. And the owners would say is it'd be really great if this illegal market, we could capture some of that. But it's so illegal and it's so sullied and it's so connected to the Lucchesis and the Gambinos and not, you know, we, the upstanding baseball owners and the wrigleys and the, the Fenways or the Yawkeys, who are horrible people, they owned the Boston Red Sox. But then when online gambling came available and we could eliminate the Mafia, and it seemed to be especially when Adam Silver, who's the commissioner of the NBA and the first one to really, really get behind it, it seemed to promise eliminating a lot of the downside of gambling, for instance. And I believe this, and I still think it's true to a large extent. Before there was online gambling, it was very hard to see who was placing what. Betsy Mafia guy in Arizona could place a bet and you wouldn't know it necessarily unless they incorporated the Las Vegas odds makers. But you know, different guys could make bets and, and make the games corrupt without there being any mechanism to know it. Now with online gambling, it was a lot easier to see, you know, what they call odd movements in the line. So you could see why is Arizona State, which normally gets $1,000 bet on it, $2,000, why do they have $50,000 bet on it? And when that side of the bet, they, at that point they would stop allowing future bets. And then this really did happen with Arizona State. And then they would investigate why and sometimes they would find out that the game was corrupt. So the promise was we're going to get, we're going to get some of this revenue and we'll be able to root out corruption. Online gambling actually helps us detect corruption. It did in the way that the stock market, odd movements directly bet on different stocks can tip people off that there might be insider trading. It's just what I said, the possibility of all these derivatives, the equivalent of these complex financial instruments. This was the Pandora's box. And of course this is the story of every capitalistic enterprise, right? Or every Internet enterpr. It comes with a promise. There's some reformed promise, but really like I said, Pandora's box or it gets way more complicated. There are unintended consequences. And now there has to be. There's going to be almost a religious fervor of pulling back. There's going to be more of a movement to stop this. And the other big part is as much as I'm, I guess pro legal gambling, or I actually think it's can be and often is a fun hobby or a fun pastime. I get into that more if you like. It's terrible for young kids, it's terrible for. You could bet at 21. Your brain's not formed until at least your mid-20s. But you know, anyone who's 17, anyone who's 18 can get online and it's really, really, really hurting young boys.

Nancy Rommelman (27:06)

Well, what isn't? But I actually, this is kind of central to my next question and then I'll let Nancy get in there because I just need to understand a few things. One of them is, you know, I just, I don't gamble. I don't like gambling. My, My high school prom was a, was a gambling night and I walked in, got a bunch of, you know, tokens and handed them to the person next to me. I have no interest in this, but I've learned that the history of Dallas is a lot of illegal gambling. There were gambling halls in Arlington and, you know, until kind of this crackdown. It sounds like in the 20s and 30s, maybe, maybe even later than that in Dallas. But gambling is so, so, so fascinating to men particularly. And I don't get it. And I wonder if you could help me understand. Like, the way that I would explain it would be that the male brain wants competition and you know, is sort of engineered, whether biology biologically or by like culturization to, to, to look for ranking and a hierarchy and wins. And this almost hijacks that part of the brain in a way that earlier sports culture, like actual playing sports would have done. But people do that less and less now. So it's more now betting on the things. What, what is your. Obviously, you know, gambling well enough that you had a podcast about it. So what's your. What do you think is the appeal?

Mike Pesca (28:47)

It's what you said. Plus they want validation that they're right. So they want competition. And there is a rush of endorphins with gambling. And addicted gamblers will tell you that it wasn't even winning that brought them back. It was the excitement of the unknown. So this is, this is a lot like other endorphin inducing behaviors. You know, shopping, eating, all the other ones.

Nancy Rommelman (29:14)

But this would be very tempting to like husbands at home that might, you know, like porn is going to be a danger alley. Drinking might be a danger alley. But gambling would seem, you know, dads and, and boyfriends and people kind of like sitting on the couch. It feels like a soft rebellion or a soft vice.

Mike Pesca (29:36)

Right, right. Because, you know, with, with food we do have to eat, don't we? And with gambling there is the. I mean, how I think I do it is make very small bets and get more entertainment out of an otherwise somewhat entertaining game than I would have otherwise. I do have to say, you know, as much as I don't like this aspect about myself, I do like being right. And maybe this gets into the Ellen Andrews thing. Maybe as our culture becomes more feminized, the imperative to be right and to prove yourself right or insightful, maybe that's less present with women. I don't know. I think a lot of guys would say, oh, you can't argue with your wife, or just always say, yes, dear. But on abstract things, on things that aren't interpersonal, on things that have an actual definitive score, the stock market and the points of a game, people, men, people do like to be right.

Nancy Rommelman (30:31)

And that's really interesting. You've just introduced an aspect that I hadn't contemplated. Men is always. Sports have always been a bit of a. Of a male space. Right. But I think, especially in the last 20, 25 years, I would imagine it has become this space where you're freed from, you know, some of the social strictures that have been introduced at things like even at colleges where you're not supposed to be aggressive in your argumentation or, you know, you're. You're not supposed to mansplain. You know, it's. It's kind of like I always think, when I think about things that, like, men like to do, I imagine them all peeing standing up against a wall, you know, and it's just like a grand celebration of peeing against a wall. And I know that's a metaphor, but.

Mike Pesca (31:26)

And who. What's the wall in the metaphor? It's DraftKings. Oh, I thought it was the construction.

Nancy Rommelman (31:31)

Or your bank account. I don't know.

Mike Pesca (31:33)

Do you know in stadia, many a times there, wall there. It will be a wall. There'll be a. A trough. There'll be a trough to pee in. Yes. And that's mostly a stadia phenomenon, maybe because they haven't updated it since the 1960s.

Nancy Rommelman (31:48)

And that's where this whole thing where, like, you're standing next to a guy and you might be able to check out his unit comes from, right?

Mike Pesca (31:55)

I hope not. You tell me.

Nancy Rommelman (31:57)

Oh, I don't know. I've seen it in movies. It seems to be a point of contention.

Mike Pesca (32:02)

Okay. And we'll be back in a minute with more, though not all, of the conversation I had with Nancy Rommelman and Sarah Heppala on Smoke Em if youf Got Em.

Sarah Heppala (32:21)

If we're on Twitter or we're having a conversation with someone and someone says, well, that's racist. And you say, well, no, it's not. You know, you can argue all day because it's pov. You can't do that in Sports. It's like, Sorry, I got 17 points. You got 14. That's it. That's it. There's winner and there's a loser. So this is, like, very, very clear. You can make this bet, and it's not going to be up for discussion, which is. I can see how that could be very satisfying. There's a couple of things I wanted to say. One, the smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller bets. It's not like, are the jets going to win? Well, we know the jets are not going to win, but they won.

Mike Pesca (32:54)

They won. They won last week.

Sarah Heppala (32:55)

Did they? Oh, man. I saw a little video the other day, and it was like someone interviewing a kid coming out of a Jets game. And the K. Did you see it, Mike?

Mike Pesca (33:03)

And he's like, I think that was my son.

Hims Ad Voice (33:04)

Yeah.

Sarah Heppala (33:05)

He's like, I hate this team. And the guy's like. He's like, I was born into it, but I just. I hate this team.

Mike Pesca (33:11)

It just walks off camera.

Sarah Heppala (33:14)

You know, it's not just the big bets now. You need to get that satisfaction, right? So it's smaller and smaller. It's sort of like the crack addict looking through the carpet for crumbs of crack, right? Like something else that I can maybe be right at. That I can maybe make $5 at. I also think I am not. I very rarely. I don't think I've ever made a bet. I've gone to a casino a few times. But it is an addiction. I mean, we know that. We know that it's an addiction just like drinking or.

Mike Pesca (33:41)

Or.

Sarah Heppala (33:41)

Or heroin or something that you can't stop.

Nancy Rommelman (33:44)

So addiction is a. I would imagine to be a controversial diagnosis because addictions tend to be associated with substances. In other words, a physical addiction. And what this is going to do is be aligned with things like sex addiction, so that the addiction is more to the endorphins or the adrenaline. But there are plenty of people that don't buy that as an addiction. So I just wanted to say, as somebody who studied this, I don't really have a dog in this race, but there are people.

Mike Pesca (34:19)

If you did, you could bet on it at Wonderland Racetrack.

Nancy Rommelman (34:23)

You know what? I think I might be like a secret crazy gambler, because my friend once did an Oscars night and he put together this spreadsheet that was crazy. It was not the. Just the. You know, he was a sports fan and he was. It wasn't just like, who's going to win? It was like, you know, what star is going to be cut to next? And I would go in on every single one of those. It was the most fun I've ever had at Oscar night, you know, because we're all like, it's going to be Scorsese, it's going to be Leo, you know, and that is my dorky. Like, if the Oscars were a betting fiat bonanza, I'd probably be broke.

Mike Pesca (35:02)

Yeah. The gay super bowl, they call it.

Nancy Rommelman (35:04)

It is the gay super bowl, and I am now. Were you betting hag, as they used to call them.

Mike Pesca (35:12)

You. You. So you're betting money then, right? There was money on the line, at least some money.

Nancy Rommelman (35:16)

Yes. I believe it was like, dollars.

Mike Pesca (35:18)

So that's why you didn't like the Enchantment under the Sea gambling night with your prom. Because it was fake money. It was funny money. Was.

Nancy Rommelman (35:25)

It was funny money.

Mike Pesca (35:26)

Right. So without. Without the freeze on Frazon of risking something, it's never going to be fun. And people think it is, but it's not. And what you said, Sarah, about the addiction, this is true. You know, it's true that there are things that we call addiction that a lot of researchers will say, well, certainly not in the same way that a substance or. And not all substances are food doesn't fall in the category.

Nancy Rommelman (35:51)

Right.

Mike Pesca (35:52)

But one of the criteria is, is there withdrawal? Like, do you have withdrawal?

Nancy Rommelman (35:56)

Absolutely.

Mike Pesca (35:57)

Yeah. And there wouldn't be withdrawal like something like sex addiction or gambling addiction. But it is. It does qualify. Like, if you look at the DSM 5 or whatever we're up to, it definitely qualifies because it affects the mind and it affects the pleasure centers of the mind. And it is, you know, in a way that I don't think the leagues that got behind gambling fully embraced. There was always a small percentage of people who would be addicted, what we call addicted, and it would be very consistent at like, around 2 or 3%. And so they wouldn't talk about this, but they would have, you know, programs that tried to convince people to stop or not to bet, and they don't work. But I think they thought of this as, okay, this would be the wages of our sin. And if you look at who's getting addicted now, it's slightly higher than that, and it definitely over indexes for the young. So the leagues don't like to talk about it, but these are facts.

Nancy Rommelman (36:55)

Yeah, that makes total sense to me that teenage boys would be completely wrapped up in this.

Mike Pesca (37:01)

Right.

Nancy Rommelman (37:01)

They would have just enough expendable money to get in trouble. I also want to say one thing about the withdrawal. You know, I'M not convinced that there wouldn't be withdrawal to. With gambling addiction. I just think it might not look the way that we think it does now. Withdrawal can be on a spectrum like anything else. You have the old days of wine and roses, guys that aren't drinking anymore and they're having hallucinations because they were drinking bathtub gin and they're basically all janked up. Most people who quit drinking don't have those. Those kinds of dts. They might have a anxious heart. More commonly, what you see in garden variety drunks like me is a kind of emotional withdrawal. You're very uncomfortable at parties, social situations. There is a compulsive behavior that has been disrupted. And you know, you. It has become a coping mechanism. So whether it is gambling at a social event, masturbating in private, sending sexy pictures of your junk to people that aren't your wife. Whatever your specific.

Mike Pesca (38:03)

When you say junk, you make it sound so sexy.

Nancy Rommelman (38:05)

So I know, I'm sorry. Jewels, your crown jewels. Whatever. You know, people have gotten into a lot of goddamn trouble with these iPhones. You know, it's like when I was coming of age, gambling was one place. It was called Las Vegas and you had to go there. And I'm sure there was all this other under the table shit that people did, but like Las Vegas is in your pocket at all times.

Mike Pesca (38:28)

Yeah, there's a lot of overlap with the masturbating in private analogy, what you're saying, under the table and in your pocket. But yeah, I just want to put two things, of course, physical addiction, withdrawal, GLP1s and Ozempic and all that that affects gambling. You know that, right?

Nancy Rommelman (38:45)

Oh, that's fascinating, but not surprising at all.

Mike Pesca (38:47)

Yeah, they have a lower urge to gamble or no urge to gamble. And in fact, I have a friend who stopped taking it because like, I didn't want to gamble anymore and I like gambling and I've been winning. Like, okay, that's interesting.

Nancy Rommelman (38:58)

So wild that that that particular hormone or whatever it is, it disrupts the pleasure centers that have been deep grooved by compulsive behavior. And it is kind of a miracle drug. But it might have unintended side effects that we don't know about yet. But right now it's astonishing how many people are breaking habits that they could not before.

Mike Pesca (39:22)

Can I tell you something? You guys will be fascinated with this total side note. Theo Vaughn interviewed Louis C.K. i don't know if you heard it.

Nancy Rommelman (39:29)

No.

Mike Pesca (39:29)

Good interview. And then the last 20 minutes gets into. They both acknowledge they're in some sort of program. And you can infer from the discussion it's a, like, sex or masturbation anonymous type program. They both benefited from it. They talk about it a little obliquely, but concretely enough that at least to me, it was fascinating.

Nancy Rommelman (39:52)

Well, that is super fascinating. And did you know that Chris Rock was. Has also talked about his porn addiction in his show Boomerang? He spoke about that, and he didn't talk about a program, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's in one. I wouldn't be surprised if all three of those guys are in one. And they all go to LA and hang out at the sex addiction program. And I'm gonna go, by the way, I have to tell a side story about when I accidentally walked into a Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting. Mike, have you ever heard this story?

Mike Pesca (40:20)

I have. I love it. They kicked you out because they took.

Nancy Rommelman (40:23)

A vote and then they kicked me out. They were like, can we have a woman at this meeting? And they were like, no, we. We can't. And I got kicked out of the sex addicts and all.

Mike Pesca (40:31)

You ever think that maybe that whatever votes you got, maybe those were the people that you wanted least on your side? Like, what were their motivations for keeping you there?

Nancy Rommelman (40:40)

I mean, I was sort of like, you know, I do like lesbians kissing y'.

Sarah Heppala (40:43)

All.

Nancy Rommelman (40:44)

I do. I like it. You know, but it was, you know, I shouldn't have been in there. Then I booted me down to the Love Addict Addicts meeting where everybody was crying about their ex boyfriend.

Sarah Heppala (40:54)

I want to. I think testosterone might be a good segue to something else I want to talk about. But one thing I really. I don't know if they were cognizant of it. I have to assume they were. Look, we know athletes, especially, like, when you're growing up, like, you really. You want to be there for the team. You want to do a great job. You want to hit the home run, you want to get the rebounds. You are, like, you really are trying hard to get to a top level of whatever professional sport you are. You can't be a. You can't be a faker or a whinger or be throwing Little League and still make it right. How in the world did the leagues and the betting outfits, the whatever, kings, whatever it's called, not say, oh, wow, this is just inviting players to throw games. This is just a lit. Like. And just, like you said, just can be a little bit. There's just a. I mean, this one guy who was on the Miami Heat, what he, he threw a game for $200,000 when his contract was what, something like 16 million? I can't remember the. Just like, is that. How do they not factor this in? Or did they factor it in and like, we don't give a shit. We don't give a shit anymore about the probity of the game. We don't care at all that we've created a level playing field that people can actually enjoy this sport. We're just going to corrupt the whole fucking thing because we could stick money in our pockets.

Mike Pesca (42:19)

They thought they had, and they thought they had that addressed. And some of this behavior really is surprising them because of the money. As you said, when the Black Sox threw their games in 20 in 1919, Charles Wrigley, who the field is named after, was a very parsimonious owner. And they made a lot of money from the gamblers as a percentage of their salary, maybe more than their yearly salary. Now when Terry Rozier is getting paid $20 million a year, why would he throw a game for 60,000? So that's really interesting. And I don't think it's psychology. I think there is psychology at play with the competitiveness of these athletes. And you see it famously in stories like Michael Jordan, who would just get fleeced left and right on the golf course when he was playing because he's so competitive, which is fine with basketball. The thing that he's best, the best in the world at, you apply that to something where a lot of people can beat you, but you have the same drive, you're very exploitable. So that's point one. The, the money point is, yes, as a percentage of the overall money that you're making it stupid to do. So some thought was that they thought they could just get away with it. But it's also the case that the money of the incomes of a lot of these guys on paper, they get reported and it's wildly misreported because even if their titular contract is worth 60 million, there's of course agents and taxes and managers, and then so it gets down something like 30 million. And then it's put in a trust because maybe a lot of them didn't grow up with money and that's the responsible thing. So they're put on a salary, so they're sorry, they're put in an allowance and the allowance is fine. But everyone who's getting $60 million contracts is playing along with guys with 100 and 150 million dollar contracts. And so they're feeling a little bit jealous. But they often have a salary, essentially an allowance. And then they have, they love to get any sort of money they can put in their pocket. I'm speaking broadly, but this is very common. Any sort of money that goes outside that allowance is like theirs. And that's what they love to play with. And so they're very exploitable in terms of that. And then they might have gotten in with these gamblers, they might have accrued some debt with these gamblers and they don't want to move the actual fund, the actual money that their wives and managers know about. So they, they dip into the slush fund of side money. And that's where they say, well, a way to pay off a $20,000 debt is I'll give you this tip. Will you erase my 20, 30, $50,000 debt? Which you think they shouldn't have gotten or shouldn't have gone to extremes to erase. But you know, they see it as easy to get away with and no cost. There are other guys who, it has been documented, are so bad, they really were desperate for money. I mean, this is also, you know, true. I once interviewed an NBA agent who had a client who was very famous and very rich. And the client just said to him, or they figured out after years and years of working together, I am going to lose my money. I can't not spend on this many Maybachs and this many cars. And I know that the contracts aren't going to get there. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to set up trust funds for my daughters. And I just know I'm going to go bankrupt, but at least I'll set them up. And that was his. That's what he brought to the client. So that was. Stuff like that goes on too.

Nancy Rommelman (45:36)

Didn't Norm MacDonald spend his fortune on gambling?

Sarah Heppala (45:41)

I think so.

Mike Pesca (45:42)

He was a big, he was a big addicted gambler. He would go on Howard Stern and talk about. Did you ever hear any of these segments?

Hims Ad Voice (45:48)

Just.

Nancy Rommelman (45:48)

No. I heard the Mark Baron episode that Norm MacDonald talked about his gambling. But no, not the Howard Stern segments.

Mike Pesca (45:56)

I mean, he played it for comedy. But you could also. Most of the comedy was what I took to be him admitting truths. Like on an NFL three day weekend, he was gambling so much that he just urinated in jars so he wouldn't leave the house or the tv.

Nancy Rommelman (46:12)

Yeah, that sounds, yeah, very sexy. That also is something that women can't really do if they don't have that sheepy device that my friend got Me that Nancy hates when I bring up.

Sarah Heppala (46:27)

I can't.

Nancy Rommelman (46:28)

I know. I've never used it. I just pee in a diaper.

Mike Pesca (46:33)

You want a top of the line one, not one of these cheapy sheepies.

Nancy Rommelman (46:36)

No, no, not at all. It's gotta be like platinum embossed and have like, it's gotta like shoot out to the, like a, like a watering can.

Mike Pesca (46:45)

Play a song.

Nancy Rommelman (46:47)

Yeah, absolutely. It'll start playing I Will Survive by Gloria.

Mike Pesca (46:50)

That's what I was thinking too.

Nancy Rommelman (46:51)

Were you? That's obviously the platinum sheepy anthem.

Sarah Heppala (46:57)

Before we move on to testosterone stuff, I really want to hear about Karine Jean Pierre.

Mike Pesca (47:03)

Oh, yeah, she's the former White House spokesperson. She's been on a press tour because she has a book out. And so she's been lighting up all.

Hims Ad Voice (47:16)

The critics of all the baked in.

Mike Pesca (47:19)

Critics of Biden, which includes, I think, every Democrat and every Republican. So they went to her and they said, you were watching what was going on, what mental decline did you see? And her answer was nothing. How dare you. They pushed him out. Her book is called Independent. She's a political independent now. And if you ask her, well, what makes you an independent, she doesn't give an answer. She was just mad how they did Biden. Wrong. Okay, next question. Should he have stayed in the race? That's not for me to answer. Okay, next question. Would he be and have the mental faculties to be president through 2029? That's not for me to answer. So every one of these interviews turns into an obvious argument because she is not bringing anything to the table. And my role in this was, you know, as often happens, you get the interview before the book publication date. So for me it was, the book was to be published in eight days time. I interviewed her on a Monday, it would be the following Tuesday. And right after the interview I did with her, which was just full of denials and interruptions and me desperately trying to get her to say anything tangible. You're an independent. What do you disagree with the Democratic Party about? Yes. What policy positions do you have differently? But everything you're saying is exactly what the Democrats say about the dangers of Trump, like me just pushing her on obvious points and her not liking it or think she's good at obfuscation. Anyway, I've done, you know, I've done thousands of shows, couple thousand shows. And I think in that time I have spiked three interviews. And this was one where I was like, I can't do this to my audience. We are not playing that. It was. There was Nothing that comes out of that except a little bit of heat.

Hims Ad Voice (49:05)

But after this week of, of crazy.

Mike Pesca (49:08)

Crazily horrible interviews and Isaac Chotner did one in print that I think the benefit of this was you could really slow down and see what she was doing, which was her, you know, obfuscatory techniques and her non connecting logic. So that was a good one. But Tim Miller of the Bulwark also did a really good one after that I'm. I've decided to put it out. I think I'll end tomorrow just as a document of how these things go so horribly wrong as compared to what she's been doing so far. Because when I did it, I didn't think it was on me. But sometimes you do an interview and this is what my feeling was, that if you listen to an interview without the context of knowing all that you say to yourself, I think the audience says to themselves that was a bad interview. I did not like listening to that bad interview. But maybe in this context the audience will say to themselves that was a bad interview. And I got something out of that which was understanding why it was bad and putting it in the greater context of this bad, this legendarily bad book tour.

Sarah Heppala (50:16)

Did you read the book?

Mike Pesca (50:18)

Yeah. And doesn't go, there's nothing there. It's. I really do think it's a. I really do think it's an exercise in her. Cleverly she thought, and she's not clever like you could tell that her arguments are threadbare. And it's not just that she has no hand to play to come back to poker, she doesn't play it well. There are things that she says in every interview that you poke a little bit, don't hold up. But I really think she thought of the people connected to the bidens of the 6 to 10 inner circle people. I'm one of them. I'm pro. I probably got paid less than the rest of them. So I don't have a for sure retirement paid for. So I've got to rehabilitate myself. What do I do? I'll mark myself as outside the Democratic Party. There's a lane for that, right? Independence. Maybe the Bernie people will like me. I'm not a socialist. I don't have those politics. But maybe I'll just be the person who's so bad at the Democratic establishment, people will hire me to be on NBC or to maybe consult with a campaign. But that was a bad. I think that was terrible strategy. There was no lane for her.

Sarah Heppala (51:28)

She's looking for a job. She thinks she's hireable.

Mike Pesca (51:32)

She would like to be hireable if this went well. And if she's not, she doesn't have, she doesn't exhibit the skills that would convince someone who actually wants to win a campaign or convince the press of anything to hire her. And I don't think she has the mix it up skills that would convince an MSNBC to hire her. And she, you know, she doesn't have any genuine insight. And I'll also say this. You talk to people who worked in the White House, talk to anyone who worked in the White House. They do not have a high opinion of her. And often, you know, the people you would talk to on the policy side will say, listen, if I'm talking to the press secretary, I've done something wrong. But they say this about all White Houses. She, she was not a person that had respect within the White House. I think to a degree I've never heard, as with any other press secretary. And I've talked to many people, Walk worked in many White Houses and this is sort of unique in the unanimity and extremity of their opinion.

Sarah Heppala (52:31)

Ouch.

Mike Pesca (52:37)

This is all produced by Cory Wara and he and I and the whole gang will be back. Talk to you on Monday.

Libsyn Ads Voice (52:51)

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