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- [00:00]
Podcast Announcer
You're listening to an iHeart podcast.
- [00:05]
Degree Advertiser
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- [00:34]
Dan Flores
Why is a soap opera western like Yellowstone so wildly successful? The American west with Dan Flores is the latest show from the Meat Eater Podcast Network. So join me starting Tuesday, May 6, where we'll delve into stories of the west and come to understand how it helps inform the ways in which we experience the region today.
- [00:57]
Podcast Announcer
Listen to the American west with Dan Flores on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:13]
Chad Millman
Welcome to the Favorites, the podcast part of the Voluum Podcast Network. I am Chad Millman of the Action Network. Today I'm joined, as always, by my co host, my companion, my compadre, my bff, Professional Better Simon Hunter. Hello, Simon.
- [01:31]
Simon Hunter
Hello, Chad. Over the weekend I heard from my doctor, who I've known for 20 years, about our Pope show. That's. He liked it. Yeah. Even though it was after the fact, obviously. It just cracked me up that my guy texted me again. He knows what I've done my whole life. He knows what the podcast and everything. He never hits me up about it. He text me how much you enjoyed the Pope show and just how we. We brought a totally different look to it and how we view the market. And yeah, we got pretty lucky. We at least we mentioned the name. We didn't give it out as a winner, but at least the name was mentioned here on the show. So shout out to Debunda.
- [02:07]
Chad Millman
You know what? I feel like I thought about this. Naturally, I thought about it from the point of view of me. And the. The Pope market that I was highest on was the dude from France, from Marseille, who had a 3% chance. And my logic on him, if you remember, was he's an outlier candidate. He has a lot of experience with immigration, which is important to the church right now, and bringing together cultures from a lot of disparate places where they need to grow the Catholic community. And it's not going to be someone who's got the shortest odds because it's never someone who has the shortest odds. So my logic was 100% right. I just discounted my guy from Chicago and like, I have been loving, loving like the text chain that I've had with my Chicago boys about the Pope and the memes and the Annie Agar tweet where she immediately sent out the, the post that Chicago has a Pope before it has a 4,000 yard passer and the T shirts that say Da Pope. Like the video that someone did of the Pope being introduced to, to St. Peter's Square, to the Alan Parsons project intro that used to be with the Bulls and Michael Jordan. I'm here for all of it. I freaking love it. I love his brothers who just keep talking about him and like are having a blast. Like, everything about it is familiar. I had an uncle who lived like on the southwest side of Chicago in the suburbs near where he lived. And they all sound alike, they all look alike. It's. I'm just, I'm loving the Pope. Love the Pope.
- [04:05]
Simon Hunter
It was a smart move by then. Like we talked in the show, I thought they've given up on the West. Clearly they have not. And that's a market they're going after. So what they wanted to do is working right. He's becoming already sensation here in America. And I joked with a buddy who's a, who's a Roman Catholic like I am. You know, he always goes to 11 o' clock mass, usually half empty. Do you think it was this weekend, Chad? Packed, packed, packed for Mother's Day. So yeah, I'm excited to see what this is going to do going forward. And you know, like we joked on the show, it's such a niche market. It sucked that it didn't work out where, you know, we did the show. An hour later, I believe we got the text from Matt Mitchell. Like, holy white smoke. But the show, if you go back and listen to it, it's, it's an interesting market and something that going forward, if me and Chad Guy Lun are still together in 12, 20 years, I look forward to our next pope show. Brother.
- [04:58]
Chad Millman
Why wouldn't we be together, Simon?
- [05:00]
Simon Hunter
I have terrible health concerns for myself. Not you. You'll be fine. Me? I don't know.
- [05:06]
Chad Millman
You know what, Simon? You and I are going to be together in about two weeks because I'm coming down to Philly.
- [05:10]
Simon Hunter
You are.
- [05:11]
Chad Millman
And we're going to spend the day together. Maybe we should go To Mass. Maybe we should go to like an 11am Mass.
- [05:17]
Simon Hunter
I'd burst into flames as soon as I stepped through.
- [05:19]
Chad Millman
And we will really, really pray. A lapsed Catholic and a Jew walk into 11am Mass in South Jersey. What possibly could go wrong? Next week we're going to have a lengthy discussion about the impact of the NFL schedule release and I'm going to want to bring in some of the points that we made in our show earlier this week that Evan noted and see if we can start to apply some of these things and see if there are games that normally we would be trapped into picking that. Are we changing our thinking a little bit? So I'm excited for that. We're also going to sit down with Jason Benetti, the broadcaster for the Detroit Tigers and nationally with Fox. Like he's been on the show before. He is so freaking good. He is so funny. He is so talented. He is so smart at calling games and keeping you entertained without it being intrusive and understanding the really nitty gritty details he used to do back in the day when he was at espn, they would do these analytics broadcasts and he was brilliant at these. So I'm excited for Jason. Today we're gonna bring in Matt Mitchell. We did this show earlier in the off season and we got great response. As you can expect. People love betting history on this show. Look, my entire desk, you can't see it right now, is piled with betting history paraphernalia and I'm looking at a picture right now of the guy who was the original bookmaker for the mafia. And he's, it's a picture of him hanging out in Cuba with a jockey and like Meyer Lansky. So it's a, it's. I love this stuff. Matt Mitchell is going to come on, he's going to tell us more of the things he's unearthed from gambling's wild history. Welcome back to the show, Matt Mitchell.
- [07:18]
Matt Mitchell
Oh, you know, it's just an honor to shoehorn myself into an off season episode chat.
- [07:23]
Chad Millman
You've been working so hard at becoming talent. You're really, you're getting close.
- [07:28]
Matt Mitchell
Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.
- [07:29]
Simon Hunter
I love on camera Matt. He's very tame compared. I could already know what he was going to say.
- [07:34]
Chad Millman
I feel like he's nervous.
- [07:36]
Simon Hunter
He was like, am I about to say what I should say to this guy? Are we taped right now? So I love on camera Matt.
- [07:42]
Matt Mitchell
You know what? I'll give a little look behind the curtain. When we started 1 million years ago here, Chad was very encouraging that I do More on camera stuff, become more talent forward.
- [07:52]
Chad Millman
That's right. I was.
- [07:53]
Matt Mitchell
I wasn't as interested in mostly as an exhausted parent of two at the time, incredibly small children. But more than that, I don't enjoy shows where the producer tries to shoehorn themselves into the show a lot. I appreciate that wherever our beloved listeners are right now, on a yacht or a treadmill or, you know, at work or in a subway or whatever the hell, they're jumping on a trampoline, whatever they're doing, the. Here to hang out with their two friends, you know, Chad and Simon. And I can. I can pop in once in a while. But more importantly, if I need to kick somebody off a show, not necessarily this one, but something else in our network, it gets a lot harder to have those conversations if you are on camera talent because you, by definition, are saying, I'm better than that. So it was always easier to be someone whose impact was felt without being seen or whose flat Rochester accent wasn't heard on these airwaves. So I appreciate that.
- [08:48]
Chad Millman
Funny, because we know that his position has clearly changed. Because if you've been to one of the live shows, you know, Matt just takes it over, and Simon and I become background noise for the entire event. Matt, we just talked a little bit about betting the papacy. Did you bet on who would become the pope?
- [09:03]
Matt Mitchell
Yeah. Well, you two jagoffs were talking in that episode. I was. I realized that the market would close at the top of that hour, so I need to get my. My bets in, and I'm going through. And I only want to bet, you know, 20 to 1 or higher for all the reasons we outlined in that episode. I'm doing foreign dudes. No, Americans. That. That felt ridiculous. And I opened up Bob's Odds. I'm trying to find ages in locations. Oh, 69 years old, Chicago, Illinois. No way. I opened it up. Could have bet it and said, no way. Make a couple more. I open up one more guy. Cardinal Burke. Oh, he's from Wisconsin. I mean, well, I'll put 10 bucks on this guy. I threw away money on an. On an American papal candidate. That wasn't the right one. Four minutes for the market closed. I will be haunted forever. But at least we got a pope who has been inside my two favorite restaurants, Wawa and Portillo's. So I feel like he'll have my best interest at heart despite not being a Catholic at all. But, yeah, I wish him the very best.
- [10:10]
Chad Millman
My God, it's great. All right, Matt Mitchell, subject number one in how sports betting explains the world. There's a really famous book called How Soccer Explains the World. The writer who's brilliant, his name is Franklin for and he writes for the Atlantic. But in his previous years he has written for a bunch of different magazines and newspapers. At one point he was the editor in chief of the New Republic. And it's a, it was a seminal book and sort of just the title alone defines the framing of something really small explaining something really big. And he wrote this book called How Soccer Explains the World. So I think about this as the How Betting Explains the World episode. Your first topic, America's Lottery Fever. Matt Mitchell, the floor is yours.
- [11:11]
Matt Mitchell
Love that framing. Great job, great hosting as always, Chad.
- [11:14]
Chad Millman
Thank you.
- [11:15]
Matt Mitchell
Well, as you can imagine, from its very founding, America has loved betting and who couldn't? But one of the hardest parts of having a new and pretty large nation is collecting money, collecting tax revenue. We as Americans, we would rather be throwing tea into a harbor than paying our taxes. That hasn't changed. So within the first couple decades of America's birth, if the government wanted to finance a large public project, they did the smart thing. They ran lotteries. They turned tax collection into gambling. And if you've ever wondered how like very old east coast cities like New York and Philadelphia, how they got so nice even before 1800, those two cities alone, just isolating those two, they financed public projects using more than 2000 state authorized lotteries. They were all over it. So I've got a couple of my favorite lottery examples. You guys ready?
- [12:17]
Chad Millman
I am ready. Simon, are you ready?
- [12:19]
Simon Hunter
Let's do it.
- [12:20]
Matt Mitchell
All right. So when they were literally draining the swamp to build Washington D.C. they financed a lot of that construction through federal lotteries. And the first of these huge federal lottos offered a big grand prize, a building called Belage Hotel. If you won this lottery, you would win this big ass building. And the first ticket in that big lotto was purchased by George Washington. So we, we know that he gambled at least one time. And fun fact, 20 years later, when those disgusting filthy Brits burned down a lot of Washington D.C. in the War of 1812, that building, Blodgett's Hotel, that would end up serving as the temporary home of Congress. And although Blodgett's hotel that would also eventually burn down years later, the Hotel Monaco in D.C. stands there now in the shadow of Capital One arena, where the Washington Capitals will be playing a playoff game this very evening.
- [13:24]
Chad Millman
How Betting Explains the World Right there. You know, we had David Schwartz on who, who wrote the Book roll the bones that we get a lot of that we steal a lot of these ideas from. I remember interviewing him 15, 16 years ago. 18 in the library at UNLV, where the gaming research studies are done, talking about the hypocrisy of state by state, everybody allowing lotteries but not allowing sports betting. And honestly, it was in that moment in the library where I realized, this shit's going to be legal. Like, at the end of the day, it's too much money to leave on the table for every state that needs more and more money every single year. If we've been doing it since the beginning of the republic, it's just a matter of time. Lotteries to sports betting. Nicely done. Matt Mitchell.
- [14:21]
Matt Mitchell
Yeah, if we could just pay our federal and state taxes in the form of scratchers, I feel like we'd solve a big part of our deficit right there. So here's another example.
- [14:31]
Chad Millman
By the way, did George Washington win the hotel?
- [14:33]
Matt Mitchell
He did.
- [14:34]
Simon Hunter
He.
- [14:34]
Matt Mitchell
He did not. In fact, I think the guy that fronted that scheme, Blodgett, I think that ended up going belly up and he ended up in debtors prison. But I can't remember the details of that one. But we'll just celebrate it as a big victory.
- [14:47]
Chad Millman
USA number one, Debtors prison was a big thing. I just finished reading the book the Gambler by one of my favorite authors. His name is Dostoevsky. In the Gambler, Debtors prison was a big thing. If you wrote an iou, piece of paper like that was as good as a contract. And if you could not pay that, you went into prison and you were there until someone paid your debt. Obviously, the Gamblers are novel, but he was. Debtors prison in that window of time seemed to be a really big thing.
- [15:20]
Matt Mitchell
I feel like the Milwaukee Bucks and Cleveland Cavaliers are working as hard as they can to put me in debtors prison this spring. So I can. I can appreciate the feeling.
- [15:30]
Chad Millman
What is the over under on the number of erudite, potentially arrogant literary references I can make on the show?
- [15:40]
Matt Mitchell
Oh, just so far. Oh, just you wait. There's so many more opportunities for you. You'll do great. You're very smart and handsome.
- [15:46]
Chad Millman
Thank you.
- [15:49]
Matt Mitchell
All right, so we've discussed that Lotteries became essentially the first solution to any American problem. Here's another one. So Thomas Jefferson is dying, and he's got a ton of debt. His debts are super high. He owed a lot of people a lot of money. And so they arrange a lottery to raise money for his daughter Martha, and the three Prizes for this lottery were going to be three of Jefferson's properties, and the grand prize was going to be Monticello. And for those unfamiliar, if you have any loose change in your pocket, that's the picture on the back of the US Nickel. It's a. It's a pretty fucking famous house. So that was going to be the grand prize of top three prizes in this lottery. But obviously Jefferson was incredibly famous and had a lot of wealthy friends. And a lottery for his, like, property and belongings is pretty humiliating. So they. They tried to pool their money together to buy it, and that didn't work. And then the lottery that they arranged sold so few tickets, they basically canceled it. And eventually Martha just sold the house for a fraction of its value. And were these kind of lotteries, were they above board? Sometimes, sometimes not. For example, 30 years after that first Blodgett's Hotel Federal Lottery that I just mentioned, they ran another one for a beautification project. And the manager who ran it sold all the tickets. He announces a winning number, does all the things he's supposed to do, except he took all the money and disappeared. May. I don't believe they ever found him. And usually the attitude, because it's America, was like, die. You know, what? What can you do that you pay your money and you take your chances. And sometimes, you know, that's life.
- [17:29]
Chad Millman
Buyer beware.
- [17:30]
Matt Mitchell
Buyer, buyer beware, man. Sometimes, you know, it's not a ticket I bought, it's just an old cracker or whatever. But this time, the guy that wins was furious because the grand prize was $100,000, which today would be $2.7 million. And they said, hey, listen, you know, we don't have any of the money. The guy stole it. So this guy files a lawsuit, he fights it for four full years, and eventually the United States Supreme Court orders the City of D.C. to pay him the money so he. You can fight city hall. And he did get his money. And you think that that scandal would make people less interested in lotteries, Right? And no. Shortly after that, one newspaper estimated that the top eight cities alone sold almost $70 million worth of lottery tickets, which is five times larger than the entire federal budget at the time. But unfortunately, the fraud did worry a lot of regulators and state governments. So within about 10 years, state lottos were illegal in almost every state. But that is the some of the fun anecdotes from our early obsession with.
- [18:39]
Chad Millman
The lottery country built on gambling, the yin and yang of our puritanical values and our need to risk it all. To win big is a constant theme throughout the building of our democracy.
- [18:58]
Matt Mitchell
One of the best anecdotes they had from Dave Schwartz, author of Roll the Bones Fabulous book was how many lottery offices there were in New York and there were even more in Philadelphia. And even puritanical Boston had 50. Like there are still a few in Boston even though they they hated gambling there. You can't keep the gamblers down, they're always going to crawl out of the woodwork.
- [19:19]
Chad Millman
No one knows self loathing better than Bostonians.
- [19:22]
Matt Mitchell
That's exactly right.
- [19:24]
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- [20:35]
Dan Flores
The American west with Dan Flores is the latest show from the Meat Eater Podcast Network. Hosted by me writer and historian Dan Flores and brought to you by Velvet Buck. This podcast looks at a West available nowhere else. Each episode I'll be diving into some of the lesser known histories of the West. I'll then be joined in conversation by guests and such as Western historian Dr. Randall Williams and best selling author and meat Eater founder Stephen Rinella.
- [21:06]
Degree Advertiser
I'll correct my kids now and then where they'll say when cave people were here. And I'll say it seems like the.
- [21:11]
Dan Flores
Ice Age people that were here didn't.
- [21:13]
Matt Mitchell
Have a real affinity for caves.
- [21:16]
Dan Flores
So join me starting Tuesday, May 6th where we'll delve into stories of the west and come to understand how it helps inform the ways in which we experience the region today.
- [21:27]
Podcast Announcer
Listen to the American west with Dan Flores on the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [21:36]
Chad Millman
Matt, can you please give us your next story?
- [21:41]
Matt Mitchell
This week is the second leg of horse racing's Triple Crown Preakness Stakes at Pimlico. And I want to give another nod to the ponies and their crucial role in the popularization of sports betting worldwide. Because, Chad, obviously on a recent episode, you referenced the origin of the term handicapping, which comes from British horse racing. In the 1700s, before the establishment of odds based wagering, the performance of a faster horse was literally handicapped by placing weights on them during a race to kind of even things out. The bigger the perceived favorite, the heavier the weights, the kind of quote, bigger the handicap. I want to talk about another phrase. So after odds making on horses was common in the early 1800s, that paved the way for establishments known as commission offices or racing banks. But what we here on the show would call the otb off track betting. If you've never been to an otb, Chad, how would you describe it?
- [22:45]
Chad Millman
I would describe it as a gloriously sad, dingy, dirty, formica floored, fluorescent lit single room that if you walked by it on the street, as I have many, many times in New York, you might think it was a storefront that was for lease because there's so little signage and it's so sort of uninviting inside.
- [23:22]
Matt Mitchell
That sounds right. Simon, you've been doing otb, right?
- [23:26]
Simon Hunter
Yeah. Never in America, only in England. It's equally as depressing in both places.
- [23:30]
Matt Mitchell
It's a magical place and they are. There is a ubiquity to them. It is a great place if you have $6 to lose, but want to make that take an hour and a half. So OTBs are springing up all over the place and it's where betting on the ponies started to transition from this, like, sport of kings and wealthy elites to something that, like, ordinary people could finally participate in. So it used to just be guys that, like, if you closed your eyes and said, like, picture the King of England or Chad Millman, it was guys like that that used to be the only people betting. And thanks to otbs, it could finally include people that looked more like Bert, the Dick Van Dyke character from Mary Poppins, or. Or Simon and his ancestors. Jim Jiminy, Jim, Jiminy Jim, Jim Girou.
- [24:19]
Chad Millman
I does what I likes and I.
- [24:21]
Dan Flores
Like.
- [24:24]
Matt Mitchell
While I do. Yeah, there was an egalitarianism to being able to wager away from the track. And some of these locations were big, sharp operations. And of course, some of these were very dodgy called mayfly operations. Because in some of the shittier places, they might need a heavy favorite to lose a race, to quote Bob Scoochie for their lungs. And if that favorite ended up winning, they might just shut down, not open the next day and just leave town. But in both places, there quickly emerged another character that the three of us know is even better today than they did then. The tout. This was the creation of the tout, the tipster. Because basically, as soon as these British OTBs opened in the early 1800s, they offered print coverage of the races. And as soon as there was coverage, there were guys advertising subscription tout services that guaranteed gambling profits. The Victorian era Brits, Chad, they're just like us.
- [25:29]
Chad Millman
Listen, Matt. I think for everyone listening, they should know that there will be a third of the final exam will be on horse racing. The importance of the Daily Racing Forum in the interconnectivity of the OTBs, the formation of the OTBs and how that led to broader sports betting throughout the country. All of that. There's going to be an essay on that that everyone can. Right in their blue books.
- [25:56]
Matt Mitchell
I was gonna say I had my blue book ready.
- [25:57]
Chad Millman
I'll be ready to go, Simon. And Matt, can you remember the name of the person who owned the Daily Racing Forum that helped propel the information economy around sports betting? I mentioned it in a previous show.
- [26:12]
Simon Hunter
Oh, I can't do that.
- [26:14]
Chad Millman
Mo Annenberg, Mo former owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer. I believe philanthropic causes throughout the city of Philadelphia. Actually unions. The train station in Philly might be like the Annenberg hall or something. I'll figure it out when I'm there in a couple of weeks. I'll tell you when I get out of the train.
- [26:37]
Simon Hunter
I gotta say, Jeff, from this show, the most amazing thing I'm going to take away from is the fact that our fraud government was less corrupt back then. It is today. I can't imagine if our government owed some guy in the news making bad headlines about them $2 million. That guy would just disappear. Yeah, back then they paid them. I am so shocked by that. So, yeah, as always, love it. Matt Mitchell.
- [26:57]
Matt Mitchell
I think this is a good example of something we talked a lot about a couple of weeks ago, which is that there's this idea, especially in America, that these betting phenomena are like a newer thing when in fact they're. They're very, very old. Like, check this out. The lawnmower, the sewing machine, the electric telegraph, refrigeration, all of these are newer inventions than the subscription tout service. Like, these are very Old ideas. And one final thing on this before we move off. Victorian era Britain, named for the reign of Queen Victoria, who was queen for, like, the last 60 years of the 1800s. One of history's preeminent haters. Not a barrel of laughs. And Britain would make OTBS illegal in 1853. They just basically became a giant black market. But I want to shout out her oldest son, very much a friend of the show, who'd become King Edward VII when she died in 1901. This guy loved betting, and he said that because horse racing was, quote, a manly sport that is popular with Englishmen of all classes, there was no reason to restrict gambling on it. And so he may have looked a little bit weird, maybe because his parents were first cousins. None of my business. But friend of the show, the people's king, shout out to him.
- [28:17]
Chad Millman
All right, Matt, last one. You have a story that involves a famous Russian gambler. Gosh, I wish I had read the script, because now is where I could have dropped in my Dostoyevsky reference.
- [28:33]
Matt Mitchell
I do want to again stress to any listeners how little Chad prepares and how much of this show is the work of people you don't see or hear. Because obviously, I'm going to talk about.
- [28:44]
Chad Millman
Where we're seeing him constantly now. He can't. He doesn't want to be on the show yet. We can't get him off the show. So, you know, take that for what you will.
- [28:54]
Matt Mitchell
Wow. If only the listeners of the podcast would hear the sarcasm that I'll so surely cut out of this episode. All right, so a lot of very famous Russians love to gamble. There's one thing that they know a lot about, and that's suffering. So obviously, they're special to gamblers of all nationalities. For example, Leo Tolstoy, the writer of War and Peace, he once lost a fortune at the German spa town of Baden Baden. But Tolstoy can't compare to our friend, renowned Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, to my credit. Incredible.
- [29:30]
Chad Millman
It doesn't say Dostoevsky in the script that I got. It just says Russian gambler story.
- [29:38]
Matt Mitchell
Full credit to you. Shame on me. You're doing a great job and are very smart and handsome. So to make a long story short, when Theodore Dostoevsky was in his 30s, he was pretty critical of the Russian government, which I wouldn't recommend, really, then or now. And he gets sentenced to death by firing squad, but he gets that sentence commuted, and instead he's got to do eight years of hard labor and then military service in Siberia. It's a step up from a firing squad, but obviously not a barrel of laughs. While in Siberia, he does what we would do and that's gamble a lot with the fellows. And obviously that was, you know, to help pass some of the time. But he also does whatever good Russian you know, has always done. Suffer and suffer and suffer some more. He's now a gambling enthusiast and long suffering. And to connect it back to earlier in the show, once those eight years in Siberia are over, if you look up a portrait of Dostoevsky, like if you just go to his Wikipedia page, he looks a lot like all of the guys you run into at any otb. It's like, exactly. If you like, I've never been to one. What do the guys look like? Just look up Theodore Dostoevsky. Anyway, after he's out of Siberia, he makes his first visit to one of those fun German spa towns like Tolstoy had been to. And at first, stop me if you've heard a story like this before. At first he wins a bunch of money, but once he gets to Baden Baden, he loses a ton of money. And there's this great description of his betting. I think this will sound familiar to lots of people we know. To quote Roll the Bones. He played in a state of grim agitation. His creative mind exponentially magnifying every win and every loss. This guy sounds like a riot.
- [31:29]
Chad Millman
You should read the Gambler. I just read it literally two weeks ago. It's slim, so you should be able to handle it quickly.
- [31:37]
Matt Mitchell
I can actually tell you how many fucking words it is. 60,000 words. It's exactly half as many words as Crime and Punishment, but we'll get to that. So the next year, more suffering. His wife dies, then his brother dies. And because of debtors prison and those regulations, he inherits all of his brother's debt. So he needs money. So he signs a publishing deal and he has to deliver a book in the next 18 months. And if he doesn't, he's going to get a huge fine and he's going to lose the rights to all of his other books. And he's in the middle of writing Crime and Punishment, but it won't be done in time because Chad, as you know, it's like 10 billion pages long. Yeah, yeah. So our boy Theodore, he's backed into a corner and then he feels like he's been set on fire and he gets a great idea. He hires a 20 year old stenographer named Anna. Great idea. Then in just four days, he dictates that entire novel to her, which, spoiler alert, would become the classic novel the Gambler. And it gets him out of his jam. And then he marries and of the stenographer. Hey, great job. Game balls all around for Fyodor. But he's still a gambling addict and he still owes all of his brother's debts. So he does the right thing here and he skips town. He heads out on a promotional tour and soon he winds up in Baden Baden, the casino town in Germany. I wonder what's going to happen there, guys? He starts betting like a complete fucking maniac. He sits down and wins four, 40 times his money at roulette. Almost right away, Anna, the stenographer wife, is like, hey, why don't we get the fuck out of here? And he knows he has to get out of here. He does not. He loses all of the money that he won, then all the money that he has, Then he sells his clothes, makes his wife sell all of her shit. They lose that money. Total washed out, degenerate situation. And then he continues later traveling. Betting more strains his marriage. But our story here has a very 19th century Russian solution. A ghost. When he's 50 years old, Theodore's dead father appears to him in a dream and scares the absolute shit out of him and warns him of impending doom. And it works. It actually works. He writes to his wife, he apologizes. He promises to focus only on writing. He promises to never gamble again. And thanks to the spooky ghost of his dead Russian father, he never gambles again.
- [34:08]
Chad Millman
Matt, you are our very own Dostoevsky.
- [34:13]
Matt Mitchell
A life of endless suffering.
- [34:15]
Chad Millman
Chad, that's exactly what I was thinking. Brilliant, brilliant storytelling suffused with long, simmering, gestating suffering.
- [34:28]
Matt Mitchell
It's my pleasure to serve.
- [34:29]
Simon Hunter
And a good lesson for kids, Chad. You'll never be a winning gambler if you eventually quit.
- [34:35]
Matt Mitchell
Jesus, there's not enough ghosts. There's not enough ghosts to visit the three of us.
- [34:41]
Chad Millman
Oh, my God, that is too funny. Matt Mitchell, that was great. I'm so excited for you to go back to producing and then find a way to wiggle your way on the show.
- [34:50]
Matt Mitchell
Oh, it's just a pleasure to share a zoom screen with someone so smart and handsome. Thank you so much for having me on.
- [34:57]
Chad Millman
See, you're saying it with sarcasm, but I internalize it and think, huh, he could be right.
- [35:04]
Matt Mitchell
And so, so many good ideas as well. Incredible.
- [35:08]
Chad Millman
Yeah, and well read.
- [35:10]
Matt Mitchell
So literate. That's right, so literate.
- [35:12]
Chad Millman
The most literate sports betting podcast in America. And you know what? We will return with our next episode of the Favorites Tuesday on the Action Network YouTube page. Download us from Spotify, Apple Podcasts wherever you get your pods. Rate Review View Subscribe Leave us five stars. Say whatever you want. Feedback is a gift. Until next time.
- [35:28]
Mint Mobile Advertiser
Love you.
- [35:35]
Chad Millman
Action Network reminds you Please gamble responsibly. If you or someone you care about has a gambling problem, help is available 247 at 1-800-GAMBLER okay.
- [35:46]
Degree Advertiser
Have you heard about this? Last year, Degree changed the formula for their Cool Rush deodorant. The fans rebelled and wanted the old scent back, and Degree listened, and that doesn't happen often. They admitted they effed up and are bringing the original Cool Rush scent back. And it's exactly how you remember it. Cool, crisp and fresh. There's a reason why it's the number one man's antiperspirant and it's back in Walmart, Target and other stores now for under $4. So try it and see what the fuss is about. Head to your local Walmart, Target and try the OG Cool Rush for yourself.
- [36:15]
Dan Flores
Why is a soap opera Western like Yellowstone so wildly successful? The American west with Dan Flores is the latest show from the Meat Eater Podcast Network. So join me starting Tuesday, May 6, where we'll delve into stories of the west and come to understand how it helps inform the ways in which we experience the region today.
- [36:37]
Podcast Announcer
Listen to the American west with Dan Flores on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to an iHeart podcast.