Why We're All In on Gambling

14:09Alexandra Schwartz:Like, sports about aesthetics and about beauty. And this makes it less and less plausible to say so. If you've got somebody who's got three TVs in his little man cave and is watching this game and this game and this game just to make sure all of his little curios act in the way that they're supposed to. Not watching the game in the right way. Not to be a crusty old man. But like watching it with these like individual interests in mind.

14:40Vinson Cunningham:In a minute, the high highs and low lows of gamblers in art. This is Critics at Large from The New Yorker.

15:08Vinson Cunningham:On Tuesdays, join me to hear interviews with influential leaders in the industry like Calvin Klein, Daniel Roseberry, and Jonathan Anderson. On Thursdays, join head of editorial content at Vogue, Chloe Mal, and head of editorial content at British Vogue, Chomenadi, as they explore style and culture through the lens of fashion with guests like Martha Stewart, Kamala Harris, and Tracee Ellis Ross. The Run Through with Vogue, new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

15:46Vinson Cunningham:So we've been talking about how everything in our current reality feels like gambling. Gambling is now openly encouraged in the streets and on the phones. But as we critics are wont to do, I want to take us back to some gambling texts to see if we can use them to illuminate our current moment and see where we've come from. Who wants to, you know, just throw it out like a chip on the table? Is that even a thing? Just a little red disc.

16:12Alexandra Schwartz:These things are pretty great. Let's say that. Let's say that everything that surrounds gambling is kind of cool.

16:17Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, well, right. Like, I guess in a casino royale way, although I did just realize something very fundamental about myself, which is that were I to give it all up, I would absolutely be a blackjack dealer instead of a player. That's how much the illusion of control means to me. I'd be on the other side of that table with a little tie on, keeping it profesh. A little vest. A little vest.

16:42Naomi Fry:I, you know, when you say gambling texts, my mind goes to one of my favorite Victorian novels, George Eliot's Daniel Duranda from 1876, because it opens with the scene of gambling, which kind of sets the stakes for the rest of the novel. A lot happens in this novel. But there is the character of Gwendolyn Harloth, who is a beautiful young woman of marriageable age. And it begins at a casino in Europe where Daniel Duranda, who is the protagonist of the novel, sees her at the roulette table. He doesn't know her, but he sees a beautiful woman about to place a bet and she's winning. He can see that she's she's on a streak.

17:27Naomi Fry:And it starts with the words, I have it right here. Was she beautiful or not beautiful? And what was the secret of form or expression which gave the dynamic quality to her glance? So the way the book proceeds then is she, as in many other Victorian novels about young women who are looking to make a choice in marriage, she is determining the plot of her life. And the choice that she makes is kind of a gamble, right? Will she bet on the right horse, a.k.a. man, for her life to turn out a certain way? And a bit of a spoiler alert, she bets wrong, which is kind of a large part of the novel. But the beginning of the novel in this house of luck, right, in this casino, kind of becomes a metaphor for the rest of the book.

18:19Naomi Fry:And I think one of the things to draw kind of a broader point from this is one of the things that attracts us about gambling is it's, of course, symbolic metaphorical qualities, right? It's like, will we choose correctly? And will our the heat of the moment, just the general unpredictability of life and how things turn out? What will the outcome be? What will our story be? And so I think one of the things that we find so attractive about stories of gambling is the drama and the unpredictability. Of course, this is quite obvious, but I think true nonetheless.

19:01Vinson Cunningham:Oh, I love that. Vincent, do you have anything to add to my table?

19:05Alexandra Schwartz:Oh, I got stuff to add. I got stuff to add. One of my favorite books about gambling is by a writer who's written lots of books that I like, Colson Whitehead. He wrote a book about his attempt to enter the world series of poker. It's called The Noble Hustle. And similarly, this idea of the metaphorical architecture of gambling, he's using it in many ways, but talking about the game of poker to illustrate certain aspects of his personality. The first section of the book is called The Republic of Anhedonia. Anhedonia being like, you know, inability to feel certain forms of pleasure, etc. It's partially also kind of a divorce book.

19:52Alexandra Schwartz:He's talking about getting divorced a lot in the book. But the first line of the book I just love, I have a good poker face because I am half dead inside. My particular combo of slack features, negligible affect, and soulless gaze has helped my game ever since I started playing 20 years ago, when I was ignorant of pot odds and M-theory and four-betting. And it gave me a boost as I collected my trove of lore, game by game, hand by hand. Great opening and really kind of a signpost for the strategy of the rest of the book. Like this attempt is in part at least a cover over the travel of various mental and emotional states and an attempt to express them.

20:43Alexandra Schwartz:I should say that, you know, we've been talking about betting on things that are outside of us, right? Betting on sports, betting on whatever. And I think these kinds of texts bring into being, at least for me, a kind of, I don't know, taxonomy, which is like primary betting, betting on oneself and secondary betting, betting on other people. Whereas like even think about the film Rounders, the Matt Damon vehicle written by the team of David Levine and Brian Koppelman about, you know, an underground poker scene. Also, the guy wants to be in the World Series of Poker, whatever. But there's a difference between getting really good at something and betting on yourself and, like, getting really mad because Kevin Durant didn't score however many points.

21:28Alexandra Schwartz:And I find, as I was looking through these things, I was like, oh, wait, I respect one more than the other. If you get really good at poker and then you decide you're going to lose your house about it, you know, like, questionable. But shout out to you for believing in your actual self as opposed to being like, I'm going to guess right about somebody else.

21:49Vinson Cunningham:I mean, I like this thing, Vincent, that you're talking about where you're talking about gambling as a way for the individual to test themselves and to find out what they're made of. And I think that gambling is such a big theme in literature, in film, even in visual art, Caravaggio painting gambling, you know, because it comes back to this fundamental question that everyone has about themselves, which is, do I got it? Or don't I? And I love gambling scenes in which the person don't got it. There's just maybe it's schadenfreude. But I think it's also just seeing what gambling does where you're suspending your disbelief if you're at the table and it isn't going right for you.

22:38Vinson Cunningham:You're suspending your disbelief because to leave the table is to know that the future has arrived and it's not a good one, that everything is going to collapse. So you dig yourself in deeper and deeper. And one scene I'm, of course, thinking of is when Nikolai Rostov sits down at the gambling table in war and peace with a man who loves Nikolai's fiance, who proceeds to fleece him of 43 ,000 rubles. Which, by the way, guys, it was a lot of rubles then. It's a lot of rubles now. It's just an amount of rubles that Nikolai Rostov simply does not have on him. But he sits there. He knows this guy. He knows Dolikov hates his guts, basically, because Dolikov loves Sonia.

23:25Vinson Cunningham:Sonia loves Nikolai. Nikolai doesn't really know what he wants in life. He's a young man. Let's not blame him, but he's a mess. He's there to have fun. And Dolikov narrows in on him and they're playing cards. And he proceeds to absolutely screw him in a way that is so precipitous and crazy that if you even the scenes are short, like if you read this, it goes by really fast. And what I love what Tolstoy does with this, he keeps having Rostov focus on Dolokhov's hands as they deal the cards. And, of course, those are the hands that are dealing his fate. He says, one tormenting impression did not leave him, that those broad-boned, reddish hands with hairy wrists visible from under the shirt sleeves, those hands, which he loved and hated, held him in their power.

24:12Naomi Fry:Wow.

24:13Vinson Cunningham:So you're seeing the hands and the kind of the beastliness of them with the hairs and the reddish skin. And they just keep dealing and keep dealing. And what happens to Rostov is he starts to fantasize about how great his life is, his regular life, which seemed kind of boring and normal. All he wants to do is go home and hang out with his family and have a lovely time and live in the before times before he ruined his own name, before he humiliated his father. all of the things that he's doing by getting further and further into debt. It's great. It's crushing. It's beautiful. You know, it reminds me in a different way of the episode in The Sopranos.

24:53Vinson Cunningham:And there's this episode, The Happy Wanderer, where this, like, absolute putz who runs a sports goods store who Tony knows from high school, weasels his way into the high-stakes poker game that Tony's crew runs. And he shouldn't be there.

25:13Naomi Fry:Tony, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm just having some bad luck. Just got worse. I'm going to come back. My luck's going to change.

25:25Alexandra Schwartz:Come on, Regis.

25:26Naomi Fry:I want something tomorrow. You want to stand there?

25:28Vinson Cunningham:He's in over his head. Yeah, in that case, it's kind of a classic portrait of gambling addiction and seen in this sympathetic but pitiless way from the outside where you see someone who absolutely cannot stop themselves get in deeper and deeper and deeper even though it is going to cost him everything he has. And in that case, I don't think you feel good watching it happen. But you can't look away. Yeah. No.

25:54Alexandra Schwartz:This group of people, I don't think we're going to make it out of this segment without talking about uncut gems. I will break the seal.

25:59Vinson Cunningham:Ah, yes.

26:00Alexandra Schwartz:Watching someone lose and do so at high cost at a sort of spectacular level of sort of adrenal energy, there is something, I mean, addicting about that. Watching someone just go down and down and down and can't look away, but Jesus Christ, they're going again. And, you know, that sort of tilting at windmills that losing and gambling represents and is so amazingly illustrated in the Safdie Brothers film Uncut Gems starring the amazing Adam Sandler. There's something, it plays out almost like a horror movie. So I want the Celtics to cover.

26:41Naomi Fry:I want the Celtics halftime. I want Garnett points and rebounds. What do you know? I don't know. I just know. Well, I'll tell you what I know. It's the dumbest fucking bet I ever heard of.

26:53Alexandra Schwartz:I disagree. I disagree, Gary.

26:58Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, it plays out like a horror movie. I haven't seen it, you know, since it came out, and I'm due for a rewatch. But I do remember the absolute adrenaline coursing through the theater. Yeah. Because what that movie does, and in some ways what a great movie or book or anything that gambling should do, is even if you're going in and you're like, this guy's a fool, shouldn't be doing that, go home, go have dinner, step away, you get invested and you get involved and you live that high of hope and expectation that the next bet is the one that's going to change it all. Because, of course, it could.

27:36Naomi Fry:Of course. Like, what could be better? There is something undeniably exciting about an upswing. You know, even if you know that behind it, there might be a different story, you get caught up. I think that's absolutely normal.

27:55Vinson Cunningham:You know, there's something I keep thinking about, because we were talking about so many of these things where gambling is shown to be not the glory that its participants would hope it would be. But I have a counterexample that's just really, for some reason, floating to the top of my mind right now from the movie The Big Short, which I think really holds up, I got to say. And it's about the young guys, that team of relatively new investors. They start to notice, I think they read a paper about the idea that the housing market might collapse, and they decide to make a bet. They decide to bet that that will happen.

28:34Vinson Cunningham:And there's a moment in the movie when that does pay off for them. The housing market collapses and they just have raked in this unbelievable windfall. And because you're watching this movie and these are two likable upstart guys, you really feel happy and excited for them. And then you remember that their benefit is the detriment of millions and millions. Do you have any idea what you just did? Come on, we just made the deal of our lifetimes. We should celebrate.

29:09Naomi Fry:You just bet against the American economy.

29:11Alexandra Schwartz:Fuck yeah, we did. Yeah. Fuck yeah.

29:13Naomi Fry:Which means, which means if we're right, if we're right, people lose homes. People lose jobs. People lose retirement savings. People lose pensions. We're just excited.

29:30Alexandra Schwartz:Just don't fucking dance.

29:32Vinson Cunningham:They didn't cause it. They did not cause it. But they did profit from it, much as perhaps your average show, such as I, might go on to Polymarket and look at a war or look at a dreadful event and think, what might there be in this for me?

29:54Vinson Cunningham:We've seen the highs and, more soberingly, the lows. So why are we still drawn to the rush of the game? This is Critics at Large from The New Yorker. Stay at our table.

30:19Vinson Cunningham:Is Wuthering Heights really a love story?

30:21Naomi Fry:Should you be afraid of Virginia Woolf?

30:24Vinson Cunningham:And most importantly, is Mr Darcy handsome enough to tempt you? This is The Secret Life of Books. I'm Sophie G, academic and writer. And I'm Jonty Claypole, broadcaster and producer.

30:35Naomi Fry:In this podcast, we tell the story behind the story of the literary classics everybody wants to read, feels they should read, or has already read and loved. We reveal their secret histories, hidden players and big ideas behind the great books.

30:48Vinson Cunningham:We show how they came into being, why they matter and how they changed the world. The deeper we go, the weirder the questions. Is George Orwell's 1984 on some level a comedy? Is Dracula the Freddie Mercury of horror? And why do so many literary honeymoons go wrong?

31:05Naomi Fry:Whether you're a committed book nerd or just curious about the history of ideas, The Secret Life of Books is the podcast for you.

31:19Vinson Cunningham:We've been talking about gambling and we haven't even we haven't even sung anything by Kenny Rogers, which is frankly a show of restraint on our parts that do the islands in the stream.

31:30Naomi Fry:Well, I'm thinking more. Yeah, I know.

31:33Vinson Cunningham:I'm kidding. That was a joke. Damn, you're good. We've been talking about gambling. We've been talking about just our culture being awash with it. We've been talking about figures in literature and film who have themselves tried their luck and more often than not found that luck to be wanting. You know, one thing that occurs to me is how dramatic the gulfs are between the highs of what your mind's eye sees when you think about To Catch a Thief, mid-century Monte Carlo, or you think about Casino Royale and the sumptuous Ava Green wandering through the casino with Daniel Craig's James Bond just looking so glamorous.

32:19Vinson Cunningham:And then often the reality of what these places are, which is no daylight and a complete loss of time and self. And then now in our current era, we have the gambler as the pseudo expert. It's like the degenerate aspect is actually faded. And now the gambler is cleaned up. He or she is just like you or me sitting watching the sports game thinking, you know, more about it than everybody else. I have been absolutely fascinated by this polymarket situation. This is this website founded by a guy, Shane Coplin, who I believe is as of now maybe 26, but he founded it when he was 21. And it lets you place bets on numerous, numerous, numerous categories of life and experience.

33:10Vinson Cunningham:But all the bets are yes, no. So here are some examples right from the homepage. Which fed decision in September? Question mark. 50 plus BPS decrease. You can place a yes or no bet. 25 BPS decrease. You can place a yes or no bet. A more straightforward one. New York City mayoral election. Zoran Mamdani. Yes or no. Andrew Cuomo. Yes or no. Right now it has 80 percent yes on Mamdani, 18 percent on Cuomo. Next prime minister of Norway. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2025. 25. Trump out as president in 2025. Right now they're giving it a 7 % chance. I like those odds. I like those odds. So there are all kinds of, you know, for for someone who wants to place a bet, you can just scroll around and place a bet on, you know, Israel withdraws from Gaza in 2025.

34:03Vinson Cunningham:Let's take a crack at it and see if you make any money, folks. So like right there is the unsavory element, of course, of what it is to bet on. Like, it's not all fun and games, maybe, when you're trying to get rich off of a genocide. But what I find really fascinating about this site, in part, is that it's been credited as being really accurate in its predictions. So for instance, polymarket bettors were saying that Trump would win the 2024 election, which he of course did. And his own team pointed to this while news sites had yet to call the election. They predicted that Biden would drop out after the first presidential debate.

34:41Vinson Cunningham:So there is a line of thinking that goes people, when they have their own money put down on a certain outcome, are going to try to be as accurate as they can be in predicting it, that this can give you a kind of more accurate bellwether. I think that's an illusion, but it's a really compelling illusion.

34:57Alexandra Schwartz:Well, yeah, and this has, you know, some of the, at least my knowledge of the terminology here does stem from sports betting. But there is this idea of the sharps, that there are people who are expert bettors, some of whom have algorithms, right, are professional bettors and have taken many different statistical things into account and making their bets. And the regular bettor takes their cues from the sharps so that some of these percentages, you say, okay, somebody that has like inside information on the polling is making these bets. So this assumption of accuracy in the betting world has something to do with this interesting relationship between amateurism and professionalism in betting.

35:46Alexandra Schwartz:But it's also, interestingly, a dovetailing then, too, of like, oh, gambling then creates new numbers, new kind of analytics, which then makes it kind of dovetail with another thing that is ascendant in our time, which is polling, that these two are on parallel tracks. Yeah.

36:05Vinson Cunningham:And in the case of the presidential election and other cases, people are saying that the betting version is more accurate than the polling version simply because people – if it comes down to putting their own money on an outcome, that's where the truth may lie. Yeah. And it really flatters the gambler with the idea that they can use their own information, their own expertise to predict an outcome and to make money on that outcome. It's the classic – like I think it's the perfect example of gambling for our do-your-own-research times basically where anyone is encouraged to be an expert, to question expertise, and to come in with their own ideas and potentially profit from them.

36:50But of course, is that happening?

36:53Naomi Fry:Yeah, it's a Wild West situation, right? And like in a Wild West situation, some people will rise to the top, you know, by either inborn talent or ruthlessness or luck even. But a lot of people will lose. I mean, look at like something like crypto, right, which the Trump administration is heavily encouraging. As you say, Alex, it's something that on the face of it, it democratizes the market. Right. And of course, some people have gained much. Many more people have lost a lot, you know, and like anything else in this country, like there's really no safety net. Right. And it's a little bit scary from my perspective.

37:39Vinson Cunningham:You know, often our financial market and our financial system is likened to a casino, I think not inappropriately. But you forget that the people who are often competing or playing know something about what they're doing. They're reading the research paper. You know, there's a reason that expertise often ends up winning the day. so I just feel something very very predatory in this encouragement of everyone to consider themselves an expert I'm not saying people can't enlighten themselves or can't do the research you can you should but in the self-declaration of under an expertise I think it's bringing us to a bad place guys I think it's bringing us to a bad place in a lot of ways and it's going to make a lot of people poor before it makes them richer.

38:25Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, certainly. I sound so scolding, but I worry.

38:29Naomi Fry:No, there's nobody, there's no protection, right? It's like, you made your choices. Sorry, you're like an unlucky sap, essentially, right?

38:38Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah, it's, on some level, it almost seems like the culmination, it's like the punchline to the joke that began with Mitt Romney saying, corporations are people. Yeah. That there's a strange logic today by which, and you see it online, you see it everywhere, influencers, whatever, telling you that you can actually act like the people that you think are like the big boys. Yeah. If only you would bet on yourself, if only you would use the number of hours and the day that the corporate CEO uses, You too, if you only were willing to put something on the line, the only thing separating you from the expert better, the expert investor, the whatever money getter you are being trained to look at, the only difference is, as they say, a mindset.

39:33Alexandra Schwartz:And so if corporations are people, also people can act like corporations. There is a sort of, my friend, the writer, John Gans, has called this vulgar positivism. That if you could only sort of take your human emotions and turn them into complex algorithms, you could get the outcome that you want.

39:53Naomi Fry:Yeah. But of course we know that's not how it works. Because people are still people. For better and worse. For better and worse. Like I was thinking about this is not from personal experience, but the whole idea of like dating apps. Right. When people find themselves in the role of a kind of gambler. Right. Like the options are all there. Like, who are you going to meet? You know, who are you going to swipe on? And how will the narrative of your life be affected by it? likely it won't in a lasting way, but there is the possibility that it will, right? And then whichever choice you make and whatever person chooses you, you know, it's kind of an exciting, unpredictable narrative that you're coasting on.

40:45Naomi Fry:From what I understand from people, from friends who've told me, you know, there is something addicting about it. You get caught up in your own narrative and how it might turn out potentially.

40:56Alexandra Schwartz:And there too, there is such a great example. And there is, again, this temptation toward, number one, turning matters of the heart into matters of the spreadsheet in terms of like sort of mathematizing, mathematizing, I don't know, all of your interactions. and the dehumanization that follows from that goes in really nasty directions. Not only dehumanizing one's own approach to another person, but dehumanizing the other person in turn. In the same way that you dehumanize the tennis player at the U.S. Open by having turned them into digits in your parlay calculation. That the sort of the impulse to gambling, at least of this kind, the app-based algorithmic gambling that is sort of maybe characteristic of our day is a way not to deal with the other and treat them as a separate being from oneself.

41:56Alexandra Schwartz:It's like, it really is a way around fear. It's like, I don't have to encounter if I can manipulate by other means.

42:06Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, and maybe it's also like, you know, the thing about gambling that's so fun is the thrill of it and the thrill of the next possibility. That's why you don't cash out your winnings and go. You know, that's why that's why you put them all back and you go double or nothing. Right. I mean, I do think so. We do live in a very we live in a culture. This will be news to everyone that that loves gratification and and the delivery of gratification. And, you know, Vincent, I'm just going I'm just thinking back to what you said at the start of the episode about religious prohibitions. You know, don't drink, don't smoke, don't gamble.

42:43Vinson Cunningham:Basically, don't destroy yourself is what I hear from that. Or the idea of the self-destruction there in the religious context is just lack of temperance, lack of the ability to say, no, it's enough. I can be as I am. I don't have to alter my experience further. I don't have to seek the next great thrill. And that's something that's really hard to walk away from. Like, you know, Nomi, I understand what you mean. If you started, you couldn't stop. It's hard to walk away from it. And the powers that be in our world have decided that there's more benefit, there's more profit, and not to us, by removing those guardrails and by removing the moral guardrails and the practical guardrails around those things.

43:29Vinson Cunningham:Let chaos reign. Yeah. Who's going to benefit? Who's going to profit? Keep on scrolling. Keep on betting. Keep on going.

43:37Alexandra Schwartz:It's also just an invitation, not only like whatever in art, in life, whatever, to kind of reacknowledge where actual control in your life lies, you know, because on some level you talk about betting on dreadful things like genocide. One way to understand that, maybe it's like the Freudian way to understand that, is you acknowledge your total lack of control in so many domains and therefore you grab at the closest node of control that you can. That's a really good point. If I can't stop or if events around me seem totally chaotic and unresponsive to the usual levers of control, what can I do except ride the roller coaster of speculation that surrounds those events?

44:24Alexandra Schwartz:grab what I can from the aura of happenings because whatever, democracy, et cetera, et cetera, my usual ways of registering or at least just feeling control are now no longer available to me. And also just like reading a novel or just watching a game and just sitting there and watching it is its own battle of control. It's like, will I cede control of my consciousness to somebody else? Can I sit and let this novelist, can I sit and let this athlete, by whatever means, like maybe lead me to transcendence? It's like a scary thing to give oneself over in that way. And maybe this is another way of sort of saying, you don't have to do that.

45:07Alexandra Schwartz:You can distract yourself in other ways. You want young person of whatever orientation, you want to feel a real rush, go up to a real person and tell them, hey, I like the cut of your jib. Could I get your number? That is the biggest high. And you might pay for it later. But there's no, you don't have to sign up for an app. Ride the real wave. It's called life.

45:34Naomi Fry:Wow. I love that so much, Vincent.

45:38Vinson Cunningham:Keep your money in your pocket.

45:41Alexandra Schwartz:Until you have to go on a date. But it's a different thing. Correct.

45:52Vinson Cunningham:This has been Critics at Large. This week's episode was produced by Michelle O 'Brien. Alex Barish is our consulting editor. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Conde Nast's head of global audio is Chris Bannon. Alexis Quadrado composed our theme music. And we had engineering help today from James Yost, Chris Letts, and Ben Adair, with mixing by Mike Kutchman. And we should say, if you or someone you know is struggling with a gambling problem, help is available. The National Problem Gambling Helpline can be reached at 1-800-GAMBLER. You can find every episode of Critics at Large at newyorker.com slash critics.

46:42Alexandra Schwartz:Hey, listeners. This is Liz Mainz-Amanzadi. the New Yorker's Puzzles and Games editor. If you're someone who likes making lists and organizing your bookshelf, we think you'll love Catalogs, our new daily game that challenges you

46:55Vinson Cunningham:to put things in order based on a hidden rule. You might be asked to sort peppers by spiciness, world capitals by population, or Martin Scorsese movies by release date. You can play Catalogs every day at newyorker.com slash games and in the New Yorker app for iOS or Android. Here's a helpful hint. The app gives you free access to our entire archive of catalogs, along with our word scramble game Shuffle-O and the mini crossword.

47:21Alexandra Schwartz:So download the New Yorker app for new games to play every day.