Alex: Alright, let's lay 'em on the table as they say. I wanna know from my fellow critics who has a relationship with gambling, have you been known to play a penny slot? I'm wondering is there a poker night in your life? 
Naomi: My relationship with gambling is non-existent and I, I'll tell you why that is. Because I feel like, I don't know if this is real or not, but in my mind I'm like, if I start, I won't stop.
Vinson: Mm-hmm. 
Naomi: Or that's at least the fear that I have, like deep within me, 
Alex: you know yourself and we admire self-knowledge. Vincent, how about you? 
Vinson: Uh, similar. I was raised where. The 10 Commandments, the Beatitudes were all distilled into three laws, no smoking, no drinking, no gambling. I don't know why gambling got in there, but it was like a big thing.
Uh, I don't know if it was like respectability, politics, whatever. So. I, I was like raised to even to look down at like the people lining up to play numbers in the, in the bodegas near me, which they did all the time. I grew up watching people online to just, you know, play the mega millions or whatever. It was a big narrative around me in which I could not, uh, participate, although I should say.
I bet on horses in Saratoga Springs, New York for the first time this summer, and boy is that fun. 
Alex: And what happened? 
Vinson: I did not break even. It was a loss and unfortunately I didn't care. It was worth it to watch those majestic beasts run from start to finish around the track and for, I don't know. Have some stakes in it.
I, I learned their names, their habits, their, their, [a]their prior performances. The money just made everything matter more. Wow. Yeah. And I was like, oh no, I get it. 
Alex: Um, all I have to say about it is I once lost $20 in a shell game, and that was it for me, Took about five seconds 
Naomi: is Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. I'm Nomi Fry. 
Vinson: I'm Vincent Cunningham. 
Alex: And I'm Alex Schwartz. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. Hello my friends. Hello, hello. So guys, can you describe a moment that you've had recently where it occurred to you that everything feels like it's connected to gambling right now?
Naomi: For me, it kind of like came home recently when I started realizing there was a thing called, uh, poly Market, a bedding site where. You can basically put odds on anything. for instance, who's gonna like inherit Anna Wintour's, you know, role at Vogue, you know, something that.
Mere months ago, I would've never thought would be a topic for degenerate gamblers to bet on. And yet on this site, which by the way has just been cleared to launch in the US even though people were already using it in the us. Uh, via VPN, suddenly everything is up for grabs, you know, and I was like, oh, I guess it's not just kind of like grim faced bookies and, and, you know, you know, just, just like the thing you imagine like the, all the, like casinos, the, the, the smoke-filled rooms, et cetera, et cetera.
But it's, it's just regular people    
Alex: Yeah, I was reading about it in this really interesting article that ran in New York Magazine 
and what this article was saying, was that Shane Coplan did the classic tech founder thing of making exactly what he wanted to make, not worry about regulations and just kind of move fast and break things and assume that the times would catch up. And with the Trump presidency they have like things weren't looking so good for him in 2022 when he was fined.
For operating like a, a gambling site without any kind of regulation. But then the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has, has now given him the, okay. Like as of a few days ago. Vinson, did you have a similar moment, with Polymarket or something else gambling related?
Vinson: For me, even though sports has always been a haven of gambling, just the sheer number of. Ads for gambling concerns that now every single sports podcaster has to like roll off of their tongue. Yeah. Uh, it just seems to me that even in the spaces where it belongs, it's a bigger part of the narrative than it has ever been before.
And I'm, I've been astounded by like, you know, my. Understanding and like acquaintance with the terms of it overs, unders, parlays, et cetera. Stuff that I never knew. I just know by osmosis from these, uh, various forms of media. It's, it's a huge thing. It's, it's a boom, it's mainstream eyes, I guess I would say.
Yeah. In a way that I don't think it, it has been before. 
Alex: Yeah. I, that's how it seems to be too. I mean, gambling is everywhere. It's just braided into daily reality in a way that it has not seemed to be before.
So that's what we're talking about today. Gambling. We wanna find out what it's doing to us now that it's been freed from the physical walls of casinos and set loose on our phones. And we're gonna be talking about some of our favorite. Gambling texts from the past and why we keep getting drawn into the drama of high stakes betting.
Even while we know or we think we do, that the lows always come to match the highs. And so what I really want us to get into today is why at a time of increasing instability in the world, when so little feels stable or predictable, are we driven to risk it all? 
Vinson: Hmm. 
Alex: So that's today on critics at large.
Why we're all in on gambling.
________________


So it's early September. There's that nice little bite in the air. It's back to school season. But more to the point of what we're here to talk about. It's the beginning of football season. And Vincent, when we were discussing this episode and, and what kinds of things we might wanna talk about, you were mentioning to us that.
You feel that there's a big difference between watching a football game now and watching one just a few years ago before New York legalized online sports betting? Tell us a little bit about it. I mean, I, I dare say that your co critics are not the biggest football watchers. Bring us in. 
Naomi: Yeah, bring us in 
Vinson: Well, you know, it's funny, it's not just football, it just, it just so happens that football is the. Most visible case of this, uh, I watched, like I I, I assume many millions did the season opening games, uh, this week in the NFL, including my jets, finding a way to break my heart by being better than I thought they would be, and still losing by two points to the Pittsburgh Steelers, whatever.
But what is interesting, almost aesthetically is a couple things. One underneath the screen on certain broadcasts runs a Chiron of the different betting odds for the games usually sponsored by, you know, these betting concerns, which are, they seem to have unlimited advertising dollars and have co-opted whole broadcast.
So it's that visual reminder that, uh, on some level the game is a pretext for the, uh, sort of monetary fortunes of, you know, small time betters everywhere. Um, but then in the content of the media that surrounds the sport, uh, increasingly there are segments on my favorite.
Talk shows.I love sports talk, but now there are these segments where it's like, you know, so-and-so's picks and they don't say it, uh, explicitly all the time, but what they're saying is, I'm giving you gambling tips for the upcoming weekend. Um draftings FanDuel, a new entrant into this arena is prize picks. Um, here's my picks for that. Go ahead and use the promo code Vincent, and you'll get 5% off your first bet. So it's all to draw you in, give you some expert advice, and the game becomes this odd secondary show.
Alex:  I do think it's worth saying that in 2018, the Supreme Court. I remember them, they struck down something called the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992. Mm-hmm. Which had restricted legal betting primarily to Nevada for more than 20 years.
So suddenly this just allowed this flood of a gambling free for all to enter into the scene. And I think 39 states now offer legal gambling of, of some kind, and 32 of them are online. And I also think the online thing is very particular because much is with. Aspects of real life that go online with some benefits and a lot of drawbacks.
Betting is now one too. Like you can't, like, here again, I think that idea of the degenerate really comes in Nome. Like you can't. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You can't shuffle up to the window and shuffle up and place your crumpled dollars underneath and have to catch your own reflection in the glass. You're just, you know, using your thumbs.
Vinson: Yeah. 
And even athletes are kind of aware of this and having. Fun with it or getting in trouble with it.  all this stuff that's like, is this person involved in gambling? Are they trying to make money for themselves or other people? Um, Kevin Durant, who is like one of the greatest basketball players ever. Also a very funny guy on Twitter watches when people get mad at him during games because of the parlays and says, here's one tweet when them parlays don't hit as a joke.
This is for years of slander from NBA fans. I'm grateful I have this much power now, smiley face. So they, they're aware of it and aware of how. Their performance in games, either as a team or individually, affects these bets radically, I think changing the experience of watching a game. 
Alex: Can you break down for us a little bit that Kevin Durant tweet, what is a parlay? What is he talking about? 
Vinson: Yes. 
Alex: How do you think his tweet is expressing like him seeing a power shift in his relationship with the fans? 
Vinson: Well, okay. A couple of things. Number one, what I have come to know, I guess this has always been true, but now many more people are aware of this, is that you can bet on any aspect of the game.
Mm-hmm. Even within a basketball game, you can be like, who's gonna score the very first point? Who's gonna score the last point? Will this person score over or under this number of points, rebounds, assist, um, all kinds of things. In addition to just the outcome of the game, so, so it's potentially 
Naomi: endless.
Vinson: Yeah. The Super Bowl famously has a, a lot of these like prop bets, what you can bet on, how long the national Anthem is gonna go in the Super Bowl, like stuff like, that's crazy. You can do all these kinds of things. And a parlay is the absolutely suicidal. Uh, act of threading these things together. So my parlay only hits if three of these things happen.
If Kevin Durant scores 27 points and the games, uh, total, you know, score is above certain number and whatever. So you pick and mix and match these little bets and create one sort of pearl of bets that you can only realize if they all hit. But of course. If they all hit, you make a lot more, there's like a sort of exponential growth when you like link them, but if you lose them all, obviously you're asked out.
Naomi: Yeah. I was talking to a friend who is friends with a pro tennis player. 
Vinson: Mm-hmm. 
Naomi: And he said that since betting has entered the arena and kind of like this much more enhanced role in, in recent years, the dms, this guy gets. Are just, it's like the fans, if you can call them fans, you know the ire Yeah. That they feel, because their bets didn't hit based on this guy's performance on the court.
Yeah. Uh, are, it's, it's scary. And so there are very, there strong feelings involved here in a way that, you know, it's, this isn't a game anymore. You know what I mean? I mean, it's, I didn't even realize that this was. Such a prominent development and kind of the relationship between athlete and and viewer, I guess.
Alex: I do wanna just briefly say that you don't have to take the word of three, um, self-proclaimed, you know, squares for, for it. You could read this piece that our colleague j Kang wrote for the New Yorker called online gambling, is changing sports for the worst. He published it over a year ago in March of 2024, and Jay himself has written about.
His experiences with gambling and the piece opens with him going to Vegas to bet on um, March Madness. So look, here's someone who knows of what he speaks. There's a great quote in this piece from Tyrese, Halliburton, the basketball player who's just like, for half the world, I'm just helping them make money on DraftKings or whatever.
I'm a prop. Like what a brutal way to feel about your profession, your vocation, your art, whatever. However you wanna define what it is to be a star basketball player. 
Vinson: All of those things. Yes, I 
Alex: know he's getting paid richly still. It seems like a bummer. 
Vinson: Yeah, and it, it, part of it is like what represents is a further privatization of. The fan experience. 'cause it's like, okay, for a long time, uh, let's say fantasy sports, which are kind of gambling, I'm gonna bet my league, whatever, about my fantasy team. But it's like something that is still social and you're still, you're yelling at your friend about how you lost because your person stayed outta the game or whatever.
Now, if you've got your own little parlay, you're watching the games in this hyper selective way. Only for this one little thing that you put together, which heightens the stakes in the wrong way, like sports about aesthetics and about beauty. And, uh, this makes it less and less plausible to say so if, if you got somebody who's got three TVs and is little man cave and is watching this game and this game and this game, just to make sure all of his little.
Curios, uh, 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 the, with these like individual interests in mind. 
Alex: in a minute. The high highs and low lows of gamblers in art. This is critics at large from the New Yorker.
:: MIDROLL 1 :: 
Alex: 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 wanna 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? It's just a little, little red disc. 
Vinson: The aesthetics are pretty great. Let's say that. Let's say that everything that arounds gambling is kind of cool. 
Alex: 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. 
Vinson: Very good, very good. I'd 
Alex: be on the other side of that table. There you go in, in with a little tie on. Keeping it profesh. 
Naomi: A little vest, 
Naomi: I, you know, when you say gambling texts, my mind goes to one of my favorite Victorian novels, George Elliot's, Daniel Rhonda, from 1876 because it opens with the scene of gambling, which kind of sets the stakes haha, for, uh, the, rest of the novels.
A lot happens in this novel. It's, but there is the character of Gwendolyn Harth who is, uh, a beautiful young woman of marriageable age and, um. It begins at a casino in Europe where Daniel Durda, who's the protagonist of, 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, 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, the way the, 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 her, the choice that she makes is kind of a gamble, right?
Will she bet on the right horse, AKA man, uh, for her life to churn out? A, a certain way. Right. And I, a bit of a spoiler alert, she bets wrong, which is kind of a large part of, of the novel, but the beginning of the novel in this like House of Luck right in, in this casino kind of becomes a metaphor for the rest of the book.
And I think one of the things. To draw kind of a, a, a broader point from this is one of the things that attracts us about gambling is it's, uh, 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.
Uh, 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, is the drama and the unpredictability. Of course, this is quite, quite obvious, but I think true nonetheless. Oh, 
Alex: I love that. Vincent, do you have anything to, to add to my table?
Vinson: Oh, I got 
Alex: step right up. 
Vinson: Yeah, I got stuff to add. Um, one of my favorite books about gambling, uh. Is by a writer who's written lots of books that I like. Uh, Colton Whitehead. Mm. Uh, he wrote a book about, um, 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.
Mm-hmm. He's using. It in, 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, et cetera. It's partially also kind of a divorce book.
He's talking about getting divorced a lot in the book. Um, but the first line of the book, I just love, I have a good poker face because I am half dead inside. Oh God, 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 beding, 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, a signpost for the strategy of the rest of the book. This attempt is in part, at least a cover over the travel of various mental and emotional states and an attempt to express them. 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, uh, I don't know, taxonomy, which is like primary betting, betting on oneself and. Secondary betting, betting on other people. Whereas like, you know, even think about the film Rounders, the, the Matt Damon vehicle, uh, written by the team of David Levine and Brian Kopelman about, you know, an underground poker scene.
Also, the guy wants to be in the World Series Poker, whatever. Um, 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. And I find as I was looking through these things, I was like, oh wait, I respect one more than the other.
Mm-hmm. Um, 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 gonna guess right about somebody else. 
Alex: 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. 
Vinson: Mm-hmm. And 
Alex: 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?
Vinson: Yeah. 
Alex: And  I love gambling scenes in which the person don't got it. There's just, maybe it's Sean and Freuder, 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, 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. Oh, 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 Rosoff sits down at the gambling table in war in peace with a man who loves Nikolai's fiance. Who proceeds to fleece him of 43,000 rubles. Wow.
Which, by the way, guys, it was a lot of rubles then. It's a lot of rubles now. Yeah. It's just an amount of rubles that Nikolai Rosoff simply does not have on him. But he sits there. He knows this guy. He knows DV hates his guts, basically. 'cause Doff loves Sonya. Sonya 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 Dolokov. Uh, 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 dollar Cobb'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. 
Naomi: Wow. So 
Alex: you're seeing the hands and the kind of the, the wow.
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. He, 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. It's great. It's crushing. It's, um, it's beautiful. You know, I, there, it's, it reminds me in a, in a different way of the episode in The Sopranos, and there's this episode, the happy wanderer where, um, this like absolute puts who runs a, 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.
        CLIP - THE SOPRANOS
He's in over his head. Yeah. In that case, you, it's kind of a classic portrait of gambling addiction and, 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. 
Vinson: This group of people. I don't think we're gonna make it outta this segment without talking about uncut gems. I will break the seal. Ah yes. Watch watching someone lose and do so at high cost, at a sort of spectacular level of sort of adrenal energy.
There is something, uh. I mean, addicting about that. Uh, watching someone just go down and down and down and can't look away, but Jesus Christ, they're going again. You know, that sort of tilting at windmills, that losing and gambling represents, um, and is so amazingly illustrated in the Saft Brothers film, uncut Gems starring the amazing Adam Sandler.
Uh, it, there's something, it plays out almost like a horror movie. 
        CLIP - UNCUT GEMS
Alex: Yeah. Yeah. It plays out like a horror movie.   I haven't seen it, you know, since it came out and I'm due for rewatch, but I do remember the absolute adrenaline coursing through the theater. Yeah. 
Vinson: Oh man. Because 
Alex: what that movie does, and in some ways what, what a great movie or book or, 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, 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 gonna change at all, because of course it could. 
Naomi: 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, that's absolutely normal 
Alex: You know, there's something I keep thinking about.
'cause we were talking about so many of these things where gambling is shown to be not the glory that, that its participants would, would hope it would be. Um, but I have a counter example that's just really for some reason floating, floating to the top of my mind right now from the movie, the Big Short.
Which I think really holds up, I gotta say, and it's about the, the young guys that, that team of relatively new investors, they start to notice, they, 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 be. That that will happen. And the, there's a moment in the movie when that does. Payoff 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. 
        CLIP - THE BIG SHORT
They didn't cause it, right. They did not cause it. But they did profit from it much as perhaps your average show. Such as, such as I might go on to poly market and look at a war, or look at a dreadful event and think, what might there be in this for me?
We've seen the highs and more soberly 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.
:: MIDROLL 2 :: 
We have 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 
Vinson: do the honor 
Naomi: islands in the stream. Well, I'm thinking more. Yeah, I know. I'm kidding. It was a joke. 
Alex: Damn, you're good. Um, 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 and then often the reality.
Of what these places are, which is no daylight and a complete loss of time in 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. 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 poly market situation.
This is this website founded by a guy Shane Coghlan, 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. But all the bets are yes, no. So here's some examples right from the homepage 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 Momani, yes or no? Andrew Cuomo, yes or no? Right now it has 80% yes on momani, 18% on Cuomo next Prime Minister of Norway, Nobel Peace Prize winner 2025. Trump out as president in 2025. Right now they're giving any 7% chance.
Um, I like 
Naomi: those odds. Oh, I like those odds. 
So, 
Alex: 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, ah, Israel withdraws from GA in 2025. 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 Yeah. What it is to, to bet on, like, it's not all fun in games maybe, right? Um, when you're trying to get. Rich off of a genocide. But yeah, seriously. 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 betters 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, um, they predicted that Biden would drop out after the first presidential debate. So there is a line of thinking that goes. People when they have their own money put down on a certain outcome are gonna try to be as accurate as they can be in, in predicting it that this can give you a kind of more accurate bellwether.
Yeah, I think that's an illusion, but it's a really. Compelling illusion. Mm-hmm. 
Vinson: Well, yeah, and this has, you know, the, 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 bets, some of whom have algorithms, right.
Are, are, are professional betters and have taken many different statistical things into, into account and making their bets. And the regular better 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, this interesting relationship between amateurism and professionalism in bedding.  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. Mm. 
Alex: Yeah. And in, and in the case of the presidential election and other, and in other cases people are saying that the betting version is more accurate than the polling version.
Um, simply because people if it comes down to putting their own money on an outcome, that's where the truth may lie. 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, um, 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.
But of course. Is that 
Naomi: happening? Yeah. It's a wild west situation, right? Mm-hmm. And like in a wild west situation, some people will rise to the top, you know, by either inborn talent or, uh, 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, it's a little bit scary from my perspective. 
Alex: you know, often our financial market and our financial system is. Like into 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. They're, you know, there's a reason that expertise often ends up winning the day. So. I, I just feel something very, very predatory in this encouragement of everyone to consider themselves an expert. I'm, 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 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 gonna make a lot of people poorer before it makes them richer. Yeah, certainly. I sound so scolding, but, but I, no, but I worry there's nobody 
Naomi: to, there's no protection.
Right. It's like you made your choices. Sorry. You're like an unlucky sap, essentially. Right. 
Vinson: 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. Uh, that there's a, a strange logic today by which, and you see it online, you see it everywhere.
Uh. Influencers, whatever, telling you that you can actually act like the people that you think are like the big boys. Yeah. That if, if only you would bet on yourself, if only you would, um, use the number of hours and the day that, the corporate CEO uses you too could,  if you only were willing to put something on the line.
The, the only thing. Separating you from the expert, better, the expert investor, um, the whatever money getter you are being trained to look at. The only difference is, as they say, a mindset.  And so if corporations are people, also people can act like corporations there is a sort of. um, my friend, the writer, John Gans, uh, has called this vulgar positivism that, um.
I if you could only sort of take your human emotions and turn them into complex algorithms, you could get the outcome that you want. 
Naomi: Yeah. But of course we know that's not how it works because people are still people and, uh, for better and worse, for better and worse.  Yeah. Like I was thinking about. This is not from personal experience, uh, but the whole idea of like dating apps, right? 
Vinson: Mm-hmm. 
Naomi: When people find themselves in the role of, of a kind of gambler, I, right?
Like the options are all there. Like, who are you gonna meet? You know, who are you gonna swipe on and how will the narrative of your life be affected by it? Likely it, 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.
From what I understand from people, from friends who've told me, you know, there is something addicting. 
Vinson: Mm-hmm. About 
Naomi: it. You get caught up in your own narrative and how it might turn out potentially. 
Vinson: And there too. Um, there is, uh, such a great example and there is again, this temptation toward, um, number one, turning matters of the heart into matters of the spreadsheet.
Mm-hmm. In terms of like sort of, uh, mathematizing, mathematizing, I dunno. Um. All of your interactions and the dehumanization that falls from that goes in really nasty directions. Not only dehumanizing one's own approach to another person, but dehumanizing the other person. Uh, in turn, in the same way that you dehumanize the tennis player at the US Open by totally having turned them into digits in your parlay calculation.
Exactly. That the sort of, the impulse to gambling um, at least of this kind. Uh, the, 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, 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. 
Alex: 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, um, you know, that's why, that's why you put 'em all back and you go double or nothing. Right.
I mean, I do think so. We, we do live in a very, we live in a culture. This will mean news to everyone that, that loves gratification, uh, and, and the delivery of gratification. 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, basically don't destroy yourself, is what I hear from that. Yeah. 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, uh, my experience further.
I don't have to seek the next great thrill. 
Vinson: Yeah. And 
Alex: that's something that's really hard to walk away from, like, you know, know me. I, I understand what you mean. If you started, you couldn't stop. It's hard to walk away from it. Yeah. And the powers that be in, 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, let chaos, rain. Yeah. Who's gonna benefit? Who's gonna profit? Keep on scrolling, keep on betting, keep on, keep on going. 
Vinson: It's also just an invitation, not only like whatever in, in art, in life, whatever, to kind of reac, acknowledge where actual control in your life lies.
You know? Yeah. Because on some level you talk about betting on dreadful things like genocide mm-hmm.  one way to understand that maybe this is 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, the closest.
Node of control that you can, if I can't, that's a really good point. If I can't stop a war, if events around me seem totally chaotic and unresponsive to the usual levers of control, what can I do except ride the rollercoaster of speculation that surrounds those events? 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 a game and just sitting there and watching it is its own battle of control. It's like, will I seed. Control of my consciousness to somebody else.
Can I sit and let this novelist, can I sit and let this athlete, uh, by whatever means, like maybe lead me to transcendence? It's like a scary thing to give oneself over in that way. And maybe, uh, this is another way of sort of saying, you don't have to do that. You can distract yourself in other ways. You, you want young person of whatever orientation, you wanna feel a real rush, go up to a real person and tell 'em.
Hey, I like the cut of your jib. Could I get your number? Woo. That is the biggest high. And you, 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. 
Naomi: Wow. I love that so much. Vincent. 
Alex: Keep your money in your pocket 
Vinson: until you have to go on a date, but it's a different thing.
Alex: Correct.
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 Steven Valentino. Conde Nast's Head of Global Audio is Chris Bannon. Alexis Quadra composed our theme music and we had engineering help today from James Yost.
Chris Letz, and Be Adair with Mixing by Mike Tuchman. 
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 New yorker.com/critics.




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