Historically High - The History of Las Vegas

Episode Date: August 3, 2022

I mean do we even really need an introduction for this one...? It's Vegas Baby. A jewel in the desert, an Oasis in the Sahara, but how did this place even happen? It's literally the strangest place on earth. Normal rules of society seemingly get left on the plane when you fly in and you pick them back up on your way out. It's bright lights, its big money, it's bet it all on black. Tune in and find out how it all came to be. Support the show Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Why do you think it is, well, I don't know if it's hard for some people, because I guess it's not hard for me. When you go into like a gas station or you're just dealing with anyone in customer service, are you usually, do you find yourself being like neutral toward the person or do you find yourself trying to be like, not going out of your way, but just trying to be courteous? I'm a bad person to ask this because I wouldn't really call myself an introvert, but I kind of always try to try to try. treat people like extra nice to the point to where it kind of backfires. Like when I was living in my apartment and I had that Albertsons that was right over there next to it. Yeah.

I would always go in after work and there would be this dude that I would talk to and he was just a random worker like just a regular worker. But I was always coming in at like 9 o'clock at night, 9.30 to get my groceries and all that shit. So this guy, very nice guy, just kind of a different dude, would like start to follow me around the grocery store. Were you a headphones in, like a headphones music guy? No.

Shop in silence? Oh, I used to just put headphones in. I've never shopped in headphones. I need that, like, awareness. Really? Yeah, I need to be able to look around me and see what's going on. But it ended up getting to the point where, like, I would walk in the door. And he would hang out with me for the 15 or 20 minutes that I was in there, like walk around

and all that shit. So I used to have to stop at the other Albertsons on the way home from work because I didn't want to deal with that guy because I was just so nice to him eventually that like he just wanted to be my buddy. He just didn't like he took he took your like courtesy or your tolerance for it as like a welcome invitation to continue doing it. Yeah I mean it's to me part of being like a normal person in society is either like just completely ignoring somebody else or just trying to be nice to him and try to be friends with them like when they ask you how's your day going and they make like a weird like oh yeah you know not

too bad things are looking up that it's like oh yeah why is it looking up like if you're gonna ask me questions i'm gonna be a little intrusive too and then eventually it's either gonna lead to one of us shutting up or like you thinking we're close do you have a response to just those generic questions that you always find yourself saying like if someone's like hey you know how's i've been going oh it's i'm always generic like there's no i'm not looking i barely look to share like good information with friends and family. I mean like just like if you haven't seen someone in a while and you're not like your acquaintances with him like, hey, how's work treating you?

Like I find myself almost, I think pretty much every time. I think my standard is without my brain even clicking in. I hear that question of my brain just like, okay, load the response, fire it. And it's, you know, can't complain or, you know, something like it's, I'm trying to see. Now I'm thinking about it and I can't think exactly what it is because it's so automatic. So you may ask me, you know, How's it been going? I can't complain too much.

I guess that's it. Yeah, I better than expected. You know what, like, what are you going to say? And there's answers to that question that people are like, fuck, why did I ask that question? Like, I've asked that question before to somebody, and it just immediately, like, launched into how their day was. Well, you're expecting because you have such an automatic response.

You're expecting their response to be automatic, and they're like, well, let me tell you. And you're like, wait, what? Oh, that's not, I wasn't actually asking. Yeah, no, this was. just a courtesy of you being human and me acknowledging your existence and like we just we keep this

symbiotic relationship yeah I guess what I'm getting at is just those like really just past by interactions where I think for the most part people are either at a neutral position of just like thanks and then they leave and take their stuff or they just take their stuff

but I mean you got to go out of your way to be like a dick to somebody yeah or to even like, I don't know if it's just me, but if I have an interaction and it's just a small, simple, I try to keep it simple. It's like, you know, have a great rest your day or something like that or, you know, don't work too hard or something. Just those little like human interactions. I know they don't mean like, mean much at all. And I don't know even how they impact the person.

But I think my interaction for people like that is it can only help your day. well yeah and that's the other thing is those people not to diminish they were downgrade them but if you're like a grocery store worker or something like that chances are your day is not going to be awesome you're going to be dealing with people that probably

are nice so if you can give somebody a nice interaction for five minutes and not be like the bright spot of their day but just be like cool enough to be like don't don't be a hindrance to their day don't be a negative spot of the day where they look back at their day you either be easily forgetable during the day or be a positive memory.

Yeah, don't. Just be the person that doesn't make them want to staple their hand for the fifth time that day. Like, just be nice. But this falls along something that... See, now I'm going to sound like a dick when I say this, but this falls along something that I believe we just need more as a society. Just be as normal as possible about things. Like, either have just a regular conversation,

and then just move along with your day. Or like, one that drives me nuts, and I don't know what it says about me, but like if I hold the door open for somebody, and they're like, thanks, appreciate it, it's like, that's great. If I hold the door open for you and you're like, oh my God, thank you so much for holding the door open for me.

It's like, don't do that. Let's tone it down. Listen, I know the effort that I'm putting into this. At this point, it's weird because, like, maybe that courtesy is genuine to them. but it's patronizing. You're like, and I don't know what that says,

like you're saying, I don't know what that says about, like us, are we so used to in interactions with our friends, like backhanded compliments and sarcasm, that all of a sudden just like, general society, you think everything that they say is going to have,

like a hint of like, oh, thank you so much for holding the door open. You're like, what's this bitch saying that like, I'm trying to get credit for putting in a little effort and everything. Like you just want to look at some

and be like, well, fuck you too. Yeah. their over niceness just immediately turns me into like a little bit of anger and I it very well could be that like I never thought that just the patronizing nature of our friendships would do that but it's just like just thank me enough like I didn't save your kid I didn't go pull him out of traffic or anything like that I'm just fucking holding the door up and just say thanks and move on like we don't we don't got to make this a thing and that's the other thing is if you're like that happy and desperate to thank somebody for opening the door for people you probably don't have a lot of people that open the door for you, which is just another common courtesy. Like,

you don't have to hold it open if somebody's 25 feet away, but holding the door open is just acknowledging their existence. That actually might go into the room of, like, being like the opposite side of the spectrum, like you're holding the door open, but you're doing it in like a dick way. Because then you make eye contact with them. You open it, and you do that thing where you make eye contact with them,

you make sure they see you, and then you just kind of look away. Like you have time to like look around at your surroundings while you're waiting for them, and then after doing that, you look back at them, are they not there yet? You're like, like you're just not creepy enough

to stare somebody down the whole walking way. And there's somebody that does a joke about that. That's a decent bit when they're talking about how they get mad that people hold the door open and they're that far away because then they feel like they have to hurry and run from the parking lot to get in the door so you don't inconvenience the other person. Yeah, I don't know.

Just do things a normal amount. Thank people a normal amount. Don't go overboard. Like don't. Just be normal. Do you want to know why I brought a customer service? Why? Because today's topic is a city, entirely built on it.

It's built on the customer. I disagree. Vegas, baby. It is. I think it's built on the underground. No. I, and I'll show you, one of the things is there was a guy named, and this is going to jump ahead, and then we're going to go back.

He was the owner of the horseshoe casino. Benny Binion. And this dude, like, I feel like this guy is probably about what you would think of when you think of old Vegas. He was a convicted bootlegger and he had shot and killed. I don't know if he'd shot him, but he had killed at least two people in Texas. Yet he was somehow still able to open and operate a casino in Las Vegas. But he had a point when they were asking him, and this was back, I think, in the, I think the 40. maybe the 50s, but they were asking him how, you know, why do you, how do you think Vegas can

become successful or how are you successful? And he's like, you make the little people feel like big people. And they're saying that that was almost the mentality going forward that Vegas had is that it was going to be a place where normal people could come and, you know, fulfill those fantasies. How much did you get into the, like, mob? Um, most of the stuff I did, I knew you were going to kind of focus on that because you talked about it before. Um, I went over kind of like how Las Vegas itself even like came into being and how it was established. And then just some, I guess some little side stories that I thought were pretty cool. Yeah. So, um, you talking about Benny Binion and saying that, a lot of these kind of customs of like, try. to make the little people feel big in trying to go the extra mile. A lot of that was like mob influence. Like one of the guys that we'll talk about coming up,

who he might be one of my favorite mobsters just from what he did. His name was Frank Rosenthal. And he was running the Stardust. And at the Stardust, he was the first one to use female blackjack dealers. and of course dressed them all up all sexy like all that kind of stuff and it actually doubled the profits of the gambling floor of the Stardust

because he was the first one to put a woman dealer in. It's just those little things that they kind of changed up to make things just a little bit different or fancier and it made a lot of money. That Benny Binion guy, he was the first one. So the horseshoe casino, so it's one of the casinos located in on Fremont

or near Fremont. on old Vegas. What was originally the original Vegas. And so he was the first one. So his casino, they would accept any wager, no matter how high. Hell yeah. And they were the first one to offer free booze if you were gambling. Can you imagine the game changer with that? Oh, I need to stop for that.

Because that's something that they all do now. I mean, wait, do modern Vegas casinos provide you? Oh, yeah. Do they really? Native casinos don't. Anything on a reservation, you have to buy your liquor. Okay, so if you're gambling, I mean, they're not going to come up if you just stop at a slot machine for three minutes. But if they probably have someone watching for people walking around saying, okay, this person's been playing the slot for 15 minutes, we should probably comp their drink. Keep them there. Yeah, I think just a lot of it's about being at the right place, the right time. Because when we go, usually, if you're looking for like a quick drink or something like that, you can't go to the sports book.

Sit down and do it in the sports book. sit down at like the there's different zones that they hit. So like you'll have dollar slots, you'll have 56 slots. Yeah, it's almost all determined like the outer circle, the inner circle, like where they put like penny or not they're not penny slots anymore, but what you would consider this day and age

to be considered like the penny slots. Yeah. They have in a certain area. So usually it goes tables, then it goes slots, then it goes cheaper slots. And so like. Keep the riff rough on the outside.

Is that what it is? It's like if you're spending a dollar, a pole on a one arm, it, you're going to want to get that guy drunk because the longer he's drunk, the longer he's going to do that. The person that's out playing the penny slots is probably just playing it for the lights and fun because you can only win so much. Nana. Nana's out there.

So Nana's probably not going to get shit. She's out there. She's got that social security check, burning a hole in her purse. All right, so let's go back. Before we do, I thought this was just kind of interesting for today. just for like today's numbers. But for budget your trip.com, it says in this day and age that you should plan on spending around $246 a day

on your vacation in Las Vegas, which is the average daily price based on expenses of other visitors. Past travelers have spent on average $64 on meals for one day and $38 on local transportation. Also the average price. price in Las Vegas for a couple, or for a hotel for a couple is $253. I think the hotel is probably close, but I think that food needs to be bumped up quite a bit. And I think that that average also, we're going to get into, I feel like we need to go back and get in.

Yeah, but just to kind of set where we are now. So I know for a fact that it's much more expensive than $64 a day for food. I don't know if that was individual. I think that's even low for an individual. Yeah. I also think that that's probably the average over the entire Las Vegas metropolitan area because nowadays Fremont and the area outside the strip are cheaper. Yeah.

And so that's, I don't think that's counting. Because if you're on the strip and you're staying just on the strip, 64 is probably what you're going to be hitting, not even kidding. If you go to anywhere to sit down and eat, that's for you and somebody else. And then you factor in drinks and it's your triple digits immediately. You could order four reasonable drinks anywhere else, and it would be $64. It's ridiculous. So that's how we do things now to go to Vegas.

But pre-Vegas, pre-Vegas, pre-Mob Vegas, pre-Mob Vegas, pre-every-every-Begas. Yeah, boom, Vegas. It wasn't, like, it wasn't necessarily a vacation destination at that point, but the debauchery happened just from the local level. It was almost had a necessity, and we're going to kind of find out why. Yeah, exactly. So. We go from vacation now to like just a weekend of blowing off steam for local residents back there. Yeah. So Las Vegas in Spanish is actually the Meadows. It translates to the meadows. It originally started out as a, was it a Union Pacific?

Yep. Railroad Hub, right? So Union Pacific came in. It was probably someplace on the way from, you know, Southern California just through the middle of the country, I would imagine. It was to connect a few different places. A lot of them just kind of when it was first found, Las Vegas was always like a halfway point to L.A. from places. Okay. That was just always, it was like a stop. So at one point back before everybody,

before the settlers found it and everything like that, the Paiute and the Anasazi lived there for a really long time. They found like Petrograts on the rocks from like 12,000 years ago. So as the Europeans came into the valley, Antonio Armigo and Rafael Rivera were too Spanish. You went way back on this. Yeah, it's an old time. And they were coming from the south,

and they were looking for somewhere that's a halfway point between Santa Fe and L.A., which to me, trying to think about that and look at a map, like it feels like that's like a curve. Yes, it feels like they went up. They went north. Yeah, and then they're coming back like southwest to L.A. That's...

And I think part of that is just the Sierra Nevada's, the mountains. Oh, yeah. I mean, at that point when you're traveling like that, it's not like we, I think we do take for granted these days when you're traveling somewhere. You're like, why isn't this road straight? You got to understand that like you have to, when people are traveling back in this time, you're all determined. Your travels all determined by the terrain.

Yep. So you had to go way out of the way to try. to go through a pass that wasn't over some huge set of mountains. And so, I mean, the passable nature of things just wasn't that. Like, nowadays, when you see a tunnel or something, you're like, okay, we just put dynamite in there and blast it through. Go out to, like, if you live anywhere where there's any type of, like, foothills or mountains, go out there and just look across and be like, well, how would I get from here to here? You always look in a straight line. You're like, but no, you're going that.

You know, you're going left for a long time, right for a long time, trying to be around. Yeah. So that was one of the first, that was actually Armigo described the valley as Las Vegas and all of his writings or the meadows because the waters from the sierras would start to flow down into the meadow, which obviously doesn't happen anymore because we fuck that area so hard. Oh, it does. I'll tell you about it. But as far as like the actual like meadows, like there's not just beautiful pristine meadows. Las Vegas is naturally, it's almost in, it's in a bowl in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. And so any of the rainfall, which, you know, the Vegas area does not get a lot of rainfall.

But what happens is when they do, they've been known to have flash floods. All the water collects from the sides of those mountains and funnels into that bowl. And as recently as like, I want to say the 80s, they had some like pretty serious floods. And they, I'll tell you about it when we get into the more modern Vegas, but they have implemented some pretty crazy things in order to go and control these floods. Just because the amount of damage to like the results. to like the resorts and casinos is so extremely high

that they're undertaking these insane like civil engineering projects to prevent this this you know these floods from happening it's kind of like New Orleans in Las Vegas like they had to build the levees to figure out you just said it's in New Orleans and Las Vegas huh you just said it's like kind of like

New Orleans and Las Vegas yeah like in New Orleans since it's below sea level they had to build levees and shit like that yeah in Las Vegas they're going to have to figure out some way to stop the flash floods that are like that. I'll let you know. So.

Okay. So he was the first one to use the term Las Vegas or the Meadows. The next people that came through... Can you imagine a different name for that? I know that it's hard to do that because we know it is Las Vegas, but even the name when you just say it... It's so tied to everything. I know, but if you said it and it didn't have anything tied to it is what I'm saying.

Like, I guess I can't imagine that because I know. know what it's tied to, but if you're just like Las Vegas, that itself sounds like snappy. Yeah. It just has a snappy sound to it. I think it's a lot of the fact that it's Spanish words and everybody really likes to fire those up. Nobody even realizes that's still a Spanish.

No one even realizes that's still a Spanish. If someone was like, it's American, yeah. Yes. It's American at this point. Loss is just an American word for them. So one thing, too, that I was kind of surprised about is actually the, almost the physical history of Vegas and how it actually came into being. So started out as kind of a railway hub town for the Union Pacific Railroad.

And at that point when it was the hub, it was still kind of wild west, like untamed west. Yeah, we don't see like actual parts of the city start until 1905. So they got there and look up exactly when they got there. but Kit Carson and John Charles Fremont, Fremont obviously named for the street. It's Carson, it's Carson County. No, it's Carson City. Okay, it's Clark County. Clark County is where Las Vegas is. Yeah, Carson, not a great guy. But Carson City obviously is for Kit Carson. And Fremont is for Fremont, but when they came into the Valley, it was 1864.

So you have certain, like there's 40 years where they're just building railroad. They're building everything into there. But they're not building it for a city. We don't see the first city really pop up until like 1905 is when the first land starts to go up for bid. Well, yeah. And what happens again, it's kind of by necessity. So you have a railway hub where are you going to house all the people that are working the railway hub? I'm going to go ahead and establish something as far as like housing for all the workers.

What you get at that point then is when you get a railway hub, when you start getting a passenger has come in, you have to have a place to if there's a, like what we would consider a layover now or a stop. Like a rest area. You'd have to have some way to feed, entertain. You know, that's how business has come up. You see an opportunity for, you know, people being congregated in an area. And you're like, okay, if I can sell these people something they need, I can open a business. So you're going to get stuff developing like general stores or what would you call like Habedash or like that kind of sense. stands almost.

Yeah. So after Carson showed up in 1864, we see the theme again where it's just another halfway point. At 1855, those good old Trek and Mormons decided to establish a fort halfway between Salt Lake and L.A. so they could have trade and commerce. And they started with their fort to kind of build out. And this was still when the Paiute Nation was still very active around there. Hence the fort.

Well, yeah, I can see that. The actual fort, not just to stop. I would say the Mormons probably needed the fort because they were still on their mission of converting the natives. And the Paiute people weren't real receptive to Mormonism and didn't really believe that that was going to be their way to salvation. Yeah. So there were quite a few run-ins that they had had. And the Mormons just finally abandoned the fort. It was like two or three years in, and they're just like, we can't.

to us anymore. These people don't like us. We're in their area. We can't kill enough of them to make a difference. They still have more numbers. So they went ahead and abandoned it too. But it was still another, like Las Vegas is just like basically almost like a suburb for L.A. It's the halfway point between Santa Fe, I guess, the halfway point between Salt Lake. Like this one place was just like a hub. Well, what's nuts to is kind of the Evan flow for early Las Vegas, not the Vegas we know now, but it went through a time where it it would boom and then like bust

and almost the town would almost dry under like you hear about like old towns like drying up and going under and then all of a sudden something would happen and the town would be revitalized and what was I think I don't want to say it was the center piece of it but it definitely allowed them to reinvent

themselves so many times was that Nevada almost kept all of its frontier rules while the rest of like the United States was getting rid of kind of what they consider maybe the vices or uncivilized portions of society or kind of I guess leisure activities of society Nevada actually was able to hang on to those

and it makes sense when you think about it because if they're you know people forget now when you fly over Vegas you know you're seeing the city and you're looking at that this thing is in the middle of the desert and it's just so hot. It's the Mojave Desert. It's the most. I don't know if it's the largest desert in the United States, right?

Death Valley is not as big. I want to say it's the largest desert. Isn't Death Valley a part of the Mojave Desert? No, Death Valley is more in Southern California, I thought. Or is it part of the Mojave? I think it is. Okay, I'm going to be a part of it. Okay.

You're going to check that while I'm talking. All right. So it kind of has this ebb and flow of like the town booming and then almost drying up and going under and then something else happening. to revitalize it. So the Hoover Dam is actually located about 20 miles away from actual Las Vegas. Now, the Hoover Dam was this huge undertaking.

It's considered, is it considered the eighth, one of the eighth wonders of the world, right? Or the eight wonders of the modern world. I would say, because it is just so big. And it created the largest man-made lake in the U.S. Is it the world of the United States? I want to say world. I don't think it is because they have that big one in China. Oh, okay.

At the time, at the time it may have. Yeah. So, just to go back for you, Death Valley lies near an undefined border between the Great Basin and the Mojave Desert. So it literally is like the, you're right up against the mountains and you're right in between the desert. So it's just hotter than hell because those mountains block any sort of rain or anything that comes over into the desert. So that's, it's just not. it's not a place where you would want to inhabit. No.

So, and it was by necessity that it kind of came about. So you have the Hoover Dam being constructed, and that was in, I'm sorry, I didn't write down the date, was it 19? 1931 is when construction started. So that's when it started. So 40,000 people go out to the Hoover Dam to try to get 500 jobs. And you got to understand that this is post-World War I. You have a lot of people coming back from World War I, pre-World War II.

pre-World War II, and it's his huge government civil engineering project. 5,000 people are able to get jobs. So they basically, the Hoover Dam, without going too far into it, straddles essentially Arizona and Nevada. So if you're standing in the middle of it, there's a line and you can stand in Nevada and Arizona technically. You know what it was called before Hoover Dam? What was it called?

Boulder Dam. That's why it's called Boulder City then. Yep. Okay. Boulder City was created to house all the workers. So it was basically like housing that was just constructed in order to house the 5,000 people and neither support staff or whatnot for this. And you said it was how far away from Vegas? 20 miles.

So Boulder City was 20 miles away. So you put in a massive influx of people that close. All men. Yeah. All men. That close to a town like Las Vegas. What does Nevada do in 1931? Legalize gambling.

And along with three, that this is something that's really weird that I tried to look into and didn't understand. And maybe it's because I'm not married, which I don't know why married people would know this either. But along with legalizing gambling, one of the biggest draws to the area for Nevada was they had changed the divorce rules. So you only had to have residency for six weeks before you could get a divorce. What is that? Do you have to be married for longer in other states to get a divorce? I'm not sure.

No, what it is is you have to. to, I don't think it's, so if you have to establish residency for six weeks, I'm thinking with other divorce proceedings, maybe they either took longer, you had to go in front of a judge and it was like a longer process. I'm not sure because the, or maybe it just took a like a six month period to get divorced. I don't know. It, to me it just seems so odd that that would be something that was a move. Like a draw? Yeah, it was the fact that it only took six weeks where the divorce. You see somebody else not doing something. you do it and you get the people that, you know, you fill it, you fill a gap that you notice.

Yeah. Maybe not a huge section of the population needs this, but it's still something that, you know, how, it doesn't cost them anything to do this service, but they get people coming and do it. And guess what? When people come in to get their divorces, they gamble, they spend money. So it was almost, it almost felt like they sat down and they were like, what does every other state not do? what can we do to set ourselves apart? And they're like, okay, well, let's go ahead and allow gambling.

Mm-hmm. The prostitution thing is kind of tricky. It sounds like for a while, it was just like, we're just not going to touch it. We're just going to allow it to kind of happen as it always did kind of like in the saloon days, the brothel house days. We're just kind of kind of allow that to happen. And they even facilitated it to a degree because they did have like red light districts. Well, one of the kind of cool things about the prostitution. Cool?

Yeah, okay, cool. when they set up the rules for prostitution in Nevada, one of the rules is that prostitution becomes legal once it becomes a metro area. So once the population reaches over 700,000 people, then prostitution becomes illegal within those city limits. Illegal, okay, got you. Or, yeah, becomes illegal within those city limits. So that's why big is to-

Do they establish at that time that it's become a populace and civilized enough society that sex for pay isn't... Yeah, I don't know. Listen, I'm very pro-sex work. Yeah. In any way, you shape, or form, because it's not, like... We've established, it's just...

It's a service industry. Yeah. And the more that you can make it safer, the better the stigma is going to be around it. So... If you don't want to participate in it, it's very easy to not participate in this sex work field,

if you do not want to. Yeah, it's super easy not to find a prostitute. So as it was growing, that's where the bunny ranches outside of Las Vegas came into play, was they couldn't have them with inside the city limits. Well, they could because at that point, the city limits weren't that high. They could, but as the city was to grow, they knew that they would have to push it out. I also think they probably had the foresight to realize that if people were coming there for prostitution, that being outside the city,

you would be, it would be cheaper to construct, cheaper for the land, and people are still going to come out to you. Yeah, it's like when you see a fireworks stand that's like outside of the county, like people know. Those are the good fireworks in that stand. Yeah, that's the best place to go.

Listen, I know there's about 20 firework stands closer, but we need to go to the good fireworks stand. I kind of want to go back to the Boulder City thing too. So when the Hoover Dam was being constructed, So 5,000 people living or 5,000 plus living in Boulder City, I'm just trying to kind of put myself into that mindset. So what would happen is Boulder City was a dry city. So you had guys that were working extreme manual labor.

Like if you do yourself a favor, watch just like a quick documentary on the building of the Hoover Dam. the fact that this thing was done back in the 1930s to me is like astounding. I underestimate because of the technology we have now and how rapidly in my lifetime it's progressed and I've seen stuff. I forget that there were these like insane feats of engineering. Like even back like when they were building New York and all the skyscrapers, but the foresight, the ability for like man to almost, I'm not going to say tame nature because we can't do that,

but just the scope of ambition of seeing where the dam was going to go, they had to like dynamite sides of the mountain to collapse it and everything like that. Then they had to reroute the Colorado River, which at the time it's not Lake Mead right now, so it's not up that high. The river was just, you know, the river had formed its way through the canyon. So they were able to dig like diversionary tunnels, these huge diversionary tunnels. Well, not to mention the Colorado River is huge.

Yes. Like, it's not just some little piddly river. If you haven't seen Hoover Dam, it is, I can't even, have you been to it? No. I've seen the pictures that I've seen in just the sheer size and scope of it, it gives me anxiety because the first thing I think is what happens if this ruptures. It's insane. It's that big that I know that everything will just be washed out.

There won't be anything left. I don't even know how to describe it. I was younger when I saw it So it was even more just like Aw inspiring but I got to go down And see like the generators which is awesome So like the way that they're set up You know the water goes down through the turbines

Half the turbines on one side belong to Las Vegas The other turbines power Arizona No shit. Yeah it's not like they share it's like these are your turbines These are turbines on our side So they're probably in charge of fixing theirs and I would imagine it's probably all the joint effort To keep everybody happy but that thing supplies power to like

Three States which is insane but Friday these guys would all get paid so you had the option of staying in Boulder City dry city nothing to do hanging out with just the dudes that you've been seeing for however long you've already been out here or you take that paycheck you jump in the and I think they had a fleet of vehicles

you jump in there and you had the 20 miles to Las Vegas baby you had and this was also when was prohibition it would have had to have been coming off the heels of it I want to say it was going on during the Great Depression. I want to say that it was still happening at this time. With all the people, I don't think it was quite at this point. I want to say 28 was the end of prohibition.

You think it was the, let's see. No, who-hoo, 1920 to 1933. Really? Here's the other thing. Nevada, or at least Las Vegas, didn't have prohibition. So these guys were being able to go, get a drink, go visit a lady at the night. perhaps gamble and provide themselves a little a little respite from you know working the 12 or 13 or 14 hour days hard labor you know built this fucking damn and what a time to be alive before AIDS I still I mean

you didn't know what you didn't know so it was just like yep what are those what are those red marks on there I don't worry about it well you don't those things eventually you'll either live with them or go away I'm sure yeah Well, I'm sure the STD trade was probably... Penicillum pretty much cured everything at that point, right? Yeah, that's what they thought or hoped. But you didn't have to worry about getting any sort of things that would potentially kill you at that point. They, to me, it just seems like...

I don't think that that was even a thought, though. Like, we look at it now and that's a, you know, what am I trying to say? What's the kind of... A risk that you take into account? No, I'm trying to think it's the kind of thought. Like, you wouldn't realize it until later down the road. Yeah. You know, we only have context now.

So back then, sex like, now you think of things. You're like, oh, I got to think of STTs. Back then, it was just like, I might get crabs or might burn a little bit when I pee. Totally worth it. It'll be back next weekend. Yeah. Yeah. Eventually.

Lady, do you know what I'm surrounded by for six, you know, five days a week with these dudes? Well, like we talked about a couple episodes ago, I guess more than a couple. But with the Titanic episode, they just, you know, they just. budgeted like for every hundred thousand dollars we spend there's probably going to be somebody that's dead and that wasn't just like an england or scotland thing i'm sure building the hoover dam there was probably 92 92 men died so yeah they probably had like a built-in if there's less than a hundred people that die on this we probably did okay probably a lot of it was it's crazy but a lot of it was like so when they were doing like the blasting for dynamite on the canyon walls it would be like guys

getting caught in the blast and shit. And then they would have these guys, I can't remember what they called them, not even shitting you. These guys were like on standby that if guys got caught like in the land side of the blast, these guys had to try to run in. And these guys were like on ropes down the cliff.

They had to try to swing in to grab these people. Fuck that. It's a fucking wild time, dude. There was a, there were images of them taking people from the top and lowering them down to work on the bottom. Imagine like a platform or like a,

I don't know, maybe like a 20 by 20 platform, except it's got like rails on all four sides and then it gates you all pile in. They hook the thing to a fucking crane and then they just swing you out over the canyon and start lowering you down. It's like a human dumbwaiter. Yes, with like, it probably looked like close

to like 50 dudes packed in on all sides. Like, can you imagine one of those goes down that adds 50 to your? But I mean, they... And you don't stop work for that day, I'm sure. You had to, yeah, probably not. Maybe I don't. know you imagine like the the morale at that point seeing you well at that point they also kind

of had a i wouldn't call it an advantage but during the depression you're still out there making money so you're willing to put your life more at risk because if you don't and you get fired where are you going to go do yeah so the place that these guys would would hop a ride and go to was Fremont Street and Fremont is early Vegas like the way we look at it now when you think of Vegas now

you think of the resorts and the casinos so early Vegas wasn't that like very very like the start of Vegas was almost saloons but like and most of them were cowboy themed but they had

you know they had gambling they had card games I don't even want to imagine like I don't understand slot machines I don't understand how they were built, how, you know, because the advantage always had to be for the house when they were developing these. But like the inventors that were able to develop at this time or early on, like, penny slot machines. Like how do you even build or construct that?

You're finding someone literally to build a state-of-the-art machine with the intention of taking a ton of money and only giving a little bit of money out every now and then. Yeah. It's just all mathematics. I'm sure the people that probably built slot machines were people that had built clocks before, just because you have to know the intricacies of, like, how it all works. Watching somebody build, like, an old slot machine is just fascinating to me. Just all the cogs and everything that goes into it, the spinners, the reels. And, of course.

And then to have the wordwithal of designing it to hit every, you know, your mathematical equation to figure out how much it's going to pay. payout and all that. It's a marvel of engineering. Along with 1931 being legalized gambling and them starting Hoover Dam Boulder Dam at that point

we saw the first basically casino and dance club that opened up in 1931. It was called the pair of dice. Per O. Dice. Was that the first one on Fremont or was that the first one that was on that highway? It was on Fremont. Okay. So it

really didn't have a long lifespan. They kind of figured out that they needed to expand it even faster. And it ended up getting purchased, I want to say it was towards

the end of the 30s and then it was reopened as the hotel last frontier. And it was 1942 and that was actually the second resort that was built on the new strip. So they shut down the paradise because they

it was in the city limits Fremont was in the city limits whereas the new strip that they were going to be building was out off of Highway 91 so you're closer to the freeway in the highway to get more of the people that are just traveling through instead of just the people that are working at the dam because the dam got finished 1935

yeah I don't think that's common knowledge because that was news to me is that so when you think of Vegas what do you think of if someone to say Las Vegas what's the picture you have in your mind is it the strip Just the flyover shot of the strip? Yeah. Okay.

I usually think of lights and women first just because it's there. But yeah, the strip is. What's the physical location you think of when you think of it? Okay, the strip. Okay. The strip and what we think of as modern Vegas and what would be Las Vegas is actually in a town, an unincorporated territory or town called Paradise or Winchester. It's two different ones.

Las Vegas, the city itself is like where Fremont is. And so technically what you know is the strip is outside of city. limits, which also allows it being in an unincorporatory to almost have its own set of rules. That's kind of how they get away with stuff. But it's like you said, what they determined was, yeah, Fremont had the casinos and everything. But those were literally just like day casinos for people to come in, use gamble, maybe have a drink and everything. You danced, you partied.

It wasn't the all-encompassing event that you would see from a resort. So the strip, what we know modern as the, modern strip today, that's where, you know, and most of it funded by mob money, that's where they started to develop the actual like resorts. It was, it was wanting to keep someone for, they developed the system of, hey, what are we doing letting these people leave? These people are here spending money on booze, gambling. Let's give them the option to go ahead and stay here. We can keep them longer. Let's give them some entertainment. And they'll continue to be here to spend their money instead of going elsewhere.

Yeah, they don't have to leave this place. We can get them for what they stay for. We can get them for what they gamble, what they drink, everything like that. If it's just all-encompassing, it becomes a full-on moneymaker. And so the other thing that kind of happened around 41 as the last frontier open was they had built Nellis Air Force Base, which is now the Las Vegas Army Airfield. And that brought more families into the area, but it also established, again, just another population boom that showed up right around that time. So what started happening is after the dam was constructed, the town started to die off because you lost 5,000 workers. Some of them may have stayed, but you lost what essentially helped build you.

A good majority. Yeah. And so when they decided to bring in these two military, I think there were two military bases. There was an army base and an Air Force base. Because the Air Force at this point, what's crazy to think about, the Air Force was new, newer. Think of like at this point. This is like right at, you know, World War II. Son of a bitch, I didn't even think about that.

This was right along the lines, really, before that. There you go. This was right around the early development for Nilsar Forest Base. So these bases, I think people also forget, too, that this is the area outside of Vegas. It's not super close, but this is the general area where, like, Area 51 is. This is also where the proving grounds are for... Is it Area 51 in New Mexico? Nope.

It's in Vegas. I think it's pretty sure it's in Nevada. Oh, is it in New Mexico? I think it's by Roswell, isn't it? Okay, let me think of what I'm thinking of. Well, no, what's weird? It might be at them, but, like, just kind of a little fact. So a lot of people that work at Area 51, most people live in Las Vegas.

Yeah. There is a, they called it Janet Airlines. There's a special airline that's strictly operated by the government, has its own private terminal at McCarron Airport. It's called by something else now. It's not on McCarron anymore. That's who takes everyone out daily to Area 51, and they just hang on one of the airfields.

Everyone goes to work at the end of the day. It's like jumping on a commuter shuttle. Like normal people going to work, hey, we're taking the bus. Nope, everyone just goes and shuttles back onto the 737. Takes you back to Las Vegas. You get off and you get on your car and drive home. That's nuts. Yeah.

Because you're not going to have people living out there. So Area 51 is, it says it's the facility within the Nevada test and training range. Oh, so yeah. Roswell is New Mexico, though, but I think Area 51 on Roswell. I'm just getting the alien thing. Yeah, I think they get, they're kind of interchangeable to most. So, yeah, so you get these another influx, but now all of a sudden, you're getting families.

So not, you're not just getting the men that are in the military, but you are getting single guys, you know, single men and everything. But if they are bringing their families, now you're also getting the women in there. You're building your population at this point. And you want to look towards more of a resort because you're not catering to the ruffians that are just showing up Friday- Saturday. At this point, man, it was like, you know, you use the term sin or vice city and everything,

but that's what it was. Yeah. At this point, when the family started coming in, it started, you still had all of that, but at the same time, you then had to look into ways to make it entertaining for a family or livable for families. And that's,

Where 41 shows up with the Air Force Base, we get the El Rancho, which was the first casino that they had opened along Highway 91 to kind of cater more towards the family atmosphere of having pools, having different places to basically just relax as a family. You still have the sin and the debauchery and the inside with the alcohol and the slots and the gambling. You want to get away from that? Here's a beautiful oasis in the middle of the desert. Who will go swimming? And like you were talking about, you talk about the last frontier sounds very... Was it the last frontier or the new frontier?

It changed from the last frontier to just the frontier. It went through a couple different. But your frontier, you think the Wild West. You hear El Rancho, you're thinking just you're out in the desert, you're out doing your thing. It's going to be a little rough and tumble. And that kind of,

kind of spurred. I think you still get that, though. Yeah, not to the degree, but, and I'll talk about this. I think we'll go into this a little bit more, but. More old Vegas, not necessarily. That's what I'm saying. Fremont, but. It's what they called, so Fremont, because of all the lights.

Yeah. And everything like that. It became known as Glitter Gulch. Oh. And then the southern edge of that area, that's where the strip was. So you start to see, once the strip starts going in and developed for these resorts, you're going to start to see more of a separation. even kind of like culturally between like glitter gulch which is that I mean you see it today go walk down the normal strip it is kind of crazy and you still see all the all the you know some sidewalk shows and all that kind of stuff but you can tell the strip is made to get you down the sidewalk into another casino it's it's just a you know there's transport systems bridges over the streets everything it's its goal is to get you from one casino to the next fremont is where you get all your streets

performers, it's, you know, you're not staying there. You're coming to visit there. That's where you get all the crazy street performers, street shows. There's a zip line that goes down underneath the LED boards now, I think. Yeah, it's nuts. And so you really do have this, and you also have, it's also like kind of a socioeconomic split too. Fremont tends to be the cheaper entertainment. It's more of the place where people want to go and play the penny slots, do all that kind of stuff. $4.99 buffets. There you go. Questionable. Oh, is this crab, questionable, I don't know, it's only cost me $4.99. Am I rolling the dice on this?

Yeah, don't question it. It's only $4.99. So that's where you kind of get that part of Vegas, and then you get resort Vegas. It's kind of in the strip. And that's when they were trying to kind of push away, like I say, you have the El Rancho, you have the frontier, you have a couple others that are popping up that all have that Western theme. In 1945, we get basically like the new. hip, fancy, the flamingo shows up. Which is still there, by the way.

Is it? Not in the way it is here. But it's been redesigned, upgraded. But yeah, we walked through it. We just went to Vegas, I think, I want to say, like three months ago. Probably like three months ago. Yeah. Two or three.

And the flamingo, it's definitely dated and everything, but it is a big-ass resort. But yeah, you can definitely tell that it almost, maybe purposefully at this point is like keeping itself kind of like in the 80s because that stuff always comes back around just a nostalgia play yeah um but yeah it's definitely there right in the middle of the main strip still the big old pink flashing light and who who was the one that that opened this so the guy that opened it ran into a lot of financial issues um just kind of right off the gate like he he didn't have really a lot of money for what he was hoping to do with it.

He, let's see. So it wasn't, was it, I thought it was Bugsy Siegel. No, Bugsy Siegel comes in later. Okay. So. Wait, are you sure? Yeah. I feel like we're going to, I feel like we're going to have a differing of opinion on this.

So I almost, no, he found an opportunity to reinvent his personal image and diversify and do legitimate business. because he was from California. He was, if you guys haven't looked up, it's called Murder Incorporated. Basically, Bugsy Segal was a, not Jot Rules murdering. No, not Jot Rules. Bugsy Segal had mob ties, probably would be considered a mobster by that, the definition of that time. 100%.

So Billy Wilkerson was the guy that wanted to start the Flamingo. Okay. And he ran out of money real quick. And when he runs out of money, then he says, starts to look outside for other funding. Bugs E. Siegel, who you were just talking about, saw an opportunity to get the mob in there. He was, he had the backing of a lot of different guys that had accents. Yeah, some of the mob names and everything aren't going to be familiar.

But apparently, you know, I think kind of these days, the, who would you say if you were going to think of the actual real mob, not like the movie or, you know, portrayals. Who do you know? I know the Gambino's. Gambinos are big. The Genevieve crime family. And a lot of these guys that we're going to be talking

about have just the Luciano crime family. I mean, they have ties in this. So that's who he had the ties to is Luciano and Frank Costello future bosses of the Genovese crime family. Yeah. And they, I love the mob. Terrible people. Awful people. Shouldn't have started out

with I love the mob. But I mean, they did do some good things. I mean, they did do the stone wall. Yeah, they did the stone wall. That wasn't out of the kindness of their heart, but still. We didn't have to deal with any more Nixon, or Nixon earlier, I guess. But the way that they worked as far as the territories that they got their hands on and the way that different mobs showed up was always kind of cool to me to see, like, you had the New York mob. You had the six families or whatever it is in New York. They're the ones. to run that area, the Chicago outfit. Yeah.

You're seeing Al Capone, these other guys, like, I believe Luciano was from Chicago, too. And that crime family was from Chicago. But the way that they would figure out money-making schemes was almost brilliant to, and this is where we're going to start talking about where the mob really shows up. So Bugsy Siegel has all these other different connections. And when he gets into being a part of the Flamingo, he just goes nuts. He's choosing the finest granites and the finest marbles for all these different. Yeah, he wanted it.

He saw at the time kind of going back to, I think I mentioned earlier. So a lot of these like Fremont casinos, they were almost all cowboy themed. It was because it was, you know, it was the Wild West, went on. So one of the things that Siegel saw, because he was also from, he was working, he'd worked previously for the mob. He was like their L.A. guy. and so he ended up almost designing the flamingo based on like Miami

so that's what it said is he he threw all like the Miami vibes in there so we had like the guy in the tuxedo to greet you what you would actually consider nowadays almost normal almost normal for the strip yeah you know not like Caesars and everything like that at the Venetian

that are supposed to be themed after you know those respective areas but the Flamingo was supposed to be this desert oasis where you had like, and they made a big deal. They're like, he had wall-to-wall carpeting and all this kind of stuff. But it had like a real like Miami Beach vibe for it. You're seeing big chandeliers. Yeah. And the amount of money that they're dumping in, and we'll talk a little bit about Bugsie coming up when we just get into kind of the straight mob ties. But he also had a buddy named Meyer Lansky who they considered the mob's accountant.

because he ran so many of the books and found so many different ways to make money in order to invest in a lot of these places. So once Bugsie gets Meyer on board, they start spending like crazy. And I want to say the Flamingo started out. First guy Wilkerson wanted to spend, I want to say it was like $900,000. By the time he realized that he was out of money, there were $400,000 over budget. and it came to a point where Bugsy was so enamored with making it as fancy and grand as possible that when it came time to open, they didn't have any of the rooms ready. They just had the gambling floor and everything else.

So he opened up first time and people would come in. They loved the opulence. They loved how pretty it was. They had a lot of fun gambling. But there wasn't a place to stay yet. So as that was happening, they realized kind of, what you were talking about earlier. If you don't have a place to stay,

you're going to gravitate, excuse me. People are going to go stay somewhere else, and they're just being like, oh, why don't we just gamble here? Exactly. So they're spending money everywhere else. So Bugsie decides to close it down again, wait until it gets finished.

Jesus, excuse me. Finally, when it reopens, it costs $6 million. Was it, so the original anticipation was for once Bugsie got in on it? It was shooting right around $900,000. Then he was over by about $400,000. and so it was about $1.3 million.

But with this cash infusion from the mob, you saw a ton of money coming in, but Bugsie still overshot what the mob wanted to spend on it because he wanted it to be just his place. So is that like, if you like overshoot what the mob tells you to spend, are they like, hey, don't do that. Is that like a slap on the wrist or what happens? Bugsie learned pretty quick that it was not going to end well for him.

And I think it was about a year maybe, After the Flamengo opened that Bugsy ended up getting snuffed out at his house by a sniper. Yeah, they said that there was not even any, they didn't even try to make it look remotely accidentally. It was like they just said it was a straight up, straight up murder. And 20 minutes, they said after the murder had happened, there were two associates of Meyer Lansky that walked into the Flamingo that walked in, talked to the bosses and said, we're running this now. This is us. they actually said Bugsy Siegel has been murdered. He's gone.

We run it now. Bugsie's on vacation. Don't worry about Bugs on vacation. So, yeah, before the advent of cell phones or anything like that or any news, they knew 20 minutes after Bugsy, it had a bullet in his head that they had taken it over. So clearly it wasn't an accident. Clearly, they knew what happened. Just like I said, the crazy shit about the mob was Meyer Lansky, the guy that I was talking about,

that was that the agent. He was like the accountant, right? Yeah, the accountant. Most of the money that Lansky had to play with was coming from the Chicago outfit, so the Chicago mob, and they had gotten somebody in power high enough to where they had control of the Teamsters, unions,

um, pension fund. Yeah. So they had for all these central states. So all the stuff in the Midwest around Illinois and all that, They had that kind of cash flow to where they could dump those investments into Vegas. They could dump as much money as they wanted to into these new casinos. And then they were because they were in control.

And again, at this time, there might have been regulatory boards, but they're nothing like they are today. No. So the whole point why the mob wanted to be involved in this is it was so easy to cookbooks and skim money. You're dealing with nothing but cash. people coming in. Guess what? You're not sitting there at the tables, marking down how much you have.

People are playing games. You're making money. And then what they were talking about how the mob would like take their payoffs and everything. So how the mob would actually like take a lot of their payoffs is they would just have designated tables or like cash boxes. That those cash boxes would, they're like,

It was never shocking if one cash box was just picked up by someone that we knew and then just walked out of the casino. Yeah. So when you see, I'm sure for anybody that's been in a casino, when they switch out dealers or anything like that or when they do chip stacks, nowadays, which I think this is kind of when it started, they have metal boxes that you just drop the money in. They slap the money in so everybody can see it. The boxes and the boxes pop out. Yeah. So the boxes are interchangeable with like, you know, you take out a full box. I think they said like some of the smaller casinos,

I would assume bigger ones have to do more often, but I watched the thing where they were talking to one of the smaller casinos on Fremont, probably because one of the bigger ones wouldn't let them in to see this kind of stuff. Yeah, no shit. Yeah. But they have, yeah, just metal boxes and they almost pop into place underneath the table with just a slot that people put money in. And like they said three times a day, these guys come around with a cart.

Top level of the card is for the full boxes. They have empty boxes on the bottom level of the cart. They pull the full one out, set it down, take the empty one, put it in, and then take everything down to the vault. Yeah, well, you have 50 tables. If you're going through and doing that switch three times a day and it's 150 transactions, if you only get back and there's 145 boxes there, it's going to be tough to figure out where those ones win. Correct, but at that point, the people that were in place that were doing the hard counts were in on it as well.

Yeah, they knew where the skin was coming. There was never 150 boxes. There might have been physically 150, but they were never expecting 150 back. No, they got what they needed. They paid, but there was the skimming off the top that it was going back to the families. And the families love this. Are we to the 50s at this point? Not yet.

Okay. Pretty close. Let me know when we get to the 50s. Okay. So just to kind of run through some of the mob influence, and we can get to the 50s after this. This is just basically how sweet the mob was at this time in this area. We went through Bugty Siegel. He was really driving forward.

force and development along the strip. He was kind of the first proof positive that the mob had a good. He's the one that did a lot of the convincing that this was going to be a viable money-making option. Yeah. So what ended up getting him popped was after the Flamingo was open, there were a million dollars over budget. They didn't know where that million dollars went. Bugsy had a very famous girlfriend at the time who was living in Beverly Hills. she was going overseas a lot of the time and so the crime family in Chicago basically just believed that they were skimming this money off the top from the mob

so they were stealing from the Steelers and that was what led to him being murdered so not that he didn't do a great job with the Flamingo but they thought that he was expendable only you know you're only as useful as long as you're making money yep and if you're biting the hand that feeds you you're just going to be dead um his buddy Meyer Lansky

the guy that was the mob's accountant He worked under Lucky Luciano, who we were talking about. He founded the National Crime Syndicate. Lucky Luciano did. Or Lansky both together. Meyer did it for Lucky, basically. So the National Crime Syndicate, like I say, the Kosanostra, the families, they realize that all they're doing is working against each other unless they kind of came together.

So. Yeah, we can either fight over this territory and keep, you know, killing each other, working against each other. or realize that this pie is fucking big and there's enough there's enough seats at the table for everybody. That was one of the biggest things. Vegas was almost like it was this experiment where several like you're saying

several of the criminal or crime families came together. I'm not saying they worked, you know, hand in hand together, but there were gentlemen's agreements to, and I'm sure there were still dustups and everything. Yeah. But there was still almost an agreement to be like,

we're not, we don't necessarily have to help each other, but we're all going to go ahead and not hinder each other. We don't step on toe. Correct. We stay to our area. You stay to your area. Correct. And at the same time, too, you got to understand that the United States government started to look into this kind of stuff about the mob influence. You had the state of Nevada also looking in on this.

So it made a lot more sense for, you know, these families to join together, at least in solidarity, to make sure they weren't. getting busted and shut down. They had to, you almost had to have like a code of ethics in order to stay under the radar. What do they call that? It's, well, they always say no honor amongst thieves, but they actually decided in this situation

that there would be some type of code among, you know, code amongst thieves. Well, the kind of cool thing that happened, I just keep saying cool and love, but when Atlantic City became a thing back east, they had a meeting of, crime families from Chicago, New York, everything to talk about where they're going to split up the new territory in Atlantic City. And a lot of the families from New York just said, you know what, Chicago, you have Vegas, just let us have Atlantic City, let us run our schemes in Atlantic City, which also would be another fascinating kind of like a Vegas 2.0 topic.

But they decided to stay as close as they could in an AC. It made more sense just geographically. Yeah, that's where they run their stuff from. Chicago, the Midwest. You also had families, like, people don't realize that you also had families in L.A. Yeah. They were running things, too. Different kinds.

Really, the syndicate that was pushed together was the Italian-Americans, the Jewish mob, the Irish mob. The longer standing mobs that were based out of both the older cities, New York, New Jersey, Chicago. And the ones that had the big enough means to be polling countrywide schemes at that point. another one Mo Deilitz was a fascinating guy he was referred to as Mr. Vegas he was a casino owner he was a gangster he's a businessman

he built the desert in in 1950 and he was ahead of what was or the head of what was called the Cleveland gang and they were giving him titles they were giving him when they call him Mr. Las Vegas they're giving him like

Las Vegas achievement awards for all the great things that he done. Yeah, and he was just, he was a monster. He had his hands in all these bad deals, but he was able to keep enough of a presence about him to almost sit above it to where people knew that he was dirty, but he did a lot of other things that kept him on the up and out. I was going to say he was also probably helping the city grow and prosper enough that it was just kind of like, yeah, he might do some shady shit, but God, it's really helping us out. Yeah, if you're making 200% profits every single year and he's skimming five percent, off, you're still making 195%.

So why would you want to push that away? These next two guys that we're going to get into are they're great. You've seen the movie Casino? Yes. Probably my favorite mob movie of all type. I think it's better than the godfather.

You have Pacino, or not Pacino. De Niro. You have De Niro. Pesci. Leota. Just everybody at that time, Sharon Stone, they're all in it. and the first guy Stollart I knew we were going to run into this

It's Spilatro right? Yeah, Spilatro But all the other names have come easy Yeah This is the first one we've done a long time Where I'm not looking at words I'm like, oh shit, what do I have to say next? So Tony Spalotro is Joe Pesci's character in Casino

He's friends with his fellow named Frank Rosenthal That we'll get into he basically was the manager to skim the profits for the Chicago outfits. He had followed Rosenthal around just everywhere. It was kind of like Rosenthal was so good at his job that the mob didn't trust him because he was so efficient. Was Rosenthal's character? Was the basis for De Niro's character, Rosenthal? Okay.

Yeah, Ace. So, but Spalotro was just an asshole. He was just, he couldn't. Have you seen fucking? Yeah. For people that haven't seen it, Spilatro can't ever stay focused on the prize. He followed Rosenthal to Miami. Then that fucked over Rosenthal because Spalotro was running deals on the side. He was getting arrested. He was robbing people and holding him out. He was allowed and he was not very like, it kind of seemed like if the, if the character is, you know, based in fact, he was not very discreet. No. I guess it's the best way to put it. And it seemed like Rosenthal.

Rosenthal knew when to be discreet. He just, his mind was always geared towards making money. And Spilatro had a gang outside of Las Vegas. It was called the Hole in the Wall gang. And they were robbing pawn shops. They were robbing all these lower area levels. They were robbing houses just so that they could sell back to the pawn shops that they were robbing. And it just, he drew bad attention wherever he could go.

And that was really kind of the end of Frank Rosenthal was, just dealing so much with Spilotro because Frank Rosenthal came up as one of just like the best handicappers and sports betters in American history. Like he... Just had a mind for it.

Yeah, he knew what he was doing. He knew how to bet. He knew, you know, he could, they said that the math that he could do in his head when he was trying to figure things out would actually like concern people. Like they thought that he was just lying to them

because he was so quick with math that he could figure out the odds on anything. so fast and he kind of just became like Mr. Las Vegas. He was a casino executive basically that ran four different casinos. I forgot what they were. One of them was the Stardust. There's a couple others. He's a casino mercenary.

Kind of. Like a casino gun for hire, basically. So when he's doing it, he doesn't have a gaming license because they don't know that he has the hand in all. these different casinos that he's running for the Chicago outfit. And once they start looking into him, the Nevada Gaming Board cracks down on him because they realize that he has a hand on all these casinos. And he's given himself different titles.

He's the lead entertainment officer. He's just kind of shuffling himself around to try not to get found. He ends up getting found out that he doesn't have a license. and puts in for one, but he has to go in front of the board. And oddly enough, the guy that was the head of the Nevada Gaming Control Board at that time was Harry Reid,

who became a senator, and I want to say he was the speaker. He wasn't the Speaker of the House. He was a very big politician. Harry Reid or Henry Reid? Harry Reid. So Harry Reid shuts down his license because of his past because he's been arrested in Miami for...

His criminal background, basically. Yeah, he was arrested in Miami for fixing games. He was actually a part of... Oh, shit. Okay, real quick. So Harry Reid, he was a center from Nevada, and then he served as the Senate Majority Leader from 2007 to 2015, so he was up there. So his his startings were dealing with the mob.

And here's something kind of going back during this entire time frame with the mob. So you have an investigation into basically not modern-day Las Vegas, but this Las Vegas time right here, the boom. And the national government gets, their federal government gets wind that the mob is involved. Of course, they have, you know, task forces and everything. They interviewed 2,000 witnesses.

I don't know over the course of how long this was, but the federal government, these congressional hearings, interview over 2,000 witnesses and are unable to bring about a case against any of the mob. You don't speak. You don't talk about your narc because you know what happens. Well, the thing is, too, is, you know, the mob, of course, is making money. They're skimming money and everything like that. But at the same time, they're running these businesses as legitimately as they're

they can to make as much profit as they can. The other thing you also have is you have, you know, the establishment like you were talking about, about the Nevada Gaming Control Board, the Gaming Commission. You also have this state of Nevada understanding that the mob running these things, they helped establish it, but they also need to keep an eye on it because the Nevada Gaming Commission is also making money off of this too. And you're going to come to a time when the Nevada Gaming Commission, again, like, you know, cracking down on Rosenthal,

they're going to start to try to do their own, kind of their own push to get the mob out of Las Vegas, because they understand how lucrative it's going to be for the state if they can go ahead and push these guys out as well. And they also know that the mob only does... What's beneficial for them? Yeah, in a way where they know that what the mob does gets results,

but if you want to sort of further grow beyond what the mob wants you're going to need to get big companies and establish yourself as a world class destination you can't be run by the mafia no it all has to be above war

and one of the funny things these were like just great clips that they had so at the gaming control board licensing hearing hearing yeah for Rosenthal They shut him down mainly because of his criminal past,

just the fact that he's had crimes that were in the realm of gambling and all that. Like financial crimes, basically. Yeah. Yeah. But he also was so closely tied to Spilatro, and they had so many different issues of Spilatro. They just said, no, we can't do this. So after they rule and deny him his gaming license,

instead of just, like, going away, um, Rosenthal walks up to Harry Reid and just starts motherfucking him up and down talking about how you called me a liar during this hearing and you know I'm not a liar and of course all the media that's there to cover this. D.C. Spalatro was talking to reading? Rosenthal was. So Rosenthal is walking up to Harry Reid while he's standing up there calling him every name

in the book saying I'm not a liar and you have the media just eating off this. They're loving it. They're holding the recorders up to take a pictures. Rosenthal goes, why don't you be honest with all these people around here? And Reed goes, if you want to talk, we can talk somewhere else. He goes, not this is the only place that you and I are going to talk where we're on even footing. And somebody else is here. He goes, did I or did I not help you when you sent me a message through one of my friends saying that there was a negative report coming out about you that you wanted squashed in the paper?

Harry Reid goes, I'm not going to talk about this in public. This isn't a deal. And just completely lays him out to the point to where he goes, answer me right now. If you're going to call me a liar, you need to tell these people if I'm lying about this or not. And while the media is going crazy and ask and read all these questions, like, did you do this? Was this real or anything like that? Rosenthal just sparks up a cigarette in the middle of like 300 people. And he's standing inside these judges' quarters, smoking a cigarette while he's just talking shit about Harry Reid. And Harry Reid finally ends up admitting. And he's like, yeah, I did come to Mr. Rosenthal to have him maybe take a look at an article that was coming.

out about me that was going to be negative. Rosenthal goes, don't you ever call me a liar again, you motherfucker. Just completely losing his shit on this guy. You can tell it reads like, oh, this is worst case scenario. We shouldn't have been doing this. But all these clips come out about it.

And after this happens, after Rosenthal is basically banned from being a part of these casinos, then he gets himself a variety hour. He goes and talks to the most famous comedians, the most famous acts that are going through, Sinatra's coming on his show.

Well, can you imagine if he, you know, he had these major ties to these major casinos. He was probably being a casino executive when these people would come to town. He was the guy that coming up and shaking hands with them and having to go, taking them out to dinner. He was the guy. Well, you're a sports better. You're a handicapper. You know all these athletes because all these athletes are in your realm. Yeah.

He had O.J. showed up on his show to do interviews. They were, it was a terrible variety, or I watched a couple of them, and it wasn't good. But he would use this medium that he had to just go on and bash the gaming committee and talk shit about them and tell them that they were wrong and what they did do and was wrong. All the while, he was still just this major fixture. And of course, the mob didn't like that. The mob didn't like that he was trying to make it about him. You being a little loud there.

Yeah, like maybe let's draw a little less attention to us. Friday hour, really frank. So, yeah, dude, like, you have a band. Like, you could have, you could have, like, just gone off into the sunset with more money than you would have no one to do with the new. Just shut the fuck up. Just let it be. So, in casino, there's a lot of times when movies, like when they cast certain characters, they do it in a way to, kind of bolster up the character a little bit.

Did they punch it up. De Niro, much more of a handsome man than lefty Rosenthal was. As a character, just a better looking guy. Frank Rosenthal's wife was played by Sharon Stone in casino. Sharon Stone is not nearly even close to as pretty as this lady was that Rosenthal was married to. But you assume that him being married to her means that that's the only woman he was with, which you know was absolutely 100% not the case. I think with him, though.

Come on. He was really like when he found, I can't remember her name. Or Jenna, Gemma, something like that. Okay, we're going to agree to disagree on this because. Let's take a P break and I'm going to look up her name, but I'll kind of explain about her. Okay. All right. back off of the P-break. So you said her name was Geraldine. What? Jerry McGee.

Geraldine. There you else about that. Just G-E-R-Y-Maggie. I'm going to let Google just correct this for me. Geraldine McGee. American model Las Vegas. What are you talking about? She was an American model in Las Vegas showgirl. She was hot. Yeah. So what are you talking about? So Sharon Stone would be the right, right? for her. I think she's better looking than Sharon Stone. Oh, okay. I would say... Oh, I got you. I thought you were going like this woman was going to be like

hideous. No. Okay, but I do see what you also mean now about Rosenthal. Ugly man. Being bumped up by De Niro. Yes, 100%. But still, here's the deal. It goes without saying you have money, you have power, you're going to attract a beautiful woman. It's just how it works. Their relationship was, they really nailed it in casino, though. She loved to spend money and he loved to make money. And he fell for her so hard that he would do anything that he could. Yeah, what do they, they portray her as almost like, she's like the female embodiment of Las Vegas to him.

Yeah. Like she's a drug addict. She isn't happy in her relationship, but she knows that Rosenthal is a very connected man. He has a lot of money. She had already had a kid coming into the relationship. Yeah, she's not, she's not ignorant to how this is all going down. No, she's fully in on it. Her infidelities are a lot.

She's got old boyfriends that are still hanging around, and she actually ends up hooking up with Spilatro and hooks up with Pesci's character, just like she does in casino. And it puts Rosenthal in a bad situation because if he knows that there's infidelity, going on and the mob finds out that he knows, it could be considered a distraction.

A distraction or he has, trying to think like weaknesses or people can get leverage on him if they learn information, yeah. So he tells Spilatro, we can't talk about this, you can't let them know that I know anything. And at this point, Spalatro has worn out his welcome with the crime family.

He's pulled enough shit, he's skimmed enough off the top from them that they've just had enough of him. and Spilatro ends up getting wiped out. It's basically what happens in casino. So he gets taken care of. And then Rosenthal, he ends up getting out of the game, getting divorced. Well, so in 82, Rosenthal survives an assassination attempt. A car bomb, right?

It was a car bomb, yeah. And the only reason that he survived it, the bomb was attached to the gas tank underneath. The Cadillac that he was in during that time had had issues of it would wobble on the road because it was just so fucking heavy on one side because of the engine. That they actually put a large metal plate underneath the driver's seat, and that was what protected him from the blast. Oh, seriously? So yeah, he lived through a full car bombing blast.

If you look up the pictures of what his car looked like, you'd think that nobody survived. But he ended up surviving a car bombing that never solved it. They think that it was a mobster back in Kansas City who had just finally had enough, and he thought that Rosenthal was running game on him. Outside of Tony Romas in Vegas. So I wonder if that was Tony Romas, like, if that was where the chain started, if it was a hotspot in Vegas and they pushed it all out.

So he ends up surviving, then he ends up in 87, he ends up getting banned. I'm surprised he didn't happen before, but he gets banned from every casino in Las Vegas. Yeah, he got put in the black book. The black book was what the government was starting to use to crack down on all these mobsters to try to get him out of Vegas. He was persona non grata, as they said. He wasn't allowed in casinos. He wasn't allowed to hold positions in casinos. They wanted him out because he was just.

Well, that's not surprising because it's, you know, at this point in 87, it's all legitimate. Yeah. The malls been pushed out for the most part. Yeah. Okay. So since we're now up a little further, I'm going to jump back to the 50s real quick, because this part just, I don't know why this blew my mind so much. So in the 50, so this is, again, so Vegas actually hits a post-World War II boom. And you got soldiers coming back.

You have them starting families. You have people, you know, the country's been at war for what the last, it was when we joined, it was 41. but there were still, you know, the World War was happening. Let's just say eight years, 45 to, from 37 to 45, four, eh, five to seven years. Well, and within the last 50 years, they've seen so much war between both of them. The two world wars, the Depression, so they felt like the 50s was America's like, this was going to be the post-war boom, everyone's just lit and off steam, where's some place you want to go ahead and visit?

you get the 50s bringing in kind of the era of the national highway system being built, which makes travel much easier. You almost have like a creation of a leisure activity of road tripping, of driving, of traveling. That kind of starts to pick up speed. One thing that you have in the 50s is they start doing, that's when the Russians have acquired nuclear weapons. and so America to keep up with that, we have to start doing nuclear bomb testing. Oh, yeah.

So in the 50s, over a 12-year period, they tested in the Nevada Proving Grounds, which is literally 65 miles from Vegas. Over 12 years, they tested 120 nuclear devices. It was one every five weeks is what it averaged out, too. Less than an hour's drive. Yeah. The first one that they lit off, they have footage of it.

It was a giant flash on the on the Las Vegas skyline. Like it looked like instant daylight for almost a flash of like a second. And then when the boom hit and traveled to Las Vegas, they said it shattered glass. I'm not saying it like shattered every window, but they said it shattered glass windows on the strip and on Fremont Street. So instead of being like, you know, well, how are we going to spin this? Vegas basically takes this and develops an entire, what would you consider, like, not a theme, but like almost a promotional push. They tried to incorporate it within like the ridiculousness or the outlandishness of Las Vegas. They would start having scheduling for these nuclear tests and start arranging watch parties.

It was like a gimmick. It was. It was like, hey, come. come stay this weekend and come see the nuclear blast. And in this documentary I was watching, they were showing, you know, you always see like the, the military guys with the big glasses and the little bunkers watching the nuclear test and everything. And I'm used to seeing that, but all of a sudden you started to see, you know, when they used to have like in the 60s and 70s, the shuttle launches, Cape Canaveral.

Yeah. And people would be sitting in the grandstands, like far away while it was being launched out on the little island, whatever it was. And you would see people watch on the rocket. there were grandstands with people and there were also like people watching from mountain sides and hilltops with glasses and one of the guys was doing an interview and he was like yeah

my parents took me to go see the nuclear test it was just something that we did and you have these people watching like could you imagine that like having a story be like yeah I used to watch nuclear bombs go off and then they would talk about how like you know

20 minutes after you would see this like little sprinkling pink stuff coming down from the sky and they're like, that was radioactive fallout. Oh yeah. Falling on us. Like that wasn't even a concern is doing this. But like these casinos would start like arranging like their whales to come in and being like we're going to have like we call them like atomic bomb parties or they would do like model shows like not fashion shows but almost kind of like a little mini Miss America type things. but it would be like Miss Atomic Bomb.

And they would like vote for these women to hold the title of like Miss Atomic Bomb. She is the bomb. She is the bomb, yeah. So that decade also saw kind of what I was talking about is the split between Fremont Glitter Gulch and then the southern edge of what they called the strip. And this was kind of the beginning,

the 50s going forward of what they consider the resort age. I like to think of that. I always think of if I see pictures of that, I always kind of think of it as Sinatrava. Yeah. That time frame. You get guys that are coming in, Sammy Davis, the rat pack. This was the development.

I'm going to tell you the development of the rat pack, how it came to be, and it was because of Vegas. So kind of with the beginning of that resort age, they started to add these features to, like we've talked about before, keeping people in the hotels. You're one-stop shop for everything, Vegas. You never have to leave us. We're going to take care of you with world-class restaurants, world-class entertainment, gambling, whatever you need. relaxation. So it was crazy to see. So like this was the advent of the buffets, the shows. You had top tier world, you know, talent coming in to do these shows. This was a little bit before residencies, um, but that's going to kind of come later. You also had, it was so crazy to see

table games being played in the pool. Really? Yes. That and like you think about it now. They would never do that now because pools are mostly, when you think of pools in Vegas, you think of like day clubs and stuff like that. Yeah. they had roulette, poker in the pool. Hell yeah. Just, you know, people standing waist deep. And then if you think of like a bar in Mexico,

it stands a little taller. Yeah. And you're just playing craps or doing whatever. So it looks so, like, seeing the footage of that was awesome. You don't got to leave to pee. You can just pee in the pool. So in 1957,

the dancers at the dunes, this was the first time this has happened. The dancers at the dunes actually start performing topless. So you now started to get more of that risque type thing. you know, all these resorts are trying to kind of like see how they can, not only has Las Vegas now set it apart from the rest of the world is this Sin City, vice destination. Now within Vegas, you now have these casinos trying to,

in resorts, trying to one up each other to who can almost be, you know, the craziest. So during this time, like this was when Vegas was growing so fast, there were golf courses at the resorts and everything. They started to have to use like sewage runoff and sewage water to keep the courses green. Just because they didn't have any other means to get water to do it? Because the infrastructure, the city was growing so quickly that the water needs outweighed how they could provide water to the city. And of course, any type of usable water you were having to use for the casinos and guests and everything. So at this point, like, and it's not to say, although Vegas seems extremely progressive in regards to these vices and everything like that, you still had the normal shit where you had segregation, racism.

and it definitely didn't skip Vegas. Like they considered the west side of the tracks in Las Vegas. And again, when they're kind of saying this, the Las Vegas metropolitan area does incorporate the strip and all that kind of stuff. But when they're saying like Las Vegas during this time, they mean the city itself. So like the west side of this, the railroad tracks in Vegas, they had these giant shanty towns. And they were like, this is where like all the black people lived. and what it happened is

it's kind of weird how tyones like grow and how people stay and everything so there was like a mine that was outside of Las Vegas I want to say magnesium maybe and magnesium was a mineral that was heavily used during the war I can't I don't know in what capacity I would assume it's probably used to strike the metal bomb making stuff like that so of course at this point if it's menial labor it's going to be a you know a lot of black people a lot of immigrants and everything working here. Those people needed places to live while they were working the mines.

They wanted to live closer to town, so they had, you know, access to food and whatnot. So they set up these huge shanty towns. What started to happen is then you started to have all these jobs open up within Vegas for, like, housekeeping, cooking, all that kind of stuff. The menial jobs that you consider within that time frame, and there was this built-in populist of people that got these jobs. and at this point the resorts and everything, they were actually still segregated pretty heavily. And the Moulon Rouge was actually the first resort to integrate. And what kind of put pressure on them is you would have these musical acts coming through,

these headliners coming through your casino. How many of these guys at the time were up and coming were like the super talented, like black artists? You had like Sammy Davis Jr. I'm trying to think of the name of the woman that they said. But these casinos and resorts are bringing in these people as headliners, and then they would say at the end of the night they would be ushered out and sent to lower class hotels in different parts of town. Well, what ended up happening is at one point, you got,

the mob had a big hand in this too, which is surprisingly enough. It's kind of like the mob will be part of doing something that seems progressive, but it's all determined by their wallet if it impacts them financially. They found out that they were going to start being financially impacted by the segregation because what they were going to start losing, and this was like a meeting of like casino owners, which included, of course, people with mob ties, and also people within the Nevada Gaming Commission

and the city, like the mayor of and city council of Las Vegas, they determined that they were going to start receiving, or they were going to start encouraging, financial losses due to the segregation and it was more financially beneficial for them to desegregate. They weren't going to lose their entertainment acts. They were going to go ahead and although they weren't sure of what the level of the clientele would be, they were going to increase the number of people that could then gamble in their casinos and take part in those activities. So although the Moulin Rouge was the first resort to integrate, a lot of other ones at that point started to do so,

especially after the city of Las Vegas, they were able to either like just bypass or overturn Jim, Jim Crow restrictions and desegregate the entire city. So it was, you know, it's amazing that they did that, but it just kind of sucks that it's all based on, it comes down to a numbers game of money. Well, and you're getting,

with integration happening, you're also getting money from the higher tiered classes of the minorities. So you want them in your casinos because if you're just getting work and labor out of them, that money's not coming back in. No, it's not about how many people that were working there would then spend a little bit of their money at casinos and everything. You always want that flow of getting your money back. It's like when you work like at a clothing store, shoe store, something like that, and they give you a employee discount. Yeah.

The reason they give you the employee discount is because that store is expecting you to spend a little bit of the money that you gave them back in that establishment. right. So kind of in addition to the rap pack, so check this out. So in the 60s, Ocean is 11, the original comes out. So that's got like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and a couple other actual actors. Well, they used like Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, because those guys were almost synonymous with Las Vegas because they had performed in Las Vegas. Frank Sinatra, widely known, had ties to the mob, everything. Big time.

Yep. And so he was, you know, always a headliner in Vegas. So while they were doing the production of Oceans 11 in Vegas, Frank or, you know, Sinatra, Martin, and Sammy Defs Jr., they would all go to the sands. And they would have, and during the, I want to say, it was something that happened over the course of weeks. You know, they weren't there permanently because they were there just shooting the movie. So over the course of a couple weeks, that's when the rat pack actually was developed. So it was Frank Sinatra. Dean Martin, Sam Davis Jr. and two actors, I think, that acted with them,

two or three actors that acted with them in Oceans 11. They would put on almost this comedy skit type show at the Sands. I'm trying to think it was called like the Copa Room, the Copa something. It wasn't the Copa Cabana. Yeah. But it was the Copa something at the Sands. And getting into these shows was like,

I'm trying to think of what, I couldn't even think of a comparison these days of like, Who, if you had like the best singers and actors of the time, like five of them, getting together to do like a skit show for like a three week period? I can't think of a comparison these days. But they were all funny and they drank the whole time. And so you started to kind of like get these guys like loosening up. You wanted to see the night show. You didn't want to see the first one of the day.

They came in just at night. I think they just came in at night. They just did one show. No, no, no, no. nightly though. Yeah. They would be there for like five or six nights a week doing this over this three week or four week, whatever period they were there shooting this movie.

But there wasn't like a, I guess if you're shooting a movie during the day, you're probably doing one show at night. I would imagine. Yeah. Yeah. This was their way to unwind and also probably make money and everything like that. Oh, yeah. Not only they're making a shitload of money that way, but they have to be getting a fair

amount of the take from the Sands. Oh, I wouldn't imagine. If they're performing there. Yeah. But so that was actually the development and the, you know, the origination of the rat pack was during this time. So they weren't the rat pack before? Nope.

So the rat pack, it was what they considered an informal group of entertainers. They originated kind of, so there was a group before them, essentially, but that wasn't as well known. But then the 1960s group is what everyone considers to be the actual rap pack. That's Sinatra, Martin,

Davis, Joey Bishop, they had a falling out later, Peter Lafford. You know, these were huge either entertainment. These were just entertainment superstars that would be performing at the Sands. And during one of the shows, just like seeing everything come together was JFK was at one of the shows. And this was when he was still a sender and he had just announced his bid for the presidency. And so, I mean, you have interesting timing. Yeah, but the development, I mean, the development of the strip to become kind of the world, would they consider what is it, the entertainment destination in the world, or that's what they consider.

The entertainment capital of the world. I was surprised to find out also that it's not the gambling capital, the highest. Macau? Macau. Yeah, Macau and China is crazy. That makes sense because, you know, what Macau did is, you know, how often do you ever kind of, when they say like a whale and everything and they're referring it in you know TV or portrayals of you know

movies how many times is it an Asian businessman coming to Las Vegas to spend a ton of money Macau is just like we'll just fucking do it here and we'll do it better and not to mention the rules and regulations we're like we're gambling fingers in Macau you're getting everyone from Asia you know Japan anywhere in that hemisphere you're probably getting a decent portion probably of

fuck I'm not gonna yeah American businessman they wanted go do even shadier shit than they can do in Las Vegas. Yeah, it's, you've seen Vegas vacation. Yes. It's like the last casino that Chevy Chase goes to where they're playing like literally guess the number or anything like that. War? Yes, the rules are so limited, I'm sure.

Rock paper, scissors, you could do whatever the hell you want. You bet on anything. You invent the game as you're getting ready to bet. They, I actually have a little bit of something about whales, about the big one that they had. Okay. So we'll just kind of, to wrap up the mob part of it, by the 80s, the mob was basically pushed out by corporate casino owners.

The Black Book had played a big part in the 60s in getting a lot of these guys out because they were starting to see that all these mob ties just weren't ever going to pay off. So the Black Book comes in, and the, I believe it was called the Corporate Gaming Act. in the 60s helped these big corporate ownership groups gain a foothold because it said that

you don't need all of the investors in the ownership group to have a, like a gaming license. So you can get these big corporations that are publicly traded that have all these stockholders and shareholders that have all the money behind them to be able to come in

and buy these casinos. And then you would have the mob ties basically go away because the mob eventually realized they weren't going to be able to keep making money. So they're trying to sell off to the highest bidder. So you get these corporations that are just buying up all this land and all these different casinos and resorts. Well, you look at it, you look at it now and pretty much for the most part, with some exceptions, you know, the largest places on the strip. So the Las Vegas strip is a four, it's about a four mile stretch, what they consider the actual strip. goes from the welcome to the famous Welcome to Las Vegas sign,

which is down where Mandalay Bay, this kind of starts a Mandalay Bay, Allegiance Stadium is, and goes all the way in what they consider now, they've stretched it down a little bit to be where the stratosphere is, because the stratosphere is quite a waste from the actual legitimate strip.

But the main strip and everything is about four miles. And for the most part, it's either you're staying in an MGM resort, not just the MGM Grand. MGM owns a ton of stuff, or you're staying in a C, or a win. That's what I'm saying is the exception.

So you have, now you have win and encore, and you also have, I think, like, that Resorts World one, that's a Hilton. I'm not sure who owns the Venetian and the Palazzo. But what I'm saying is you have, like, MGM owns at least, I want to say, like, four to five of them. And Caesar owns, I think Caesar owns close to something like that. But it's kind of what you're saying. You have these corporations come in, and they just are.

snagging up these properties. Yeah, and it's, if one's good, five's better. You know that people are still going to be traveling around for different ambiences. You build something and you got something next door and you're like, I like that, but I'd like to

tear it down and build what I want to build. How much you want for that? And if they're not doing very well and you're siphoning in their business, they'll sell to you. Well, and if you have the Venetian, just ancient, beautiful setup, all that. I don't, it's like you're in a different place. Yeah. And that's, and that's what it's meant to be. I mean, the secrets of Las Vegas, if anyone has been there, no clocks. No. You never see a clock on the

casino floor. Pump oxygen. Pumping higher concentrated oxygen in there to keep you awake and alert and gambling. Up and drinking and gambling and everything. There's so many tricks that they have done, how much money do you think they annually put into research and how to make people gamble or stay longer? Oh, tons. Absolutely tons. You look at the way that they comp people. You're not

getting comp to room because they like you. You're not getting comp to room because you're a great guest. You're getting comp to room because they want you to stay longer and spend more money. If you're only going to spend $70 on a room but you're going to drop another

$500 at the table, they want that bigger bite of the apple. If you take their money, they are going to do whatever they can to get you to stay to lose that money back because odds are, that's what you will do. They'll give you, you win 50 grand from them. They'll give you the $1,000 a night suite or whatever it is to get you to stay for two more nights to lose. Because what are they going to, they might get 20 grand back from you. Even if they don't get it all, they're going to get something back. They always do.

The house always wins. That's where that whole statement comes from. but you know to me my my biggest takeaway is just just having been there recently is there's just so much I don't know if you you know you can never have the energy to do of course to do everything but even you know being there for just a few days there's just so much to do it's almost exhausting trying to figure out what to do and then you got to have a plan man I did not have a plan for like shows or what to see in place. And even just walking around

in itself is entertainment. It's crazy entertainment. Then you throw alcohol and gambling in there and it can- Legalize marijuana now. Woo-woo. Yeah, you don't. There is no limits. Like you have to

kind of almost set an alarm for your plane ride out because there's so much shit that you can get tied into. Don't book it early. No. Take your time. That last day. Take your time. Check out as late as you can go find yourself a nice

comfy spot in the airport everyone's in the same boat as you everyone just be quiet put in your heads head you know earbuds and just listen to some nice relaxing music and try not to throw up yeah yeah so along the lines of

just talking about what casinos do to get a hold of you and keep you there considered the biggest whale of all time and the biggest loser to ever go through Las Vegas. His name was Terrence Watanabe, of course,

a businessman from Asia. In 2007, Watanabe went on a year-long gambling spree in Vegas, primarily at Caesar's Palace. He bet a staggering total of $835 million in a year and lost

$127 million on a losing streak that was the biggest that Las Vegas has ever seen. How much did he win? So he lost $127 million to the $835 million that he spent. Okay. So he lost $127 million in a year. That could have been a lot worse he was betting the...

I know those numbers are insanely huge and everything like that. I'm just thinking of like at one point he was risking $850 million. Yeah. Which it's good that he didn't lose at all. But to know that that's the portion that they got out of him, like he spent, that much, but $127 million is made in a year just off of one dude. That is so much money just to be able to go lose. And obviously, the fact that it didn't hurt him.

The number almost sounds so ridiculous that I don't think it's... Like, if someone's willing to gamble that, how much money do they actually have? Yeah. He definitely, it was probably didn't hurt him too much just because he still walked away with 600 plus million just from that time. But it was just that little chunk that they were able to get from him, which Sounds like a little chunk to him, but $127 million is, that's a big come up for them for a year. And I'm sure that was them clumping him, the fattest sweets.

He probably never paid for a meal the whole time he was there. He definitely never paid for a drink the whole time he was there. The sheer like scope and size of everything there when you're on the strip is just, especially if you're, you know, if you're a little stoned, it's nice because you can stay nice and calm while you're walking around. around with a whole bunch of people, but at the same time, the sheer scope of the resorts, when you look at them from, I was trying to explain this when, I mean, the white were there, like, you would look out your window. And the resorts do seem huge. The towers seem huge.

But what you're also forgetting is that when you look at all that area around the tower and the property, those are like four-story buildings. Oh, yeah. They're just kind of disguised to blend in. Like, these things are just like the enormity. of these and just how they're designed to all fit together and they're able to get so much on small pieces of what you consider like smaller pieces of land for this kind of stuff it's just it's nuts well you have a smaller replica of the Eiffel tower it's half yeah it's half

in the middle of this whole deal and right across from that you had the bellagio fountain which is like fucking two, three football fields worth of water show, it seems like. Eight acres. Eight acres? Eight acres. Imagine that you took eight acres of the most, or one of the most costly pieces of real estate in the world. Easily.

And instead of turning that into rooms, shopping, casino floor, anything like that, you're like, nope, fuck it. Put in a pond or built a fountain show. Yeah. That happens, isn't it like every hour on the hour or something like that? Something like that, but I, just watching even like some of the information on the fountain, it's fucking insane. They have a group of 40 guys. 40 guys whose dedicated job is it to make sure the fountain works. Well, and there's the light beam that comes out of the top of the Luxor, the pyramid.

It costs $60 an hour to keep that thing running. And it runs 24-7. So Las Vegas is the brightest spot on Earth. obviously, I mean, that shouldn't go, because you can see the Luxor light that specifically from space. It's easy to see, but the city itself is visible from space. I know you had a bit in there about the prostitution. So I'll have you piggyback off this. So it's like at this point, because you were talking about the city size, the city has reached the size, which, guys, it's not as people.

Like, how many people do you think live there? Did you look up the population? No, I would bet probably like 1.5 million. It's like 2.6. Really? Okay, yeah. And it was for a time, like, one of the fastest growing markets in the country. Yeah, and I mean, it's cool because one of the things you can do,

depending on where your hotel is, if you're up high enough and you get a view out, you can actually see the edge of the city. It's way the fuck out there, but because the city is in that valley, that bowl, they can only spread so far before that starts going up into the hills, yeah. So prostitution isn't legal in Las Vegas unless it's inside a license brothel. But you also have the point of how much it, actually makes yearly. Which legal prostitution in the, this is where it got me and this is where I kind of like

had to recalibrate what I was reading because it just didn't make any sense. Legal prostitution in the entire state of Nevada, not just around Las Vegas, the entire state of Nevada makes about $70 million a year, which 75 million bread around there sounds like a ton of money just for prostitution. illegal... Huh? Until... Yeah.

Until you get to Las Vegas, just itself, the Las Vegas metro area, illegal prostitution, they've estimated grosses around $5 billion a year. So just the staggering difference that a whole entire state

legally will gross 75 million, decent amount of money, but illegal prostitution in one city area grosses $5 billion. And granted, they can't figure out all that money, I mean, you can figure out any illegal trades worth fairly easily. But even if it's $4 billion, even if it's $6 billion, something like that.

It has a B in there is fucking astonishing. And how much money can they make off that taxing? I mean, how much safer can they make it? It's if you have that big of a piece of pie out there. And when we talk about like the mob was pushed out of Vegas in the 80s kind of towards the end, they were pushed out of casinos. They weren't pushed out of every other racket that they had going on.

They're running prostitution rings to this day. They're running drug rings to this day. They still have a hold on the people, but it's not close to the legalities, almost. They're not dealing with chips anymore. They're not dealing with cards. They're not dealing with drinks. They're dealing with everything outside of those casinos

that makes Vegas the Sinbin capital of the world. Yeah. So just a couple other little facts about it. So open containers. So no glass, no metal, don't be an asshole. But like just being able to just grab a drink from someplace and just look around and everybody is literally just carrying their drinks. And it's always those fucking plastic yard. $48 drink.

But it's ginormous. Yeah. Well, it's actually technically not that big because when you boil down how much actually fits into one of those. They're the hourglass, almost shape cups. if you've ever seen what's the movie it's knocked up right remember where they're sitting around the pool they're walking around around around mushrooms and they're drinking out of those i mean they're nothing but sugar and alcohol so they get you fucked up and then they keep you going but it's just crazy how many of those you see walking around and how many you have to nurse how many like it's like having another child with you

you have to be able to understand where that is at all times because you just went and paid some dude 60 bucks for that so if you sit down on a park bench you have to remember that that needs to come with because that's a $60 investment. That's why they have the lanyards on a lot of them. Yes. Fucking hang around your neck. That's the peak of laziness when you have to wear a lanyard to be able to. And then you just put this draw on your mouth and it just, yeah, make it as fucking easy as possible.

Elvis got married in Vegas? I think that makes sense. That shouldn't be surprising, but it kind of maybe is a little bit surprising. It has to. Elvis is kind of the embodiment of Vegas. Rhinestones, glitter went out and just a crazy. fashion. He was, I think, probably one of, he had to have been one of the first, like, big influential performers there, because you wouldn't see all the Elvis impersonators. You

wouldn't see Elvis's marrying people. Oh, I think, yeah, he's, that's weird that he's that synonymous with Las Vegas and, you know, the married by Elvis and the chapels and everything like that, which in itself is even, you know, another thing that Nevada was like, what else does everybody do? They make you wait for a marriage certificate? Nope, not us. Come here. Give us your money in literally any way possible. You want to get married here? We'll take your money.

You want to get a divorce here. We'll take your money. Just any way that they figured out to. That should be either the Nevada state motto or Las Vegas city motto is like, we make shit happen. We'll make it happen. If you have extra money, we'll take it for whatever you need. But, you know, it's if I don't know, man. It's just like it's such a weird.

it's just such a weird place. There's rules, but there's not rules. And you can almost, it's some place you can go and almost not be yourself. You don't have to be. No, no. I want to, yeah, you live, you can live beyond your means and you're going to hate yourself, you know, on the flight back Monday morning or whatnot. But, you know, for that 72 hours that you go, you're, you know, you can pretend to be a millionaire. You can print, it's just, it's weird.

You live like a king until the credit card bill comes due. Or until the ATM tells you that you don't have anything else to withdraw. Yeah. And there's another thing. You go to an ATM and a casino. You're spending like $2 for a service charge anywhere else. Well, anywhere else. But you go to an ATM and a casino, it's a $20 charge every time you pull money out.

I think mine was like $9 or $10 or $11. But it's just like you'll pay it. What other option? You have, yeah, you don't have another option. There's no banks along the strip. No. And I mean, you don't necessarily have to have cash, but if you want to tip, you got to have cash. Mm-hmm.

Okay, so there you go. Pack accordingly. Have cash with you. Do not take it out at the casino. And don't flash it. No. It's still not the safest place in the world. All right, man.

You got anything else? No, I love this. I, it's such a fun topic to look at how basically, I would say that most outlandish city in this country, easily and probably top 10 in the world. Just how it all came to be and where it all came from. How quickly, too. Yeah.

Again, we've talked about civilization or civilizations that glow up real quick. They built an entire city from train tracks, which somehow there's not like public train transit there anymore. Like the closest hub is outside of it now. That's because it's in Las Vegas. But the closest train station now is like 50 miles away. Oh, I got you. Okay. So there's nothing really that connects them railway-wise.

As soon as the city, as soon as this stuff, the gambling, the Sin City aspect got bigger. This was now the primary. You just have to look at where the airport is. The strip is the closest, like one of the closest things. You're basically land. You're five, ten minutes from the strip. You're five, ten minutes away. And you don't, I was about to say you're five, ten minutes away from spending

money, but you're not. You walk off the airplane. You hear the ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, the moment you actually get, you can probably hear it from the plane. Yeah, there's slot machines in the airports. Immediately. You find slot machines and gas stations. They're everywhere. It's, it's incredible. Anywhere that you want to spend money, you can. The concept of living in Las Vegas is something that is completely boggles my mind. I know why it has to happen because it's an entire city support, and you have to, but like, just do you think you don't have, like, uh, Do you think your concept of reality is skewed by living in Vegas? I don't think that locals do any of the stuff.

No, no, no, I don't think they do. But what I'm saying is that, like, you're literally seeing people either at maybe what they feel is their best or their worst on a consistent daily basis. Oh, yeah. Well, there's a reason why you can't open your window more than, like, three inches when you stay at a hotel in Las Vegas. Because if you killed, you're figuring out a way to get out there if you're sad and you're jumping. It's Yeah, you're either Living the time of your life

Or you're in the doldrums Of like the worst Losing streak ever But there's always that hope There's always that You can hit big That feeling yeah You can be down

$500,000 You can be down Hundreds of millions like Watanabe But you keep coming back Because there's always that chance There's always the chance To make more money Either that or you just like

The thrill How many people don't even like They win And it gives them that little rush but then they go right back to like, okay, I got to chase that again. It's not enough for them. Yeah, it's like a crack hit. I'm not a big gambler.

I honestly don't even think I gambled the entire time down on that trip. Just because there was just so much to go do and seeing everything. But, you know, I have before at a casino, and I'm one of those people that I'm like, the rush of winning for me, that feeling of losing way outweighs. doesn't it doesn't bounce. I know for some people it does like they can lose. And that feeling is, you know, brings them down to a negative five, but the feeling of winning brings them to a six. For me, yeah, it's a six if I win, but I'm like it an eight if I lose. So it just doesn't work out. Like if I win and I can get a little bit of money, I get to a point where I'm just like the first

time I lose or the second time I lose after winning, I'm just like, nope, I'm good. I'll back away for a while. And that's probably the right way to be. Unfortunately, I, I feel like I'm the opposite. That's the one time when I'll suspend the rule just like everything normally. Because when you're sitting at a craps table and you roll a hard eight, you got a couple chips on there and you win. And the whole table wins along with you. And everybody's exciting.

See, that's going to be the feeling, though. That's probably what really keeps people in it too. Oh, absolutely. Is if you're playing to an audience and you're getting all this encouragement and you're doing well, I don't know what that feeling is. There's few times in my life that it's happened, but when you walk away from a table and you've just been on an incredible heater, whether it's, you just rolled 20 straight times on a craps table or you're hitting things left and right on a roulette wheel, when you walk away and somebody slaps you on the back and says, great roll, that's like the best compliment that you can get. You live on that to the point where you feel like you had something to do with that. That was your skill, just not pure luck. Yeah, you were throwing the dice in a certain way where things were just coming up. Most likely there's a good chance that the resort, the table, the casino had a hand in what was going on.

Keep all those other people invest and make them put their money in. Well, and the superstitions that you run into, too, when you see people that won't touch their cards until a certain time. Or me, I have to, I know it's stupid. I have to grab the dice with my middle finger and my thumb. Nothing else touches. Loft it down there nice and easy. you come up with these little rituals that make you think you're going to win.

Nothing helps you win. No, it doesn't. I'm just one thing that I keep coming back to is like, what's the psychology study of Las Vegas? Because that's always ongoing. But like, they have to determine by some type of scientific or psychological formula, how often do we need to let this person win?

Because they have to design these games where, of course, the odds are in the house's favor. but the odds have to be enough in the favor of the player to allow them to win, to not only keep that person playing, but then anybody participating or watching to see, oh, this game is winnable. And it has to be winnable often enough to catch people watching in different times. The sheer psychology of it, I would love to just pick someone's brain and be like,

first of all, you know, do they still develop new casino games, or is there pretty much an establishment of general? Because, I mean, you can always design new slots and everything like that. You're always trying to make those flashier and updated and everything like that. Card games and more of the traditional roulette, blackjack, poker, craps, that kind of stuff. Is there development of new games ongoing? Or when these games were developed, was this just the rules and they never got Twitter? Like, it's a weird thing to think about, right?

Yeah, I don't think they could develop anything new. I think gambling is just as old as time. Throwing dice, you can do it anywhere. Exactly, but just, like, think of how intricate some of these games are. Like, they don't seem like it to people who maybe play them a lot. But even the game of craps, at some point, someone was just like, okay, you got to roll seven. And they're like, why? And they're like, I'm just making up the rules, man.

Like, we're just trying to develop a new game. Yeah, well, seven is, I believe, the easiest number to make. Or I don't remember if it's the easiest number, the hardest number to make with two people. a set of dice. I think that's actually probably what it is then. Yeah. And so that's your credit. It's the hardest.

Yeah. Because you can go six and a one, a five and a two, a four and a three. Yeah. Because it can have the most combinations. Yeah. So you're trying not to hit that. So that's why it's skewed. Sevens are bad because it's the most likely to come up, even if on a percentage base,

you know, okay. Yeah. And I think a lot of this stuff is just things that are as old as time. I'm sure before the World Series of Poker really got hot and going. on TV, there were probably hold them tables in... Oh, they're definitely... If you think about it,

anytime you see a Western, they're playing some type of version of poker. Yeah. But I'm sure after the World Series of poker hit and everybody started watching it, they probably threw 10 more hold them tables down there because that was where the pocket was going to.

You hear Blackjack, and Blackjack, again, is a game as old as time, but you go in to play it and you get somebody that doesn't know all the rules and they just heard it. Backer at. I don't know what the fuck Backerat is. Never, I think I've maybe seen it played once or twice. I couldn't

figure it out to save my life. So I've never spent money on it, but there are people that go and want to learn. I mean, the way that I learned how to play craps was I just pulled up to the table, told them and all that kind of weird ass video, but like, yeah, it's just. And it's an investment. I spent

probably two, 300 bucks at least before I finally learned how to play craps, but that's what made me learn how to play craps. It was like, I'm fucking tired of losing. Yeah. And then it takes that one hit, that one big score. It's like golf. One good shot will carry you the entire day.

All right, man. That's pretty much all I got on this. Yeah, great topic. A lot of fun. All right. Hopefully you guys enjoyed it. Learn something. Hit us up with any comments or questions.

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