The Herd with Colin Cowherd - Great Moments In Gambling's History Part III

Episode Date: May 16, 2025

Back by popular demand, Action Network hosts Chad Millman and Simon Hunter welcome back their producer and colleague Matt Mitchell to discuss more great stories from gambling's wild history. How did lotteries help build America? How did horse racing give us one of betting's most enduring characters? And how did a life of endless suffering influence the betting of a Russian novelist? Is King Edward VII really a friend of the show? All these questions answered and so much more in this fast-paced episode. #VolumeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey guys, it's us The Jonas Brothers. I'm Joe. I'm Kevin. And I'm Nick. And guess what? We created our own podcast called, Hey Jonas. We invented a podcast?

Well, we didn't invent it. We just contributed to it. We're the first people to do podcasts. We get to ask other people questions because we're sick and tired of being asked questions. Well, sick and tired is a strong way to put it. But, you know, tired and sick. Listen to Hey Jonas on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Just listen.

We don't care where you hear it. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and Friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, S&L's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter.

Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Winning on Clay is an art. The rallies are relentless, and at the French Open, only the toughest survive. I'd know.

I competed there for decades. Join me, Renee Stubbs, on the Renee Stubbs' tennis podcast for no-nonsense breakdowns of the biggest matches, the toughest players, and the moments that define Roland Garris. She's an outsider to win the French win. And she likes Clay. Listen, Lennar Rabakina is arguably the best player in the world right now, and I actually can win on any surface. Listen to the Renee Stubbs Tennis podcast on the IHeart Radio. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. Last night, a blown call changed a game. This morning, the internet lost its mind, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo, and every episode, we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the biggest moments in sports and giving you the real story behind the headline. And we're going straight to the source, the athletes themselves. their locker room stories, their reactions in the moment, and the stuff nobody gets to hear.

Listen to SportsSlice on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Slicalife-Life 12 in the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. Welcome to the favorites, the podcast, part of the volume podcast network. I am Chad Millman of the Action Network. Today, I'm joined, as always, by my co-host, my companion, my compadre, my BFF professional better Simon Hunter. Hello, Simon. Hello, Chad. Over the weekend, I heard from my doctor, who I've known for 20 years about our Pope show. That's how good he liked it. Yeah, even though it was after the fact,

obviously, it just cracked me up that my guy texted me. Again, he knows what I've done my whole life. He knows what the podcast and everything. He never hits me up about it. He texts me how much you enjoyed the Pope Show and just how we brought a totally different look to it and how we view and yeah, we got pretty lucky. At least we mentioned the name. We didn't give it out as a winner, but at least the name was mentioned here on the show. So shout out to Dubunda.

You know what? I feel like I thought about this. Naturally, I thought about it from the point of view of me. And the Pope market that I was highest on was the dude from France, from Marseille, who had a 3% chance. And my logic on him, if you remember, was he's an outlier candidate. He has a lot of experience with immigration, which is important to the church right now

and bringing together cultures from a lot of disparate places where they need to grow the Catholic community. And it's not going to be someone who's got the shortest odds because it's never someone who has the shortest dots. So my logic was 100% right. I just discounted my guy from Chicago. And I have been loving, loving. Like the text chain that I've had with my Chicago boys about the Pope and the memes and the Annie Agar tweet where she immediately sent out the post that Chicago has a Pope before it has a 4,000-yard passer.

and the t-shirts that say da pope, like the video that someone did of the pope being introduced to St. Peter's Square to the Alan Parsons Project intro that used to be with the Bulls and Michael Jordan. I'm here for all of it. I freaking love it. I love his brothers who just keep talking about him and are having a blast.

Like everything about it is familiar. I had an uncle who lived. like on the southwest side of Chicago, in the suburbs near where he lived. And they all sound alike, they all look alike. I'm just, I'm loving the Pope. Love the Pope. It was a smart move by them.

Like we talked on the show. I thought they've given up on the West. Clearly they have not. And that's a market they're going after. So what they wanted to do is working, right? He's becoming already sensation here in American. I joked with a buddy who's a Roman Catholic like I am. You know, he always goes to 11 o'clock.

mass usually half empty what do you think it was this weekend chat packed packed for Mother's Day so yeah I'm excited to see what this is gonna do going forward and you know like we joked on the show it's such a niche market it sucked that it didn't work out where you know we did the show an hour later I believe we got the text from Matt Mitchell like holy shit white smoke but the show if you go back and listen to it it's it's an interesting market and something that going forward if me and chat guy loon are so together in 12 20 years i look forward to our next pope show brother why wouldn't we be together simon i have terrible health concerns for myself not you you'll be fine

me i don't know you know what simmon you and i are going to be together in about two weeks because i'm coming down to philly you are and uh we're going to spend the day together maybe we should go to mass maybe we should go to like an 11 a m mass i'd burst into flames as soon as i step through the and we will really really pray a last night Collapsed Catholic and a Jew walk into 11 a.m. Mass in South Jersey. What possibly could go wrong? Next week, we're going to have a lengthy discussion about the impact of the NFL schedule. And I'm going to want to bring in some of the points that we made in our show earlier this week that Evan noted and see if we can start to apply some of these things. Yeah.

And see if there are games that normally we would be trapped into picking that are we changing our thinking a little bit. So I'm excited for that. We're also going to sit down with Jason Benetti, the broadcaster for the Detroit Tigers, and nationally with Fox. Like he's been on the show before. He is so freaking good. He is so funny. He is so talented.

He is so smart at calling games and keeping you entertained without it being intrusive and understanding the really nitty, gritty details. He used to do back in the day when he was at ESPN. They would do these analytics broadcasts, and he was brilliant at these. So I'm excited for Jason. Today we're going to bring in Matt Mitchell. We did this show earlier in the offseason, and we got great response. As you can expect, people love betting history on this show.

Look, my entire desk, you can't see it right now, is piled with betting history paraphernalia. And I'm looking at a picture right now of the guy who was the original bookmaker. for the mafia. And it's a picture of him hanging out in Cuba with a jockey and like Meyer Lansky. So it's a, it's, I love this stuff. Matt Mitchell is going to come on. He's going to tell us more of the things he's unearthed from gambling's wild history. Welcome back to the show, Matt Mitchell. Oh, you know, it's just an honor to shoehorn myself into doing. an off-season episode, Jeff. You've been working so hard

at becoming talent. You're really, you're getting close. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. I love on-camera mat. He's very tame. I could already hear what he's going to say if you're off-camera. I feel like he's nervous.

He was like, am I about to say what I should say of this guy? Are we taped right now? So I love on-camera mat. You know what? I'll give a little look behind the curtain. When we started one million years ago here, Chet was very encouraging

that I do more on-camera stuff become more talent-forward. That's right. I was. I wasn't as interested in, mostly as an exhausted parent of two at the time, incredibly small children. But more than that, I don't enjoy shows where the producer tries to shoehorn themselves into the show a lot. I appreciate that wherever our beloved listeners are right now on a yacht or a treadmill or at work or in a subway or whatever the hell, jumping on a trampoline, whatever they're doing, they're here to hang out with their two friends, you know, Chad and Simon. and I can pop in once in a while. But more importantly, if I need to kick somebody off a show,

not necessarily this one, but something else in our network, it gets a lot harder to have those conversations if you are on-camera talent because you, by definition, are saying I'm better than that. So it was always easier to be someone whose impact was felt without being seen or whose flat Rochester accent wasn't heard on these airwaves. So I appreciate that. funny because we know that his position has clearly changed because if you've been to one of the live shows, you know Matt just takes it over and Simon and I become background noise for the entire event.

Matt, we just talked a little bit about betting the papacy. Did you bet on who would become the Pope? Yeah, well, you two Jagoffs were talking in that episode. I realized that the market would close at the top of that hour, so I need to get my bets in. And I'm going through. And I only wanted to bet, you know, 20 to 1 or higher. for all the reasons we outlined in that episode. I'm doing foreign dudes, no Americans, that felt ridiculous.

And I opened up Bob's odds. I'm trying to find ages and locations. Oh, 69 years old. Oh, Chicago, Illinois. No way. I opened it up, could have bet it, and said, no way. Make a couple more. I open up one more guy, Cardinal Burke.

Oh, he's from Wisconsin. I mean, well, I'll put 10 bucks on this guy. I threw away money on an American papal candidate that wasn't the right one. Four minutes for the market closed. I will be haunted forever. But at least we got a Pope who has been inside my two favorite restaurants, Wawa and Portillo's. So I feel like he'll have my best interest at heart, despite not being a Catholic at all. But yeah, I wish him the very best.

My God, it's great. All right, Matt Mitchell. Subject number one is. how sports betting explains the world. There's a really famous book called How Soccer Explains the World. The writer, who's brilliant, his name is Franklin Ford, and he writes for the Atlantic, but in his previous years, he has written for a bunch of different magazines and newspapers. At one point, he was the editor-in-chief of the New Republic, and it was a seminal book and sort of just the title alone defines the framing of something really small,

explaining something really big. And he wrote this book called How Soccer Explains the World. So I think about this as the How Betting Explains the World episode. Your first topic, America's Lottery Fever, Matt Mitchell. The floor is yours. Love that framing. Great job. Great hosting as always, chap. Thank you. Well, as you can imagine, from its very founding, America has loved betting and who couldn't. But one of the hardest parts of having a new and pretty large nation is collecting money, collecting tax revenue. We as Americans, we would rather be throwing tea into a harbor than paying our taxes. That hasn't changed.

So within the first couple decades of America's birth, if the government wanted to finance a large public project, they did the smart thing. They ran lotteries. They turned tax collection into gambling. And if you've ever wondered how like very old East Coast cities like New York and Philadelphia, how they got so nice, even before 1800, those two cities alone, just isolating those two, they financed public projects using more than 2,000 state authorized lotteries. They were all over it.

So I've got a couple of my favorite. lottery examples. You guys ready? I am ready. Simon, are you ready? Let's do it. All right. So when they were literally draining the swamp to build Washington, D.C., they financed a lot of that construction through federal lotteries. And the first of these huge federal lottoes offered a big grand prize, a building called Belaget's Hotel. If you won this lottery, you would win this big-ass building. And the first ticket, and that big lotto was purchased by George Washington. So we know that he gambled at least one time.

And fun fact, 20 years later, when those disgusting, filthy Brits burned down a lot of Washington, D.C., in the War of 1812, that building, Blodgett's Hotel, that would end up serving as the temporary home of Congress. And although Blodgett's Hotel, that would also eventually burn down years later, the Hotel Monaco, in D.C. stands there now in the shadow of Capital One Arena, where the Washington Capitals will be playing a playoff game this very evening. How betting explains the world right there. You know, we had David Schwartz on who wrote the book, Roll the Bones, that we get a lot of, that we steal a lot of these ideas from. I remember interviewing him 15, 16 years ago in the library at UNO. where the gaming research studies are done, talking about the hypocrisy of state by state, everybody allowing lotteries, but not allowing sports betting.

And honestly, it was in that moment, in the library, where I realized this shit's going to be legal. Like, at the end of the day, it's too much money to leave on the table for every state that needs more and more money every single year. if we've been doing it since the beginning of the Republic, it's just a matter of time. Lotteries to sports betting. Nicely done, Matt Mitchell.

Yeah, if we could just pay our federal and state taxes in the form of scratchers, I feel like we'd solve a big part of our deficit right there. So here's another example. By the way, did George Washington win the hotel? He did not. In fact, I think the guy that fronted that scheme, Blotch it, I think that ended up going belly up

and he ended up in debtor's prison. but I can't remember the details of that one. But we'll just celebrate it as a big victory, USA number one. Debtors prison was a big thing. I just finished reading the book, The Gambler, by one of my favorite authors, his name is Dostoevsky. In The Gambler, Debtors Prison was a big thing. If you wrote an IOU piece of paper, like, that was as good as a contractor. If you could not pay that, you went into prison and you were there until someone paid.

your debt. Obviously, the gamblers are novel, but he was debtor's prison in that window of time seemed to be a really big thing. I feel like the Milwaukee Box and Cleveland Cavalers are working as hard as they can to put me in debtor's prison this spring. So I can appreciate the feeling. What is the over under on the number of erudite, potentially arrogant, literary references I can make on the show? I'm just so far. Oh, just your way. There's so much. many more opportunities for you. You'll do great. You're very smart and handsome. Thank you. All right. So we've discussed that lotteries became essentially the first solution to any American problem. Here's another one. So Thomas Jefferson is dying and he's got a ton of debt.

His debts are super high. He had a lot of people, a lot of money. And so they arrange a lottery to raise money for his daughter, Martha. And the three prizes for this lottery were going to be be three of Jefferson's properties. And the grand prize was going to be Monticello. And for those unfamiliar, if you have any loose change in your pocket, that's the picture on the back of the U.S. nickel. It's a pretty fucking famous house. So that was going to be the grand prize of top three prizes in this lottery. But obviously Jefferson was incredibly famous and had a lot of wealthy friends. And a lottery for his like property and belongings is pretty humiliating. So they, tried to pool their money together to buy it. And that didn't work. And then the lottery that they

arranged sold so few tickets. They basically canceled it. And eventually Martha just sold the house for a fraction of its value. And were these kind of lotteries, were they above board? Sometimes, sometimes not. For example, 30 years after that first Blodgett's Hotel federal lottery that I just mentioned, they ran another one for a beautification project. And the manager who ran it, sold all the tickets. He announces a winning number. He does all the things he's supposed to do, except he took all the money and disappeared.

I don't believe they ever found him. And usually the attitude, because it's America, it was like, you know what, what can you do? You pay your money and you take your chances. And sometimes, you know, that's life. Buy or beware. Buy or beware, man. Sometimes, you know, it's not a ticket I bought.

It's just an old cracker or whatever. But this time, the guy that wins was furious because the grand prize was $100,000. which today would be $2.7 million. And they said, hey, listen, we don't have any of the money the guy stole it. So this guy files a lawsuit. He fights it for four full years. And eventually the United States Supreme Court orders the city of D.C. to pay him the money.

So you can fight City Hall. And he did get his money. And you'd think that that scandal would make people less interested in lotteries, right? And no, shortly after that, one newspaper. estimated that the top eight cities alone sold almost $70 million worth of lottery tickets, which is five times larger than the entire federal budget at the time. But unfortunately, the fraud did worry a lot of regulators and state governments. So within about 10 years, state lottos were illegal in almost every state.

But that is some of the fun anecdotes from our early obsession with the lottery. Country built on gambling. The ying and yang of our puritanical values and our need to risk it all to win big is a constant theme throughout the building of our democracy. One of the best anecdotes they had from Dave Schwartz, author of Roll the Bones, fabulous book, was how many lottery offices there were in New York. And there were even more in Philadelphia. and even Puritanical Boston had 50. But there were still a few in Boston, even though they hated gambling there.

You can't keep the gamblers down. They're always going to crawl out of the woodwork. No one knows self-loathing better than Bostonians. That's exactly right. Hey, it's us, the Jonas Brothers. And guess what? We have some big news. What's the news, next?

Huge news. We created our own podcast called, Hey, Jonas. We invented a podcast? Well, we didn't invent it. We just contributed to us. We're the first people to do podcasts. Pretty, yeah, pretty wild.

range of podcasts throughout there. But this one's extra special. So how do we actually come up with a name Hey Jonas, guys? I honestly don't remember. I think it was on a call about what we should call it. We were thinking I'm originally

calling it one of the early names of our band before Jonas Brothers. This is how you guys remember it going down? Yes. I have a very different memory of this. We were talking about a thing, a bit for the podcast, where people could call in and say, Hey Jonas.

and then I wrote down on my little notepad, Hey Jonas, and offered it up as a potential title for the podcast. But thanks for remembering that, guys. Listen to Hey Jonas on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Just listen. We don't care where you hear it. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite.

Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and Head, writer Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes.

Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The French Open is one of the toughest tests in tennis, and I know firsthand because I competed there myself.

I'm Renee Stubbs, and on the Renee Stubbs' tennis podcast, I'm breaking down everything happening at Roland Garris. Every match, every upset, and what it really takes to win on Clay. Jenchen won. I mean, she went down to three to Rabakina, but I'm delighted. She's an outsider to win the French for me. And she likes Clay.

Listen, Lena Rubakina is arguably the best player in the world right now, and I actually can win on any surface. Because if she's serving, well, good luck. Consider this your court side seat to the French Open. Listen to the Renee Stubbs tennis podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or... wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports.

Imagine an Olympics where doping is not only legal but encouraged. It's the enhanced games. Some call it grotesque. Others say it's unleashing human potential. Either way, the podcast's Superhuman documented it all, embedded in the games and with the athletes for a full year. Within probably 10 days, I'd put on 10 pounds. I was having trouble stopping the muscle growth.

Listen to Superhuman on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Matt, can you please give us your next story? This week is the second leg of horse racing's Triple Crown, Preak mistakes at Pimlico, and I want to give another nod to the ponies and their crucial role in the popularization of sports betting worldwide. because Chad, obviously, on a recent episode, you referenced the origin of the term handicapping, which comes from British horse racing in the 1700s, before the establishment of odds-based wagering,

the performance of a faster horse was literally handicapped by placing weights on them during a race to kind of even things out. You know, the bigger the perceived favorite, the heavier the weights, the kind of, quote, bigger the handicap. I want to talk about another phrase. So after odds making on horses was common in the early 1800s, that paved the way for establishments known as commission offices or racing banks.

But what we here on the show would call the OTB off-track betting. If you've never been to an OTB, Chad, how would you describe it? I would describe it as a gloriously sad, dingy, dirty, for mica floored fluorescent lit single room that if you walked by it on the street, as I have many, many times in New York,

you might think it was a storefront that was for lease because there's so little signage and it's so sort of uninviting inside. That sounds like. Simon, you've been doing an OTB, right? Yeah, never in America, only in England. It's equally as depressing in both places.

It's a magical place. And there is a ubiquity to them. It is a great place if you have $6 to lose, but want to make that take an hour and a half. So, OTPs are springing up all over the place, and it's where betting on the ponies started to transition from this, like, sport of kings and wealthy elites to something that, like,

ordinary people could finally participate. in. So it used to just be guys that, like, if you closed your eyes and said, like, picture the King of England or Chad Millman. It was guys like that that used to be the only people betting. And thanks to OTBs, it could finally include people that looked more like Bert, the Dick Van Dyke character from Mary Poppins or Simon and his ancestors. Jim, Jim, Jim, Jim, Chirou, I does what I likes and I likes. While I do. Yeah, there was an egalitarianism to being able to wager away from the track.

And some of these locations were big, sharp operations. And of course, some of these were very dodgy called Mayfly operations. Because in some of the shittier places, they might need a heavy favorite to lose a race, to quote Bob Scucci for their lungs. And if that favorite ended up winning, they might just shut down, not open the next day and just leave town. But in both places, there quickly emerged

another character that the three of us know even better today than they did then, the tout. This was the creation of the tout, the tipster, because basically as soon

as these British OTBs opened in the early 1800s, they offered print coverage of the races. And as soon as there was coverage, there were guys advertising, subscription tout services, that guaranteed gambling profits.

The Victorian-era Brits, Chad, just like us. Listen, Matt, I think for everyone listening, they should know that there will be a third of the final exam will be on horse racing, the importance of the daily racing form in the interconnectivity of the OTBs, the formation of the OTBs,

and how that led to broader sports betting throughout the country, all of that, there's going to be an essay on that that everyone can write in their blue books. I was going to say, I had my blue book ready. I'll be ready to go. Simon and Matt, can you remember the name of the person who owned the Daily Racing Forum that helped propel the information economy

around sports betting? I mentioned it in a previous show. Oh, I can't do that. Mo Annanberg. Mo. Former owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer. I believe, uh, philanthropic causes throughout the city of Philadelphia.

Actually, the train station in Philly might be like the Annenberg Hall or something. I'll figure it out when I'm there in a couple of weeks. I'll tell you when I get out of the train. I got to say, Jeff, from this show, the most amazing thing I'm going to take away from is the fact that our fraud government was less corrupt back then. It is today. I can't imagine if our government owed some guy in the news making bad headlines about them $2 million. That guy would just disappear.

back then they paid them. I am so shocked by that. So yeah, as always, love it, Matt Mitchell. I think this is a good example of something we talked a lot about a couple weeks ago, which is that there's this idea, especially in America, that these betting phenomena are like a newer thing, when in fact they're very, very old. Like, check this out. The lawnmower, the sewing machine, the electric telegraph, refrigeration, all of these are new. inventions than the subscription tout service. Like these are very old ideas. And one final thing on this before we move off, Victorian era Britain named for the reign of Queen Victoria, who was queen for like the last

60 years of the 1800s, one of history's preeminent haters, not a barrel of laughs. And Britain would make OTBs illegal in 1853. They just basically became a giant black market. But I wanted to shout out her oldest son very much, very much a friend of the show who'd become King Edward the 7th when she died in 1901. This guy loved betting, and he said that because horse racing was, quote, a manly sport that is popular with Englishmen of all classes, there was no reason to restrict gambling on it. And so he may have looked a little bit weird, maybe because his parents were first cousins.

It's none of my business. But friend of the show, the people's king. Shout out to him. All right. Matt, last one. you have a story that involves a famous Russian gambler. Gosh, I wish I had read the script because now is where I could have dropped in my Dostoevsky reference.

I do want to, again, stress to any listeners, how little Chad prepares and how much of this show is the work of people you don't see or hear. Because obviously, Joe Stieffsky is who's going to talk about. We're seeing them constantly now. He can't, he doesn't want to be on the show yet we can't get him off the show. So, you know, take that for what you will. Wow.

If only the listeners of the podcast would hear the sarcasm that I'll so surely cut out of this episode. All right. So a lot of very famous Russians love to gamble. There's one thing that they know a lot about, and that's suffering. So obviously, they're special to gamblers of all nationalities. For example, Leo Tolstoy, the writer of war in peace. He once lost a fortune at the German spa town of Baden-Baden, but Tolstoy can't compare to our friend,

renowned Russian novelist Fyodor Dostaski. To my credit. Incredible. It doesn't say Dostoevsky in the script that I got. It just says Russian gambler story. Full credit to you. Shame on me. You're doing a great job and are very smart and handsome.

So to make a long story short, when Fyodor Dostevsky was in his 30s, he was pretty critical of the Russian government, which I wouldn't recommend really then or now. And he gets sentenced to death by firing squad. But he gets that sentence commuted. And instead, he's got to do eight years of hard labor and then military service in Siberia. It's a step up from a firing squad, but obviously not a barrel of laughs. while in Siberia, he does what we would do, and that's gamble a lot with the fellas. And obviously, that was, you know, that helped pass some of the time. But he also does whatever good Russian, you know, has always done, suffer and suffer and suffer some more.

He's now a gambling enthusiast and long suffering. And to connect it back to earlier in the show, once those eight years in Siberia are over, if you look up a portrait of Dostafsky, like if you just go to his Wikipedia page, He looks a lot like all of the guys you run into at any OTB. It's like exactly if you were like, hey, I've never been to one. What are the guys look like? Just look up Fyodor Dostavsky. Anyway, after he's out of Siberia, he makes his first visit to one of those fun German spa towns like Tolstoy had been to.

And at first, stop me if you've heard a story like this before. At first, he wins a bunch of money. But once he gets to Baden, Baden, he loses a ton of money. and there's this great description of his betting. I think this will sound familiar to lots of people we know. To quote, roll the bones, he played in a state of grim agitation, his creative mind exponentially magnifying every win and every loss.

This guy sounds like a riot. You should read the gambler. I just read it literally two weeks ago. It's slim, so you should be able to handle it quickly. I can actually tell you how many fucking words it is. 60,000 words. It's exactly half as many words as crime and punishment. But we'll get to that. So the next year, more suffering. His wife dies, then his brother dies, and because of debtor's prison and those regulations, he inherits all of his brother's debt. So he needs money. So he signs a publishing deal. And he has to deliver a book in the next 18 months. And if he doesn't, he's going to get a huge fine and he's going to lose the rights to all of his other books. And he's in the middle of writing.

crime and punishment, but it won't be done in time because Chad, as you know, it's like 10 billion pages long. Yeah. So our boy, Fyodor, he's backed into a corner and then he feels like he's been set on fire and he gets a great idea. He hires a 20-year-old stenographer named Anna, great idea. Then in just four days, he dictates that entire novel to her, which, spoiler alert, would become the classic novel, the gambler, and it gets him out of his jam. And then he marries Anna the stenographer. Hey, great job. Game balls all around for Fyodor. But he's still a gambling addict and he still owes all of his brother's debts. So he does the right thing here and he skips town. He heads out on a promotional tour and soon he winds up in Baden, Baden, the casino

town in Germany. I wonder what's going to happen there, guys. He starts betting like a complete fucking maniac. He sits down and wins 40 times his money at Roulette almost right away. Anna, the stenographer wife, is like, hey, why don't we get the fuck out of here? And he knows he has to get out of here. He does not. He loses all of the money that he won, then all the money that he has, then he sells his clothes, makes his wife sell all of her shit. They lose that money, total washed out degenerate situation. And then he continues later traveling, betting more, you know, strains his marriage.

But our story here has a very 19th century Russian solution, a ghost. When he's 50 years old, Fyodor's dead father appears to him in a dream and scares the absolute shit out of him and warns him of impending doom. And it works. It actually works. He writes to his wife.

He apologizes. He promises to focus only on writing. He promises to never gamble again. And thanks to the spooky ghost of his dead Russian father, he never gambles again. Matt, you are our very own, Dostoevsky. A life of endless suffering, Chad.

That's exactly what I was thinking. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant storytelling suffused with long, simmering, gestating, suffering. My pleasure to serve. And a good lesson for kids, Chad. You'll never be a winning gambler if you eventually quit. Jesus. There's not enough ghosts.

There's not enough ghosts to visit the three of us. Oh, my God, that is too funny. Matt Mitchell, that was great. I'm so excited for you to go back to producing and then find a way to wiggle your way on the show. Oh, it's just a pleasure to share a Zoom screen with someone so smart and handsome. Thank you so much for having me on.

See, you're saying it with sarcasm, but I internalize it and think, huh, he could be right. And so many good ideas as well. Incredible. Yeah. And well read. So literate.

That's right. So literate. The most literate sports betting podcast in America. And you know what? We will return with our next episode of the favorites Tuesday on the Action Network. YouTube page download us from Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your pods. Rate, review, subscribe, leave us five stars. Say whatever you want.

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I'm Kevin. And I'm Nick. And guess what? We created our own podcast called Hey Jonas. We invented a podcast? Well, we didn't invent it. We just contributed to it. We're the first people to do podcasts. We get to ask other people questions because we're sick and tired of being and ask questions. Well, sick and tired

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This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Winning on Clay is an art.

The rallies are relentless. And at the French Open, only the toughest survive. I'd know. I competed there for decades. Join me, Renee Stubbs, on the Renee Stubbs tennis podcast for no nonsense breakdowns of the biggest matches, the toughest players, and the moments that define Roland Garris. She's an outsider to win the French fame.

And she likes Clay. Listen, Lina Rabakina is arguably the best player in the world right now. And I actually can win on any surface. Listen to the Renee Stubb's tennis podcast on the Iheart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHart Women's Sports. Last night, a blown call changed a game. This morning, the internet lost its mind, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened.

That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo, in every episode, we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the biggest moments in sports and giving you the real story behind the headline. And we're going straight to the source, the action. athletes themselves, their locker room stories, their reactions in the moment, and the stuff nobody gets to hear. Listen to SportsSlice on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Slicelife 12 in the TikTok podcast network on TikTok.