The Gamble of Lying
There are a lot of benefits to being a liar.
For the last few months, we’ve been having poker nights at my place in Brooklyn.
It’s usually my old roommate (whose idea this was), my current roommate, my girlfriend (also roommate), and some chum who ends up taking all of our money.
We’ve all known each other for a pretty long time, and it’s easy for me to tell when somebody has something (or doesn’t).
For one thing, I’ve noticed they have a tough time betting when they don’t have anything. The only way they’ll put a lot of chips out on a hand in their own volition is if they have something
One thing you’ve gotta know about me (unless you’re a prospective employer) is that I’m a gambling addict. I’ll put down money until I’m out of it, especially if I think I can win.
I don’t have a great poker face, but I’m great at creating chaos. The rush of winning on a bluff hand feels amazing, and even makes losing half a dozen bluffs totally worth it.
At least it does when it’s not your friends that you’re fooling, I imagine.
When it’s your friends, you feel a need to return the money back to them. There’s no thirst to rip them for every dollar they have.
Also, I imagine the only way I’d be able to keep the money would be by walking away from the table.
It’s nice to have some analog fun with friends, but there’s no doubt in my mind that the game represents a larger gambling trend pervasive in the United States
People are throwing their money down, with Forbes estimating that $66 Billion was spent gambling in 2023. While Bezos and Musk might have just been putting their net worth on the Chiefs, the lack of sports betting millionaires and billionaire stories make it easy to assume that most of this money went right back to the house.
Speaking from personal experience, I would have to win a pretty massive wagers to earn back the money I’ve wagered with them. So some of this could be sour grapes.
I would make the argument that gambling is form of lying. It’s an attempt to be certain about an uncertain future. I wouldn’t consider it a way to make an honest living, with even sports betting professionals being estimated to hit on around 52-57% of their bets.
Given that statistic, I would also make the argument that advertising gambling is certainly a form of lying, as most advertising is. Even without objectively lying, not pointing out the immense odds against bettors and the dangers of gambling in your commercial, all while enticing first-timer with promotions, is a form of deceit.
I believe that gambling epidemic is a symptom of a larger credit and integrity problem in the US. You can’t blame people for gambling, you can’t blame businesses for taking advantage of the law. But you can wonder where people and society will go if we can all throw our money at any given moment on innocuous sporting events.
To speak like my Generation Z colleagues, it’s giving bread and circuses, but it’s taking all of our money away. Not to be all doom-and-gloom, but I don’t think our integrity is coming back anytime soon. Regulation is being cut all of the time.
Misinformation and disinformation feels more rampant than ever before. Honesty and integrity, and also reality, seem to be under constant attack.
Our current President, Elon Musk, is one of the most sinister liars to have ever existed. He has convinced much of the world that he is the gatekeeper to the future of technology, that his genius is the only thing preventing the world from being doomed. In
I think that both he and Trump are also massive gamblers. (The polite, corporate way of saying this is “they aren’t afraid to take risks”) They have both been down before, being handed pretty major losses and then bouncing back from them. Who knows how much they’re hiding, but for the moment they are winners in the eyes of the public.
What troubles me most is that these men are not poker players. They are con men tampering with the slot machines using magnets in their shoes. If Vegas doesn’t kick them out, I’m certain that if the wrong person discovers their tactics, they’ll be buried out in the desert.
What they’re both willing to leverage in the name of saving their own asses has appeared boundless. I have no doubt that the consequences of this administration will have on our lives as Americans will have be massive.
Circling back, this past week was the Super Bowl. I didn’t watch the majority of it, which is my preferred way to watch it.
I work in advertising, and I love sports as well as, frankly, America. But all three of these things tend to be at their worst during the Super Bowl. As with most Sundays during the NFL season, if I spend the entirety of my day consuming sports, I’ll come off feeling dizzy and like I just ate a bunch of processed food, even if I haven’t.
To really miss the Super Bowl without actively ignoring it, you have to make plans. My plans used to be working. When I was a delivery guy, this meant missing at least the first half and popping into bars to catch whatever glimpses of the game I could.
Around the 4th quarter, the amount of requests for pizza and wing deliveries would inevitably decrease, and I’d be able to sit and watch the remainder of the game.
This only ended up being worth it, really, during one year. The Patriots-Falcons in 2015, when the patriots unleashed a monster comeback after being down 28-3, that eventually lead to overtime.
Every other Super Bowl that I can remember working during had been a blow-out by the time the fourth quarter came around.
For the past few years, I’ve had the time to sit and watch the game. There have been some close ones, and some blow-outs. But through just about all of them, Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs were consistent participants, having made it to the big game four out of the past five years.
This brought praise, fame, and accolades for Mahomes, who was entering into the conversation of being the greatest football player of all time. A larger cultural crossover occurred when the team’s star Tight End, Travis Kelce, began dating Taylor Swift.
This isn’t unfamiliar territory for the league. Tom Brady and the Patriots were once the most hated team and player in the league. The team was accused of cheating multiple times, even leading to Congressional investigations. Brady’s wife, a supermodel named Giselle, even took the place of Swift as America’s least favorite cheerleader.
And, in turn, there were multiple Super Bowls when the Patriots were favored to win where they lost instead. Vegas took the money of cynics and super fans alike,
All of this fame and success led to a lot of hype and adoration, but it also created cynicism, spite and rage from fans of other teams and fans of the league at large. The boys hated the girls intruding on their game, and how the league seemed to welcome them with open arms.
Conspiracy theories about the league and referees tampering with the game became part of the public discourse about the team.
This year, I wasn’t able to watch the Super Bowl because I had an acting class. A class where they teach us how to pretend better (lie). It is a class done in earnest in the name of theatre and art, but anyone with malicious intent could use their lessons and methods to manipulate people.
At first, I was disappointed that I would miss the game. But I soon grew hopeful that I would be able to catch the thrilling last few moments of a close at a midtown bar after class was over. It would be another classic New York memory to add to my fading collection.
After performing a rendition of Shelly Levine in Glengarry Glen Ross, I went with a few other student to Jack O’Doyle’s on 35th Street to discover the bar was half-empty, and the game was a complete blowout.
The mood in the bar was bitter. I drank whiskey and watched an exhausted staff meander through ecstatic eagles fans. I can say with certainty that I saw no Chiefs fans at the bar.
There were a few people sitting at the bar who weren’t wearing any paraphernalia, with eyes glued to the game.
In the final moments, with the game fully out of reach, Mahomes launched a touchdown pass to Marquis Brown. I saw a man at the bar slammed his hand down and storm out of the bar. He clearly had just lost the spread.*
The Philadelphia Eagles victory seemed to be an opportunity for most fans to berate the Chiefs and Mahomes. They beat them so badly that fans across the country took to social media to gleefully announce Mahomes’s chances at becoming the GOAT were now nullified. The President’s spokesman, Donald Trump, even posted lambasting the Chiefs and Taylor Swift.
Now, risk is a culture within itself. People love to watch winners win, but they love even more to watch winners lose. Mahomes put the pressure on himself during last season’s Super Bowl, when in his on-field interview he said he and the team wanted to do it again the next year.
Why anyone would expect a competitor of his caliber to say anything less is beyond me, but nevertheless it added extra pressure. There were definitely people who lost money on the Chiefs Sunday night but were still happy to see them lose, simply out of spite.
People like to use the metaphor that the president is like a quarterback. We want them to be great communicators, never give up, and never make mistakes. Additionally, we can only go as far as they take us. They use this metaphor to justify rooting for someone who goes against their ideals and values. To some, Trump is a winner. To others, like myself, he’s a cheater and a loser. But like a quarterback, we all win and lose with them whether we gamble on their performance, or not.
The problem with this is the president isn’t a quarterback. He’s a president. And this one we have now is barely that. Politics might be football, but governing isn’t. And when he loses, there won’t be some sort of rally from people on the other teams of this country to rally and celebrate. We’ll all just be fucked.
Even when we don’t want them to be, our ideals and virtues stand only as far as we fight for them. And when we fight for them, we risk everything to do so. Most people’s virtue is a bottom line, whether they like it or not. Religious and political extremists might see things differently, but their bosses don’t.
*The next day, I decided that I needed to quit drinking.