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Episode: The Other Business Stories Catching our Attention
Author: The Motley Fool
Duration: 00:29:18
Episode Shownotes
See more music, talk to strangers, play more games. Ricky Mulvey, Mary Long, and Asit Sharma take a look at the business-adjacent stories that caught their attention over 2024. They discuss: - The rise of concert ticket prices. - Why companies trying to solve the loneliness epidemic are in a
difficult business. - The implications of widespread sports gambling. And a heads-up, Motley Fool Money returns on Friday, December 27. Companies mentioned: LYV, MTCH, BUMBL, GRND, DKNG, FLUT Host: Ricky Mulvey Guests: Mary Long, Asit Sharma Engineer: Rick Engdahl Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Transcript
00:00:05 Speaker_01
Let's go a little bit outside of market news. It's almost Christmas. You're listening to Motley Fool Monday. Awesome, Mary, it's Christmas Eve. So we're gonna do some lighter topics. We're not just doing market news today.
00:00:19 Speaker_01
So I thought we could do some business adjacent stories that have just kind of caught our attention this year. Ones we've been thinking about and, you know, have a little bit of a looser Motley Fool money than we normally do.
00:00:32 Speaker_01
I set this so I go last if we get to it at all. But I'm gonna go with the analyst who thinks more about money and finance and stocks. So I'm gonna go with Asit. Asit, what is your business adjacent story that you've been thinking about this year?
00:00:46 Speaker_02
Well, Ricky, the three of us love music so much. And sometimes we need to get on and tape a show. We're still talking about bands and concerts. So I was thinking about this leading up to this last, one of our last episodes of the year.
00:01:01 Speaker_02
I've been wondering about the price of tickets for concerts. Back of the napkin math here, but the average ticket price to see Taylor Swift this year works out to about 200 bucks.
00:01:14 Speaker_02
Now, back in the 70s and 80s, to go to a high-demand concert, the price was much less, like $10. Now, we do have to adjust that for inflation.
00:01:25 Speaker_02
But even when you plug this through an inflation calculator, it looks like folks used to pay about $50 to go to a big-name concert back in the day.
00:01:33 Speaker_02
So, my question to start out for the two of you is, why the heck do ticket prices cost, in some cases, quadruple what they did 30 or 40 years ago?
00:01:45 Speaker_00
Before I dive into answer, I'm going to kind of highlight the $200 point that you brought up for Taylor Swift because my first reaction to that is, wait, it was way more.
00:01:55 Speaker_00
And there was like a whole new genre of media over the past two years dedicated to the wild amounts of money that people spend.
00:02:04 Speaker_00
not just for Aries tour tickets, but for buying merchandise associated with the concert, like all the money that people spent to travel, not just see the show, but get to the cities where the show is playing, etc.
00:02:14 Speaker_00
So my immediate reaction was, it has to have been more than that. But I mean, I went to the Aries tour, I spent $120 on a ticket, was lucky enough to get something at face value originally. So actually, that $200 number might be kind of
00:02:29 Speaker_00
more in line, who's to say, I'm going to use this all to segue into the fact that I think one of the reasons that ticket prices have gotten, have skyrocketed so much is because of this social media virality piece.
00:02:41 Speaker_00
Like you get to talk, not only are you paying to go to the concert, but you're paying to be a part of something that, A, look around you, everybody is going to this. And then you get to like, it's
00:02:52 Speaker_00
the part of the premium is like the social status of saying, hey, I was there too. To quote Taylor Swift, it was rare. I was there. And I get to relive that experience in perpetuity on social media.
00:03:05 Speaker_00
So I think that's kind of my big reason is it's not just about going to see the show and listening to this artist that you love anymore. Sure, that's a piece of it.
00:03:13 Speaker_00
But it's also about participating in what kind of becomes something that takes seemingly takes over all of the culture for a given period of time.
00:03:22 Speaker_02
So you're saying future bragging rights are embedded in that ticket price?
00:03:26 Speaker_00
Little bit, little bit.
00:03:28 Speaker_01
There's also, there's definitely a social standing. If you have a photo of you on Instagram at the Ares Tour, showing what a wonderful time you had, in part because it was so difficult to get tickets for that, right?
00:03:38 Speaker_01
There's so many people who wanted to go, but weren't able to. I remember I was trying to get tickets to go see Taylor Swift in Denver, and it was absolutely impossible. I was one of those people. Mary, it was for Sam.
00:03:51 Speaker_01
But anyway, I think there's this line from Scott Galloway where he's made this point that it's never been more difficult to be a millionaire, but it's never been easier to be a billionaire.
00:04:01 Speaker_01
And it has to do with this sort of winner-take-all economy that we live in, especially in internet culture. There are things that everybody suddenly knows about in ways that I don't think existed pre-internet.
00:04:14 Speaker_01
Think about how everyone knows who the Costco guys are right now, right? And it's just these things happen all of a sudden become a focal point. Taylor Swift was doing stadium shows for years and years, probably an inappropriate comparison.
00:04:25 Speaker_01
But I think it's because even though the internet was originally supposed to like create more niche interests, what's ended up happening is you have that monoculture where everyone knows about a few certain artists.
00:04:36 Speaker_01
So the biggest acts right now are absolutely impossible to get tickets to. You think of probably Zach Bryan, Taylor Swift, I put Olivia Rodrigo in that list when she was doing her arena tours.
00:04:47 Speaker_01
You're not getting tickets to that, and it's a social statement to be able to go. But what we are starting to see, I think, and this happened this year, was a swing back.
00:04:56 Speaker_01
Maybe where people were saying enough with these excessive ticket prices, specifically with the black keys. So the black keys were gonna do an arena tour saying, we wanna charge about 150 bucks for lower level arena seats.
00:05:09 Speaker_01
And, you know, I'm a fan of the Black Keys. I saw the Lonely Boy tour. I'm from Ohio. I like him, but I wasn't going to spend $150 to go see him thinking, you know, this is like a, this is like a $50 ticket.
00:05:20 Speaker_01
And I think something that happened this year, despite the focal point of Taylor Swift, you are starting to see a swing back in terms of ticket prices.
00:05:30 Speaker_02
Yeah, I think you're on to something there that things are swinging back, Ricky. I also want to say there's a different experience today for younger people because they do have maybe a parasocial relationship with a star and not in an unhealthy way.
00:05:45 Speaker_02
I think there's so many young women who grew up with Taylor Swift, so a bond forms and you are willing to fork out more to have that experience in person with the artist who you feel like you've lived your life experiences alongside.
00:05:58 Speaker_02
Things that you found in that music that were going on in your life. make that bond ever stronger. And I want to say for acts like the Black Keys, which they've been around for a while, maybe they don't have that close association.
00:06:11 Speaker_02
We're talking about everything here, but the music in some ways. And there was a simpler time when the music was much more the value point of buying that ticket.
00:06:20 Speaker_02
So you could still love a band, but if it wasn't economically feasible for you, I think you could take that pass. And maybe that's what you're drawing here, one thread that's interesting to follow.
00:06:30 Speaker_01
I think it's a great time to be a fan of concerts right now. This year, I saw the most impressive concert of my life. I went to Sphere and saw Dead & Company. And I mean, my mind was blown by that.
00:06:41 Speaker_01
Anyone who's been there to see a live show is raving about it. That was a $200 ticket. But when I walked out of it, I was like, yeah, that was absolutely worth the money. And in some ways, it was like living in the future for those few hours.
00:06:53 Speaker_00
Well, some of my favorite concerts that I've ever been to have been in really small venues. So one of the best concerts I went to this year was pretty unexpected. It was for an artist whose name is J.D.
00:07:04 Speaker_00
Clayton, and he had shown up on my Discover Weekly on Spotify. And it was one of those moments where you hear the song for the first time and you kind of stop in your tracks and you're like, I like that.
00:07:15 Speaker_00
And so it made me like, go to his page, start listening to more of his music. And I saw because Spotify told me, hey, he's going to be in Denver pretty shortly and went to this awesome concert at a great local venue. Tickets were $20, including fees.
00:07:29 Speaker_00
And I convinced a bunch of pals to come join me for this. They'd never heard of him before. And it was just a fantastic experience.
00:07:38 Speaker_00
And part of what made that experience so awesome, but also it has been the case with so many other live shows I've gone to at small venues, is this, it's not really, I guess maybe it's a parasocial relationship that you develop with the artist, but for me it's like you can tell how amped they are to just be there.
00:07:58 Speaker_00
I don't know that you get that same feeling. I have not always gotten that same feeling at a stadium show. It's this intimacy between artist and audience that they're just stoked that they get to play and there's anyone that's watching them at all.
00:08:12 Speaker_00
And that like brings out a lot of the magic of live music to me. And I think it's
00:08:18 Speaker_00
I hesitated saying parasocial because I don't know that that feeling has ever left me more interested in the personal life or feeling like I have a friendship with the artist.
00:08:28 Speaker_00
But it makes me root for them in a way, kind of like they're someone that I went to school with and that I'm kind of cheering on from afar rather than someone that I'm pretending to know. And that's a really lovely bond to have with an artist.
00:08:42 Speaker_02
Mary, how much did you pay for that ticket for that concert?
00:08:44 Speaker_00
Less than $20. Okay, yeah. 20 bucks including fees.
00:08:48 Speaker_02
So I can totally sympathize with this because there are some great venues around where I live. I live near a few college towns actually.
00:08:57 Speaker_02
And that's like a starting price, 18 bucks, not just for a new band that might be coming together, but for a good act that you have followed for a while that comes through town.
00:09:07 Speaker_02
And I would say there's a certain type of artist who never quite hits the stratosphere. They're super talented. You love their music when they debut. And then you see them several years later still on a relatively small venue circuit because
00:09:22 Speaker_02
You know, we all know the economics of Spotify aren't in the favor of the artists. And so some of these artists still go around. I don't think they sell CDs as much anymore, but definitely the merch aspect is there.
00:09:32 Speaker_02
And it's great to be able to come back a few years later and see an artist again, for me, that I associate with a certain time in my life. I have a very eclectic mix always going on.
00:09:44 Speaker_02
I find that several years pass and I was in a certain frame of mind in a theme and I can sort of relive that again. That's not quite even that related to that parasocial relationship, but it's meaningful.
00:09:56 Speaker_02
And I just love small venues as well because they're so intimate. The acoustics are generally in some cases terrible, but so much better than a stadium, right? And in a great club, you get everything.
00:10:09 Speaker_02
You get atmosphere, you're packed, you know, cheek to jowl with other human beings who have also come for this experience. And so, I tend to love those.
00:10:18 Speaker_02
Adjusted for inflation, those tickets are a much better deal than your average like big venue ticket.
00:10:24 Speaker_01
You like being packed cheek to jowl at a concert? I need a little bit of space.
00:10:28 Speaker_02
I don't know what you're doing. We've talked about this throughout 2024, how socially isolated I am in an era of remote work. And this has something to do with Mary's topic. We'll get to this.
00:10:38 Speaker_01
So I think, too, a couple of things that stand out to me. One is that, Mary, when I look at J.D. Clayton, I put him up on Spotify. He has one album out, so he's still kind of relatively new to the scene.
00:10:47 Speaker_01
But he's on, you know, playlists with folks like Gary Clark, big blues artists, big rock artists.
00:10:53 Speaker_01
And I think it goes to, honestly, my point that you see this huge disconnect, like Noah Kahn right now, the biggest folk act is going to easily sell 30,000 tickets in Denver.
00:11:06 Speaker_01
But if you're like the fifth biggest folk act, if you're the 10th biggest folk act, you're not getting anywhere close to that.
00:11:13 Speaker_01
And then to Asit's original question, something that I think is important compared to the time of the Eagles, now there's significantly less friction to buy tickets. It's also an e-commerce store. You don't have to call somewhere.
00:11:24 Speaker_01
You don't have to show up somewhere to get tickets. You can look, pick your seat, and then that's allowed not only just more buyers, more demand, but also you see it from Ticketmaster, the ability to completely
00:11:37 Speaker_01
figure out the market for what something's going to cost. A front row seat is now premium. You know, we can make seats even in the balcony in the rafters of an arena premium if we see that it's selling out due to dynamic pricing.
00:11:48 Speaker_01
And I think that's that's played into what you're talking about. Let's go to Mary's story. Mary, what's your business adjacent story?
00:11:55 Speaker_00
My business adjacent story will come as no surprise to anyone who's ever heard me talk about my latest rabbit hole because this is it. I am really fascinated by the loneliness epidemic.
00:12:06 Speaker_00
And I kind of smile as I say that because I think that this is a really genuine problem. We just heard Asit allude to it or mention it directly. You know, remote work has a lot of people starved in some ways for more in-person human connection.
00:12:20 Speaker_00
I think it's kind of easy to write off, again, the loneliness epidemic. That's a funny phrase to say and hear and take fully seriously, but I do think it's a very genuine issue.
00:12:33 Speaker_00
What's fascinating to me is how many businesses I am seeing try to solve it. And while I think the issue itself is very real, I am cynical about a lot of the purported solutions, especially those from tech companies.
00:12:50 Speaker_00
So I'm talking in large part about dating and friendship apps here because increasingly dating apps are trying to tap into the platonic market as well. Kind of wild to refer to human relationships as a market, but here we go.
00:13:04 Speaker_00
But I'm also seeing I do a lot of work at a WeWork in Denver, and I see postings there all the time about, hey, find your community, let's build our community.
00:13:11 Speaker_00
And I, again, I appreciate those efforts on one hand, but I also think that they're tapping into something that's that that search for community is so prevalent, it also is kind of sad to me.
00:13:27 Speaker_00
I'm increasingly seeing, and maybe it's just because I'm paying attention to it, social clubs that will offer memberships for like $200 a month.
00:13:36 Speaker_00
There's a mountain collective that's prominent in Denver, but it's kind of scattered throughout the West called Gravity House. And they offer a number of things. There's a gym that you can have access to. There's a co-working space.
00:13:45 Speaker_00
But part of their pitch is, hey, like, it's harder and harder to find community these days. And here's a way to do it. Just pay us this price.
00:13:53 Speaker_00
And again, I don't really know what to make of this, because while I think it's fascinating that so many businesses are trying to address this problem, I don't know that the answer is actually is actually best solved by a business plan.
00:14:07 Speaker_00
I think it's solved by something else. So I was going to kick this to you guys, not only just for your thoughts, but how I know both of you are interested in cultivating community and being engaged in a number of different ways.
00:14:21 Speaker_00
So how do you find that out in the world?
00:14:24 Speaker_01
I'll answer it and then I want to, Mary, I want to get to your cynicism because I think that that's interesting.
00:14:29 Speaker_01
The best advice that I could give if you're like in a new place struggling to make friends is try to set up a regular event that's centered around an activity. It could be a card game. It could be like a bi-weekly dinner kind of thing.
00:14:41 Speaker_01
And then you can sort of build a reputation around being the person that's a hub of activity.
00:14:46 Speaker_01
And then from that, you'll often like find more people want to hang out with you because A, you're offering something and B, you become a person that like is a active community member. And I don't think you necessarily need a tech startup for that.
00:14:58 Speaker_01
Find a game you like. But the thing that I think is interesting is you're cynical about private enterprise being able to create this, Mary. Why are you so cynical about it? I know you've checked out a lot of these businesses.
00:15:11 Speaker_02
I don't think she's cynical. I hear some questioning there.
00:15:15 Speaker_01
She said, I am cynical, Austin. What are you saying?
00:15:17 Speaker_02
I don't think she meant, I think we're just to the right of being cynical here, but maybe we are there. Are you cynical, Marian?
00:15:25 Speaker_00
I think you're right. I'm skeptical. Maybe that's the better word.
00:15:30 Speaker_00
I'm skeptical of a lot of these because I think, while I think the internet in particular has certainly been the basis for, it can be a great way to make friends in certain capacities, I think like
00:15:44 Speaker_00
paying an app or an organization to give you friends. Am I about to just describe Greek life and go on a totally different path?
00:15:54 Speaker_01
Wait until I tell you about country clubs.
00:15:58 Speaker_00
Like, I don't know that that is the answer to something that the US Surgeon General has referred to as an epidemic.
00:16:09 Speaker_00
I think there are good things to be found there, but to turn completely to tech companies to solve a problem that they in part created, that's where the cynicism actually steps in. Does that answer your question, Ricky? A little bit. A little bit?
00:16:25 Speaker_02
I like the last part of your answer or I should say I like your answer. That last part really resonated with me because it's commerce and technology that have made it easy for us to be detached from one another.
00:16:35 Speaker_02
So many times I remember having to stop way, way back and ask directions for places. I'm actually still a person who tries to figure out the way because my brain will go mush otherwise. But it's now so easy.
00:16:49 Speaker_02
You don't have to have much human interaction. There's so many ways to avoid it. You can order in. You can use an app to get around. You don't have to go to the ticket box office anymore to buy a ticket.
00:17:01 Speaker_02
So do we turn to the same place that's helping to create this problem in the first place? I think that's a great question, Mary. For me, I have tried to do a few things.
00:17:12 Speaker_02
One is to be a little bit more the person that Ricky is describing, because I tend to go down rabbit holes myself. I love nothing more than to shut myself off and explore a rabbit hole.
00:17:22 Speaker_02
In fact, we've got a little package of carrots in the fridge at the office for Mary when she's down these rabbit holes. put a little bit of orange right at the edge so when she looks up, she sees it and comes back out. But I can sympathize with that.
00:17:37 Speaker_02
So turning what has developed into a weakness for myself into a strength, trying to flip it around and say, Asit, maybe you could be that guy again. I mean, there was a time in your life where you were a little bit of a hub. Try it out.
00:17:51 Speaker_02
I think that's great, Ricky. I'm going to steal one of Mary's thoughts, which is she's talked about volunteering. And I think this is an amazing way to form some social connections. You get a lot out of volunteering.
00:18:04 Speaker_02
There was a time in my life where I used to volunteer quite a bit because I had three kids in school. So I was simultaneously coaching a chess club, helping coach an intramural soccer team and a quiz bowl team.
00:18:17 Speaker_02
And that was just amazingly beneficial for me. Now, it meant that my social group was all middle schoolers.
00:18:24 Speaker_02
Still, still, the mental and physical activity of it, that feeling of accomplishment, like this is warm fuzzy you get when you're serving others versus serving yourself.
00:18:34 Speaker_02
And then I think that the biggest part of it is you're thrown into a group of like-minded people who have a common cause, whatever you choose to volunteer with. And that's just like a, I wouldn't call it a slide.
00:18:44 Speaker_02
Maybe we've talked about slides before. I wouldn't call it a friendship slide, but it is a friendship funnel. If you want to just go a little bit further, it becomes increasingly easy to make friends and do things outside of that activity.
00:18:56 Speaker_02
You can screen people out a little bit.
00:18:58 Speaker_01
Yeah, I've found I do like a little bit of volunteering, I don't do enough. But one thing I found from that too, is there's almost something beneficial, like working from home and you know, trying to maximize your time efficiently.
00:19:10 Speaker_01
When you're volunteering, it's the complete opposite of that, you know, you might be bored, you might feel like your time is being wasted, but you won't feel lonely. And that's ultimately I think, I think it's ultimately a good thing.
00:19:21 Speaker_01
Getting to the business side, and this is where Mary's cynicism is emerging. If you think about broader trends, people are working from home, people are meeting fewer people, people want to meet people.
00:19:33 Speaker_01
You would think those would be tremendous tailwinds for the dating app stocks, Match.com, Bumble. The only one that's been doing well over the past few years is Grindr.
00:19:42 Speaker_01
And I wonder, Asit, if you've looked at those stocks, if you've made sense of that for these businesses that should have tremendous tailwinds, yet maybe it's the pressure of, you know, I don't want to pay this company in order to meet people.
00:19:55 Speaker_02
They're really hard to figure out. And I know they became very difficult to evaluate during the pandemic, post pandemic.
00:20:02 Speaker_02
But I think the loneliness factor creeps in the difficulty of getting yield out of these apps versus let's go back to a previous example, the yield you get out of using Google Maps, when you hop into your car, instant, you see the value proposition, you never questioned it, right?
00:20:18 Speaker_02
The yield on a dating app is hit and miss.
00:20:22 Speaker_02
And I was laughing thinking about, you know, the example of paying someone for like a social connection, maybe two or three hundred bucks a month, because that was my reaction when dating apps first came out. I was like, that's never going to fly.
00:20:36 Speaker_02
And here maybe the cynicism is creeping in a bit for me as well. Maybe we see a future in which the platonic type apps actually gain some traction and it becomes normal and commonplace for you to meet your best friends on a social app.
00:20:51 Speaker_02
I personally don't think it's going to happen that way. I personally think the pendulum, the way it's swinging in society, this hunger, especially in the United States where we're more spread out physically to re-engage with other folks.
00:21:04 Speaker_02
is going to take some of the edge off of that market proposition, if we can speak again in such cold-blooded mercenary terms. But the dating apps, I think they're up against some really difficult dynamics.
00:21:17 Speaker_02
One is that the frustration level is very high on these apps. And as my great friend and colleague Emily Flippen often points out, even as she has lobbied for us to recommend a few of these over the years,
00:21:31 Speaker_02
If you find your soulmate the first week or two of an app, you never need it again. So what do you do there?
00:21:37 Speaker_02
That's actually, I thought it was sort of just a cutesy aside when I first heard it, but it turns out it does have something to do with the dynamics of retention for these businesses.
00:21:47 Speaker_02
So I don't see that the technology aspect is going to help much with these and I wonder the long-term trajectory of investing in some of these businesses if it really makes sense or if they're just like cyclical businesses, you know?
00:22:03 Speaker_01
And for the listener, I put Austin on the spot with that one and you just knocked it out of the park, man. So, good job with that. Anything else before we go to the final story? Are we good? We are waiting. We are so curious.
00:22:16 Speaker_00
I can talk about this for forever, but I think we should change it up and go to Ricky's.
00:22:20 Speaker_01
Let's see the final story. So this has exploded this year. This has exploded over the past few years. But one of the things that I've been thinking a lot about is the rise of sports gambling and its effect on young men.
00:22:34 Speaker_01
in particular, it feels like a Pandora has definitely come out of the box.
00:22:37 Speaker_01
And I think in years from now, we're going to look back and consider a lot of the mistakes we've made, which is, you know, there was a huge push for, for sports betting legalization. I have a draft Kings account.
00:22:51 Speaker_01
I'm good at gambling responsibly on it. I'm not betting more than like a Chipotle entree, I would say. But what I've seen is even though I'm interacting with fewer people in my late 20s here, I'm seeing more people
00:23:08 Speaker_01
that I interact with like betting heavy on sports. And I think this is one of those things that's gonna be a big problem for a few reasons. One is, it's a dopamine rush.
00:23:17 Speaker_01
It's a huge dopamine rush that's just been released into the world and it's available at any time for you.
00:23:23 Speaker_01
And then secondarily, it's also for a lot of people, it's gonna be an addiction that is tremendously easy to hide compared to something like drugs or gambling when you had to like have an offshore account or go to a casino when there were more hurdles involved.
00:23:36 Speaker_01
So I'm thinking like how this changes conversations with especially parents are going to be having with kids and also just what what has been released into the world where we're going to be looking back on this a few years down the road saying, will we be saying what did we do releasing that?
00:23:53 Speaker_00
Yeah, Ricky, as I was kind of thinking on this before we started recording, one of the questions that kept coming up for me was like, There's a difference. There's a very clear difference, but I'm unsure of where to draw the line.
00:24:04 Speaker_00
So there's a difference between small stakes poker games or like a fantasy football league, even if there's a little bit of money involved in that.
00:24:10 Speaker_00
And then like the complete gamification of sports that you see with DraftKings, FanDuel, fill in the blank. And I'm like, okay, there's a clear difference, but where is the line drawn between those two things?
00:24:21 Speaker_00
And when does one become, when does it become more dangerous as opposed to just like a friendly exchange? And to me, the thing that sticks out is the facelessness of DraftKings and FanDuel or whatever sports betting app you're using.
00:24:34 Speaker_00
And maybe this even kind of harkens back to my cynicism about like the tech companies that have solved, that have presented us with a problem in trying to solve it. I've just, it's one thing to
00:24:46 Speaker_00
to play around with your friends, to make a social event out of something, and to have some stakes involved, that's fun, healthy. Versus to have a faceless company that doesn't know you and wants to profit off of your potential addiction, that's
00:25:06 Speaker_00
terrifying to me, actually.
00:25:08 Speaker_01
So Michael Lewis has a podcast series about this, and he's pointed out in interviews, you know, if you're allowed to play on these apps, it's because the companies think you're a loser.
00:25:17 Speaker_01
Basically, what happens for these companies is they send you a VIP host if you're betting a lot of money on there and you're losing a lot of money, but they completely limit you if you win. And that's something in Nate Silver's book
00:25:28 Speaker_01
that he put out this year, he talks about where he started betting on NBA games, and he noticed that he was getting limited from being able to do that.
00:25:34 Speaker_01
So I think part of it is, and I'll steal the Michael Lewis take, have people understand that they're playing a rigged game.
00:25:41 Speaker_02
Yeah, I love that. Victor Niederhofer, who's a famous speculator, who I sometimes refer to for inspiration, wrote a great book called The Education of a Speculator. It's about 1997. And he talks about the house always having an advantage.
00:25:57 Speaker_02
And Ricky, I mentioned him earlier this year when you and I had a conversation. to be able to overcome the house advantage is nearly impossible because they always find a way to change the game, to change the spread, to change the odds.
00:26:10 Speaker_02
So it's a sort of depressing enterprise long term for anyone who undertakes it.
00:26:17 Speaker_02
I should say, though, there's a benefit to sharpening your mind about risk, about payoffs, about trade-offs, about how to manage capital, how to allocate it that comes from these types of activities. I, myself, don't gamble.
00:26:30 Speaker_02
I do think it's addictive, but I've played lots of poker in my life, and what you said Yeah, I'm going to cite here, which I rarely do from our actual outline. Ricky called this guys playing cards together. There is something of a male bonding ritual.
00:26:46 Speaker_02
It's not exclusively male, but a bonding ritual from the time you're a kid and you play your first hands of pokers with your friends for penny stakes. I had a penny jar we used to bring to our poker games.
00:26:58 Speaker_02
So, you know, you merge up to maybe some chips that somebody buys and you assign a value to those. Or sometimes it's like dollar stakes. That kind of socializing, I think, is carried on by men's groups through decades.
00:27:13 Speaker_02
Those who are able to do this responsibly. So there's a lot to like about the activity when it's social, when you're together with other people. But I agree with Mary, it becomes sort of scary in the context that you're pointing it out, Ricky.
00:27:27 Speaker_02
This is the theme of what we've been talking about today. Technology makes it easy. Commerce makes it easy. for you to do this. The psychology of the app makes it easy for you to do this. We should say the engineering of the app.
00:27:39 Speaker_02
So that whole branch is scary to me, but I'm here today to endorse men and women getting together for some low stakes poker and enjoying an evening together, just as they do lots of other card games across the globe.
00:27:56 Speaker_01
I'll co-sign that as well, Asit. I think it's a good way to limit yourself, make sure you're not doing anything financially harmful. But if you're doing it with friends, it's a good way to learn how to play fairly with each other.
00:28:08 Speaker_01
And I think something we lose in adulthood is we play fewer games with other people. Let's leave it there. We'll be back on the 27th. Appreciate y'all being here.
00:28:18 Speaker_01
If you suck through the remainder of this episode, I'll also plug that if you find value in the show, if you like listening to Motley Fool Money, please leave a review and a rating on Apple Podcasts.
00:28:28 Speaker_01
It's sort of the front porch for Motley Fool Money, and leaving a review is a good way to invite other people in, especially if you found value in listening to the show over the past year. Austin Shryma, Mary Long, thanks for being here. Appreciate it.
00:28:42 Speaker_00
Thanks, Ricky. Thanks a lot. Play more games 2025.
00:28:49 Speaker_01
As always, people on the program may have interests in the stocks they talk about, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear.
00:28:57 Speaker_01
All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards and are not approved by advertisers. The Motley Fool only picks products that it would personally recommend to friends like you. I'm Ricky Mulvey. Thanks for listening.
00:29:08 Speaker_01
We will be back on December 27th.