A casino. Not a box of chocolates.
by Michel Heitzmann
© Michel Heitzmann - On the bus prior to the Grand Prix
Quel bordel. Non, plutôt un casino
Não, mãe. A vida deixou de ser uma caixa de bombons
Run, Forrest, run. And his sweet Mama and the box of chocolates.
I have been there. In casinos.
Campione d’Italia, on the lake. Las Vegas. Some island in the Caribbean whose name I have decided not to remember. Monaco.
I never won.
Not once. Not at blackjack, not at roulette, not at the slot machines I tried for twenty minutes in the Caribbean because James Bond apparently never played slot machines and I wanted to know why. I do now.
I walked into each of them the way every man my age walked in. With the dinner jacket of the imagination on, and the soundtrack playing in the head, and the fantasy that this was the room where the interesting version of me was finally going to show up. James Bond. The chips. The Martini. The woman across the table.
What I got was three hours, free drinks, and a lighter wallet.
That is the deal. Always was. Casinos do not sell games. They sell a costume you put on at the door and take off in the cab home. The Martini is on the house because the math is on the house.
The casino has a very long memory and no sense of mercy.
The thing about a casino, the thing that takes you twenty years to notice if you notice at all, is that it has no clocks. No windows. The carpet is thick so your footsteps disappear. The oxygen is pumped, slightly enriched, depending on the establishment and the decade. The drinks are free because a man who is drinking is a man who has lost his ability to reason. The dealer is friendly because friendliness is the only product the house gives you for free.
You do not walk out. You are extracted. By the dawn, by your wife, by your wallet, or by a polite man in a dark suit who has been watching you since the moment you sat down.
The slot machine was invented in 1898 by a mechanic named Charles (né August “Gus”, rather geboren) Fey, in San Francisco. Variable rewards. Three reels. Gum and coins. No operator. No patent because gambling was illegal in California.
The behavioural science behind it was not understood for another sixty years in 1957. B(urrhus) F. Skinner of Harvard enjoyed mistreating pigeons and rats.
He found that if you reward a pigeon every time it pecks a button, it pecks at a steady rate. If you reward it sometimes, randomly, it pecks faster. If you reward it almost never, but unpredictably, it pecks until it falls over. Charming.
Mr President did not read the paper but is conducting his own experiments with new pigeons.
Kevin Systrom read the paper in 2010 and came up with Instagram.
He offers the following advice: learn enough to be dangerous. Thanks Kev. Same stuff. Now in my pocket.
Zhang Yiming over in Beijing, tried once, merged twice and we have been dancing the TikTok bytes ever since. Have you seen the sweet commercials on UK tv about the girl that aces her exam because she studied on TikTok? How could you possibly not be on TikTok?
It is so good that it ceased to be a national security issue as they say it comes up with votes.
Zhang outdid Kevin by a factor of 30 according to Forbes and has now some 60 billion. Who cares about the currency.
Three iterations. The first one took our coins. The second one took our pigeons and rats off the street. The third took us.
I have not been in a casino for decades.
But I have been in a casino every day for three weeks at my own desk.
No clocks. No windows. The dogs are the carpet. The screens are the dealer. The recognition is the jackpot the house keeps dangling, and I have been hitting it just often enough, for thirty years, to keep me in the building. I have built three ventures and now an object on my desk on this engine. The engine works. The casino is the engine.
Anything that captures complete attention is a casino.
This is the part that should have been obvious to me sooner. The phone is a casino. Everyone knows. We have all read the article. We have all underlined the same paragraph. We have all kept scrolling.
My build is a casino. A grudge is a casino. A renovation is a casino. A relationship you cannot stop performing is a casino. A divorce, especially a slow one, is a casino (from experience with only one loser, me).
No clocks. No windows. Variable rewards. The house always wins because the house is selling time and you are paying in life.
Most of the people we know are sitting at their own table, in their own windowless room, and no one is selling them anything. They are dealing to themselves.
My Saturday version, since you were about to ask.
I walk into the living room at nine. The kids are home.
AM BUSY! I must do MY thing. I remember three small wins on the build between ten and one, the kind that make you put another chip on the table. I remember the dogs at some point and a thing I cooked for them, briefly, between three screens.
I looked up around three.
I was alone with the dogs. I had won three small things on the build. I was still in the building. Ignoring the view, the kids.
© Michel Heitzmann - The view I ignore
The charming dealer in the carpet-matching burgundy vest was not there because in this casino, I was her. And it hit me, my loss.
I never saw a James Bond pay for his shaken not stirred.
You also do not have to pay. There is a reason, pigeon.
What casino are you in?
We are all sitting at a table somewhere. Most of us did not pick the room. I built The Quiet Frame to help us notice the carpet, the oxygen, the missing clocks. It takes a couple of minutes a day, in the other direction. I’m not sure it works on me yet. But it might work on you. Free on Apple and Android, links at thequietframe.com/app.
Thanks for reading.