Building a Crypto Casino Empire: Lessons from MonkeyTilt | Sam Kiki DSH #1265

Risk taking. Well, regulation makes it really tough because different different countries regulate different pieces of those products.
You know, some of the products they call financial services, some of the products are like trading cards aren't even regulated. Some of the products like NFTs aren't regulated.
Sports betting is highly regulated. My casino is the most regulated, right? So it's hard to put all of them on one platform, but we're trying.
Yeah. All right, guys, We got Sam here from Monkey Tilt.
Thanks for coming on, man. Absolutely, man.
Yeah. You were golfing yesterday with Menry, huh? I was.
How was that? It was good. Did you see the bet? No.
What happened? Oh, really? Well, two on two, right? So we're doing... Okay.
So, you know, Bob did the full send golf. Like he kicked off full send golf.
Yeah. So what we're doing is, I haven't golfed in two years.
It took like a two-year break when I founded Monkey Toe because you need time to golf and practice. And I just had no time.
So Bob's been in my ear. He's like, we have to have a Monkey Toe golf channel.
We have to have Monkey Toe golf channel. So finally, I get a few days this week and I said, you know what, we're in Vegas.
The weather's amazing, by the way, right now. So let's So we created, we needed to create a format.
I can't hit the ball that well right now. So we need to create a format that was like easy for me to slot in and just play without needing to practice a lot.
We created two man scramble. So, you know, the format where basically both of you hit a drive and you, but you can play whoever hits the better drive.
Then both you hit an approach shot, but you can play whoever hits the better approach shot. So you kind of, it's kind of, you know, you can kind of only make one or two good shots a hole and still be in the game.
It makes it very fun. So we create this new format.
It's like a high stakes two man scramble where we like challenge, you know, two man teams and we play a scramble. So yesterday, Bob, Bob was going to get this girl influencer, this girl golf influencer out there and stuff.
First of all, he didn't sleep the whole night before. He was at Durango all night,

just zapping, drinking, gambling, whatever.

By himself?

Like for good chunks of the time by himself, right?

And then, I don't know.

Then, you know, Bob does this thing

where he always meets people at like a bar or something.

And then like those people become his friends

for like two weeks or whatever.

So he shows up to the golf course with this guy

who's like a big litigator in the US.

Randomly, they just met at a bar, right?

He was hitting on the guy's fiance. And then the guy comes back from the bathroom and him and Bob become friends.
Oh my God. So he brings him and he brings this girl.
She's like a golf influencer or something. And then I hit up my buddy and I said, hey, oh no, Spencer, Spencer, our buddy.
Yeah. And he says, hey, I got this friend, Adam.
We'd love to come play with you. And I said, great.
And the girl hadn't shown up yet I said great so Adam shows up and Bob is like Bob gets this thing where he like Bob thinks he's like the best golfer in the world Bob thinks he's the best at everything Bob said you know what why don't I play me and the litigator against you and Adam and we played two-man scramble and I said cool I said but what do you want to bet because Bob you know I don't do money with Bob anymore it's stupid so he goes well I win, I want 25 grand. I said, okay, well, if I win, I want you to get a tattoo.
That's why I left it at that. And he said, if you win, I will get a tattoo on the shaft of my penis.
And I was like, you're kidding me. I would have settled with like a peck or like a neck tattoo would have been hilarious.
And he insisted that this is bad, right? So Spencer calls up this girl. Spencer is a a tattoo artist he calls up this girl and she's down to do it she's like yeah 100 so we're like we're making jokes the whole time like and by the way my partner in the first two holes you watch the stream shits the bet my partner's supposed to be like a really good golfer and just playing terrible first tool so bob's getting cockier cockier he wants to press the bats like the whole thing right couldn't even play it in our hands.
And Bob's drinking, drinking, drinking. Anyways, he crumbles like the middle.
We freaking destroy him. We get him to press the bet too.
So his second bet was for, I had to put up 7,000 and he had to do three blind dates of my choosing, five on stream. He also owes me that.
So right now the whole internet is like chasing him because he owes us a dick tattoo and a three blind dates series on stream. on stream.
He also owes me that. So right now the whole internet is like chasing him because he owes us a dick tattoo and a three blind date series on stream.
So that, yeah, that was honestly one of the best golf days of my life. It was so much fun.
That was nuts. You think he'll actually get the dick tattoo? Well, so now we're talking, Spencer's talking to OnlyFans and because we were like, we thought it was such a funny idea because we're out there on the golf course and stuff.
Then we would go, oh shit, like how do we do we stream this? Because you can't, you know what I mean? You can't put this on kick, right? And so we're like, well, can we put this on porno? Like, what do you do? And then Spencer goes, I bet you we can get a deal out of OnlyFans. So Spencer's talking to OnlyFans and he's trying to get Bob to stream this whole thing live on OnlyFans.
Oh, my God. And Bob might get a bag out of it.
Now he has to show his. Yeah, and Kyle, we were supposed to golf tomorrow on Full Send Golf and against Kyle and Slim slim kyle's like i'm not doing it until you honor your best sam wow yeah i don't know the internet's behind me on this one dude that is crazy i don't think he'll do it but we'll see i think you will you think he'll get it by the way and i've offered because i think it's i don't even i didn't even know this was a thing i didn't know you could do this apparently you can't apparently some people do this right so i didn't even know that was a thing but uh i said to Bob, I'm willing to be cool about this.
The bet was Iris is $25,000, so why don't you put up five or $10,000 and I'll let you get it somewhere else. I'll let you get the tattoo somewhere else, like on your arm or your leg or something normal.
He's like, no. Damn, he's all in.
He's all in. Holy crap.
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The whole dick or just a little picture? And I said it's the monkey head, monkey logo's head. Oh my.
Yeah, yeah. There's all sorts of logistical things I don't want to get into on this podcast, but I mean, it's crazy.
I don't even know if I'm going to watch it, to be honest, but it's kind of that sick thing on the internet. You kind of want to watch it, or you kind of don't.
It's going to be unavoidable, I feel like. I don't know.
That's going to break the internet. I think if we can pull off this deal with OnlyFans, this thing's going to go nuts.
Holy crap. That's crazy.
How often do you and Bob do these weird bets? So I've known Bob. I met Bob in 2021.
And we've been really good friends, you know, those four years. Bob's been on an absolute life roller coaster in that, in that probably, you know, me and you were talking before the show, you got to know Bob and stuff.
Yeah. We bet, we've bet our whole relationship, like our whole life, our whole time together, we bet on all sorts of crazy stuff.
What's the craziest bet you've done with him? That one for sure. It takes, like, it's not even close, right? But like we've done, we got, we went and picked up this um we were gonna do this heads up poker thing right we still are actually working something out to do it on poker go where we play heads up poker for some crazy stuff you would destroy him i i think so so we played this we played this uh heads up poker match we did you see the tilt truck that we have was that the one at the super bowl or uh yeah yeah exactly so you can like cut cut that into this club or whatever we did this dope truck with West Coast Customs.
And we had this whole plan where we're going to go and pick it up in LA and then drive it around LA and invite people on to gamble with us. And Bob and I, in between, were just going to play heads of poker nonstop for like 48 hours and stream the whole thing.
Damn. Yeah, because he thinks he's a better heads of poker player than me.
So I was like, let's do it. Let's play like 48 hours straight on stream, the whole thing, right? So we were playing, but then of course the LA wildfires happened.
So we turned it, we changed it into doing something for charity for the LA wildfires. And so we raised, we ended up raising $50,000 for the LA wildfires, just driving around on the bus, posting on social media, acting like complete knuckleheads, right? But in that same time, an audition and raising 50,000 for the fires, we also, I beat Bob heads up for 17,000.
I mean, you have a poker background. I don't know why he would have thought.
Yeah, I like to play poker. Yeah.
I mean, you are actually good at poker. You're a winning poker player, right? I'm okay.
I wouldn't say I'm a winning. I wouldn't say I'm a winning.
It depends who against. Against an average person, probably.
Against someone like Andrew Robo or Alan Keating, no shot. They would crush me.
So you're better than an amateur, but you're not a pro.

100%. You're in between.

Yeah.

Is that your favorite game to gamble on, poker?

I think sports is my favorite game.

Sports betting?

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah, sports is definitely the thing

that I've had the most success with.

Really?

Yeah.

That's a hard one to make money in,

I feel like.

It is, 100%.

So what's your game,

like NFL, NBA?

I'm really good at NFL.

So I was doing this thing for fun this year called Seniors Pick of the Week during NFL.

I was 8-1 going in Super Bowl.

Damn.

I had a huge bet on the Chiefs.

So I was 8-2.

Against the spread too, right?

So I'm a pretty good NFL capper.

And then, you know, I dabble.

NBA, NHL.

I like betting totals a lot.

Yeah.

What's the biggest sports bet you've made money-wise? It's a big one. I don't want to say the number.
It's that big? It was on a boxing match, yeah. Damn.
I like to bet big on fights. Wow, boxing.
Yeah, I feel like boxing, if you have the right information, is a good one, right? Yeah. I mean, I had a ginormous bet on the Chiefs for the Super Bowl.
I got crushed on. That was a weird game.
That was a terrible game. I've've lost big bets before but that one felt really gross because it felt like we would never had a chance not at all like I couldn't even watch the game it was spooky man I wanted a close game because I'm just a fan of sports yeah so like I just wanted a good game we got spoiled last year with the Chiefs and 49ers that was a good one in the overtime and I was there in Vegas and I mean dude that was that was awesome so to go from that Super Bowl to this one which is a total bummer super weird because everyone was saying the refs were in on the Chiefs and it seemed like they were going to win it all yeah you know the refs weren't either the first few calls went like the Eagles way for sure yeah I don't know people I've had guests come on here say the NFL is rigged uh no I don't I don't know about all that yeah that would seem hard to pull off you know right? Like, there'd have to be so many people in on it.
I feel like there's been a lot of gambling scandals have been like the big thing. You saw that headline the other day about the college basketball and NBA stuff.
Yeah. Yeah, so it's obviously there's stuff going on with player props and things like that.
And it's really unfortunate the i think most of the world's doing things pretty coachly but i guess you're always going to get stuff like that yeah michael porter jr's brother right oh i didn't know this out oh you didn't know that no i didn't know that yeah he would fake injuries and uh yeah that was like allegedly or this is like uh yeah i'll say that to be safe but i'm pretty sure it's like a known thing wow yeah just to get the Just to get the under, you know? Yeah, I've never really bet player props at all in my life. Yeah, my whole life.
I just never, it's never been my thing. I never liked Daily Fantasy, never bet player props.
I always bet sides and totals. I mean, that's probably smarter because you can't really predict the player stuff if they get injured or if something happens.
No, and it's hard to get, I guess people don't talk about this, but it's hard to get big bets down on anything but main markets. So I like to bet big.
So the only things that I can get down on are major sports like NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, and major markets, major liquid markets. So like full game over-unders, full game spreads, that kind of thing.
The casinos must hate you out here. Okay.
So no, no, I'm good. You know, obviously, because dude, I've been at a lot of these casinos.
So like I've been so I think they love me as a casino player because, you know, it's impossible to win in the casino. So when you're playing Baccarat and craps and stuff.
So I'm a good casino player. I give good action.
But yeah, I can't get down big on sports in any of these places. I'm limited like across the board.
Even at Circa? Circa will give me I think Circa gives gives like, what, 25,000 a game or something like that. Which for you is like nothing.
Small, yeah. Damn.
Small, yeah. Yeah, because if you bet that, you can't really win six figures, right? No, your ROI in a sports, like if you're really good at sports, your ROI is like, you know, low single digits, mid single digits.
Some people have like things that are high single digits, but it's very tough. Damn.
The markets are really efficient, right?

Like, you know, think about all the smart people betting every single day.

Yeah.

And I think what this is where people get preyed on all the time, right, is they buy sports

picks from people.

And the problem buying sports picks from people is let's just say I tell you I like the Chiefs

minus six and a half, minus 110, right?

And then you go and you bet the Chiefs minus six and a half, minus 120, or you bet the

Chiefs minus seven, minus 110.

To you bet the Chiefs minus six and a half, minus 120, or you bet the Chiefs minus seven, minus 110. To you, you're betting the Chiefs, right? But to me, you're just seeded multiple percentage points of ROI.
And so you just went from doing a plus expected value bet, positive expected value bet to a negative expected value bet. So most people are math illiterate and they don't realize that and they get preyed on..
And that's what I think is pretty, pretty bullshit. Right.
So, um, sports betting, it doesn't, it doesn't matter what side you pick. It just matters the price you get because everything has a right price.
Yeah. The timing of the bet's important.
People don't know that. Yeah, that's right.
That's why like really smart bettors aren't allowed to bet football on Tuesdays or Wednesdays. Like when I used to first bet football draft Kings, I used to bet NFL on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, then draft Kings came back to me and they said, no, you were only going to take your action on Sundays, right? Because they want more efficiency in their line before they take a big bet from you, which is fair enough, right? Oh, so the line would move so much by the time Sunday comes around, right? Yeah, exactly.
Damn, that's interesting. And I say this when I give, you know, I don't need to sell sports picks, but when I give my sports picks out for free on my IG, I always say like, hey, look, just remember the price matters.
Like I get, like if there was one game, it was like where it was the Commanders and I got plus nine and a half and the line closed like Commanders plus seven and a half, plus eight. Like those are two different lines.
You know what I mean? It's a million things that can happen. And this is when you do sports, you're running Monte Carlo simulations.
So just like taking all the data and running sims of what's what's what possibly could happen. And you're running thousands and thousands of these sims.
So all sorts of scenarios. And then you create there's a probability distribution curve of like the percentage chance it lands on any given game outcome.
Right. And so when you think about there's key numbers, you never hear about key numbers in NFL and NBA.
Like there's key numbers in NFL, like three, seven, six has become a key number now. So those numbers have a lot of statistical value.
So when you move off of that number, it's a huge change in the delta and percentage of expected value. Damn.
Yeah. Damn, you're intense with this stuff.
Yeah. There's actually a really good book on it for beginners.
I don't even play, you know, I don't get paid to plug anything, right? But there's, it's called, it's by a guy named Matthew Davideau and his partner. I think it's called The Logic of Sports Betting.
Really good book. It just gives you, it gives you basic tools to understand how to bet little.
If you're, if you're betting sports every day, or you're doing this just for fun, recreationally, it just gives you a little bit of a compass to know, like, it's like if you're playing blackjack, right? Or if you're, no, that's a bad example. If you're shooting dice, right? Everyone knows you're shooting dice, you're losing long-term to the casino, but there's things you can do to massively minimize your loss that you should know about like max passing the max backing the pass line right because that's an ev neutral bet um making sure you're getting comps all that kind of stuff making sure you're getting instead of three four or five x odds ten x odds on the numbers right these are these these things all matter and add up over time so um it's really you know i was listening this uh conference call for the win back when I was in my early 20s.
And they talk about, you know, in the high traffic areas, they always put the games that are most advantageous to the casino. So they put like blackjack that pays six to five.
Now, if you're someone who's pretty knowledgeable at gambling, you'd say, well, where's the three to two blackjack game, which is a huge difference. And of course they have it there, but it's hidden somewhere in the middle kind of thing.
In the high roller, right? Uh, yeah. A lot of times.
Yeah. They'll do it for their high limit players.
Yeah. That's right.
Palms just brought back three to two blackjack. That's awesome.
They're trying to revive. Yeah.
The local casinos do a good job of giving higher payout slots, three to two blackjack, 10 X, uh, on the odds versus for dice versus three, four, five. Yeah.
All those things are very good for the player. Also.
I Also, I hate when the casino plays mind games with you. And I know I own an online casino.
Some irony in this, but you should just be honest about it. When you play Commission Baccarat and a normal person goes, oh, no, I have to pay commission.
This is terrible for me. I'm going to go play No Commission Baccarat.
But of course, the game mechanics and rules of No Commission Baccarat are way worse for you than commission Baccarat. Really? Yeah.
Or that, you know, that when, uh, I didn't know that, you know, in 21,

there's all those variations of 21, like 21 plus three or switch card 21 and

stuff. Yeah.
They're all way, way, way worse for you mathematically than just

regular blackjack. Damn.
So what they do,

what these game designers do is they come up with these really clever mechanics

that are very appealing to math illiterate people that, you know, just right? And play it. And that's all fine.
I mean, if you're playing for entertainment and stuff, and that's what you should be doing, then that's fine. But you just need to understand that doing a little bit of homework helps you a very, very long way, because this stuff all compounds.
If you're playing regularly, you should pay attention to a lot of these things yeah i gamble regularly right i know i'm getting taxed some

amount for that over the course of every single year but i get a lot of perks for it i get to

stay at nice villas i get to eat at all these nice restaurants in vegas and so for me it's like a

small tax to pay and i enjoy doing it i do it socially with friends um but i'm playing like

the thinnest edge stuff like you think about a player like me i'm playing baccarat i think what household on Baccarat is like sub 1%. And then I'm getting comps on top of that.
And then, of course, I've got really high limits, which helps me because I can chase, right? And so the reason why a casino does well, a casino has a game with a hold or return to player that's in their favor, but it's very thin, right? The percentage is very thin. So the way they get you is they put their max limits low.
The delta between the min and the max limits is compressed. So you can't martingale out of it, right? You know, martingale where you double your bet.
Mathematically, if there was a big delta between the min and max bet, let's say the min bet was a hundred bucks and the max bet was a hundred thousand and the casino didn't stop you from martingaling. I mean, statistically, you can martingale your way through most of your life.
Damn. It's actually nuts, right? Until it doesn't work, right? Wow.
But that is like some of these little math tricks is what, you know, the secret science from a casino. And then of course, there's all the psychology that goes into it.
Like UNLV has a gaming institute and these guys will study the types of things and what their effects on player behavior is like the color of the felts the where they put side bets and stuff in games the lighting in the room the smells of the room the music uh the the lighting did i say the lighting right yeah the lighting yep so they they study just kind of like all these different stimuli and their effects on their brain you you've heard some of the infamous stuff on the internet that they pump oxygen i've heard that and stuff like that is that true i don't know i i've you know it's funny i've worked in casinos a good chunk of my life i actually have no idea um but it's definitely like when you walk into a casino it's kind of similar to like walking to a good hotel lobby or you walk into like a um like uh like an amusement park you know you know how that like that smell yeah you feel it your senses get woken up right away right 100? 100%. It's hard to sleep inside.
Yeah, when I walk into Aria, I feel different. Yeah, 100%.
Yeah, it's nuts how they do that. They got it down to a science, man.
Yeah, they do. Wow.
And they study everything from placement of slots to placement of table games. They're very quantitative about foot traffic, promotions that drive different kinds of foot traffic, cross-selling, so getting people into the hotel for cheap, let the hotel be a loss leader, then get them to gamble or whatever it is, make food a loss leader and get people to traffic that way, make a poker room a loss leader, make sports a loss leader.
So they're very good about getting you there and then figuring out how they're going to make their money off you. But it's funny, Vegas has evolved.
It used to be that Vegas, you would do all these cheap buffets cheap calm food all that stuff now of course um the if you look at a pie chart from how vegas strip made its money 10 years ago to how they made its money now it's transformed dramatically it used to be uh mostly gaming now it's actually mostly fnb and entertainment damn yeah that's actually crazy i mean you go eat out all the same eat out. Yeah.
It's expensive. I'm dropping like 500 bucks if I'm with someone.
Yeah, that never was the case in Vegas 20 years ago. Damn.
Like $5 steak. Yeah, I used to love the buffets back in the day.
Yeah, dude, me too. The one in...
It still has a good buffet. Wind's decent.
The one in Caesar's Palace. Which one is that? Yeah, I don't know.
I forget the name. I've never been.
Bacchanal. You've never been to Bacchanal? That's fire.
Oh, fire, bro. bro but now i go on it it doesn't hit the same yeah no it doesn't once you've had really good food i was exactly i was raised on buffet food yeah i grew up in vegas and you know we didn't we were just middle class family and stuff so we uh we had buffets a lot yeah i used to sprint to the food man yeah and unlimited desserts yeah it was was fire.
Yeah, I've never seen a casino go out of business out here, though, right? They know their business pretty well. Mostly.
There have been casinos that have gone out of business in Vegas, but it's usually just overspending, right? So, you know, there's been bad projects where they've overspent on the development and stuff. They just never were able to recoup their capital.
So there's a couple. And then there's of course stories of casinos that have been bankrupted by players.
So bad risk management on the casinos part. Yeah.
But that hasn't happened in a while though, right? It hasn't happened in a long time. I feel like with all the algorithms now, they probably can...
They're very... I mean, well, remember casinos used to mostly be privately held.
And I think for the most part, a lot of them around the world are. But in Las Vegas, a lot of these guys are publicly listed.
So MGM owns like 30, 40% of the Las Vegas Strip.

Caesars owns 30, 40% of the Las Vegas Strip.

That's 80% of the Vegas Strip.

They're both publicly listed companies.

The Wynn owns Wynn and Encore.

So that's whatever other percentage of the Vegas Strip.

Venetian and Palazzo are owned by Apollo Private Equity.

Yeah, dude, I can't think of one thing on the Strip that's private.

Oh, Circus Circus is owned by Phil Ruffin. Yeah.
He's like a multi-billion. They're selling though, right? It's funny.
I was at MGM when we sold it to Phil Ruffin. Oh, yeah? Yeah.
But I heard, I guess there's rumors going on. About Disney, right? Yeah.
Yeah. I don't know.
I don't know the buyers, but yeah. We'll see.
You think Resorts World and Found Blue are going to survive? They're not profiting right now, right? So I think, I don't think anyone knows the answer to that question about whether they're profiting or not. And Resorts World has a parent company that's public listed on the Hong Kong Exchange.
They're a Malaysian parent company. I think they are profitable.
Oh, they are? Oh, so Vegas policy, you were wrong. Yeah, one of my good friends just took over as chairman of Resorts World, Jim Murren, who used to be one of my bosses at IBM.
Really, really good guy. And he brought in a new team.
And I think they're doing pretty well. Fountain Blue, I really get along.
So I like Brett Muffson a lot. He's a good friend of mine.
He's part of the ownership group. And I think it's, you know, they just, they spent a lot of money on that property.
It's drop dead gorgeous. I don't know if you've said.
No, it's really beautiful. I got a power slap there.
Yeah, we did a monkey tilt event there. But the thing is, is that whenever you spend, the target that a casino is trying to hit is 10% return on investment.
So if you spend $4 billion, you're trying to make $400 million of EBITDA a year. Just to give you an idea, I think, and these numbers might be a little stale, so check these numbers for me, but I think the Wynn and En combined makes $600 million of VivaDot.
Holy crap. So when you think about that, and Bellagio for a long time, back when I was looking at this closely, makes about $500 million of VivaDot.
So those are two of the highest earning properties on the Las Vegas Strip. So you have to kind of like, you're spending, I don't know how much Fountain Blue spent on development, but let's just say it was $4 billion, but just fact check that for me.
But then they would need to make $400 million of make $400 million. It's a million profit a day.
It's just hard. Yeah, it's super hard.
Profit too, right? Yeah. And is that including the restaurants and stuff or no? It includes everything.
Oh, everything? It includes everything. That's the ROI target.
There are some big spots there. Poppy Steak's probably bringing in a lot.
I love David. David Ionard.
You know, you saw my socials. David Ionard's my fucking guy.
I love that guy. You got the briefcase?

So yeah, of course I got the briefcase.

He has that new thing.

What's a new thing?

It's like a carousel.

What?

It's like, dude, go look at his IG.

It's like a carousel.

It comes out.

It's like a bunch of bottles that come out with these three big steaks hanging on a cart,

on a beverage.

Yeah, we'll throw up a video on this.

Yeah.

Marketing genius.

Yeah, he's very, very good. Charging a thousand bucks for steak, man.
And you should get him on your pot. He's down.
Yeah, we've talked. Very cool story.
He's going to be in Vegas, actually, upcoming this week. Oh, hell yeah.
I'll hit him up. Yeah, because he's killing it, but Neusseret just went under.
Did you see that? Salt Bay? I did not see that. Salt Bay had a restaurant next to the T-Mobile stadium.
Yeah, and you're saying that restaurant, that specific restaurant closed? Went under, yeah. Yeah, okay.
Yeah it was location that's a tough area where is it t-mobile but you got a parking's just a bitch there dude oh you mean like right outside of t-mobile yeah yeah that is tough because there's a there's a shake shack there yeah i think so yeah that's just tough that's a hard place to be because where do you park you can't park yeah park at like paris i guess location yeah but people are so spoiled They want to park and just walk in. Yeah.
Or valet. Well, dude, I'm so lazy.
Like, I like to go to the Wynn because it's on the other end of the Strip. You can sneak in there.
And you can sneak off the Strip. But if you don't want the Aria and stuff, you're in the middle.
So when you spit out, you're stuck in all that traffic. So like, location matters a lot.
Is Wynn your favorite spot to gamble right now? I know you got a lot of friends in this industry. Yeah, I would say you know what actually was spot I don't want to think I paid to plug this.
I'm not. The spot I like to gamble a lot lately is Durango actually.
How did I know you were going to say that? I don't know. I was talking to my guys on my team and we were walking through Durango on a sunday and we're like atmosphere is so pleasant man it's so everything's so brand new yeah and uh they did such a good job with that property and it's like it's got the right mix i always say a casino has to find that right mix between luxury and then the product for the everyday person because even people who like luxury stuff who are wealthy still like to feel like normal people and like every day go to a go to a food court or like pick up a burger or pick up some like a frozen yogurt or something.
It's like Durango's food court is fire. Fire.
So good. Herb's Burgers, the pizza spot's good.
Herb's Burgers is fire. Yeah, they have this ice cream place that's good.
And then, what did you say, the pizza place? Yeah. You can't eat pizza, but Prince Street, right? Prince Street, yeah.
You can't eat it? No, because I'm like, I'm not supposed to eat dairy damn um yeah it sucks but uh but i still eat ice cream but um the sports book is killer the sports book bar whatever that thing's called the george george or something i haven't been there yeah that's unbelievable bel-air lounge too um everyone tells me that i haven't been really yeah everyone tells me it's nice but i think durango is awesome i care of me, dude. I just became part of the chairman club there.
Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that. What is that? I never heard of it.
It's like the MX Black Card, right? It's like an invite-only program. They do it for their top customers.
I've been playing at the Wynn, dude, since it, I guess, how old am I? Since I was 21, I guess. Damn.
Yeah, 14 years or something. So they do a good,

they know how to treat players.

And then they're opening up Zero Bond.

So they're tying Zero Bond

into the Chairman's Club

and that kind of stuff.

That's cool.

And I like how they've done their,

the way Wynn's done their development.

Like they brought in Earth Cafe from LA.

They brought in Cipriani's.

They brought in a lot of these cool little

Delilah's.

Delilah's, yeah, Poppin'.

So I think Wynn has,

whoever does their F&B in retail has a very good grasp on what's relevant what's cool crushed it yeah and so they're they're like you know they're the marquee you know spot still on the las vegas strip and then durango is just so cool for a local spot like i i dude i'm fine i live uh not far i live not far from the strip i live like three minute drive from the wind yeah and so driving to durango real pain in my ass. It's a hike for you? Yeah, it is.
But I still go. Damn.
Yeah, Durango just feels clean, man. That's where all the Nellboys gamble too, right? Steve and stuff.
Yeah, I think so. Steve and stuff.
I've gambled with Steve there and at Red Rock. Oh, yeah? Yeah.
How'd you guys do? That day, that was that day that Steve was down a huge number and we were trying to claw back. Jeez.
Yeah, I've done well. Actually've done really well yeah you know that's just variance it's just the disco variance but i've done really well at durango had a much harder time at win well their odds are probably better than strip places i'd imagine right for sure yeah and they comp better too but the problem is like what do you what do you want the comps for at the end of the days you know so like win, you know, you can spend those comp dollars at Delilah or at the golf club or, you know, they've got a lot of good assets for you to spend that currency on.
Durango, like Durango is good. Like, you know, but I don't need them to comp Herb's Burgers.
You know, we're like, I don't want to like stay in a room at Durango, right? But like, you know, like that's why I like playing it. Like, like my family really like staying at mgm mansions yeah i heard those are nice dope is product like the butler service is incredible it's like dude you walk into that courtyard and there's like a smell they like spray this smell oh my god it's so beautiful and like peaceful you're almost like not in vegas yeah like a waterfall in the middle they have a private chinese restaurant that's really good damn and so when you stay ations, like my family likes staying at Mansions.
So, so I'm like, okay, well I can use my MGM comp dollars at Mansions when, you know, we throw, throw this fantasy party every year and we do it at the wind villas and stuff. So like, you know, that's kind of how you think, but I, you know, I'm not going to stay in a Durango room or I've eaten at Nico's.
Nico's is pretty good. That's the Italian one or the steakhouse.
one? I don't know, actually. I went to some restaurant there.
I thought it might have been something else. Yeah, but the Drango team's good.
Yeah. I actually like for staycations, my favorite spot is Venetian.
Really? Yeah, have you stayed there? Never stayed there. All the rooms are sweet.
That's awesome. Yeah, so it's like...
And then what do you do there when you staycation? I mean, Venetian has some good restaurants. If I had to pick a hotel for favorite restaurants, it's Venetian.
Yeah. So it's like...
And then what do you do there when you staycation? I mean, Venetian has some good restaurants.

If I had to like

pick a hotel

for favorite restaurants,

it's Venetian.

Yeah.

Hossalon is in there.

Hossalon.

You got Mott 32.

Yeah, Mott 32 is fire.

That's my favorite Asian spot in Vegas.

Order the duck ahead of time.

Yeah, you got to order the duck there.

They got Milos.

They got fire, man.

Yeah, you're right.

X-Pot, if you like hot pot.

Oh, I've eaten an X-Pot before. It's really do they still have that that karaoke spot in there karaoke they had this little karaoke spot that they were trying to blow up kind of similar to the oh I think it's there I haven't been though it used to be a spot before COVID it was really popular yeah they got a new dart spot if you're into darts never done darts really yeah I tried actually hard, right? It's terrible.
Yeah. I couldn't even get the thing to stick.
Couldn't be neither. Yeah, axe throwing is no joke.
Yeah. Shout out to those guys.
Yeah, 100%. Yeah.
But no, Venetian is a sleeper, man. Yeah.
If you had to pick one hotel to stay at, what's your favorite one? Mansions. MGM.
It's not even close, actually. Because the wind gonna i was thinking wind villas but then i thought um their butler service is nowhere near the mansions like i'm talking dude mansions there's like stuff i can say on the pod and stuff i can't say in the pod but like mansions is like um there's nothing that they won't do for you like like you you can be you're in your room you're in like the hot tub like there's a hot tub in the like in the Some of them them in the middle it's like a ginormous hot tub it's like bigger than the size of this table and like you're in the room and then they're they're like putting out fruit platters for you they're hanging all these nice robes that like just came out of some like hot robes they have they've got like the attention to detail the luxury like music star stuff that like it's just crazy and they'll they'll come in if you like you just walk in there with the clothes on your back whatever you need they got it for you swimsuit no problem you need uh i don't i'm just making like you need workout clothes no problem they got it do you want you know what's funny with me i like the stairmaster yeah i love hitting the stairmaster in the morning when i'm come in they put a stairmaster in my room for me in in like my rooms they buy buy a brand new Stairmaster and then put it in my room.
That's crazy. And then my girlfriend really likes flowers.
So they know the exact types of flowers she likes. They put them in every room.
No way. They know the exact type of food we like.
Dude, that's insane. They'll work with, if you have a chef you like somewhere in the country or the world, they'll talk to that chef ahead of time and pay them to get the ingredients and recipes.
I they are there is no that's crazy how much a night is this spot they don't they don't you know oh you can't just get it online they don't you got it's invite only type stuff is it for the noor members i've heard they comp they charge you a comp rate for the biggest room there is comp rates like 30 000 a night oh my gosh but i know the end i don't know what the entry is um but they uh it's just comp so who knows right i don't think they sell the room wow i wonder how many of them there are there can't be too many of them 28 28 and then are they all like by each other like they're all they're all very private they're all kind of they're you know very very private although one time i know i can't tell i'm sorry one time one time we were like having a great party in the room and we get a knock on the door it's a very very very famous rapper oh yeah thought it was his room and I was like oh no but then I was like can I take a quick pic yeah I think Mickey Mace used to stay there when he was gambling a lot right oh I don't know I don't know Mickey oh okay have you gambled with him at all I don't know him really I've never met him damn I'm surprised you guys probably know a lot of the same people we yeah probably a lot of mutual friends I've never met him. Banks.
Banks is one of my friends. Oh, yeah? Yeah, he's a mutual friend.
Is he big on gambling? He gambles, but I don't think he's big on it. Yeah.
I think crypto is a form of gambling, right? It's very debatable, dude. For meme coins? It's very, very debatable.
I would argue yes. For meme coins, 100%.
It's not even a question with meme coins. I agree.
But for Bitcoin, I guess you could see that as an investment. Yeah, Bitcoin's like a store of value.
It's just highly volatile. Yeah.
I know you come from crypto a little bit, right? Yeah. Yeah, I do.
So I built, if you think about MonkeyTill, it's my third business in crypto as a startup. My first business I ever co-founded was a company called Manifold Trading.
It was a quantitative high-frequency hedge fund in crypto. So my whole thing with crypto has been, what do I think are the biggest use cases of crypto? The number one biggest thing was, did you study abroad when you were in college? I didn't.
I wish I did, actually. So when I studied abroad, one of the most stressful moments for me, I remember was this one time when I needed money for something.
And of course, no, I mean, all your friends aren't going to give you money. You need your parents to send you money.
And my dad didn't know how to send me money quick enough. It was like a three to four day delay or something like that.
This was before Venmo. Yeah.
No, no, no. But Venmo doesn't exist outside the US.
Oh, really? Yeah. So if you're in Australia, a lot of Americans don't like realize this, right? You're in another country, like moving money from one country to another country is not instant.
It's a delay. It's like a multi-day delay.
And I guess it depends. There's different services and stuff, but it is a delay.
It takes time, right? And there's FX rates and there's transaction fees, all that kind of stuff. And sometimes back in the day, people used to use, what's that one, cash, Western Union or something? Yeah, Western.
Cash. Yeah, I used that.
There's all sorts of different ways to move money across borders, but it's all extremely

expensive and takes a lot of time. So the number

one use case for crypto is just money

transmission, right? Like if my daughters

are in Australia

and they need, I don't know, $5,000,

I can send them

ETH on ERC20 and it'll be there in two minutes.

Probably less, right? But

that's incredible. And then

I think the second best use case for crypto is gambling. I mean, so you know what I mean? Like, you know, the store of value thing, I believe that Bitcoin, I can do believe Bitcoin is a good store of value.
It's I guess you can believe in Bitcoin as much as you can believe in any fiat currency. Right.
Makes sense. Or as you can believe in gold.
but I think for some for whatever reason crypto as a basket trades as

like a hyper

beta index

to tech

in the US

so when tech's hurting

crypto tends to hurt But I think for some, for whatever reason, crypto as a basket trades as like a hyper beta index to tech in the US.

So when tech's hurting, crypto tends to hurt.

And when tech's doing well, crypto tends to do really well.

Yeah.

So I, you know, I own a lot of crypto, as you can imagine.

I also own a lot of gold.

Right.

And yeah, but sorry, we were talking about my startup.

So Manifold is a quantitative high frequency hedge fund. And then I spun a piece of technology out of that called aether and then i sold aether um so this monkey tilts my third company damn and it's a crypto casino yeah it's like i think it was like a crypto it is right now it has a casino right but over time i think it is like a risk-taking platform where i think all these things that you correctly identify are risky right or take some take some meme coins, um, collectibles and trading cards.
Like we know when you buy a pack of trading cards, I don't know how many people are buying packs of trading cards to just hold the cards and put them on their wall. Like I think a lot of people will hope they get that big $10,000 card, $100,000 card, whatever it is.
So in some way that's gambling, right? You know what I mean? You open a pack of cards to whatever. And it's, it's a multi-billion dollar a year business, right? And so I believe that all of these things are risk-taking, whether they regulate them as gambling or not, you know, whatever, I'll let the regulators decide that.
But I think they should all live on one platform tied together by one wallet and one rewards currency. Because how cool would it be if, you know, when anything you like to keep your dollars spent at one place that takes good care of you.
So like if you're a good customer at MonkeyTilt and you mess with collectibles on our platform, you trade crypto on our platform, CryptoPerps, you bet sports, you play casino, you play poker. These are all the product verticals we plan to introduce.
Then now all of your spend, you could have been trading crypto on Binance and you could have been doing collectibles and cards cards with fanatics or whatever but if you're doing this on the monkey tilt ecosystem now all of a sudden you might be level one or two or any of those places you know all individually but now at monkey tilt you're level five on the rewards tier and now all of a sudden you're getting free ufc tickets free formula one passes all that kind of stuff and i think that that's overall a better value proposition for the customer 100 it's very's very, and I'm sure you know this because you dabble with a lot of stuff. It's very disaggregated, right? It's like, if I think about crypto, I've got some money on chain.
I've got some money on centralized exchanges. I'm trading, you know, meme coins through Telegram bots.
That is my Solana wallet's linked into. I'm using Dex Screener to check, you know, the activity.
I'm betting sports on, you name it, any of the list of guys you were just rattling off. I'm playing casino.
I don't play casino. I mostly played in real life, right? And all these different products.
So like you think about that and you're like, man, there's a lot of wasted rewards currency. A lot.
Yeah, it's all over the place. Yeah, and rewards, and everyone knows this.
Any good, if you study reward systems, I'm fascinated. It's like one of my nerdy things is about studying reward systems.
I don't know if you ever went deep down the hole. I haven't.
Credit card reward systems. I'm curious.
Award systems. There's, dude, there's like, there are people who just do ridiculous amounts.
Now you have ChatGPT, so you just have ChatGPT, but before on the internet, there's all over these people hacking these systems, right? But the overarching theme of these systems is that the rewards get infinitely better as the closer you get to the top, right? So the closer you get to the top, the higher the reinvestment in the customer is because the theory is acquiring a high value customer like that is going to cost so much money. So once you acquire them, you don't want to lose them.
So you're willing to give that customer so much higher of a percentage back than you would to any of the customers lower down the ladder. Because ergo, it should be easier and easier to acquire that each tier of customer as you go lower down the ladder but that top echelon of customer you don't want to lose so you're almost willing to make it a super super low margin proposition for you so as a customer you want to be able to consolidate all of your points into one ecosystem and right you know run up the rewards ladder as quickly as possible so that's what i trying to do at MonkeyTail is give an all-in-one platform for risk-taking.
Regulation makes it really tough because different countries regulate different pieces of those products. Some of the products they call financial services, some of the products are like trading cards aren't even regulated.
Some of the products like NFTs aren't regulated. Sports bidding is highly regulated.
High casino is the most regulated, right? Right. So it's hard to put all of them on one platform, but we're trying.
Yeah. Yeah.
Sounds like a nightmare logistically. Holy crap.
Yeah. It's expensive.
Yeah. Because you got customers all over the world, right? We do.
Yeah. Damn.
So what's, is there a reward system in place right now at all? Yeah. You're still developing? And right now, no, there is one that's really, really generous and it's mostly focused on reinvestment back into the dollars on the platform.
And then we take care of our VIPs and soft comp dollars in all sorts of ways. I mean, you were at our Formula One party, threw a Super Bowl party, bought a big old suite to the Super Bowl.
You went hard. You gave away a million at that, right? Yeah, I gave away another million dollars on top for the Valentine's Day thing.
We did a million dollar safe crack opening thing. So we do things like that all the time.
I think the stuff like the million dollar Valentine's Day race is more targeted at VIPs and the stuff like the million dollar safe is more targeted at the everyday customer. Yeah, yeah.
It's smart that you take care of VIPs because you see that happens in Vegas and that's why these casinos grow. I mean, I am a VIP customer, right? So I treat those VIPs the way that I would want to be treated.
Yeah. That's what matters.
Yeah.

What's next for Monkeytell?

Anything fun this year?

I mean, just, you know, we're doing a lot of,

the stuff I'm excited about,

we're partnering with some very new personalities.

Our product roadmap is super aggressive.

So we're obviously introducing a ton of stuff on the crypto trading front, on the poker front,

on the collectibles front.

So whether those all come out all this year

or a little bit bleed into next year,

we're excited about them.

And then I think just some of the stuff we do,

you know, the content's been so much fun.

That's been the new thing for me

because I've been such a private person.

But the things we're doing on YouTube

and through social media and stuff,

the different channels that were popping up,

the podcast, the golf channel, all this stuff.

We're just going to keep doing that

and keep having more fun with it.

Yeah, yeah.

What made you want to step out?

Because you've been behind the scenes your whole life.

My whole life, yeah. Actually, the feedback was, it's funny.
They just interviewed the guys who founded Steak recently. Yeah.
This is a really good article. The feedback from our customers was, we feel more comfortable gambling and putting money on a platform where there's a face associated with it.
So we know the guy, we know his story. And I'm sympathetic to that, right? Because at the end of the day, if something goes wrong, at least they have someone to go after.
They know I'm out there, right? And so it's like, it's fair enough. I think that my customers deserve that level of accountability.
And it's what I would also want as a customer. So it makes a lot of sense.
Now it came at some cost to me because it's not something, I'm not used to having a public social media or anything like that, but it's been fun. And I've just tried to lean and appreciate the the positive elements of it which is just having fun having some visibility now i go and gamble and people want to gamble with me and stuff wow i take pictures of me gambling and stuff yeah that's cool it's really funny man those state guys crushed it they murdered it i don't i don't know how they're doing still but i know back in the day oh they're still crushing it they're focused on kick now that streaming platform right that was an them.
But Snake just is a cash cow at this point. Well, that was probably a smart move because they were banned everywhere, right? You couldn't post about them.
Yeah, it was weird. Twitch, like, kicked them off the platform.
They were able to de-platform them. And I don't know if that's because of gambling or if it's just because of them.
I don't know. I really don't know.
But they had to create Kik almost out of necessity. I think their story is that they were going to do it anyways, or they were thinking about doing it anyways, and then getting deplatformed off of Twitch just accelerated.
Yeah. And partnering with streamers was a brilliant model.
Yes, 100% agree. I think Rubet maybe did that a little bit before them.
But Stake definitely, what Stake did a good job of doing is partnering with really big brand name celebrities. So even before the streamers,ers, like the Drakes, the Izzy at Asania's, I mean, they did a phenomenal job of just branding.
Before, those kind of offshore casinos and stuff, they didn't do any branding. Yeah.
They were just- They were sketchy, right? Yeah, sketchy fly-by-night operations. And so Stake did a good job of like, you know, resetting what expectations- I mean, they created original games.
They created Insight Chat. They created social communities through Discord and Reddit and stuff like that.
So they set the bar and then now it's on us, like it's on people like Monkeys, like new interns to the market. It's on us to compete with them and find new and inventive ways to accommodate the customer and create new product experiences for the customer.
But it's also fun, you know, they've at the same time, they do a really good job of being like the Costco of online gambling. They just squeeze and squeeze and squeeze the margins.
So they make it really, really hard for new people to enter the market. And I have all the fucking respect in the world for that.
Really? How do they squeeze the margins? Well, they just give more and more back to the player, right? So they make it like very hard for you to steal players from them. Damn.
Yeah, and I think that's a super clever operating model. So that, of course, forces us to do the same, right, to match those, which makes it very hard for us to make money for some amount of time.
But the good news is for people like me, you know, I have a track record of being a successful operator. So I'm, you know, I couldn't do it with my own balance sheet alone, but with my investors balance sheets and, you know, with the backing I have, then I can take on someone like Stake.
And we're not taking them out. We're not trying to win number one in the market, but we think there's going to be a top in the market.
So Monkey Tilt's goal is to be a number two or three in the market. I love that.
Yeah, because to open this, it must be really capital intensive. It's very capital intensive, mostly on the marketing side.
Because what happens is you go to enter a new market and, I mean, you're well aware because you're in the social media game, affiliate channels get very expensive, right? So if you're marketing keywords, Stake's buying all the same keywords as you, right? So you're going after, okay, keywords, you can't do that. You go to find paid affiliate traffic, stakes going to pay a lot more for that affiliate traffic than you're going to be able to pay right out of the gate.
You talk about things like, you know, like celebrity endorsement deals and sponsorships that they're going to be able to throw a lot more money at. But eventually then that becomes the big guy starts spent overspending, and it becomes very ROI backwards for them.
And they'll do that to some level, right, until they can crowd out the market. And then they have to go back to making money, right? So, you know, I look at this and I go, rather than trying to take them head on in their own game, we try to take a very differentiated approach.
I think you notice that our brand is very different than Stix. Like, you know, we're fun, we're degenerate.
You're more laid back. Yeah, I feel so too.
I feel like we're a little less corporate and we're a little more fun. And I do feel that our channels and the way we touch our customers is very different than the way that, you know, that they go about it.
So I have all the respect in the world for those two. And they're also young, right? So when they founded this company, they were very, very young.
So I'm enormous amount of respect for that. I never met either of them, funnily enough.
They're in Australia, right? Yeah. But one of them, Beej is American and Eddie is Australian.
And then Beej moved to Australia. Yeah.
But they are just, yeah, they've built an absolute operational powerhouse. And so now it's my job to go build a formidable competitor to them in the market.
Yeah, I remember they were kind of low-key for a bit and then their houses got leaked. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's how they became public.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, I guess, no,

they became public through Drake.

The Drake stuff.

Yeah.

And then they bought,

like, Eddie started buying

every $50 million house

you could buy in two acts.

Well, the Drake stuff,

allegedly, right,

a billion dollar contract,

something crazy,

I don't know the exact number.

No one knows, right?

100 mil or whatever.

Yeah, no one knows,

but I'm sure it's a huge number.

That's nuts.

Yeah.

Well, dude, it's been cool.

People keep up with you. Yeah, absolutely, man.
I appreciate it. Yeah, what's knows, but I'm sure it's a huge number.
That's nuts. Yeah.
Well, dude, it's been cool. Where could people keep up with you?

Yeah, absolutely, man.

I appreciate it.

Yeah.

What's your social media?

Social media is at Senor Tilt on Instagram.

And I don't know.

What is that?

Yeah, just add Senor Tilt on Instagram.

We'll link it below.

Yeah.

Bye.

Thanks for watching, guys.

Peace.

Thank you.