The $2.5M DNC Controversy: What They're Hiding | Blake Wynn DSH #681

Crowd looked pretty light at DNC compared to RC.

At the DNC, all the they're all talking about, you know, they basically get up there and they talk about how they don't like the middle class, they don't like the upper class, they want to grow the size of the middle class.

But meanwhile, everyone in that room, the seats and the suites start at half a million dollars.

The big suites are as much as two and a half million dollars.

They spend a lot of money to be there.

They have no legitimate pulse on what's going on right now in the world.

The issue is themselves.

All right, guys, Blake Wynn is back on.

Went off an interesting night.

Yeah, it was a lot of fun.

Got to spend some time with President Trump yesterday.

You know what's so interesting?

I started my visit with him yesterday about 3.45 in the afternoon, and I thought I had a stressful day on my way over there.

As it turns out, his day started in West Palm Beach, Florida.

He got on a plane before the sun came up, flew to Arizona so he could go visit the border, something that our current administration doesn't really ever do, as you know.

Visits the border, shakes a lot of fantastic Americans' hands who are helping protect that border against really, in some cases, the current administration.

He's out there.

It's 107 degrees.

He's in a full suit.

He then gets on the plane.

He comes to Las Vegas.

He has a whole bunch of work to do in Las Vegas.

And I start seeing 345.

That's what he did up to 345.

It just goes to show you, I mean, this is one of the most selfless patriots.

And we have the opportunity to elect him as president in November.

It's really, it's exciting.

Right.

And now you got Biden closing up shop at four.

Closing up shop at four while he's in there.

You know, it's so interesting.

I mean, if you watched the DNC, you would think that Trump has been in power for 12 of the last 16 years.

As it turns out, they have.

They say, we will not go back.

You're in right now.

What do you mean we won't go back?

Go back to what?

You know, I mean, it's absolutely ridiculous what's going on right now.

And I think America feels that way.

They don't like what they have to spend on things.

They don't like how how unsafe they feel.

They don't like what's going on around the globe in terms of all the war and all the fighting.

And so

I think he's got a real good chance in November.

Yeah.

The crowd looked pretty light at DNC compared to RNC.

Well, you know, the crowd size thing, especially in those environments, I mean, you know, at the DNC, they're all talking about, you know, they basically they get up there and they talk about how they don't like the middle class.

They don't like the upper class.

They want to grow the size of the middle class is what they say, which they have no actual plan of how to do that.

But meanwhile, everyone in that room, the seats and the suites start at half a million dollars.

The big suites are as much as two and a half million dollars.

So these people that are in there supporting and cheering, they spend a lot of money to be there.

They have no legitimate pulse on what's going on right now in the world.

And they're obviously the most, you know, liberal people in the world, which is fine.

The issue is not people that are being liberal.

The issue is the issue that's themselves.

You know, the issue is the border.

The issue is not people deciding who they want to vote for.

The issue is when you go to the gas station, when you go to the grocery store, stuff is so much more expensive than it was in 2020.

And they get up there and they admit that and they say, we won't go back.

And people sort of cheer and they talk about joy and they talk about all these things.

I would ask you this and I'd ask anybody listening this question.

When is the last time that you woke up one morning and you said, you know what, I'm not having a great day, but

This person is president, so therefore I will be joyful.

I mean, that's not really what determines an individual's joy.

But what I can can tell you is what determines an individual's sense of struggle.

You know, when your checking account ends up at zero, when you don't own your home and your rent's higher than your income, when your income is not only not that high, but then your taxes are really high on that income.

People feel that.

You can ensure for as sure as the sun is going to come up and go down every day that people can feel that and they're not going to be very happy as a result of it.

And so when you talk about joy, if you don't have a plan to actually make people not feel pain, never mind try and feel joy.

You're just, there's a lot of blah, blah, blah for the circus.

And, you know, certain media outlets eat it up, but I don't think Americans do.

Absolutely.

When did you start getting really into politics?

Because I know you grew up Democrat, right?

I grew up Democrat.

You know, I think that party is not what that party used to be now.

I mean, you know, Tulsi Gabbard would be a good example of exactly the kind of person that has felt exactly what I would say I have felt.

But really, I mean, from 2016 and on, I think I don't think people remember how bad of a term Obama had in his second term from 2012 to 2016.

I think even in 08, you know, I mean, granted, I wasn't old enough to vote yet, but I would have voted for him.

And I don't think he did a poor job that first time.

But we were left with a country that the economy wasn't doing very well.

It wasn't very safe.

The border had a big crisis.

Healthcare, while he took a stab at fixing it, really totally screwed it up.

And so we needed a big change.

You know, I think in a lot of ways, his second term created the ability for someone like President Trump to come in and win.

I mean, you talk about a country rejecting what it currently had at the moment.

I can't think of a more polar opposite to President Obama than President Trump.

And he had a fantastic term.

I mean, all the different ways you can stack it up, right?

No wars, the price of things, the economy,

you know, people's wages.

I mean, there's so many issues you can point at and go, wow, this is one of the better presidencies in the history of the United States.

And then somehow in 2020, he didn't win.

And look what's happened since then.

I think coronavirus was

unfortunately timed because Democrats were able to use that and sort of blame him for all the things that were caused by a global pandemic,

unlike people have ever seen before or anyone who's alive has seen before.

You've sort of read about it in history books, but that's the extent of it.

And,

you know, I don't think that's going to work anymore.

You know, they're trying to blame everything that's going on right now on him, But you've, you've had control.

For 12 of the last 16 years, you've had control.

You know, you had for the first two years of Biden's term, you had all three branches of government.

You still have the presidency and the Senate.

And by the way, she says

she gets up there.

On day one, I'm going to do this.

On day one, I'm going to do this.

Excuse me.

You're on day 1100.

You're in there right now.

And by the way, people could say, well, she's only vice president.

Really?

Because

are you saying that Biden's in charge?

I don't think so.

He doesn't think so.

So, you know, I mean,

the promise is people should sort of take those things as pretty empty.

I haven't seen a single change they've made, have you?

Yeah, I've seen the changes.

Are you kidding me?

I fill up my car for five times more.

I go to the grocery store.

It's $286 to get like a basket of items that normally used to be $90 or $100.

I've seen a lot of it.

Yeah.

You know, and it's, and it's, and it's.

I meant positive change, but yeah.

Oh.

I've seen those.

No.

No, I haven't.

When I go to Whole Foods now, it's like $300.

Same with Costco.

It's very expensive and it's very, you know, it's very unsafe.

I think truthfully, the prices and stuff, all these things that

you and I both know to be true, that most Americans can feel to be true, those are the issues that you already feel from what's been done.

The real damage they've done, you haven't even started to feel yet.

People don't understand when President Trump gets up there and starts going on about how serious of an issue it is that all these

illegal immigrants have come into the country and there's so many undocumented people here.

People say, oh, maybe you should have compassion for them and this and that.

And it's not about that.

If two of them are terrorists and one of those two people decides to do something major in one of our major cities and kills 10,000 Americans, 20,000 Americans, that'll be the moment that everyone goes, oh, that's why illegal immigration wasn't okay.

It's not about every last person that's here.

Now, granted, there's elements of it that are.

all the taxpayer dollars that are going to that, all of the jobs that are going to that, all of the

issues in cities like homelessness and all these other things that are

a result of this.

That's one thing.

But

the safety of the average American today is lower than they even realize because there's unrealized consequences of what this administration has done.

Right.

Yeah.

We haven't seen the full effects yet.

Not even close.

That's scary.

And if, and if she wins this time, I think it'll be irreparable.

You think so?

I think so.

You don't think we'll be able to come back from it?

Not for a very long time.

And, you know, people in our generation are the ones that are going to feel it the most.

You know, I have this conversation with, you know, older people in my family and different people that I meet and even a lot of the politicians who are older people.

And they say, at the end of the day, I might not necessarily even be here for the full consequence of this.

But you and I, who are trying to build business and all these different things at a young age, we could be in some serious, serious trouble.

The promise of America.

is about to change if she wins again.

And it's not going to be the same promise.

That has been the case for 240-some years.

What do you think is going to determine who wins this election?

Well,

from a literal perspective, it's going to come down to seven states.

Within those seven states, it's going to come down to the people who are sort of sober-minded to the country right now.

And they're going to say, I don't like how expensive things are.

I don't like what's going on with safety.

Maybe I don't like his rhetoric, though.

So they're sort of battling themselves and they're looking for some issue to push them over the edge.

I think what's going on with the economy, because everyone can feel it with their checkbook and 99.9% of people people care about the way that their checkbook feels, I think that's going to be the key issue.

And it's really going to be a key issue in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Nevada, and Arizona.

Every other state, I hate to admit it, is sort of accounted for.

There is no chance that President Trump isn't the person that wins Louisiana.

There's no chance that he wins California.

Which is crazy, by the way, that he does win California because boy, talk about a state that has been totally screwed up by Democrats.

California's people, one of the most beautiful places, great beaches.

San Francisco talk about one of the business capitals of the planet, not just the country.

You go to San Francisco now, that is almost a third world country.

It is so dirty.

It is so unsafe.

Homelessness, like you would not believe, crime running so incredibly rampant.

And it's people like Gavin Newsom, people like Kamala Harris, who was DA there for so long that have created these issues.

And now they want to bring the issues to the whole country.

And they're asking you to vote for it solely predicated on the idea that they're not President Trump.

You know, he says, even at the RNC, he got up there.

He says, he says, they're anti-MAGA.

He says, what does that mean?

Anti-MAGA.

Make America great again.

They're anti-that.

How does that make any sense?

And it doesn't make any sense.

You know, the Republican Party has turned into the party of common sense.

And the Democratic Party has turned into this collective of people who have been so fear-mongered and are victims victims of such a level of dishonest propaganda that they don't even realize that they have decided that feels like their only option.

Part of me says I sort of feel for those people because if they really understood what's going on, they'd be like, wait a second,

I'm not a sucker and they're treating me like one.

I'm going to vote for the other side and everything about my life is going to get better as a result.

All the promises the Democrats are making, the only way they're going to fulfill them is if President Trump wins.

Right.

Yeah, you'd think these Californians would start to realize like things are going downhill, right?

Well, they do realize it.

They just don't attribute it to the party, which is why the population of California is going down, not counting the illegal immigrants that are coming in there and replenishing it.

And they're coming to states like Nevada.

They're coming to states like Texas, states like Florida.

And that's why those states are getting more, a little more Democratic votes.

They're still going to be red states, but they're getting a little more Democratic votes because these Californians are saying, okay, our state is screwed up.

We're going to move to a different state.

We're going to vote the same.

We're going to treat it the same because we don't think that was really the problem.

Right.

Okay, so what's the problem?

I didn't know Nevada was a swing state because I've never met a Democrat out here.

Nevada's a swing state.

It is the swing state that it looks like President Trump is doing the best in right now.

Biden won here in 2020.

President Trump won here in 2016.

I think he'll win here in 2024.

You know, right now he's got, you know, this, this, this big, big, fantastic thing he's decided to do, which is that if he's elected, there's going to be no tax on tips.

Well, Kamo saw the response that he got to that and decided, wow, that's a good policy.

I'm going to do that too.

Now, here's a difference.

This, when they hired 88,000 new IRS workers to go after the service industry in large part to make sure that tips were being taxed, it was a 50 to 50 vote in the Senate.

And it happened during this administration.

When there's a vote in the Senate that's 50 to 50, the vice president casts the tiebreaking vote.

Wow.

There is a video that you should clip in right here of Kamala Harris hitting that gavel after she says, I vote in the affirmative and pass that to get all those extra IRS agents hired to be the to be the ones who could go after the service industry for not paying taxes on their tips.

So what I would tell people is yes, she is now saying that she will change that policy.

If she's elected and you think she's actually going to change the policy, the one that she personally voted to create, I would say that that is probably very wishful thinking.

And if you want to ensure that that policy gets changed, you should vote for Donald Trump on November 5th.

Crazy.

That's really going to help a city like Vegas, that policy.

Well, it's going to help the whole world.

I mean, think about it.

Service industry is a big-time industry, and you have to do it because a lot of the people in the service industry, you know, they're a lot of times they're not even paid minimum wage because the sort of guaranteed threshold that they are going to earn in tips is something that the businesses are able to incorporate into their pay.

So then they're getting taxed on income that they may or may not earn, and they're being audited as people who aren't necessarily earning six figures or anything like that.

You know, this party that says that they're for everyday people, I can't think of a more everyday person than servers, waiters, dealers in the case of Las Vegas.

I mean, those are our citizens.

Those are the backbone of the country.

And you hired 88,000 people to go after them.

And then you said that you're on their side.

How does that make any sense?

Yep.

Speaking of dealers, celebrity poker tour next week, August 31st.

Oh, it's a lot of fun.

You know, the celebrity poker tour is unlike anything that's ever existed in the poker space because you think about the best poker players of all time, people like Phil Ivey.

If you're really into poker, it's a cool thing to watch him because he can mentally best anybody.

Daniel Negranu, Phil Helmuth.

And by the way, they will say that.

Maybe not Phil, but Negranu.

Negranu, I know you know Daniel.

Daniel will say without question that Phil Ivey is the best player of all time, but there's nothing to watch if you're not really into poker.

You don't even need to know how the game is played to watch a celebrity poker tour and say, what am I watching?

Sophie Dossie goes all in putting her legs over her head and flipping the chips in because she's America's Got Talent Winning Contortionist.

And

you've got this unique environment where Joe Gatto from Practical Jokers can be sitting next to Haley Welch, who's the Hoqtua girl, who could be sitting next to Dwight Howard, who could be sitting next to Austin.

I mean, it's this unbelievable collective of people pitted against one another because the nature of cards is conflict.

And so every 90 seconds, there's a new conflict with the most dynamic and unique personalities in the world behind the conflict.

And they don't really know how to navigate the conflict.

So it's a really interesting thing to watch.

And it's been really fun to see.

It's been a blast, grow quick.

It's been very quick.

Our first event was six months ago.

Our last event had over a million viewers, the largest live poker event of all time.

It got more views than the World Series of Poker

main event final table just got, yep, where Jonathan Tamayo won

$10 million.

And by the way, it wasn't even close.

That got about 200,000, 300,000 views.

We did about a million one, million two almost.

So

people are liking it.

But the poker world's really not even watching.

I mean, maybe there's a little fraction of our audience that's poker world,

but it's it's it's the celebrities' audiences that are watching.

It's because it's like a podcast on steroids.

Imagine if you and I were having a dialogue right now, except while we were having that dialogue, we were maybe playing chess or doing something where we were sort of pitted against one another.

It might make it harder to answer questions, it might make me say things that I wouldn't be saying as I'm just solely focused on the conversation.

And you get that for four hours straight under the lights.

We got 109 cameras shooting it.

It is a really high quality production, and it's a lot of fun, and people like it.

Yeah, tune in, guys, next week.

The lineup is stacked on this one.

I don't know if you want to reveal any names.

Oh, it's fun.

Well, Haley Welch is coming to play, which I think will be a lot of fun because she's been so big on social media.

But we got, you know, Steiny from Nelk.

We got people like Bryce Hall and Tana Mode, who are some of the biggest influencers in the world.

We have people like Mike Bibby and Mario Chalmers and Kendrick Perkins and Dwight Howard, all these fantastic basketball players who are some of the best that have ever played.

And Jose Conseco, you know, you go to baseball, you go to the actor, people like Black China, who's just, I mean, she's got 16 or 17 million followers.

I mean, it's, but it's, it's very interesting because we don't have a lot of repeats from past events.

Right.

So you get this new dynamic and they come in and they're totally amazed because they're like, oh, God, I don't really know how to play poker and I'm getting mic'd up and I'm under all these lights and I'm going to be on TV.

So they sort of get nervous, but then we get the drinks flowing a little bit.

And next thing, you know, everyone's come out of their shell and they're their fantastic personalities that they all have.

And they just have a good time.

Absolutely.

Where do you see this thing going?

Because the World Series of Poker just got acquired, 500 million.

It did.

Is that in the plans for you?

No, you know,

I feel very lucky that, you know, I've never really started business thinking about, well, can we get it acquired?

Can we do this?

Can we do this?

I am having the fun of a lifetime right now with this.

I wouldn't consider selling it for any amount, only from the perspective that we have so many more ideas we haven't even touched yet.

You know, I think that what we're going to do is going to take the game of poker to new heights because we're sort of positioning it and we're saying poker is not about gambling.

In fact, we don't make our players gamble.

We put up a prize pool, but they all get to play for free.

We want to take the gambling out of it because that's got a stigma.

And

that's a side of Las Vegas that makes Vegas what Vegas is.

But I want to make CPT bigger than Vegas in the sense that everyone around the world can get behind it.

You know, a lot of cultures, they look at gambling and they immediately dismiss it.

They wouldn't give it five seconds of attention.

We're not gambling.

It's televised conflict.

It's a game.

And it brings people together and people see that.

You know, all these friendships that have been formed between the players we have at CPT or even better, I was speaking at Babson University a couple of months ago, and they were telling me a story about how a bunch of the kids in their class, they love the Celebrity Poker Tour.

They get together and they put on home games that everyone's invited to on campus.

So they have 20 or 30 kids come and they play poker while the game's on the TV.

So they watch this big celebrity poker tour game while they play their own poker game and get to know their classmates and stuff like that.

That's what it's about.

That's cool.

It's creating this this sort of uh canvas to get to know one another like what golf does for some people who know how to golf and can afford to do it like book clubs you know all those kinds of things that bring people together poker can be that right you got to treat it like a game though you can't treat it like financial risk and gambling and so i think as we reposition the game i think we'll make it bigger than it's ever been before absolutely you already broke the record so yeah let's see where this goes man i'm excited for you i appreciate it one of your big help yeah dude thank you i can't wait to do interviews at this next one oh it's gonna be fantastic one of the the players was Austin Eckler, who's also a good friend of yours, and you're in a rock band with him.

Well, I wouldn't say it's so much a rock band as it is from time to time.

I'll go to his house and I don't, so I don't play any instruments.

I'll screw around with like a bass guitar.

He's taught me a little bit of how to play the drums,

and he plays the guitar very well, which is why that's his air guitar celebration.

But Austin Eckler, I mean, you talk about

an athlete that's making the most of their opportunity.

This guy has built an app off the field.

He's got a fantastic foundation.

He started a company called Pro Athlete Ventures, which shines light on the ventures of his fellow NFL players.

He's one of the people in charge of the NFL Player Association.

I mean, this is as well-rounded and intelligent and fantastic of a human being as exists.

It was so lucky to call him a brother.

He is so special and he just got married.

That guy has completely won life.

And so we have fun when we jam out a little bit, when neither of us are that good at being.

We'll see how far he makes it in the next tournament.

Yeah.

Well, it'll be interesting to see.

He's a good poker player.

He is.

He's a big reason why we started the Celebrity Poker Tour Tour.

Really?

He and I would take turns hosting a group of six to 10 people playing home poker games for 50 or 100 bucks.

Because like I said, it's not about the money.

It's about the environment.

So when I say we're playing 50 to 100 bucks, I'm not trying to say it's not a lot of money.

But when the players are, you know, people like Austin Eckler, who earns seven or eight million dollars a year, Chum Lee from Pawn Stars, Shane Victorino from the World Series champion.

We had a great group that we'd play all the time.

Finally, I said, guys, look how into it we are for 50 bucks.

Imagine if this was being filmed, the world would love to watch this.

And so that was really what started the idea for Celebrity Poker Tour was the games that Austin and I would put together.

I love that, dude.

That's so cool.

It sounds really pure, actually.

Very pure.

Very, very,

it's just meant, it's just meant to create a space where you can meet people, get to know one another, have fun, have laughs, be a little competitive.

Absolutely.

Because people love being competitive, especially these kinds of people.

These people are winners.

You got to think, I mean, these people, whether they define themselves as competitive or not, have essentially done the best in competition of anybody.

If you're in the NFL, there's 1,500 of you.

There's millions of people that play football.

You know, you're a famous actor.

A lot of people want to act.

You're the one that broke through.

And you can go down making those same analogies for really any industry.

So they're all competitive.

So you put cards in front of them.

They get into it.

Hell yeah.

So your uncle, Steve Wynn, King of Hospitality in Vegas.

What has he done to change the landscape of Vegas, in your opinion?

Half that skyline is because of him.

I mean, the Bellagio, the Mirage, the Treasure Island, Golden Nugget, the Wynn, Encore,

even the Monte Carlo, way back when people don't really know, he was heavily involved.

I think the thing that

the way that he'll put it is he says, you know,

when you come to the desert of Las Vegas and it's hot and stuff like that, if you close your eyes and you open them again and now you see something that your eye wasn't expecting to see, you're immediately curious.

So when you come to the heat of the desert, And next thing you know, it looks like Lake Como, which is what Bellagio is based upon.

Or you go to to the wind and you see all these hand-woven carpets and crystal chandeliers from Italy and France and all over Europe.

And it's a beautiful place and everything like that.

You're so intrigued by what you can possibly experience there.

And you sort of forget about your everyday life.

You forget about your struggles.

Even almost to the degree that you could forget what's going on right now when you think about what the Democrats have caused.

You can almost forget what's going on that much when you're in those buildings because it's meant to be like adult Disneyland.

You can eat the best food in the world.

You can have the most fun.

You can see the best shows.

You stay in the prettiest rooms.

And, you know, there's other hotels that have come along now who have tried to create their own version of that, but I don't think there's anything in the world like the wind.

I still think it's number one in Vegas, dude.

Well, and financially it is.

And, you know, and then there's a wind palace in Macau, which is debatably even bigger and nicer.

Wow.

I haven't heard of that one.

Yeah.

Oh, it's fantastic.

Damn.

Got to check that out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Your uncle changed the game, dude.

What's some big lessons?

Were you really close with him when he was doing this?

Well, I was pretty young when he was doing this.

You know, the win opened in 2005.

I was five.

So

I would say, yes, I was close with him then, but I was five.

We've gotten really, really close over the last handful of years.

And that's when he's really been able to sort of sit me down and explain.

the really the intelligent thought that goes into everything.

You know, like as an example, I'll give you one sense of how detail-oriented this guy is.

Like

when he was picking the chairs to go into one particular restaurant

in the hotel, he had all these different companies come.

He must have lined up 300 or 400 chairs in his driveway.

And he woke up, he went out the driveway and he sat in every last chair until he picked, okay, this chair is going to be good for this place.

This chair sucks.

This chair has good lumbar support.

I want the arms.

But I've had the luxury as someone who's really, I mean, the Celebrity Poker Tour and our events business Enclave and Key.

I mean, a lot of the businesses that we do, they're really a different version of the hospitality business.

They're not hotels, but we're catering to VIPs.

We want to make sure everybody's comfortable.

We throw a lot of dinners and what have you.

And so, I mean, I've had four-hour conversations with him about what it takes to set a table correctly with the centerpiece.

You don't want it too high to block the conversation.

You want to make sure that the silverware is like this.

You want to make sure the service comes like this.

You want to, you know,

and so when people say, you know, what has he done for you and what opportunities he created for you?

This is so different.

You know, people have the luxury of going online and listening to people like you who can share so much insight about business and Gary Vaynerchuk or Ty Lopez, Grant Carda, whoever you feel like listening to.

But then when you hear it from him in a really long-extended period of time where it's that detail oriented, it makes us as folks in the hospitality business really, really powerful because we have that win touch to it.

And so I'm very grateful for him for that.

Dude, that's insane.

Because as consumers, we just show up to the restaurant, we sit down and eat.

We don't think about these things.

That's the exact thing that we want you to think, though.

We don't want you to think about it.

You know, you'll notice at his hotels, there's almost zero right angles.

There's a right angle if you got to go to the bathroom.

If you got to go to your room, there's a right angle into the elevator.

If you want to go to the parking garage, there's a right angle.

Besides that, the room flows.

There's turns, but they flow sort of like a parabola.

Because

subconsciously, you follow a path.

You got to make a conscious decision to make a turn when you're walking.

You know, so you feel like it's an effortless thing to explore the property, end up gambling, go to a restaurant, go to a sports book, go to a show.

You didn't make any turns.

You know what I'm saying?

So it's the little things like that that I can think about it because of him thinking about the turns, the lighting, the smells, the color schemes, the attitude of the employees, which is probably is really 80 or 90% of the equation.

Yeah, the attitude.

Yeah.

Steve's famous quote, and I do this all the time whenever I go speeches, is a

80 to 90% of the guest experience is determined by the way that they're treated by other people because because only people can make people happy.

And self-esteem is the most powerful thing in human dynamics.

And so if you can make someone feel positive self-esteem as a result of an action that they took, they will repeat that action incessantly.

That's like if there should be a Steve Wynn quote, the way there's Mark Twain quotes and stuff like that, that's the quote that it should be because it's dead on the money.

Yeah.

You know,

10% of that place is the chandeliers.

But when you go to those restaurants and they're happy to serve you and they have a smile, when the dealers are striking up conversation with you, they're not, you know, you go to some of these hotels in the strip.

You'd feel like the dealers are trying to take your money.

Right.

They don't talk to you.

Right.

They, they, they pass out the cards.

When they win, they scoop your money away real fast.

They don't crack a smile.

They don't care if you win or lose.

The win dealers, they'll hand you a card.

Do you have blackjack?

No, I just busted.

Oh.

Okay.

They take, you know, they're, they're there to make sure that you're having a one-of-a-kind experience that makes you want to come back.

They're working on making sure that your self-esteem as a customer is high because on the back end, their self-esteem is very high because they get to work for the win.

The best hotel in the world.

He's done a great job with that.

A good server, a good waitress can make or break your dining experience.

Not only is that true, but to add a layer to that, I said, how important do you think it is to build culture?

You know, because that's really a key dynamic in creating this environment.

He says, here's a way of looking at it, Blake.

He says, you understand that we have servers and waiters and dealers.

He says, we have the same hiring pool of Las Vegas as the Circus Circus does.

You know what I mean?

I mean, all these hotels, the A-rate properties down to the D-rate ones that are probably a week and a half away from closing, they have the same hiring pool.

But you go to the win and everyone's polished.

You go to a place like, and I'm not trying to bash a circuit circus.

You pick, there's a number of hotels that are on the decline.

They haven't been upkept very well and things like that.

And it's not the same experience.

You're not treated the same.

So, you know, there's.

The notion of understanding human dynamics as being the ultimate key to success is something that he taught me more than anything.

And it's the thing that we've implemented the most, which is why I think when you have these celebrities coming to the celebrity poker tour, who, by the way, we don't pay them to come.

They just come.

We don't make them pay to play in the game, but

they fly themselves here.

They put themselves in a hotel.

They go to dinner, they pay for it, or maybe they gamble and get comps or something like that from somebody else.

But they're there and they're happy to be there because their self-esteem is attached to our game because they come in, they see all the light stuff.

Well, I want to be the one that wins.

I want the belt.

I want the Louis trophy.

I want the 20 grand.

And by the way, 20 grand to most people in that room, like I said, they're really not even playing for money.

They're playing for pride.

Right.

You know, and it makes it, it makes it really interesting to see those dynamics when you have these people who are worth 20 million bucks standing up, slapping the table, praying they get a card just so they can win some fake tournament chips.

Really, it's a neat thing to see.

Absolutely.

You've created a really fun, unique environment, man.

I appreciate it.

What's your future for the

vision for the future of Las Vegas?

Well, I think think it's already become one of the best cities in the country.

I think it's going to continue to be that.

I mean, our population is growing here rapidly.

I mean, the rate at which they're building homes,

we're getting all the new sports teams.

I wouldn't be shocked if we get an NBA announcement here very soon.

I wouldn't even be surprised if LeBron has a piece of that team, which I think will make that much more buzz behind the team.

But it's...

It's adult Disneyland in the form of a city, and it provides so much opportunity.

And it's such a, for the most part, such a well-run state you know governor lombardo making sure that we don't have state income tax so it becomes a really attractive place for new businesses to come here you know uh the fact that we have an international airport that runs smoothly you know is great because it makes everyone in the world can come here really almost non-stop from almost anywhere um you know i mean the the level of entertainment that you can see anywhere you know there's not a performer who skips coming to Vegas if they go on tour.

There's now almost within eight years, there's not going to be a single sport that doesn't come here.

And then by the way, not only are those sports going to come here, but their biggest games are going to come here.

We already had the Super Bowl.

We've had the NFL draft.

We had the NHL draft this year.

Now we've got the Sphere, which is probably going to produce

Dana White.

is dead set on the idea that the best live sporting event of all time is going to take place on the 14th when UFC goes to the sphere.

And I believe him.

That guy is a no-nonsense guy.

And I know what kind of money he's spent to pull this off.

So I think that's going to be fantastic.

And really, the UFC is based here.

I mean, mean, there's so much fantastic opportunity.

Best restaurants.

All the top chefs in the world would love to come here and have a restaurant open here.

So I think if you live in Las Vegas, I think you live in as great of a city as you could possibly live in.

And I don't think that's going to change for a very, very long time.

Absolutely.

I love it here, man.

What's next for you, CPT, and where can people find you, man?

At Blake Wynn on Instagram.

I'm not a super public person, at least not yet.

But I definitely recommend checking out the Celebrity Poker Tour at Celebrity Poker Tour on every social media.

Definitely watch next event, August 31st, where you'll be there.

You'll be doing a bunch of interviews, which is going to be fantastic.

But that's really what's next.

I want to continue to do my part to sort of redefine people's expectations when they think about something specific.

And in this case, my focus is poker right now.

Love it, brother.

Thanks for coming on again.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Sean.

Thanks for watching, guys, as always.

See you next time.