Football was always a deal we made with ourselves. We adopted it for its brutality, which was embedded in a context that happened to be perfectly suited to television and to gambling, but which we could convince ourselves was only incidental to our enjoyment because it was only incidental to the game itself.
Obviously, Nevada doesn't prohibit all forms of gambling, but you have to submit yourself to a very rigorous regulatory process to run a gambling operation in Nevada.
I played golf with my friends, and then I started to play with the hustlers. And I learned a lot. I learned about golf; I learned about gambling. I learned about everything.
But I also think that it does create a lot of revenue, but to me it's a temporary revenue stream because it's an industry that, if suddenly gambling started in Massachusetts, then a lot of our patrons who would gamble in New Hampshire if we had it, would disappear.
It's been a difficult thing because some great opportunities have come and I've just been holding my breath and praying... I'm basically gambling hoping something will come along this season and if not, I don't know what the future holds.
All actors who have been around for a long time, which I have, and have been skint for long periods, which I have, find it difficult to turn down jobs. If I turn anything down my stomach turns over. I feel sick. It feels like gambling.
I used to be a health-care investor a long time ago in the public markets. One thing I learned that we tried to apply here is that investing in small molecules, trying to invest in the next treatment, there's an element of gambling to that.
Establishing a 0.03 percent Wall Street speculation fee, similar to what we had from 1914-1966, would dampen the dangerous level of speculation and gambling on Wall Street, encourage the financial sector to invest in the productive economy and reduce the deficit by more than $350 billion over 10 years.
We didn't become the most prosperous country in the world just by rewarding greed and recklessness. We didn't come this far by letting the special interests run wild. We didn't do it just by gambling and chasing paper profits on Wall Street. We built this country by making things, by producing goods we could sell.
I'm not coming in as an advocate of sports gambling. I'm trying to be more of a realist to say it's going on in a massive way... and I think the right course would be therefore to legalize it and regulate it.
In 'Honeymoon in Vegas,' after Nicolas Cage tells his fiancee that he's given her away to pay for his gambling debts, she gets into a tizzy as if she were a 6-year-old. I couldn't believe it.
