Richard Marcus was a casino cheat in Las Vegas for 25 years. He says he used a mixture of chip scams and social engineering to con casinos such as Caesars Palace, the MGM Grand, and the Riviera out of millions of dollars. Though he was tailed by private investigators, he was never caught.
Marcus discusses the influence of the Italian Mafia in Las Vegas and his early years of being recruited while working as a dealer at the Four Queens Casino. He covers casino cheating teams and how they used the false shuffle in baccarat and the Savannah move. He also discusses casino surveillance, security, and the role of the police and the FBI, and he suggests ways to catch cheaters.
Marcus now works as a security advisor at several casinos and chairs the Global Table Games & Game Protection Conference. He is the author of "American Roulette," "The World's Greatest Gambling Scams," and "The Great Casino Heist."
How did Elon Musk go from being an Obama supporter to a self-described "dark MAGA" Trump ally? Here's a look at the relationship between two billionaires ahead of the second Trump presidency.
MrBeast in a promotional photo for his competition TV show, "Beast Games."
Prime Video
"Beast Games" is the Amazon Prime Video game show from the YouTuber MrBeast.
The show is family-friendly, but its message about the concept of money makes me uncomfortable.
I'd say to enjoy the show but remind your kids that money doesn't work this way in real life.
"Beast Games," the game show on Amazon Prime Video from MrBeast, debuted Thursday, and I watched along with my elementary-aged son. As an adult, I enjoyed the spectacle and found the show highly watchable. But as a parent, I'm not sure I liked the message about money it was imparting to my young ward.
Elementary-school-aged kids, whether or not they're allowed to watch YouTube, all know who MrBeast is. He's a superstar to Gen Alpha. His candy bars are on grocery-store shelves, and his specter hangs over playgrounds and lunchrooms.
(My colleague reports that his teenage son says MrBeast isn't quite as cool in high schools anymore, perhaps because he's seen as being for little kids.)
Like most parents, I want to teach my kids the value of a dollar: that money comes from hard work and that saving and budgeting are important.
"Beast Games" flies in the face of all that. Money is tossed around as this strange easy-come, easy-go object. It opens with MrBeast standing on a pyramid of cash (allegedly the full $5 million prize in stacks of bills). We are repeatedly told this is the largest cash prize ever in a game show.
The show's premise is that a group of contestants will compete in challenges to win that big prize — a season-long version of some of his popular YouTube videos.
Later in the season there will be physical challenges (we see preview clips of people pulling a monster truck), but in this first episode the games are almost all psychological tests.
This first series of minigames aims to winnow the contestant pool to 500 people from 1,000. The games are variations on the prisoner's dilemma, pitting what's good for an individual against what's good for the group.
In the first game, MrBeast makes this offer: Anyone who quits the game immediately can share a pot of money — but the pot gets smaller as more people choose to take the early out. In another game, each team of about 100 people must have one person sacrifice themselves and leave the game with no prize money at all — or else the whole team is eliminated. People are sobbing, yelling at each other to be the ones to quit.
I worry about the message 'Beast Games' sends
It's a fascinating challenge to watch as an adult. But I'm not sure a kid can really understand what's going on — the wrenching pain of people losing what they thought could be a chance to pay off loans or buy a home.
In the game, money is an object to build into pyramids or toss around in bags — it's funny money; it doesn't feel real.
Representatives for MrBeast declined to comment for this story.
Other game shows have cash prizes, even kid-friendly ones like "Is It Cake?" or even the old "Double Dare" on Nickelodeon. But on other shows, the prize is an exciting treat at the end — it isn't the whole point of the show.
In "Beast Games," money is the point — and even the games themselves are about money. I'm not sure I like what subtle message that's sending to young minds not old enough to earn a real paycheck.
Update: December 20, 2024 — MrBeast representatives declined to comment when contacted by BI; the story has been updated reflecting that.
The AI-generated video scene has been hopping this year (or twirling wildly, as the case may be). This past week alone we've seen releases or announcements of OpenAI's Sora, Pika AI's Pika 2, Google's Veo 2, and Minimax's video-01-live. It's frankly hard to keep up, and even tougher to test them all. But recently, we put a new open-weights AI video synthesis model, Tencent's HunyuanVideo, to the test—and it's surprisingly capable for being a "free" model.
Unlike the aforementioned models, HunyuanVideo's neural network weights are openly distributed, which means they can be run locally under the right circumstances (people have already demonstrated it on a consumer 24 GB VRAM GPU) and it can be fine-tuned or used with LoRAs to teach it new concepts.
Notably, a few Chinese companies have been at the forefront of AI video for most of this year, and some experts speculate that the reason is less reticence to train on copyrighted materials, use images and names of famous celebrities, and incorporate some uncensored video sources. As we saw with Stable Diffusion 3's mangled release, including nudity or pornography in training data may allow these models achieve better results by providing more information about human bodies. HunyuanVideo notably allows uncensored outputs, so unlike the commercial video models out there, it can generate videos of anatomically realistic, nude humans.
Jimmy Donaldson, known online as MrBeast, has a new competition show on Amazon Prime Video.
AaronP/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images
YouTube star MrBeast has a new competition show that will debut Thursday on Amazon Prime Video.
BI viewed a copy of a contestant release form and other documents for the preliminary "Beast Games" round.
An entertainment attorney said the documents were fairly standard but expansive in their terms.
Documents obtained by Business Insider reveal the terms that contestants of MrBeast's competition show, "Beast Games," were asked to agree to during a preliminary round.
The terms prohibit contestants from disclosing information about the show, which debuts Thursday on Amazon Prime Video. Contestants who break the agreement prior to the last episode airing must pay the producer and network $500,000 for each breach. After the last episode airs, each breach would cost contestants $100,000, the documents said.
The documents also ask contestants to agree that their portrayal in the program may be "disparaging, defamatory, embarrassing, or of an otherwise unfavorable nature," and may expose them to "public ridicule, humiliation, or condemnation."
Daniel J. Ain, an entertainment attorney at RPJ Law, said the terms are largely standard for a competition show, but some — like the threat of a $500,000 charge for each breach — are particularly expansive.
"The producers use every available tool to give them ultimate flexibility to make the show and protect themselves from liability," Ain told BI, calling the documents a "contestant agreement on steroids."
"Beast Games" is a 10-episode physical competition show in which contestants compete for a $5 million prize. YouTube's top star — whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson — is the host.
The show has attracted some controversy ahead of its release. A New York Times report in August cited "over a dozen" participants who said they didn't receive enough food or medical care during the preliminary round of competition in Las Vegas.
The documents obtained by Business Insider relate to the Las Vegas taping, where over 2,000 contestants participated in physical challenges designed to see who would make the show's official production round in Toronto.
The documents include information about the show, a contestant questionnaire form, and an outline of the show's official rules and protocols. By signing the form, contestants gave full consent to the use of hidden cameras and recording devices, gave producers full discretion to edit footage, and agreed to participate for no money. Potential prizes were the only form of compensation.
A person close to the production characterized the Las Vegas production as a "promo shoot" for the show and said Amazon wasn't involved. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment from BI.
Read 24 pages of the documents below:
Note: BI omitted some pages from the document that included the contestant's personal information and a few pages with minimal or repeated information.
The former CIA counterterrorism officer John Kiriakou looks at counterterrorism scenes in movies and TV and breaks them down for realism.
Kiriakou explains the counterterrorism efforts done to directly address the September 11 attacks — commonly known as 9/11 — such as the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound, which ultimately led to his killing, in "Zero Dark Thirty," featuring Jessica Chastain, Joel Edgerton, and Chris Pratt; and the CIA's interrogation techniques — such as waterboarding and sleep deprivation — to detainees, such as the Al-Qaeda members Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in "The Report," starring Adam Driver. He breaks down the plausibility of weapons used by terrorists, such as the use of weapons of mass destruction, particularly nerve agents, in "Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation," with Tom Cruise and Simon Pegg; and the cyberterrorism attack in "Skyfall," featuring Daniel Craig and Judi Dench. Kiriakou looks at more counterterrorism strategies, such as the drone attack in "Homeland" S4E1 (2014), starring Claire Danes; and the collaboration of intelligence agencies in "Body of Lies," featuring Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crow, and Oscar Isaac. He also reacts to the depiction of other real-life terrorist attacks, such as the 2008 Mumbai attacks in "Hotel Mumbai," starring Dev Patel; the Munich Massacre, which involved the Palestinian militant organization Black September, in "Munich," with Daniel Craig and Eric Bana; and the depiction of the hijacking of the Indian Airlines Flight 814, which landed in Kandahar International Airport in Afghanistan — then a stronghold of the Taliban — in "IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack" E5 + E6 (2024).
Before 9/11, Kiriakou served as a counterterrorism operations officer in Athens, Greece; and after the 9/11 attacks, Kiriakou was appointed chief of counterterrorist operations in Pakistan, where he oversaw a series of military raids on Al-Qaeda safe houses, resulting in the capture of numerous Al-Qaeda members, including leading the raid that captured Abu Zubaydah — who was then believed to be Al-Qaeda's third-highest-ranking member. He left the CIA in 2004, and in 2007, he went public with his information about the CIA's "enhanced interrogation techniques," a program of systematic torture of detainees. He was sentenced to 30 months in prison, where he pleaded guilty to a charge of revealing information that identified a covert agent. He went on to become a senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a terrorism consultant for ABC News. He has written various books and teaches and speaks around the country, focusing on the CIA, terrorism, torture, and ethics in intelligence operations.
OpenAI says it has no plans to release an API for Sora, its AI model that can generate reasonably realistic videos when provided with a text description or reference image. During an AMA with members of OpenAI’s dev team, Romain Huet, head of developer experience at OpenAI, said that a Sora API isn’t in the […]
Firearms expert Patrick McNamara rates gun technique in movies.
McNamara talks about recovering ammo on the battlefield in "John Wick: Chapter 2," starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, and Common. He explains how to handle different types of machine guns in "Rambo: First Blood Part II," starring Sylvester Stallone; and "Pulp Fiction," starring John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, and Bruce Willis. He critiques James Bond's shooting form in "Die Another Day," starring Pierce Brosnan, Halle Berry and Judi Dench; and "No Time to Die," starring Daniel Craig, Rami Malek, and Ana de Armas. He breaks down how to fire at a moving target in "Deadpool," starring Ryan Reynolds. He discusses firing two guns at once in "The Bourne Identity," starring Matt Damon and Clive Owen. He describes shooting range exercises in "S.W.A.T.," starring Colin Farrell, Samuel L. Jackson, and Jeremy Renner; and "Lethal Weapon," starring Danny Glover and Mel Gibson. He looks at shooting in dark environments in "Sicario," starring Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin, and Benicio del Toro. He analyzes the reload techniques displayed in "Scarface," starring Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer. He walks us through different sniper positions in "Mad Max: Fury Road," starring Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, and Nicholas Hoult. Finally, he deconstructs Tom Cruise's shooting stance in "Collateral," also starring Jamie Foxx and Jada Pinkett Smith.
Patrick McNamara served for 22 years in Army special operations forces. He is president of TMACS, where he trains people in tactical marksmanship.
You can learn more about safe gun-handling techniques from Patrick here:
Advertising took over the streaming-TV experience this year, and it'll only get bigger next year.
Interactive ads that try to get viewers to shop or take other actions are gaining traction.
This article is part of "Transforming Business," a series on the must-know leaders and trends impacting industries.
It's back to the future in Hollywood.
Streaming is starting to look like the TV days of old. Entertainment for the masses is back. Bundles are making it easier to consolidate subscriptions.
And ads seem to be everywhere.
Netflix, Disney+, and Max — which all started ad-free — now have cheaper ad-supported tiers. Amazon turned on ads in Prime Video this year, making advertising de facto for more than 100 million viewers in the US in one fell swoop.
According to the analytics firm Antenna, these cheaper versions are gaining traction with viewers, too. In May, most new paying subscribers to five major streamers were choosing ad-supported tiers — a year earlier, this was true for only two streamers.
On Disney's latest earnings call, execs said that about 60% of new subscribers in the US were opting for its ad-supported tier, which accounted for 37% of its total US subscribers.
Ad-supported TV viewing also is on the rise through free services like Fox's Tubi, Paramount's Pluto TV, and The Roku Channel. According to Nielsen, those services plus YouTube made up 14.8% of viewing in July, up from 12.5% a year earlier.
"What's old is new again," said Jonathan Miller, a veteran media executive and chief executive of Integrated Media Co., which invests in digital media.
Miller sees ad tiers as a validation of the dual revenue streams that long supported cable. "Advertising and subscriptions have always been a successful model," he said.
Streaming ads are here to stay because — along with bundling, cheaper programming, and password-sharing crackdowns — they're one of the ways streamers can help make themselves sustainable.
Ads have also begun to directly shape the content streamers offer. Streamers are showing more sports and other live programming because of the big audiences and advertisers they attract.
For example, Netflix's highly anticipated Mike Tyson-Jake Paul fight on November 15 was a win for the streamer despite some tech glitches. Why? Because it showed Netflix's ability to draw huge audiences at once; it said that as many as 60 million households tuned in. That large audience bodes well for Netflix's NFL games on Christmas and its live WWE programming set to debut in January.
Viewers' tolerance for ads will be increasingly tested
Streamers that dipped a toe in the ad space are looking to wade in.
The ad load — or ad volume per hour of entertainment — has crept up over the past year, according to the measurement firm MediaRadar. There was an average of six minutes of ads per hour in September across eight leading ad-supported streamers, up by 9% from January 2023, when Netflix and Disney had just entered the ad-supported game. That's still far lower than cable, where ad loads can push an eye-watering 15 minutes or more an hour. Viewers are also more likely to tolerate ads in live sports because people are used to them being part of that content.
Ryan Fitzpatrick, Charissa Thompson, and Tony Gonzalez host Amazon Prime Video's "Thursday Night Football."
Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images for Amazon
Amazon and Warner Bros. Discovery recently said they'd start showing more ads to their streaming viewers in 2025, while emphasizing that their ad loads were lower than their competitors.
"On the ad-load side, we are light," WBD's streaming chief, JB Perrette, said of the streamer Max during the company's third-quarter earnings call. "We have a very light ad load compared to everyone else in the market, so there's room to grow on the capacity side."
The industry consensus is that streaming ad loads won't become a throwback to cable, though — at least not anytime soon.
For one thing, it's a buyer's market. Amazon flooded the market with ad inventory, which depressed ad prices for everyone. Streamers aren't incentivized to add too much more ad inventory because it'll just drive the price down more. Some advertisers are also wary of annoying viewers who are still getting used to seeing ads in streaming.
"The supply has grown significantly over the last few years," said Maureen Bosetti, the chief investment officer for Mediabrands. "It's created a marketplace for marketers."
Makers of streaming video ads are also becoming more ambitious. It's not enough for an ad to be seen — they'll try to get viewers to take action, whether by clicking a QR code or dropping a featured product in their shopping cart. These interactive ads could get higher price tags at a time when streaming ad prices have come down.
"As a consumer, I'm seeing more of them," Jessica Brown, a managing director of digital investment at GroupM, said of interactive streaming ads. "We're getting more pitches from the streaming partners. You can measure success in a different way."
Warner Bros. Discovery recently rolled out two such formats. "Shop with Max" identifies items in TV shows and films and matches them with relevant advertiser products that viewers can shop while they watch. "Moments" uses AI to figure out themes, sentiments, and on-screen elements that line up tonally with the advertiser's message.
Fubo recently announced four ad formats, including ones that show trivia questions or polls and product carousels. Fubo said such ads made people 47% more likely to purchase something compared with standard video ads.
"A big objective we have is to make a majority of ads have some form of interactive or engaging feature," Krishan Bhatia, an NBCUniversal exec who was hired by Amazon to lead its Prime Video ads push, said at a recent event. "What brands love about it is not just the fact that you generate a potential purchase off it but people are spending more time with your brands."
In the US, oxtail was once considered a cheap and undesirable cut of beef. That's because it's mostly bone and fat, with only about 40% usable meat. But as it's become more popular in recent years, its price has jumped to $14 a pound. Now, oxtail's longtime fans are fighting to #MakeOxtailCheapAgain.
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Mysterious sightings of what are believed to be drones are stumping authorities, who still can't fully explain what's behind the recent activity in New Jersey and other East Coast states.
Dancers at the New York City Ballet go through about 7,000 pairs of pointe shoes each year. That's because traditional pointe shoes break down after only a few wears.
All of them come from Freed of London, which has been one of the world's leading ballet-shoe manufacturers for nearly 80 years.
We went behind the scenes with the New York City Ballet and Freed of London to see how pointe shoes became such a big business.
Shutterstock's approach to AI integration focused on the user experience.
dusanpetkovic/Getty Images
Shutterstock added gen AI to its stock-content library to generate $104 million in revenue.
The company has partnered with tech giants including Meta, Amazon, Apple, OpenAI, and Nvidia.
This article is part of "CXO AI Playbook" — straight talk from business leaders on how they're testing and using AI.
Shutterstock, founded in 2003 and based in New York, is a global leader in licensed digital content. It offers stock photos, videos, and music to creative professionals and enterprises.
In late 2022, Shutterstock made a strategic decision to embrace generative AI, becoming one of the first stock-content providers to integrate the tech into its platform.
Dade Orgeron, the vice president of innovation at Shutterstock, leads the company's artificial-intelligence initiatives. During his tenure, Shutterstock has transitioned from a traditional stock-content provider into one that provides several generative-AI services.
While Shutterstock's generative-AI offerings are focused on images, the company has an application programming interface for generating 3D models and plans to offer video generation.
Situation analysis: What problem was the company trying to solve?
When the first mainstream image-generation models, such as Dall-E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney, were released in late 2022, Shutterstock recognized generative AI's potential to disrupt its business.
"It would be silly for me to say that we didn't see generative AI as a potential threat," Orgeron said. "I think we were fortunate at the beginning to realize that it was more of an opportunity."
He said Shutterstock embraced the technology ahead of many of its customers. He recalled attending CES in 2023 and said that many creative professionals there were unaware of generative AI and the impact it could have on the industry.
Orgeron said that many industry leaders he encountered had the misconception that generative AI would "come in and take everything from everyone." But that perspective felt pessimistic, he added. But Shutterstock recognized early that AI-powered prompting "was design," Orgeron told Business Insider.
Key staff and stakeholders
Orgeron's position as vice president of innovation made him responsible for guiding the company's generative-AI strategy and development.
However, the move toward generative AI was preceded by earlier acquisitions. Orgeron himself joined the company in 2021 as part of its acquisition of TurboSquid, a company focused on 3D assets.
TK
Photo courtesy of Dade Orgeron
Shutterstock also acquired three AI companies that same year: Pattern89, Datasine, and Shotzr. While they primarily used AI for data analytics, Orgeron said the expertise Shutterstock gained from these acquisitions helped it move aggressively on generative AI.
Externally, Shutterstock established partnerships with major tech companies including Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, OpenAI, Nvidia, and Reka. For example, Shutterstock's partnership with Nvidia enabled its generative 3D service.
AI in action
Shutterstock's approach to AI integration focused on the user experience.
Orgeron said the company's debut in image generation was "probably the easiest-to-use solution at that time," with a simple web interface that made AI image generation accessible to creative professionals unfamiliar with the technology.
That stood in contrast to competitors such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, which, at the time Shutterstock launched its service in January 2023, had a basic user interface. Midjourney, for instance, was initially available only through Discord, an online chat service more often used to communicate in multiplayer games.
This focus on accessibility set the stage for Shutterstock.AI, the company's dedicated AI-powered image-generation platform. While Shutterstock designed the tool's front end and integrated it into its online offerings, the images it generates rely on a combination of internally trained AI models and solutions from external partners.
Shutterstock.AI, like other image generators, lets customers request their desired image with a text prompt and then choose a specific image style, such as a watercolor painting or a photo taken with a fish-eye lens.
However, unlike many competitors, Shutterstock uses information about user interactions to decide on the most appropriate model to meet the prompt and style request. Orgeron said Shutterstock's various models provide an edge over other prominent image-generation services, which often rely on a single model.
But generative AI posed risks to Shutterstock's core business and to the photographers who contribute to the company's library. To curb this, Orgeron said, all of its AI models, whether internal or from partners, are trained exclusively on Shutterstock's legally owned data. The company also established a contributor fund to compensate content creators whose work was used in the models' training.
Orgeron said initial interest in Shutterstock.AI came from individual creators and small businesses. Enterprise customers followed more cautiously, taking time to address legal concerns and establish internal AI policies before adopting the tech. However, Orgeron said, enterprise interest has accelerated as companies recognize AI's competitive advantages.
Did it work, and how did leaders know?
Paul Hennessy, the CEO of Shutterstock, said in June the company earned $104 million in annual revenue from AI licensing agreements in 2023. He also projected that this revenue could reach up to $250 million annually by 2027.
Looking ahead, Shutterstock hopes to expand AI into its video and 3D offerings. The company's generative 3D API is in beta. While it doesn't offer an AI video-generation service yet, Orgeron said Shutterstock plans to launch a service soon. "The video front is where everyone is excited right now, and we are as well," he said. "For example, we see tremendous opportunity in being able to convert imagery into videos."
The company also sees value in AI beyond revenue figures. Orgeron said Shutterstock is expanding its partnerships, which now include many of the biggest names in Silicon Valley. In some cases, partners allow Shutterstock to use their tech to build new services; in others, they license data from Shutterstock to train AI.
"We're partnered with Nvidia, with Meta, with HP. These are great companies, and we're working closely with them," he said. "It's another measure to let us know we're on the right track."
Bryan Johnson spends $2 million a year on longevity treatments. We spent a day with the tech entrepreneur who wants to live forever, getting a close-up look at his antiaging meals, supplements, clinical procedures, and daily exercise routine.
AI models that understand videos as well as text can unlock powerful new applications. At least, that’s what Jae Lee, the co-founder of Twelve Labs, believes. Granted, Lee’s a little biased. Twelve Labs trains video-analyzing models for a range of use cases. But there may just be something to his assertion. Using Twelve Labs’ models, […]
Before the war, Hamada Shaqoura was a food blogger. Now, he spends his days cooking to feed children and displaced people in Gaza. And he figured out a way to reach millions on social media without saying a word. His intense stare at the camera as he cooks various dishes has been easy for many to understand. Hamada finally opens up and shares his story with Business Insider. He told us why he sees food as a symbol of resistance and why it's important for him to cook food people had before the war, like chicken wings, tacos, croissants and popsicles.
