Name: Watch Author Molly Bloom Speak at MPW Next Gen
Uploaded: 2019-12-18
Duration: 13 min 31 s
Description: A look inside the true story of a high-stakes adventure in the world of underground poker

Watch Author Molly Bloom Speak at MPW Next Gen

Leadership

A look inside the true story of a high-stakes adventure in the world of underground poker

So this is Molly's first interview anywhere about the movie, which comes out on Christmas Day. Molly Bloom, played by Jessica Chastain. Um, so I was saying to someone yesterday that I used this line. If you think your life is dramatic No, no, meet Molly Bloom. So I'm gonna give. I'm gonna give briefly as I can, just a little bit of background, because it's helpful to know the sort of basic parameters of Molly Story. She was the number three freestyle mobile skier in in North America headed to the Olympic. She had an accident. She decided to go to law school and, like many of us, decides to take a year off. So she moved to L. A. From Colorado, and she gets a job in offices and her boss is a poker player, and her boss invites her to the poker game to basically do some kind of Erin kind of work for him. Molly knows nothing about poker. She's learning. She works for him, she decides, run our own game. You basically Mali started building a startup, and you've got consumed by it. Like a lot of the people in this room tend to get And how do you look at yourself as an entrepreneur who got consumed and got a little over her skis? Well, that's certainly what happened, and I in retrospect, I think that it was the motivations that I had for wanting to be successful that were somewhat dysfunctional and somewhat missed. Directed I was I grew up in a very high achieving family. My brother is a two time Olympian and played in the NFL. My other brother is a Harvard surgeon, and while I was good at school, I was I was a good student and I was a good athlete. I always felt invisible in that family, and I mean literally, if you weren't the best in the world in my family, you just it wasn't impressive. And so I was I was. I was looking for this thing that was going to make me feel fulfilled inside that was going to put me on the map and in a weird way, I felt in this weird rabbit hole and found this opportunity and looked at it as a start up and approach it as an entrepreneur and I was really good at it, really good at it. and I built these games and they were the biggest games in the world and I was very successful and I finally had that thing. And I think that that what led to the compulsive nous to chasing it so far down the line. So when you started, uh, running the games, it was a $10,000 buy in and you built it and built it. And the clientele who included Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire and many famous names. Some we know, some we don't know, how high did the stakes get? I had a regular game that was the $250,000 buy in. It was in New York and it was Wall Street guys for the most part. And, um, people were winning and losing millions of dollars every night. And this game sometimes went to two times a week, and then I would have one off where people, you know, they wanted to play even higher stakes. And I was I was guaranteeing the money. I was bankrolling the games. I was vetting the players and extending this credit. So my life was really stressful. I didn't have the traditional recourse to collect on a debt, and I certainly wasn't going to be violent about it. I mean, I'm not scary on I and I and I, you know, put my foot down there. So my my life was a constant that sheet. And how much money were you making? Personally, I can tell you, in just 2009 and I paid my taxes on my illegal business in 2009 my tax returns showed over $4 million. And were these all tips that you were made? So, um, for a long time, they were tipped. And let me just clarify on tips here because I was extending this credit because these people wouldn't come to the game with, you know, millions of dollars in a suitcase. I had to extend credit, which meant I was loaning them. I was vouching for them to be able to make this money. So when they would win a big number, Um, they were tipping me because I had allowed that Not because I was bringing them drinks in the beginning was about bringing them drinks, and but it really was. I was extending the credit to them. Um, and you know, sometimes those those hips. We're really big. I mean, I saw someone lose one night $100 million $100 million. Now he was playing poker and backgammon and betting on, you know, it was madness. But that was a structure there and then ultimately, at the end, because I had made some poor judgment. So many poor judgment not, huh? I was I had been quite often, you know, it I was I had made some really bad call. So I started taking a percentage of the pot in the last 78 months of my career. And, um, to kind of cover that downside as more of an insurance. And that's where I crossed that little gray line. That got me a little trouble. So everyone who built the startup thinks about picking, serving the right clientele and picking the right customers. And you vetted your customers and you were very disciplined about it. And then some of the customers turned out to be members of the Russian mob on Maybe vetting isn't my future. Molly. What? What do you consider your undoing? Was ambition was agreed? Wasn't naivete, was it? Molly got addicted to drugs after being very disciplined and allowing no sex, no drugs. She ran a very disciplined operation. But you got to the point where drugs were the only thing that could keep you going. I think it was all those things. I think you pretty I think he summed it up pretty well, huh? And yes. And, you know, these games sometimes lost in three nights and I could do with my money on the table. So I felt like I needed to stay up. I couldn't have just ended the game. That would have been the intelligence today over, um and so I I crossed over that line and I did. I got I was in way too deep with greed, with drugs, with, um trying to hang on to the thing that had been that has established me, legitimized me. You know, there's so one of the things that we've been talking about this for the last two days. The issue of sexual harassment, the movies, the movies. Terrific. And I was fascinated watching it, seeing how disciplined Molly, the Jessica Chastain played character waas in terms of not letting these guys play with her or, you know, harassed her or I mean, talk about a testosterone fused environment and you were just all business And how, in light of what we're reading about now and personally dealing with now, in terms of sexual harassment, you were in the ultimate, potentially sexually harassing environment. How did you deal with it? And did you ever let that part of it let it slip? Well, you know, I don't want to compare my experience to someone else's who has, you know, run into a much more challenging situation. I didn't There wasn't. There wasn't a Harvey Weinstein in my game, but they're certainly Waas overtones of what we're talking about here. And but it changed for me really quickly in the beginning, when I was serving drink when I was googling. What do poker players like to listen? Like, Who are these people trying to learn their lingo trying to understand them? This naive girl from a small town in Colorado working for someone else. There was a lot of like, uh, you're cute. Let me, you know, take you to dinner, buy you an apartment like all this stuff, you know? And then when I became the bank and I started extending credit. It was like, I'm not gonna pay you that $25,000 like no way. And I'm like, Okay, so I guess the apartment, It just changed my role dramatically. I was no longer this object of desire. I was someone who, uh, either let them have more money to play this game that they wanted or didn't. And that changed the dynamic pretty radically. Well, to the extent that sexual predators prey on people women who are less powerful than they are, you became more powerful than they were. Okay? Yes, right here, up front. So this is a personal question. If you don't want to answer, I understand. But the way you described your family now, seeing a little bit of the trailer and understanding what you went through, what's the family dynamic like? And how did that all play out? Um, it was hard on them. Uh, and to their credit, they have, then incredible. Um, my father and I had to do Ah, a lot of work, you know, on on our relationship. Um, you know, they were very disappointed. I got federally indicted. I, um I went to rehab. I mean, there was a lot of fallout, and they saw this thing kind of spinning out of control and came to me and warned me, and I didn't heat it. So I would say that it's better now than it's ever been. And it's pretty amazing. These type of things either completely shatter it or bring about healing. And and luckily, it spend the ladder. Sure. Yeah. Absolutely. Yes. One more question over over here. Yeah, time only. Please identify yourself. My name is Anna, and I work at Barclays. Obviously that you know, your story is pretty extraordinary. But you still created this incredible business that did say March and then oversee that would fall out out of that. But you're young and over. He still have a lot of energy. What happened next? Um, I get asked that a lot right now, and I wish I had a perfect answer. Answer for you. But for the last, you know, I got arrested by the FBI and indicted in 2014 and that time I wrote and published a book that completed my 200 hours of community service. And I worked very closely with Aaron in the research phase in the writing of the movie and then Aaron Sorkin. This is his dick directorial debut, by the way and on. And then I took six months of six months, seven months. I went back home, I did a lot of soul searching. And, um, you know, I got to be intellectually curious. I got kind of look at what these things and what were the things in my life that led me to make these choices. And I also landed on this realization that success I needed to redefine success. And it had to be about something that was bigger than myself and outside of myself. So I'm looking at some things right now. I don't feel, you know, solid enough to really pitch them to this room. I feel like I've really legitimate to do that. But, um, I'm just kind of keeping my options open and seeing what's out there. Molly will be with us. Think evening at the reception, so please come up to our and she's eager to meet all of you. So my job. Molly, thank you. And let's all go see the movie on December 25th