This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

Rock paper scissors is an elegant game dating back a couple thousand years.

It hasn't always been rock, paper, or scissors, but the principles were always the same.

Conflicting items in opposition, thrown by hand, simultaneously, with a zero-sum

outcome.

You win, you lose, you draw. It's so simple and straightforward that anyone can understand it and play it, which is why it has spread everywhere in the world.

The only non-intuitive aspect is the fact that paper beats rock, which defies our lived experience with both

papers and rocks. But I am not here to nitpick. For as long as Rock Paper Scissors has existed,

it's been useful as a peaceful way to settle disputes.

It's not as random as a coin toss because you're playing against another human.

It has enough randomness to feel fair, but enough skill to feel satisfying.

Which leads us to one of the most high stakes game of rock paper scissors I've ever heard of.

Reported by our own Joe Rosenberg originally for the brilliant

brilliant show, Snap Judgment.

Here's Joe Rosenberg.

So our story is going to start with this guy.

The Lord, I'm practically making love to this microphone now.

His name is Jonathan Rendell.

I'm a deputy chairman of Christie's in America who spent a lot of his time in the late 80s, earlys selling material to Japan material meaning art and in the

mid 90s to the mid 2000s going back to Japan to get everything back that I'd sold to them 10 years before.

The extraordinary thing was you'd go to a trunk room,

which looks like that last scene in the Raiders of the Lost Ark, you know, there's things in boxes going on forever and open a box and in the box would be a work of art or several works of art and you would pick the object up and you would look on the back of it and you would find your handwriting from 10 years ago.

...