Episode 8: The Integrity Landscape

Summary

Against the Rules with Michael Lewis: Episode 8 – The Integrity Landscape

In Episode 8 of Against the Rules with Michael Lewis, titled "The Integrity Landscape," host Michael Lewis delves deep into the burgeoning world of legalized sports betting in the United States. This episode, released on January 7, 2025, examines how the normalization of sports gambling is reshaping American sports culture, impacting athletes, fans, and the very essence of fair play.

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Introduction: The New Era of Sports Betting

Michael Lewis sets the stage by recapping the previous parts of the season. In the first part, he explored the journey of sports gambling's legalization and its growing acceptance in American society. The second part dissected the sports gambling industrial complex, highlighting how giants like FanDuel and DraftKings have monopolized the market, promoting an influx of bets that are both numerous and often ill-informed.

Michael Lewis [02:24]: "In part two, we laid out how the new sports gambling industrial complex works, how it came to be dominated by two companies, FanDuel and DraftKings, exquisitely designed to maximize both the number of and the stupidity of sports bets that Americans make."

Lewis emphasizes that while the industry may not have consciously aimed to create gambling-related tragedies, its unchecked expansion is inadvertently fostering them.

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The Role of Integrity Monitors

Central to maintaining fairness in this new gambling landscape are integrity monitors. These individuals are tasked with overseeing betting activities to detect insider trading and other malpractices that threaten the integrity of sports.

Matthew Holt [10:06]: "When abnormalities are identified, you send those abnormalities out for requests for information from every licensed operator in the country."

Matthew Holt, the creator of the first independent licensed integrity monitor, explains how sophisticated algorithms and vast data analytics are employed to spot irregular betting patterns. For instance, an average bettor like Michael placing an unusually large bet on an unfamiliar sport would immediately trigger an alert.

Despite these measures, Holt acknowledges that the system primarily catches the "dumb insider traders."

Matthew Holt [14:08]: "That's one point about integrity monitors. They're pretty good at catching the dumb insider traders."

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Impact on Professional Athletes: Larry Nance Jr.'s Story

Professional athletes are particularly vulnerable in this environment. Larry Nance Jr., a power forward for the Atlanta Hawks, shares his firsthand experiences with the pervasive presence of sports betting in professional basketball.

Larry Nance Jr. [03:31]: "There are gambling signs and gambling advertisements. We can't even watch playbacks of our game without seeing, you know, FanDuel DraftKings or whoever advertising, you know, the player props or futures going on."

Nance describes the cyberbullying and harassment athletes face from bettors who place personal prop bets on their performance.

Larry Nance Jr. [04:27]: "If you log into social media before or after any game... people are begging you to hit a certain amount of rebounds or points... They either praise you or absolutely curse you out for it being your fault that they lost money."

This personal vendetta from bettors adds immense pressure on athletes, blurring the lines between professional performance and individual responsibility.

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Scandals and the Fragility of Integrity

The episode highlights several scandals that have emerged due to the new sports betting craze. From Jontay Porter faking injuries to Casejon Boudet placing exorbitant bets on his own games, the integrity of sports is under siege.

Michael Lewis [11:41]: "It doesn't sound like they were that smart about it."

These incidents underscore the challenges integrity monitors face in safeguarding sports from corruption. Many wrongdoing individuals are caught due to their blatant mistakes, but more sophisticated schemes remain elusive.

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The College Sports Conundrum

College sports present a unique challenge. With over 520,000 athletes across various sports, the temptation to engage in betting is widespread, especially among college students.

Michael Lewis introduces Charlie Baker, the former governor of Massachusetts and the current president of the NCAA, who discusses the alarming statistics and pressures faced by college athletes.

Charlie Baker [30:13]: "60% of 18 to 22 year olds bet on sports. And the numbers were higher for those that were on college campuses."

Baker highlights the harassing and threatening messages athletes receive from bettors, which often escalate beyond mere frustration over game outcomes.

Clint Hunkabrau [31:33]: "We've heard about one over March Madness that was kill yourself for taking that three, you fucking worthless loser. Slit your fucking throat."

These abusive interactions not only tarnish the athletes' mental well-being but also jeopardize their academic and professional futures.

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The Complex Integrity Landscape

Navigating the integrity landscape is akin to traversing an intricate rainforest, with numerous companies and varying standards across states. Each state employs its own integrity monitors, leading to a fragmented and often inefficient system.

Michael Lewis [15:17]: "The integrity landscape in sports gambling is complicated. Less like a wheat field in Kansas than a rainforest in Borneo."

This disjointed approach allows savvy insider traders to exploit loopholes, such as using different sportsbooks across state lines to evade detection.

Matthew Holt [15:06]: "Because at the end of the day, and if it's different operators across state lines, what we are seeing right now is, is more competition in the integrity landscape."

Despite these challenges, integrity monitors have increased the number of detections, though primarily of less sophisticated offenders.

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Long-Term Consequences and Social Implications

Clint Hunkabrau, Charlie Baker's head of risk management, expresses deep concerns about the future implications of unchecked sports betting.

Clint Hunkabrau [35:53]: "My heart is palpitating... there's a whole generation of young people that... found themselves gambling and had just extremely negative consequences on their lives."

The episode paints a grim picture of a future where the pervasive influence of sports betting undermines the integrity of sports and the well-being of its participants.

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Conclusion: A Call for Comprehensive Reforms

Michael Lewis concludes the episode by emphasizing the invisible yet destructive force of sports gambling. Unlike tangible issues like drinking or smoking, sports betting subtly erodes the relationship between fans and athletes, embedding itself into the fabric of American sports culture.

Michael Lewis [36:37]: "What it lacks. Integrity."

The episode serves as a stark warning about the potential long-term damage of the sports betting industry and calls for more robust measures to protect the integrity of sports and the individuals who make it what it is.

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Notable Quotes

• Matthew Holt [10:23]: "These integrity monitors are kind of doing for illicit sports gambling the Kinsey Report once did for sex, showing us all what everybody else is doing."

• Larry Nance Jr. [05:16]: "So what do you do to defend yourself? I mean, I don't mean physically. I mean, just like, just like to make sure this isn't making your life miserable."

• Clint Hunkabrau [35:53]: "We're failing a generation, if that's what we look back at 10 to 20 years."

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Final Thoughts

The Integrity Landscape offers a comprehensive examination of the intricate and often perilous relationship between sports and gambling in contemporary America. Through insightful interviews and real-life examples, Michael Lewis underscores the urgent need for systemic reforms to preserve the sanctity and fairness of sports against the encroaching influence of sports betting.

For those unfamiliar with this episode, it's a compelling listen that sheds light on the unseen battles waged to maintain integrity in the face of an ever-expanding gambling industry.

Transcript

[Michael Lewis]

Pushkin. This year at Pushkin, we've been able to work with some of the world's biggest brands on bespoke content. But the ad space is incredibly noisy. How do we ensure our content reaches the right audience? That's where LinkedIn ads come in. You can precisely target professionals by job title, company and more, making sure your message lands with the right people. Cut through the noise and reach your ideal audience. Get a $100 credit on your next [e-mail]. malcolm. Terms and conditions apply. All right, here we are. Welcome to the third and final part of our season. In this last part, we'll be giving you secret tips so you can make a killing.

[Matthew Holt]

I was able to completely change my life around. From making $0 to now making of.

[Larry Nance Jr.]

Thousands of dollars from sports betting. During this entire journey, I found seven key habits.

[Matthew Holt]

I wish I knew earlier.

[Michael Lewis]

Just seven key habits. How hard can it be? I mean, even Eric Andre is doing. It's Broncos time. I'd take the over. Take the over. Over to YouTube.

[Larry Nance Jr.]

Everybody's going to hate me for this. But day 307 of betting $100 every.

[Matthew Holt]

Single day of the year.

[Larry Nance Jr.]

I won $500 yesterday.

[Michael Lewis]

Every day is a new day, but it only counts if you put some money down on it. You need to be more like me or Kevin Hart.

[Matthew Holt]

A home run will have you crying.

[Michael Lewis]

Like it's the birth of your child. Michael. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're in the wrong script. Oh. Oh. Go to V2. I mean, you know, I never, never realized how important it was to have an editor. Thank you, Julia. Yeah, so that was the old script. I guess I wrote that somehow before we decided to be the only podcast that refuses ads from sports gambling companies. Ah, here's the new one. Here it is. Welcome to the third and final part of our season. It's. It's not about how to make a killing gambling on sports. No, it's about how to prevent sports gambling from killing you. There we go. That's better.

[Matthew Holt]

Okay, let's roll the theme.

[Michael Lewis]

I'm Michael Lewis, and this is against the Rules. In the first part of this season, we told the story of how sports gambling came to be legalized and normalized in the United States. In part two, we laid out how the new sports gambling industrial complex works, how it came to be dominated by two companies, FanDuel and DraftKings, and exquisitely designed to maximize both the number of and the stupidity of sports bets that Americans make. I don't think anybody consciously set out to create as many gambling related tragedies in the United States as possible. But in effect, that's what this new industry is doing. Now we're going to turn to the future, like where all this might be headed. And the best way to see the future is always just to look a bit more closely at the present. We're going to start our tour of the present on a basketball court.

[Larry Nance Jr.]

There are gambling signs and gambling advertisements. We can't even watch playbacks of our game without seeing, you know, fanduel draftkings or whoever advertising, you know, the player props or futures going on.

[Michael Lewis]

That's Larry Nance Jr. First round pick of the Los Angeles lakers back in 2015. Now he's a power forward for the Atlanta Hawks. The NBA forbids its players from gambling on basketball, but they still have to live in the same world as the rest of us.

[Larry Nance Jr.]

I know, obviously, no betting, no tipping, no fixing, but it's like, come on, guys, he just at least try to hide it from us. Like, you know, this is still a passion of ours. This is a job of ours that, you know, you're making just the sheer, almost like a mockery of. It feels like.

[Michael Lewis]

Are you ever made aware of, like, the specific bets people might have made on you? Like the prop bets social media will.

[Larry Nance Jr.]

If you, if you log into social media before or after any game, before the game you have people begging you to hit a certain amount of rebounds or points or whatever it is, and after the game you either have somebody praising you or absolutely cursing you out for it being your fault that they lost money.

[Michael Lewis]

Is it different than it was when they were just upset or happy that the team won?

[Larry Nance Jr.]

Oh, significantly. Significantly, yeah. It's the kind of language used is drastically different than just like losing a basketball game or having a poor performance. But now when somebody thinks you lost them money because it was my job to get your seven rebounds tonight, you know, then, then they, they get very animated if you don't hit that number.

[Michael Lewis]

So it's, it's kind of. It gets personal.

[Larry Nance Jr.]

Oh, very much so, yeah. Attacks on family, attacks on just anything they can lash out on, they will use and lash out.

[Michael Lewis]

So what do you do to defend yourself? I mean, I mean, I don't mean physically. I mean, just like, just like to make sure this isn't making your life miserable.

[Larry Nance Jr.]

Oh, I, I mean, I, I didn't, I didn't ask you to put money on me for me. Like, I, I honestly, I have no desire to hit anybody's number. I hope, I hope nobody ever bets on me ever. Like I. I genuinely hope nobody ever bets on me because I just don't care about your specific agenda. So you can tweet at me anything you want. And my honest reaction is like, shouldn't have bet now.

[Michael Lewis]

Larry Nance isn't even close to the focus of gambling interest in basketball. I love watching him play, but he usually comes off the bench, and hardly anyone except sports gamblers pay attention to how many points he scores. But even he senses the new danger in the air.

[Larry Nance Jr.]

We played in Memphis, I think, and we were staying there that night, and I didn't hit my player prop, which I don't know why you're betting on me, but I got a message while we were in Memphis that was like, hey, better not leave your hotel room tonight. And it was just like, you know what? I don't know if that's credible or not, but regardless, I'm probably gonna stay in my hotel room tonight.

[Michael Lewis]

This moment in Larry's story, it reminded me of someone we heard from a few episodes ago. Jeff Gordon, the recovering gambling addict. As a kid, Jeff had been a huge basketball fan, but after he started gambling on the sport, his love curdled into something else. What triggered my mind, that I think I have a problem, is I was pissed at the player because I was a quarter of a point away from being in first place and winning more money, and I was pissed that.

[Matthew Holt]

That.

[Michael Lewis]

Player didn't score one more basket or give one more assist. And I just remember hating Andre Iguodala for so long. And it's like, why? Of course, fans have always wanted things from players. There's nothing new about that. What's new is the tone of their desire. Less a want, more a need.

[Larry Nance Jr.]

Like, you know, when you go sign autographs or something pregame or go sign autographs for people getting on the bus, they'll be like, hey, how's Zion feeling tonight? Or as a nasty fall, how is he? And you got to look at them and go, like, fine. You know, just one word. Fine. Good. I don't know.

[Michael Lewis]

More and more, what fans want is information and edge.

[Larry Nance Jr.]

There's been multiple occasions where, like, you can tell someone's come up digging for information. When you don't give it to them, they're like, come on, man. Like, come on, just, you know, help me out this one time. Like, I don't know you. No.

[Michael Lewis]

The players always know stuff that would be useful to gamblers. The players are also seeing gambling happening all around them on them. To Larry, it seems pretty clear what's coming next.

[Larry Nance Jr.]

I Think there's going to be a lot of players getting in trouble. A lot. I mean, a lot of players getting in trouble.

[Michael Lewis]

Trouble. That's what's coming. We've already seen a trickle of it, but the waters are rising and you can feel the flood on its way. And so can everyone involved in any sport that's being gambled upon. The entire sports industrial complex is a bit like those poor people in western North Carolina who were told they lived in a flood zone but had never seen a flood. And then came the rain. One of the amazing things about the new sports gambling industry is just how totally unconstrained it is. Zero restrictions on advertising, for example. Zero punishment for pushing gambling on people already prone to gambling addiction. Zero consequences for designing diabolical apps that nudge gamblers into making dumber and dumber bets. We're still at a stage where the industry is promising to police itself. And apart from limiting the bets of sharp sports gamblers, there's really only one thing the industry is doing to prevent maximum havoc. It's trying really hard to catch and punish anyone who trades on inside information. Each and every one of the states that have legalized sports betting also now employs a sports betting insider trading detective. This person is called an integrity monitor.

[Matthew Holt]

So all you're doing is monitoring the market for abnormalities. When abnormalities are identified, you send those abnormalities out for requests for information from every licensed operator in the country. Hey, did you also see any abnormal wagering here?

[Michael Lewis]

That's Matthew Holt, who created the first so called independent licensed integrity monitor. Because Matthew got there first. Matthew's company took the best U.S. integrity. And so tell me what you're monitoring in the marketplace for number one.

[Matthew Holt]

And the easiest would be, hey, Michael bets $100 a game on average on football. So we have a betting pattern for Michael. We know he likes to bet football. He usually bets 100 to $200. But now he wants to bet $20,000 on the first set of a tennis match. Hmm, very abnormal. Or you know, Michael bets 100 to $300 on baseball every day, but now he wants to bet 15,000 on first round KO in an MMA match. Well, he never bets MMA and he never bets more than a few hundred dollars. Boom. That's going to trigger someone to look into that match.

[Michael Lewis]

These new sports gambling companies have more data on their customers than all the casinos in history combined. The integrity monitor sifts through most of it, hunting for betters who clearly know something they shouldn't.

[Matthew Holt]

Why are we getting all these new accounts signing up just to bet one wager, severe odds movement is something that definitely triggers the system and would have an analyst further investigate.

[Michael Lewis]

These integrity monitors are behind the recent uptick in sports gambling scandals. One week, Jontay Porter of the Toronto Raptors NBA team fakes an injury and pulls himself out of a game so his creditors can make money, betting that he won't score as many points as he could have. Next thing you know, a wide receiver for the New England Patriots named Casejon Boudet is arrested for placing 8,900 bets while he was a student at LSU. Some of those bets were on his own games. Back in the old days, people who argued for legalizing sports gambling said they could prevent these kinds of scandals once insider trading was easier to detect. No one would dare do it. Well, not really. Instead, it seems that the easier it is to trade on inside sports information, the more insider trading there will be.

[Matthew Holt]

Brad Bohannon was a college baseball coach at the University of Alabama who with a group of his friends had got into some gambling debt and they came up with an idea to make some money. They were playing LSU on a Friday night when LSU was the number one team in the country. And the coach came up with an idea that he wouldn't tell anyone he was going to make a pitching change to a basically an outfielder relief pitcher who had not started any games and didn't have any experience.

[Michael Lewis]

Corrupt sports bets are a bit like weird sex acts. You hear about them and think, nah, no way anyone would do that. But a good rule of thumb in life is that anything some human being has imagined, some human being has done. And apparently some human being imagined a college baseball coach hired to teach and improve a bunch of young men rigging a game against his own players.

[Matthew Holt]

When one of the betters attempted to place a six figures wager at a sports book, you know, the, the people behind the counter started asking him questions. You know, they realized that he was actually communicating with the coach on the phone at the time. We were able to collect that evidence, video surveillance evidence, and end up showing that they were putting together a pretty big scheme. And they had four people betting in four different places.

[Michael Lewis]

It doesn't sound like they were that smart about it.

[Matthew Holt]

They weren't? No. And at the end of the day, you know, sometimes we joke that we certainly catch America's dumbest criminals.

[Michael Lewis]

That's one point about integrity monitors. They're pretty good at catching the dumb insider traders. People who work for pro sports teams placing bets from inside their training facilities, for example, and who are instantly Caught by the sports app's geolocation feature and reported to the league office. I'm told that's happened a lot, but there's just no way that everyone trading on inside sports information is that dumb. If you were the Alabama coach and you were advising the people how to place the bets so that they didn't get detected, what would you tell them?

[Matthew Holt]

Number one, you want to try to place the bets in person if possible, because again, once you sign up for an account, there's this huge digital footprint with all of your information. Make sure that it's across state lines.

[Michael Lewis]

Why? Why do you want to make sure it's across state lines?

[Matthew Holt]

Because at the end of the day, and if it's different operators across state lines, what we are seeing right now is, is more competition in the integrity landscape.

[Michael Lewis]

The integrity landscape. I love that phrase. The integrity landscape in sports gambling is complicated. Less like a wheat field in Kansas than a rainforest in Borneo. There are a bunch of companies like us Integrity. Each state with legal sportsbooks hires its own integrity monitor with its own set of data on wagers.

[Matthew Holt]

And let's say that I knew that there's five big sports books, and I can use a different sportsbook in each state. And of those five big sports books, three of them use different integrity monitoring providers. Well, suddenly, one bet at one sportsbook might not trigger the alert. But if each integrity monitor only saw one or two of the bets, and each operator also only saw one of the bets, they're not likely to report, and you're more likely to get away with it.

[Michael Lewis]

Still, it's true that they're catching a lot more people trading on inside information than ever have been caught in the history of sports. Matthews says that they're now like 150 busts a year. So these integrity monitors are kind of doing for illicit sports gambling the Kinsey Report once did for sex, showing us all what everybody else is doing. And is there a pattern to why they do it?

[Matthew Holt]

You know, it's. It's crazy some of it. You know, it just goes to the competitive nature of athletes in general. When you think of, like, Calvin Ridley and Jameson Williams and some of the NFL suspensions just as examples, those guys were betting such inconsequential amounts of money. Calvin Ridley was hurt. He wasn't even playing. He certainly wasn't trying to manipulate any matches.

[Michael Lewis]

The insider trading is often totally irrational. I mean, you think that a guy making millions of dollars as a player wouldn't risk them by making sports bets, but they do. And you would Think that if they're going to take that risk, they'd at least make very big bets. But they don't.

[Matthew Holt]

Hunter Deckers, the starting quarterback at Iowa State who lost his eligibility. His average bet size was $7.22. $7.22. And he lost his entire collegiate career.

[Michael Lewis]

And why?

[Matthew Holt]

And why? I don't know. Just.

[Michael Lewis]

He's bored.

[Matthew Holt]

Boredom, I guess. Yeah. You know, some of those guys, especially in college, live such regimented lives. You get up, you have team practice and breakfast, and you're basically told what to do all day. Every day is scheduled out for you. But the one thing they can't control is those little gaps you have in this device that's in your hand. So I got 15 free minutes. I can't actually go anywhere and do anything in that 15 to 18 minutes, but I could take out my phone and mess around.

[Michael Lewis]

One way to think of sports gambling is as a massive new market for information. All sorts of information that no one thought twice about can now be used immediately to make money. And not just information that most people used to pay zero attention to. Like, I don't know whether the quarterback for some obscure college football team just came down with pneumonia. I'm talking about information that would never have occurred to anyone ever in the history of man to have financial value.

[Matthew Holt]

We saw some significant betting on this basketball game. The line moved like four points.

[Michael Lewis]

This was a college basketball game before which the odds shifted in a big way, even though there was no new public information.

[Matthew Holt]

And then one of these syndicate betters called us and said, hey, I heard that this team is stuck on the tarmac with mechanical issues. They're going to make it to the arena, but not in time for warmups. And we know in football and basketball, if you miss your stretching slash warm ups, those teams lose every time.

[Michael Lewis]

Is that true every time? I didn't know that.

[Matthew Holt]

It is. Yeah. They lose over 90% of the time, and usually in blowout fashion.

[Michael Lewis]

Moments after the pilot announced the delay of the team's flight, the sportsbook started seeing bets from people who had obviously heard about it because it took the integrity monitor only 7 minutes to get the news.

[Matthew Holt]

And in that timeframe, you know, it somehow got in the hands of syndicate bettors who bet all this money. And one of them even had time after making all those bets to call us and give us a heads up to like, hey, if this keeps happening, you know, here's what's going on.

[Michael Lewis]

Information moves so fast, so fast that the modern world really hasn't gotten its mind around it so fast that there's no way it won't run wild over any integrity landscape. The various sports leagues are really trying hard to prevent this from happening. They want to turn the American fan into a habitual gambler that keep everything else about American sports as it was before gambling invaded and, well, good luck with that. First, let's just talk about how you chose where you were going to go. Like, you could have gone to any college in America. You go to Kansas, right? Why?

[Lydia Jean Cott]

I chose Kansas because we had two possible weekends where we could do this reporting trip because of our production schedule. And I was looking for places that had games that were a big deal for students, like on those weekends that had direct flights from, like, New York and California.

[Michael Lewis]

That's, of course, Lydia Jean Cott, my producer. I usually hate the sort of journalism we're about to do, you know, where some reporter or pundit talks to some supposedly representative person or visit some supposedly typical place to take the pulse of the nation. But we made an exception here because going to the University of Kansas felt more like testing a scientific theory. The theory was that you could pick any random college, and so long as it had fraternities and a football team, you'd find some huge potholes in the integrity landscape. Right now, 520,000 athletes compete in 24 different sports at hundreds of colleges. And you can place bets on lots of them. Not just on the teams or on the games, but on the kids. Like whether the freshman guard on the Temple University hoops team will score more than 10 points in tomorrow morning's game. And if you saw him passed out at a frat party the night before, a prop bet might seem like the opportunity of a lifetime. So we dropped LJ at random into a college, the University of Kansas. She'd just been basically kicked out of all the sportsbooks for committing the sin of placing smart sports bets. So she now had time on her hands to talk to the people the sports gambling companies just love.

[Lydia Jean Cott]

So, yeah, so the first thing I did is I went to this kind of student coffee shop in Lawrence, and I met with two student reporters, and one of them was Chad Cushing. He's a multimedia editor at the University Daily Kansan.

[Matthew Holt]

It's everywhere. It's absolutely everywhere. I mean, any morning of a game day in class, especially for basketball, I mean, the most guaranteed thing you could say to break the ice almost, if you find another boy that you sit next to is like, hey, what's the play tonight?

[Larry Nance Jr.]

You know, what's our Hawks moneyline Hawks Moneyline.

[Matthew Holt]

Hawks Moneyline. Hawks Moneyline. People get.

[Lydia Jean Cott]

That's Ben Hook. He's a sophomore and the sports editor.

[Matthew Holt]

Like, tattoos.

[Lydia Jean Cott]

What's Money line mean?

[Larry Nance Jr.]

So Moneyline is they win out, right?

[Matthew Holt]

Yeah, it's just you win picking the winner. And if. If the Hawks are going to win, the Jayhawks are going to win.

[Michael Lewis]

Hawks Moneyline.

[Matthew Holt]

People get Hawks Moneyline. Like tattoos.

[Lydia Jean Cott]

When people get Hawks money line tattoos, I've seen crazy.

[Matthew Holt]

Yeah. I mean, Hawks, Hawks, Moneyline. Yeah, yeah. On the inside of your lip, it.

[Lydia Jean Cott]

Says Hawks Money Line.

[Larry Nance Jr.]

I made. I made good money on Hawks money Line last year.

[Michael Lewis]

So. So you. You talk to the journalists, and the journalists lead you to the real people.

[Lydia Jean Cott]

Yes. They tell me that where I need to be is in this place called the Triangle.

[Michael Lewis]

Like the Bermuda Triangle.

[Lydia Jean Cott]

Exactly. And it's three bars, kind of in the middle of nowhere, like, not near anything else that don't really card. So, like, I heard that freshmen work as the bouncers of these bars, and they'll accept anything as an id, Even, like, a Pokemon card.

[Michael Lewis]

Taking me back. You're taking me way back. You're taking me back to when I was, like, 12 years old in New Orleans.

[Lydia Jean Cott]

And I'm supposed to be there at, like, in the Friday afternoon because they have something called free Beer Fridays.

[Michael Lewis]

And so Friday afternoon, before the big game against arch rival Kansas State, Lydia Jean enters the Bermuda Triangle. Five bucks.

[Matthew Holt]

Come on.

[Charlie Baker]

Five bucks.

[Matthew Holt]

It's for a good cause.

[Lydia Jean Cott]

The fraternities have set up these tables in front of the bars where they have plates of shaving cream, and if you pay $5, you can throw the plate onto their faces, I guess, to raise money for cancer.

[Michael Lewis]

One day, someone will study all the things Americans have done to raise money for cancer research and notice that some of them almost certainly cause cancer.

[Lydia Jean Cott]

So there's, like, long lines outside of these bars, and then there's people congregating around these tables of shaving cream plates.

[Michael Lewis]

Okay. How are you feeling in this crowd?

[Lydia Jean Cott]

Oh, terrified. Absolutely terrified. Yeah. Like, every single cell in my body was like, do not be here. But I. I did my best to stay.

[Michael Lewis]

I knew she'd stay. I've said this before, and I'll say it again. My producer has the gift. Forgetting the story. People forget just how dangerous she is.

[Lydia Jean Cott]

Are you guys winning? Overall?

[Matthew Holt]

Probably not.

[Larry Nance Jr.]

Probably losing.

[Matthew Holt]

I'm definitely down. Money down a lot. I'm.

[Michael Lewis]

I've got a lot of cash up.

[Larry Nance Jr.]

Up in fun, though.

[Lydia Jean Cott]

Like, how.

[Larry Nance Jr.]

How down are we talking overall? Yeah, we're talking hundreds, thousands, probably in the lower hundreds.

[Matthew Holt]

Thousands. Might be. Might be.

[Michael Lewis]

I'm hundreds.

[Matthew Holt]

I like to say hundreds. Yeah, I would say lower hundreds.

[Lydia Jean Cott]

And what's your guys strategy? Sports betting strategy?

[Larry Nance Jr.]

I.

[Matthew Holt]

You just wait for someone who's due.

[Larry Nance Jr.]

And then you just hammer it.

[Matthew Holt]

Kind of just.

[Michael Lewis]

Two related points here. Most of these people are under 21 years old. So whoever's accepting their bets is breaking Kansas state law. Also, none of them have any idea what they're doing still. It's obviously a total blast. Everyone's just hammering everything while getting hammered. They ought to make the Kansas mascot a hammer. Are they at all nervous about talking about what they're doing?

[Lydia Jean Cott]

So I will say that I eventually started being like, don't tell me your names. Because when I asked them originally I would say, can you introduce yourself? And then that I kind of felt like I was getting like marketing material. Like it's so bad what they're doing to the youth or whatever. So eventually I was like, don't tell me your name and tell me about sports betting. And then the interviews got a lot better. But before I went to the Triangle, I actually spoke to this guy who used to be on the football team. His name is Jack Jackson.

[Matthew Holt]

Being friends with people who weren't athletes, they'd be like, oh, like what do you think about. Do you think we're going to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like are we going to cover it?

[Lydia Jean Cott]

Do you feel like people were like trying to like in a squirrely way, get, get.

[Matthew Holt]

Yes, yes, yes. And K, you did a very good job of media training every single one of us. Even like my closest friends, they'd be like, oh, what's like the game plan? I'd be like, I don't know, I can't tell you, like, not going to get in trouble over something silly.

[Michael Lewis]

There are few laws that ban insider trading in sports. You can't get put in jail for it or even fined. You can only get in trouble with your team or your school or your league or of course your sports bookie who'll toss you out if you win too much. And so the players might feel a bit frightened to share inside dope, but the fans, they have no reason not to dig for whatever they can find.

[Lydia Jean Cott]

I found this one guy, for example, who told me that his roommate was on the football team and that he was planning to bet on the game. Are you gonna ask your former ringmate for any like, intel on the player? Props?

[Matthew Holt]

Yeah, well, yeah, well, he's in, he's driving there right now. He's on the bus. So I'm gonna text him later tonight, be like, what should I put money on?

[Lydia Jean Cott]

Do you think he'll tell? He'll tell you anything.

[Matthew Holt]

Oh, yeah, he definitely will.

[Lydia Jean Cott]

Oh.

[Matthew Holt]

Oh yeah, he definitely. 100%. He always does.

[Lydia Jean Cott]

Does what he tell you help you make money?

[Matthew Holt]

Couple of them. More college related. Cause he's college athlete, so he knows a lot more things than I do. But like NFL, he doesn't know shit.

[Lydia Jean Cott]

Right, right. But he's a player, so if he tells you stuff about the team, he'll know. That's correct. And that has helped you make money before.

[Larry Nance Jr.]

50 bucks.

[Lydia Jean Cott]

I went up to a lot of people and I heard so often that they had some way of getting inside information. A lot of times they like had me turn off the mic that I was actually googling how many people are on the football team, because I was like, how is it possible that they're talking to so many people that everyone feels like they have some sort of in on the football team? So like I have tape of me saying like, have you ever gotten inside information? And the guy is like three times and then he runs away. Add one more question. Do you think, would you say, like, find out information about people on the team? Is that anything that happens here to place their bets?

[Larry Nance Jr.]

No.

[Lydia Jean Cott]

Can you help the record?

[Michael Lewis]

No. Here's one bet I'd like to make. DraftKings. Make me a market on the number of sports bets that get placed each week on college football games by college students who think they have inside information. I don't mean winning bets. It's actually not as easy as it looks to make money trading on inside information. I just want the over on bets that threaten the integrity landscape. It's so preposterous. Right. We think, oh, the bad guys, they got them. And then every roommate of every football player in the United States is getting inside information.

[Lydia Jean Cott]

Oh, yeah. I just felt I went up to a guy with a mic and I was like, do you have inside information? And he was like, I'm texting for it right now.

[Michael Lewis]

How do we refer to you in the podcast? Governor Baker, President Baker. Charlie.

[Charlie Baker]

Charlie.

[Michael Lewis]

Is that all right? This is Charlie Baker, former governor of Massachusetts, who recently became president of the ncaa, which has got to be at least in the running for the world's worst job. But Charlie took it and did the same thing he did when he became governor of Massachusetts. He hit the road and talked to people to hear their problems.

[Charlie Baker]

We have colleges all over New England and just start talking to them about what was on Their minds. And a lot of them brought up not so much sports betting, but the harassment around it.

[Michael Lewis]

Charlie heard so many complaints, and so soon after he took the job that he commissioned to study, the numbers came.

[Charlie Baker]

Back, and they were huge. You know, 60% of 18 to 22 year olds bet on sports. And the numbers were higher for those that were on college campuses. That just puts college athletes basically in the midst of a whole community that is betting on sports. Whether they're betting on their games or betting on other people's games, they're betting on sports. And a lot of the kids on campus bet on their own teams. Why? Because they're more familiar with them. They think they know them better, and they think it's a better opportunity for them to win.

[Michael Lewis]

And the athletes you were talking to when you first took the job, some of them brought up the pressures caused by the gambling interests?

[Charlie Baker]

Oh, absolutely. It was. It was just all kinds of trash being talked at them based on their performance and how much somebody lost or how much it cost somebody or. I'll meet you outside your dorm the next time you. I see you. And I mean, really just awful stuff.

[Michael Lewis]

The NCAA now has filing cabinets filled with the horrible things that sports gamblers have said and done to college athletes. I was hoping Charlie would let me rifle through them, but he wouldn't. But still, I got a glimpse of what's inside from the guy who guards them. His name is Clint Hunkabrau. He's Charlie's head of risk management, which is another job you really wouldn't want.

[Clint Hunkabrau]

We see messages. One that we flagged this last year during our work around March Madness is if you don't get 22 points and 12 rebounds, everyone you know and love will be dead. So it's a far cry from normal fandom. You know, you suck. I hope you lose the game. And, you know, others that we've seen, and I apologize for the language, but, you know, we heard about one over March Madness that was kill yourself for taking that three, you fucking worthless loser. Slit your fucking throat. And it goes on from there.

[Michael Lewis]

Jesus.

[Clint Hunkabrau]

So again, it's not just, oh, gosh, it cost me 50 bucks, or things that are pretty innocuous like that. They're very specific, they're very threatening. You know, we've heard about a lot of student athletes receiving Venmo requests after games where it's like, you know, you effing this, you effing that. You cost me $5,000. Pay up or I'll be waiting for you outside the facility. So Just really, really specific, abusive, threatening messages with clearly a gambling nexus to them.

[Michael Lewis]

The NCAA has pushed for all the states that allow prop bets on college athletes to eliminate those bets. Very few have done so. And Charlie Baker keeps hearing these horror stories.

[Charlie Baker]

A kid will talk to me about, you know, having a dorm mate, a fraternity brother, a friend of a friend who comes up to him and says, look, you know, I need the money and I don't want you to lose the game. All you really need to do is just don't take the first shot, you know, miss your first free throw. Just, you know, small stuff. That's all I need.

[Michael Lewis]

To you, it may seem trivial if some college basketball player misses his first free throw in a game. And until roughly five years ago, no one would have thought twice about it. But now you can bet tens of thousands of dollars on whether or not that free throw is good.

[Charlie Baker]

And the problem with that is there's no end to that. And you never want, especially an 18 year old or a 17 or 19 year old to be put in a position where they're being socially pressured by people they're going to see every single day who are claiming that this is a moment of desperation for them.

[Michael Lewis]

Back in the 1970s, Charlie Baker played hoops at Harvard. He wasn't on the team at the time, but in 1978, Harvard lost a shockingly close game to a much stronger Boston College team. It turned out that several of the Boston College players had taken money from the Lucchese crime family to shave points to make the final score much closer than it should have been. Fixing games is, of course, the ultimate act of insider trading. The gambler knows for sure what will happen. But the Boston College players still screwed up. They won a game or two by too much. And the Mafia allegedly sent them a message. You can't play basketball with broken hands. Still, the Boston College players successfully rigged the Harvard game, and after it, they got caught by one was sentenced to prison for a decade. But that was just a weird one off example. Now the same kind of force is everywhere in sports. It's just the mob that's different.

[Charlie Baker]

It could be people who are, you know, who live in the dorm next to you. It could be people who live right off campus and walk through campus when you walk past. Every single day when I talk to them, the biggest thing about it is, is the challenge associated with not looking over your shoulder or not assuming that anybody you don't know could be one of these people or that people you do know could be some of these people.

[Michael Lewis]

So here we are in a new world where college athletes walk around their campuses with just a little bit of the same uneasy feeling as the Boston College players must have had when they pissed off the Lucchese crime family. And the only question really is just how much that feeling will be amplified.

[Charlie Baker]

So we're just getting into this space. And that's the other thing I'd say when people say to me, well, social media has always been obnoxious and nasty.

[Michael Lewis]

That's true.

[Charlie Baker]

But, boy, in this world, it has gotten a lot nastier in the course of the past couple years.

[Clint Hunkabrau]

My heart is palpitating.

[Michael Lewis]

Clint Huckerbrough again, Charlie's risk officer.

[Clint Hunkabrau]

You know, I think the biggest worry that keeps me up at night is really looking, you know, 10 years down the road, 20 years down the road back, and there's a whole generation of young people that, you know, went to college and ultimately found themselves gambling and had just extremely negative consequences on their lives, from their finances to their aspirations to their relationships. Like we're failing a generation, if that's what we look back at 10 to 20 years. And that's the picture that we see.

[Michael Lewis]

The integrity landscape in sports gambling. Here's maybe its most important feature. How hard it is to see all this new stuff is going on around us. But it's not like drinking or smoking or even drug use. Even as sports gambling poisons the relationship between fans and athletes, even as it seeps like a fog into American college life, the drug itself is invisible. But in this strange new landscape, one thing is clear. What it lacks. Integrity against the Rules is written and hosted by me, Michael Lewis and produced by Lydia Jean Cott, Kathryn Girardeau and Ariella Markowitz. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our engineer is Jake Gorski. Our music was composed by Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Symphonet. Our fact checker is Lauren Vespoli. Against the Rules is a production of Pushkin Industries. To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you'd like to listen to ad free and learn about other exclusive offerings, don't forget to sign up for a Pushkin plus subscription at Pushkin FM plus or on our Apple show page.

[Lydia Jean Cott]

How do you, like, decide what to put money on? What's your process?

[Matthew Holt]

I think you kind of gotta, like, do some research.

[Larry Nance Jr.]

I do a lot of Twitter research.

[Michael Lewis]

Gut feeling?

[Matthew Holt]

Yeah, only gut feeling go with homework. Never do any research.

[Larry Nance Jr.]

Emotions.

[Matthew Holt]

Only emotions.

[Larry Nance Jr.]

Emotions only it's on Twitter.

[Matthew Holt]

People like on Twitter that do, like.

[Larry Nance Jr.]

Do actual research on it.

[Lydia Jean Cott]

And are you. And you said you're doing. You've done pretty well.

[Charlie Baker]

No, I've done terrible.

[Michael Lewis]

Amazon One Medical presents painful thoughts. I could catch anything sitting in this doctor's waiting room. A kid just wiped his runny nose on my jacket, and the guy next to me sitting in a pool of perspiration insists on sharing my armrest.

[Larry Nance Jr.]

Next time, make an appointment with an.

[Michael Lewis]

Amazon One medical provider. There's no waiting and no sweaty guy. Amazon One Medical Healthcare just got less painful.