Natasha Schüll on the Antisocial Lure of Gambling

Summary

Against the Rules with Michael Lewis Episode: Natasha Schüll on the Antisocial Lure of Gambling Release Date: January 28, 2025 Host: Michael Lewis Guest: Natasha Schüll, Associate Professor at NYU and Author of Addiction by Design

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Introduction to the Episode

In this compelling episode of Against the Rules, journalist and bestselling author Michael Lewis delves deep into the world of legalized gambling with Natasha Schüll, an esteemed associate professor at NYU. Together, they explore the evolution of gambling from traditional casinos to the pervasive influence of mobile and online betting platforms.

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Understanding the Evolution of Gambling

Michael Lewis begins by acknowledging his initial assumptions about why people gamble, recognizing that motivations like making money or socializing might only apply to a subset of gamblers. However, he introduces Schüll’s groundbreaking research, which uncovers deeper, more pervasive motivations behind gambling behaviors.

Notable Quote:

"We often think of gambling as being a way to get something for nothing, and what I learned in my extended research with particularly slot machine gamblers... they're really after getting nothing, not something for nothing."
— Natasha Schüll [02:31]

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The Psychology Behind Slot Machines

Schüll explains the concept of the "machine zone," a state where gamblers lose track of time and external pressures as they engage repetitively with slot machines. This zone serves as a form of escapism, allowing individuals to detach from their daily lives.

Notable Quote:

"It's about creating a physical surround and environment that makes you feel safe and alone so that you can zone out into your own little world."
— Natasha Schüll [09:44]

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Technological Advancements and Their Impact

The shift from mechanical to digital slot machines in the late 1970s marked a significant turning point. Schüll highlights how advancements in computer and video screen technology enabled casinos to manipulate odds more precisely, drastically increasing slot machines' revenue from 20% to 90%.

Notable Quote:

"Once you've got so-called virtual reels inside the machine, you can really manipulate how a particular payout schedule can feel when you're interacting with it."
— Natasha Schüll [05:41]

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Cultural Perceptions and Gender Stereotypes in Gambling

Historically, gambling in casinos was gendered, with slot machines perceived as games for women and older individuals, while table games attracted men. Schüll discusses how these stereotypes are breaking down, especially with the rise of online gambling, which attracts a more diverse demographic.

Notable Quote:

"More and more it's pretty equal the amount of men that play these machines versus women... with sports betting and mobile betting, you're seeing a complete reversal of that stereotype."
— Natasha Schüll [08:00]

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Designing Addictive Gambling Environments

Schüll provides an in-depth analysis of how casinos are meticulously designed to prolong gambling sessions. From architectural choices that avoid right angles to create a seamless flow, to the use of soothing sounds and subdued lighting, every element is crafted to keep gamblers engaged and isolated.

Notable Quote:

"Right angles put you up against a stopping point... you want to just curve them where you want them to go."
— Natasha Schüll [09:44]

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Transition to Digital Gambling and Its Implications

As gambling has migrated from physical casinos to smartphones and online platforms, Schüll observes that many of the same addictive design principles persist. Mobile gambling apps eliminate friction by offering constant access, removing social barriers, and ensuring continuous engagement through algorithmic design.

Notable Quote:

"The same strategies... carry over from the bricks and mortar casinos to anything on the website or online."
— Natasha Schüll [18:42]

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The Allure and Risks of Sports Betting Apps

The conversation shifts to the emergence of sports betting apps and their unique design elements that foster addiction. Schüll explains how these apps employ techniques similar to slot machines, such as removing natural endpoints and creating a perpetual betting environment that capitalizes on behavioral incentives.

Notable Quote:

"You're keeping someone continually engaged and hooked into the flow of the game... it makes a lot of sense that when the game comes to an end, they're going to want to keep playing it."
— Natasha Schüll [40:06]

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Guidance on Introducing Gambling to Teenagers

Addressing a personal anecdote from Lewis about his son experimenting with sports betting, Schüll offers nuanced advice. She emphasizes the ubiquity of gambling-like behaviors in modern apps and recommends fostering self-awareness and critical thinking in teenagers to navigate these environments responsibly.

Notable Quote:

"What I would recommend is trying to have the neuroscientist riding alongside in his mind as a kind of layer of awareness... trying to understand how am I reacting to certain things, how are they manipulating me."
— Natasha Schüll [29:32]

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The Predatory Nature of the Gambling Industry

Schüll critiques the gambling industry's manipulative strategies, labeling it as "asymmetric collusion" where casinos thrive on revenues while gamblers seek personal escape. She underscores the ethical concerns surrounding the industry's understanding and exploitation of psychological vulnerabilities.

Notable Quote:

"They are preying on the gambler's total uncertainty about what they're going to get... it's asymmetric collusion."
— Natasha Schüll [36:20]

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Conclusion and Future Discussions

Michael Lewis wraps up the episode by thanking Schüll for her insightful contributions and hints at future discussions, including an upcoming conversation with Dr. Laurie Santos about the impact of sports betting apps on teenage males.

Final Notable Quote:

"Against the Rules is written and hosted by me, Michael Lewis... [closing remarks]"
— Michael Lewis [40:43]

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Key Takeaways

• Design Manipulation: Both physical and digital gambling environments are meticulously designed to maximize engagement and revenue by fostering addictive behaviors.

• Technological Influence: Advancements in technology have transformed traditional gambling, making it more accessible and harder to escape due to seamless integration into everyday devices.

• Gender Dynamics: Shifting stereotypes are leading to a more balanced demographic in gambling participation, especially with the rise of online platforms.

• Addiction Mechanisms: Constant accessibility, removal of social barriers, and algorithmic unpredictability contribute to the addictive nature of modern gambling applications.

• Ethical Concerns: The gambling industry's strategies raise significant ethical questions about the exploitation of psychological vulnerabilities for profit.

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Further Resources

• Book Mentioned: Addiction by Design by Natasha Schüll
• Next Episode Teaser: Interview with Dr. Laurie Santos on the impact of sports betting apps on teenage males.

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This episode offers a nuanced exploration of the intricate relationship between gambling, technology, and human psychology, shedding light on the subtle yet powerful forces that drive addictive behaviors in both traditional and modern contexts.

Transcript

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[Michael Lewis]

Pushkin welcome back to against the Rules, everyone. I'm Michael Lewis. I'll admit I came into this season of the show with some conventional ideas about why people gamble. Of course, some people think they can make money, but also maybe they just want to impress people or hang out with their friends while at a game or a casino. And maybe that's true for a subset of folks who like to bet. But that overlooks all the gamblers who play the slots.

[Natasha Scholl]

We often think of gambling as being a way to get something for nothing, and what I learned in my extended research with particularly slot machine gamblers, which are the golden geese of the industry, revenue wise, that they're really after getting nothing, not something for nothing.

[Michael Lewis]

That's Natasha Scholl, an associate professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at nyu. She was trained as an anthropologist and she did more than a decade of work in Vegas casinos, especially among the.

[Natasha Scholl]

Slot machine Players, they're after what they call a kind of machine zone where time and space and daily demands and worries fall away and they go into a kind of rhythmic flow of repetitive action that zones them away from the world.

[Michael Lewis]

Natasha's book Addiction by Design is a fascinating look at everything from casino design to the digital overhaul of Las Vegas. And she makes a very compelling case that slot machines explain not just what's happened in Vegas, but what's but in the world far beyond, including the world inside our smartphones. Natasha had a big effect on the way I think about gambling and I wanted you to hear our conversation in full.

[Interviewer]

How'd you get interested in this in the first place?

[Natasha Scholl]

On my way out to Berkeley for college freshman year, I had a layover in Vegas and greeting me for my two hours I spent there was these banks of machines right there at the exit. And I said, what an odd place this is. So when I became an anthropology major, I decided that would be an interesting topic to explore. And it kind of went from there.

[Interviewer]

And at that point it's all in Vegas.

[Natasha Scholl]

All in Vegas. Vegas I took as a sort of site or case study for looking at this turn in the market both away from the sort of the baccarat and the greenfell tables toward slot machines, this more sort of childlike arcade, innocent seeming form of gambling as being the revenue lion for the city. But also looking at the Disney ification of Las Vegas and the way they were appealing, democratizing gambling, appealing to the mass market.

[Interviewer]

What's the history of this? When does gambling take this turn?

[Natasha Scholl]

Gambling takes this turn right in line with certain developments in computer technology and video screen technology. In the past, slot machines would bring in maybe 20% less of revenue. And they pretty quickly, over about a decade, a decade and a half, went to bringing in 80 to 90% of revenue. And this was all because of the technology changes and how they enabled the operators and the game designers to manipulate odds in far more precise ways, appealing to people who are sitting in front of them. So you could think of it as a sort of algorithmic turn.

[Interviewer]

When is this though?

[Natasha Scholl]

Late 70s. Some of this technology is coming on the scenes and it's sort of right in line with the personal computer developments. They start playing around with putting this technology into slot machines, moving away from the analog three reels with 22 stops on each reel. That's really constraining in terms of what you can do with a machine like that. But once you've got so called virtual reels inside the machine, you can really, really Manipulate how a particular payout schedule can feel when you're interacting with it. So that really was the turn. Curious.

[Interviewer]

If I'd have walked into a casino in Las Vegas in the 1960s, how would it have looked different?

[Natasha Scholl]

So people would have been dressed a lot more elegantly. And you might find slot machines standing around by the check in counter, maybe in hallways and kind of on the peripheries of the main gaming areas, really, to serve the wives and to serve people who are waiting. They typically didn't have chairs because you weren't really meant to spend a lot of time at them.

[Interviewer]

You said for the wives.

[Natasha Scholl]

Yeah. There is a long standing association in this country with women and these, what we think of as these little tedious arcade like games. So we associate them not only with women, but with older women. Right. The cute little old ladies going to Atlantic City. We associate them with kids in arcades. Sort of like the equivalent to knitting in gambling. And there is something knitting like about it when you talk about the kind of repetitive flow and zoning away from yourself that you get into. But it turns out that that flow doesn't select by gender if you don't have those stereotypes hanging around. And more and more it's pretty equal the amount of men that play these machines versus women. And with sports betting and mobile betting, you're seeing a complete reversal of that stereotype, associating women with these little apps that you engage with.

[Interviewer]

So this is a cultural artifact. This is like we sort of channel women towards slot machines and men towards the real men's games in the middle of the casino.

[Natasha Scholl]

Yeah. Even in the literature on problem gambling, there's a split between so called escape gambling and so called action gambling. And guess who the action gamblers are. There's also an interesting social history about how men sought out this kind of character contest. Especially in the 50s and 60s when life was relatively boring and you were probably a middle manager or a bureaucrat. And so you had to seek your thrills and your risks and your sort of confrontation with other men on the gambling floor. Whereas what women in those days and in the 80s and beyond articulated in their addiction and relationships with these slot machines was much more of a getting away from people. You would often find that those in service positions, waitresses, nurses, accountants, wanted nothing more than a sort of relief or a respite from people. So it was kind of the opposite tendency. Turns out though, that that's more of a cultural phenomenon than one that we can link to gender. And a. Really to prove that point, one could go and look at the case in Russia where you had young men in their twent and they were the ones who played the exact same games with the same mathematical algorithms as the 60 year old women in the US back in the 90s, huh?

[Interviewer]

So explain to me how this what the casino does to shape the experience and shape people's behavior around the slot machines.

[Natasha Scholl]

I begin with the very bricks and mortar strategies of architecture and interior design. There are giant casino design manuals. And you know, if you go to Vegas yourself, I encourage you to look for this. Look down as you're walking and you will be hard pressed to find a lot of right angles, because right angles are a no, no. Right angles put you up against a stopping point, into a position of a decision maker where you've suddenly got, oh, now I must make a decision. It sort of forces you to decide, am I going left or right? You don't really want to put people in the stance of a decision maker, engaging their prefrontal cortex, engaging their rationality and responsibility. You want to just curve them where you want them to go. And so there's pages and pages in these casino manuals about how you have to gently curve people over into the gaming areas. And then once they're in the gaming areas, you don't want to have a lot of overhead space as you might in a church or a big modernist arena. You really want to bring the ceilings down and make people feel that they're going into cozy little sanctuaries or caves. And this is the language that is in these manuals. It's very lyrical almost about creating a physical surround and environment that makes you feel safe and alone so that you can zone out into your own little world. Because that is very lucrative for the establishment. They also do it with so called casino atmospherics, paying close attention to the acoustics, the way the sound bounces, not having too many bright lights or flashes that draws your attention away from the machine. You just want to keep it at the machine. One company designed all 400 of the sounds on its slot machines to be in the thought, to be soothing. Key of C to keep people. It's almost an ergonomics if you think about it. It's an ergonomics of sensation that extends from the body to one's whole being. This is kind of counterintuitive to the way that we think about gambling, which is much more of a volatile, suspenseful risk operation. And that's what you see in all of the ads for casinos. But as I'm sure you Know, if you've walked into any casino, really, the attitude is more one of a sort of expressionless face, a reclining posture and maybe a slight tapping of the finger is about all the movement that you would see.

[Interviewer]

You know, it's advertised and kind of thought of as a social experience. But when you walk through a casino, you're not seeing people interacting with each other.

[Natasha Scholl]

No, it's really about being away from other people. And what really drove this home for me was when gamblers kept talking about how oddly disappointed and anxious they would become when they won a jackpot. And I really tried to understand. I said, talk me through this. And they said, well, suddenly the game stops playing, right? You can't keep going. Your flow is interrupted. LOUD MUSIC PLAY PLAYS People look over at you. And that really struck home for me, like it's. It's antisocial what they were doing. They were precisely trying to get away from themselves and away from the social world. So those things we see in the ads with groups of people crowding excitedly around a machine is really not the way that it plays out for slot machine gambling.

[Michael Lewis]

So I don't want to interrupt the flow too much, but we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, Natasha and I talk about how casino design translates onto that little slot machine in our pockets, the smartphone.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

This year at Pushkin, we've been able to work with some of the world's biggest brands on creating bespoke content. Whether it's a custom episode in partnership with a brand or a creative ad campaign, we want to be sure that our content reaches people. But the ad space is incredibly noisy. How do we ensure our content reaches the right audience? That's where LinkedIn ads come in. With LinkedIn ads, you can precisely reach professionals who are more likely to find your ad relevant. As you will have direct access to a billion members, 130 million decision makers and 10 million C level executives. You can target your audience by job title, industry, company and more, ensuring your ads reach the right people for your business. Start building the right relationships and reach your audience in a respectful environment with LinkedIn ads. We'll even give you a $100 credit on your next LinkedIn ads campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com Malcolm to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn.com Malcolm. Terms and conditions apply. Hello. Hello there. This is Malcolm Gladwell from Revisionist History. Ready? Let's go. We're getting in the special car.

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[Natasha Scholl]

Whoa.

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[Speedy]

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[Malcolm Gladwell]

Oh, it goes so fast.

[Speedy]

Let's go.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

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Yeah.

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Spadey, was that fast again? Oh, yeah.

[Natasha Scholl]

Okay.

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[Malcolm Gladwell]

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[Michael Lewis]

I'm back with Natasha Scholl, author of Addiction by Design.

[Interviewer]

As more gambling moves out of the casino and just into the phone, is there anything from any of this design that can be applied by the bookies, by the gambling companies to to affect the behavior of someone who's Gambling digitally.

[Natasha Scholl]

Absolutely. All of the strategies that I just talked you about, without even touching on math yet show up there. And these are strategies of removing friction. The same way that you remove friction from a carpet. By removing a decision point, you're removing friction from the flow of the app, you're making it stickier, you're not increasing what they call in the gambling industry time on device, but you're certainly increasing time on site. You know these, these terms and these strategies so neatly carry over from the bricks and mortar casinos to anything on the website or online. So if you look closely at some of these apps that I've just mentioned, you will find all manner of slot machine strategy. You'll even find bars lining up, you'll find confetti. So so many things all geared to keep you in that zone.

[Interviewer]

So I sit down at the slot machine. We're going to see analogies too when we look at just our phone. That keeps me going and gets me addicted.

[Natasha Scholl]

Yeah. One of the big challenges that they were facing was that they were basically saying, ugh, our market is dying out. What are we going to do? Like we're basically going to go extinct because our gamblers are 50 to 60 year old women. How do we bring in the youth? Then they said, oh, it looks like, you know, young men are liking playing this online poker. So let's try to import dimensions of online poker into the casino. So you would see poker tables that instead of having actual dealers, would have avatars and while you were waiting to take your turn, because you know, if you're, if you're online playing 20 tables at once, which is often what online poker players do, you're not going to want to wait sitting there to take your turn. So they would give you a screen on which you could play other games, usually more profitable to the house than poker while you were waiting for your turn. So they were throwing all sorts of technology and schemes at the casino floor, trying to draw in young men. Nothing really was working. They were also at the time fighting very much against mobile gambling. So if you just look back at the history of how the industry has positioned itself, they were absolutely lobbying, throwing all they had against the coming tides of mobile or online gambling. Then around 2017, they just capitulated. They said, we have to accept this is the direction that things are going in. So we're just going to get on the train. Let's get on the train. And now with so many states offering legal sports betting, you see with DraftKings, with Caesars, in so many cases, this embrace of mobile online gambling. And the truth is the young men like it. Not just the young men, but you know, it's also getting women over into sports betting, which has never been the case.

[Interviewer]

Is that true?

[Natasha Scholl]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Interviewer]

I didn't know that.

[Natasha Scholl]

I mean, just it's the same exact rhetoric as you saw with Robinhood app and others that so called democratize day trading in part by making it friendlier. You didn't have that experience of being a woman who had no cultural background. And in sports betting you're very unlikely to want to walk into a sports book with the old guys in there and figure out what a prop bet is. But you can do that online. It's very friendly, no one is watching, your friends are maybe doing it. So yeah, we've seen. Not only has has the gambling industry found a way to really entice men in and sort of bring them over into other areas of gambling. It's been a way to bring women into sports betting.

[Interviewer]

If I put you in charge of a sports betting app, knowing what you know about slots and women, what would you encourage them to do to encourage more women to become addicted to sports gambling?

[Natasha Scholl]

Some of the things that a company might think it should do, which are just sort of laughable and absurd, but might work a little bit, would be, you know, changing the tones, making a sort of. I remember, I remember there was one case on the casino floor where they figured out that men exiting a sort of dirty review show were bothering young women who were playing and, you know, giving a lot of their money to the casino. And the casino didn't like this. So they advertised directly to all those women in their 30s saying, we have created a women's only slot shelter for you. We have decorated it in lavender, we have special little drink cups for you. Come be pampered like you're in a spa. It was sort of like a spa slash slot shelter which was just so interesting gender wise. And it did actually increase their revenue. So the aesthetics do count. And if you make it less like all black with white and these sort of macho truck like symbols and sort of, you know, do a little ab testing, throw in some lavender, see what comes up.

[Michael Lewis]

So don't you all run out to that lavender slot shelter just yet. We'll be right back.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

This year at Pushkin, we've been able to work with some of the world's biggest brands on creating bespoke content. Whether it's a custom episode in partnership with a brand or a creative ad campaign, we want to be sure that our content reaches people, but the ad space is incredibly noisy. How do we ensure our content reaches the right audience? That's where LinkedIn ads come in. With LinkedIn ads, you can precisely reach professionals who are more likely to find your ad relevant. As you will have direct access to a billion members, 130 million decision makers and 10 million C level executives. You can target your audience by job title, industry, company and more, ensuring your ads reach the right people for your business. Start building the right relationships and reach your audience in a respectful environment with LinkedIn ads. We'll even give you a $100 credit on your next LinkedIn ads campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com Malcolm to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn.com Malcolm. Terms and conditions apply. This is Malcolm Gladwell from Revisionist History. So we are, we're sitting in what.

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[Malcolm Gladwell]

And describe the way in which it's been modified.

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[Malcolm Gladwell]

Not even a steering wheel as far as I can tell.

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Yeah, right now there's no steering wheel. Although I can fix that in a second.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And what's the appeal of a late 80s BMW 325?

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[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Car Enthusiast]

Let me give a little, a little sneak peek. I need to connect the battery. The battery is disconnected.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Wait, the battery's in the backup.

[Car Enthusiast]

The battery is actually under the rear seat.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Oh, I see. Just. That's it. That's so it has an absolutely perfect balance between front and rear. Rear. Rear way.

[Car Enthusiast]

Exactly.

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[Malcolm Gladwell]

So yes. Turn it on, let's hear it.

[Natasha Scholl]

Oh, yes.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And this is you. This is your first BMW.

[Car Enthusiast]

My second.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Oh, no, Lucas, you can't say that. Wait, what was your second? What was your first?

[Car Enthusiast]

It was a 1989 535i.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Oh yes, this is. But you own that with a bunch of other people.

[Natasha Scholl]

Yeah, yeah.

[Car Enthusiast]

So this is my first. My true, my first, you know, sole BMW. Solely owned, solely on rear.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

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[Michael Lewis]

I'm back with NYU's Natasha Scholl. Back when we recorded this interview, I was still planning the previous episode in this feed, the one where my son Walker set up with a sports betting account as a kind of experiment. I wanted to get Natasha's advice on all this.

[Interviewer]

So his neuroscience teacher is going to try to explain to him what's going on in his brain as he gets into this. Do you think it's a bad idea to introduce my 17 year old to sports gambling?

[Natasha Scholl]

So I don't know that it's that bad of an idea because that suggests that there's something super unique about this, that this is sort of like some intense heroin like thing that could turn you for life. When in fact, and this is a point I always like to make and those who would like to use my voice to sort of speak against the gambling industry don't always like it when I do this. And this is to observe that these gambling apps are part of a wider ecology that extend not only to Candy Crush, but also to like apps for regulating your diabetes management or even your banking. It is so around us. And the idea that your 17 year old boy would not have already encountered in spades this, this kind of stuff floating around in social media is, is just not realistic. Right? So this is just going to be a sort of focused case for him of something that I think he's already very familiar with. What I would Recommend is trying to have the neuroscientist riding alongside in his mind as a kind of layer of awareness. So he's almost doing like anthropology of himself. Autoethnography. Right. And I think that that kind of awareness isn't entirely protective, but in general, it's a great way of going through the world, sort of watching how am I reacting to certain things, how are they manipulating me? That's a good attitude to have. I think anything that came in front of you as it's going to come in front of your son, you can sort of have a rubric for performing an audit of how odious or dangerous it is. And so my rubric has four things on it, and one of them is the easy and constant access. So we know, we've known for a while in the bricks and mortar landscape that if you live 50 miles or closer to a casino, you are probably that's 50% more likely to develop a problem. So I like to think about the mobile phone and sports betting that is five inches, right? So it's just constantly there. The portal is open, it's inviting you, it's there. So you've got this, this easy and constant access, no friction. Right. There's also a removal of the social component. It's very solitary. That seems to be something which is fertile ground for these kind of machine zones that one could get caught in and continue to seek out in a kind of addictive way. And you might be thinking, but really, does it really remove the social component? When we're talking about sports betting, there's so many other people. There's this whole culture to it, and there's like athletes on the field. The truth is, when you are doing this betting, it is you and your phone. Just like when you're doing online dating. There's an odd way in which it removes the other people and turns them into a game. And there's a lawsuit going on right now against hinge that says this is going on. Right. So instead of going out and having a date, you end up in your bedroom swiping left and right. And so this is kind of the equivalent. You're not going on an outing with the buddies to this racetrack. You are with your phone constantly clicking away. It's very solitary and you can go your own speed. Another thing is that there is no natural end to the things that seem to grip us most tightly in this clique economy. You might say, oh, but in sports there is. It's built in because the game ends, the race ends. Right. That used to Be the case addiction researchers in gambling used to talk about, oh well, sports isn't so bad because the event frequency is 1, whereas the event frequency for a slot machine could be 1200 hands an hour. You can only run one horse race an hour. This is no longer the case when you bringing in apps and technology, because if you've still got that energy for doing this kind of betting, it seamlessly transfers over to. You could find your people say they find themselves betting on basketball in Belgium or ping pong in China. You know, time zones don't even matter anymore. You're not even constricted by space or time. So you can just keep flowing and think about it. There is no natural end. So it's the availability of continuity, another sort of removal of friction. And then, you know, the final thing is just to go back to our friend B.F. skinner, and perhaps your son has already had that high school class about behaviorist science. A Skinner box is a setup, usually with levers or little lights, and whatever mammal is in there is going to be like pecking to see what comes next. And he found, after experimenting with a vast array of different sort of output schemes, different algorithms, you could say that the one that's going to keep you pecking, ignoring your water and ignoring your friends is the one where you never know how much is coming out and you never know when. If you know that you peck 10 times and you get your pellet, you'll peck 10 times, you'll get your pellet, you'll go play with your friends. Not so if you don't know, there's something about that uncertainty. And what the slot machine and what so many of these apps that we've been talking about do is they're constantly sort of opening that interval of uncertainty. And then you can reveal it and then you can open it again. So it's open, closed, open, closed, and it's very, very fast. So it sort of exceeds the capacity of the brain. Maybe the neuroscientist will talk about this to your son. To compute and process what is going on and you really just get caught in this flow.

[Interviewer]

You know what's interesting about that is I'm just thinking maybe this is a stupid thought, but with slot machines, the user is experiencing it as uncertainty, but the casino is totally certain that if you sit there long enough, you're going to lose all your money. It's calibrated that way and you just can't perceive the deep certainty that's there.

[Natasha Scholl]

This is sort of the argument that I'm making. About why it is predatory is because you've got this giant, well financed corporate apparatus that can use numbers in a way, both algorithmically and in terms of its overall revenue. They know absolutely, certainly down to decimal points, what they're going to get. And they are preying on the gambler's total uncertainty about what they're going to get. So I call it asymmetric collusion. You know, they both want the playing to be happening, but for utterly different reasons. The gambler wants to zone out and the corporation wants its revenue.

[Interviewer]

The sports book, I suppose, might be designed in a way that's similar to the slot machine, that if you play enough with it, you're gonna lose, although I don't think they actually are. I mean, a sharp player can come in and beat the book in a way a sharp player can't come in and beat the slot. But the sports themselves are genuinely uncertain.

[Natasha Scholl]

Yes.

[Interviewer]

So this thing that makes it so naturally addictive is hardwired into the product in a way it's not in most casino games.

[Natasha Scholl]

Well, interestingly, the slot machines that are most high earning today, and this is maybe since the 2000s, are called multi line slot machines. And when I say multi line, I mean like 500 lines. And so instead of betting on one row of symbols across and then you win or you lose, then they folded in three, they added two diagonals to make five. And then when you're talking about physical reels, they maxed out once video technology came along, and virtual reels and computers, they're able to allow you on a computer screen to bet sideways diagonal scatter shots. So you don't even know where the things are lining up. Just dots and you can't really even tell what's going on. And then if you think about it, each bet is a moment of learning and reinforcement in the behaviorist sense. So if you're betting hundreds of times instead of just once on the outcome of the game, each one of those bets is yet another moment of sort of reinforcing the behavior or sort of pulling them into it. So I think it's pretty clear why it would be more addictive in the. In the online interface, there have been calls to ban multi line slot machines because it seems that the higher the number of lines you can bet on, it's almost like diversifying your portfolio. You put 100 pennies on the machine and you win 40 back, then you put 50 in and maybe you win 60, then you put the 60 in and you win 20 and you're just going along so fast and most of the time you're not actually winning, you're losing, but you're taking more time to lose and along the way you feel like you're sort of winning all along. And this has been the real formula of giving people more time on device so as to take more of their money during that time. That's the formula of the gambling industry and you can see it a little bit. You can draw that parallel to the in game betting. You're keeping someone continually engaged and hooked in to the flow of the game. So it makes a lot of sense that when the game comes to an end, they're going to want to keep playing it.

[Michael Lewis]

Thanks so much to Natasha Schull for a fascinating conversation and check out her book Addiction by Design Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. By the way, I'm not done with you guys yet. Next week I speak with Dr. Laurie Santos, host of the Happiness Lab here at Pushkin, about how the sports betting apps take advantage of the teenage male brain.

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But I think adolescent brains in general are like prone to risk taking and prone to really seeking out belonging in whatever form it's sort of presented. And so I feel like these cues to belonging are especially salient to to young boys too.

[Michael Lewis]

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 Sarah Bruguerre. 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.

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