How Sports Gambling Apps Are Rotting Society

Summary

Better Offline Podcast Episode Summary: "How Sports Gambling Apps Are Rotting Society"

Release Date: February 12, 2025
Host: Ed Zitron (Tech Industry Veteran)

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Introduction

In this compelling episode of Better Offline, host Ed Zitron delves into the pervasive influence of sports gambling apps in the United States, examining how these apps are systematically eroding societal values and fostering detrimental behaviors. Joined by co-hosts Caleb Wilson and Arif Hassan, Zitron unpacks the mechanics, marketing strategies, and profound societal impacts of mobile sports betting.

The Transformation of Sports Gambling

[03:05] Caleb Wilson:
Caleb opens the discussion by highlighting the drastic shift in sports gambling accessibility. Gone are the days when one had to visit a casino in person to place bets. Now, with just a smartphone and a debit card, anyone in over 30 states (including D.C.) can engage in sports betting seamlessly.

[04:28] Ed Zitron:
Ed elaborates on the evolution, noting that pre-2016, sports gambling wasn't as normalized or easily accessible. The advent of mobile apps has removed significant barriers, making betting frictionless with intuitive designs, bright colors, and immediate deposit options.

Gambling vs. Fantasy Sports: A Legal Distinction

[05:35] Caleb Wilson:
Caleb questions the distinction between gambling and fantasy sports, noting the deceptive legal separations that apps exploit to bypass stringent gambling regulations.

[06:07] Ed Zitron:
Ed explains that unlike traditional fantasy sports, which are marketed as skill-based and require multi-faceted picks across different teams, gambling apps allow users to place direct bets on specific outcomes with real money, blurring the lines further.

Psychological Manipulation and Predatory Marketing

[27:29] Arif Hassan:
Arif discusses the overwhelming presence of gambling ads, particularly during high-profile events like the Super Bowl, where apps like Crypto.com aggressively market their services despite operating in legally gray areas.

[37:29] Caleb Wilson:
Caleb underscores the predatory nature of these apps, explaining how they use sophisticated algorithms to target vulnerable individuals, especially those from lower-income backgrounds, with personalized offers designed to maximize revenue at the expense of users' well-being.

[39:58] Ed Zitron:
Ed provides a harrowing example of how a user's behavior is monitored and manipulated through concierge services that offer escalating promotions, leading to severe financial losses and addiction.

Societal Impact: Addiction and Financial Ruin

[43:03] Ed Zitron:
Ed highlights the tragic consequences of sports gambling addiction, sharing a narrative of an individual losing their home and family due to relentless betting encouraged by relentless app promotions.

[49:17] Arif Hassan:
Arif emphasizes that this issue disproportionately affects low-income earners, exacerbating financial instability and perpetuating cycles of poverty and addiction.

Media Partnerships and Cultural Corruption

[51:35] Ed Zitron:
Ed critiques the symbiotic relationships between major sports leagues (e.g., NFL) and gambling operators (e.g., DraftKings, FanDuel). These partnerships result in pervasive advertising within sports broadcasts, subtly normalizing and embedding gambling into the fabric of sports culture.

[65:13] Ed Zitron:
Ed introduces an incident where ESPN Bet misrepresented a player's selfless act in a game as a gambling-related maneuver. This distortion undermines the integrity of the sport and shifts focus from athletic achievement to betting outcomes.

Technological Exploitation and Algorithmic Advantages

[77:02] Caleb Wilson:
Caleb draws parallels between sports gambling apps and other tech-driven predatory industries like crypto and dropshipping, highlighting how these platforms exploit user data and employ advanced algorithms to ensure profitability favoring the operators over the users.

[85:36] Ed Zitron:
Ed discusses the financial strategies of gambling apps, explaining how promotional offers are designed to entice users into losing more, thereby ensuring sustained revenue streams for the operators.

Cultural and Gender Implications

[77:02] Caleb Wilson:
Caleb points out the gendered targeting of sports gambling apps, noting their aggressive marketing towards men, reinforcing harmful stereotypes and contributing to societal issues like the male loneliness epidemic.

[79:56] Caleb Wilson:
He further critiques the neoliberal and patriarchal underpinnings that these apps exploit, promoting a false narrative of entrepreneurship and personal responsibility while masking systemic exploitation.

Personal Accountability and Systemic Failures

[82:45] Arif Hassan:
Arif argues that addressing the issue requires a systemic approach, recognizing how entrenched societal structures and tech-driven predation contribute to the problem, rather than placing undue blame on individuals.

[90:38] Ed Zitron:
Ed shares his personal experiences with gambling, emphasizing the importance of setting strict limits and recognizing the addictive nature of these apps. He underscores the difficulty in resisting manipulative tactics despite personal awareness and effort.

Conclusion

In "How Sports Gambling Apps Are Rotting Society," Better Offline provides a thorough examination of the dark side of mobile sports betting. Through insightful discussions and real-world examples, Ed Zitron and his co-hosts expose the intricate ways in which sports gambling apps exploit technological advancements, manipulate marketing strategies, and contribute to widespread societal harm. The episode serves as a crucial call to awareness, urging listeners to recognize and combat the insidious impacts of this burgeoning industry.

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Notable Quotes:

• [04:53] Caleb Wilson: "Now you can just bet money because you have an iPhone and a debit card."

• [06:07] Ed Zitron: "Fantasy is trying to distinguish itself legally from a gambling product by offering things traditionally scored in fantasy football."

• [27:29] Arif Hassan: "Most consumers... will never know the difference between a fantasy ad and a gambling ad."

• [37:41] Caleb Wilson: "They're actively advertising something that they ideally need you to lose on."

• [50:26] Ed Zitron: "All of this is about did someone win a bet on this kind of question."

• [62:47] Caleb Wilson: "Everything is either gambling or content about gambling."

• [77:02] Caleb Wilson: "It's very heteronormative. Cis heck guy like, it's very aggressively male-oriented."

• [85:36] Ed Zitron: "They ensure a sustained revenue stream by making it extremely hard for users to make money."

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Further Resources:

• Ed Zitron's Newsletter: Wideleft Football
• Arif Hassan's Podcast: Western Kabuki
• Better Offline Website: betteroffline.com

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Disclaimer: The views expressed in this summary are based on the podcast transcript provided and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the AI or its creators.

Transcript

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[Alec Baldwin]

Hey, it's Alec Baldwin. This past season on my podcast, here's the Thing, I spoke with more actors, musicians, policymakers, and so many other fascinating people like writer and actor Dan Aykroyd.

[Ed Zitron]

I love writing more than anything. You're left alone. You know, you do three hours in the morning, you write three hours in the afternoon. Go pick up a kid from school and write at night. And after nine hours you come out with seven pages and then you're moving on.

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Listen to here's the thing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Caleb Wilson]

Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I Am your host, Ed Zitron.

[Ed Zitron]

Better offline.

[Caleb Wilson]

We are sitting in my living room and we're going to talk about sports gambling today. Now, sports gambling. We're focusing on the US because this is a US focused podcast. There is a hell of a lot of weird shit in England, where I grew up, and in Europe at large with gambling. We have to focus somewhere. We're gonna focus on the U.S. now, we are in my living room in Las Vegas because it's the Super Bowl Sunday weekend. That was a great sentence that we're keeping. But nevertheless, I have another podcast. I have an NFL podcast, football podcast called the 60 Minute Drill. And I'm joined today by my co hosts on that podcast. To my left is Arif Hassan of wide left. Hello. And to my right is Caleb Wilson of Western Kabuki.

[Arif Hassan]

Happy to be here.

[Caleb Wilson]

Okay. So the reason I wanted to focus on this is because those out. I know this is happening in Europe as well, but in America, we've seen this insidious intrusion of sports gambling apps into modern life. Now, if you are not a sports fan, we're actually really gonna take great pains to explain why this is an important thing, but also why people like sports in general so that you can understand how insidious this whole thing is. So for the uninitiated, for people that don't watch sports, you will literally be watching basketball and you will get a strip at the bottom that says the odds on particular plays. You' this across every sport now. And it used to be at least. And Arif, maybe you can enlighten a little on this as well. It used to be that you couldn't just start gambling by having a phone. There was a. You had to, like, go to a casino and set it up.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, no, that was the. That was the whole setup. It. It's more complicated than that because of the way that we've defined sports gambling and how it doesn't include fantasy sports. But pre2016, you know, you couldn't really go on your phone and gamble really quickly unless you knew a couple of workarounds. There's exceptions to every rule, but for the most part, it wasn't normalized to be able to just very quickly bet on a line.

[Caleb Wilson]

And now you can just bet money because you have an iPhone and a debit card.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. And, well, some connect directly to your bank account. Oh, good. Most places will connect to a credit card or a debit card. You can connect some of them directly to a PayPal account. It's very convenient. And this is probably going to be a theme throughout the episode, but it's frictionless in many ways. And so you can navigate through these apps that have these, like, bright colors and haptic feedback and all of these wonderful reward mechanisms we'll talk about and instantly deposit, you know, $25, bet that $25, lose that $25, and then do it again, all in the span of, like, 5 seconds.

[Caleb Wilson]

And is there, like, age verification? Is there any efforts to do, like, anything to stop people underage?

[Ed Zitron]

For gambling apps, there are. For fantasy apps, there typically are, but not universal.

[Caleb Wilson]

What is the separation between a gambling and a fantasy app?

[Ed Zitron]

It is an entirely legal distinction, in my opinion. I think that there isn't much of a difference. But fantasy is legal in different states than gambling is. And so a fantasy app is trying to distinguish itself legally from, like, a gambling product.

[Caleb Wilson]

Right.

[Ed Zitron]

By offering kind of the things that are traditionally scored in fantasy football. And then they're kind of expanding beyond that. But let's say that for now, so, you know, hey, I imagine, you know that Patrick Mahomes will pass for over 225 yards in this.

[Caleb Wilson]

And that's the quarterback for the quarterback from Kansas City. Lead quarterback. The guy who throws the ball. Guy catches the ball for him, 200 yards would be the completed.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, the completed yardage of those successful passes. And so, you know, this, this fantasy app will be like, hey, do you. Or less than that. You go, well, I think he's very good, so I'm going to go more than. And then you can't actually place a bet on that. Exactly. Otherwise that would be gambling. So you have to pair it with another pick. They call them picks and not bets. And so you'd say, well, alongside that, I think that Jalen hurts the opposing quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles in this week's Super Bowl. I think he'll pass for over 190 yards. And so you combine those two and maybe three, four, five. However. Right. And that is your pick em for that week and you submit it. You put like, let's say, I'll put $20 on it. And you've got a couple of ways to do it. In gambling, they would call them, you know, parlays or teasers. But in fantasy, you just, you. It's like they're flex picks or all.

[Caleb Wilson]

And you're just betting on what a player might do effectively.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. And you can do that in gambling. Yeah, with real money. And so the fantasy distinction is that you cannot pick multiple players on the same team without adding another player on A different team.

[Caleb Wilson]

Oh, so they find a way to make it.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, so it's definitely not gambling. It's just fantasy. So you have to have multiple teams and you can't just bet on one single outcome or, sorry, you can't pick one single outcome.

[Caleb Wilson]

Right. And this is all they're trying to pretend it's skill based then.

[Ed Zitron]

Correct.

[Caleb Wilson]

Very cool. So one of the things I wanted to get into as well is why people give a shit about this. So for the. We have a lot of non sports listeners and I'm very, very aware of this and I don't want anyone to think this is going to be an hour of us just talking about like really specific sports stuff. In fact, I kind of want to explain to people who aren't in sports why people give a shit so much. Why is, why, why do you love sport? Like, what is the thing that gets you excited about this? And how does that kind of lead into this sports, Sports gambling world? Caleb?

[Arif Hassan]

Well, for me, I mean, there's a, there's a lot, you know, in, I guess as broadly as possible. We're in one of the most lonely times in human history. Right. This is one form of entertainment as opposed to something like, you know, reading a book or watching a TV show. These are predominantly things that you do alone when you're watching sports. Particularly when you go to a game or to tailgating. You're doing something that's, that's communal in nature. You're doing something that builds tradition. I think that anybody who doesn't, maybe they don't dislike sports, but they just don't understand it. Go tailgating one time immediately. It will click for you.

[Caleb Wilson]

And tailgating for the European listeners is actually kind of a fun thing where you just, outside the stadium, drink a bunch and eat a bunch. Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

People have set up like grills and.

[Caleb Wilson]

Smokers and it's very communal, like there's no money involved.

[Arif Hassan]

It's like people just do this. They spend thousands of doll of their own money just to build social bonds and to.

[Caleb Wilson]

And deadly serious. So when I went to Penn State in 2005, I remember just walking around kind of confused. I was like, genuinely was like, do I pay? And I walked up to someone who just had like a roast suckling pig. And I'm like, wow, what is that? And he goes, it's a pig. I'm like, oh, yeah. I mean. And he was like, do you want some? I'm like, why? What? Sure. And they're like, okay. And they like made me like a pile of Meat. And they were, like, cool. And then they just kind of turned away from me. Like, not in a rude way, but they went back to, like, watching, like.

[Ed Zitron]

I'm done with this.

[Caleb Wilson]

No, they just gave this random person food. But I like the tailgating example because it's the same thing in, like, a bar. It's like a thing you all get upset about together.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. And one thing that I find kind of interesting, like, you compared it to, you know, it's more communal than watching television. One thing that kind of, I recall is, you know, how excited everyone was for, like, the weekly release of, like, Game of Thrones whenever that episode came out. And that was somewhat unique because now that we're in a streaming era, people don't.

[Arif Hassan]

That's kind of gone.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. And so people don't experience shows in real time, but sports are always experienced in real time. So even if you're not going to a bar or the stadium or tailgate or whatever, you are experiencing it with an online community in real time reacting to the same things.

[Caleb Wilson]

Right. Yeah.

[Arif Hassan]

Well, that was gonna bring me to my next point. Like, it's semiotics in a way that's like, I can, in my office, put a football on my. You know, on my. On my desk or behind my desk or whatever, and somebody that comes in, they'll, oh, Seahawks fan, whatever I am. And then immediately any tension involved in a professional interaction is reduced. This is a person that I can have a normal human conversation with that I might not otherwise be able to have.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. I think a lot of our social bonds are defined and identified in ways that this is gonna sound so, like, basic, like, separate people. Right. And it's not separate as in sow division, but as in, you know, you either identify with this or you don't. Right. Is that Pokey?

[Caleb Wilson]

Yes, you are. Now, we are also joined by Pokey, one of my Bengal cats.

[Ed Zitron]

Very adorable.

[Caleb Wilson]

She's beautiful.

[Ed Zitron]

Also mischievous.

[Caleb Wilson]

Oh, yes.

[Ed Zitron]

But, yeah, like, a lot of our social bonds are through these group identities, but the identities are generally pretty harsh categories, you know, male, female. Right. Which is not to suggest. Right. That, you know, you can't be friends with men or women, but rather that this is not an area that typically you cross the social boundary and have some shared experiences. It's either kind of like an all or nothing thing. And a lot of our stratifications of identity kind of fit along those lines in a lot of ways. But with sports, you've got kind of this, like, ladder of identity that you can Find at some point, some level of connection. It can either be, you know, hey, we have the same favorite player on the same favorite team. Let's talk about, you know, how cool Patrick Mahomes is or whatever, right? Or you can go up a level and say, hey, we're both Chiefs fans. Let's talk about how cool it is to be Chiefs fans. Or you can go up a level and say, hey, we both love football. Let's talk about football. You know, whatever, right? And you can get broader and broader, and it creates something you always have a level of conversation about, but you always immediately, you know where the other person is coming from.

[Caleb Wilson]

Right.

[Ed Zitron]

Which is invaluable, I think, in a lot of social interactions.

[Caleb Wilson]

And I would say, like, I got into sports pretty much because of the Internet. Casey Kagawa, the fifth Beatle of Better Offline, he's talked over many ideas. He also got me into baseball and I got into football because I went to Penn State and the people around me all wanted to do stuff on Saturday or leave me at home. So I wanted to go to Penn State. I wanted to go to Penn State football. I was made to, but then I learned the sport, but I got into baseball almost entirely online, like it was. Casey took me to games, but he would send me YouTube after YouTube and help me discover things like, Foolish Baseball Bailey is a legend. Outstanding channel, an incredible channel.

[Ed Zitron]

And I don't even like baseball. I like that channel.

[Caleb Wilson]

And the way that this is computers, by the way, listeners, is I did not grow up in America. I moved here in 2008. I did a year at Penn State. So all of my understanding of baseball in particular is completely digital. Like Rickey Henderson, who recently passed one of the greatest players of all time. No fucking clue who he was. I had no idea. I had no idea who that was. He's so incredible. And the only reason I will ever be able to see Rickey Henderson do anything is because Foolish Baseball Bailey over there pulled together every bit of footage of this guy who played in, like the 70s and 80s. Or maybe it was just the 80s.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, yeah.

[Caleb Wilson]

And I was able to discover this guy while looking at the stats online. And I feel like that has kind of deepened the numerous ways people can access sports and get into sports and thus connect with other people. I mean, the Reddit communities can be very funny or they can be terrible.

[Arif Hassan]

Some variants, yeah.

[Caleb Wilson]

But I think it's something that I love trying to explain sports to people that don't watch them or like them or don't understand them, which leads to one or the other. Because it's like, there's something genuinely lovely about it that has, it's brought a lot to my life. Despite me being like very much a computer person.

[Arif Hassan]

Yeah, yeah. Well, there are like, say you're listening to this and you're cynical and that doesn't. That has not sold you on this. There are still like just utilitarian social reasons that sports are important too, for young people. I mean, study after study after study shows that kids that are involved in team sports or team based activities, always, almost across the board, have better outcomes in life because they're taught things like cooperation and, you know, all the things that you would learn in sports or other, you know, team based activities. But beyond that, you know, sports is like the front lines always for social issues.

[Ed Zitron]

Yes.

[Arif Hassan]

Historically, that people don't really understand. Marginalized groups that don't have a voice in politics. You are, you know, a black man or a woman. None of your elected officials look like you. They don't represent your interests. All you have is, is if you're Muhammad Ali, you can use your platform to avoid the draft. You can do Colin Kaepernick and take a knee. The U.S. women's soccer team fighting for equal pay. These are things that happen in sports because they can't necessarily happen in other avenues.

[Caleb Wilson]

Right. And I think it makes sports important to people on a level that things like the computer will never be, though I personally have proven that differently with this podcast. I feel like you get the same attachments maybe to like Marvel comics or something or like whatever fandoms they may be. But sports, I feel like, goes like one level deeper because you can have a history with the team and the team can have a history and you can have a history with friends as a result of watching. Like Casey, for example. My experience of baseball has been colored very heavily by the last five or six years of Dodgers baseball. As Kayce has desperately tried to educate me. I now get it. I now fully get the game. This poor guy, I mean, I would bring him to baseball games. So. Yeah, but it's. That is something that I will always have with one of my best friends who I love so much. And I feel like sports is singularly unique with that.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, well, especially as Caleb mentioned, we're like entering this period of increasing social isolation. There's all kinds of data on how unlikely it is that we're going to interact with people in real life, in social spaces in a lot of ways. And I think that, that, you know, all plays a really Significant role. But to speak to Kayla's point about, like, social progress and stuff like that, I think people have an understanding of, like, these are historic moments, but they don't always necessarily place them on a timeline.

[Caleb Wilson]

Right.

[Ed Zitron]

So, like, for example, Jackie Robinson spearheaded the integration of baseball in 1947.

[Caleb Wilson]

And what was the integration of baseball? Just to.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, so for a long time in baseball only, especially at the professional level, but for most of the minor leagues.

[Caleb Wilson]

I'm also going to say. I'm going to guess you're going to say a word beginning with N at some point with this. And I want to be very clear that when Arif says this, he is referring to a specific thing.

[Ed Zitron]

Yes. We'll get there. Yes.

[Caleb Wilson]

I just wanted a real warning before that should surprise anyone.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, but there was a color barrier in Major League Baseball that prevented people of color, but specifically black people, from playing baseball.

[Caleb Wilson]

Right.

[Ed Zitron]

This was enforced mostly from my understanding, without a rule. It was just. Everyone had an understanding.

[Caleb Wilson]

Everyone agreed.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, everyone just kind of agreed.

[Caleb Wilson]

We were re.

[Ed Zitron]

Employing. And so you end up with a lot of talented black baseball players that were playing in the Negro Leagues, in which there's a Negro League Museum and Baseball Reference and a couple of other statistical organizations have finally started recognizing those as official professional statistics.

[Caleb Wilson]

Right. And they did a realignment of all the stats. So, like, there's two black players who are better than Ty Cobb, who was one of the most racist men to walk the earth.

[Ed Zitron]

It's beautiful.

[Caleb Wilson]

It's wonderful.

[Ed Zitron]

But, yeah, so Jackie Robinson spearheaded the integration of Major League baseball in 1947, which is.

[Caleb Wilson]

And how did he do that?

[Arif Hassan]

Just.

[Caleb Wilson]

Pardon me. Did he, like, what did he do to spit?

[Ed Zitron]

Well, he started at first base, but yeah, I mean.

[Caleb Wilson]

Oh, he was just that good.

[Ed Zitron]

Well, I mean, he was an outstanding player. He's one of the best players we've seen statistically, you know, whatever. But no, I mean, I think. Was it. Was it. It was the Kansas City Monarchs, and then it was the. Was it the Dodgers? Are we. Yeah, it was Dodgers. Yeah, it was. You mentioned the Dodgers and the Dodgers came into my mind. Like, am I remembering that just because Ed. No, it was the Brooklyn Dodgers. So the Brooklyn Dodgers decided, like, hey, you know, like, I'm. I'm not a historian on this particular topic, but the Brooklyn Dodgers decided that this would be the time to bring in a black baseball player.

[Caleb Wilson]

And so capitalism.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, no, that definitely was a big part of it. And there's a whole history about, you know, Jackie Robinson's approach. They were very particular about the player they selected, we don't need to get into that. But nevertheless, though, it was 20 years prior to a lot of the stuff we associate with the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s. Right. And I think a lot of that is just because that's the locus of a lot of social change can occur prior to the way people understand in the mainstream in sporting arenas. And I think that a lot of people always attempt to disaggregate kind of social movements and sports without understanding that sports are not just embedded in the culture of society and the fabric of society, but very often can be like canaries in the coal mine for social change.

[Caleb Wilson]

Kind of feels like that's where the whole horrifying attack on trans athletes is really making like.

[Ed Zitron]

Yes.

[Caleb Wilson]

And by the way, if you agree that trans athletes shouldn't be in sports, I have another idea for you. So if you followed my last instructions, you should be in your garage, in your car. Now, I want to make sure those windows are up. Check all those windows now. And I want you to turn the ignition now. You may start feeling sleepy. That means that it's working. Now. Moving on, I feel like. And the reason I really wanted to explain what makes people love sports.

[Ed Zitron]

Well, there's one more.

[Caleb Wilson]

Oh, no, no, sorry, sorry. Now that I've threatened some people. Please continue.

[Ed Zitron]

No. One of the things that really appeals to me about sports is that it is one of the ultimate storytelling art forms. And you can attach yourself to a team or a player or a larger league, wide trend, whatever. But what's really cool about sports is that it constantly creates storylines, tensions, and conflicts that people can follow along and enjoy, not just in real time, which always has this added kind of oomph when it comes to storytelling, but it is truly unpredictable. We know about tropes in storytelling, and very often you can read a very good book and you recognize a trope and understand the direction that the headed in.

[Caleb Wilson]

Even some modern writing kind of like is affected by fandoms.

[Ed Zitron]

Right? Exactly. And not that tropes are bad. Tropes are a necessary element of writing, but it can impact your experience because you know the direction that the writing is going to be headed in. Just because you're familiar with the tropes. Right. And tropes are unavoidable in writing. This is not about that, but rather that we can identify tropes in sports, but that doesn't mean we know what the conclusion of this story is going to be. And so when you see someone, you know, kind of struggle through A lot switch teams five or six times or you know, whatever and accomplish, you know, this remarkable dream or this goal which can be, you know, winning the Super Bowl. Of course that's like the classic example. But some, some of the best stories are the guy made the team. There are some really outstanding stories where it's like this person went to a junior college because he didn't have the grades to make it because of the system he grew up in. Just didn't give him access to the resources he needs to get good grades. Goes to junior college, gets good grades there, transfers to a Division 2 school. And a Division 2 school for people unfamiliar are essentially multiple levels below the level that typically NFL athletes come from. But you know, maybe they go to a Division 2 school or Division 3 school where they're barely even any athletic scholarships at all. And you know, they grind it out, they work hard, they're an outstanding star player for their program and it comes time to declare for the draft. They declare for the draft. A team, no team drafts them, you know, cause there's only 256 odd picks in the NFL draft. And so then they have to advocate for themselves as a potentially undrafted free agent. These are people that get a lot less consideration when it comes to making the team, make a lot less money. It's much more difficult.

[Caleb Wilson]

So them making it to a professional team is extremely unlikely.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. And so they make what's called the 90 man roster. And from the 90 man roster they cut down to the 53 man roster. And that process is onerous. And maybe you know, that first year, that guy, you know, that guy from co college or whatever, doesn't make the team, but he makes the supplementary practice squad and then the next year he gets another opportunity to potentially make the team. He makes the team. And that's the whole story. And it rules.

[Arif Hassan]

Can I interject with my favorite example of that? Sorry.

[Caleb Wilson]

This is good. Just make sure it's like really simple for the non sportsman.

[Arif Hassan]

The Griffin brothers in Seattle. Twin brothers Shakim and Shaquille. Yeah, Shaqim is. He's disabled. He doesn't have, he doesn't have a hand. A right hand with a physical disability still makes the roster. Twin brothers, both on the Seahawks. Wonderful story.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. And when Shaquille was deciding which college to cause they both went to ucf, right? Yeah, I think so, yeah. Deciding which college to go to. He said, you have to offer my twin brother Shakim, otherwise I'm not going. And so he was like a four star recruit or something like that. Which, again, for people who are unfamiliar, there's three, four, and five star recruits. Five star recruits get recruited by the blue bloods, Alabama, Georgia, whoever. And at the time, you get a ton of under the table money. Now you just get over the table money. It's fantastic.

[Caleb Wilson]

As they should.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. But, like, you know, these are several hundreds of thousands of dollars, potentially, that these big programs can offer. And he said, no, I'm playing with my brother.

[Caleb Wilson]

That's so cool.

[Ed Zitron]

And UCF was like, yeah, we'll play both of them. And Shaquille was a really good player at the college level, too. So, like, it turned out to be a great event. But that wasn't the reason. It was because the team wanted to respect Shaquille. And they're like, well, if there's a spot for Shaquille on our program, you know, certainly he can play. And he played his way into a spot. He's actually one of the more unique players. I'm not gonna get into that. That has nothing to do with his hand. One of the more unique players, just from the way that he plays. And then, you know, he goes to a college all star game, the Senior bowl, and they're like, well, we'll see what you can do. We'll play you at this position. This position, this position, this position. Because you have a really unique body type. We don't really know what to do with that. And they're playing him in coverage, and the quarterbacks are doing their job. It feels cruel, but you got to do it. They're throwing at his coverage, at the hand that he's missing, to see how he handles not playing with the full extension that you'd normally get. And he impresses the scouts enough that he ends up making the Seahawks. With his brother Shaquille, it's an outstanding.

[Arif Hassan]

Might be a little bit into the weeds, but he worked really well with the Seattle scheme because of that kind of hybrid linebacker type.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, it's a body type. Because in football, you have a bunch of different positions, and there are kind of body types that tend to fit in those positions, and they tend to be somewhat static, and so there's very few teams that can fit. So it was kind of like a perfect situation to find the right team culture in Seattle that would encourage that kind of thing, to find the right team that had basically a position available for the type of football that he played. And it emerges as this really wonderful story where to be clear, by the.

[Arif Hassan]

Way, neither of them are still on Seattle. Shaquille is still playing.

[Ed Zitron]

He just played for the Vikings, his contract just ran out, so we'll see where he goes.

[Arif Hassan]

But point being, very short time together in Seattle and it is still top five Seahawks moments for me because of just the narrative storytelling that you were getting at.

[Caleb Wilson]

And the thing is this depth is necessary. Understanding why people are so emotionally attached to these teams and why people have such cultural awareness to really explain how evil these apps are. Yeah, because you're not just, it's not just like betting on numbers and the excitement of gambling. It's. And this is a very, very overwhelmingly wanky way of putting it, it's exerting control over something that you have even less control over than numbers, than odds. So, Caleb, you have. And Arif, I know you've written about this as well, but you've definitely complained a lot in our sports related group chat about these fucking ads as well. So describe some of these ads, the way they target people for these sports betting apps.

[Arif Hassan]

Well, I mean, it's kind of hard to pick one because it's such a deluge. It's everywhere now and it seems like I just blinked and then it was there for context. I didn't want to interrupt. Arif, what you were saying earlier when you were explaining the fantasy stuff, I had no idea about any of that because none of this is even legal in Washington state. I have never done this. I've never been able to do this right. And up until I think it was yesterday when crypto.com just said, you know what, I don't care about the laws on the state level. We're just gonna start doing this. And so you're probably gonna see ads for that on the super bowl today, I would imagine, where they're like, yeah, we're just gonna ignore the law and we're gonna advertise to you cynically that you can just do this.

[Ed Zitron]

Now, despite they offer a product that is, according to them, not gambling, which is why they can offer it in whatever state, but it functionally is gambling. It's also not fantasy, which is why they can offer it whatever. But you buy a token in whether or not a player will accomplish a particular goal or won't accomplish a particular goal, and then the token cashes out based off of the player's performance, which again, is somehow not gambling.

[Caleb Wilson]

And on a real basic level, the way they kind of trick you into believing you have more control is by saying, oh, you would pick a team. So in fact, we've kind of gone over this, but not hard to reaffirm it where you Go. Oh, I think that these guys will all score the most. Right. So you pick like Patrick Mahomes in the regular season, Patrick Mahomes, wide receiver, running back and all them. And then you kind of submit that with a bet on it, right?

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. Well, so there are like bets for game day. Right. But there are season long bets and there is season long fantasy as well. But the way that these ads are kind of marketing the concept of gaming on sports or whatever is just game day betting and sometimes even live betting in games.

[Caleb Wilson]

And that's what most of these were because it wasn't really clear to me. So just again to distinguish, there are the ones where you bet on outcomes and then there are ones that you bet on whether you have chosen the correct amount of boys, like the correct guy is that will score the most points.

[Arif Hassan]

Right.

[Ed Zitron]

Well, again, I think they're both gambling.

[Caleb Wilson]

They are both gambling. I'm just trying to delineate which one is the most like which is the one that has penetrated so far.

[Ed Zitron]

I would say more people are sick of fantasy ads because they've run for longer. But gambling ads have done a lot more in the past two years to saturate the market. But it's also kind of difficult to tell the difference between a fantasy ad and a gambling ad. And I think most consumers that are just watching this, most of the people.

[Arif Hassan]

Listening to this will not know the.

[Caleb Wilson]

Difference between the two. Sorry, I actually came into this with a slight mistake and this is a common one, I think I thought. I didn't know that gambling, gambling was so prevalent. I didn't. So it's. How many states can you just boot up an app?

[Ed Zitron]

I wanna say it's 21.

[Caleb Wilson]

That's insane. So now it's 50. They start ignoring regulation. But just to be clear to the listeners, non sports fans, sports fans alike, what we are discussing is that basically in 21 states, anyone can pick up their phone and start gambling like they're in Vegas. Specifically on the outcomes of sports events.

[Arif Hassan]

This is individual plays. Like in the time that it would take you to send a tweet, you can lose $100.

[Caleb Wilson]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

So the last I looked it was 21. Now mobile online sports betting is legal in 30 states plus D.C. well, 31 states, but it's not yet operational in Missouri. And retail gambling, which is you have to physically go in in additional eight states.

[Arif Hassan]

Yeah. So that is legal in Washington. I have to go to a place to gamble and that's, I guess that's a little, you know, less insidious.

[Caleb Wilson]

So we're talking over 100 million people.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, easily. Yeah. Well, especially because it includes New York and Florida.

[Caleb Wilson]

Oh, God.

[Arif Hassan]

We were talking about this earlier, before we started recording. Ed, you were in the other room, but I was reading about this today. Just today. $1.5 billion will be bet that's on the Super Bowl.

[Caleb Wilson]

Just on the apps or in general?

[Ed Zitron]

In general.

[Arif Hassan]

In general.

[H]

Have you ever looked into the night sky and wondered who or what was flying around up there? We've seen planes, helicopters, hot air balloons, and birds. But what if there's something else, something much more ominous that appears under the COVID of night? Silent, unseen, watching. They may be right above your car late one night as you cruise down the road. Or look like mysterious lights hovering above your home. Drones. Or are they?

[Alec Baldwin]

We used the word drone because it was comfortable to other people.

[Ed Zitron]

One minute was there and one minute it wasn't.

[Arif Hassan]

Oh, that is beyond creepy.

[H]

Do you feel like this drone was targeting you specifically?

[Ed Zitron]

Yes, absolutely.

[H]

Listen to obscure Invasion of the Drones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Oz Veloson]

Do you want to understand an invisible force that's shaping your life? I'm Os Veloson, one of the new hosts of the long running podcast Tech Stuff. I'm slightly skeptical, but obsessively intrigued.

[Paola Pedrosa]

And I'm Cara Price, the other new host, and I'm ready to adopt early.

[Oz Veloson]

And often on tech Stuff. We travel all the way from the mines of Congo to the surface of Mars to the dark corners of TikTok to ask and attempt to answer burning questions about technology.

[Ed Zitron]

One of the kind of tricks for surviving Mars is to live there long enough so that people evolve into Martians? Like data is a very rough proxy.

[Paola Pedrosa]

For a complex reality.

[Caleb Wilson]

How is it possible that the world's new energy revolution can be based in this place where there's no electricity at night?

[Paola Pedrosa]

Oz and I will cut through the noise to bring you the best conversations and deep dives that will help you understand how tech is changing our world and what you need to know to survive the singularity. So join us.

[Oz Veloson]

Listen to tech stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Alec Baldwin]

How serious is youth vaping? Irreversible lung damage? Serious. One in 10 kids vape serious, which warrants a serious conversation from a serious parental figure like yourself. Not the seriously know it all sports dad or the seriously smart podcaster. It requires a serious conversation that is best had by you. No, seriously, the best person to talk to your Child about vaping is you. To start the conversation, visit talkaboutvaping.org, brought to you by the American Lung association and the AD Council.

[Paola Pedrosa]

Welcome. My name is Paola Pedrosa, a medium and the host of the Ghost Therapy Podcast, where it's not just about connecting with deceased loved ones, it's about learning through them and their new perspective. Join me on the Ghost Therapy podcast.

[Caleb Wilson]

Whoa.

[Ed Zitron]

My lights in my living room just flickered.

[Paola Pedrosa]

I'm a little nervous. I'm excited. I'm excited nervous. You know, I'm a very spiritual person, so I'm like, I'm ready and open. That was amazing. I feel so grateful right now. I got to speak to my great grandmother, Abuela, and she gave me a lot of really good advice that I'm gonna have to really think about.

[Caleb Wilson]

Wow.

[Ed Zitron]

Okay.

[Paola Pedrosa]

That's crazy. Yes, that is accurate. Listen to the Ghost Therapy podcast as part of the My Cultura Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Caleb Wilson]

This is real rot economy shit as well, because anyone can gamble. So you've got this system that's already not great. And the things you on, just to be clear, aren't just like, guy wins game or guy scores points. It's like the coin toss.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. The level of, well, absurdity, like with the coin toss, but the level of absurdity and precision that on the things with which you can bet on are absurd. And so some of them are just called novelty bets.

[Caleb Wilson]

And the coin toss, by the way, is who. Whether the coin will be heads or tails.

[Ed Zitron]

Correct. Or you can bet on who will win the coin toss. Which. Same odds. Right.

[Caleb Wilson]

Great. So two bets on the coin.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. You've got. Well, and then there's. You can. There's correlated bets. So there's a. I was offered. When I logged into FanDuel earlier, I was offered a bet on Chiefs win the coin toss and the game.

[Caleb Wilson]

And when you say offered, how do you mean?

[Ed Zitron]

When I logged into the app, a splash screen showed up telling me that there was this bet that I would be available for. It was like a bright.

[Caleb Wilson]

Available for in what? Like, I'd not otherwise be allowed to bet on it.

[Ed Zitron]

No. If I navigated to.

[Caleb Wilson]

But was there a special deal or was it just telling you you could.

[Ed Zitron]

Do this in this case, There wasn't a special deal. It was just informing me that. And I assume. So here's my understanding of how this operation works, right. When they come up with unique bets like that one, which for most games you don't get to bet on the coin toss in most books.

[Caleb Wilson]

And books refers to the apps, the operators.

[Ed Zitron]

Cool. Yeah. But when they come up with these, they start kind of testing which ones are the most popular and then also using the data that they have to determine which ones are the most profitable, which is another way of saying which ones people lose the most money on.

[Caleb Wilson]

So they are just, so we're clear, advertising specific bets.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, advertising specific bets and telling you and then highlighting the ones that are the most profitable and most likely to generate interaction.

[Caleb Wilson]

So trying to actively advertising something that they ideally need you to lose on. And the thing they're promoting is.

[Ed Zitron]

And their data tells them that you are very likely to lose on.

[Caleb Wilson]

So when you say you are likely to lose on, are you saying that they customize it based on your actual betting history?

[Ed Zitron]

Yes and no. So they can. They can customize their offers to the category of bets that you typically make and will engineer kind of the ones that are most profitable to them to show to you. But, like, the specific ones, like the one I just showed, that one's offered to everybody when you show up. And so the specific bets, they don't really. They're not like, man, this guy loses a ton of money on the Jaguars. Let's, you know, throw some more Jaguars.

[Caleb Wilson]

I'm surprised they don't.

[Arif Hassan]

It's probably worth noting that the way that they target these offers to you depends on whether you are a casual gambler or if you are somebody who puts a lot of money into this who's losing quite a bit. In some cases, if you hit a certain threshold for how much money you've lost, they will assign you a personal bookie who will text you directly specific offers, and they'll even comp you that.

[Ed Zitron]

A concierge.

[Arif Hassan]

Yes.

[Caleb Wilson]

So does which services. We're talking FanDuel drafting.

[Arif Hassan]

I read a story about this in NPR the other day, and this one was, I believe, fanduel.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, well, so I've covered this a little bit on. In my piece on sports gambling.

[Caleb Wilson]

We'll link that in the notes.

[Ed Zitron]

Both FanDuel and DraftKings do this. BetMGM, from my understanding, has begun doing this. But yeah, specifically the ones that have primarily an online presence, which I know people understand BetMGM to have, like a casino in Vegas, but, like, they've massively expanded their online footprint. And so the ones that do that will interact with a lot of their most valued customers, maybe is the best way to put it. The people who are losing the most money and if you look into the stories of some of the people that have been contacted by a concierge, it's very much, I mean, it's almost like beat for beat, the script you would write for a drug dealer engaging with an addict. And I don't say this lightly. I've lost a couple of people in my life to drug addictions and I know other people in my life who are currently struggling with addiction. And some of those people have also, in addition to their drug addiction, have become addicted to gambling, not necessarily sports betting.

[Caleb Wilson]

And this is all exacted through software. This is all directly, predominantly.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. And so the software will flag someone as like, hey, this person's lost like $30,000. You should get more money from them. And then they'll assign a concierge and that person will email them like, hey.

[Arif Hassan]

It's also possibly worth noting here that this might sound like the people they're targeting are like high rollers. But predominantly speaking, this affects low income earners more than any other group.

[Ed Zitron]

How so?

[Arif Hassan]

Because those are the people that typically gamble the most.

[Caleb Wilson]

And that's the thing. This is inherently predatory in a way that I don't think would be possible without the current digital ecosystem. We have the penetration of completely impossible consumer apps and, and also the kind of fuzzy legal definitions that allow them to just do this bullshit.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, I think it's a combination of a couple of things. One, I think the nature of gambling is that it provides a lot of hope to people, which is one reason it targets people in lower income strata. But two, the current gambling environment is frictionless. I just mentioned, and this would be something with the BETMGM Live product. So let's say we're watching the super bowl, right? And they're on. You know, the Eagles are on the five yard line, which is to say they're 15ft away from scoring a touchdown. And I'm in the BetMGM app and I'm in the live section of the BetMGM app and I've got $0 in my account, right? I look up, I see the screen, I see that they just made it to the five yard line. And I immediately go, hey, it looks like Saquon Barkley is. And I'm going to throw a number out here that a lot of people are not going to know how to interpret. I'm going to skip past that in a second. But he's minus 230 to score a touchdown on the next play. So I press yes, minus 230. I want to bet $20 on it. And immediately a pop up will say, hey, you don't have enough money in your account to bet $20. Do you want to deposit it right away? And I go yes. And it takes me to the deposit screen. It says this is your automatic, this is your default payment method. Press yes. And you press yes. And then the $25 gets deposited in the account. And then you go back to the bet slip that you made and you press yes. And that within three to five seconds. And then the next play runs and Saquon Barkley did not score a touchdown. He went to the three yard line. And now I've just lost my money and I want to. It's gone and it's gone and now I want to make it back. So I'm going to do it on the very next play.

[Caleb Wilson]

And it is that quick.

[Ed Zitron]

It's so quick. Yeah. You could do it between so many people do it between plays.

[Caleb Wilson]

Have you ever seen someone physically do this?

[Arif Hassan]

Yeah, it's completely normal for them to be while the game is happening.

[Ed Zitron]

I've seen them do it in arenas.

[Arif Hassan]

Yeah.

[Caleb Wilson]

And this is why I wanted to do this episode so badly. Because so much of this though, everyone hears sports and there are definitely some oh, is a sports ball on type people who can be like, I don't like the sports ball. I read book, I watch PowerPoint, watch PowerPoint. But nevertheless these people need to know. It's like this is one of the most evil things tech has done. It's very much like management consultants plus tech. But this is a evil perpetuated only through technology.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. I think for people who are unfamiliar with sports, it feels like an exaggeration to say people are like commodifying your relationship with your family. But there are a lot of people that are closer emotionally speaking to the teams that they follow than the family that they have.

[Caleb Wilson]

Right.

[Ed Zitron]

And I don't regard that necessarily as a tragedy. I don't have a great relationship with my family. So that's just the nature of what they are taking advantage of is they're commodifying this relationship. And to an extent it's always been commodified. Sports are there at a professional level to make money. And I've always had thoughts on the tension between that, between the relationship a team has to a consumer or a fan in this case, they're identical things and vice versa. But I think that teams don't attempt to ruin their customers lives. And the way that a lot of these books operate, I would argue essentially every one because smaller Books get bought by larger books.

[Caleb Wilson]

Books meaning the apps, right?

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, I think the official term is operators, but I just call them books.

[Caleb Wilson]

Sure.

[Ed Zitron]

But is almost explicitly to ruin people's lives because they want to extract as much money as quickly as possible. And so there's this story in the Athletic that about somebody who, you know, began, you know, gambling. And you know, it's just kind of, at first they were a casual better. They saw like a $50 promo. And typically what these promos are is you deposit $50 and then you receive $50 in promotional cash, which you can only use to gamble with.

[Caleb Wilson]

Right.

[Ed Zitron]

And so $53, okay. You bet with all of it. And at the end of the week he's run out, so he deposits 100. There's no more promo because he was a first time customer until he got the original promo and so on. And he just keeps going. And he's got a wife, he's got children, he's got a house. Right. And he bets larger and larger sums to make up for what he had lost previously. And he's describing the thrill of a win a lot like you would describe a high. Right. And the wins are becoming rarer and rarer because he is betting on longer and longer shot outcomes because the long shot outcomes have the highest potential payout. So essentially what he's doing is he's buying a ticket for the lottery, but instead of paying $1 at the gas station for like a mega millions ticket, he's paying $1,000 for, you know, something that'll multiply that by.

[Caleb Wilson]

And they do special offers and special bets. Right. Sometimes they'll be like, they'll improve. Like, I've seen offers like that.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. And so, and so what, what began happening to this guy is, you know, he started betting at odd hours of the night. He started betting on sports. He clearly was unfamiliar with Russian tennis, you know, Estonian basketball.

[Caleb Wilson]

And you can bet, and this is actually important detail. You can bet in some cases on just the most obtuse stuff.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, just really obscure. You can bet on snookers, like you can bet on snookers is, is the.

[Caleb Wilson]

Very strange kind of billiards variant that you have back in England.

[Ed Zitron]

Sure.

[Caleb Wilson]

We say snooker now. I'm not sure which one of us is correct. Anyway, continue.

[Ed Zitron]

Well, you're British, so you're probably wrong, but yeah, you could bet on anything almost anywhere in the world. People have been betting on like high school games and stuff like that. And so the app is tracking his activity. They notice that he's making deposits at odd Times of the night, they notice that he's betting on obscure sports that he's probably not familiar with. And so in response to that, they assign him a concierge. And the concierge emails is like, hey, you know, you're one of our most valued customers. I want to offer you a $500 promotion. You don't even have to deposit anything. He's like, oh, wow, that's $500 free dollars. I don't have to. Okay. And then he bets it all, and it all withers away. Right, right. And they're like, wow, that's, like, really tough. And so he ends up losing thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars. And he's, like, trying to hide this all from his wife. And he's taking out additional loans, personal loans at high interest, and he decides, you know, oh, man, this is awful. I'm gonna stop. I'm about to lose the house. I have to find some way to do it. And so he stops for two weeks. He stops. Then he receives an email saying, hey, you haven't, you know, bet in a really long time. Is there something that we can do to kind of repair our relationship between the two of us? Because, hey, we've become friends, man. You and me, you know?

[Caleb Wilson]

This is the concierge.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, this is the concierge.

[Arif Hassan]

We're in this together.

[Ed Zitron]

We're in this together, man. I want to see you succeed. So what I've done is I've placed $2,000 of promotional cash in your account. You know, you can do it that way you want. And he emails back like, hey, I think I've developed a problem. I don't think I can do this anymore. I'm not going to do this anymore. And the guy responds with, and I'm paraphrasing from an article I read a.

[Caleb Wilson]

Couple months ago, so we'll find it and link it as well.

[Ed Zitron]

It was over at the Athletic, which is now a New York Times gig, so it'll be easy to find. But the guy responds with, oh, wow, that. I wish the best for you. That really sucks. I'm sorry to hear that. Take care of yourself. But if you ever come back, those $2,000 are still there for you. And so it's just always in his mind for the next couple of weeks, and he decides he's gonna do it, and he does it. And the guy emails like, oh, wow, I'm glad to see that you've taken care of it and you're back, or whatever. And he's like, yeah, I don't know if I can still do this. And he's like, okay, yeah, I understand. We don't want you to put, we don't want you to put yourself in a bad spot. But we've got this great promotion coming up that I just want to make sure that you take advantage of if it's there, if there's some way that you can pull together all of the, you know, pull together what you need in order to act. And it just, they, they wreck. Like he has said multiple times, I think I'm an addict. And they say they give lip service to the idea that he shouldn't do anything about it. And then they enable him.

[Caleb Wilson]

And this is done like fucking software as a service sales. This is exactly, this is exactly. You have a customer that's churning, you email them, you have a look at the analytics. People aren't using it within their company. You reach out and you say, hey, look, so you've got a bunch of users who aren't using it. Hey, we'll cut those off, we'll refund those. But have you considered this add on for this team? Except instead of like business software, this is like life ruining gambling.

[Arif Hassan]

Yeah, well, the guy lost his house. Yeah, it happens all the time. 1, 1 in 4Americans will be betting on the super bowl today. Jesus, that 1.5 billion is like gotta be one of the most single day transfers of wealth from lower income brackets upward in human history. I mean that's. Even if you're cynical about the individualistic aspects of, and if you're an egoist or whatever, this is what individuals should be able to do. Whatever, whatever. You know, as a problem that the society continues to have is people are starting their lives later. They're not buying houses, they're not having kids, they're not financially stable enough to do these things. These are the same people that are being targeted directly by these apps.

[Caleb Wilson]

Because the idea is, it's kind of like the crypto ads of 2022 where it was like, seize the day. Like this idea that you can have hope and accumulate wealth.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It combines that predation on hope, right. With all of the lessons we've learned from mobile gaming about the gamification of.

[Caleb Wilson]

Our experiences and it is the gamification of gambling. While also on every show you see the odds of the play and this sense that you could somehow influence the outcome.

[Ed Zitron]

This is, I think one of the most insidious things about this whole thing is that all of the leagues or the broadcast partners that carry the league or both have relationships with these companies. Jesus. And some of the relationships are not sponsorships or advertising mechanisms. Like, the NFL gets paid by William Hill, which is a sports book slash operator, to provide real time data so that Will Hill can set lines in real time. Whatever. Okay, sure, fine, whatever. I don't care. But also, the NFL has a relationship, I believe, with DraftKings. Is there? Is there? It's either FanDuel or Draft. It's almost always one of those two. And so on the NFL Network, they talk about the lines set by DraftKings. There are promotional spots for DraftKings. On the broadcast, you'll see some stuff about DraftKings. And then on top of that, Fox Sports has a relationship with, I think, FanDuel. And so the broadcasters will reference the FanDuel line. And so you'll see, like you mentioned at a basketball game, you'll see a ticker at the bottom saying, like, hey, you know, Victor wembanyama is like +230 to get a triple double this game bet. You know, whatever. Right.

[Caleb Wilson]

If you don't watch basketball, Victor Wembanyama is like seven foot tall.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. They should deport him. Actually, he's the only person in America. I think that ICE should deport everybody else.

[Arif Hassan]

Okay.

[Caleb Wilson]

We do not actually. We're not pro ice. We're not pro deportation. Thank you.

[Ed Zitron]

No, no, no. They should eradicate ICE before.

[Caleb Wilson]

Okay, well, Mia will love that. So it's just. I'm trying to think of the terms to put this, but. Because I know and I'm very obviously anxious about this. People don't like sports, hear this, they get annoyed. But think of it like if you were watching Game of Thrones and they're like, will Ned Stark live? And it's like you can bet on the outcome and they had a thing at the bottom. Or like severance. Like, will Adam Scott find out? Like, and it's like, except imagine if it was being written in real time. So different. But something you deeply cared about emotionally or something that you had grown attached to with your friends. Something that you remember from your childhood that is now through the apps. And it's these, like, on the fucking app store advertised by Apple. Apple, I don't think makes a cut on these, but I'm sure there's something weird there. But it is that that abstraction layer higher than just the kind of manipulative microtransaction you'd see in like a free to play game.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Caleb Wilson]

Except the money goes so quick, like in a snap. Yeah, it is like you said like just if the thing doesn't happen, the money is gone, you're not getting a refund, they're not gonna do this. You've just gambled, they got your money.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, yeah.

[Caleb Wilson]

So actually, here's a dumb question. You said there's the $50 free credit. Aren't there people who take advantage of that surely? Like, who like sign up an account and are good at gambling?

[Ed Zitron]

Yes.

[Caleb Wilson]

So how do they. No, but that's the thing. No, but the reason I ask this is not because I'm trying to convince people they have any more industry. I'm trying to find out like what is. So, like, how do they make the free money go? Like, how does the free money go? Because they offer it quite a lot.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. So there's like a couple of things. One, we found kind of psychologically that if you're offered free money, right. Even if you have to pay to get the free money, right, you are more likely to bet the free money on long shot odds. So as a whole, that money is not going to turn into real money that they have to pay off.

[Arif Hassan]

They don't give that. I didn't want to interrupt when you were talking about this earlier, but it just kind of goes to show you, they'll throw 50 bucks, 500 bucks, 2,000 bucks at this because they know within a statistical certainty almost that they're going to get that money back and then some.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. And so there's a percentage of customers that they retain and then those customers, they retain, the vast majority of the retained customers will pay back and that'll make a, that I make up. And they've got a cost of acquisition. I mean they're publicly traded. You can look at their filings for like a quarter or two or whatever. And they've got a cost of acquisition. And they talk about reducing the cost of acquisition and increasing our hold, which is the percentage that they make on each bet. It's a whole kind of element. But one thing that is kind of interesting about the way that they manage these books is, is that if you begin winning and here's this is gonna go super in the weeds, there's a different definition of winning they use for this particular determination, which I'll get into in a second. But if you begin winning a lot at a really high percentage, they will start reducing your limit. And your limit is the amount that you can bet on a single bet. And so if I'm a new FanDuel customer, I believe my limit is $1,000. And if I get pretty bad at gambling, my limit will expand to 2,000, 5,000, 20,000. But if I'm pretty good, they'll start reducing my limit to 500, 250, all the way down to a dollar. And so you get good, you actually don't really have a lot of opportunity to make money. And so the thing I was going to get at is they don't actually determine it based off of whether or not you've made money. They determine it based off of whether or not the bet that you made at the time you made it anticipated the closing line value of the bet. So markets move, right? Betting markets move based in response to who's doing the betting. And so it's actually not critically important that the people setting the odds for any particular bet are laser precise accurate about what those odds truly are. They have to be accurate to a certain degree. But what ends up happening is that a certain amount of money goes one way on a bet and a certain amount of money goes on another way in a bet. And that moves the line. And over the course of the lifetime of that bet until the game actually starts, you get a closing line value. And if you beat the closing line value, they determine that you're a sharp gambler. And if you do that, I think like 60% of the time or something like that, they start reducing your limit. So it's really hard to make money.

[Caleb Wilson]

It's not even like the traditional idea of winning is the thing. It's like this weird matriculated bullshit so that they can will never let you win then or never let you. You never win on your terms. Even when you win kind of.

[Arif Hassan]

They advertise this as like a skill based situation. And you just need to understand that even if it was a fair fight, if they didn't move the lines, if they didn't do all these things that Reef was talking about, they still have. You will never outsmart them because they have teams of analysts that make these bets and they're very good at it. And they've been doing it for a long time. And they have algorithms to watch this stuff.

[Ed Zitron]

Access to proprietary data too, that you won't have access to.

[Arif Hassan]

Exactly.

[Ed Zitron]

I mean, so for example, there's a product that I think is very good called Profootball Focus Ultimate Profitball Focus is a data firm that covers football and their ultimate package which gives you access to granular level data. Like every individual play, you can see if a pass was caught, at what yard line that pass was caught, how many yards after the catch that player, you know, generated after the catch, how many tackles that player beat on the way to doing that?

[Caleb Wilson]

You know, insanely granular. Do they have a level below that that somehow these people. Or they get access to that?

[Ed Zitron]

Well, they get access to that because it's a $200,000 package.

[Caleb Wilson]

Oh, so they have advantages that we could never even. Unless we were insanely rich.

[Arif Hassan]

Yeah.

[Caleb Wilson]

And no one who's doing that is doing that.

[Arif Hassan]

Yeah, nobody who's doing this has the money to spend on that.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. And so they get access to the proprietary data which they can use to kind of create these models. Those models help set the lines. It's very difficult to beat.

[Arif Hassan]

And then they give that insanely granular data to a team of analyst perverts that will then set the lines.

[Caleb Wilson]

Yeah, it's almost like the ultimate management consultant thing because it's barely about sports anymore. It's not even about winning. And another betting thing that I only recently understand, came to understand even, was the concept of unders and overs, where they will set a point amount like. Actually, Caleb, can you explain what an over and an under is? Because it's important to explain that you can't just bet on whether someone wins or loses.

[Arif Hassan]

Yeah, I could do my best.

[Caleb Wilson]

Again, just the very basic of what it means.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Arif Hassan]

And Arif, you may have to correct me on this because again, it's not legal in my state, so I've never actually done it.

[Caleb Wilson]

Oh, okay.

[Arif Hassan]

So they don't like. It's called the spread. Right. So if the team is under. This is kind of confusing. If the team is the under, that means they're the favorite by however many points. Right?

[Ed Zitron]

Kind of. So we wouldn't call them the under. Right. But if the team is the favorite, they're like minus one and a half. Right. Or whatever. So, for example, the Chiefs in this game opened at minus one and a half. That means that the betting line is essentially, if you subtract one and a half points from the Chiefs, who wins the game. And if you bet on the Chiefs, you bet on the Chiefs to win by at least two points or more. If you bet on the Eagles, you either bet on them to win outright or lose by about a point or less.

[Caleb Wilson]

So you can't just bet win or lose.

[Ed Zitron]

You can, but it's. Yeah, so that's called a moneyline bet, where you just bet outright on the winner or the loser, but there are different odds for that. So that's where you get stuff like plus 230 and minus 110 and minus 100. So what plus 230 means is if I bet a hundred dollars, I will receive and I win, I get the $100 back plus $230.

[Caleb Wilson]

Right.

[Ed Zitron]

If I bet minus 230, I would need to bet $230 in order to get not just my original bet back, but $100 it is. So it's kind of confusing.

[Caleb Wilson]

No, it's. And I assume by design.

[Ed Zitron]

Sure. I mean, this is a system that is like 60, 70 years old. So I don't know.

[Arif Hassan]

But for people that are on the strip back there, the hoople heads that are seven beers deep that are gonna say, yes, we ball, put 50 on the packers or whatever. Right.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. And so you can convert those odds into the percentages. So like a minus. Okay. It's actually more complicated than this, but the minus one hand would suggest, I believe, like, a 46% or whatever odds that, you know, whatever the bet is. But the problem is if two teams are evenly matched. So if the spread is PK or pick'em. Right. Zero. Right. Either way. So if the spread is pick'em, and each team was equally likely to win. Right. You would get probably, in most books, in, well, most books a couple years ago, minus 105 odds.

[Caleb Wilson]

So the thing is, I'm sure people are a little bit lost now, because I slightly am. But actually, I think that's kind of illustrative of how fucking weird this is, because these are the numbers that are just on the TV being thrown at you all the time.

[Ed Zitron]

Minus 1A5, plus 210.

[Caleb Wilson]

And you open the app, and the app is screaming at you just like, hey, you should try this. Why don't you fucking try this?

[Arif Hassan]

Pig saquon Barclay is minus 230. Sure. What the hell?

[Caleb Wilson]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. And the thing is. So I described that both of those even bets are minus 105. If you bet on the coin toss, it's minus 105. Right. Like, that's the.

[Caleb Wilson]

So you would need to put $105 down to make $100.

[Ed Zitron]

Correct.

[Caleb Wilson]

Got it.

[Ed Zitron]

Which obviously suggests that, you know, your odds of being correct have to be not just higher, but substantially higher than what the implied odds are by the book. Because they're gonna make money on the coin flip. Right. Like, there's no question that they're making money.

[Arif Hassan]

And yet, by the way, while we were talking about this before, I Googled it, hundreds of thousands of dollars will be bet on the coin today.

[Caleb Wilson]

Hundreds of thousands of dollars.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Caleb Wilson]

It's so fucking horrible. This is the thing, like, earlier on in this show's existence. I was definitely mad at the tech industry and people like, why are you so mad? It is stuff like this because they've managed to find a way to do, to turn gambling into online gaming, to turn it into. To introduce the concepts of gambling and microtransaction gaming and just the horrors of online advertising. Because this is selling hope and industry over something you could never hope to understand.

[Arif Hassan]

Well, every, like the stuff that we talked about, about the ostensibly good aspects of sports, whether you agree or not, all of that, even from my perspective as somebody who does love them, is being destroyed by this. Every aspect of tradition, all the ostensible social good that could come from this, is being completely gutted by this industry.

[Caleb Wilson]

And how do you mean?

[Arif Hassan]

Because it takes away. It's like the anti sport. It takes it something that could be a potentially positive thing and it turns it into like a torment nexus. You know what I mean?

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, yeah. So there are a couple of things that kind of stood out to me that motivated me to write about it, which was that every interaction that you see in a game is no longer taken for the implications that it has for the team or the player, no longer taken for the narrative value that that has. But it's all concentrated on this. Did someone win a bet on this kind of question? So for example, espn, which is the worldwide leader in sports coverage, a name they made up for themselves and earned in fairness, they are the dominant. They're the hegemony when it comes to sports coverage. They have a partnership with, I think it's Penn Sportsbook. So they have a product called ESPN Bet, which in my opinion undercuts their journalistic integrity. But that's a different topic, right? So they've got a bunch of social arms called ESPN BET, right? They got like a TikTok channel, YouTube channel, whatever, right? And there was this Giants game where Devin Singletary, one of the running backs for the Giants, it's near the end of the game and he broke free, right? So he got the ball, big run, he gets past all the defenders. He broke free to the end of the game, the Giants are already ahead. And so if he scores, that doesn't meaningfully change the Giants odds of winning, but it does give the other team the ball. So in fact, it might even decrease the Giants odds of winning because the other team now has an opportunity to respond. They've got possession and they can score points, right? So what he does is he runs all the way to the five yard line and then goes down. So that the Giants retain possession, they can drain the clock, finish the game with a win. Great move. Like tactically correct. It's a tactically correct move. It's selfless.

[Arif Hassan]

Yes.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, because he benefits. He's got like a contract incentive. And when his contract comes up, he's going to negotiate for a new contract. The statistics, those extra five yards, a touchdown, whatever, those statistics will be used in his negotiation. And maybe he has a contract incentive that gives him more money for touchdowns. Right. So he's making a selfless move to improve the team's odds of winning.

[Caleb Wilson]

Right.

[Ed Zitron]

It's always a good story. Some running backs will do this maybe a couple times a year or whatever. I love it. And ESPN Bet put out a TikTok saying Devin Singletary goes down to ensure the Giants hit the under. And the under is the total amount of points scored in the game. And in that game, I forget who the maybe Washington, the Giants and commanders go under the projected point total by the books. And I think my opinion is that ESPN Bet really poorly used the language of their platform because it suggested that Singletary did that on purpose in order to accomplish a gambling goal. In order for the. For whoever was betting on the under to cash in.

[Caleb Wilson]

Right.

[Ed Zitron]

And it's just like I think they just meant he did this and so therefore the under hit.

[Caleb Wilson]

Right.

[Ed Zitron]

Either way, I don't like it.

[Caleb Wilson]

It's poisonous. It's poison to culture.

[H]

Have you ever looked into the night sky and wondered who or what was flying around up there? We've seen planes, helicopters, hot air balloons and birds. But what if there's something else, something much more awkward, ominous, that appears under the COVID of night. Silent, unseen, watching. They may be right above your car late one night as you cruise down the road. Or look like mysterious lights hovering above your home. Drones. Or are they?

[Alec Baldwin]

We used the word drone because it was comfortable to other people.

[Ed Zitron]

One minute was there and one minute it wasn't.

[Arif Hassan]

Oh, that is beyond creepy.

[H]

Do you feel like this drone was targeting you?

[Ed Zitron]

Specifically? Yes, Absolutely.

[H]

Listen to Obscurum Invasion of the Drones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Oz Veloson]

Do you want to understand an invisible force that's shaping your life? I'm Osvaloshin, one of the new hosts of the long running podcast Tech Stuff. I'm slightly skeptical, but obsessively intrigued.

[Paola Pedrosa]

And I'm Cara Price, the other new host, and I'm ready to adopt early.

[Oz Veloson]

And often on tech stuff. We travel all the way from the mines of Congo to the surface of Mars to the dark corners of TikTok to ask and attempt to answer burning questions about technology.

[Ed Zitron]

One of the kind of tricks for surviving Mars is to live there long enough so that people evolve into martial like.

[Paola Pedrosa]

Data is a very rough proxy for a complex reality.

[Caleb Wilson]

How is it possible that the world's new energy revolution can be based in this place where there's no electricity at night?

[Paola Pedrosa]

Oz and I will cut through the noise to bring you the best conversations and deep dives that will help you understand how tech is changing our world and what you need to know to survive the singularity. So join us.

[Oz Veloson]

Listen to tech stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Alec Baldwin]

How serious is youth vaping? Irreversible lung damage serious. 1 in 10 kids vape serious. Which warrants a serious conversation from a serious parental figure like yourself. Not the seriously know it all sports dad or the seriously smart podcaster. It requires a serious conversation that is best had by you. No, seriously, the best person to talk to your child about vaping is you. To start the conversation, visit talkaboutvaping.org, brought to you by the American Lung association and the AD Council.

[Paola Pedrosa]

Welcome. My name is Paola Pedrosa, a medium and the host of the Ghost Therapy podcast, where it's not just about connecting with deceased loved ones, it's about learning through them and their new perspective. Join me on the Ghost Therapy podcast.

[Caleb Wilson]

Whoa.

[Ed Zitron]

My lights in my living room room just flickered.

[Paola Pedrosa]

I'm a little nervous. I'm excited. I'm excited nervous. You know, I'm very spiritual person, so I'm like, I'm ready and open. That was amazing. I feel so grateful right now. I got to speak to my great grandmother Abuela, and she gave me a lot of really good advice that I'm going to have to really think about.

[Caleb Wilson]

Wow.

[Ed Zitron]

Okay.

[Paola Pedrosa]

That's crazy. Yes, that is accurate. Listen to the Ghost Therapy podcast as part of the My Cultura Podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Arif Hassan]

This shouldn't be happening at all. Yeah, to begin with, it's destroying like, the product is becoming almost unrecognizable at this point.

[Caleb Wilson]

Can you go into more detail on that?

[Arif Hassan]

Yeah, I mean, just even. Just a few years ago, that would have never happened. We wouldn't have even heard about that. Yeah, just even two seasons ago, probably. I would say two, three seasons.

[Ed Zitron]

You might get a mention on SportsCenter because Scott Fenpelt does a bad Beat kind of thing. But that was like a fun like oh, you know, if you bet on the under like oops, whatever, it's some.

[Arif Hassan]

Wacky corner of the site that's not really that important as opposed to versus.

[Caleb Wilson]

What is likely a huge revenue driver media narrative.

[Arif Hassan]

Especially considering like, and I mean I'm not going to be the person that says the NFL's rigged. I think that there's no evidence to really suggest any level of that. But as these lines get blurred and the NFL does have a history of. There's Dan Mildez book Interference Goes into this. This is mind you, published in the late 80s or something. So he's talking about the 60s and 70s when the NFL was acutely aware of owners and players relationship with gambling, sports books, organized crime. And it's not conspiracy stuff. This is like all police cases and FBI files that he's sourcing this from. And I just think that for the league's perspective, it is a really, really bad look that these lines are as blurred as they are now.

[Caleb Wilson]

And the thing is as well, this is again a uniquely software based thing and a uniquely Internet culture based thing because you can see these stats in minutiae, the minutiae of them. You can see them instantly. Your little fucking phone with the beautiful Internet connection that used to allow you to send posts to friends is now just like an actual portal to Vegas. In a more craven way though, I say this with our beautiful slot machines which we love so much, it feels like an evil version of gambling, which is already fairly evil in that it is now poisoning the actual culture around it because. So you don't need to know anything about basketball for this. So right now there is a big scandal going on with Miami Heat player Terry Rosier who's under investigation in connection with sports betting scandal.

[Ed Zitron]

Yep.

[Caleb Wilson]

And now there is just this weird thing of like you said, Caleb, it isn't scripted or anything. But are players doing shit now with.

[Arif Hassan]

Fears of that, like there is more financial incentive. Here's what I will say. There's more financial incentive than ever. The lines are more blurred than ever.

[Ed Zitron]

I don't know. I don't. Yeah. And so what I don't like is that whenever a player makes a mistake, we have to ask that question. That's the thing that really bothers me because now we can't think of players as people who can make mistakes. And one of the beautiful things about sports is recognizing the humanity in others. Right. Understanding that these mistakes occur and that they weigh heavily on or whatever.

[Caleb Wilson]

Right.

[Arif Hassan]

The randomness of the phrase any given.

[Ed Zitron]

Sunday is exactly the Giants beating the Patriots when the Patriots are undefeated. It was just an outstanding story. Right. And now you're thinking, wow, a lot of people had money on the Patriots going undefeated. Did the Patriots throw the. No.

[Caleb Wilson]

And they're promoting these stories on their sites. They're saying how much.

[Ed Zitron]

And so this is now.

[Arif Hassan]

That's the media focus.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. And so that's the thing that, like really bothers me is that all of this content, which I already kind of hate the word content, but all of this content is now about gambling. So you talk about how your phone is this portal to Vegas, but also when you try to, you know, get out of.

[Caleb Wilson]

You actually cannot use these apps in Nevada either, which is really funny.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, I do think it's. Well, you can if you go physically into the sportsbook and enable the Sportsbooks app from inside the. It's very funny.

[Arif Hassan]

I didn't know that.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, it's very funny. It's crazy. I found that out. But nice. But. Yeah. And so like, you can like, you'll get like a notification. Like I've got like four notifications on my phone right now from like various fantasy whatever. And they're like, hey, you haven't bet in like a week. Is here's $100, please. You could do that. Or I can just get rid of the notifications. But then the notifications from the athletic, which I follow for my work as a football writer, are like, hey, here are the lines on the super bowl. And I get rid of that. And then the next notification will be from my Google News alerts. And the Google News alert will be, hey, did Devin Singletary do this in order to do the. And it's just like everything is either gambling or content about gambling or content that points to gambling. And it's like the storylines are about gambling. The way I engage with the game is about gambling. And you know, it's my fault for installing the fantasy apps on my phone. But then the fantasy apps are just like, it's all. Everything orients itself around the ability to make money off of what is ultimately, you know, a storytelling device.

[Caleb Wilson]

Right.

[Ed Zitron]

And it just, it sucks and it's.

[Caleb Wilson]

And so, Caleb, you don't gamble, right?

[Arif Hassan]

No. Now, it depends how you define it. Right. I want to be clear about this. I play fantasy football every year and I have so fancy.

[Caleb Wilson]

And just. Just to delineate, fantasy football is not a money based thing unless you put into a football.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. Most people who play fantasy don't put in more than like 10 bucks.

[Arif Hassan]

We all put in about 20 to 30 bucks to make sure everybody stays accountable, sets their lineup. It's not really about winning money.

[Caleb Wilson]

Right, right. But it's not like in Mich. You don't have to like give your credit card or anything. You can just.

[Arif Hassan]

This is between friends.

[Caleb Wilson]

It's informal. Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

You're like venmo it or whatever.

[Caleb Wilson]

But that isn't really gambling. That's just like kind of dicking around with friends. Right.

[Ed Zitron]

And he's describing what's season long fantasy.

[Caleb Wilson]

Which is separate, though, from the money fantasy, though.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. From the type of fantasy that's being promoted, which is daily fantasy.

[Caleb Wilson]

Right.

[Ed Zitron]

They call it daily for football. It's weekly, but whatever. It's daily for basketball, baseball, whatever. But you can, you can set your fantasy lineup for the day, that day, put in like $20 on your lineup and then repeat that lineup 20 times. Put in $20 every single time. Right. And then at the end of the day you'll have made or lost money and you can react to that and do it again the next day. Where a season long, you do it once a year for like 20 bucks to win, you know, maybe $150. Like, it's like, what are we doing?

[Caleb Wilson]

Yeah.

[Arif Hassan]

I just wanted to say also that what I described to you of like, oh, I'm gonna Venmo, my friend. For fantasy, you actually have to lie on all the apps when you send your fantasy winnings because that's illegal and they can shut down your account for that.

[Ed Zitron]

Which is crazy because I just use emojis. Yeah, exactly.

[Arif Hassan]

It doesn't really happen, but if you. They can flag it. If you say fantasy football in like the Note or whatever, they can do that.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, wow. There you go.

[Arif Hassan]

And that's more regulated than crypto.com doing their rube Goldberg system of crypto.

[Ed Zitron]

Basically, if you buy a token which is on the Ethereum chain, and that token activates when Patrick Mahomes passes for 225, which again to be very clear.

[Arif Hassan]

Should be, and I think many judges would agree is also illegal. But who's gonna stop them at this point?

[Ed Zitron]

Right.

[Caleb Wilson]

And I think the. And one of the things that I'm sure people will find insufferable, but I think it's worth talking about is this is another thing really heavily targeted to guys as well.

[Arif Hassan]

Yeah.

[Caleb Wilson]

Very heteronormative. Cis heck guy like, like, it's very much like for like the fellas. And it's very male oriented. Even the color schemes and the actors. It's Very aggressively. And so you've got this other fucking problem with guys now where guys just add another one.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Arif Hassan]

And guess what? Who's, like, outside of sports, who's like the number one purveyor of like, of ads for this shit is like red.

[Caleb Wilson]

Pill guys, you know, because it's more. More kind of noxious, nebulous masculinity thing of being like, be a big strong man and lose your money.

[Arif Hassan]

Don't tell your bitch wife that you lost $50,000. Or like, that's rise and grind. That's how you really.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, it's very much in the rise and grind culture. A lot of. So one of the. I don't know if New York has actually done this yet, but one of the proposals in New York State was to ban advertisements for these apps on college campuses.

[Caleb Wilson]

Oh, my God. They can legally do that.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. And that's where a lot of.

[Caleb Wilson]

So they advertise them outside the college basketball games as well.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, yeah, buddy.

[Caleb Wilson]

Damn. This is so fucking. But actually this does kind of play into it because it's like, what is happening to young men who are not the fucking victims. I'm not doing that. Don't worry. It's just like things to terrorize people.

[Arif Hassan]

It's like young men now and again. Not saying that they shouldn't be able to count them by the victims, whatever, but it reminds me of like those baby turtles that are born in the sand and they have to race to the ocean before the birds swoop down and eat them all. And the birds are like crypto ads and red pill guys that are swooping up and eating these turtles. That's kind of. Then they all just become bad bastards, you know?

[Caleb Wilson]

Yeah. And. And the thing that happens to women is those men, right?

[Ed Zitron]

No, Exactly.

[Arif Hassan]

Yeah. Maybe there's zombies.

[Caleb Wilson]

No, no, no. It's the. I'm just saying this because anytime I bring up the male loneliness epidemic, it's never a kind of. Well, men need to be treated. No, no, it's. Perhaps we need to look at the fucking conditions of society itself.

[Ed Zitron]

Right. It's.

[Caleb Wilson]

It's.

[Ed Zitron]

And then we're throwing another kind of. Because, like, one of the. The natures of, like, one of the things about patriarchy is that it isolates people into particular roles.

[Caleb Wilson]

Right.

[Ed Zitron]

And those roles for men include things like breadwinner. Right. And they're the ones that are like, you know, imbibed with the entrepreneurial spirit. Right. Which is. I guess gambling is entrepreneurship.

[Caleb Wilson]

No, no, it is, though. It's the same rise and Grind. No, it is, it is because it's like you have power over stuff that you don't have power over. You just work hard and money will come out same way. With this, you just gamble, right?

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. And so this is kind of another one of the pressures among the extant pressures that exist in patriarchy that produce these responses among young men that then those young men will act out in the world, often on women, but also on other young men.

[Caleb Wilson]

Right.

[Arif Hassan]

Patriarchy produces the drywall punchers, right?

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And this is just, just that.

[Caleb Wilson]

And it's funny and you've mentioning the entrepreneurial spirit. Cause it really is exactly that same genus of like focusing on guys and being like, yeah, you know, what's going wrong in your life is not actually something caused by a system.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, we shouldn't look at the system.

[Caleb Wilson]

Don't look at the system. And definitely don't worry about being responsible for this. This is all happening to you. And instead of looking at the stuff actually happening to you, let's just look at woman. And you know what you actually need to do? You need to just. It's neoliberalism, but right wing, I guess. Well, maybe I repeat myself, but it's the sense of selfish kind of producer that only comes from hard work. Despite the fact that. Yeah, but despite the fact that hard work is not what any of this is. Being an entrepreneur, a successful entrepreneur is like tons of luck having the privilege to be in the right place at the right time.

[Ed Zitron]

If you look at a lot of the entrepreneurship, like YouTube videos or whatever, a lot of it's just like drop shipping. It's like, okay, cool, it's just a scam. Yeah, yeah, Caleb, but like, there's a reason.

[Arif Hassan]

Like another episode, we'll talk about dropshipping.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, but like there's a reason. Like we can find a lot of the same figures throughout all of these, like micro trends of like entrepreneurship masculinity. Like Gary Vaynerchuk is doing like motivational dropshipping content and then he does crypto content and then he does NFT content and now he's doing sports gambling content.

[Arif Hassan]

But the concept of somebody who did for many years work in E commerce and like not drop shipping. Yeah, yeah, but just like as an actual E commerce marketing person, motivational E commerce content makes me want to blow my brains out.

[Ed Zitron]

But you know, I'm describing a thing that's real.

[Arif Hassan]

Yeah, of course, I know, I know. I'm acutely aware of the thing that you're talking about. It's like a I like, I feel like an animal on the Serengeti where I just, my predator prey sense went off like, oh my God.

[Ed Zitron]

But yeah, like someone like Gary Vee was in all of those.

[Caleb Wilson]

Is he doing sports betting content?

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Caleb Wilson]

Jesus Christ. That man's a fucking monster.

[Ed Zitron]

He's evil.

[Caleb Wilson]

I want to. We should do a Behind the Bastards episode and that piece of shit. Fuck you, Gary Vaynerchuk. I hope you hear this, you freak. You'll never buy the jets anyway. It's just the reason I. Another reason, I mean that I wanted to do this episode is it feels uniquely part of a way in which the Internet is being poisoned where so many content empires are now based on the same ones that do the article. That's what time is the Super Bowl. So they can rank on Google now you've got, oh, the right picks for sports gambling.

[Arif Hassan]

It's the same problem, just in a different shape. Right?

[Caleb Wilson]

Yeah. And it's, it's really sad as well. And again, I'm going to repeat this every time. Like it's not saying men don't. Men have fucking accountability regardless of whether they've been twisted by the Internet. But we should at least consider the forces twisting.

[Arif Hassan]

If you're ever going to fix the problem, you eventually have to look at the system in which these people are brought up. Right?

[Caleb Wilson]

Right. And it's, you see, it's the same thing you've seen with red pilling. It's the same thing you see with pretty much in any mgtow thing. It's just this sense of, hey, you feel helpless. Do you want to rise up against the thing that makes you feel helpless? Oh, oh, sorry. But don't worry, we won't make you do the inconvenient work of actually understanding things.

[Arif Hassan]

That's why, like when we were talking about this before, one of the football or sports is important is because even if you're from a utilitarian perspective, you don't care about sports. It is too big of a ground to cede to these kinds of people. You should never cede that ground. Right. We can't allow them to take this over.

[Caleb Wilson]

And they're trying. They're trying. Really, they're doing a very good job of it. And it's the reason they're able to is because there's these noxious companies that are twisting people up, young people. And it is not just young men, but really it's heavily targeted against men. They grow up, they can't get a house, they can't ever hope to get a house. Now it's not been the case for like 15, 20 years. The average person just can't fucking save the money. Men, men are and as as many people are, but like very targeted on men. Told, you must be big, strong and you must have money good big. And if you don't have those things, you're not man. You're not man at all. You're woke.

[Arif Hassan]

And you are soy. And you are woke.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, you're soy made a cuck.

[Caleb Wilson]

And then they attack aggressively with both convenient excuses and convenient ways to allegedly make money with these incredibly craven marketing systems perpetuated by the app. It's just fucking. Every time I think about this, I feel a little crazier because even coming into this, I didn't realize that the most common thing was just straight up gambling. I thought it was that they kind of like dodged around like Teehee. You just bet on a few players, right? No, it's just the straight up gambling now and it's everywhere. And it doesn't sound like they even do like Kyc, like know your customer stuff or if they do, it's like.

[Ed Zitron]

So gambling does do know your customer.

[Caleb Wilson]

Stuff, but fantasy does, despite money going into it?

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Caleb Wilson]

Fucking brilliant. Yeah, it's just like I. And it's not just like we can't even say, I hope it's made illegal. They're never gonna do that.

[Ed Zitron]

Oh, that's definitely not happening.

[Caleb Wilson]

Yeah, I feel like everyone involved should be put in prison personally. So it doesn't look like Apple.

[Ed Zitron]

They did, they did try that with the DFS people along like 15 years ago, and about three or four of them did, and then the rest invented DFS.

[Caleb Wilson]

What is the affair?

[Ed Zitron]

Daily fantasy services. So the people that were doing online poker stuff way back when Chris Moneymaker was big, like 2004. Ish. I wanna say Those people, it turns out, were violating a bunch of laws about Internet gambling. Three or four of them got tagged for it, then the rest of them left and invented daily fantasy.

[Caleb Wilson]

Right. And it's right now, by the way, on the App Store. They don't actually advertise this stuff, so perhaps I was wrong saying they did. But it is the like, number, number. Let's see, the number three and number four. So it's DraftKings and then Fangil and then Prize Picks. Those are the three, four and five top apps right now.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, I'm going through my prizepix promos right now. If it's not clear, I do engage in this.

[Caleb Wilson]

Yeah, I was gonna ask you about that.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. And I've got like $1 million super sweat lineups.

[Caleb Wilson]

What does that.

[Ed Zitron]

I don't know. It's a combination of like, you know, they, they like hire these influencers to like put together. Well, in theory, they hire these influencers to put together their picks for the game and then you can, you can nail their picks, essentially.

[Caleb Wilson]

Horrifying.

[Ed Zitron]

But yeah, there's like tons of promos like in my.

[Caleb Wilson]

But as we wrap up. So you do gamble on this stuff?

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah.

[Caleb Wilson]

Do you win?

[Ed Zitron]

I have net made money on the year.

[Caleb Wilson]

Right.

[Ed Zitron]

I think a good chunk of that has been luck.

[Caleb Wilson]

Why do you do it?

[Ed Zitron]

It's fun. That's it. One, the smallest. But the first reason is because it's important for me to be familiar with the stuff, with the work that I do. But I wouldn't be gambling as much if that was the only reason. But no, I've been making a small amount of money on it and so I've been doing it. I set some pretty clear limits for myself because I am always concerned about having an addictive. Everything we've been discussing. But what's interesting is that if I play for a couple of weeks, then I stop playing for weeks to see how the apps engage me because I get notifications, I get emails. Like when I, when I went to London for the Vikings game, I also spent a week prior to that game just taking a vacation in Ireland.

[Caleb Wilson]

Yeah.

[Ed Zitron]

Right. And so gambling is like legal in both of those places, but. Or sports gaming is legal in both of those places, but the apps I was using were not authorized in those places.

[Caleb Wilson]

Right.

[Ed Zitron]

And so I couldn't do it. And I was like, well, I'm not gonna get a new app. I'm not gonna. Yeah, whatever. Right. And I had to like bet in person in London. It was awful. I hated it.

[Caleb Wilson]

William Hill or a living Ladbrokes.

[Ed Zitron]

I, I couldn't. I couldn't do a place called Ladbrokes. I, I couldn't.

[Caleb Wilson]

Did you bet on the dogs?

[Ed Zitron]

No, I, I only bet on football.

[Caleb Wilson]

There's still. Do they still do greyhound races?

[Ed Zitron]

Yes, they definitely advertise that when I walked into the wheelhouse country. But yeah, and so I do it because it's, it's fun. I do it because it's my work and I do it because so far I've made a little bit of money, but I've been really hyper careful about like, I've got a spreadsheet that keeps track of everything. I. And I pay attention to what are called like reverse line moves when the majority of the tickets are on one side, and the majority of the money is on the other side. Tickets mean the number of bets. So you would have, let's say three people bet on Saquon Barkley to get 110 yards in this game.

[Caleb Wilson]

Got it.

[Ed Zitron]

And then one person bets that he's going to get fewer than that many yards, but that person bets way more than those three people combined. What you get is a reverse line move where the line moves in the direction of the guy who bet a lot of money. Even though there's more tickets on that side, you pay attention to that and you can see maybe there's some edges here or there. It's way in the weeds.

[Caleb Wilson]

But they've got their hooks into you to some extent.

[Ed Zitron]

Absolutely. No, I'm forsaken.

[Caleb Wilson]

It's so great. And you're a very intelligent person. You're not someone I would consider easily, like, tricked. Even though you're in the system. It's interesting how it can get its claws in.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. And when I started, I knew that I had to set really hard limits, and I knew that I had to make rules about not chasing good money after bad.

[Caleb Wilson]

Right.

[Ed Zitron]

And so I set a limit for myself on the number of times a year I can deposit, which is three. I set a limit to how much I can put on one bet, which is. Is. I think the limit I set was like, 8% of the total amount of money I have in that app on each individual bet. Right. And I say, I think, because I just started doing it kind of like, by feel, because it's like, oh, I've got 150. I'll just put 10, you know, so.

[Caleb Wilson]

Right, right.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah. But, yeah, and so the only times I have broken that limit once, but it was because I was offered an obscene promo, which is how they get you.

[Caleb Wilson]

Right.

[Ed Zitron]

But, like, I was like, oh, I'll deposit again because that's 250buc.

[Caleb Wilson]

Right.

[Ed Zitron]

So I put in 250, and then I bet the 250 promo dollars on like a minus 10,000 bet or something like that.

[Caleb Wilson]

You did the thing they wanted you to.

[Ed Zitron]

No, I did the opposite. It was a minus 10,000 bet.

[Caleb Wilson]

So what does that mean?

[Ed Zitron]

That means if I won, I would get no money. But the 250 turned from a promo into real money, and then I just withdrew it.

[Caleb Wilson]

Okay.

[Ed Zitron]

So a minus 10,000 bet is you have to bet $10,000 to win 100.

[Caleb Wilson]

Okay.

[Ed Zitron]

And so the percentage return on that is miniscule. And so I bet the $250 promo bet on a.

[Caleb Wilson]

Just to get the money out.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, it was a 99.9% chance that I. Yeah. And most people don't do that. No, because you can do that, I promise you.

[Caleb Wilson]

And I think. And I think the funny thing is, is like this is all data. I'm not just trying to pull it back because it's a tech podcast, but it really is. This is just. When you remove the word sport, this is just like what crypto does, except more craven and on television all the time. And it's the same fucking people, or at least the same fucking people who do like crypto channels that kind of do some sports shit or they kind of flirt with the same linguistics. It's just. Yeah, well, disgusting.

[Ed Zitron]

The. Again, like the people who were doing online poker were the people that did DFS that ended up going into crypto and then they go back into like the. We call them pickums now, this version of fantasy, which is basically also daily fantasy. But yeah, it's the same. And so they use the same language. Like when. When you see kind of the communications between them or the way they. Even. Even sometimes when they talk to the public, they use like poker language. And. And that's the way that they talk about crypto, it's the way they talk about NFTs, that's the way they talk about AI, it's the way they talk about this.

[Caleb Wilson]

It's all just one big scam. So let's wrap up there. Arif, where can people find you?

[Ed Zitron]

You can find me at Wideleft Football. That's the newsletter I run. It covers there's sports politics and sports culture and sports and all of that. Otherwise, on socials, I'm Arif BSKY Social on BluesKY and Arifson NFL on Twitter.

[Caleb Wilson]

Caleb, where can people find you?

[Arif Hassan]

I've got a podcast called a Western Kabuki. It's kind of an irreverent look at Internet culture.

[Caleb Wilson]

It's wonderful. I've been on multiple times.

[Ed Zitron]

Yeah, it's incredible.

[Arif Hassan]

Both of you have, and I thank you for that. With a. I guess a comedian, Juniper and Alex Goldman, formerly of Reply all, where we just kind of talk about people's relationship with. With, with the Internet, I guess predominantly you can find me there at Western Kabuki. You can find me. I'm no longer on Twitter. I'm on BlueSkyirdRespector and you can find.

[Caleb Wilson]

Me everywhere you're going to hear about after this. Matt. I'm going to re record this at some point. But I'm not. I'm not going to do it now. You're just going to have to hear it's going to go do the whole theme will go on. It'll be amazing. Anyway, I've been Ed Zitron. You can find me.com on Blue Sky. I'm still on Twitter but I don't give a about it. And yeah, if you haven't done this, please go to everyone you know. Tell them to download the show. Tell them to download every single goddamn episode. I need the downloads. Okay, do this for me. Thank you for listening. And then you're going to hear me say thank you for listening again. You're going to be so mad. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osawski. You can check out more of his music and audio [e-mail] M A T T O S O W s k I.com you can email [e-mail] or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend recommend you go to chat where's your ed to visit the Discord and go to R betteroffline to check out our Reddit thank you so much for listening.

[Ed Zitron]

Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.

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[Oz Veloson]

To see into the future? Do you want to understand an invisible force that's shaping your life? Do you want to experience the frontiers of what makes other us human? On tech stuff we travel from the mines of Congo to the surface of Mars, from conversations with Nobel Prize winners to the depths of TikTok to ask burning questions about technology, from high tech to low culture and everywhere in between. Join us Listen to tech stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Tisha Allen]

You are cordially invited to the hottest party in professional sports. I'm Tisha Allen, former golf professional and the host of welcome to the Party, your newest obsession about the wonderful world that is women's golf. Featuring interviews with top players on tour, tips to help improve your swing, and the craziest stories to come out of your friendly neighborhood country club. Welcome to the Party with Tisha Allen is an iHeart Women's 4th production in partnership with Deep Blues 4th Entertainment. Raymond Listen to welcome to the Party that's P A R T E e on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Alec Baldwin]

Hey, it's Alec Baldwin. This past season on my podcast, here's the Thing, I spoke with more actors, musicians, policymakers, and so many other fascinating people like writer and actor Dan Aykroyd.

[Ed Zitron]

I love writing more than anything. You're left alone, you know, you do three hours in the morning, you write three hours in the afternoon. Go pick up a kid from school and write at night. And after nine hours you come out with seven pages and then you're moving on.

[Alec Baldwin]

Listen to here's the thing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.