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Foreign.
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This episode is brought to you by indeed. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com podcast that's indeed.com podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs I want to tell you three stories about the state of gambling in America. Story 1 On the morning of February 28th, someone logged onto the prediction market website Polymarket and placed a $32,000 bet. This bet wasn't placed on an NBA game. It wasn't placed on a hockey game. It wasn't placed on any sport. This was a bet that the United States would bomb Iran that very day, at a time when the odds said it was an extremely low probability chance of happening. A few hours later, the bombs fell and that one bet turned into a $553,000 payday for a user named Magamyman. It was just one of dozens of suspicious, perfectly timed wagers totaling millions of dollars placed in the hours before a war began. The term war profiteering typically refers to arms dealers who get rich from warfare. But we now live in a world where online bettors, including perhaps inside of our government, stand to profit by declaring wars that they have a rooting interest in planning. On March 10, several days into the Iran war, the journalist Emmanuel Fabian reported that a warhead launched from Iran struck a site outside Jerusalem. Meanwhile, back on polymarket, users had placed bets on the precise location of missile strikes on that very date, March 10th. Fabian's article was therefore poised to determine payouts of $14 million in betting. As the Atlantic's Charlie Warzell reported, bettors encouraged Fabian to rewrite his story to produce the outcome they had bet on. Others sent threats to him saying, quote, I'll make your life miserable. We now live in a world where journalists are being pressured, bullied, threatened, even paid to publish specific stories for the sole purpose of cashing out online bets about the world. Number three. McKay Coppins is a writer at the Atlantic. This month, he wrote a feature story on the rise of sports gambling in America. As part of that story, he was staked $10,000 to bet on sports himself. He lost pretty much all of it. This is an increasingly commonplace American experience. To lose your shirt betting on Sports in 2017Americans bet less than $5 billion through online sportsbooks. Last year, they gambled more than $160 billion. But McKay's story is not just about the common experience of losing money on gambling. It's about the rise of sports betting in America more generally and. And how the logic of gambling has come to colonize every square inch of our media, from warfare to football. McKay is today's guest. We talk about the rise of gambling in sports, how it's spread into politics and life, and what to make of the slow or rapid casino ification of America. I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English. This episode of Plain English is presented by Audi. We all know that feeling. A change of plans, a new opportunity. Instead of overthinking, what if you just said yes? With the all new Audi Q3? The answer is easy. It's made for the yes life. With the power and room to handle whatever pops up. Yes to adventure, yes to right now. Because saying yes without hesitation, that's real luxury. The all new Audi Q3 made for the yes life. Learn more at audiusa.com McKay Coppins, welcome to the show.
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Thanks, Derek.
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You are the author of the Atlantic's latest cover story, My Year as a Degenerate Gambler. How did a Mormon end up writing the Atlantic cover story on gambling in America? What is the backstory here?
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That's not a natural fit to you?
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Not the most obvious fit, no.
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So this started as a more kind of normal magazine story assignment. You know how these things go. Right. My editor said, we want a big story on the explosive growth of the sports betting industry, the online gambling boom, what it's doing to America. And we started kind of charting the course of normal reporting. Like, oh, I'll interview executives at FanDuel and DraftKings, and I'll interview athletes and people maybe who are struggling with gambling addiction. And I think it was my editor who first said, it would really be better if you had a little skin in the game, experienced it firsthand. And I said, well, yeah, but, you know, for religious reasons, I don't gamble. And he was like, yeah, I know, I know, I know. But what if we staked you some money? And I think it was actually the editor in chief, Jeff Goldberg, who was like, well, what if we staked you $10,000? Like, I thought it was gonna be a few hundred bucks. He had this idea of giving me a bunch of money. And the deal was, we'll give you $10,000 to gamble with. We'll cover your losses, but to keep you kind of invested. We'll split the winnings 50, 50, if there are any. And. And so I write about this in the piece. I was intrigued. I had never been a gambler. Part for religious reasons, partly just not that interested. I'm a sports fan. I felt like I didn't really need to bet on the games to enjoy them. But I did go and consult my bishop about it, which was an awkward conversation. He basically kind of tacitly agreed, but was also like, look, you need to be careful with this. It can really. I've seen this, like, wreck people's lives, right? And I will admit that in that moment, I kind of smugly brushed him off because I was like, it's, you know, it'll be fine. Like, this is a journalism stunt. But I think that, look, my editors, I think, thought there was something just inherently funny about taking a kind of suburban Mormon dad and dropping him into this world.
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Your editors were right. It is objectively funny.
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It turned out to make, you know, the story a lot more entertaining. I will say I did not expect to write as much about my own experience when I started. Like, I thought this would be maybe one section where I, like, wrote about my own little foray into gambling, but it ended up kind of consuming my life in ways that I wasn't expecting.
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Well, look, before we talk about how the perverse casino ification has destroyed America, let's actually hold on your experience. I mean, can you admit that sports gambling is kind of fun?
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Yes, of course. Novel insight by McKay, Coffin's new gambler. Gambling can be fun. I remember the first game I bet on. It was the first game of the NFL season. It was Eagles, Cowboys. And I punched in a bunch of bets. I didn't know what I was doing at all at that point. I just downloaded DraftKings. And I remember sitting down to watch the game, and within 10 minutes, I was like, oh, this is why people do this. Because I had purchased a synthetic rooting interest in a game that I would otherwise have no reason to care about normal life. The way I would have watched that game was turned it on, folded some laundry with my wife, probably fallen asleep. Turn it off at halftime, check the score in the morning. Right? That's like that, you know? Cause I don't care about the Eagles or Cowboys really, but I bet on the Eagles, and I was locked in and I, you know, there was a weather delay. There are a lot of weird things. In that first game, somebody got ejected for spitting.
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Jalen Carter. Yeah, the defensive lineman for the Eagles. I think spat in Dak Prescott's face. But also there was reverse camera angle that suggested that Dak may have spat at him first. This is like first 15 seconds of the NFL season.
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Of the NFL season. And I was, like, riveted, right? Like riveted. And I ended up staying up till like, midnight to finish the game. And what helped also was that that first night, I came out 20 bucks ahead, and I was like, this is amazing. This is awesome. Like, why? You know, I totally get why this is so popular. And also, you know, when you have your first win as a gambler, it's really like, there's kind of nothing like it. Like, I remember I told my wife the next morning, and she immediately was like, whoa, are we going to win money? Are we. Is this going to, like, can we buy a new KitchenAid mixer? Can we. You know, like, we were.
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It's that easy for a Mormon wife to go from gambling. Gambling is against my creed to, oh, if we extrapolate this out over the course of the season, we can totally redo the kitchen.
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She. She, look, she had bought into the. The spiritual workaround logic of the whole thing, so she had already made her moral peace with it. And now it was all like, can we. Can we remodel the pantry? Like, let' get going.
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So I'm gonna let listeners in on a little secret about Atlantic magazine features, which is that there's a template, there's a formula. And part one of a classic Atlanta cover story is you have this microcosmic anecdote, this anecdote, often in the first person, that contains the stakes of the story and the import of the story. Here is my experience in gambling, and this is what it reflects about American life. And always in part two of the story, the lens is pulled all the way back, and we go back to the beginning of human history and walk forward the chronology of this topic. So we are both vets of Atlantic feature writing, so let's stick with that template here. Gambling has a millennial old history. The ancient Greeks wagered on the Olympics. The ancient Romans wagered on the gladiators. Can you tell me a very specific potted history of gambling in America between the 1600s and the year 2010? And the reason to stop in that year will be made apparent to people in just a few seconds. But give me a sense of America's history with gambling from the 17th century to the early 21st century.
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Yeah. So I think it will surprise nobody that the Puritans, not huge fans of gambling right from the very beginning of Plymouth Colony, gambling was banned under penalty of punishment. And it basically, that attitude toward gambling stretched throughout the early, you know, the colonies, the founding fathers. George Washington, I found this amazing quote where he talked about how gambling can be linked to every other evil. You know, it's the child of avarice, et cetera. And basically the, you know, laws varied state by state, century to century. It changed and evolved. But the general American attitude toward gambling was that it was a socially costly, you know, civilizationally ruinous vice that might need to be tolerated, but should be regulated, stigmatized, and ideally kept to certain kind of containment zones like riverboats and red light districts.
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That quote from George Washington is that gambling could be at the heart of every possible evil. It is the child of avarice, the brother of inequity and the father of mischief, that is our founding father, George Washington. On sports gambling. I stopped in the year 2010 because something happened in 2012 that I think totally reoriented American history, at least as it relates to gambling. What happened in 2012?
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Chris Christie, Governor of New Jersey, signed a bill into law that legalized sports betting in New Jersey. Up to that point, there had been a federal law on the books for a long time that made it so that sports betting was only legal in a handful of locations.
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And is that the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection act of 1992?
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PASPA Yep, by the way, that it was created with the very strong support of all the professional sports league commissioners. They testified before Congress saying that there was no greater threat to the integrity of sports than legalized gambling. And they had good reason to believe that. By the way, if you look at that history that we talked about, there were these big scandals, right? The 1919 World Series, the point shaving scandals in college basketball in the 1970s, these scandals that had convinced professional SP that betting on sports was kind of an existential threat, even to the game, because not only did it breed potential for corruption and manipulation, it also just planted in the mind of sports fans and viewers that these sports might not be totally on the level that the game you're watching on the court or the field might be manipulated by gambling. And if that sentiment is too widely adopted, it ruins the whole experience of watching sports. Right. Anyway, Chris Christie signs this law, the sports leagues sue to stop it from being implemented, and it starts to wind its way through federal court until it gets to the Supreme Court in 2018.
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A 2018 Supreme Court decision, Murphy vs. NCAA, which strikes down this law, PASPA, that was passed in 1992 and that essentially reversed this rule that said that legal sports betting had to be contained to Nevada. So now the gates are flung wide open. And I want to do a beat here on industry economics because there's a 180 that the sports league's take on gambling that's absolutely remarkable. And a lot of what I'm going to say here comes from a conversation we had last year on the show with Jonathan Cohn, the author of Losing America's Reckless Bet on sports gambling. In 2012, the commissioner of the NBA, David Stern, screams in Chris Christie's face for opening the door to gambling. Two years later, the commissioner of the NBA is Adam Silver, and he writes an op ed in the New York Times entitled, quote, legalize and regulate sports betting. End quote. That's a two year 180 in the NFL. This is a league that spent decades lobbying the federal government to protect PASPA. Last year, the NFL saw $30 billion gambled on football games. The league itself made half a billion dollars in advertising, licensing and data deals. To your mind, and I have a lot of thoughts here, and so maybe we'll go back and forth just a bit on the economics of this. What explains this 180? How would you in good faith explain how the sports leagues in almost a matter of months went from keep the barbarians out of the gates to let's fling open the gates?
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Yeah, let's bracket the kind of the funny nature of the righteous indignation that these leagues had about legalized gambling just completely melting away once the Supreme Court overturned it. Because that is amusing. But there were real economic reasons for the leagues to embrace gambling. If you go back to 2018, 2019, 2020, professional sports in general and specific leagues, especially Major League Baseball, for example, were facing what looked like a kind of a gathering crisis when it came to falling TV ratings and younger fans disengaging from the sport. And you know, you've talked about this on your show a lot of shows. The NBA, for example, younger fans were, you know, very interested in the players, interested in watching highlights on TikTok and Instagram, not so much in turning on games and watching entire games. And this posed a big, you know, challenge to the leagues where they, you know, they to make their money licensing broadcast deals. They need people to watch the games on tv. So what's a way to ensure that people will not just watch, you know, Kevin Durant Highlights on TikTok, but actually turn on entire games? Well, if they've got money on it, they're much more likely to want to watch the Games. Gambling was seen by these leagues as a way to reengage younger fans especially and to prop up sagging TV ratings.
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I want to emphasize what you just said, the way I would reiterate it is that gambling turned out to have both a direct benefit to the leagues and indirect benefit to the leagues. The direct benefit to the league is, is that the leagues are literally making licensing and data deal money from the gambling leagues. They're making advertising revenue from the gam. I mean, if you said gambling leagues, the sports books, if you turn on an NFL game, you turn on an NBA game, every third AD is FanDuel or you know, MGM sports book. It's, it's constant, the drumbeat of, of gambling advertising. That's the direct part. The indirect part that you mentioned though, I think might, just might be just as important that in an era of cord cutting and an era of declining television revenue, the best way to get people to watch games, especially once the outcome of that game is relatively decided, is for them to have a material benefit riding on the outcome of the game. And so this was their way to keep younger viewers in particular attached to, to linear programming at a time when cord cutting was rampant. I do think that it was both those things. And look, clearly it's been incredibly advantageous to the leagues. I mean, did you speak to folks like from the leagues who essentially said, look, we, we made a bet, so to speak, on gambling and for us it's paid off. It was, it was a good economic decision.
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There really doesn't seem to be a lot of remorse or like reckoning with the consequences. Right. Even as there have been more recent revelations of gambling related scandals in professional sports line from the leagues and from professional sports is these are isolated incidents, they're rare. They're by the way, being flagged by the legal online sports books. They're helping us root out corruption. And overall this has been an enormous win for us. Now I would say that if you talk to people off the record, and I won't betray any confidences here, but you hear a slightly different story, they will still say, you know, this was definitely a deal worth doing. But I think that the power dynamics between the online sportsbooks and the leagues are getting a little bit uncomfortable for some people in professional sports.
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How so?
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You know, there's a sense that even if they wanted to start to distance themselves a little more from gambling or to call out more aggressively the trade offs or the perils of gambling, they kind of don't have the ability to. Because the economics of Professional sports are not so interlocked with profess with online gambling that it's really hard to disentangle them.
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Right, back to your story. After two weeks of betting, you were down $60. You decided to reach out to a gambling guru. Who did you pick and what did he teach you?
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So I called Nate Silver, who I first encountered, like most people, as a political pundit and prognosticator. Famously, in 2012, his site 538 correctly predicted the outcome of every single state in the presidential election. And in recent years, he has pivoted more toward writing about gambling. He wrote a great book about gambling, and his newsletter is full of kind of model driven sports betting advice. And I basically felt like, as somebody who knew nothing about this and clearly was out of my depth, that he could give me best practices. And he did. He kind of walked me. I mean, first of all, he did. It was kind of humiliating, the first conversation, because I showed him my bet slips for the first week and he started on the phone going through the bet slips and like roasting me. You know, he was like, oh, no. And then he laughed at me. And, you know, like, I write that. That's how I learned you can be emasculated by Nate Silver.
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What bets in particular did he find particularly offensive?
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I think there was. This is pretty humiliating even to talk about now. There was one where I had turned on a random college football game with my brother. I can't even remember who the teams were. I knew nothing about them. And I got on and bet the under for the point total of the game, lost that, and then bet, chased my loss for another higher point total, and then lost that too. And it was just like violating every single rule of sensible sports betting.
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But also, that is what sports gambling is.
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Well, that's what people.
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You at least were participating in this experiment in a way that was like representative, I think, of millions and millions of bettors, which is there's a television game in front of you. You're like, you know what'd be really fun is to have a little bit of financial interest riding on this game. You lose money, you don't want to be down $25 in the day. And so you're like, you know what? I can make this back if I just make one more bet. This is how it happens.
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Totally. I mean, it's funny because since the piece came out, some people are like, oh my gosh, this guy is such an idiot. Gambling. I'm like, I hate to break to you. Most people who are downloading these apps and just using them casually are gambling like idiots. Most people are not Nate Silver. Right, Right. What Nate told me was, look, there are some basic economic realities of sports betting. With the vig that they take the books, essentially charge you four and a half percent for every bet. So you have to win to break Even at least 52.5% of the time before taxes. So actually even more. And that means that you have to basically grind out microscopic edges game after game after game. Right. It is not the case that you're gonna win 70% of your bets. Nobody does that. Right. The way that you come out ahead is by very carefully studying the lines, pouring over roster reports and weather updates and all the things that could affect the outcome of a game, and then sticking, especially if you're a newbie like me, to point spreads. Not doing parlays or prop bets. Those are suckers bets. And basically making sure that you're not doing in game live betting, too, because that's more emotionally driven. He kind of taught me all these rules.
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Yeah. And at an abstract level, the lesson that I took from Nate in your piece, because I've actually. I just was on stage with Nate at the MIT Sloan Conference, and he talked a little bit about his betting strategy, and he reiterated this lesson to me in different words. But the most popular bets are typically the worst deals. They're popular for a reason. They are made to look fun for a reason. And it takes a beat to recognize that it is economically sensible for the sports books to have an inverse relationship between fun and profitability for the better.
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That's a really interesting way to put it.
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Parlays are fun. It's a parlay to say, oh, I need three different things to happen, so I have fun riding on three different outcomes today. That's much more fun than saying, I'm just gonna bet the over under on one game. But parlays are a terrible deal for most bettors. Props, which is like a very specific bet on, you know, is one player gonna have more than seven and a half assists in a game? Is one player gonna have their longest rush be 35, you know, 0.5 yards? Like, these kind of props are really fun because they can happen at any time. It encourages you to watch to the end of the game to see what did the assist number end at. Did Saquon Barkley break one out in the fourth quarter when the outcome of the game was essentially decided? But these are really bad bets. He also pointed out that NFL spreads are the most popular bets, and they're the hardest sport to win money on. Almost for the very same reason that they are popular, which is that they are a more populated bet. So, you know, it's harder to get a consistent edge. Maybe just elaborate a little bit on the degree to which Nate taught you that there is this inverse relationship between fun and profit in gambling, which is something that, you know, amateur betters should probably know about before they're getting into this.
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Well, something that he said that. That stuck with me. First of all, he. He talked about the NFL. He was like, look, you're betting on the NFL. That is the hardest sport to make money betting on because it's so popular. There's so many bets. There's the. The lines are too sharp. Right. That, like, you probably are not going to be able to beat the house on NFL bets. It's like the people who make a lot of money betting on sports tend to be people who are betting on lesser. Yeah. Lesser known, even. He was like, there's a lot more value to be found in the wnba if you can actually learn about the wnba. The books don't know as much about it. There's more opportunity to kind of exploit different edges. But the thing that he said to me that was really interesting was, you know, I asked him, I'm starting with $10,000. What would be a good season? Like, what should I be shooting for? What would be, like, a respectable amount of money to win? And he was, like, kind of mystified by my question. And he was like, you understand that if you win one penny, you'll be better than 98% of gamblers. Like, a good season would be not losing money. And that kind of shocked me, honestly, and maybe I should have known that. But the thing that he said was like, like, Nate himself has made hundreds of thousands of dollars gambling, mostly playing poker in tournaments. Right. He said, I have a proprietary model that I've developed. I'm constantly tweaking it. I'm pouring over data. I'm pretty good at this. He's been limited at various sports books, et cetera, because he's a very good better, which.
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Pause you there.
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A
We should talk about that.
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B
That's another important thing to know, which is not only are the stakes against amateur betters, but also, if they prove themselves to be better than 95% of amateur bettors, the sportsbooks can take action to make them, like, to make betting less likely or to shut down their. What exactly do they do?
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Because they talk to me about this. Yeah, yeah. So they call it limiting, you it's essentially banning you from making big bets. So, like, if you are consistently winning money, a book will start limiting the amount of money you can gamble on any given game to, like, $25 or something. Right. Which is kind of insane when you think about it. Like, it shows. Again, just like the entire system is developed to be fun, not for you to make money like that. It's. And it is very fun, but it's. You know, you could call it rigged or whatever, but it clearly, it's like a carnival game where you go. And it's actually very, very hard to win those ring tosses. But that doesn't stop people from doing it because it's fun and you're there and it's a good time. But, yes, if you are a sharp bettor, that means you're consistently winning money. The books will either limit you, in some cases, kick you off the platform entirely. And so there's actually this whole cat and mouse game that sharp bettors will play with the books where they'll open up an account and pretend at first to be an amateur, better, maybe even a compulsive bettor, so that the books will raise their limits and let them make very big bets. And then once the limits are raised, they'll move in for the kill and try to make a bunch of money before they get kicked off.
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B
I never thought of it quite this way, but would it be fair to say that since 80 to 90% of bettors are losing money overall and the top, say, 1% of bettors are getting limited or even kicked off the platform, the only way to really make consistent money in this game is to be somewhere between the 91st and 98th percentile. You see how you're bounded on both sides? You're either losing money or you're making too much money, which makes the Goldilocks zone very narrow.
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A
Yeah. And I think that even in those cases, it's a matter of. It's really what they say in Las Vegas is it's all about knowing when to walk away from the table. Right. Even in those cases, if you're in that 91 to 98% spot, you could get on a hot streak, but then you have to leave before your luck turns and you start losing again or before the books shut you down.
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B
Right. I wanna talk a little bit about four levels of risk that I think gambling poses for America. Number one, the risk to individual betters. Number two, the risk to individual athletes. Number three, the risk to the integrity of sports. And number four, I didn't Know what to call this. So I just called it the risk to American decency writ large. Let's start with individual betters. What is the best way to understand the frequency of gambling addiction?
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A
Well, it's only about 2 to 5% of gamblers will develop what are considered compulsive behaviors or addictive behaviors. So as with, you know, the number of people who drink or, or, or engage in other, you know, potentially addictive behaviors, most people are able to do it in a kind of responsible or, or casual way. Right. I do think though that that 2 to 5% is a bigger number overall than you would realize in this era when we're creating tens of millions of new gamblers. Right. The way that gambling has permeated the culture, the way that it's omnipresent in sports, has kind of inevitably, by design, created a bunch of new people who are gambling and otherwise wouldn't, including people who are under the age that they're supposed to be 21. Right. A lot of teenage boys, I mean, anybody who has had any experience with teenage boys in the last few years can tell you that they are very acquainted with point spreads and money lines and they know how to gamble. Now, some of them have gotten access to accounts through their dads or older friends. Some of them do it illegally, A lot of them just do it within high school. Right. But the way that gambling has become omnipresent, it means that the likelihood that there will be hundreds of thousands, millions of new gambling addicts is pretty high. And it's important to know that because unlike other addictive disorders, gambling addiction doesn't manifest physically the same way. Right. Like, it's much easier to hide a gambling addiction at first than it is to hide a drug addiction or, you know, alcoholism, because people, people can't smell it on you. You don't have glazed eyes or slurred speech. And there are tons of stories even since the story has come out. I've gotten all these horror stories from people who reach out and say, my 19 year old nephew was deep in the whole gambling. We had no idea he was gambling, but he stole a debit card and started gambling with it. And then he's been arrested and his life is over. There are a ton of stories like this. And the recurring theme is people had no idea that, that this person was gambling at all, let alone that they had a gambling addiction.
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B
You talked to the president of FanDuel and other online sports books to ask if they preyed on problem gamblers. What did the sportsbooks tell You. And what was your reaction to what they told you?
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A
Yeah, they make, I think, a pretty sincere case, honestly, that they tried to root out problem gamblers. I will give them the benefit of the doubt that they believe they're not being disingenuous when they say that we don't want gambling addicts on our platforms. And, you know, I talked to the president of FanDuel and he walked me through all the different things that they do to identify potential problem gamblers and to slow them down. Right. So if you're on FanDuel and you start gambling much more money than you typically do or spending much more time on the app than you typically do, their kind of algorithm will flash and the app will actually send you notifications saying, hey, just so you know, you're spending a lot more money with us than you typically do. Let us know if you want to slow down. Let us know if you want to implement your own kind of limit on how much you can lose, which, you know, most of the apps allow you to do. And if things get really out of hand, the executives that these DraftKings and Pandua both told me they will actually kick people off the platform. They'll just shut them down. So I believe that's true. I don't think they're lying. And I actually experienced myself during moments of this experiment where I would get the. They call it a reality check pop up on FanDuel that says, hey, just so you know, you spent the last hour on this. And I always kind of. I was like, this feels a little passive aggressive. You know, leave me alone. I'm using your product. But the reason that I'm a little skeptical of the claims that they don't want any money from, you know, problem gamblers is that the basic economic reality of the sports betting industry is that a majority of their profit comes from the 10% of people who use their apps the most.
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B
I think the stat I remember from the piece is it's 90% of revenue comes from 10% of users.
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A
Yes. Now, no. Their counter to that is it's not necessarily the case that the people that gamble the most money are the ones that have an addictive disorder or problem. Right. There are people with a lot of discretionary income who can lose a lot of money, and it's no problem.
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B
Nate Silver exists.
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Nate Silver exists. Right. And that's true. That's fair. I also think that it is probably inevitably the case that in that 10%, there are a lot of people who either qualify as full blown gambling addicts or people who are developing a compulsive problem. And I don't know if it really is in the interest of these sportsbooks in the bottom line interest to root those people out and throw them off the platform.
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B
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- [37:12]
C
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- [38:44]
B
This episode is brought to you by Lincoln Whether it's bonding digitally or exploring the world Together, the 2026 Lincoln Nautilus Hybrid is built for connection with lots of smart tech that helps bring worlds together both on and off the screen. So help turn EveryDrive into an opportunity for discovery with the 2026 Lincoln Nautilus Hybrid. Learn more at lincoln.com available connectivity, features and functionality vary by model. Package pricing, trials and term lengths vary by model. Video streaming and games are only available while parked. It's also a fact there's been studies that show that as sports gambling spreads state to state, you can track the rise of personal bankruptcies in each state as sports gambling opens. So there's a natural experiment that happens as different states are opening up gambling. And that natural experiment has revealed that bankruptcy rates increase suddenly when online sportsbooks are open to that state. It's not clear exactly what the scale of the problem is, but the fact that the problem is there I think is undeniable. I mean, did you ask the sportsbook presidents whether there was something more they thought they could do? Are there cards left unturned on the table here? You think that they could be doing, but they're not doing because they only this is the cynical take. They only want to be seen as stopping problem gamblers, but they also want to respect the fact that they live and operate in an economic industry that relies on compulsion. 10% of users creating 90% of revenue is at least indicative of some level of compulsion. What do you think are the plays that they could make that they're not yet making?
- [40:39]
A
So there definitely are a ton of things they could be doing whether they would admit that there are more kind of cards to play. So to speak is a separate question. I would say that generally speaking, the executives at the really big online sports books are very good at saying the right things, right? We are eager to work with regulators. We're eager to work with political leaders. We understand the concerns. We don't want gambling addiction to become a public health crisis. They'll say all the right things. They have, you know, taken, I think, certain lessons from the kind of combative and ultimately counterproductive approach that Big Tobacco took, you know, a few decades ago. And they're trying to be much more conciliatory and eager to work with legislators. That said, I mean, if you talk to political leaders and experts who are trying to tackle this issue, they'll tell you there are a ton of things that should be happening. Right? They would say, for example, that while all the big online sportsbooks allow you to place limits on yourself, maybe it should be actually legally required that to set up an account on DraftKings and FanDuel, you should have to say, I only want to lose $300 this month. Right. And if I lose more than that, shut me down. There are things like a national self exclusion list, right? So right now there is in most states that allow online gambling a self exclusion form that you can fill out that essentially cuts yourself off from online gambling. These sports books are legally prohibited from taking your action, but it only works in that state. So if I fill one out in Virginia, where I live, and then I go into D.C. or Maryland or wherever else, I can just fire up a new DraftKings account. So there should be a national list, right. Are the online sports books willing to come out in favor of something like that? I don't know. Like, I think that would certainly help. There are a bunch of other tools to mitigate the problem. One of the biggest ones, frankly, is advertising, right. And in that area, I do not see a lot of eagerness to rein in their kind of aggressiveness. But look, there is a reason that 30, 40 years ago, we decided as a country that, you know, cigarette companies shouldn't be selling known addictive products during daytime TV when kids can see it and whatever else. When I, I cannot watch a sports at any game with my 10 year old son without him having to kind of slog through 15 commercials about, you know, gambling. Right. Should we rein that in? I think probably yes. Would the sportsbooks be willing to do it? I would guess there would be some
- [43:31]
B
pushback from the leagues as well.
- [43:33]
A
Yeah.
- [43:34]
B
So that's bucket one, which is the risk to individual betters on the second category, which is the risk to individual athletes. Tell me about Caroline Garcia.
- [43:42]
A
Yeah. She's a recently retired French tennis player. Was at one point, I think, like fourth or fifth in the world. And it was interesting. I talked to her. She said that the first time she got a, like, an abusive, violent message from an angry gambler was when she was still a teenager. This became basically almost like white noise to her. A recurring theme of her entire career was that after a match, she would look at social media, look at the Internet, and see just a stream of the most, like, vile things you could possibly see from angry gamblers who are mad at her for either losing money for them, or in some cases, she's being accused of throwing matches because she's corrupted in some way or manipulating her performance for gambling purposes. This has become a very common experience for athletes at the professional level, even at the college level, too. And I actually experienced this a little bit as a fan. There was one right about this one experience where Amari DiMarcado people might remember
- [44:59]
B
running back for the Arizona Cardinals. I think. Yeah.
- [45:02]
A
During a Cardinals Titans game in October. I think it was. He was about to score what should have been a game ceiling touchdown and dropped the ball half a step before he went into the end zone. And, you know, on purpose, it was kind of a flex, like, he was, like, throwing it on the ground. Turned out he fumbled, the touchdown was reversed, and the team ended up losing. And I ended up losing, I don't know, 300 bucks. And I write about this irrational hatred that I developed for this player.
- [45:34]
B
Well, it's irrational and it's not. It's incredibly rational. I mean, in a flex, he made a volitional decision to lose you or to create an outcome that lost you $300.
- [45:46]
A
That's right.
- [45:47]
B
I do think it's important to point out that, like, the anger isn't entirely irrational.
- [45:52]
A
It's actually if you have hundreds or
- [45:54]
B
thousands of dollars riding in the outcome of a game, it makes hatred of certain athletes more rational. That's precisely the danger of it.
- [46:03]
A
That's actually a good way of putting it. And that's the problem, right? That my kind of seething contempt for this guy who I knew nothing about except that he had lost me $300, was actually kind of like baked into the experience of gambling on the game. Right. And so, you know, that, that, that. That feeling, the intensity of that feeling that I briefly experienced made me understand why a gambler who loses a bunch of money, maybe more money than they should have bet on Any given match or game would be compelled in a, in a fit of pique to write something that they, they probably would regret. I mean, Carolyn Garcia tells me stories about, like, getting these, just the, the most vile message you can imagine from some angry gambler. And she'll look at his profile and it's him with his one year old, you know, and she's just like, what is wrong with you? And the reality is he's responding to the, the, the very like, rational, you know, survival mechanism that kicks in when you, you lose a bunch of money. Like you're angry about it and you want to blame somebody. And it's probably outside of his character, but he's behaving in a way that makes sense.
- [47:16]
B
In a certain way it makes sense and it doesn't. And that's what I think is rich and complicated about it. Because on the one hand, I absolutely believe, I think this is the first thing we said, that when you gamble on the outcome of the game, it makes you care more about the game and therefore you can have more fun watching the game. It increases the cortisol and just general hormonal arousal that you have while watching sports. It also turns what should be leisure into a 1099 document. It turns leisure into income and the opposite of income. And something happens in that conversion that is incredibly emotional. And of course, can be emotional in a negative way if 80 to 90% of Americans are losing money on this activity year after year.
- [48:09]
A
And the players, I think just to go back to them, like, they didn't ask to be like props in our own personal financial dramas. Right. Athletes, I think we should say, are used to getting yelled at by fans. I'm a Boston sports fan. I've been to Fenway. I know what it's like to pretend
- [48:27]
B
that fans were really polite before 2018.
- [48:30]
A
Exactly. They get heckled, they get yelled at. But it is a different experience when you're losing money. When your bank account is suffering because of an athlete's performance versus your favorite team losing a game, it just fundamentally is different. And the number of people who care is much larger.
- [48:50]
B
Yes, I said four categories. Number one, the risk to individual betters. Number two, the risk to individual athletes. Number three, the risk to the integrity of. So in October, as you reported, the FBI announced 30 arrests involving gambling schemes in the NBA. In November of last year, two baseball players were indicted for manipulating pitches, essentially for throwing balls, or I think it was throwing balls when there was a live bet to throw a ball or to, or maybe throw strikes in some cases when there's a bet to throw a strike, but always easier to throw a ball directly into the dirt than to throw a fastball behind a batter. Two thirds of Americans now believe that professional athletes change their performance to influence gambling outcomes. Two thirds of Americans now believe that the sport they watch is directly influenced by gambling outcomes. Do you think the trust crisis in sports is already here? And why does it matter?
- [49:51]
A
That statistic that you read when I came across it was the moment where I kind of realized that the crisis of authority that has kind of already visited every other American institution in the last couple of decades has arrived at professional sports. Two thirds of Americans believing that on some level, and at least some games that they watch, it's professional wrestling, right? Not to overstate it, but that's a disaster for sports, right? Like, if we get to the point where Americans think that what they're watching on TV is not on the level, that it's being manipulated by gambling outcomes, it will initially lead to a wave of conspiratorial thinking and angry, violent messages to athletes and ref blaming and all the rest. It will eventually just erode interest in the games entirely. Right.
- [50:44]
B
I wanna be clear. You made an observation followed by a prediction there, right? The conspiratorial age of sports. It's here.
- [50:51]
A
That's already here.
- [50:51]
B
It's 2026. The idea that gambling might ironically reduce interest in sports, I think is more of a prediction. But it's interesting. It's a very interesting prediction because you're essentially describing a kind of monkey's paw scenario where the sports leagues, fearful of cord cutting eating into television revenue, open up the gates to gambling income to encourage more interest, encourage more viewership of an entire game, but in so doing, create a kind of conspiratorial model of, or conspiratorial relationship with sports where people feel like games aren't sincere, outcomes aren't real. There's this metagame of gambling that is influencing the actual game of sports. And over time that might cause some younger viewers to pull away because they're like, I'm not watching basketball qua basketball. I'm watching a bunch of people that I think might be manipulated. That's not as interesting to me. I'll just watch TikTok all day long rather than follow sports. So maybe just play out this scenario here because it is a kind of ironic monkey's paw sort of prediction.
- [51:59]
A
There's an interesting parallel with politics, which is, you know, I spend a lot of time writing about politics where the political parties and Specific, you know, politicians have invested so much in whipping up the kind of anger and resentments of their respective bases that it has led to, you know, a kind of sugar high of engagement. Right. And you look at politics in the last 10 years, the Trump era especially, people are, you know, exhaustingly focused on politics. And they're, you know, they go through periods where they're on social media all the time tweeting about it, and, you know, they're, they're angry about it and they're becoming a little bit conspiratorial and they're engaging in these kind of crazy ideas, but at some point they burn out. Right? And I think we're actually, you know, we've seen recent evidence of people disengaging from politics entirely because they're just so exhausted by it. You know, it's not exactly the same trend line, but I could see a situation in sports where as gambling becomes completely pervasive and overtakes sports culture, people go through a period, maybe we're in it now, maybe it lasts a few more years, where every time a game doesn't go their way, they're speculating about which coach or player is on the take from the mob or which referee is secretly corrupted. And then at some point that becomes tiresome and they're exhausted by it and they're like, you know what? I don't have to watch this anymore. I can turn on Netflix. Right? There's a lot of other things that'll entertain me. I don't need to watch this clearly corrupted product that actually causes more misery than it gives me. Joy.
- [53:43]
B
It's interesting because what you're proposing here is, and I hadn't quite thought of this, but you're proposing a kind of theory of the relationship between conspiracies and media which says that there's kind of a two phase relationship between conspiracy and media. In phase one, conspiracy. Media increases engagement with this underlying subject. Right. People who are conspiracy theorists about the JFK murder or the Epstein files pay a ton of attention to the jfk, to the Zapruder film and the Epstein files. They pay a ton of attention to it. But what you're saying is that too much conspiratorial thinking about a subject can create a kind of cynical disconnection from that subject that removes interest over time. I mean, I mean, again, we are making a kind of prediction here because NFL ratings are great. NBA ratings have been sort of wacky for a while. Major League Baseball ratings are like, maybe kind of coming back. WNBA ratings look pretty Good. I haven't followed that story particularly recently, but it is interesting to think, you know, what happens if this relationship between conspiracy thinking in sports and sports viewership ends up sort of ironically, pulling viewership away from sports as trust is lost. So the final category I wanted to talk about here, here is the risk to American decency. And here we're moving away from the topic of gambling in sports. We're talking more about this idea that the logic of gambling is spread to other domains of American life. Tell folks about the growth of prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket.
- [55:15]
A
Yeah, so these predictive markets are basically kind of, I would argue, the logical endpoint of the online gambling boom. Right. We have kind of taught the entire American population how to gamble with sports. Right. We've made it frictionless and easy and put it on everybody's phone. Why not extend the logic and culture of gambling to other segments of American life? Why not let people gamble on who's gonna win the Oscar when Taylor Swift's wedding will be? Why not let people gamble on how many people will be deported from the United States next year or when the Iranian regime will fall, or whether a nuclear weapon will be detonated in the year 2026 somewhere in the world? Right. Whether there will be a famine in Gaza. These are not things that I'm making up. These are all bets that you can make on these predictive markets. And I think it is both fascinating and the most kind of dystopian element of this whole story because. Because to see people reduce all, you know, every facet of American life, every part of the world, art and culture and war and geopolitics, into kind of an abstract money making venture, I think is incredibly dangerous. It's desensitizing, it's dehumanizing, and I think it risks bringing that kind of conspiratorial thinking, the gambler's tendency to lash out in desperation into other facets of American life where it could be even more risky.
- [56:54]
B
What I think is so interesting about prediction markets is that there is real underlying utility to some prediction markets. There's evidence that prediction markets for American elections, for example, do just as well, if not better than polling averages, even Nate Silver polling averages. And folks who are interested in the outcome of American elections pay a ton of attention to prediction markets because of this track record of success. Dystopias don't happen, I think, because bad ideas go too far.
- [57:27]
A
That's interesting.
- [57:28]
B
They happen because good ideas go too far.
- [57:29]
A
Yeah.
- [57:30]
B
I think prediction markets have a ton of value I also don't think that betting markets with millions of dollars at stake about famines in Gaza and when we're going to bomb Iran next and when Iran is going to knock out Qatar's liquid natural gas refineries, I don't think those kind of markets are going to lead anywhere good. Because the opportunity for insiders to not only make money off of knowing the outcome of these bets, but also maybe to be encouraged to make policy based on how rich they can get from these bets is utterly dystopian.
- [58:16]
A
Let me play devil's advocate for a second because I did talk to some people involved in these prediction markets and proponents of the prediction markets, and I guess this comes down to the question of how much social utility is there in being able to predict all these outcomes, because I take your point and I actually think there's a lot of evidence to the idea that the predictive markets are better at predicting things than polls, survey data, certainly commentators, pundits, Right. I don't know necessarily that it's a social good that we know exactly how many people are gonna be deported or every beat of the Iranian war. But let's. But to play devil's advocate, if there is a real social utility in these predictive markets being good at predicting things, then insider trading is actually also a social good. It should be encouraged. Right? The proponents of the predictive markets will say it's not a bug, that there are people trading based on inside classified, you know, military intelligence. That's a feature that makes it better.
- [59:29]
B
The market represents truth. It represents predictiveness, which means that you need people who have insight on the future to be able to participate in these future predictive markets.
- [59:39]
A
The co founder of Kalshi has actually even gone further. He's said the ultimate goal of the financial or of the predictive markets is to move the entire online public square away from social media, which is kind of characterized by AI slop and rage, bait and trolling, and a lot of kind of disingenuous back and forth into predictive markets where people are financially incentivized to make their bets based on what they genuinely believe or actually know. And as he put it, you know, people don't lie when there's money on the line. Right? And so his argument is we're actually improving the quality of public discourse by having everybody put real money behind what they're saying. I think he said the goal is to take every difference of opinion and turn it into a tradable asset.
- [60:32]
B
Again, dystopias are not bad. Ideas that go too far. They're good ideas that go too far. It is interesting and useful to have marketplaces that predict the future of incredibly important events to give people a sense of what's going to happen. In that case respect, the prediction market is essentially acting as a poll, as a kind of financialized survey. And I, as a journalist interested in the future, can of course see the value of an instrument of future predictions. That said, I mean, I said this in the Open. On February 28, a better named Maga, my man, placed a $32,000 bet that the United States would bomb Iran on a very certain day. And that bet turned into a $553,000 payday for, again, username MAGA, my man. The odds that there are administration insiders who are making hundreds of thousands of dollars by timing their bets or timing their policy decisions to their bets, I can't possibly see this as a benefit to the American people. I mean, this seems purely an instrument of corruption that can be rationalized by the president of Kalshi as a useful indicator to the American people of what's going to happen in the near future. But fundamentally, what we're dealing with here is just straightforward corruption.
- [62:06]
A
Yeah, no, I mean, that's where I am. And I think we probably have barely scratched the surface. Right. I think that as more and more people become familiar with these markets, figure out ways to manipulate them, there is going to be an explosion of insider trading, corruption, people figuring out ways to manipulate them. There's a part of me, and maybe I can't tell if this is a cynical part of me or an overly optimistic, naive part of me. It's one of the reasons that I don't think the predictive markets will last that long, because I don't think it's sustainable. I just think that unless there are dramatic changes to what kinds of bets are available on these platforms, and they're much more heavily regulated, I think that they'll burn themselves out pretty quickly because people will realize they're so easy to manipulate, that unless you really do have insider information, you're just a sucker.
- [63:00]
B
Right. And I do want to be clear. The darkest timeline here is not the Pentagon making a decision and then people associated with the Pentagon betting on the outcome of that decision. The darkest timeline is people in government realizing they can make hundreds of thousands of dollars on a bet and then tailoring public policy to fit the bet. That's the equivalent of purposely throwing a ball when you are a middle reliever in the Major League Baseball. Right.
- [63:26]
A
But it's life and death stakes.
- [63:27]
B
Except it's life and death stakes. It's bombing a different place than you typically would because you realize that on Tuesday there was an opportunity to make $500,000 from that bombing location and not the bombing location that your boss said. Please pick between these two. It's that tail wagging the dog that to me, is the darkest timeline. And I have no reason to honestly think that the people who govern this country are so moral that they won't throw that purposeful ball.
- [63:57]
A
No, I mean, we've been given no reason to. I should also just say, as an aside, this current administration is largely responsible for the runaway growth of the predictive markets. Under the Biden administration, two different investigations were opened into Calcium Polymarket. And once Trump returned to power, they were quietly shuttered. Don Jr. The president's son, was made an advisor to both companies. So, look, there is a reason I write in the piece that it's not necessarily an accident that the casino fixed of America took place when a former casino operator is in the Oval Office. Like, there is something about the ethos of the Trump era that lends itself to the growth of these predictive markets.
- [64:51]
B
You published this piece? Thousands, 9,000 words. How many words was that?
- [64:55]
A
Oh, even longer. I don't know. Around 12,000. It's long.
- [64:58]
B
It's a great long piece. I really encourage people to read it. And it's linked in the show notes. People can read the piece if they want. So I'm not gonna ask you more questions about the piece. What they can't read are the angry reactions to piece that you're receiving in your private email. What's the most interesting angry reaction that you've heard?
- [65:18]
A
Yeah, the angriest people are recreational gamblers for whom gambling has become a core part of their identity. Right. So I've heard from a lot of gamblers who are saying, first of all, this is like the 9th magazine story going after this industry, and this is a moral panic, and you guys are all neo puritans trying to take away our fun. And fair enough, if that's how you see the kind of terms of the debate, then that's how I would also think about the Atlantic story. A lot of people make fun of me for being an obviously bad gambler, which. Guilty as charged. But the interesting thing that I've seen is the overwhelming majority of gamblers who have expressed frustration with the piece are taking issue with my gambling being not sufficiently representative of a typical gambler and that my losing money is somehow kind of Defaming the sports betting industry, which almost is a little tragic to me because it suggests that all these people believe that they're in the 1 to 2% of gamblers who are over the course of their lives ahead. Right. That they make money gambling. That is just statistically impossible. It's like the, you know, the old thing about like 10 million people say that they were at Woodstock. Right. Because their own memory and own perception of their stuff.
- [66:54]
B
89% of people think they're above average drivers or something like that.
- [66:56]
A
Right, Exactly. Like, it is clearly the case that a, a very large number of regular gamblers believe that they are exceptional at gambling and have maybe even erased their memories of losses and have convinced themselves that they're not losing money. So that's interesting in and of itself. Even more interesting, I've had several people latch onto the fact that I'm Mormon, which I write about in the piece, and say, you know, how would you feel if I went to a Mormon church for a few months and then wrote a 10,000 word cover story about how Mormonism is bad and all these things? And my reaction to that is, first of all, that would not be a wholly original experience. Like, oh, a magazine writing has never criticized Mormonism before. Yes, I can't imagine. But to me, the thing that I take out of that is that there are gamblers for whom sports betting is their religion. Right. They equate their sports betting communities and, and behaviors to kind of a religious experience. Like it is part. It is their community, it's their identity, it's who they are. And I think that's a social catastrophe in the making. Right. Like sports betting, whatever you think of it, maybe it's a vice that needs to be much more heavily regulated. Maybe if you have a more libertarian approach, it's a fun hobby that a few people will, you know, turn into a bad thing in their lives. But for most of them, it's, you know, a source of enjoyment. It should not be central to who you are. It should not be a religious experience. And if it is, I think that it's that much more dangerous as a phenomenon.
- [68:37]
B
One reason I really like the idea you mentioned earlier about signing up for an online sportsbook and having to indicate a minimum amount of or maximum amount of money you can lose on a monthly or annual basis is that that requires that users think of this activity as a kind of normal leisure.
- [69:05]
A
Yes.
- [69:05]
B
Like there are people who love music concerts and spend thousands of dollars a year on music concerts. There is not, however, a music concerts Anonymous group that counsels people who can't stop buying Coldplay tickets. I mean, maybe like three of those people exist, but it's probably not large enough to require its own group. You could say the same about, say, going to the movies or going to amusement parks or going to fancy restaurants. There's all kinds of leisure activities that people spend thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars a year on. So the idea that people are losing money to sports gambling does not itself strike me as catastrophic. If these people's relationship with sports gambling is. It's a leisure activity. Yes, leisure activities cost money, which means you don't make money from going to YouTube concerts.
- [69:58]
A
And I budgeted into the, you know, my expenditures for the month. I am comfortable spending 200 bucks a month on this fun thing that I like doing.
- [70:09]
B
And that's why I think it's important to remember these sort of four categories of risk. Risk. The first category was not, oh, some people lose money, it's, oh, a meaningful share of this betting population predictably becomes addicted to the activity. And then there's the other categories that have nothing to do with other leisure activities like threats to individual athletes, threats to the integrity of the game, and threats to the general, like American project and American morality. That's where I really think that the, the idea that, oh, I'm just treating this as a leisure activity doesn't quite match up to the effect that gambling writ large is having on American society.
- [70:47]
A
But if you dramatically reduced the amount of money that was being gambled on sports, it would at least mitigate some of those other risks we talked about. Right. I will say that a heartening thing about the response to the story has been that it. But it truly does seem cross ideological in the kind of concern about these things. Right. I have had very right wing social conservatives invite me on their religious radio shows to talk about this story. I have had lots of people on the left who are concerned about corporate predation and corporate power who think that these are issues that need to be solved and want to talk to me about it. And so, so to me that looks like the beginning of an American consensus that we just need to think harder about how to regulate the industry. I don't think really any serious people are calling for a prohibition on gambling or sports betting. Right. We're not putting the genie back in the bottle. I don't even know if I would support that. Right. I think that in a liberal democratic society there has to be some place for vices even maybe that are bad. You have to allow for some of it, I think there should be more social stigma attached to it. I don't like this era of, you know, everybody proudly wearing the term degenerate gambler. You know, I know that it's ironic, but it's probably not the best thing for like 11 year old boys to be walking around calling themselves degenerate gamblers. By the way, 1/3 of 11 year old boys in America have gambled in the past year, which is kind of an amazing statistic.
- [72:28]
B
Unbelievable.
- [72:28]
A
But then also I think that like, like we are smart enough as a country to figure out how to not criminalize something but apply sensible regulations and guardrails to it. And I think we just need to have the willpower to do it. Basically.
- [72:48]
B
That's a great place to stop. I'm not going to stop there because there's one question I really want to ask you. Is this a man problem? Like, what do the numbers say about the share of gamblers or the share of gambling addicts that are male versus female?
- [73:04]
A
So I think that the. If you look at all people who bet on sports, 70% of them are men. If you look at problem gamblers who bet on Sports Online, 98% of them are men.
- [73:18]
B
Wow.
- [73:19]
A
So it is, it is really almost universally a male problem gambling addiction. More generally speaking, there are a lot of women who have gambling addiction problems online sports betting addiction. Almost all men.
- [73:36]
B
Men. Too bad. McKay, coffins, thank you very much.
- [73:40]
A
Thanks, Derek.
- [73:55]
B
Lifelock. How can I help? The IRS said I filed my return, but I haven't.
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A
One in four taxpaying Americans has paid
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C
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B
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- [74:09]
A
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B
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- [74:15]
C
One in four was a fraud paying American.
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A
Not anymore.
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C
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