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The explosion of sports betting in America
Americans legally bet close to $167 billion on sports last year, a dramatic increase since states began to broadly legalize it in 2018. Author and journalist David Hill speaks with Geoff Bennett about the rapid rise of sports gambling and prediction ...
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- [00:00]
A
Hey, everybody. Jeff Bennett here. And this is the PBS News podcast Settle in. March Madness tips off next week. And if last year is any guide, Americans will wager more than $3 billion on college basketball over the next few weeks after the Super Bowl. It's one of the biggest betting events of the year, from office pools where you toss in a few bucks, to legal wagers on digital sports betting apps that have exploded since legalization started back in 2018. Sports gambling is now legal in 40 states and Washington, D.C. and nearly half of men under the 50 have an active betting account. Our guest is author and journalist David Hill, who has written about sports betting for Rolling Stone, hosted a podcast about professional gamblers, and has a forthcoming book on the industry. And he's also a gambler himself. We'll talk about the rapid rise of legal sports betting and where regulation is falling short. So settle in and enjoy our conversation with David Hill. David Hill, thanks so much for making time. We appreciate it.
- [01:01]
B
Appreciate you, Jeff. Thanks.
- [01:03]
A
So a lot of people feel like sports betting exploded overnight, essentially after the Supreme Court cleared the way for legalization back in 2018. As someone who studies this and has spent a lot of time in this world, is that perception accurate, or has gambling always been deeply tied to American sports in some way?
- [01:24]
B
I think both things are true. I think that gambling has always been tied to American sports from the beginning, and betting on sports has always been around. But it is true that it really did explode after the repeal of paspa.
- [01:36]
A
So tell me more about that, that connection between the repeal and the explosion
- [01:39]
B
of betting after the repeal of PASPA that sort of paved the way for individual states to license and regulate sportsbooks. We saw that a lot of companies just put a lot of money into trying to expand as quickly as they could in the United States. A lot of that money got put behind marketing, and that marketing money really ginned up the numbers big time. I mean, brought in a lot of people who probably had never gambled before in their lives that became sports bettors just in those few years. And then the pandemic in 2020, I think, really helped speed the plow.
- [02:10]
A
So before 2018, legal betting was mostly confined to Nevada. Is that right?
- [02:15]
B
Right. Legal betting in the United States. The only state that really had regulated betting was Nevada, but people could bet offshore pretty much everywhere in America. And, you know, it's a little bit of a distinction without a difference. But, you know, I think a lot of people sort of took this idea that it's legal to bet but not legal to book. Bets. So the people who are betting in America weren't necessarily breaking any laws. The people who are booking their bets may have been.
- [02:40]
A
How big was the illegal market before 2018?
- [02:43]
B
Well, it's hard to know for sure because they didn't really file any tax reports in the United States or tell
- [02:48]
A
everybody that's why it was illegal. Yeah, right.
- [02:51]
B
So there's really just guesses, but, you know, it's quite big. I mean, in the billions of dollars.
- [02:56]
A
And for years, most professional leagues opposed legalized gambling. And that has changed dramatically, too.
- [03:02]
B
Yeah, I mean, forever. You know, the professional leagues in the United States were all pretty much opposed to gambling rank and file. But the sort of cracks in that began to show, really, before even paspa, honestly. I mean, the NFL, for example, used to be opposed to fantasy sports and wanted state attorneys general to go after fantasy leagues. When fantasy started to grow in popularity in the, like, 1980s into the 90s. And then when they realized that fantasy sports was going to be really big and that it was actually going to be good for the sport, they kind of reversed their position on that and started to welcome fantasy. They started to welcome the fantasy player as a fan that they knew would generate a lot of revenue and help. Help really grow their audience. And the same thing happened with sports betting. There was opposition to it until they realized that this was going to happen and that if they embraced it, it actually would be good for the sport.
- [03:57]
A
Yeah. And just to back up a bit, how did you get interested in this?
- [04:01]
B
Well, I grew up in a little place called Hot Springs, Arkansas, which, if you're not familiar, was sort of once upon a time, America's gambling capital. I mean, Hot Springs was like America's Las Vegas, well before there was a Las Vegas. And I grew up in a sort of a gambling family in a community where gambling was the business that I think f a lot of the families in our community. And I grew up around it my whole life.
- [04:23]
A
It's funny, my family gambling to the extent that they would play the lottery a lot and grew up in South Jersey, so there was always a bus going from Camden, where my grandparents lived, to Atlantic City. And so the stories of going to Atlantic City to go spend a weekend at the slot machines and stuff, I completely understand sort of growing up in that culture. So in addition to covering the betting industry and gambling, you're also a better yourself, a gambler yourself.
- [04:50]
B
Yeah, I definitely. I'm a gambler and I bet on sports, and I like to play cards, and, you know, I like to gamble. I think that, you know, gambling's fun. You know, I'm a big games player. I like to play games. And to me, you know, gambling's just another game. It's just one where, you know, point. The points are money.
- [05:05]
A
Yeah, yeah. And it's no longer the case, obviously, that if you want to bet or bet on a sports book or go gamble, you have to go to Nevada. Of course, you can now do it on your phone. I mean, how. How big of a change has that been for the industry?
- [05:19]
B
Well, it's huge, but I mean, I think there's a step in between that. Right. Once upon a time, you did have to go to Nevada or Atlantic City to gamble. But we didn't just go from Nevada and Atlantic City to Mobile gambling. We actually saw a wave of the sort of legalization of brick and mortar casino gambling in states all across the country. Well, before we saw this wave of sports betting. Right. And it sort of mirrored it. Right. I mean, there was a time when a lot of states opposed casino gambling, and voters in different states rejected initiatives to bring in casino gambling time and time again through the 1980s. But going into the 1990s, there was sort of a wave of states that sort of gave in and started to allow different versions of brick and mortar casinos in their states, really just as a way to fill gaps and holes in their state budgets. They saw an opportunity to generate tax revenue. And so it wasn't long before you had, you know, Americans in over 40 states had access to brick and mortar gambling in one way or another. So the same thing happened with lotteries, where a lot of states didn't have lotteries, and now they're almost everywhere. So I think that there was, you know, what we're talking about is a part of a longer continuum that really goes all the way back to, like, the late 70s, when we saw Atlantic City bring casino gambling in to now. And sports betting is just the latest domino, I think, in like, a long continuum of an expansion of gambling across the United States.
- [06:41]
A
Were these states initially opposed for moral reasons or because they just couldn't figure out a good way initially for how to tax it?
- [06:49]
B
I mean, every state was different, Right. But for the most part, yeah, they were opposed for moral reasons. I mean, one of the few states that doesn't have any form of gambling at all, including a lottery, right now is Utah. So, yeah, for the longest time, there was this sort of moral opposition, but I think that this sort of thing comes. It comes in waves, right? I mean, in the 1950s, you know, there was sort of a gambling fever that swept America. You know, Time magazine called the United States the most gamblingist nation that ever existed. You know, we had the Broadway show in the movie Guys and Dolls that was sort of a celebration of gambling. So it was like really kind of a big part of the zeitgeist in the 1950s. And you see this sort of peak in the 1970s. And then in the 1980s, it all sort of ebbed, you know, went the other direction. And there was a real kind of movement across the country that gambling, that an expansion of gambling was bad, that it was sort of. It became a taboo again. And that's when we saw states rejecting efforts to legalize gambling in different states. But by the time the 1990s roll around, that's where the sort of financial picture kind of outweighed the moral one. And I think some pressure from states that did have casino gambling, especially tribal gaming and stuff like that, that I think showed folks, hey, we need to take a good look at this, because it's gonna happen one way or another. Whether it's tribal gaming or illegal gaming, people are gonna gamble. So a lot of states figured we might as well get our cut and help pay some of these, you know, fill some of these gaps that have been created by us cutting taxes, you know, for decade after decade.
- [08:17]
A
And of course, if you open an app today, you will find thousands of options, everything from the outcome of a game to individual plays. Could anyone have ever imagined the ability to bet on this many things in real time at once?
- [08:33]
B
No, definitely not. The sort of modern version of sports gambling is more a sort of technological innovation than anything else. I think technology has really changed the way that bookmakers and gamblers think about this game that even 20 years ago, people could not have even imagined. It's not just the sheer of, you know, it's not just the speed that people can do it and the sort of volume of things that people can bet on. It's that they've been able to sort of figure out every type of combination of these things together to present all kinds of different, like, packages of ways that you can bet on things. It's sort of mind boggling. And yeah, I don't think that any of the old school bookmakers would have ever imagined being able to take this, the kinds of bets that are being taken today.
- [09:16]
A
Another change is live betting, where you can wager on a game in real time. Why is that such a big deal for sportsbooks?
- [09:23]
B
Well, I think they do a lot of Volume on, on live betting. I mean, people are sitting and watching the game and so they want to bet while they're watching the game. It's sort of another way in this sort of world of second screen entertainment consumption for people to sort of feel like they're participating. I think live bets, you know, you can continue to bet throughout the game, right? As you bet and the bet wins or loses and it gets resolved, then you can immediately make the next bet versus making a bet pregame and having to wait till the game is over to see whether you won or lost, whether you made money or lost money. If you bet live, you're constantly getting to sort of reinvest that money the same way that somebody might day trade a stock or swing trade a stock. You can continually bet throughout the game. And I think that generates a lot of handle for the sportsbooks.
- [10:04]
A
And what about parlays? I mean, that's one of the most heavily promoted bets. What exactly is a parlay?
- [10:09]
B
A parlay is just a combination of bets. You know, if you take a bunch of bets and you stick them together into one bet so that if any one of your bets loses, you lose the whole thing. But if they all win, you win an incredibly eye popping sum of money. The more bets you put into this combination, the bigger the payoff will be. Parlays by a lot of sort of sharp gamblers or old school gamblers were always considered kind of sucker bets. But they've become the most popular kind of bet in America because there's this real American sort of notion that it's fun to bet a little and win a lot of sort of the same. I think appeal of a lottery ticket is at play in the way that a lot of Americans, particularly young Americans, like to bet on sports. They want to put the least amount of money at risk for the biggest amount of money that they could potentially win. Which means they're going to lose their money more often than they're going to win. But they want to know that when they do win, they win some, you know, really big amount of money. And so the parlay has really taken off in America in a way that it hasn't in other countries. And the thing about parlays, particularly same game parlays, which we can talk about, is that they are big moneymakers for the sports books. They can really charge a pretty big vig or tag that's baked into that that the average consumer doesn't really know is there and are going to lose a lot more of their money betting those than they would if they just bet the game or the total.
- [11:23]
A
What's it called? The same game parlay?
- [11:25]
B
Yeah, same game parlay is the same concept. It's just a. It's a bunch of bets combined into one. But they're all in the same game. Right. So you would bet, say, who's going to win the game, who's going to score the most points in the game, you know, how many yards a person might run for in a game. You can combine all these little propositions within one game together into one bet. And now your bet on the game isn't just a bet where you're betting 20 bucks to win 18. You could bet $20 to win, you know, 1200. And most people would rather put their money at stake for a large payoff, even if they know that the odds of them winning it, you know, go down exponentially.
- [12:01]
A
Yeah. Are you good at math, David? I feel like one of the barriers to entry to gambling is like, as you say, all of these different options that people don't even know are available to them. And then folks were like, this doesn't make sense to me. The math of it doesn't make sense to me. I know what buying a lotto ticket is, but beyond that, it's sort of like a vast expanse of all these different options that are just really confusing. How do you see it?
- [12:27]
B
I think that's right. I think that gambling, particularly gambling on sports, but really, gambling generally is a game where it helps you to know math and to understand math, particularly understanding probability, and not only understanding how to calculate probability, but probabilistic thinking, too. You know, a big concept in gambling is to understand that when your bed has the highest expected value, where you understand variance, you understand that you're going to lose sometimes, that you're not going to win every bet, but that you should expect over the long run to win more than you lose. And I would say that if I am any good at math, a lot of the math that I know here in my. My midlife, I learned and got, you know, and got proficient at through gambling. So, I don't know. Take that to your STEM classes.
- [13:11]
A
There you go. The public service announcements for Settle in.
- [13:14]
B
We teach it in the schools.
- [13:16]
A
Yeah. You know, one thing I know that a lot of casual bettors don't realize is that if you win too consistently, that sportsbooks can really shut you out. Tell me more about that.
- [13:25]
B
This is something that American gamblers are growing more and more aware of as we see the expansion of sports betting in America, particularly With the types of companies that are controlling the market right now, what some people would call recreational sports books, and that's that the. The larger sportsbook in America, like FanDuel, DraftKings, MGM, Caesars, that they will. If a player shows any real, you know, propensity to win, you know, that they show any. That they're adept at understanding how to win at gambling, they'll limit their bets, that they will limit those folks to betting small amounts of money to protect their own liabilities against those types of bettors. And this shocks some people. I mean, originally, the bettors who were getting limited in the early days of sports betting, sort of growing the United States were professionals, people that bet pretty large sums of money and were winning large sums of money. But at this point, it's pretty scattershot. I mean, I think a lot of these sports books are painting with a pretty wide brush. And we're seeing that a lot of gamblers who don't bet very large amounts of money, myself included, have found that they've been limited by sports books down to where they can only bet a penny on a. On a game or something like that, because they maybe, you know, won too much money or even. You don't even have to really win a lot of money. You just have to show that you're able to win at a certain type of bet or a certain type of sport over. Over time.
- [14:39]
A
Well, tell me about your experience with this.
- [14:42]
B
My experience is that I'm not somebody who bets lots of money. You know, I'm somebody who, if I bet a couple hundred bucks on a game, that was a pretty decent sized bet for me. And I found that in a number of sports books, my bets would, you know, over time got limited down to where I couldn't bet 5, $10. In some cases, I couldn't bet more than a penny simply because the. I was winning. I was betting on things that the sportsbook maybe felt like they didn't have as strong of a model or as good of a sense of what the price should be. That I did. And that's essentially what sportsbooks are doing. They're profiling their players to say, if this player seems to understand the bet better than we do, we just won't take their bet. But if the player seems to be someone who is just sort of betting foolishly and is likely to lose, we'll let them bet as much as they want. In fact, the more foolish this bettor looks, the higher limit we'll give them. And I think that these two things in combination is a real problem. The fact that you limit people who win, but you will expand the limits for people who lose is a bad recipe. In Europe, they call this the banner bankrupt model, that you ban anybody that's going to win over time and then you bankrupt all the players who you've identified are never going to win. Why is that approach legal in the U.S. well, I think that what the Sportsbook would say is that they have a responsibility to their shareholders or whatever to sort of protect their own liabilities as a business. Right. That if they just took any bet from anybody that came down walking in, that they would be exposed to sort of sharp bettors who had better information than them and they would lose too much money. Why is it legal? I don't know. And some states are taking a look at it. Massachusetts is really at the forefront of this. But a number of states are now trying to look at the practice of limiting to try to figure out legislation that could put some guardrails around it. At the very least, what they're trying to do in Massachusetts is make it so the Sportsbook has to tell you when you've been limited and why. And I think what some advocates are asking for is that in addition to that, they should tell people when their limits are unlimited. And why? Because the problem of trying to bankrupt the losing gambler is just as much, if not more so a problem, a social problem that we have than the problem that they're not going to let anybody who could win at this game win. But I think what they have said many times is this is an entertainment product. We don't think people should make a living at gambling. We think that people should do this for fun and nothing else. And I would just say to that that it's fun to win. It's not so much fun to lose.
- [17:07]
A
And you've spent time with professional gamblers. So how do they navigate these restrictions?
- [17:11]
B
Well, they have to be creative. In many cases, what professional gamblers have had to do is partner with, with recreational gamblers and they've had to go out and find people who will become their partners and they will share their information with that gambler so that that person can then bet and maybe give them a percentage for their information. But it's just a matter of time before that person gets banned as well, or limited as well, and they have to continually move on. The other thing that professional betters have to do is they've had to move a lot of their bets offshore, which I think is key here, because one of the Main arguments that the sports books are using in states, when they want to get a state to permit and regulate sports betting in their state is they say we need to regulate this so that we can shut down the black market, the offshore market, and get Americans money out of the illegal market and bring it into a regulated marketplace. But what we see is that a lot of people who are professional betters are now having to move their money back offshore because those are the only places that will take their bets.
- [18:08]
A
Wow. And with all of the ads and the betting activity, I think people, many people, assume that these sports books are printing money. Are they really profitable?
- [18:16]
B
No, they're not. In fact, I'm not sure that any of them are profitable. A number of the leading sports books in America have yet to show a profit, or if they have, it's only been recently. Really, they've spent a lot of money. You know, they've like a lot of startups in America, they invest a lot of money into tech and into, into marketing, and they sort of are willing to take a loss for as long as they can until, you know, they either get acquired or they go public or whatever. And so, yeah, we haven't seen a lot of profits, which has really come. It's much to the chagrin of some of these states who are hoping for those profits in order to get revenues. I think I just saw this morning that in Missouri there have. There's been two months now of sports betting and there hasn't been a dime paid in taxes because the sports books are not showing any profit to pay taxes on. So the taxpayers in Missouri and the legislators in Missouri, I'm sure, are waiting for when it's eventually, the day's eventually going to come where they're going to get a single penny from any of these sportsbooks now that are operating in their state.
- [19:12]
A
So we're in this moment now where legalization and easy access have coincided with concerns about people having gambling problems, especially young men. What's the issue there?
- [19:22]
B
Well, the issue is that I think what we've seen from the academic research that's been done around this is that young men are more susceptible to these types of behaviors than maybe any other demographic group. You know, some of that may have to do with technology, you know, attention spans, things like that. But young men have also been the key demographic for the sort of growth of sports betting as well. And there's concerns that problem gambling is going to, you know, really spike and skyrocket because of the expansion of sports betting that's already happened, and that is yet to happen here in the United States.
- [20:01]
A
And there are also concerns that wagers on individual performances can be manipulated.
- [20:07]
B
Right. We've had a few scandals here recently about players who have, you know, shaved points or, you know, taken themselves out of games or, you know, altered their pitches or whatever to. To help them, their confederates win bets. And so there's some concern that the. The. What these bets are called are player props, you know, propositions on a player's performance. There's been a lot of discussion about whether or not player props are inherently more sort of corruptible than. Than sort of betting on the outcome of a game outright. And so I think some folks have been. Some legislators, both federally and at the state level, have been sort of kicking around a lot of ideas about how they might regulate player props to avoid those types of scandals in the future.
- [20:53]
A
Yeah. How serious are these legislative efforts? I mean, here in D.C. social media has been with us since at least 2008, 2009, and Congress still hasn't been able to regulate it in any meaningful way. What's the state of play for betting?
- [21:08]
B
Yeah, I'm not sure. I mean, the problem is that, like with anything in our government, there's a lot of different interests with a lot of different money, and it really just becomes down to whose sort of lobbyist is going to win the day. I think that the problem with gambling legislation that is sort of floating around right now is that there is the sort of casino industry, there's the sports gambling industry, there's tribal gaming, there's racetracks, there's all these different gambling interests, and they all have their own sort of legislative agenda, and they're fighting each other. There's also prediction markets, but there isn't really any organized force in D.C. or at any state level that sort of represents the consumers of these things. Right. The gamblers. And so their voices aren't really being heard in any way. And the legislators who are having to weigh in on this stuff typically don't know anything about gambling if they know, you know, they know very little, if anything at all. And they're being educated about gambling by the industry, by that side of the counter, by the. By the casinos or by the sports books, and not by the consumers or anybody. That sort of comes from the perspective of what's good for the consumers. And I think that's one of the things that worries me the most about current debate that's happening around the country on gambling legislation.
- [22:17]
A
You mentioned the prediction markets. Let's talk about them. We Got Polymarket, Kalshi, others do. They operate in a way that is fundamentally different than sports betting.
- [22:27]
B
Yeah, it's completely different. One way to think about a prediction market is that it's like an exchange, almost like a stock exchange or something like that. In fact, the prediction markets would like the government to really treat them as if they were a futures exchange. What happens in a prediction market is that betters come together and they enter into a contract with each other over a proposition. Right. So if what we're predicting is who's going to win the basketball game tonight, I would take the, you know, one side of that contract and another better would take the other side of the contract and the market or the exchange would take a fee from the winner of the bet. And that's how they make money. And this is different than the way a sportsbook operates because in a sports book, the sportsbook has to back every bet no matter what it is. Everybody that comes and takes a bet that's being offered a sportsbook, the sportsbook is guaranteeing them that they're going to be paid no matter what. If everybody decides they're all going to bet on the same team, then the sportsbook's just on the hook for paying them all off if the other team wins. In a prediction market, every bet that I make, there's another counterparty to that bet. And so there's really almost. I mean, there's zero risk for the prediction market itself.
- [23:34]
A
Hmm. In the US Why are some prediction markets legal and others aren't? So for instance, you could bet on Kalshi, but you couldn't use polymarket unless you use a VPN to get around the location restrictions.
- [23:47]
B
Right. Well, now you can bet on polymarket. As of 2026, the the Trump administration, CFTC has allowed polymarket to take bets from Americans. And it's questionable whether or not it was legal for you to take, for you to use Kalshi last year or not. Kalshi just decided that they were going to operate and come and get us. Right.
- [24:08]
A
The wild, wild west.
- [24:09]
B
Right. I mean, in the sort of tech industry or in the world of business, they call this being a first mover. Right. That you sort of move into this gray area and you set up shop and then you let the, you know, the wheels of justice figure out how to regulate you. And that's exactly what's happened with prediction markets, is that they opened up shop and said, this is not a well defined area of law and we'll just start taking bets and we'll See what happens. The Biden CFTC kicked polymarket out and fined them. The Trump CFTC has welcomed them. I think it should be said that Donald Trump Jr. Was an advisor to both Cal she and Polymarket. And there is a new CFTC chair now who has not only said that they're willing to regulate prediction markets, the current CFTC is also saying that any state government that wants to challenge whether or not the federal government has the jurisdiction to regulate them over state governments, that they would see them in court. So they're also sort of going to bat on behalf of the prediction markets as well.
- [25:11]
A
And prediction market betting was just incorporated into this past year's Golden Globes. I mean, this is saturated into nearly every aspect of American culture. What do you see as the consequences, intended and otherwise, of betting being so interwoven into so many aspects of what we do, how we live?
- [25:32]
B
Well, I do want to say that in some ways, it's important for us to know that this isn't really new, that we've been through this before. In America, in the middle of the 19th century, they say there was more money bet on presidential elections than there was on any horse races. I mean, that was sort of the premier betting proposition in America, was betting on presidential elections and betting on politics. In the beginning of the 20th century, bucket shops, which were operations where people could go in and make bets on the prices of stocks and commodities without actually investing in stocks and commodities. Because in early 20th century America, everyday ordinary Americans weren't allowed to invest in the stock market or participate in the stock market. They would play in these bucket shops, these sort of like Wild west operations where they could go in and bet on what stocks are going to do. So in some ways, that exactly mirrored what we're seeing now with prediction markets, the way that this was. And these places were incredibly popular through, you know, right up until the Great Depression. And so I think we've been through this before. You know, Americans have always sort of showed this propensity to want to wager, speculate, you know, and put their money at risk for a big payday. What's happening now is that we're just seeing that as Americans turn back to this again, that the government's figuring out, okay, if we can't beat them, join them, and how are we going to regulate this stuff so that we get a piece of the action? This question that you're asking about, what's it going to do to us as a society if we bet on everything? I don't think that it makes A lot of sense for us to want to turn every single proposition in American culture and life into a betting proposition. But I do think that there's clearly a market for it. People are clearly doing it. I mean, these things are, you know, there's, you know, a billion dollars or more in volume being traded in some of these prediction markets on some really goofy stuff. And so as long as these people are willing to bet on it, somebody's going to be out there to take their bets. Somebody's going to be out there to sort of offer them this product. I just think that we as a society have to figure out how we're going to reckon with this, build some guardrails around it, protect people that are vulnerable, and also protect the integrity of all these things so that the gambling on it doesn't lead to sort of large scale corruption or, you know, I mean, especially when we're betting on things today, like things like war, things like, you know, politics. I mean, there's real life and death stuff that's getting bet on that I think behooves the government to get involved and figure out how we can regulate what types of things people are allowed to, you know, predict and buy contracts on. And I just did air quotes. So for people who are listening and I say predict, I think that the notion that we're predicting is a little bit ridiculous. Right. I mean, what people are essentially doing is gambling. They're betting on these things.
- [28:09]
A
Yeah, yeah. Is that where you think government regulation should begin? Setting limits around what people can actually bet on when it comes to prediction markets? Let's say?
- [28:20]
B
Yeah, I definitely think the government has a responsibility to take a look at what kinds of things we should be allowed to place wagers on, for sure. I mean, right now, in this sort of week, you know, the big conversation that's going on is, you know, should we be allowed to bet on somebody's life or death? Right. Should we be able to bet on, you know, acts of war, things like that? There is legislation being proposed, I think, in Vermont to, to ban prediction market contracts on things that have to do with life and death. So, you know, already people are, you know, thinking about this as sort of a red line. Where that red line ends, I don't know. But I definitely think that it's, you know, betting on the Golden Globes to me feels harmless, but betting on an invasion or a bombing or the death of a world leader to me feels like something far more grim.
- [29:09]
A
Yeah. What about this really holds your interest? I mean, you could apply your Brilliance to any lane of public life. Why gambling? Why sports betting?
- [29:21]
B
Well, you know, to me, I think that this question about gambling is something that really gets at the. Gets. Gets at the heart of what it means to be an American. I think that gambling and American culture are really intertwined. And I think gambling, we're currently talking about gambling as if it's everywhere because we're betting on prediction markets and things like that. But the truth is that American, our American economy is a very speculative one. When people gamble on things all the time, you know, it's a big part of life in America is risk and reward, you know, and, you know, I'm somebody who's really captivated by games, and I'm captivated by people who are good at games because they're able to figure out patterns and they're able to figure out, you know, interesting, you know, optimal strategies and things like that. And gambling is just a game that's played for the highest of stakes, where people sort of put their money up as points. And so I've always been, you know, captivated by people who are really good at, you know, professional gamblers and people who are really good at gambling. And so that's always kept my interest in this sort of sphere. It's weird because I've been writing about and reporting on gambling for a long time, but now it seems to be the only thing anybody wants to talk about. And it's because these gambling companies have really sort of invaded our lives in ways that I don't think I ever could have predicted. I mean, initially, my interest in the world of gambling and gamblers was because it was a bit of an outlaw culture. It was something that was a little bit of a, you know, a little bit of a sort of an underground, you know, American taboo. It was something that I think sort of reflected this sort of. These sort of. It was a niche American culture, and today it's everywhere in a way that I think feels way different and in some ways probably you know, less interesting for somebody like me who considers myself a storyteller first and foremost. I mean, the stories of outlaw rascal gamblers who have to leave the United States to book bets in Costa Rica, or the stories of, like, you know, Texas poker players traveling on the road to, you know, make their living playing poker. Those stories are gone. And now all the stories are just business stories. You know, there's stories about, you know, Silicon Valley startups and things like that and publicly traded corporations. And to me, those stories are far less interesting. So I don't know. Maybe. Maybe my days of wanting to cover this world are numbered. I don't know.
- [31:37]
A
I'd read your story about the gambler who had to flee to Costa Rica. That sounds fascinating.
- [31:41]
B
Well, you can read my book when it comes out.
- [31:44]
A
David Hill. Thanks so much for your time. Great to speak with you.
- [31:47]
B
It's great to speak to you. Thanks, Jeff.