How the World Became a Casino (With Natasha Schüll)

Summary

Podcast Summary: The 404 Media Podcast – How the World Became a Casino (With Natasha Schüll) Date: May 11, 2026
Host(s): 404 Media Team (Joseph, Sam, Emanuel, Jason)
Guest: Natasha Schüll, Professor and Author of Addiction by Design

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Episode Overview

This episode explores how technology, prediction markets, and digital design have transformed everyday life into a form of gambling, blurring the lines between entertainment, financial markets, and addictive behavior. Special guest Natasha Schüll, renowned anthropologist and author of Addiction by Design, delves into the psychological and technological mechanisms underlying modern gambling—from slot machines to news prediction markets—and connects these trends to broader digital culture.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Transformation of Slot Machines

• Physical to Digital: Natasha explains the shift from physical reel slot machines, with limited outcomes, to digital, programmable machines.
  • “What digitization did was completely divorce what you see in front of you with what the odds actually are. ... The easiest way to describe what virtual reels did for physical slot machines is to use the analogy of weighting the dice."
    (04:03, Schüll)
• Continuous, Controlled Reward Structures: This allowed casinos to manipulate pacing, increasing ‘time on device’ and thus profits, while creating a more immersive, less volatile experience for players.
  • “We want you to recline on our math model the way you recline on a comfortable couch.” — A slot designer (relayed by Schüll) (06:28)
• Multi-line Video Slots: Enabled betting across dozens of lines for pennies each, creating frequent small 'wins' (often net losses), fostering the illusion of success.
  • “You’re slowly losing, but as you’re slowly losing, you’re experiencing that as winning every time.”
    (09:45, Schüll)

2. Digital Influence Spreads to Social Media and Prediction Markets

• From Gambling to Everyday Tech: Concepts like “time on device” and reward scheduling now permeate social media, mobile gaming, and even news consumption.
  • “It seems like we’ve come around full circle ... now we’re just back to gambling.”
    (10:54, Host)
• Prediction Markets as Mass Gambling: Markets like Kalshi and Polymarket let users bet on real-world events, ranging from politics to pop culture. Natasha notes the historical and structural overlap between gambling and investing.
  • “The absurdism of the claim that Kalshi, Polymarket, et cetera, are not gambling rests on another absurd claim, which is that there is a big difference between things like day trading and things like gambling.”
    (12:53, Schüll)

3. Behavioral and Societal Impacts

• Normalization of Gambling: Gambling is increasingly normalized in media and everyday life, with massive ad campaigns and integration into news and sports reporting.
  • “There really isn’t just an explosion of gambling, but an explosion of normalized forms of gambling.”
    (13:38, Schüll)
• Shifting Attention and Citizenship: Betting on granular details of politics, sports, and entertainment alters how people experience reality.
  • “You’re not really listening fully to what they are saying. You’re listening for those little words and it’s like, oh, ding, ding, ding.”
    (15:56, Schüll)

4. Addiction, Self-Awareness, and the ‘Machine Zone’

• Contradiction in Addiction: Many gamblers Natasha interviewed were acutely aware of their odds and behaviors, yet remained caught in addictive loops.
  • “I think we’re all on a spectrum somewhere, right? ... It’s hard not in the contemporary world of digital media. It is hard not to have a glimpse of what gamblers call the machine zone and to understand its hook and its hold.”
    (20:23, Schüll)
• Machine Zone as Universal Experience: The same psychological state appears in many facets of modern life (scrolling, gaming, etc.), not only in gambling.

5. Regulation and Future Trends

• Regulatory Lag and Legal Contours: The hosts draw parallels to tech companies like Uber outpacing regulation. Natasha believes lawsuits against sports betting giants may foreshadow legal challenges for prediction markets.
  • “It isn’t too many steps from that to bringing the same sort of suit against prediction markets ... To my mind it should be and would be so easy in court to make the case that this is gambling and should be regulated as such.”
    (29:06–30:28, Schüll)
• Superficial Regulation: Transparency and ‘wellness tools’ are often used by gambling firms to avoid deeper responsibility or structural fixes.
  • “By focusing on that, they completely obscure what the real problem is, which is the algorithms that are geared toward keeping you in the seat for continuous play.”
    (34:23, Schüll)

6. Personal Immunity and Cultural Reflections

• Natasha’s Perspective: She doesn't feel personally drawn to gambling, but is vulnerable to other repetitive or ‘flow’ activities (e.g., photo editing, gardening).
• Machine Zone vs. Flow State: Not inherently bad—can be productive or destructive depending on the context and who benefits from the engagement.
  • “What is it then that makes the difference between, you know, let’s call it good flow and then flow that is destructive and depleting? ... We have to look outside of it to who is designing the experience, who is profiting from the experience.”
    (39:18, Schüll)

7. Buffet Culture as a Metaphor (and Literal Parallel)

• Buffets as “Slot Machines of Food”: Natasha’s documentary “Buffet” examines how buffet layouts are designed to manipulate behavior, echoing casino logic.
  • “It relates. Even though it’s food that we’re talking about, there’s definitely a design element at play there ... a culinary example of creating an algorithm for a slot machine in a way.”
    (41:05, Schüll)
• Gamifying Volatility: Gambling and buffet culture both offer a controlled rehearsal of the precarity and volatility people experience in their wider lives.
  • “It’s a way to both rehearse volatility, but you’re rehearsing it in a more controlled and limited way.”
    (45:19, Schüll)
• ‘Binge Culture’: From streaming media to buffets, the culture encourages overconsumption as a coping or soothing mechanism in a volatile world.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On the ‘Machine Zone’:

  “It is hard not in the contemporary world of digital media. It is hard not to have a glimpse of what gamblers call the machine zone and to understand its hook and its hold.” (20:23, Schüll)

• On Normalization of Gambling:

  “I think we’re in danger of having news in general taken over by prediction markets, which really speaks to this normalization of betting on things.” (13:38, Schüll)

• On Regulation’s Limits:

  “We’re so transparent and fair. And you’re right that by focusing on that, they completely obscure what the real problem is, which is the algorithms that are geared toward keeping you in the seat for continuous play until your funds run out.” (34:23, Schüll)

• On Cultural Parallels:

  “Buffet as this sort of little appendage to the casino that plays out so much of what’s going on in the casino.” (41:05, Schüll)

• On Coping with Volatility:

  “It’s almost like it’s a way to ... short circuit a sense of uncontrollable precarity by acting out that volatility itself.” (45:19, Schüll)

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Notable Timestamps

• 03:05 – Natasha introduces her research on slot machines
• 04:03 – The shift from physical to digital slot machine design
• 09:45 – How multi-line slots generate a ‘winning’ feeling amid net loss
• 12:53 – Comparing prediction markets to gambling and investing
• 13:38 – Normalization of gambling in media and news
• 15:56 – Impacts of betting on civic engagement and attention
• 20:23 – Contradiction of self-awareness and lack of control in gambling addiction
• 29:06 – Legal regulation and the current climate around betting markets
• 34:23 – The limits of existing regulation, and how it misses the real harm
• 41:05 – Buffets as another example of engineered behavioral design
• 45:19 – Gambling as “gamification of volatility” for a precarious society

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Conclusion

This episode provides a deep, lucid, and accessible examination of the intersection between technology, addiction psychology, and the evolving nature of gambling—from physical slot machines to prediction markets and daily digital habits. Natasha Schüll, with the hosts’ insightful questions, illuminates how design choices shape not only personal addictions but broader cultural norms, and raises pressing questions about regulation, responsibility, and how we all relate to risk in an increasingly casino-like world.

Transcript

[Natasha Schüll]

If you are constantly betting on this, how many times is a politician going to say a certain word or how long will they shake someone's hand? You're not really listening fully to what they are saying. You're listening for those little words and it's like, oh, ding, ding, ding.

[Podcast Host]

Hello and welcome to the four four Media podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. Four4Media is journalist, founded and needs your support. To subscribe, go to Four4Media Co as well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments and they get early access to our interview series too. Get access to that content at 404 MediaCo. This week we're joined by Natasha Schewell. Natasha is a professor and anthropologist at New York University. She is also the author of a book called Addiction by Design Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. This book was published in 2012. I stumbled into it while I was writing about social games and Facebook games while these were all the rage. And I stumbled into that book in the way that many journalists and researchers who want to study addiction and compulsive behavior that is not associated with drugs but with technology. We all end up reading this book by Natasha because it is brilliant. Natasha basically spent years in Las Vegas talking to the people who play slot machines, the people who design slot machines, the people who design casinos, and really laid out the way that technology, specifically our phones work today and beautifully expertly described what she calls the zone, which is this area of behavior and brain activity where you're in like this flow state of playing a game that describes a lot of the addiction that I think we all feel today. To some degree. Natasha's work is always relevant, but the reason I reached out to her is we've been covering prediction markets more often on 44 media, polymarket and Kalshi and this is something that she is interested in as well because it obviously feeds into her research. So was very happy to have her on. Please check out her book if you haven't already. Again, it's called Addiction by Design, Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Natasha, thank you so much for being here.

[Natasha Schüll]

Thank you for having me.

[Podcast Host]

I think it would be very useful for our listeners to hear a little bit about your research into slot machines that you wrote about in your fantastic book Addiction by Design. There is so much to that book. You go into it in great detail. I highly recommend everyone read it or listen to it. There's also an audiobook. But to just kind of give an example of how digital user interfaces and design can really change behavior and gambling behavior specifically, I was wondering if you can talk about this pivotal moment in Las Vegas and slot machine design, specifically where they changed from physical reels that are spinning in machines to more digital interfaces. What that did for gamblers and what that did for casinos, right?

[Natasha Schüll]

So when you had the physical reels or the analog reels, we could think about them as there was 22 positions per reel, and so you'd have three of them spinning, and you were really constrained in terms of the mathematical outputs, or we can think about those as algorithms by these 22 per 3 reel positions. There was really only so much that you could do with that in the 80s. And then even more so in the 90s, when we saw digital technologies and capabilities and computerization coming on board and being wedded to the slot machine, you saw this explosion of new possibilities for designers, particularly the designers of the math. So, so each of those reels, even if you continued to see it spinning in front of you, even as it continued to be physical, that you were interacting with, was actually virtual, with hundreds of stops on them that you could mathematically program to. Most of those virtual stops would be mapped to blank spots on the reel. So they were heavily weighted toward the blank spots you would see physically in front of you exactly what you saw in front of you on the physical machines. And, you know, if you imagine someone sitting for 24 hours in front of a machine, whether or not you're mathematically competent, you do get some sense of what the odds are by interacting with the symbols that are in front of you. But what digitization did was completely divorce what you see in front of you with what the odds actually are. The easiest way to describe what virtual reels did for physical slot machines is to use the analogy of weighting the dice. So just as you would, like, drill silver into the corner of a die to weight it more toward one position, you were mapping most of the blank, non paying, non winning spots to the blank spots on the reel. That was like weighting the reels, Right?

[Podcast Host]

And that allows both the casinos or the designers of the machines to better design the outcome for their profit, but also for the enjoyment of the players, right?

[Natasha Schüll]

Yes, because you could, you know, if we think about the old one arm bandit, the limitations that those 22 per times three stops gave you also meant limitations in the kind of experience. Experiences that you could have and the kind of time you could spend there. This is why one Armed bandits most often did not have seats in front of them. They were very volatile in the sense that you would either double or triple your winnings or you would lose it all. And this would happen pretty quickly. So if you drew it on a graph, it would be very, very spiky in terms of your winnings over time, and you would quickly zero out your time. When you had these computerized models that could be manipulated to dispense rewards at a kind of continuous pace, but small, little, tiny rewards over time, you were able to manipulate that graph and give people much more time on device. And this really was a shift from a profit model that had to do with let's get all their money right away, let's fleece the consumer, and then they can be on their way to, let's actually let the consumer sit there much, much, much longer. Let's give them more time for their money, and let's take their money much more slowly. Because what we see in terms of revenues is that machines that do that ultimately earn much more money from them. So instead of that spiky graph zeroing out in time, you saw a much more slow, gradual line down to zero. And some of these machines that would dispense tiny little bits over time were so sort of relaxing in the way that they felt to play. One of the designers of them drew it on a napkin for me and he pointed to that slow curve down to zero and he said, we want you to recline on our math model the way you recline on a comfortable couch. I guess I do have to say to explain how this happens, you do need to go beyond the three reel. So the three reel virtual real machine that was sort of the first step toward computerization and virtuality. What gave even more possibilities and this sort of comfortable couch that you can recline on. That kind of algorithm that depended on what's called multi line slots. These are the slots that you will still see today in casinos or in online casinos. And basically it's a video screen. There are no physical reels. It's a video screen with many, many symbols all over them. And typically you can bet on 50, 100 lines and you can bet pennies, right? So you put in your $5 and you're betting pennies on each line because there are so many lines. You're going to win back pretty often on at least one or two or three of those lines. And guess what? It's going to say, ding, ding, ding, ding. You won on this line, but that's a net loss. So this idea of what are called false wins. So slowly taking your money, you're slowly losing, but as you're slowly losing, you're experiencing that as winning every time.

[Podcast Host]

So you do this research in the 90s or early 2000s, and that is long before the ubiquity of social media and mobile games and loot boxes and all this stuff. But I'm sure anyone who is listening to you immediately recognizes all these incentive models from their day to day lives. These little hits of dopamine, an algorithm that is trying to solicit a certain type of behavior, and time on device, a term that technologists use, social media companies use, makers of mobile devices use. And you wrote an introduction, a new introduction to your book in 2024 where you kind of talk about how relevant the book became over time and all these journalists reaching out to you, policymakers, some of the people from these companies that are actually implementing these type of designs. And it seems like we've come around full circle in a way, like the philosophy was adapted into all these other industries, but now we're just back to gambling. And you say you wrote near the end of the introduction, actually I want to quote this, you mentioned Kalshi at the very end, Kalshi being the prediction market where like poly market, people can bet on the outcome of real world events. You say the convergence of future markets in lay betting is not caused by digital technology. The two were intertwined from the start. Digital technology has, however, made the activity widely accessible to anyone with a mobile device, easy to perform and designed to hold attention. I want to start with that first part. Can you talk about how future markets and lay betting were always intertwined? Because I thought of it historically, there was like a research aspect to it and people actually use experts to bet on real world events in order to get good predictions. What do you mean by that?

[Natasha Schüll]

I'm not a historian, but what I mean by that is that back in the early days of stock markets, which weren't, weren't necessarily even called that back in the early days you saw those activities, activities that today we identify as investing and trading as considered betting. And even, even some of the same laws I'm talking about like back, back in England and this kind of thing, I think to anyone today it's sort of absurd that prediction markets would say that they aren't betting in some way. I always like to say the absurdism of the claim that calcium, poly market, et cetera, et cetera, are not gambling rests on another absurd claim, which is that there is a big difference between things like day trading and things like, like gambling. You can go to history to see that link.

[Podcast Host]

And for the second part of that statement, when you talk about how accessible this has become, when you see like a Kevin Hart commercial for a casino app, a slot machine app, or you see commercials on TV for betting apps and prediction markets, what's your reaction? How do you think machine gamblers that you've talked to or people that you talked to in Vegas at the time that you were researching your book and talking to a lot of gamblers. Gamblers, like, how are they responding and receiving those ads, do you think?

[Natasha Schüll]

I imagine that they're sort of appalled and I mean, it makes one very cynical. But there really isn't a sort of not only an explosion of gambling, but an explosion of normalized forms of gambling. Even more shocking to me than seeing the ads by celebrities and others on TV are the increasing adoption by media of these metrics and sort of referring to prediction markets as they kind of tell the news and we've already seen the news, take the sports news especially really taken over by mobile sports betting. And I think we're in danger of having news in general taken over by prediction markets, which is really speaks to this normalization of betting on things.

[Podcast Host]

This is something I wanted to ask you about. I'm not sure how to phrase it. So like, forgive me as I stumble through this thought, but slot machines is a form of bedding that is totally abstract. Like there's no subject to the thing that the bed is being placed on. You can say the same for most card games, roulette tables, I think even something like the stock market or crypto, they correspond to things in the real world. But the system that you're betting on is so diffused that it's hard to connect a single bet to a single outcome. And sports betting and things like Kalshi and Polymarket especially, it's kind of like a one to one. Like I was looking at Kalshi before this interview and like some of the bets that I saw is what will Justin Bieber perform at Coachella on April 11, 2026? Will Meta release Llama 5 this year? How will Tyson Fury, who is like an MMA fighter, say, what will he say during his final press conference? Have you thought about that at all? Like, what is the impact of betting doing to reality, to real world events, if everything is a bet, if we're betting on everything?

[Natasha Schüll]

Yes, I have been thinking a lot about this lately, but in a number of different ways. There are a few different Kinds of bets that I can see on prediction markets. There are these event contracts that are very linked to specific outcomes like an election or a game. And for those, I think what it does is just taking those two examples, let's take an election as an example. It really changes the way that you orient towards not only the election, but how you are a citizen in a way. If you are constantly betting on this and checking in to see what the price is doing, you're sort of orienting to what used to be a much more civic minded, socially oriented decision in this granular, you know, gambling type way. I think that that can change maybe even how we feel about politics, especially when you get to things like attention markets and you know, how, how many times is a politician going to say a certain word or how long will they shake someone's hand? You're not really listening full fully to what they are saying. You're listening for those little words and it's like, oh, ding, ding, ding. So I think it changes the way that we listen and hear. I think it could also change literally the way we listen to music. Instead of just listening for what do you like and what do you respond to what songs. You're kind of vigilant. If you, if you're engaged in prediction markets, you're very vigilant to which song is most likely to be like the pick or to rise to the top according to the population. So you're listening differently. You're not listening as a music connoisseur. You're listening as someone who's on prediction markets and has a stake in them. And then in terms of a game, it's very similar to the politics in the sense that it changes the way you are a fan. You used to place your bets and then participate in the game supporting one side or the other. But now you have money on the game in all of these fragmented, choppy little ways. So you may be watching for tiny things, you may be watching for what a specific player does. You may even bet against your own team because the betting becomes more important than the being a fan. So I really think having money on things and gambling, especially in these sort of granular ways, changes so much about who we are and how we are in the world.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. I think it is clear from your interviews with machine gamblers that it causes a change in behavior that extends beyond just like the moment of gambling. It just like your perspective of the world maybe shifts a little bit if you're obsessed with gambling in that way. Something I really liked about the book and something that I think we tried to do in our own reporting is the book is very respectful of gamblers. And you say that you learned so much about how all of this works from them. And it's very clear that they are very aware of what they're doing. They're not being fooled. They know the odds, they know how the machines work. You talk to a woman who like got a very deep education in how they work and are constructed. And I found that to be fascinating and to be a huge benefit to your findings. And then on the other hand, despite all this awareness, gambling addiction has a higher suicide rate than other addictions. And it appears that machine gambling addiction works faster and is more of a problem from an addiction perspective than other forms of gambling. And I was wondering how are like those seems contradictory, like the self awareness and the lack of control, like how do you reconcile that? How are both of those things possible at the same time?

[Natasha Schüll]

I think that, you know, we sometimes talk about self delusion with addiction in general, but I. But I also think we understand and addicts understand addicts of all kinds, they sort of know themselves and know what's going on. And even if they have that knowledge, even if they've been through the programs, it doesn't mean that they're not going to be pulled back into it. So I don't know that machine gamblers are so unique in terms of a spectrum of addictions in that. And in terms of how to reconcile that, I mean, I don't think it's hard for any of us to understand how knowing that it's time to go to bed and stop scrolling, you know, doesn't make us stop scrolling and go to bed. And I don't mean to trivialize addiction through that analogy. I just mean that I do believe that these behaviors, that addiction is not something completely other to who we all are. I think we're all on a spectrum somewhere, right? And I do think that every one of us, it's hard not in the contemporary world of digital media. It is hard not to have a glimpse of what gamblers call the machine zone and to understand its hook and its hold. So I think to answer that question, we just need to ask ourselves what is that? When we know we should be doing one thing, but we're doing another. I don't have the answer. If I had the answer to that question, I'd have it made.

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[Podcast Host]

Reporting on technology over the past 10 years, there have been instances where like with Uber, for example, it feels very much like we're reporting on a company that is running ahead of regulation and that regulation will one day catch up with it. And in many cases that is what happens. I get that feeling about the betting markets. It feels like it's a new technology, it's a new type of business. They are making as much money as they can. But eventually another shoe will drop. There's going to be some horrible story in the news about how this has impacted people and we'll see regulators come down on these companies. But I feel like I would have had that reaction if I was you. Kind of reporting on machine gambling in Vegas and that hasn't happened. Right. Like those are going strong. They're sophisticated. Do you think that we're going to see regulators intervene here or is it going to be more like Vegas where we're going to let it run wild and just face the consequences?

[Natasha Schüll]

So when you're referring to it and the betting markets, you do mean prediction markets, right?

[Podcast Host]

Yes, yes.

[Natasha Schüll]

Right. They wouldn't call themselves betting markets. And the other reason I asked is because we what we do see and maybe this hints to what could come with prediction markets. We do see an uptick in legal case suits that are being brought against mobile sports betting giants like DraftKing and FanDuel. Sort of following in the footsteps of these product liability lawsuits that are that are being mounted against big tech like the meta YouTube outcome that we just saw. So I think just in the past couple of months there's been two big lawsuits brought against DraftKings and FanDuel taking this approach. And I think that it isn't too many steps from that to bringing the same sort of suit against prediction markets. You'd have to modify it slightly, but I think you could sort of show how certain features, how certain technological affordances are in the legal presentation defective in that they're causing all sorts of harm and that they should be regulated in terms of where we're at right now with prediction markets. I mean, we just had the New Jersey ruling, right. Where prediction markets can continue on as they wish there and not be counted as betting. And I don't know how long that's going to hold. To my mind it should be and would be so easy in court to make the case that this is gambling and should be regulated as such. Not that gambling has the greatest regulations, but at least it's something. But right now that's not even happening. So I'm not exactly sure when it will.

[Podcast Host]

Are you surprised by how prevalent it seems that gambling has become in culture since you published the book? Do you agree with that statement at all that the America feels more like a casino in general?

[Natasha Schüll]

Yeah, I mean so you mentioned that my book was put out in a new edition with the preface and in that preface I narrated the way that my book was kind of taken up as a sort of. And the slot machine became this kind of Rosetta stone or skeleton key for unlocking how the hold of so much emerging on the landscape of, of digital media from Candy Crush to the smartphone and texting what were some other big ones to dating apps and you know, Tinder as a horizontal kind of slot machine and then Robinhood and fractional shares like sort of like multi line slot machines. And now we've landed in this moment when it isn't just diffusing out everywhere into all of our devices and online experiences, but those experiences are increasingly becoming gambling, like actual gambling. So we have this explosion of the mobile sports betting and the prediction markets. I did not see that coming. I saw it coming probably a little sooner than others just because I was in touch with what's happening over in the UK where the mobile sports app are a few years ahead of us. And so I sort of saw that, that what was coming down, down the pike. And the reason I keep talking about mobile sports betting is that I think you have to talk about that when you're talking about prediction markets. Especially now because it's 90% of what's happening on prediction markets is sports betting. I think 90% of the activity on Kalshi and I'm not sure what it is on Poly Market, but I think it's almost all of its US like official US business is sports betting. But you've really got to see those two are very, very similar. And I think that the regulation, the eventual regulation discussion around them would hopefully

[Podcast Host]

converge back to the regulation question. There is regulation in gambling and there's. I actually don't notice but I'm assuming there's like specific rules about slot machines. But you talk about in the book how the makers of slot machines use awareness of gambling addiction As a shield almost. They are transparent about the odds and that makes it seem above board. But that kind of underplays the reality of why people play, how they play, all the ways that they're pulled in. And just because people know the odds, it seems like transparent and fair to the gambler, even though it can cause harm and all of that. I guess when you say that hopefully there's going to be some discussion of regulation, do you think that actually curbs the behavior or it just, I don't know, normalizes it?

[Natasha Schüll]

So I understand your question. The kind of regulation that I was talking about or that I would be hopeful for would be a kind of regulation that we don't see yet with slot machines. And it would be the kind of regulation that, just taking the slot machine example, they say, oh, slot machines are so regulated, they run on random number generators, and near misses only occur five times more than they would by chance alone. Which is kind of. There's a couple of other sort of trivial things. We're so transparent and fair. And you're right that by focusing on that, they completely obscure what the real problem is, which is the algorithms that are geared toward keeping you in the seat for continuous play until your funds run out and a lot of other kind of holding design features like that. We can take the example of in social media and the recent trial of things like infinite scroll. Right. The slot machine is a kind of infinite scroll, right. So should we regulate the infinite scroll? Yes, we should. That's what we should be looking at, those kinds of things. And I would hope for the same with mobile sports betting and prediction markets, both of whom are totally trying to do that move of, oh, look, we're, you know, we're putting up warnings and we're, we're putting up labels. I have a Calshi account just so that I could go on and see how these things work. And so I got a little ping a couple of weeks ago telling me Calshi, like wellness tools or I forget, I forget exactly what they're called, but it's a suite of ways in which you can kind of regulate your own self and your time and your, your spending. And it's a way of sort of, if we put that stuff out there, then we are less liable for all this other stuff we're doing to keep you there.

[Podcast Host]

I imagine your upcoming book will touch on it. But do you have anything to. Any thoughts about how you inoculate yourself to these incentives, being in that environment and researching it all? Do you feel the pull and how do you push back against it or does it just slide right off of you?

[Natasha Schüll]

I've never really felt the pull of gambling and maybe that's what, what allowed me to kind of get so close to it. And it was also what propelled my curiosity because it seemed I really couldn't understand it and what the appeal was. And I really wanted to understand. I think that's what gave me momentum with my many, many interviews with gamblers over, over the years I've begun to interview some mobile sports bettors. Have not yet really talked to anyone in the prediction market sphere. So I don't consider that I yet have researched that. I'm sort of extrapolating from what I know about slot machines and sports betting apps to prediction markets and what I see when I go on and kind of play with it myself. I feel like I'm not that at risk there. I am at risk for other kind of tedious little flow, clicky, tappy activities. Which is why it was gratifying when my book was taken up mostly by journalists as a cipher for understanding all of our infinite scrolling, just to put it that way, as a culture, because that I relate to. And I always, I think in the back of my mind had my, my own penchant for becoming sort of disappearing into little repetitive continuous activities. Whether it's weeding, you know, even non digital activities or whether it's like editing, clicking around and editing photos in Photoshop for many, many, many, many, many, many hours. You know, I thought those were just sort of my personal connections. So that's why it was gratifying that others saw a link there.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, and I guess there isn't anything like inherently, inherently harmful about being in the machine zone. Right. Like you can be it in some innocuous way or some joyful way or. I obviously I came at your book from the perspective of video games and when I read the, the description and theory of the machines and I was like, ah, this is like expressing a very base feeling that I have. Maybe you can like do anything too much, but there's nothing inherently wrong with like being in that space, I think.

[Natasha Schüll]

No, I don't think so at all. Like whether it's knitting or gardening, I think, you know, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist has this, has popularized this term flow and the title of his book Flow. The subtitle is, you know, the optimal human Condition or something. And if you look at how he defines flow, every category, every criteria could apply to the slot machine or to day trading or these kinds of things. And so I had to ask myself when I was writing the book, you know, what is it then that makes the difference between, you know, let's call it good, good flow and then flow that is destructive and depleting. And at the end of the day, I don't think there's that much difference in the biophysiological state itself. I think to understand the difference we have to, we have to look outside of it to who is, is designing the experience, who is profiting from, from the experience that really makes the difference.

[Podcast Host]

I think this is very tangential to gambling, but I've seen your documentary in college Buffet, and I was such a big fan. It was such a mind blowing documentary. It's a short documentary. It's about buffet culture in Vegas, who's partaking in it, what happens to the food after the fact and all of that. I just kind of, if you don't mind, like a couple of questions about that, I assume that that is something you became interested in while you were researching your book and just like observing it kind of on the periphery of casinos. Is that how that came about?

[Natasha Schüll]

That is how that came about. I mean, I was living in Las Vegas for quite a while and friends would visit and we'd go to the buffets and especially European friends would just be sort of flabbergasted and watching their discomfort and they just didn't know how to do it. They're like, really? I leave my plates here with foods and I go get more, you know, they just didn't understand it. And I came to see the buffet as this sort of little appendage to the casino that sort of plays out so much of what's going on in the casino. And of course I couldn't make a film about slot machine gambling easily. You can't bring cameras into casinos, etc. But you totally can bring a camera into the buffet. So I decided I'm just going to focus there and it relates. Even though it's food that we're talking about, there's definitely a design element at play there. I spoke to the chefs and others behind the scenes and they very meticulously lay out the food in a certain order and pattern to kind of produce certain behavior in the diners. So it's sort of like a culinary example of creating an algorithm for a slot machine in a way.

[Podcast Host]

How are they complimentary in the sense that is there something about gambling all day and maybe probably losing money, that eating too much at a buffet would be, would be a complimentary experience? To that.

[Natasha Schüll]

So I will answer that question. But first I'll say what the difference. A big part of the difference is. Big part of the difference is that just as with, like alcohol, there's only so much food you can eat. You can eat to excess, and you, like one person in my movie, you can go and vomit and come back and eat more. But there's a physical limit to how much food you can eat. There is no limit to the gambling that you can do as long as you've got credit or currency of some kind to, to stay in motion. So that's the real difference. But in terms of the similarity, that might allow me to return to one of your earlier questions that I realized I didn't answer, which was about the. This, the sort of culture of gambling that, that the U.S. maybe the world in general, but certainly the U.S. has become and what that has to do with and why that might be. I think the answer could sort of explain the appeal both of buffets and gambling and probably prediction markets, et cetera. And I think it is a certain. The gamblers that I spoke with when I, when I kind of asked them to talk about their lives and introduce themselves and then make connection between their lives and their histories and the machine zone and the draw that it held for them, they often brought up volatilities and sort of what the zeitgeist would call precarity today. Just these precarious circumstances, whether it was domestic abuse or losing a job or being from very poor family or having a child that was very sick and, and on and on, and they were, they were able to bring those sort of volatile, uncontrollable circumstances of their lives directly into conversation with the relief they got going into that repetitive zone that you find in a slot machine. I think the world today, you know, it's been, it's been a few years. It's been like 12, 13 years since I wrote that book. But certainly where we're. Where we're at as a society politically, in terms of the climate, in terms of so, so many things out there, volatility abounds. And I believe Mansoor, he's. Is. He's the CEO of Polymarket, I believe, described the, the sort of volatility in his, in his childhood politically, as having a lot to do with his conception of, of prediction markets. And so it's almost like a gamification of volatility. It's a way to both rehearse volatility, but you're rehearsing it in a more controlled and Limited way. So it's almost like it's a way to kind of like short circuit a sense of uncontrollable precarity by acting out that volatility itself, if that makes sense.

[Podcast Host]

That's very well said. Yeah, I think that makes perfect sense. And I think there's also something like if the entire world or this country is becoming more like Las Vegas in the way you just described, where we feel precarity, we feel volatility, and we are somehow, I don't know, role playing that or coping with that by betting and predicting on everything. I think there is probably. I don't know how to exactly identify it or express it, but there's also like a buffet aspect to the culture where we go from the precarity and the betting, coping and then soothing in some way with food or, I don't know, video games or entertainment or just like switching from one extreme to. To the other. And I think that's definitely where we are.

[Natasha Schüll]

Binge culture. I mean, we binge.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Natasha Schüll]

We binge watch shows. I think there is a sort of throw caution to the wind and go to this. To this extreme in the face of, you know, all this shit.

[Podcast Host]

No, totally. And, yeah, Netflix is a buffet. Right? Like, a lot of the stuff we get served is kind of buffet style. Right. Pick what you want and gorge yourself.

[Natasha Schüll]

Yeah. And I think that Netflix Autoplay was one of. Was one of the. Was one of the early sort of like. Or I think it was called Post Play originally, where it just, you know, so it's like no resolution. You just go into the next one and the next one and the next one, and then it. It is. It is very soothing. It's sort of like holds the whole world in abeyance and it keeps everything at bay.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. Okay, Natasha, thank you so much for your time. I'm looking forward to your next book. And again, I highly recommend everyone read Addiction by Design if you want to understand a lot of how you feel in the face of these technologies that we interface with every day.

[Natasha Schüll]

Thank you so much for having me.

[Podcast Host]

Thank you. As a reminder, Forefront Media is a journalist founded and supported by subscribers. If you wish to subscribe to four four Media and directly support our work, please go to four four media Co. You'll get unlimited access to our articles and an ad free version of this podcast. You'll also listen to the subscribers only section where we talk about a bonus story each week. This podcast is made in partnership with Kaleidoscope. Another way to support us is by leaving a five star rating and review for this podcast. That stuff really helps us out. This has been four four media. We'll see you again next time.

[Natasha Schüll]

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