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The Gist
High Stakes, Low Standards: America's Gambling Gamble
00:38:12
Jonathan D. Cohen, author of Losing Big: America’s Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling, joins to explain why our national rush into online sports betting might be a bigger mess than we realize. They talk sketchy app rollouts, bad state deals, and...
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- [00:00]
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- [00:32]
Mike Pesca
Foreign August 5, 2025 from Peach Fish Productions, it's the Gist. I'm Mike Pesca. We have a good show today about one of my passions that I don't often talk about on this show. If not paid by the correct sponsor, I like to gamble very small amounts on sports that I know a lot about and the result of this gambling is sometimes winning. But. But is it good for society just because I like a little bit of it After I interviewed our next guest, Jonathan D. Cohen, author of Losing Big America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling and we know from the subtitle where he stands. After I interviewed him, I had a strange and interesting visitor to the house. He wasn't strange, but he was interesting. It was a guy named Isaac Rose Berman and I invited him, or he was invited. Passive voice. I don't know how he got there, but I'm glad he did to my occasional poker game and IRB as I've come to call him. Great guy, great at poker, good gambler. And it turns out he studies this very issue. And it turns out he himself is something of a professional gambler. And it further turns out he co writes a lot of papers with Jonathan D. Cohen who I'm about to interview. I think Jonathan D. Cohen is more in the anti camp and Isaac Berman. Isaac Robert Rose Berman is more in the we'll see camp. Let me tell you something about Isaac. He took the cards and said I'll deal for everyone. It keeps me in the game. So we didn't even have to rotate the deal. Isn't that menchie? How do you reward a guy like that? I'll tell you what I did. I scheduled him to do a substack live where we're going to talk about many of the issues that I talk about today. So that'll be. I don't know, I don't know how far in advance you want to mark your calendars, but that'll be in a week and a day. 8:13 6:00pm we do these substack lives and please do join me at Mike Pesca that substack.com but what I've been thinking about gambling. I'll bring it up with him and it informs my conversation that I'm about to have with Jonathan D. Cohen is that even though I'm in favor of not policing something where the only victim is the self in general, and even though I'm in favor of decriminalization if it's possible, and it's possible, the way we've done it is so shoddily that I think the execution is as good an argument for keeping gambling illegal as the actual principles that I'm about to talk to Cohen about. Sports, especially professional sports, are a lot of things. An escape is one. But now professional athletes are stars. There's a transcendence at their best. 2. Sports. There's a grandiosity. I happen to be a Mets and jets fan. Doesn't always get there. But the effect of gambling is it turns sports into something so grubby, so petty. And then you have these scandals of Malik Beasley in the NBA or Louis Ortiz in Major League Baseball where Ortiz is said to and there's pretty good evidence he throws the first pitch of an inning far outside and gamblers can win money on that. I come back to the word grubby. It is. It just so sullies the sports experience. And not just because that is illegal. And that's not what sports gambling was supposed to do. It's supposed to be about betting on the up and up, but everything about it takes the escapism or the entertainment value of sports and turns it into something a little perverted and a little less joyful. Now I find my joy where I can and as you'll hear in my conversation, I like to bet a make a preseason bet for a small amount of money on a long shot and if it in, Well, I get 82 games out of a season for rooting for the Dallas Mavericks. It's crazy. Why do I even care about the Dallas Mavericks? I just care about my 150 bucks that's on the line. So much is on the line of my upcoming conversation. It is again with Jonathan D. Cohen losing big America's reckless bet on sports gambling and unlike some of the betting apps, I hope I hooked you with the teams foreign I'm buried in non stop meetings. Maybe you are too. What? And it just brain fog and brain freeze and there's no way to remember if I told the publicist guy to do this, the social lady to do that. Wait a minute, is the publishers. Is it the publicist guy, the socialist lady? That's why I need Fireflies. We're all trying to figure out how to work smarter, not harder. Whether it's automating, post meeting, follow ups, streamlining communication and collaboration. And I turn on Fireflies, which is an AI teammate that helps me keep track of it all. I turn on Fireflies with the phrase hey Fireflies. And I get reliable answers directly inside my video calls. I don't have to futz with the switching tabs or the losing focus. It's all about clarity. Or clarity. It's all about clarity. It's a little weird that Fireflies as animals flit around and are distracting when Firefly as this AI tool is quite clarifying. I guess the common thread is that they're both illuminating. It's time to upgrade your AI note keeper and note taker to be part of the team. Just say hey Fireflies and bring your AI teammate to life. You should note Fireflies now provides tailored summaries that are personalized to fit you and your role across many different industries like sales, marketing, engineering, recruiting, management, more, even podcast production. They integrate with Zoom, Google, Meet Slack, Asana, Zapier, and your CRM. And right now, when you sign up for a yearly Fireflies subscription, you get your first two months free. Just go to Fireflies AI the Gist. That's right, two months free when you go to Fireflies AI the Gist. That's Fireflies AI the Gist. Hymns can't control snoring or blanket stealing. Appropriation they sometimes call it. 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Think of HIMS as your digital front door that gets you back to your old self. To get simple online access to personalized affordable care for ed, hair loss, weight loss and more, visit hims.com the gist that's hims.com the gist for your free online visit hims.com the gist actual price will depend on product and subscription plan. Featured products includes compounded drug products which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness or quality. Prescription requires the website for details, restrictions and important safety information. So a little bit about me and about my life. I usually don't like sharing so much, but the other day I put a thing $3 bet on a Dallas Mavericks to win the NBA championship next year. Future $3 would pay I think $70. What value. I also that very evening enjoyed a beer. It was a pills a crisp pills with my chicken masala and I didn't though I could have imbibed a THC gummy walked down the block and got one from illegal pot store. All three of these are vices that are allowed. But my next guest, Jonathan D. Cohen says one shouldn't be. Well, I don't want to mischaracterize his argument or put my thumb on the scale. He is the author of Losing Big America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling. Jonathan, welcome to the gist.
- [09:34]
Jonathan D. Cohen
Thanks for having me. I want to hear how that bet turns out so you have to have me back next year.
- [09:38]
Mike Pesca
Do you want action? You want, you want some of my action?
- [09:40]
Jonathan D. Cohen
Yeah. Can I, can I lay your bet? Yeah.
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Mike Pesca
You want to lay it off at the big bucks on the strip? Yeah, my $3 bet. So do you have problems with drug legalization or the 21st Amendment?
- [09:55]
Jonathan D. Cohen
I'm no expert on drug legalization, but just as a helpful example, my understanding is from across the border here in Connecticut that in New York, in New York State, the drug legalization program has gone very poorly and has been the.
- [10:09]
Mike Pesca
Rollout was ill conceived.
- [10:10]
Jonathan D. Cohen
Correct. And so I think marijuana or THC should be legal. But I don't mean that does not necessarily mean that the way it was rolled out was well done or was in the interest of public safety and public well being. And that is where I sort of have a problem and to step on the conversation we're about to have, that's my problem with the current sports betting as well.
- [10:28]
Mike Pesca
But having read the book, I don't see many allowances for the municipalities that do it the right way. Did I miss that?
- [10:38]
Jonathan D. Cohen
Well, I'd love for you to point to me, to the municipalities that are doing it the right way. There are some that are doing it better than others. But I don't know if we've, if we know yet what the right way is.
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Mike Pesca
Well, if and okay, we're getting ahead of ourselves. But if sports gambling is to you acceptable if done according to some parameters that you're going to lay out, it's only that we've never had or seen those parameters. Then is sports gambling really acceptable to you?
- [11:07]
Jonathan D. Cohen
It is. And I do it not that often and not on the Dallas Mavericks to win because I'm not a. I like having $3, not losing $3. But it is acceptable to me. What is not acceptable to me is a setup by which someone can start by placing their innocent $3 bets on the Mavericks and that becomes the sort of start of a dangerous journey that leads them into peril. And I think there's, there's always me people who end up in peril from gambling. But. But that should be as bumpy of a ride, as difficult of a process of a transition as possible.
- [11:40]
Mike Pesca
What are your main critique with how sports gambling has been implemented in The United States? 2018 Supreme Court decision. For a couple of years, we knew this was burgeoning states looked at it as a way to raise revenue. Different states negotiated with different gambling apps for different cuts of revenue. That is my big problem, that some states did this really poorly and some states did this, did this well. But what is in fact your big problem or critique?
- [12:08]
Jonathan D. Cohen
So the thesis, and it's captured in a single word in the title of the book, is reckless, which is not that we shouldn't have sports gambling or that the Murphy decision, the Supreme Court decision that you mentioned, wasn't correctly decided, but the way this was rolled out was as quickly as possible, get as many games as possible onto as many phones as possible with as few guardrails as possible. And that's my issue. I don't have any problem with someone betting $3 on the Mavericks to win the game. I don't even have a problem with maybe even in game betting, which lots of advocates have a lot of problems with. You know, whether which player is going to get the next rebound or whatever. I do have a problem with the fact that you can lose. You bet $3, but someone could very easily lose multiple mortgage payments in a matter of a few minutes that you can bet overnight on Malaysian women's doubles badminton if you wanted to that the protections aren't in place and that we didn't. Not that more time always equals better regulation, but that we didn't take the time to regulate this better and to get it set up better from the start. Whereas we're in a situation where we're going to have to go back and clean up this mess that we made because of the rush to jump headlong into sports gambling.
- [13:14]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. By the way, I have in that doubles match, Tenku and Magot over Juan and Nick. That. But this is just. I'm not saying that you should bet that. That is just who I have in that Malaysians doubles match. And that's badminton. Okay. Why is. I'm going to take the portion of your critique and we'll get into all of it. But you can make a small, innocent bet and that could be a gateway, if not a gateway drug to larger bets, and then you could lose your house. All true, but isn't this the exact argument with the 21st Amendment and the legalization of alcohol and one drink can lean to two and eventually destruction at the bottom of a bottle?
- [13:56]
Jonathan D. Cohen
Yes. And I'm also not here calling for the repeal of the 21st Amendment. Just for the record, lest there be any question about my intentions, it is actually a good comparison in that gambling addiction, as you might know, works actually very similarly to alcohol dependency, whereas they both are actually a chemical dependency, something that you are chemically addicted to in your brain. This is not. You can't just tell someone who's addicted to gambling to stop gambling. They are, again, addicted in the same way that they are addicted to alcohol. And the parallels run deep in that someone can drink a lot, fairly often, every night at dinner. They could have a glass of wine. They could place a $3 bet on the Mavericks and not develop a problem. They could have one night of drinking that ruins their life or one night of gambling that ruins their life. But we have set it up in such a way. There are actually some protections in place around alcohol that, at least from a liability standpoint, hold providers accountable when someone abuses and gets into trouble. This concept of a dram shop law. So if you're obviously intoxicated and a bar keeps serving you and then you go out and you hit someone with your car when you're driving home drunk, the bar that served you over served, you can be held partially liable. And there's no equivalent sort of dram shop responsibility or equivalency when it comes to casinos or sportsbooks.
- [15:24]
Mike Pesca
Right. And there are. To further your point, there are Robust enforcement mechanisms in every city where they send in an underage person to purchase from a store or a bar and then they'll shut that bar down. Every city that I know of has that mechanism on the books. And there's really no such thing with the apps online, is there?
- [15:44]
Jonathan D. Cohen
No. Or not that we know of. Not to mention, you know, obviously this came to this a little late, but the 80s and 90s, we started the drunk driving campaigns and now drunk driving is effectively eliminated. Whatever the equivalent is for sports gambling. We haven't sort of set up the cultural infrastructure to tell people to behave more safely than they would.
- [16:02]
Mike Pesca
There was a huge cultural norm effort about drunk driving and we haven't seen anything like that with gambling. It's more of a harm reduction or, you know, to look at it like addiction. But it's not to call them.
- [16:17]
Jonathan D. Cohen
That's what it is. All it is is called the hotline. Call the hotline, call the hotline, call the hotline.
- [16:21]
Mike Pesca
And yeah, and here's another good example of the parallel, is that I'm sure you've seen this, that I know you've seen the statistics because you relay them on gambling. But some gigantic portion of the income of the big brewers is by people who drink more than. And off the top of my head, I don't know it, but problem drinking. But for problem drinking, the big brewers in America would not be operating in the profit. Now. They'd probably have to tweak their business model. But ads about, you know, the Coors train coming through and people having one or two at a party are not actually what is making Coors money. And maybe you could tell us what some of these statistics about how much the big problem gamblers, as opposed to me with my $3 Maverick wager, fuels the online gambling sites.
- [17:09]
Jonathan D. Cohen
Right? I mean, so. So just for betting on the NFL, 82% of the revenue comes from just 3% of betters, which, you know, when gambling, unlike with alcohol, there is sort of theoretically no limit. So someone can be very, very rich. And just their liver, it's not like their liver is going to explode. They can actually just handle. They can just gamble a lot more money. So some of those people are VIP rich people, but some of them are just young guys who are over their skis betting more than they should.
- [17:35]
Mike Pesca
Okay, so what should have been done when instituting legalized gambling in the United States in your assessment?
- [17:42]
Jonathan D. Cohen
So, two tracks. One is a. Well, first was. The first was proposed by an unlikely duo of Chuck Schumer and Orrin Hatch. Who shortly after the Murphy decision, laid out the first version of a federal guidelines and says, okay, we're going to have legalized sports gambling. States are going to be allowed to decide for themselves if they want to have legal sports gambling. But here are some minimum standards set by the federal government that you need to meet. You need to. I don't remember exactly what the details were, but that's the kind of thing I would have wanted is a federal framework, a minimum standards, set of safety standards in place. Then at the state level, the number one thing that I would have done differently is the advertising. But that's actually downstream of the biggest, most fundamental change, which is with state government. You have all these parts of state government, like 99% of the state government's job is to promote well being and make people's lives better. And then we have 1% of the government with the lottery commission or the state gambling commission whose job it is to make as much money from the state as possible from gambling. And that is of course completely incongruous and makes no sense. And so what I would have wanted coming in was a regulatory regime where the commissions, the groups in charge of running gambling, their remit, their mission, their North Star is not make as much money for the state of Indiana as possible through gambling, but allow people to gamble legally while protecting their well being.
- [19:12]
Mike Pesca
So two things. First of all, not so much of a odd duo when you consider the issue in that Utah is the only state with, forget spoiler sports gambling. They don't even have a lottery. They're the only state without any sort of legalized gambling. So Orrin Hatch is going to be a natural person. And then I think Chuck Schumer, who, if nothing else, stands for the proposition that effective government regulation can help people. And maybe there's a New York, New Jersey rivalry going on. He didn't want to.
- [19:39]
Jonathan D. Cohen
They're going to know how old they are. But that's.
- [19:41]
Mike Pesca
Yes, this is true. But also they do come from an era where gambling was seen as potentially threatening the legitimacy of the sports leagues. And they grew up in an era where you didn't even have to say, though NFL commissioner Pete Roselle would say it again and again, the number one threat to what we do is the potential of gambling. And he kept gambling at more of an arm's length, sometimes to a ridiculous degree, where Brett Musburger would make an oblique reference to a point spread in one of his games. And he got so much credit for it just because we were operating under this fiction that no One is gambling. So it does make sense. Now, the second thing that I would say about government trying to, in the case of lotteries or sports gambling, maximize revenue. It's funny because this is my biggest critique and it's based a lot on very good reporting in the New York Times. Some state governments did a terrible job in maximizing revenue. Just a terrible job. And they gave away to FanDuel DraftKings, whoever came in and plied them with drinks and cigars. They gave away the shop in terms of the amount of revenue they would keep. And this will probably air after the New York mayoral primary. So it's not an endorsement, but one of the things that Andrew Cuomo did and New York, Chuck Schumer, state, those on the state level is they drove a really hard bargain. And I think if more states were drove a hard bargain, the revenue actually would be increased. And I think you're also adding. And part of that hard bargain should have been more safeguards, more outreach, more actual, not just messaging, but proven, tested mechanisms to intervene with young people or potential problem people who could be gambling.
- [21:34]
Jonathan D. Cohen
Yeah, this is all tied up together. And this is to answer my own question before about what was the rush? You know, why did we sort of recklessly heat in? The reason why we recklessly jumped in was because lobbyists from the gambling companies showed up at states and tried to get us to go in as quickly as possible. And now, currently, as we speak, the Illinois just increased the tax rate on gambling and all the companies are crying foul, but it's because Illinois got hoodwinked by two or three years ago and now they're realizing the mistake that they made and they're trying to get back to this New York arrangement. New York, for folks who don't know, has the highest tax rate in the country on the revenue from sports gambling and seems to be going just fine there. So other states are like, okay, why can't we have more?
- [22:14]
Mike Pesca
FanDuel aren't complaining. Yeah, I mean, they might be complaining, but they're also making.
- [22:19]
Jonathan D. Cohen
Oh, they're complaining, but yeah, it doesn't mean they're justified. Yeah, yeah.
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Mike Pesca
Kansas was one of the lowest sports revenues. Let's also add to the fact we don't even if I like gambling, there's so much associated with it that is really distasteful. The amount of marketing they do on college campuses to team up with with Purdue University or Big Ten universities. It is kind of crazy. Of course, kids who are 20 years old aren't supposed to be gambling, but they are they don't have fully developed prefrontal cortices. This is just, it's kind of a nightmare situation and it's totally unregulated. And another aspect of it is the marketing and the advertising. And I don't know, as a kind of free speech person, I don't know what I do to regulate it. They certainly regulate beer advertising. Can't even drink a beer in an advertisement, it seems like. Well, you tell me, what rules do they actually have and are those rules in any way working?
- [23:15]
Jonathan D. Cohen
So, so this is, this is a great example because we were already talking about this. But the, the normalization of sports betting. Right. Was basically done by advertising. Right. It wasn't like we took. Yeah, of course there were some weirdos who were betting offshore or had a bookie who, you know, were already illegally gambling. But a lot of people, especially like people who are 14 at the time who are now gambling, sure weren't gambling until like Kevin Hart told them it was cool and Kevin and like LeBron James started doing it on commercials. So advertising, I think can't be underrated as for its impact and how important it is. Yeah. So other countries, I mean, FanDuel, right?
- [23:48]
Mike Pesca
FanDuel was the number one advertiser of all advertisers a couple of years ago.
- [23:53]
Jonathan D. Cohen
Yeah. In their daily fantasy sports area. And 10 years ago, DraftKings and fandom were each. Yeah. Just insane.
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Mike Pesca
And if advertising didn't work, they wouldn't be spending billions of dollars on it.
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Jonathan D. Cohen
And advertising is also only the tip of the spear, if anyone. This is actually probably the number one thing I hear about when I talk to people about the book is like, oh, I'm watching a Mets game with my son and then it's like time for the seventh inning stretch brought to you by DraftKings. Like, here's the money line. That doesn't even count as advertising. That's like an in game promotional thing. But so what? Lots of other countries have like a whistle to whistle ban. So any while a sports game is being aired live, you can't have any advertising. Countries are now banning like the jersey patches that were common in Europe on soccer teams from sports betting companies, stuff like that. Again, I don't know. The time to fix advertising was seven years ago and we sort of let it slip because now it's already normalized, it's already here. People are going to find it even with if it's not advertising. But that is again, for a lot of people, the point of contact with gambling and where they first Heard about it. Where they first learned about it was through this advertising and that was minimum federal standards. The Orrin Hatch Chuck Schumer thing could have sort of set a floor under that.
- [25:00]
Mike Pesca
If all gambling in the United States had to be done in physical shops, as was the case when it was legal in the UK and Ireland, Ladbrokes was a big shop on many corners. Do you think the picture would change a lot in from what it is now?
- [25:17]
Jonathan D. Cohen
Yeah. And I mean and we, we have thankfully thankful thanks to the beauty of American federalism we have some natural experiments of mostly states in the Midwest that basically have this arrangement. Wisconsin and a couple other states, they don't have online gambling, but they do have it in physical casinos. I do think it would be different. I don't think anyone is going to be at a casino in Wisconsin, in Racine at three in the morning gambling on Malaysian women's doubles badminton. Also, as you know, we already referenced the live bets. You can bet on the speed of the next pitch, whether the next tennis serve will be the ace, whether the third pitch in the second at bat of the fourth inning will be a foul ball. You can bet on stuff like that and you just can't do that live just the speed it owned that all that stuff only works on the phone. And many of many of those things are sort of trapdoors basically for problem gamblers. Just really, really easy ways for them to sort of get addicted or further their addiction. And those are not possible in person.
- [26:10]
Mike Pesca
Right. Because old forms of sports gambling, it was horse racing and the races take 20 minutes between races and there was, there were different kinds of bets but it wouldn't be stride for stride bets. So now as a dopamine delivery mechanism, right. Online sports gambling has perfected itself. So that is a problem. But in terms of the we should have you talk of natural experiments. So we should have I think by now some better statistics than we do about the costs. I know in your book there is a study about bankruptcy, bankruptcies went up by very low double digit 25 to 30%.
- [26:48]
Jonathan D. Cohen
Yeah, yeah.
- [26:49]
Mike Pesca
In counties that legalized casinos knows. But this is going back from around 1990 to 2005. Over the years, do you see a difference, have they picked up a difference between the effects of gambling losses, addiction bankruptcies in Wisconsin versus right over the border Illinois, where Illinois could bet on your phone. Wisconsin got to go to a physical place.
- [27:13]
Jonathan D. Cohen
Right. So this is. These are relatively new studies that are I would say have not be up in peer reviewed. So I'm just going to and they're also not my study, so I don't want to sort of present them as such. But basically doing that exact natural experiment that does show that in states with online, specifically online sports betting, there is an increase in bankruptcies, a reduction in credit scores, an increase in auto loan delinquencies, an increase in or a reduction in savings and investments in low income households, a rise in problematic gambling, however you want to define that. So we are running some natural experiments. The data isn't great yet, it's not perfect. And the really data that I think everyone is waiting for are studies on problem gambling and ways to measure that. But that's sort of always been really, really hard to develop. But even just sort of initially, without getting into the sort of questions of addiction, the data we have indicates financial harms, financial losses that as you say, states think they're making all this money without accounting for the costs and the harms to the individuals that are actually probably offsetting many of those gains.
- [28:16]
Mike Pesca
We'll be back with more of Jonathan Cohen and his anti gambling stance. As summer winds down, I'm all about refreshing my wardrobe and what I like to call my staple pieces for the season ahead. I didn't know they were called staple pieces, but then I found out what they were. Quint helps me do that. Quint styles are so versatile I find myself reaching for them again and again. I want to mostly focus on linen pants. Linen shorts? Really? Oh, am I a Beau Brummel, a man about town in my linen Quints shorts? They're half the cost of similar brands. I take it on faith. I don't even look to similar brands. So good are the Quince shorts. And Quince only works with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing processes and premium fabrics and finishes. They make sure their shorts are not too short, but not too long, but definitely linen. And you know what? The je ne sais quoi of these shorts have convinced me to look into towels. Towels, which Quince is also pioneering. Throw out another one that got a boy who's going to college and he needs luggage. Let's quince it up. I say. Elevate your fall wardrobe essentials with quince. Go to quince.com the gist for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q-U-I-N C E.com the gist to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quints.com the gist let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel Tips Honestly.
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Mike Pesca
That's not the itinerary we're following.
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Mike Pesca
Bon voyage.
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- [31:06]
Mike Pesca
We're back with Jonathan Cohen who is hoping to parlay his gambling criticism into a coherent argument. I think you will find in this half of the conversation that it's a fairly successful endeavor. One of the ways that MAD was effective was they highlighted stories of tragedy and people, regular people, wanted to take action. Now it was also the case in the 80s or 70s that big brewers and, and, and beer companies and spirits companies were donated a lot of money to politicians or politically powerful and you know, had the means to craft a message and, and fight the mothers against drunk driving, but they couldn't and so they changed course. Why aren't we seeing if as you say, all these addictions and you know, there's such a human cost, why aren't we seeing the equivalent with gambling? Why aren't all the stories of ruin and addiction penetrating the national consciousness to the point where like with opioids, people are saying we've got to do something about this.
- [32:14]
Jonathan D. Cohen
I was about to bring up opioids, so thank you for referencing that. I think that that is a great example in part because think about first of all how long it took, given what we know in retrospect, how long it took from when we know the opioid crisis started developing in like the 1990s through when public attention was placed on the issue, when Beth Macy published her reporting, when Dope, the TV show comes out, when there's hearings about the Sackler family and so on, that was like a 10, 15, 20 year lag. And we should have known even better by the fact that with the opioid crisis right it was so geographically concentrated, it was like, okay, entire counties in southwestern Virginia and West Virginia and through New Hampshire are just being wiped out. Whereas sports gambling, it's like there's no sort of geographic component to that. It's sort of house by house, family by family. It's really individualized. And then in parallel, we also have just furthering the metaphor with opioids we did not have before the opioid crisis, for example, a destigmatization of gambling, of drug addiction, such that if someone was addicted to opioids, they at the time felt most likely that it was their fault, that there was sort of some personal moral failing rather than, oh, you were addicted by these doctors who plied you with pills and everyone in your county is also addicted. So I don't think we. And we have certainly have not had that sort of level of destigmatization with gambling addiction, such that there are probably lots of people and some of my profile in the book who's like, parents don't even know that they have gambling, that they're like gambling a lot because they've been able to sort of forestall the absolute worst financial consequences. So I wonder if the fear, right, is United Kingdom. The sort of. The reckoning that's happening right now over gambling is sparked by basically a wave of suicides of young men. It's like one of the UK government has this report on suicide prevention, and gambling reform is one of the six pillars of that report. So the fear is these stories are going to develop, they are going to become more public, and only then will we start to clean this up and react and fix it, because it's sort of we staring us in the face.
- [34:15]
Mike Pesca
Are the guardrails in the UK different from ours?
- [34:19]
Jonathan D. Cohen
They are now because they are being. Being basically being set up at 20 years after online gambling was rolled out there in 2005. So this is the classic. I mean, of course, we're America, we don't have to learn from other countries, but they're in the process of undoing the exact gambling setup that we are in the process of erecting.
- [34:36]
Mike Pesca
Do other countries have gambling, online gambling like ours, without. With a lot of advertising, with social conditioning to convince people that it's like part of watching sports as integrated into their daily lives. Is that common in other countries? Western European countries?
- [34:57]
Jonathan D. Cohen
And you probably know Australians are just nuts about gambling. They have, like, the highest per capita gambling spend globally.
- [35:03]
Mike Pesca
And yeah, yeah, Macau is pretty big too, right? A lot of Hong Kong.
- [35:08]
Jonathan D. Cohen
Yeah, so. So yes, there. There are Lots of other countries, but lots of other countries again are rolling back. Our Bulgaria, which is of all places one of the countries where DraftKings has, that's where DraftKings European offices or one of their European offices is, is just banned all gambling advertising, full stop. And like the Spanish Supreme Court, whatever, Spain tried to ban all this advertising and gambling too. The Supreme Court blocked it, whatever. Now they have other things to worry about. But there are other countries again that have basically exactly what we've had, obviously with more soccer involved and they're, they're, they're reforming it as we speak.
- [35:41]
Mike Pesca
Aren't the leagues far sighted or do they need suicides or the lesson of UK to actually anticipate that if they go too far they're going to be hurt in the long run.
- [35:54]
Jonathan D. Cohen
So I think the leagues actually are going to be hurt in the long run, but for a different reason or by different calculus, which is my fear, if I were them, is okay, I get it. The NBA ratings, you always want to point ratings are always sort of going down. You want to put them back up. You want to get fan engagement, you want to sell your data to all these gambling companies. In the short term, this is a huge revenue booster. But over the long term, my fear is you're not creating a generation of sports fans, you're creating a generation of people who like gambling on sports, who will not be who when they have a bad experience or when they stop gambling, won't care about basketball, won't care about football in and of itself because all they cared about was the gambling on football. So again, long term, I think they're actually running a real risk and maybe shooting themselves in the foot by sort of going all in harhar on, on the gambling economy when they, when, when they need to sort of develop that floor that, that baseline of support for their product without gambling.
- [36:51]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. You could argue that half generation before that the fantasy sports fan was in a similar situation. Were they fans of football as a sport or were they fans of fantasy football? And I don't know how much the NFL cared.
- [37:06]
Jonathan D. Cohen
Right. But to me it's like less likely that you're going to be disillusioned from football by fantasy football versus disillusioned from whether you lose a lot of money or like you think the refs cheat you out of a game or something like that. That seems to me a slipperier slope than fantasy.
- [37:22]
Mike Pesca
Yeah. I would say the main critique, I'm with you, that just like everything we do in America, we did it haphazardly and we're going to have to pull back from some of our excesses. But to me, the baseline isn't something like gambling versus no gambling. It's legalized gambling done close to the best way versus what was going on before, which is rampant illegalized gambling. And so there are all these statistics in the book about how much was legally bet. And I say to myself, yeah, that's how much was legally bet. There's a whole lot that was illegally bet. And this put wind beneath the wings of the mafia and other nefarious actors. So it's a little different. Actually. It's very similar to the pot trade. Would you rather have drug dealers quote, unquote doing it or it regulated in a store as well? As long as the stores are, you know, well thought out and well maintained and safe.
- [38:22]
Jonathan D. Cohen
Yes. And so my last book is on the lottery system. Right. And the lottery system was justified in the exact same way. We're going to wipe out the illegal numbers games that were rampant in the mid 20th century and replace them with the state run operation. The difference with sports betting is that the lottery, this is lottery also different from marijuana. The lottery gets better when more people participate. So it's only through sort of mass participation and state organization can you get more people in because the prizes get bigger, more people participate, prices get bigger and so on. But with sports betting all you need is like one guy is like, hey Mike, will you take my, will you book my action? And so there's always going to be illegal gambling. Yes. When we legalized it there was probably a, not a rush, a trickle, a small flood of people from the illegal market who were betting on these offshore Antiguan sportsbooks into the legal market. But at some point that flood or trickle, whatever stopped because there are lots of people who, no matter what, as you know, are always going to stay offshore, are always going to stay illegal. They like their bookie, they don't want to pay taxes, they want to stay anonymous for whatever reason. They're not going to come back or come to the legal market and they.
- [39:30]
Mike Pesca
Get extended credit, maybe they get better credit that some of the online books give you.
- [39:36]
Jonathan D. Cohen
Right. And, and so, but the companies. This is a convenient boogeyman. This is, oh, you can't raise our tax rates. Oh, you can't restrict our advertising. How else would we possibly go after all this illegal gambling dollars? Oh, the states. You should legalize gambling because all your people are already gambling. It doesn't even matter. You're not even going to create new gamblers all you're doing is capturing revenue from the black market. It's just a totally disingenuous threat of all this illegal gambling that again has, you're totally right, bolstered the mafia and all sorts of other nefarious things. But at some point it morphed into a political talking point rather than a political reality.
- [40:12]
Mike Pesca
I would say that the whole idea of trying to eliminate the numbers, I mean, who was running the numbers? It was a small town operator or small inner city operator. Sometimes, you know, some guy without real connections to crime who could never break your legs.
- [40:29]
Jonathan D. Cohen
But sometimes it was Whitey Bulger.
- [40:30]
Mike Pesca
But yes, sometimes it was Whitey Bulger, but a lot of times it was, you know, some Caribbean guy who did it for. For the 45 friends of his. I don't know that. I just always thought of the bookie. The illegal gambling trade is inherently more nefarious than running the numbers.
- [40:47]
Jonathan D. Cohen
Yeah, and, and I think we also, I mean, we have a bit of a romanticized view of the numbers, I think because it actually was very regressive and it was actually preying on a lot of poor people. But because the money was sort of stayed local and it felt like a communal social activity, it does feel different than like the state or a corporate actor coming in and like being extractive of poor people's money.
- [41:06]
Mike Pesca
Oh, for sure. So last thing is in, if you look at it as a public health issue, you'll probably look at it like public health. People looked at Covid to pick an analogy that's actually going to submarine my point. But there is all the emphasis placed on the harm reduction to the victims. And what about what is gain now? It's kind of. This is why it's not a great reality in Covid. It's a good argument because when you do anything you can to eliminate deaths, you do things like shut down schools for too long. And there is learning loss. With gambling, it's something very unsympathetic. Like Mike Pesca likes to bet $3 on the Maverick and get enjoyment out of his life. Because without my $3 bet, there'd be no enjoyment in my life. Millions and millions of people like it. It's entertainment. It takes a afternoon watching a golf match that you don't care about, but you have to put up with while you're at your sister in law's shower. It makes that a bit more enjoyable. So there's some sort of net, the accrual of net good that I just think is totally jettisoned in this analysis. But do you do that? Do you? I know you'll acknowledge, yeah, some people like it. But how do we actually incorporate the net enjoyment, the net positivity, the net entertainment value of this against the very real, heartfelt stories you tell of people who have been ruined by too much of this?
- [42:40]
Jonathan D. Cohen
No, I think you're right. And I think we advocates who want a safer gambling setup do ourselves a disservice when we don't say, hey, I get it. Gambling is fun. And you should be able to bet $5 on the Cubs. You should be able to bet $500 on the Super Bowl. And. And there are people who, whether they are actually prohibitionists in disguise or they certainly sound like prohibitionists, even if they aren't, if they claim they aren't, who. Who don't acknowledge that. And I think should.
- [43:06]
Mike Pesca
To.
- [43:06]
Jonathan D. Cohen
To. To me, yeah, I think it's a matter of. I don't know where it is, but, like, you know, when you see it, of, okay, this is augmenting someone's experience with sports versus this is a. Something only an addicted gambler would do. Maybe it's Malaysian women's devil's badminton, or maybe it's the live. Maybe it's the betting on the speed of the next pitch. But there's some line in there of like, okay, Mike is doing this because he's bored out of his skull, like at his sister's shower. And Mike is doing this because he can't stop and he's addicted to action from gambling.
- [43:40]
Mike Pesca
By the way, I once covered a throne match scandal. Not women's, but Malaysian badminton. I once covered that for NPR. It was a big deal at the 2012 London Olympics.
- [43:51]
Jonathan D. Cohen
That's crazy. That's like my go to example. And it always resonates because people immediately say it's. That's insane. But it, like, it's of course, something you can legally bet on in Colorado. And I never thought I would actually meet someone who knew anything of any kind about Malaysian doubles badminton.
- [44:04]
Mike Pesca
Well, they kept throwing the match to get better seating. So if you were able to bet on it, man, would. Would you have been pissed off at that. Jonathan D. Cohen is the author of Losing Big America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling. Thank you, Jonathan.
- [44:19]
Jonathan D. Cohen
Thanks, Mike.
- [44:25]
Mike Pesca
That's it for today's show. Cory Wara produces the Gist. I assembled the Gist list alongside Kathleen Sykes. I mean, not really alongside. She's in Utah. I'm here. But we collaborate, as do Astrid Green and the team. She runs our socials. And Ashley Khan is our production coordinator who's in charge. It's Michelle Pesca. As I'll tell you, she is loath to say Peru. G Peru. Do Peru. And thanks for listening.
- [44:56]
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