← The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
We Legalized Sports Gambling. Now We're Paying for It — ft. Jonathan D. Cohen
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Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all in one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e commerce, and more. And the best part, Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you try Odoo for free@odoo.com that's o d o o.com support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all in one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e commerce, and more. And the best part, Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you try Odoo for free@odoo.com that's o d o o.com.
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Episode 396. 396 is the call code belonging to Johnson Island. In 1996, Motorola released the first flip phone. This year, the Apple iPhone is the most popular handheld. No, it's my always in the other hand. I don't like that. Today's episode we ask, do you really need a new smartphone every year? Brought to you by Apple. That's better.
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Go, go, go.
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Welcome to the 396 episode of the Prof. G Pod. What's happening? In today's episode we speak with Jonathan D. Cohen, who leads gambling policy at the American Institute for Boys and Men. He's also the founder of Losing Big America's Reckless Bet on sports gambling. This is something I think about a lot. So I gamble. I don't do it as much, but I buy or I actually write options contracts. And I've convinced myself that it's a means of hedging and a way to make money. The reality is whatever that dopa releases you get from gambling, that's why I do it. I know that over the long term, there's probably someone smarter on the other side of the trade. It's very risky, but I continue to do it anyways. This is something that is really, I don't know, the term is preying on the young male brain. They're bored, they're at home, they have their smartphone, they basically have Vegas in their pocket. But if I'd had the ability in class to bet on the speed of the next pitch, I don't know if I would have been able to resist that. It is just absolutely everywhere. And six out of seven gambling addicts are men. And the thing that always struck me, or the fact about gambling, that always stuck with me. My mom. When my mom was retiring, we looked at Arizona, Palm Springs and Las Vegas. And we chose Las Vegas because in addition to it being beautiful, 10 months of the year, July and August, a
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little bit rough, a little bit rough,
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but the desert is beautiful. Desert's the most underrated topography in the world, in my view. But also during the week, because no one's there in Vegas, seniors could go downtown to the Strip and see Mamma Mia and grab a meal for $14. And my mom was a docent. She was a volunteer at the Bellagio. And the stat that blew my mind that she came home with in her docent training was that suicide, of all the addictions, has the highest suicide rate. Now, why is that? If you develop a meth addiction or an addiction to cocaine, or you're an alcoholic, people around you notice. And hopefully some of those people really care about you and are willing to intervene and try and get you help. Or they fire you, or they say, I'm going to leave you, but someone will move in. Whereas with gambling, people don't know that you're in way too deep. You can lose your kids, college fund, mortgage the house, spend everything, and your family may have no idea. And you feel as if you're in too deep and you decide that there's only one way out. So this is a serious issue. States that legalized gambling have seen a rapid increase in bankruptcy. And this is something that appears to be especially important to the well being of young men. Anyways, with that, we hope you enjoy our conversation with Jonathan D. Cohen. Jonathan, where does this podcast find you?
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New Haven, Connecticut. Home to really good pizza and a decent university.
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I knew about the university, I didn't know about the really good pizza. But let's bust right into it. Jonathan, take us back to 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down the federal prohibition on sports betting. Since then, 39 states have legalized it. The total amount of bets placed hit roughly 148 billion in 2024, about a 30x increase from pre legalization levels. Today, 94% of bets are placed online or via mobile apps. And roughly half of men age 18 to 49 have a sports betting account. Can you walk us through the incentives here? What did this policy change really mean?
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Yeah, so I'll just riff for six hours and then we can call it a day. How does that sound?
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There we go.
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B
Yeah.
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See you tomorrow.
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B
Yeah, right. So there are a lot of things happening. So this all started, you know. So what the Supreme Court did, first of all was allow states to decide the issue of sports gambling for themselves. So it removed a congressional roadblock that had been blocking state from legalizing. So states got into it for the same reason states always get into legalized gambling, which is the promise of tax free government revenue. They got into it more specifically because of all the lobbyists from all the gambling companies that showed up sort of at their door telling them how much tax free government revenue they stood to make if they did legalize sports gambling. And they did. So these companies did in cooperation with sports leagues who had been told for decades and finally sort of were willing to take the plunge, that gambling would drive more interest in their product, would most importantly drive up TV ratings. Because people who gamble on sports watch more sports and as a result would make more money for the league. So we sort of have all these sort of different fingers in the pie or all these hands sticking into the cookie jar and all the cookies just come from gambler's wallets.
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A
How do you reconcile? So there's a general notion, okay, we have batting, but it's been ring fence. It was mostly kind of in Vegas or, you know, certain Native American reservations. Now it's everywhere. How do you reconcile the tension between infantilizing young men and providing them access to something that's legal anyways? And what do you see as over the last decade, obviously this has exploded. What are the primary externalities you're focused on in terms of gambling permeating kind of everyday life?
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B
Totally. And it's one thing to have gambling legal, right? Or even have something like fast food or tobacco or alcohol legal. It's another thing to have a frictionless gambling app on your phone where you can lose multiple mortgage payments on Malaysian women's doubles badminton, right? To me, you can't have it. I think all Americans probably have, whether they like to admit it or not, some sort of libertarian streak in them where they say, okay, people should be able to do whatever they want. If you run into trouble with gambling, with fast food, with whatever else, it's your fault. You didn't exhibit enough self control, fine. But it can't be like it's every 21 year old out for themselves against a billion dollar corporation using every sort of trick in their book and every marketing device that they can think of and every sort of user interface design trick they can think of to part that 22 year old from their money. So that to me is we can talk about sort of the negative extra specifically and sort of why it's preying on young men. But that's why I'm not. I would love to be sympathetic to sort of the libertarian framing, but I just think it doesn't apply in this case or it's not suitable fully in this case.
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I remember reading you're not against legalization of sports betting, you're against a reckless legalization of it. What regulation would you like to see imposed?
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It really boils down to this concept of friction. More specifically, for gambling apps, friction looks like something to slow down the pace of betting, to make it so that someone who is gambling, casually gambling $5 here, $10 there on the Knicks or whatever the case may be, doesn't sort of fall down this rabbit hole where all of a sudden they are gambling on minor league British darts or check table tennis because they're chasing their losses. So something to slow down how quickly you can get money into the app to make it easier, ironically, to get money out of the app, to maybe limit how much money you can spend in a day, how much time you can spend on the app, things like that, that would just organically slow down the pace of play and make it so that someone doesn't sort of fall down the hill and accumulate velocity, accumulate speed with their gambling without realizing what's happening to them.
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So I've seen, I've read statistics that when states legalize gambling, bankruptcies surge by a third. What are some of the other kind of. I mean, if you were to sound the alarm here, what's your evidence for why frictionless gambling is a real issue?
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B
Right. So I would say two categories. One, as you already referred to, there's these three so far, three Aggregate level studies that, you know, basically within a few, the arrival of online sports betting. Within a few financial quarters, we see a 30% increase in bankruptcies, rising in credit card auto loan delinquencies, debt use of debt consolidation loans, percentage of accounts with debt in collections, reduced savings and investment in low income households, and an increase in calls to child and protective services. So even at the aggregate sort of at the state level, within a year or two of the arrival of online sports betting, we see sort of the effect there and then that's. I haven't even gotten to like sort of the addiction question and sort of the number of people who've like run into addiction, that's just like people who are just like losing a shit ton of money.
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My mom was a docent at the Bellagio Hotel. We moved her to Las Vegas when she retired and she used to come home with all these fun facts about the casino business or the gambling business. And one that's always struck me is that gambling has the highest suicide rate of any addiction because you can get in so far over your head. Do you have data around? I read somewhere that one and two college age men bet on the Super Bowl. Are you starting to see some of the externalities of that bubble up in terms of men dropping out of school or higher self harm rates? What can you point to right now that is clear that the increase and the prevalence of online gaming is hurting young men?
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Okay, so the best data we have right now is primarily from survey evidence and there's in fact a huge lack of research on gambling in general. That part of which is what my organization is starting to help fix a little bit. You're right. Gambling is the addiction with the highest sort of connection to suicide. It is for the record, the only sort of behavioral disorder that's technically formally diagnosed, diagnostically codified as an addiction. You know, something like sex addiction, shopping addiction, those aren't like, those are disorders, but they're not addictive in the way that tobacco, alcohol, drugs is like changes your brain chemistry and gets you hooked on the, on the dopamine. And gambling does. So here's, here's a stat that if I was sort of, sort of going to boil it down when it comes to addiction because we don't have the great data yet. But here's the stat that sort of keeps me up at night. There's this thing called self exclusion where if you say, okay, enough's enough, you're not allowed to allow me onto your casino floor anymore. You can't allow me onto Your app. You can't send marketing materials to my house. You can fill out a form with the state or with the gambling company and say, you need to exclude me. Theoretically, Scott, you could do this if you wanted. I don't know why anyone would go through the trouble of self excluding if they didn't sort of have run into a gambling problem of some kind. Okay, so Pennsylvania created a self exclusion program in 2006. From 2006 to 2018, they had roughly 400 people between the ages of 18 and 35 who self excluded. So about 50 a year for 12 years. And then since 2019, when they legalized both online sports betting and online casino gaming, there have been 10,277 people from 18 through 35 who have self excluded. So we've gone from about 50 a year sort of under, let's call it treatment or control conditions under normal conditions, to now 1,500 a year just from sort of the young, not just male, but the young age bracket as what I can offer as sort of the best proxy right now for indications that gambling harm has gone up.
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A
My sense is men are predisposed to being more risk aggressive, and that that has real dividends and they're more inclined. I see movement in the bushes, I grab a spear and I go try and hunt it. And I take risks. But some of that risk aggressive behavior is there for a positive reason. You know, I would argue men make better combat soldiers and war warfare has changed. And you need a combination of more thoughtful, what I'll call feminine instincts or measured feminine instincts, but you also need those more aggressive, valorous. I know what the term is male instincts, and it's a peanut butter and chocolate combination. I think that it serves society fairly well. The men are men. My understanding is six out of seven gambling addicts are mentioned. Can you go back to the male brain and when it starts, and why are men more predisposed to gambling addiction? Where does it come from?
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B
You called my boss's boss's boss, Richard Reeves, your Yoda. So I'm drawing a lot of this from his work and credit to him for having the American Institute for Boys and Men work on sports gambling, which is young men, as you've said, are already predisposed to risky behaviors of all kinds, especially given sort of the economic circumstances in the United States where they're suffering, where they're not doing as well in higher education, they're not doing as well in the labor market. You. You sort of see why, why gambling would take on this sort of what Kyla Scanlon calls sort of a nihilistic logic or a financial nihilistic logic where I don't have enough money to buy a house, but I might, but I might as well gamble with whatever money I do have to try to get enough money to, to secure.
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I'm not saving, so why not?
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Yeah, right, why not gamble? And then, not to mention the sort of slower developing prefrontal cortex, not to mention the sort of sports fandom of it all already. Not to mention the sort of overconfidence or desire to like prove that, you know, ball to your buddies or to your friends and to show off a little bit. I think all those things combined just create this like toxic cocktail that makes sports gambling just so biologically, sociologically, economically dangerous. Specifically for young men.
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We'll be right back after a quick break. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you don't need me to tell you how much hiring great people matters. But the time and resources you have to spend to get it right are precious commodities. Sourcing, connecting with and screening candidates can quickly eat into time better spend on your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's designed to be your hiring partner, helping you source the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without making it feel like a full time job. LinkedIn hiring pro simplifies the entire process all the way from writing your job post to shortlisting candidates and running AI powered initial interviews. Plus it does it all through a conversational interface where you can just describe what you're looking for in plain language. LinkedIn says nearly 60% of hires find someone to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. So instead of sifting through piles of resumes, you get a tight, high quality shortlist that actually moves things forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free@LinkedIn.com Prof. Terms and conditions apply.
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Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all in one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, E commerce, and more. And the best part, Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you try Odoo for free@odoo.com that's O D O o.
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Support for the show comes from Zbiotics. Zebiotics Pre Alcohol Probiotic drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by PhD scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Here's how it works. When you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut. It's a buildup of this byproduct, not dehydration, that's to blame for rough days after drinking. Pre alcohol produces an enzyme to break this byproduct down. Just remember to make pre alcohol your first drink of the night. Drink responsibly and you'll feel your best tomorrow. So I have been using ZBiotics even before they were an advertiser. If I know I'm going to drink, I take a zbiotic and I found that on average it takes away about a third of the the yuck the next morning if you will. So for me that's absolutely worth it. May is packed with back to back reasons to be out. Don't let a rough morning after keep you on the sidelines. Drink pre alcohol to stay ahead of it and make the most of every Saturday this month. Go to zebiotics.comgalloway to learn more and get 15% off your first order when you use Galloway, that's G a double L O W a y at checkout. ZBiotics is backed with 100% money back guarantee. So if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked. Remember to head to ZBiotics.com Galloway and use the code Galloway at checkout for 15% off. Give me what you think, if there are any. The difference is my understanding is flutter the biggest sports gambling or the biggest company has gotten the shit kicked out of it. It's equity and I think some of that is regulatory risk. But I would argue the majority of it is there appears to be leakage of that firm's growth and upside to the prediction markets. Curious how you would establish or distinguish between the prediction markets and the gambling apps. So we had the head of Calcion and he made what I thought was a fairly compelling point that we're in the middle of a trade or two contracts similar to when stocks trade as opposed to the gambling apps where they're essentially trying to engineer a way to get more money from you, that it's, you know, anyways, you sort of, I can see by your language, you sort of buy that you sort of don't. So let me ask the initial question. What and how would you distinguish between gambling apps and the prediction markets?
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So honestly, I wouldn't. As a baseline, 90% of the trading volume on Kalshi is on sports. And as far as we know, yeah, it's cool, it's sexy, it's weird, you can bet on Taylor Swift's bridesmaids or gas prices in Miami or whatever, but functionally these platforms, because they're 18 plus rather than gambling, which is 21 plus, and because they're available in all 50 states rather than just the 32 states that have legal online sports betting, functionally this is a way for a 19 year old in Utah to gamble on sports when he wouldn't have been able to otherwise. And all the election stuff, all the will aliens will Jesus Christ return in 2026, all those markets are basically just like appetizers for sports gambling, which is the bread and butter business, whether they want to admit it or not, of companies like Kalshi and polymarket. So fundamentally, I'm not going to beg their question, but these are just gambling platforms and they've worked like gambling platforms. And the fact that you can build a parlay or what they call a combo like you could on a sportsbook also begs to me the question of like that this is all peer to peer. How can I have like Bangladesh invasion by the U.S. plus Philadelphia Eagles plus Sacramento Kings. There's no trader with the exact opposite combination. There's clearly a house working, might not work exactly like a sports betting house, but there is clearly some institutional investor on the side of the prediction market providing the initial liquidity for these markets and provide allowing me to build these sort of extremely bespoke custom investment tools, if you want to be generous and call them that, such that this. Yes, nominally these are peer to peer platforms, but I would love to sort of open the books and see if that's actually the case or to what degree that's actually the case.
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A
How do you build in the best type of. So when I think of the stock market, $3 trillion a year in transactions, 300 billion is for the initial objective of the market and that is secondaries or IPOs. You could argue that 90% of the transactions taking place in the market are speculation. It's me betting against Jonathan. If I sell my Apple stock and you buy it vis a vis through a third party intermediary, I'm betting it's going to go down. You're betting it's going to go up. But there is some friction there, right? You have to be, if you're investing in a private company, you have to be a quote unquote accredited investor. You have to, there's certain margin requirements. Have you seen any country other than. And maybe it's just an outright ban, but what are the best methods of introducing friction to the system? I don't think you're ever going to screen out all the problems. And you know, if you wanted to sit at home and smoke cigarettes and eat ice cream and kill yourself, I kind of think that's your right to a certain extent. But at the same time we put warning labels on it. You know, we do have certain intervention. What have you seen as the most effective means of introducing friction into the system?
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B
So I mean you referred to Flutter earlier, which is FanDuel's parent company, but this is a case of actually effective and important self regulation by flutter, which is FanDuel's parent company, which imposes limits on gamblers in the United Kingdom and Ireland who are under the age of 25. It's like you just like there's a maximum amount that you can lose if you're under the age of 25 and then you get cut off. I think it's on a monthly basis. And that's the kind of friction that should be that you. What we have right now is friction that you can opt into. You can opt into a time limit, you can opt into a deposit limit. And spoiler alert, no one ever does. And what they're creating is an opt out system where you can't opt out, but it's a default friction system. And this is. Well, I'll stop there. Yeah, I think that as a starting point that's not even regulatory, right? That's sort of industry imposed, self imposed. That's the kind of thing I would like to use as a, as a baseline.
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The thing that also strikes me as a potential solution, and I wonder if you've thought about this is I've always thought that we have the word crisis is overused. A problem with kids borrowing money for degrees that are just unlikely to provide them with the market power to be able to pay back their student loans. And I thought an easy solution or Friction, if you will, would be putting the host institution or the issuing institution of the debt. They're not actually issuing the debt, they're just approving it such that the government provides that putting them on the hook for 10, 20, 50% of the bad debt. Is there some sort of mechanism here where you'd say, okay, if someone goes bankrupt, the host institution is on the hook for a certain percentage of it.
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So just be clear. We basically have this for alcohol, right? We have this concept of a dram shop law, which is if someone, if Scott's at the bar and he's clearly drunk, but the bar just sort of keeps plying him with booze because he's an easy mark and he should get
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A
in the car and kill someone.
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B
Yeah, right. And then you go out and you kill someone. You run over someone's mailbox with your car. The bar can be held, at least in part, partly liable for your malfeasance and for your misbehavior. And we have no equivalent, let's say dram shop for gambling, where there's no disincentive for the company to stop serving you because in fact they don't want to stop serving you because you're going to sort of move over from DraftKings to FanDuel or from FanDuel to Caesars or whatever the case may be.
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How would you do that?
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I'm willing to accept industry self regulation to a point, but there has to be some actually industry wide imposition and the industry is not always going to agree to everything. So it has to sort of be regulatory. You know, for example, a national self exclusion program says that you block yourself from one platform, you're sort of automatically cut off from the rest of them and they don't have an incentive to sort of lure you over. You know, fandral doesn't have an incentive to lure you over once they find out that you've cut yourself off from DraftKings or something like that. Or when you set a time limit, when you set a deposit limit, it sort of automatically goes across all the apps rather than just sort of the app of choice because someone is going to just, you can just download another one. So something like that, which is the kind of thing I would have loved to have had in place in 2018 when this all got started. Better late than never. But it's the kind of thing that I think would, would create that baseline of guardrails that were so sorely needed now, that are so sorely needed now.
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A
And why has this exploded across states legalizing it? Is it for tax revenue? Is it a general view, more libertarian standpoint? How come, how come these companies have been able to essentially, you know, I don't call it run over, but states have embraced this.
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B
I mean, a lot of states, including New York, did it during COVID and They were, there was sort of a very acute need for revenue, even though it's a very, very small amount of revenue. Only Montana, Montana is the only state that gets more than 1% of its tax revenue from sports betting. In most states it's, it really is a drop in the bucket. But going back to the 1730s, right. Lawmakers in the United States have always sought out tax free sources of government revenue and have always turned to gambling as a result. So yeah, some of them probably did have this sort of libertarian streak about gambling, but some of them were probably just told, hey, this is gonna be a big money maker. I think a big point that they were told that we haven't talked about is all this black market gambling already exists. So you're not even gonna be increasing the number of people who gamble. All you're doing is just capturing this revenue that was sort of flowing out the door in the form of, to bookies or to, you know, these offshore casinos based in the Caribbean. And you're going to reshore it, you're going to now, now it's going to generate tax revenue for you and it's going to be great.
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A
And do you see, I'm curious how the different players have lined up. I keep hearing that Vegas is just dying. A combination of Canadian tourists have decided, yeah, we don't need to, we don't need to spend our money in America if they're going to be just shitty neighbor, you know, a meth lab that we're living above in an apartment in terms of bad decisions. And also I would kind of imagine the prevalence of that ability to scratch that dopa you get from gambling when it's in your pocket. Have they played a role in trying to, I mean, where are they in all of this? Are they trying to actively figure out a way to, to regulate these guys? Are there certain senators in certain states who have been leaders saying this is a bad idea and are proposed? I mean, the problem with this stuff is it's usually pretty hard to roll back. Right?
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B
Yeah.
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A
What's the state of play in the legislative market right now?
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B
Honestly, it's a lot of it is focused on prediction markets specifically. I mean, just right now or as we're talking, right, there's a lot of what appears to be very obvious insider trading on the Iran strikes by the US government. So there's a lot of focus specifically on prediction markets which really have been a runaway train over the last just few months. So there's been some talk at the federal level about sports betting regulation, but I think more likely that's going to happen at the state level and the federal government is going to be focused on prediction markets.
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A
If you could only implement one reform, what would it be?
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B
So this, okay, this is a little bit of a cop out, but I would change the mandate for the regulatory agencies that oversee sports betting. I'm going to butcher the exact, the exact quote, but the Maryland Lottery and Gaming Control Agency, or whatever it's called, one of their official mandates, their missions is to increase or maximize the amount of tax revenue for the state of Maryland from sports betting. And I would change that mandate to something along the lines of foster the well being of Marylandians and allow make it possible for them to gamble on sports. And I think friction, all these other things would sort of flow downstream of a different North Star for the agencies that oversee sports betting.
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A
We'll be right back. Where is Daredevil? I'm right here. Don't miss the return of Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again. So what's next? I feel liberated. We're gonna take this city back over medicated in an all new season. Now streaming only a on Disney plus. They're hunting us.
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It's time we started hunting them.
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I can work with them. This should be tons of fun. Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again now streaming only on Disney plus.
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A
We're back with more from Jonathan D. Cohen. And how do we compare to other markets? I'm living in the UK right now, and as far as I can tell, just as late night or the evening news has become pharmaceutical TV in the U.S. it feels like Premier League football. Here is BET TV. You know, BET365. And I find it very cynical because they have on their advertising bet responsibly, bet365. I'm like, okay, what does that mean? I'd be very curious to see what their vision of bet responsibly is. But as you look at what can we learn from what other nations have gone through in this market?
- [31:44]
B
Yeah, I mean, the UK frankly, is where we're going. Right. They've had legal sports gambling since 1961, online legal gambling since 2005. And they are currently in the process of rewriting the rules of what gambling should be, in part because they've experiencing what we are going to or have already begun experiencing in the US of increase in suicides, increase in financial catastrophe, increase in addiction and the like. So there are other countries that have a model in other parts of Europe, specifically, for example, advertising restrictions, as you said. And I think the United Kingdom is in fact in the process of sort of rolling back some of the number of jerseys that can have gambling advertising. I think that's sort of on its way out. But there are ideas like a whistle to whistle ban while a sports game is going. You can't air any gambling advertising. Some go further, like between the hours of 10am and 10pm you can't air any gambling advertising when children might be watching stuff like that. That I think maybe the time to do it again was eight years ago, before we totally normalized social and before we totally normalized and socialized gambling, before Pandora's box was fully opened. But I'm willing to take it before for today's young people. I don't know how many of them are watching cable TV or watching live sports, but it can't hurt.
- [32:56]
A
What are the demographics of the people who are most prone to this? And also what's the relationship or crossover between this and other types of addictions? I found it fascinating what you said, that it's not technically it's a behavioral addiction, not a biological or a chemical addiction, if you will. I found that was really interesting. But is this a gateway? Are people who do a lot of, you know, are betting on. On the Super Bowl, Are they more inclined to develop a drinking problem? Is this technically a gateway drug or other drugs or Addictions a gateway to this. And what is, we know it's more men than women, but how else does it break down demographically?
- [33:33]
B
So for sports bet, as far as we can tell, problems from sports betting is pretty reflective of the percentage of people who are doing sports betting. It's disproportionately male who are sort of running into trouble. But of course, more men are gambling on sports than women. And many even of the women who we think are gambling on sports are probably actually just men using their wives Social Security numbers. So it's probably even more male dominated than we think it is. And there is a huge prevalence of what you'd call sort of comorbidity where someone, just as I live in New Haven, our local police chief got over a drinking problem and then developed a gambling problem that he sort of sees as sort of a specifically sort of replaced the role of alcohol in his life and he ended up embezzling a bunch of city funds to feed his gambling habit. And so there's a huge comorbidity of people with a drinking problem, a drug problem, if they still have any money left with, you know, ptsd, with bipolar, with any other sort of mental disorder will oftentimes find their way to gambling as a way to get their fix. And those people are uniquely susceptible to the clutches of a gambling ad, gambling ad, gambling app on their phone, push notifications, you name it.
- [34:45]
A
So regulation that results in friction. I get that. Whether it's age gating or maybe putting them on the hook or not letting certain people continue to gamble. Is there financial penalties for companies that are bad, that are, that are, that are bad actors? I also wonder how much of this is. And let me know if, if you've seen anything like this. But I've always thought that in the senior year of, of high school we should have a class called adulting. You know, how to pay your credit card bill. What is a mortgage? My kid can do integers. I don't think he understands the, the interest rate on his credit card. You know, how to approach someone and express romantic interests while making them feel safe. You know, like basic adulting. You know, what are the standards in the workplace, standard norms. And then to educate them about the difference between the male and the female brain and which addictions and types of addictions you're most inclined to and why and when to seek out help. Do you think there's a role or an obligation for education around gambling apps in high schools? And have you seen anyone actually implement it?
- [35:53]
B
Yes, I think that it's all, I'm totally agree with you. Let's not be naive about whether 17 year olds are going to pay attention to any of this material when it's actually presented to them and they're going to, any more than they're paying attention to their English literature class. But we should be furnishing students, young people with this information that they're not going to hear anywhere else. Everything they learn about gambling should not be from like Kevin hart during a DraftKings ad talking about how fun it is and how easy it is to gamble. So the Commonwealth of Virginia actually is doing this and is incorporating basically a gambling curriculum into what you'd call like its sex ed materials, right? Where you talk about sex, you talk about porn, you talk about alcohol, drugs, sort of, you name it. And to me I'm in favor of it because it's not a question anymore of if a young person is going to gamble. It's just a question of what they're going to gamble on and how long it's going to take them to run into trouble. Whether it's sports betting, prediction markets, crypto, Robinhood, video game, loot boxes, you name it, they're going to find their way to gambling. And it's sort of like porn where you, you know, they're going to find their way to it. It's just a question of like, are they prepared, are they sort of armed with the resources and the resilience to know what they're looking at and to place it into the proper context and understand it, or are they sort of being left to their, left to their own devices, on their own devices, and a multibillion dollar company is sort of able to have their way with their
- [37:07]
A
dopamine pathways in terms of treatment for gambling, is there, you know, there's Nicorette for nicotine, there's methadone or for, for alcohol. Have you come across or in your research seen anything that helps young people just on a more productive level replace the same kind of reward or dopa they get from gambling somewhere else?
- [37:28]
B
This is what's crazy, right? Which is that with gambling, with heroin, right, you're ingesting something, you're injecting something into your body. And with gambling you're not injecting anything. But still your brain is changing and your brain chemistry is changing sort of in response to the dopamine addiction from gambling. And so with gambling treatment, it's a lot of therapy, a lot of therapy, a lot of sort of internal self work to realize sort of what hole in Your life you were trying to fill with gambling and then trying to build the self control to every day for the rest of your life not fall down that rabbit hole again.
- [37:57]
A
And just to remind people, so in 2018, the US legal sports betting was approximately 2 or 3 billion a year. And this year it's going to be 150 billion a year. It just feels as if, I mean, this really does feel like a runaway freight train at this point. What are you predicting? Do you think we're just the tip of the iceberg of self harm and bankruptcies? Is there a certain lag where it takes someone a few years to get in real trouble? Are you predicting kind of 2028 is when, I mean, typically what I've seen with these types of things is they happen, there's a profit incentive, they tap into a flaw in our instincts, whether it's addiction or dopa, or wanting to gorge food, whatever it is. And then it takes us 20 or 30 years to figure it out. Took us 30 years with tobacco, 20 years with opiates. I think it's going to take us about 20 years of social media to finally regulate it. Where do you think we are in this cycle and when do you think it hits a breaking point and people get more serious about regulation?
- [38:59]
B
Yeah, I think so. Prediction markets I actually think are sort of an accelerant in all of this. Right. Because California, it seemed like was going to take a long time. You know, industry insiders that I've talked to thought that it was gonna take until the 2000 and 30s for California to get legal online sports gambling. But of course, through the back door of prediction markets, we have legal online sports gambling in places like Texas, California, Minnesota, Georgia. So we have it sort of statewide. So we've sort of accelerated the conversation. So I don't think there is the public, as much as I would love to say that within one month, one month of joining the American Institute for Boys and Men, I've single handedly changed the tide of the national conversation on sports betting. I don't think that's happened. And I think what's actually going to, what's going to do it more than anything is these questions of sports integrity which we haven't talked about yet, which aren't as salient to me as the question of sort of what's happening to young men. But unless like Chuck Schumer's grandson or whatever gets a gambling problem and some very high official sort of, this becomes their pocket issue and they really sort of start pushing it every day it's probably going to be these questions of sports integrity and the threat to the integrity of the NFL and MLB and so on that wakes people up to the problem. And then there is sort of space, space will be created there for people like me to sort of push the public health approach within the sort of broader conversation about what, what the hell have we unleashed and what have we done? So I don't, I don't want to, I don't know, I don't, I don't have a timetable for you. But there's a chance it happens pretty soon if like LeBron James gets caught betting on, betting on NBA games or for example, that Overton window might open really quickly.
- [40:29]
A
And just some data here states that legalize online sports betting have seen their bankruptcies more, more loan delinquencies, lower credit scores and reduced savings, especially among lower income households. Among heavy batters, 60% of those depositing $500 plus per month say they can't cover at least one bill or loan. So this does appear to be preying, especially on lower income households. Does that fit to your research?
- [40:52]
B
Yeah, and there's a study specifically about the reduction in investment in savings in low income households from sports gambling. But to your previous question, I don't know when, I don't know to what degree that bill comes due, so to speak, or the degree to which a lawmaker, for example, wakes up and says, oh, we have this financial precarity crisis, crisis, sorry, sorry to use that word, we have this financial priority problem and it's specifically because of sports betting versus inflation or sort of the job market, AI, you name it. And so I don't know if we're ever going to get to that point where we wake up to the problem of sports betting because specifically because we can see of the increase in bankruptcies, for example, the causality is always sort of, there's always going to be plausible deniability about the causality here, which is my problem. And why think that it's going to take the integrity angle to sort of open the door for the public health discussion.
- [41:37]
A
Jonathan Cohen leads gambling policy at the American Institute for Boys and Men. He's the author of Losing Big, America's Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling and For a Dollar and a Dream. And he joins us from New Haven, which he claims is the pizza capital of America, which I would call challenge. But I guess I'll let him prove me wrong at some point. Jonathan, congratulations on joining my intellectual role model or hero, Richard Reeves, and thanks for your good work. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez and Laura Gennar. Cami Reek is our social producer, Bianca Rosario Ramirez is our video editor, and Drew Burroughs is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G pod from PropG Media.
- [42:25]
B
Foreign.
- [42:33]
A
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