The Casino-ification of America

I want to tell you three stories about the state of gambling in America. Story one. On the morning of February 28th, someone logged on to the prediction market website Polymarket and placed a $32,000 bet. This bet wasn't placed on an NBA game, it wasn't placed on a hockey game, it wasn't placed on any sport. This was a bet that the United States would bomb Iran that very day. At a time when the odds said it was an extremely low probability chance of happening. A few hours later, the bombs fell. And that one bet turned into a $553,000 payday for a user named Maga My Man. It was just one of dozens of suspicious, perfectly timed wagers, totaling millions of dollars placed in the hours before a war began. The term war profiteering typically refers to arms dealers who get rich from warfare, but we now live in a world where online bettors, including perhaps inside of our government, stand to profit by declaring wars that they have a rooting interest in planning. Story two. On March 10, several days into the Iran War, the journalists and Manuel Fabian reported that a warhead launched from Iran struck a site outside Jerusalem. Meanwhile, back on Polymarket, users had placed bets in the precise location of missile strikes on that very date, March 10. Fabian's article was therefore poised to determine payouts of $14 million in betting. As the Atlantic's Charlie Whorezel reported, "Better's encouraged Fabian to rewrite history to produce the outcome they had bet on." Others sent threats to him, saying quote, "I'll make your life miserable." We now live in a world where journalists are being pressured, bullied, threatened, even paid to publish specific stories for the sole purpose of caching out online bets about the world. Number three, McKay Coppins is a writer at The Atlantic. This month, he wrote a feature story on the rise of sports gambling in America. As part of that story, he was staked $10,000 to bet on sports himself. He lost pretty much all of it. This is an increasingly commonplace American experience to lose your shirt betting on sports. In 2017, Americans bet less than $5 billion through online sportsbooks. This year, they gambled more than $160 billion. But McKay's story is not just about the common experience of losing money on gambling. It's about the rise of sports betting in America more generally and how the logic of gambling has come to colonize every square inch of our media, from warfare to football. McKay is today's guest. We talk about the rise of gambling in sports, how it's spread into politics and life, and what to make of the slow or rapid casinoification of America. I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English. This episode of Plain English is presented by Audi. We all know that feeling, a change of plans, a new opportunity. Instead of overthinking what if you just said yes? With the all new Audi Q3, the answer is easy. It's made for the yes life, with the power and room to handle whatever pops up. Yes to adventure, yes to right now. Because saying yes without hesitation, that's real luxury. The all new Audi Q3 made for the yes life. Learn more at AudiUSA.com. McKay Coppins. Welcome to the show. Thanks, Derek. You are the author of the Atlantic's latest cover story, Sucker, my year as a degenerate gambler. How did a Mormon end up writing the Atlantic cover story on gambling in America? Was the backstory? That's not a natural fit to you. Not the most obvious fit. No. So, this started as a more normal magazine story assignment, how these things go. My editor said, we want a big story on the explosive growth of the sports betting industry, the online gambling boom, what it's doing to America. We started charting the course of normal reporting, like, oh, I'll interview executives at FanDuel and DraftKings and I'll interview athletes and people who maybe who are struggling with gambling addiction. I think it was my editor who first said it would really be better if you had a little skin in the game, experienced it first hand. And I said, well, yeah, but for religious reasons, I don't gamble, and he was like, yeah, I know, I know, I know. But what if we staked you some money? I think it was actually the editor-in-chief, Jeff Goldberg, who was like, well, what if we staked you $10,000? I thought it was going to be a few hundred bucks. He had this idea of giving me a bunch of money and the deal was, we'll give you $10,000 to gamble with, we'll cover your losses. But to keep you kind of invested, we'll split the winnings 50/50 if there are any. And so I write about this in the piece, I was intrigued. I had never been a gambler. Part for religious reasons partly, just not that interested. I was sports fan. I felt like I didn't really need to bet on the games to enjoy them. But I did go and consult my bishop about it, which was an awkward conversation. He basically kind of tacitly agreed, but was also like, look, you need to be careful with this. I've seen this like wreck people's lives, right? I will admit that in that moment, I kind of smuggly brushed him off because I was like, it'll be fine. This is a journalism stunt. But I think that, look, my editor's, I think, thought there was something just inherently funny about taking a kind of suburban, Mormon dad and dropping him into this world. Your editors were right. It turned out to make, you know, the story a lot more entertaining. I will say, I did not expect to write as much about my own experience when I started. I thought this would be maybe one section where I like wrote about my own little foray into gambling, but it ended up kind of consuming my life in ways that I wasn't expecting. Well, before we talk about how the perverse casinoification has destroyed America, let's actually hold on your experience. I mean, can you admit that sports gambling is kind of fun? Yes, of course, novel insight by McKay Coffin's new gambler. Gambling can be fun. I remember the first game I bet on. It was the first game of the NFL season. It was Eagles Cowboys and I, you know, I punched in a bunch of bets. I didn't know what I was doing at all at that point. I just downloaded Draft Kings and I remember like sitting down to watch the game. And within like 10 minutes, I was like, oh, this is why people do this. Because I had purchased a synthetic rooting interest in a game that I would otherwise have no reason to care about, right? In my normal life, the way I would have watched that game was turned it on, folded some laundry with my wife, probably fallen asleep, turned it off at half time, checked the score in the morning, right? That's like that, you know, because I don't care about the Eagles or Cowboys, really. But I bet on the Eagles and I was locked in and I, you know, there was a weather delay. There are a lot of weird things in that first game, somebody got ejected for spitting on. Didn't take your card. Yeah. The defensive alignment for the Eagles. I think spat. Literally like Prescott's face. But also there was reverse camera angle that suggested that Dak may have spat and it came first. It was just like the first 15 seconds of the NFL season and I was like riveted, right? Like riveted. And I ended up staying up till like midnight to finish the game and and, you know, what helped also was that that first night I came out 20 bucks ahead. And I was like, this is amazing. This is awesome. Like why, I, you know, I totally get why this is so popular. And also, you know, when you have your first win as a gambler, it's really like, there's kind of nothing like it. Like I remember I told my wife the next morning and she immediately was like, whoa, are we going to win money? Are we, is this good? Like, can we buy a new KitchenAid mixer? Can we, you know, like we're, it's that easy for a Mormon wife to go from gambling, gambling is against my creed to, oh, if we extrapolate this out of the course the season, we can totally be the kitchen. She, uh, she, like she had bought into the, uh, the spiritual work around logic of the whole thing. So she had already made her moral piece with it and now it was all like, what can we, can we remodel the pantry? Like, let's get going. So I'm going to let listeners in on a little secret about Atlantic magazine features, which is that there's a template. There's a formula. Part one of a classic Atlantic cover story is you have this microcosmic anecdote, this anecdote often in the first person that contains the stakes of the story and the import of the story. Here is my experience in gambling and this is what it reflects about American life. And always, in part two of the story, the lenses pulled all the way back. and we go back to the beginning of human history and walk forward the chronology of this topic. So we are both vets of Atlantic feature writing. So let's stick with that template here. Gambling has a millennial old history. The ancient Greeks wagered on the Olympics, the ancient Romans wagered on the gladiators. Can you tell me a very specific podid history of gambling in America between the 1600s and the year 2010? And the reason to stop in that year will be made apparent to people in just a few seconds. But give me a sense of America's history with gambling from the 17th century to the early 21st century. Yeah, so I think it will surprise nobody that the Puritans not huge fans of gambling, right? From the very beginning of the Plymouth colony, gambling was banned under penalty of punishment. And it basically, that attitude toward gambling stretched throughout the early, you know, the colonies, the founding fathers, George Washington. I found this amazing quote where he talked about how gambling can be linked to every other evil. You know, it's the child of avarice, et cetera. And basically the, you know, laws varied state by state, century to century. It changed and evolved. But the general American attitude toward gambling was that it was a socially, costly, you know, civilizationally ruinous vice that might need to be tolerated but should be regulated, stigmatized, and ideally kept to certain kind of containment zones like river boats and red light districts. That quote from George Washington is that gambling could be at the heart of every possible evil. It is the child of avarice, the brother of inequity and the father of mischief. That is our founding father, George Washington on sports gambling. I stopped in the year 2010 because something happened in 2012 that I think totally reoriented American history at least as it relates to gambling. What happened in 2012? Chris Christie, governor of New Jersey, signed a bill into law that legalized sports betting in New Jersey. Up to that point, there had been a federal law on the books for a long time that made it so that sports betting was only legal in a handful of locations. Is that the professional and amateur sports protection act of 1992? Pass by, yep. By the way, that it was created with the very strong support of all these professional sports league commissioners. They testified before Congress saying that there was no greater threat to the integrity of sports than legalized gambling. And they had good reason to believe that, by the way. If you look at that history that we talked about, there were these big scandals, right? The 1919 World Series, the point-shaving scandals in college basketball in the 1970s. These scandals that had convinced professional sports that betting on sports was an existential threat even to the game. Because not only did it breed potential for corruption and manipulation, it also just planted in the mind of sports fans and viewers that these sports might not be totally on the level, that the game you're watching on the corner of the field might be manipulated by gambling. And if that sentiment is too widely adopted, it ruins the whole experience of watching sports, right? Anyway, Chris Christie signs this law. The sports leagues sue to stop it from being implemented. And it starts to wind its way through federal court until it gets to the Supreme Court in 2018. At 2018, Supreme Court decision, Murphy versus NCAA, which strikes down this law, Passpa, that was passed in 1992. And that essentially reversed this rule that said that legal sports betting had to be contained to Nevada. So now the gates are flung wide open. And I want to do a beat here on industry economics because there's a 180 that the sports leagues take on gambling that's absolutely remarkable. And a lot of what I'm going to say here comes from a conversation we had last year on the show with Jonathan Cohn, the author of "Losing Day" America's reckless bet on sports gambling. In 2012, the Commissioner of the NBA, David Stern, screams in Chris Christie's face for opening the door to gambling. Two years later, the Commissioner of the NBA is Adam Silver and he writes an op-ed in the New York Times entitled, quote, "legalize and regulate sports betting." End quote. That's a two year 180. In the NFL, this is a league that spent decades lobbying the federal government to protect Passpa. Last year, the NFL saw $30 billion gambled on football games. The league itself made half a billion dollars in advertising, licensing, and data deals to your mind. And I have a lot of thoughts here and so maybe we'll go back and forth just a bit on the economics of this. What explains this 180? How would you in good faith explain how the sports leagues in almost a matter of months went from keep the Barbarians out of the gates to, let's fling open the gates. Yeah, let's bracket the kind of the funny nature of the righteous indignation that these leagues had about legalized gambling just completely melting away once the Supreme Court overturned it because that is amusing. But there were real economic reasons for the leagues to embrace gambling. They, if you go back to 2018, 2019, 2020, professional sports in general and specific leagues, especially Major League Baseball, for example, were facing what looked like a kind of gathering crisis when it came to falling TV ratings and younger fans disengaging from the sport. And you know, you've talked about this on your show, a lot of shows, the NBA, for example, younger fans were very interested in the players, interested in watching highlights on TikTok and Instagram, not so much in turning on games and watching entire games. And this posed a big challenge to the leagues where they went to make their money licensing broadcast deals. They need people to watch the games on TV. So what's a way to ensure that people will not just watch Kevin Durant highlights on TikTok but actually turn on entire games? Well, if they've got money on it, they're, they're much more likely to want to watch the games. Gambling was seen by these leagues as a way to reengage younger fans, especially and to prop up sagging TV ratings. I want to, I want to emphasize what you just said. The way I would reiterate it is that gambling turned out to have both a direct benefit to the leagues and indirect benefit to the leagues. The direct benefit to the league is that the leagues are literally making licensing and data deal money from the gambling leagues. They're making advertising revenue from the game. I mean, if you said gambling leads, the sportsbooks, if you turn on an NFL game, you turn on an NBA game, every third ad. No, yes. Fan dual or, you know, MGM sports book. It's, it's constant. The drumbeat of, of gambling advertising. That's the direct part. The indirect part that you mentioned though I think might just, might be just as important. That in a, in an era of court cutting and an era of declining television revenue, the best way to get people to watch games, especially once the outcome of that game is relatively decided is to, if it's for them to have a material benefit writing on the outcome of the game. And so this was their way to keep younger viewers in particular attached to linear programming at a time when court cutting was rampant. I do think that it was both those things. And look clearly it's been incredibly advantageous to the leagues. I mean, did you speak to folks like from the leagues who essentially said, look, we, we made a bet so to speak on gambling. And for us, it's paid off. It was, it was a good economic decision. There really doesn't seem to be a lot of remorse or like reckoning with the consequences, right? Even as there have been more recent revelations of gambling related scandals and professional sports, the line from the leagues and from from professional sports is these are isolated incidents. They're rare. They're by the way being flagged by the, the legal online sports books. They're helping us root out corruption and, um, and overall, this has been an enormous win for us. Now, I would say that if you talk to people off the record and, you know, I won't betray any confidence is here, but you hear a slightly different story. They will still say, you know, this was definitely a deal worth doing, um, but I think that the power dynamics between the online sports books and the leagues are getting a little bit uncomfortable for some people in professional sports. Yes, sir. You know, uh, there, there's a sense that even if they wanted to start to distance themselves a little more from gambling or to call out more aggressively, uh, the, the trade-offs or the perils of, of gambling, they, they kind of don't have the ability to because the, the economics of professional sports are now so interlocked with, with online gambling that it's really hard to disentangle them, right? Back to your story. After two weeks of betting, you were down $60. You just had to reach out to a gambling guru. Who did you pick and what did he teach you? So I called Nate Silver, who I first encountered like most people as a political pundit and prognosticator, famously in 2012, his site 538 correctly predicted the outcome of every single state in the presidential election. And in recent years, he has pivoted more toward writing about gambling. He wrote a great book about gambling and his newsletter is full of kind of model-driven sports betting advice. And I basically felt like as somebody who knew nothing about this and clearly was out of my depth that he could give me best practices. And he did. He kind of walked me through, I mean, first of all, he did kind of humiliating the first conversation because I showed him my bed slips for the first week and he started on the phone going through the bed slips and like roasting me, you know, he was like, oh, no, that he laughed at me. And you know, it's like I write that that's how I learned you can be a masculated by Nate Silver. What bets in particular did he find particularly offensive? I think there was this is pretty humiliating even to talk about now. There was one where I had turned on a random college football game with my brother. I can't even remember the teams or I knew nothing about them. And I got on and bet the under for the point total of the game, lost that and then bet chased by loss to for another higher point total and then lost that too. And it was just like violating every single rule of like sensible sports betting, you know. But also that is what sports gambling is. That's what people do. You at least were participating in this experiment in a way that was like, you know, representative, I think of millions and millions of bettors, which is there's a television game in front of you. You're like, you know, it'd be really fun is to have a little bit of financial interest routing on this game. You lose money. You don't want to be down $25 in the day and see, you're like, you know, I can make this back if I just make one more bet. This is how it happens. Totally. I mean, I was it's funny because since the piece came out, some people are like, oh my gosh, this guy is is such an idiot gambling. I'm like, I hate to break to you. Most people who are downloading these these apps and just using them casually are gambling like idiots, like it's it's most people are not Nate Selver, right? Right. What Nate told me was, look, there are some basic economic realities of sports betting with the the the big that they take that books essentially charge you four and a half percent for every bet. So you have to win to break even at least, you know, 52 and a half percent of the time before taxes. So actually even more. And that means that you have to basically grind out microscopic edges game after game after game, right? That it is not the case that you're going to win 70% of your bets. Nobody does that, right? The way that you come out ahead is by very carefully studying the lines, pouring over roster reports and weather updates and all the things that can affect the outcome of a game and then sticking, especially if you're a newbie like me to point spreads, not doing parlayers or prop bets, those are suckers bets and basically making sure that you're not doing in-game live betting too because that's that you know, that's more emotionally driven. He kind of taught me all these rules. Yeah, and at an abstract level, the lesson that I took from Nate in your piece because I've actually I just was on stage with Nate at the at the MIT Sloan conference. I talked a little bit about his betting strategy and he reiterated this lesson to me in different words, but the most popular bets are typically the worst deals. They're popular for a reason. They are made to look fun for a reason and it takes a beat to recognize that it is economically sensible for the sportsbooks to have an inverse relationship between fun and profitability for the better. That's a really interesting way to put it. Parlay's are fun. It's a parlay to say, oh, I need three different things to happen. So I have fun riding on three different outcomes today. That's much more fun than saying I'm just going to bet the overrunder on one game, but parlay's are a terrible deal for most bettors. Props, which is like a very specific bet on, you know, is one player going to have more than seven and a half assistant a game is one player going to have the longest rush B35, you know, 0.5 yards. These kind of props are really fun because they can happen at any time. It encourages you to watch to the end of the game to see what did the assist number end debt did say one Berkeley break one out in the fourth quarter when the ultimate the game was essentially decided, but these are these are really bad bets. He also pointed out that NFL spreads are the most popular bets and they're the hardest sport to win money on. Almost for the very same reason that they are popular, which is that they are a more populated bet. So, you know, it's harder to get a consistent edge and maybe just elaborate a little bit on the degree to which Nate taught you that there is this inverse relationship between fun and profit in gambling, which is something that, you know, amateur bettors should probably know about before they're getting into this. Well, something that he said that stuck with me. First of all, he talked about the NFL. He was like, look, you're betting on the NFL. That is the hardest sport to make money betting on because it's so popular. There's so many bets. There's the lines are too sharp, right? That like you probably are not going to be able to beat the house on NFL bets. It's like the people who make a lot of money betting on sports tend to be people who are betting on less or known. Even he was like, there's a lot, there's a lot more value to be found in the WNBA. If you can actually learn about the WNBA, the books don't know as much about it. There's more opportunity to kind of exploit different edges. But the thing that he said to me that was really interesting was, you know, I asked him, I'm starting with $10,000. What would be a good season? Like what should I be shooting for? What would be like a respectable amount of money to win? And he was like kind of mystified by my question. And he was like, you understand that if you win one penny, you'll be better than 98% of gamblers. Like a good season would be not losing money. And that kind of shocked me, honestly. And maybe I should have known that. But the thing that he said was like, you know, Nate himself has made hundreds of thousands of dollars gambling, mostly playing poker in tournaments, right? He said, I have a proprietary model that I've developed. I'm constantly tweaking and I'm pouring over data. I'm pretty good at this. You know, he's been limited at various sports books, etc. Because he's a very good better. Which I probably should pause you there. We should talk about that. That's another important thing to know, which is not only are the stakes against amateur bettors, but also if they prove themselves to be better than 95% of amateur bettors, the sports books can take action to make them like to make betting less, less likely or to shut down. What exactly do they do? Yeah, so they can they call it limiting you. It's essentially banning you from making big bets. So like if if you are consistently winning money, a book will start limiting the amount of money you can gamble on it at any given game to like $25 or something, right? Which is kind of insane when you think about it. Like it shows again, just like the entire system is developed to be fun, not for you to make money. And it is very fun, but it's you know, you can call it rigged or whatever, but it clearly it's like a carnival game where you go and like it's actually very, very hard to win those ring tosses, you know, but that doesn't stop people from doing it because it's fun and you're there and you know, it's a good time. But yeah, so you if you are a sharp better that means you're consistently winning money, the books will either limit you in some cases kick you off the platform entirely. And so there's actually this whole cat and mouse game that sharp bettors will play with the books where they'll open up an account and pretend at first to be an amateur better, maybe even a compulsive better so that the books will raise their limits and let them make very big bets. And then once the limits are raised, they'll move in for the kill and try to make a bunch of money before they get kicked off. I never thought of it quite this way, but would it be fair to say that since 80 to 90% of bettors are losing money overall and the top say 1% of bettors are getting limited or even kicked off the platform. The only way to really make consistent money in this game is to be somewhere between the 91st and 98th percentile. Like you see how like you're bounded on both sides. If you're either losing money or you're making too much money, which makes the Goldilocks zone very narrow. Yeah. And I think that even in those cases, it's a matter of it's really it's you know what they say in Las Vegas is it's all about knowing when to walk away from the table, right? Like even in those cases, if you're in that 91 to 98% spot, you could start you could get on a hot streak, but then you have to leave before you your luck turns and you start losing again or before the the book shut you down, right? I want to talk a little bit about four levels of risk that I think gambling poses for America. Number one, the risk to individual bettors. Number two, the risk to individual athletes. Number three, the risk to the integrity of sports. And number four, I didn't know what to call this. So I just called it the risk to American decency writ large. Let's start with individual bettors. What is the best way to understand the frequency of gambling addiction? Well, it's only about two to five percent of gamblers will develop what are considered compulsive behaviors or addictive behaviors. So, as with the number of people who drink or engage in other potentially addictive behaviors, most people are able to do it in a kind of responsible or casual way, right? I do think, though, that 2% to 5% is a bigger number overall than you would realize in this era when we're creating tens of millions of new gamblers, right? The way that gambling has permeated the culture, the way that it's omnipresent in sports has kind of inevitably, by design, created a bunch of new people who are gambling and otherwise wouldn't, including people who are under the age that they're supposed to be 21, right? A lot of teenage boys. I mean, anybody who has had any experience with teenage boys in the last few years can tell you that they are very acquainted with points, spreads, and money lines, and they know how to gamble. Now, some of them have gotten access to accounts through their dads or older friends. Some of them do it illegally. A lot of them just do it within high school, right? But the way that gambling has become omnipresent, it means that the likelihood that there will be hundreds of thousands of millions of new gambling addicts is pretty high. And it's important to know that because, unlike other addictive disorders, gambling addiction doesn't manifest physically the same way, right? Like, it's much easier to hide a gambling addiction at first than it is to hide a drug addiction or alcoholism because people can't smell it on you. You don't have glazed eyes or slurred speech. And there are tons of stories, even since the story has come out, I've gotten all these horror stories from people who reach out and say, my 19-year-old nephew was deep in the whole gambling. We had no idea. He was gambling, but he stole a debit card and started gambling with it. And then he's been arrested. And his life is over. And there are a ton of stories like this. And the recurring theme is people had no idea that this person was gambling at all, let alone that they had a gambling addiction. You talked to the president of FanDuel and other online sportsbooks to ask if they prayed on problem gamblers. What did the sportsbooks tell you? And what was your reaction to what they told you? Yeah, they make, I think, a pretty sincere case, honestly, that they tried to root out problem gamblers. Like, I will give them the benefit of the doubt that they believe they're not being disingenuous when they say that we don't want gambling addicts on our platforms. And I talked to the president of FanDuel and he walked me through all the different things that they do to identify potential problem gamblers and to slow them down. So if you're on FanDuel and you start gambling much more money than you typically do, or spending much more time on the app than you typically do, their kind of algorithm will flag that. And the app will actually send you notification saying, hey, just so you know, you're spending a lot more money with us than you typically do. Let us know if you want to slow down, let us know if you want to implement your own kind of limit on how much you can lose, which, which, you know, most of the apps allow you to do. And if things get really out of hand, the executives at these draft Kings and FanDuel both told me, they will actually kick people off the platform. They'll just shut them down. So I believe that's true. I don't think they're lying. And I actually experienced myself during moments of this experiment where I would get the, they call it a reality check, you know, pop up on FanDuel that says, hey, just so you know, you've spent, you know, the last hour on this. And I always kind of, I was like, this feels a little passive aggressive. You know, leave me alone. I'm using your product. But the reason that I'm a little skeptical of the claims that they don't want any money from, you know, problem gamblers is that the basic economic reality of the sports betting industry is that a majority of their profit comes from the 10% of people who use their apps the most. I think the sadder member from the piece is it's 90% revenue comes from 10% of users. Yes. Now their counter to that is it's not necessarily the case that the people that gamble the most money are the ones that have an addictive disorder or problem, right? There are people with a lot of discretionary income who can lose a lot of money and it's no big problem. Nate silver exists, right? And that's true. That's fair. I also think that it is probably inevitably the case that in that 10%, there are a lot of people who either qualify as full bloom gambling addicts or people who are developing a compulsive problem. And I don't know if it really is in the interest of these sportsbooks and the bottom line interest to root those people out and throw them off the platform. It's also a fact there's been studies that show that as sports gambling spreads state to state, you can track the rise of personal bankruptcies in the state as sports gambling opens. So there's a natural experiment that happens as different states are opening a gambling and that natural experiment has revealed that bankruptcy rates increase suddenly when online sportsbooks are open to that state. It's not clear exactly what the scale of the problem is, but the fact that the problem is there, I think, is undeniable. I mean, did you ask the sportsbook presidents whether there was something more they thought they could do? Are there cards left unturned on the table here, you think, that they could be doing, but they're not doing because they only want to be seen as stopping problem gamblers, but they also want to respect the fact that they live and operate in an economic industry that relies on compulsion. 10% of users creating 90% of revenue is at least indicative of some level of compulsion. What do you think are the plays that they could make that they're not yet making? So there definitely are a ton of things they could be doing, whether they would admit that there are more kind of cards to play, so to speak, is a separate question. I would say that generally speaking, the executives at the really big online sportsbooks are very good at saying the right things. We are eager to work with regulators. We're eager to work with political leaders. We understand the concerns. We don't want gambling addiction to become a public health crisis. They'll say all the the right things they have taken, I think, certain lessons from the kind of combative and ultimately counterproductive approach that Big Tobacco took a few decades ago, and they're trying to be much more conciliatory and eager to work with legislators. That said, if you talk to political leaders and experts who are trying to tackle this issue, they'll tell you there are a ton of things that should be happening. They would say, for example, that while all the big online sportsbooks allow you to place limits on yourself, maybe it should be actually legally required that to set up an account on draftings and bandwidth, you should have to say, I only want to lose $300 this month. If I lose more than that, shut me down. There are things like a national self-exclusion list. Right? Right now, there is in most states that allow online gambling a self-exclusion form that you can fill out essentially cuts yourself off from online gambling. These sportsbooks are legally prohibited from taking your action, but it only works in that state. So if I fill one out in Virginia where I live and then I go into DC or Maryland or wherever else, I can just fire up a new draftings account. So there should be a national list, right? Are the online sportsbooks willing to come out in favor of something like that? I don't know. Like I think that would certainly help. There are a bunch of other tools to mitigate the problem. One of the biggest ones, frankly, is advertising, right? And in that area, I do not see a lot of eagerness to reign in their kind of aggressiveness. But look, there is a reason that 30, 40 years ago, we decided as a country that cigarette companies shouldn't be selling known addictive products during daytime TV when kids can see it and whatever else. When I cannot watch a sports at any game with my 10-year-old son without him having to kind of slog through 15 commercials about gambling, right? Should we reign that in? I think probably, yes, would the sportsbook be willing to do it? I would guess there would be some pushback. From the leagues as well. Yeah. So that's bucket one, which is the risk to individual betters. On the second category, which is the risk to individual athletes. Tell me about Caroline Garcia. Yeah. She's a recently retired French tennis player, was at one point, I think, like fourth or fifth in the world. And it was interesting. I talked to her. She said that the first time she got a, like, an abusive, violent message from an angry gambler was when she was still a teenager. this became basically. almost like white noise to her, a recurring theme of her entire career was that after a match, she would look at social media, look at the internet and see just a stream of the most like vile things you could possibly see from angry gamblers who are mad at her for either losing money for them or in some cases she's being accused of throwing matches because she's corrupted in some way or manipulating her performance for gambling purposes. This has become a very common experience for athletes at the professional level, even at the college level too. And I actually experienced this a little bit as a fan. There was one, right about this one experience where Amari DeMarcato, people might remember, running back for the Arizona Cardinals. Yes, it was during a Cardinals Titans game in October, I think it was. He was about to score what should have been a game ceiling touchdown and dropped the ball half a step before he went into the end zone. And you know, on purpose, it was kind of a flex like he was like throwing it on the ground, turned out he fumbled. The touchdown was reversed and the team ended up losing and I ended up losing, I don't know, 300 bucks. And I write about this irrational hatred that I developed for this player. It's irrational and it's not. It's incredibly rational. I mean, in a flex, he made a volitional decision to lose you or to create an outcome that lost you $300. That's right. That's right. I think I do think it's important to point out that like the anger isn't entirely irrational. It's actually hundreds or thousands of dollars writing in the outcome of the game. It makes hatred of certain athletes more rational. That's precisely the danger of that. That's a good, that's actually a good way of putting it and that's, that's, that's the problem, right? That like my kind of seeding contempt for this guy who I knew nothing about except that he had lost me $300 was actually kind of like baked into the experience of gambling on the game, right? And so, you know, that, that, that, that feeling, the intensity of that feeling that I briefly experienced made me understand why a gambler who loses a bunch of money, maybe more money than they should have bet on any given match or game would be compelled in a, in a fit of peak to write something that they, they probably would regret. I mean, Carolyn Garcia tells me stories about like getting these just the, the most vile message you can imagine from some angry gambler and she'll look at his profile and it's him with his one year old, you know? And she's just like, what is wrong with you? And the reality is he's responding to the, the, the very like rational, you know, survival mechanism that kicks in when you, you lose a bunch of money, like you're angry about it and you want to blame somebody and it's probably outside of his character, but he's, he's behaving in a way that, that makes sense in a certain way. It makes sense and it doesn't and that's what I think is, is rich and complicated about it because on the one hand, I absolutely believe, I think this is the, the first thing we said that when you gamble on the outcome of the game, it makes you care more about the game and therefore you can have more fun watching the game. It's just, it increases the, the, the, the cortisol and just general hormonal arousal that you have while watching sports. It also turns what should be leisure into a 1099 document. Like, you know, it, it, it turns leisure into income and the opposite of income and something happens in that conversion that is incredibly emotional and of course can be emotional in a negative way if a did 90% of Americans are losing money on this activity year after year. And the players, I think, just to go back to them, like they didn't ask to be like props in our own, you know, personal financial dramas, right? Like athletes, I think we should say, like are used to getting yelled at by fans. I'm a, you know, Boston sports fan. I've been to Fenway. I know what it's like to, yeah, fans for really polite for 2018. Exactly. They get heckled, they get yelled at, but it is a different experience when you're losing money, when your bank account is suffering because of athletes performance versus your favorite team, you know, losing a game. It just fundamentally is different. And the number of people who care is much larger. Yes. I said four categories. Number one, the risk to individual better is number two, the risk to individual athletes. So in October, as you reported, the FBI announced 30 arrests involving gambling schemes in the NBA. In November of last year, two baseball players were indicted for manipulating pitches, essentially, for throwing balls or I think I was throwing balls when there was a live bet to throw a ball or to yeah, or maybe throw strikes in some cases when there's a bet to throw a strike, but always easier to throw a ball directly into the dirt than to throw a fast ball behind a batter. Two thirds of Americans now believe that professional athletes change their performance to influence gambling outcomes. Two thirds of Americans now believe that the sport they watch is directly influenced by gambling outcomes. Do you think the trust crisis and sports is already here? Yeah. Why? Why does it matter? That statistic that you read when I came across it was the moment where I kind of realized that the crisis of authority that has kind of already visited every other American institution in the last couple of decades has arrived at professional sports. Two thirds of Americans believing that on some level and at least some games that they watch, it's professional wrestling, right? Not to overstate it, but that's a disaster for sports, right? Like if we get to the point where Americans think that what they're watching on on TV is not on the level that it's being manipulated by gambling outcomes. It will initially lead to a wave of conspiratorial thinking and, you know, an angry, violent messages to athletes and ref blaming and all the rest. It will eventually just erode interest in the games entirely, right? I would be clear. You made an observation followed by a prediction there, right? The conspiratorial age of sports. It's here. It's 2026. The idea that gambling might ironically reduce interest in sports, I think is more of a prediction, but it's interesting. It's a very interesting prediction because it's you're essentially, you're essentially describing a kind of monkey's paw scenario where the sports leagues fearful of court-cutting, eating into television revenue, open up the gates to gambling income, to encourage more interest, encourage more viewership of an entire game, but in so doing create a kind of conspiratorial model of or conspiratorial relationship with sports for people feel like games aren't sincere, outcomes aren't real. There's this meta-game of gambling that is influencing the actual game of sports. And over time, that might cause some younger viewers to pull away because they're like, I'm not watching basketball, quad basketball. I'm watching a bunch of people that I think might be manipulated. That's not as interesting to me. I'll just watch TikTok all day long rather than follow sports. So maybe just play out this scenario here because it is a kind of ironic monkey's paw sort of prediction. There's an interesting parallel with politics, which is, you know, I spend a lot of time writing about politics where the political parties and specific, you know, politicians have invested so much in whipping up the kind of anger and resentments of their respective bases, that it has led to, you know, a kind of sugar high of engagement, right? And you look at politics in the last 10 years, the Trump era, especially. People are, you know, exhaustingly focused on politics. And they're, you know, they go through periods where they're on social media all the time, tweeting about it and, you know, they're angry about it and they're becoming a little bit conspiratorial and they're engaging in these kind of crazy ideas. But at some point they burn out, right? And I think we're actually, you know, we've seen recent evidence of people disengaging from politics entirely because they're just so exhausted by it. You know, it's not exactly the same trend line, but I could see a situation in sports where as gambling becomes completely pervasive and overtakes sports culture, people go through a period, maybe we're in it now, maybe it lasts a few more years where every, every time a game doesn't go their way, they're, they're, you know, speculating about which coach or player is on the take from the mob or which referee is secretly corrupted. And then at some point that becomes tiresome and they're exhausted by it and they're like, you know what? I don't have to watch this anymore. I can turn on Netflix, right? There's a lot of other things that will entertain me. I don't need to watch this clearly corrupted product that actually causes more misery than it gives me joy. Well, it's interesting because what you're proposing here is, I hadn't quite thought of this, but you're proposing a kind of theory of the relationship between conspiracies and media, which says that there's kind of a two-phase relationship between conspiracy and media. In phase one, conspiracy increases engagement with this underlying subject, right? People who are conspiracy theorists about the JFK murder or the Epstein files. Pay a ton of attention to the JFK murder to the Subruder film and the Epstein files. They pay a ton of attention to it. But what you're saying is that too much conspiratorial thinking about a subject can create a kind of cynical disconnection from that subject that removes interest over time. I mean, again, we are making a kind of prediction here because NFL ratings are great NBA ratings have been sort of wacky for a while. Maybe the baseball ratings are like maybe kind of coming back. WNBA ratings look pretty good. I haven't followed that story particularly recently. But it is interesting to think, you know, what happens if this relationship between conspiracy thinking in sports and sports viewership ends up sort of ironically pulling viewership away from sports as trust has lost. So the final category I wanted to talk about here is the risk to American decency. And here we're moving away from the topic of gambling in sports or talking more about this idea that the logic of gambling is spread to other domains of American life. Tell folks about the growth of prediction markets like Calci and Polymarket. - Yeah, so these predictive markets are basically kind of, I would argue the logical endpoint of the online gambling boom, right? We have kind of taught the entire American population how to gamble with sports, right? We've made it in frictionless and easy and put it on everybody's phone. Why not extend the logic and culture of gambling to other segments of American life? Why not let people gamble on who's gonna win the Oscar? When Taylor Swift's wedding will be? Why not let people gamble on how many people will be deported from the United States next year? Or when the Iranian regime will fall or whether a nuclear weapon will be detonated in the year 2026 somewhere in the world, right? Whether there will be a famine in Gaza. These are not things that I'm making up. These are all bets that you can make on these predictive markets. And I think it is both fascinating and the most kind of dystopian element of this whole story because to see people reduce all, every facet of American life, every part of the world, art and culture and war and geopolitics into kind of an abstract money-making venture. I think is incredibly dangerous. It's desensitizing, it's dehumanizing. And I think it risks bringing that kind of conspiratorial thinking the gambler's tendency to lash out in desperation into other facets of American life where it could be even more risky. What I think is so interesting about prediction markets is that there is real underlying utility to some prediction markets. There's evidence that prediction markets for American elections, for example, do just as well, if not better, than polling averages, even Nate Silver polling averages. And folks who are interested in the outcome of American elections pay a ton of attention to prediction markets because of this track record of success. Dystopias don't happen, I think, because bad ideas go too far. That's interesting. They happen because good ideas go too far. I think prediction markets have a ton of value. I also don't think that betting markets with millions of dollars at stake about famines and Gaza and when we're going to bomb Iran next and when Iran is gonna knock out cutters, liquid natural gas refineries, I don't think those kind of markets are going to lead anywhere good because the opportunity for insiders to not only make money off of knowing the outcome of these bets, but also maybe to be encouraged to make policy based on how rich they can get from these bets is utterly dystopian. Let me play devil's advocate for a second because I did talk to some people involved in these prediction markets and proponents of the prediction markets, and I guess this comes down to the question of how much social utility is there in being able to predict all these outcomes in general? Because I take your point and I actually think there's a lot of evidence to the idea that the predictive markets are better at predicting things than polls, survey data, you know, certainly commentators, pundits, right? I don't know necessarily that it's, it's social good that we know exactly how many people are going to be deported or the every beat of the Iranian war. But to play devil's advocate, if there is a real social utility in these predictive markets being good at predicting things, then insider trading is actually also a social good. It should be encouraged, right? The proponents of the predictive markets will say, it's not a bug that there are people trading based on inside classified, you know, military intelligence. That's a feature that makes it better. The market represents truth. It represents predictiveness, which means that you need people who have insight on the future to be able to participate in these future predictive markets. The co-founder of Kalshi has actually even gotten further. He's said, the ultimate goal of the financial, or of the predictive markets is to move the entire online public square away from social media, which is kind of characterized by AI slop and rage bait and trolling and a lot of kind of disingenuous back and forth into predictive markets where people are financially incentivized to make their bets based on what they genuinely believe or actually know. And as he put it, you know, people don't lie when there's money on the line, right? And so his argument is we're actually improving the quality of public discourse by having everybody put real money behind what they're saying. That, you know, he, I think he said, the goal is to take every difference of opinion and turn it into a tradable asset. Again, dystopias are not bad ideas that go too far. They're good ideas that go too far. It is interesting and useful to have marketplaces that predict the future of incredibly important events to give people a sense of what's going to happen. In that respect, the prediction market is essentially acting as a poll, as a kind of financialized survey. And I, as a journalist, interested in the future, can of course see the value of an instrument of future predictions. That said, I mean, I said this in the open. On February 28th, a better named Maga My Man placed a $32,000 bet that the United States would bomb Iran on a very certain day. And that bet turned into a $553,000 payday for again, username Maga My Man. The odds that there are administration insiders who are making hundreds of thousands of dollars by timing their bets or timing their policy decisions to their bets, I can't possibly see this as a benefit to the American people. I mean, this seems purely to be an instrument of corruption that can be rationalized by the President of Calci as a useful indicator to the American people of what's going to happen in the near future. But fundamentally, what we're dealing with here is just straightforward corruption. Yeah, no, I mean, that's where I am. And I think we probably have barely scratched the surface, right? I think that as more and more people become familiar with these markets, figure out ways to manipulate them. There is going to be an explosion of, you know, insider trading, corruption, people figuring out ways to manipulate them. I actually, there's a part of me, and maybe I can't tell if this is a cynical part of me or an overly optimistic naive part of me. It's one of the reasons that I don't think the predictive markets will last that long because I don't think it's sustainable. I just think that unless there are dramatic changes to what kinds of bets are available on these platforms and they're much more heavily regulated, I think that they'll burn themselves out pretty quickly because people will realize they're so easy to manipulate that unless you really do have insider information, you're just a sucker. Right. And I do want to be clear that the darkest timeline here is not the Pentagon making a decision and then people associated with the Pentagon betting on the outcome of that decision. The darkest timeline is people in government realizing they can make hundreds of thousands of dollars on a bet and then tailoring public policy to fit the bet. That's the equivalent of purposely throwing a ball when you are a middle reliever in the Major League Baseball, right? But it's life and death stakes, right? It's life and death stakes, it's bombing a different place than you typically would because you realize that on Tuesday there was an opportunity to make $500,000 from that bombing location and not the bombing location that your boss said, please pick between these two. It's that tail wagging the dog that to me is the darkest timeline. And I have no reason to honestly think that the people who govern this country are so moral that they won't throw that purposeful ball. I mean, we've been given no reason to. I should also just say, as an aside, this current administration is-- largely responsible for the runaway growth of the predicted markets. Under the Biden administration, two different investigations were opened into a calcium polymarket, and once Trump returned to power, they were quietly shuttered. Don Jr., the president's son, was made an advisor to both companies. So, look, there is a reason, right in the piece, that it's not necessarily an accident that the casino vacation of America took place when a former casino operator is in the Oval Office. Like, there is something about the ethos of the Trump era that lends itself to the growth of these predicted markets. You published this piece, thousands, 9,000 words, how many, how many words was there? Longer. I don't know about it. 12,000. It's a long, long piece. I really encourage people to read it, and it's linked in the show notes. People can read the piece if they want, so I'm not going to ask you more questions about the piece. What they can't read are the angry reactions to the piece that you're receiving in your private email. What's the most interesting angry reaction that you've heard? Yeah. The angriest people are recreational gamblers for whom gambling has become a core part of their identity. I've heard from a lot of gamblers who are saying, first of all, this is like the ninth magazine story going after this industry, and this is a moral panic, and you guys are all Neopuritans trying to take away our fun, and fair enough. That's how you see the terms of the debate, and that's how I would also think about the Atlantic story. A lot of people make fun of me for being like an obviously bad gambler, which like guilty as charged. The interesting thing that I've seen is a lot, the overwhelming majority of gamblers who have expressed frustration with the piece, are taking issue with my gambling being not sufficiently representative of a typical gambler, and that my losing money is somehow kind of defaming the sports betting industry, which almost is a little tragic to me because it suggests that all these people believe that they're in the one to two percent of gamblers who are over the course of their lives ahead, that they make money gambling. That is just statistically impossible. It's like the, you know, the old thing about like 10 million people say that they were at Woodstock, right, because they're, their own memory and own perception of their self. 89% of people think they're above average drivers. Yeah. Right. Exactly. Like it is clearly the case that a, a very large number of regular gamblers believe that they are exceptional at gambling and have maybe even erased their memories of losses and have convinced themselves that they're not losing money. So that's interesting in and of itself. And more interesting, I've had several people latch on to the fact that I'm Mormon, which I write about in the piece, and say, you know, how would you feel if I went to a Mormon church for a few months and then wrote it, you know, a 10,000 word cover story about how Mormonism is bad and all these things. And my reaction to that is, first of all, that would not be a wholly original experience like on a magazine writing. Yeah, I can't imagine. But to me, the thing that I take out of that is that there are gamblers who, for whom sports betting is their religion, right, they, they equate their, their sports betting communities and, uh, and behaviors to kind of religious, a religious experience. Like it is part, it is their community, if they're identity, it's who they are. And I think that's a social catastrophe in the making, right? But sports betting, whatever you think of it, maybe it's a vice that needs to be much more heavily regulated. Maybe if you have a more libertarian approach, it's a fun hobby that a few people will, you know, turn into a bad thing in their lives, but for most of them, it's, it, you know, a source of enjoyment. It should not be central to who you are. It should not be a religious experience. And if it is, I think that it's that much more dangerous as a phenomenon. One reason I really like the idea you mentioned earlier about signing up for an online sports book and having to indicate a minimum amount of, or a maximum amount of money you can lose in a monthly or annual basis is that that requires that users think of this activity as a kind of normal leisure, like there are people who love music concerts and spend thousands of dollars a year on music concerts. There is not, however, a music concerts anonymous group that counsels people who can't stop buying cold play tickets. I mean, maybe like three of those people exist, but it's, it's probably not large enough to require its own group. You said the same about going to the movies or, you know, going to amusement parks or going to fancy restaurants. There's all kinds of leisure activities that people spend thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars a year on. So the idea that people are losing money to sports gambling does not itself strike me as catastrophic if these people's relationship with sports gambling is, it's a leisure activity. Yes. And that's why I think it's important to remember this, these sort of four categories of risk. The first category was not, oh, some people lose money. It's, oh, a meaningful share of this betting population predictably becomes addicted to the activity. And then there's the other categories that have nothing to do with other leisure activities, like threats to individual athletes, threats to the integrity of the game, and threats to the general like American project and American morality. That's where I really think that the idea that, oh, I'm just treating this as a leisure activity doesn't quite match up to the effect that gambling writ large is having in American society. It's automatically reduced the amount of money that was being gambled on sports. It would at least mitigate some of those other risks we talked about, right? The, I will say that a, a heartening thing about the response to the story has been that it truly does seem cross ideological in the kind of concern about these things, right? Like, I have had very right wing social conservatives invite me on their religious, you know, radio shows to talk about, about the story. I have had lots of people on the left who are concerned about corporate predation and corporate power who think that these are issues that need to be solved and want to talk to me about it. And so, to me, that looks like the beginning of an American consensus that we just need to think harder about how to regulate the industry. I don't think really any serious people are calling for a prohibition on gambling or sports betting, right? Like, we're not putting the genie back in the bottle. I don't even know if I would support that, right? I think that in a liberal democratic society, there has to be some place for vices, even maybe that are bad. Like, you have to allow for some of it. I think there should be more social stigma attached to it. I don't like this era of, you know, everybody proudly wearing the term degenerate gambler. You know, I know that it's ironic, but it's probably not the best thing for like 11-year-old boys to be walking around calling themselves degenerate gamblers. By the way, one-third of 11-year-old boys in America have gambled in the past year, which is kind of an amazing statistic. Absolutely. But then also, I think that like, we can, we are smart enough as a country to figure out how to, you know, not criminalize something, but apply sensible regulations and guardrails to it. And I think we just need to have the willpower to do it, basically. That's a great place to stop. I'm not going to stop there because there's one question I really want to ask you. Is this a man problem? Like, what do the numbers say about the share of gamblers, the share of gambling addicts that are male versus female? So I think that the, if you look at all people who bet on sports, 70% of them are men. If you look at problem gamblers who bet on sports online, 98% of them are men. Wow. So it is, it is really almost universally a male problem. Gambling addiction, more generally speaking, there are a lot of women who have gambling addiction problems, online sports betting addiction, almost all men. Men. Too bad. Let me kick off and thank you very much. Thanks, Derek.