America is losing big on sports betting

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0:01:33 Almost every tech platform in your life is designed to grab your attention.
0:01:35 And then never let it go.
0:01:39 You give it clicks, and it gives you dopamine.
0:01:41 Scroll to the next story.
0:01:42 Dopamine.
0:01:44 Smash that buy now button.
0:01:45 Here’s your dopamine.
0:01:47 It’s a pretty perfect system.
0:01:52 So perfect, in fact, that you almost have to admire it.
0:01:56 Games, news updates, social media hits.
0:02:01 They all run on the same logic, and we’re all more or less adjusted to it.
0:02:06 And now that we’re comfortable with this, we can add a new activity to the list.
0:02:20 I’m talking about frictionless apps on your phone that let you bet on everything from March Madness to a pre-game coin toss to who wins a minor league British dart tournament.
0:02:28 In just a few years, sports betting has gone from a legal gray area to a multi-billion dollar industry.
0:02:31 And this isn’t just about sports.
0:02:43 It’s about how our economy increasingly runs on behavioral design, how it exploits our cognitive biases, our dopamine systems, our irrationality.
0:02:54 And it’s about how institutions, governments, media companies, even the sports leagues themselves have partnered in this system because they all want a cut of the action.
0:03:00 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
0:03:07 My guest today is Jonathan Cohen.
0:03:12 He’s the author of Losing Big, America’s Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling.
0:03:21 It’s a book about the financial infrastructures that we’ve built on top of these vulnerabilities, our vulnerabilities.
0:03:34 We talk about how this happened so fast, what online gambling shares with social media and crypto, and how genuinely destructive, on a human level, all of this has been.
0:03:41 Jonathan Cohen, welcome to the show.
0:03:42 Thanks for having me.
0:03:45 What pulled you into this story as a writer?
0:03:48 Why sports gambling, of all things?
0:03:48 Yeah.
0:03:52 I mean, it was definitely an accident or a strange set of circumstances.
0:03:56 When I started at graduate school, I was interested in topics and themes of the American dream.
0:04:01 And they don’t let you write a history of the American dream as a first-year graduate student.
0:04:04 So I basically ended up sort of stumbling into a history of the lottery.
0:04:10 And then in 2018, as I’m sure we’re about to talk about, was the Supreme Court decision that opened the floodgates for sports betting.
0:04:16 So really, all I had when I started this project was, something is fundamentally changing in society and to sports.
0:04:21 Let me see if I can sort of use my background in gambling policy to, like, dig into the causes and the consequences.
0:04:23 And the rest is 190 pages later.
0:04:24 Here we are.
0:04:31 Well, you mentioned right where I wanted to go, which is with this big Supreme Court case in 2018.
0:04:39 And seemingly overnight, as you said, the floodgates for sports gambling were thrown wide open.
0:04:40 What happened?
0:04:41 Give us the capsule history there.
0:04:42 Okay.
0:04:46 Dangerous question to ask someone with a history PhD to provide a capsule, even a capsule of history.
0:04:47 You can do it.
0:04:48 Okay.
0:04:49 So just very briefly, if you’ll indulge me.
0:04:57 In 1992, the sports leagues went to Congress because of a threat that was real at the time of states legalizing sports gambling.
0:05:05 And Congress passed a law called the Professional Amateur Sports Protection Act that banned states from legalizing sports betting.
0:05:06 Okay, fine.
0:05:15 Come 2018, the Supreme Court rendered PASPA, as it was called, unconstitutional on the grounds of basically states’ rights.
0:05:21 And so starting in 2018, with the Supreme Court decision, states are allowed to legalize sports gambling if they so choose.
0:05:22 Okay.
0:05:23 And how many did?
0:05:23 How quickly?
0:05:25 Delaware did within six weeks.
0:05:39 Today, as we’re talking in July of 2025, we have 38 states and Washington, D.C. with legal sports gambling, 30 with online legal sports gambling, probably soon to be 39 and 31 later this year with Missouri.
0:05:45 So who are the major players here, again, for people who are not swimming in this world every day?
0:05:46 Who are the big companies?
0:05:48 Is it FanDuel and DraftKings?
0:05:51 I mean, I think those are the names almost everyone knows.
0:05:54 How much of the pie do they control?
0:05:55 Yeah, a lot.
0:05:59 Those are the new players, almost to the point of a duopoly, sort of defining the industry.
0:06:04 And they have, I would say, around 80, maybe 85 percent of market share.
0:06:06 And, of course, it depends on some states.
0:06:11 You know, there are lots of other companies out there sort of fighting for third, fourth, fifth place.
0:06:14 So we have this 2018 Murphy decision, right?
0:06:24 And it doesn’t make gambling the law of the land, but it meant that gambling could be the law of the states, which were now, as you said, free to do whatever the hell they wanted.
0:06:26 And 38 of them said, yeah, let’s do it.
0:06:31 And you point to Colorado as a case study of this.
0:06:32 Why Colorado?
0:06:37 I picked Colorado, actually, because I spoke to a couple different industry insider types.
0:06:42 And I asked them, I was like, what’s a state where the industry got everything it conceivably could have wanted?
0:06:45 And independently of one another, multiple people said Colorado.
0:06:48 So I was like, OK, how did they get what they wanted in Colorado?
0:06:56 And when, in fact, there was very little lobbying, sort of official lobbying money that I could find traces of in the state public records.
0:07:05 And what I found instead was basically this one lawmaker, Alec Garnett, who is sort of a pretty important player in the Colorado Democratic Party at the time in the statehouse,
0:07:14 who loves sports betting and who loves the Denver Broncos and was really, really excited and went on Denver Sports Talk Radio the day of the Murphy decision to be like, hell yeah, this is going to be awesome for Colorado.
0:07:15 We’re going to raise money.
0:07:23 And I wouldn’t say he didn’t do it single-handedly by any means, but he provided sort of a foothold for the companies to come in.
0:07:28 And he worked with them, and they wrote their legislation to create sports betting.
0:07:32 And then he helped get it passed, and he recruited a bunch of Republicans to co-sponsor it with him.
0:07:39 And then the companies sponsored, but he helped advise on a ballot initiative.
0:07:40 This was another reason I picked Colorado.
0:07:44 It was the first state with a ballot initiative to legalize sports betting and so on.
0:07:54 So it’s another case of the gambling industry getting the laws it wanted, but not quite through the same sort of subterfuge that it used in other states.
0:07:58 There was just an alignment of visions here, right?
0:08:05 Yes, of wanting to raise tax revenue, legalize gambling, and make it as easy as possible for as many people as possible to do so.
0:08:25 In Colorado and some of these other early adopting states, was there any signs that the lawmakers there cared about or thought much about the potential social and psychological problems that might come along with this kind of accessible gambling?
0:08:27 Not really, frankly.
0:08:36 And this is sort of the thesis of the book, right, which is that we should have legal sports gambling, but the way we did it is reckless and was sort of unnecessarily reckless.
0:08:41 Alec Garnett at one point asks, like, after the ballot initiative passes, he’s like, can we get this up in two months?
0:08:44 And like, I don’t know, government doesn’t do anything in two months.
0:08:45 They barely do anything in two years.
0:08:48 And so they basically didn’t consider it.
0:09:01 They didn’t, you know, for example, this is not just Colorado, but like, spend a bunch of time looking really, really closely at everything Nevada has done for the last 70 years, you know, because who cares about Nevada and their precedent?
0:09:04 They just wanted the money for the state as quickly as possible.
0:09:06 They wanted to get sports betting up as quickly as possible.
0:09:09 This is, you know, this is good old American bravado.
0:09:12 It’s, oh, let’s just embrace this market force.
0:09:14 And then, oh, it’s going to create all these negative externalities.
0:09:15 Oh, let’s go in and clean them up later.
0:09:27 So, COVID unleashes hell on everyone in 2020, and we have this window of time where everyone is quarantined or at home, scrolling.
0:09:33 What happens to the online gambling industry during this period?
0:09:35 Does it really take off?
0:09:42 I would say it takes off politically in places like New York because of the crunch, the fiscal crunch faced by states.
0:09:46 And lawmakers have always seen, and this goes back to the lottery, too, and even before the lottery.
0:09:47 Many people don’t know this.
0:09:51 During the Great Depression, slot machines were legalized in four states because, like, states needed money.
0:09:57 So, lawmakers have this belief that, like, oh, there’s always more money in the gambling cookie jar.
0:09:58 Like, oh, we need money.
0:10:00 We’re giving out billions of dollars in payments.
0:10:01 We have all those high rates of unemployment.
0:10:04 Let’s just legalize more forms of gambling, and that will make up for our revenue shortfalls.
0:10:10 So, politically, that’s exactly what happens during COVID in places like New York and in other states.
0:10:14 And then, yeah, as you said, from the industry, lots of people sitting at home.
0:10:18 Professional American sports come back relatively quickly.
0:10:23 Colorado sports gambling went live on May 1st, 2020, so during the peak of the pandemic.
0:10:27 And the only sports that people could bet on were, like, Russian table tennis.
0:10:31 But your point about COVID is you get a lot of people sitting on their couches, a lot of professional sports back.
0:10:36 Lo and behold, there’s a new app on their phone where they can legally, seamlessly, frictionlessly gamble.
0:10:43 And so, you can imagine sort of the way the industry sort of grows its market share and grows its foothold in that time.
0:10:46 So, that’s the bet these states make, right?
0:10:48 They’re in a bit of a crunch financially.
0:10:51 They need some easy tax dollars.
0:10:55 They turn to gambling because it seems like a sure bet.
0:10:58 How did that bet play out in most cases?
0:11:12 This is what’s tough about gambling in general and sports betting in particular is, in most cases, it actually sort of has met expectations if you were the sort of, like, fiscally responsible person who is reading the budget projections.
0:11:15 But most people are not the kind of person who read budget projections.
0:11:20 They just imagine, oh, we have this new well of money for the state.
0:11:24 Oh, DraftKings and Fandle are, you know, taking 100 billions of dollars of bets every year.
0:11:31 Surely, our state will be flowing in money and won’t need to raise taxes and so on because we have all this gambling revenue.
0:11:37 So, in many cases, if you, again, if you were sort of in the legislature at the time, it actually has been in Colorado.
0:11:45 In fact, it has started to exceed the initial fiscal projections that were raised at the time of legalization, parentheses, at what cost.
0:11:51 But also, it’s never as much as people think in the grand scheme of the state budget and total state revenue.
0:11:58 I just want to pause to just appreciate how fast things have shifted culturally.
0:12:00 I mean, I’m a huge sports fan.
0:12:03 I’m a consumer of sports media.
0:12:09 The stigma around gambling was so deep for so long.
0:12:12 And now it is completely flipped.
0:12:16 If you watch sports media, almost all of it assumes.
0:12:17 You mean gambling media?
0:12:18 Right.
0:12:20 That’s where I’m going, right?
0:12:22 I mean, it just assumes that you’re a gambler.
0:12:28 They’re constantly talking about the odds and the lines and the parlays and the spreads and all that.
0:12:32 And that was nowhere to be seen not that long ago.
0:12:37 But now it is completely and thoroughly baked into the whole product.
0:12:41 I mean, obviously, marketing and propaganda can do a lot of work here.
0:12:48 But, man, we’re talking about a legal and a cultural 180 in almost no time at all.
0:12:51 How does that happen, Jonathan?
0:12:53 It can’t just be lots of commercials, right?
0:12:53 Yeah.
0:13:05 Well, okay, let’s call it a 90-degree step rather than a 180 step because I think people don’t sort of see fantasy sports as a stepping stone into this, but I really think it was.
0:13:24 I think fantasy sports going back 10 to 15 years or daily fantasy, especially going back 10 years, was a stepping stone in teaching people to watch sports in order to try to predict what was happening in sports rather than just watch sports and enjoy it.
0:13:35 But it’s like, oh, all of a sudden I care about predicting whether this wide receiver in Cincinnati or that quarterback in Green Bay or whatever, how they are going to perform because I have a personal stake in their performance.
0:13:40 So you can see how that sort of parlays, pun intended, itself into sports betting.
0:13:44 But for our parents, I would say generation, you know, going back to the 80s and 90s, you’re right.
0:13:49 It was like so, so, so verboten to even talk about sort of on the air.
0:13:50 I just thought it was interesting.
0:13:55 I think it was a DraftKings, someone in the DraftKings marketing department you spoke to.
0:13:57 It may have been off the record, but you quoted them.
0:14:00 And they were talking about their strategy, right?
0:14:12 And like, oh, no, we want people like Jamie Foxx and Kevin Hart out there hawking these products, doing the commercials, because we’ve already got the hardcore sports degenerates, right?
0:14:17 We want to reel in the normies, the people who aren’t crazy about sports.
0:14:28 And the way you do that is you have these huge, like, pop cultural stars put their imprint on it, and it kind of welcomes, you know, the non-crazy’s in, which is the bread and butter, right?
0:14:30 I mean, that’s if you want to really, you know, make bank.
0:14:32 You can’t just have the crazies.
0:14:33 You need mainstream.
0:14:37 Yeah, and to your initial question, the byword that I use is normalized, right?
0:14:43 Is you want to take a nation of non-sports bettors, and how do you transform them into sports bettors?
0:14:46 And you’re right, advertising plays a huge part in it.
0:14:53 Promotional offers, in-game promotions, you know, this seventh-inning stretch is brought to you by whatever sports book.
0:15:00 But it’s a matter of making it, as you’ve already said, as normal to bet on sports as it is to watch sports.
0:15:05 And you’re right, it’s happened pretty rapidly over the course of just the last five to seven years.
0:15:08 So the NFL officially leans in in 2018.
0:15:10 Is that a huge deal, right?
0:15:12 I mean, NFL is king.
0:15:14 I mean, they just dominate the sports landscape.
0:15:17 When they go all in on this, is that really the tipping point?
0:15:19 Okay, so that is a 180.
0:15:21 I’ll grant you the full 180 status.
0:15:22 That’s not a 90 degree.
0:15:24 That’s, like, bigger than a 180.
0:15:30 In part because they were so virulently anti-gambling for so long.
0:15:35 And, you know, in the middle of the concussion crisis, Roger Goodell says that gambling is the number one threat to the integrity of football.
0:15:46 It was sort of this punching bag of you can trust the integrity of our product, not just because, like, everyone loves football, but because we hate gambling so much.
0:15:49 You cannot be more mainstream than the NFL, right?
0:15:51 When they’re all in, we’re all in.
0:16:09 Yes, the NFL is, as the most popular sports league in the country by far, it is the quickest and fastest way to normalize sports gambling for mainstream sports audiences was to integrate it into NFL content and to transform the NFL, not sports writ large, but the NFL specifically, into a, you know, a gambling-related entity.
0:16:10 Okay.
0:16:13 I think we’ve got some good history and context here.
0:16:17 What I really want to get into with you now is the human toll, right?
0:16:18 What this is actually doing to people.
0:16:32 And you open the book, not with policy or economics or tech platforms, but with a story about this kid, really, young guy named Kyle, whose life was completely ripped apart.
0:16:33 Why did you start there?
0:16:38 What does his story capture about these gambling apps and how they’re designed?
0:16:39 Yeah.
0:16:46 So, Kyle, like all good 21st century romances, you know, we met on Reddit, or I found him through Reddit.
0:16:51 And he was someone who I think is emblematic in many ways.
0:16:55 First of all, as a 26-year-old white man, you know, someone who ran into trouble gambling on sports.
0:17:04 But then even more specifically, because he was someone who had gambled before sports betting went live, but had never run into trouble until it appeared on his phone.
0:17:07 But he was just really excited for sports.
0:17:12 He was a sports fan, and he was really excited for sports betting, and he started betting sort of pretty quickly.
0:17:25 And at some point, I don’t know when his personal tipping point came, but it came at some point where his, like, life, gambling went from being something he did sort of as part of his life to being, like, basically his entire life.
0:17:31 And he wasn’t going out, he wasn’t hanging out with friends, he was just gambling.
0:17:32 That was all he was doing.
0:17:36 And he was drinking, he was smoking more, because he was just so stressed out from his gambling.
0:17:42 He falls behind on his rent, his dad has to bail him out, just because that’s something he started to do, because it was so instantly accessible to him.
0:17:48 And look, just to paint the picture here, Kyle was making $65,000 a year.
0:17:54 And at one point, he wagered close to $93,000 on bets in a month.
0:17:55 In a month.
0:17:58 That’s insane.
0:18:06 And of course, eventually he’s fired, he goes on unemployment, blows all that money betting, and then he moves back in with his parents.
0:18:11 And I mean, well, I guess maybe we’ll return to Kyle at the end, but I mean, it completely destroyed him.
0:18:19 Yeah, it’s just, I would say it, I picked him because he is a young man, and this is the demographic it’s happening to, but it sort of, like, interrupted his life, basically.
0:18:30 And he sort of has this black hole in his life for two to three years that we’re just consumed by gambling and the stress from gambling and the financial and mental health deterioration wrought by gambling.
0:18:37 Why are young men in particular so vulnerable to this, right?
0:18:41 Why are they such easy marks, and how are these companies exploiting that?
0:18:42 A couple things.
0:18:52 First of all, young men are not exactly known for being judicious and careful, especially when it comes to money, especially when their prefrontal cortex isn’t fully developed and they don’t have exactly great impulse control.
0:18:53 Right.
0:19:00 So you can already imagine how that would set them up poorly for something like this.
0:19:11 There also, I think, is specific, and I’ll speak for myself as a once formerly young male sports fan, overconfident, let’s say, about their knowledge of sports.
0:19:11 You don’t say.
0:19:15 Yeah, and they are challenged in this respect by sports gambling companies.
0:19:24 Sports gambling companies absolutely take advantage of this, and there’s a FanDuel ad, like, never waste a hunch, like, challenging you to prove that you know ball by, like, betting on your hunches.
0:19:30 But young men are exploitable in this way, and they want to prove to their friends, they want to prove to talk show radio hosts, whatever.
0:19:35 They want to prove that they know ball, and gambling is presented as a way for them to do so.
0:19:36 So those are sort of two starting theories.
0:19:50 And then a third one, one that I sort of picked up from the work of Kyla Scanlon, right, is this sense of, let’s call it financial nihilism among young people and young men in particular, that there’s, they have, many young men have disposable income.
0:19:55 Maybe not so much that they’re ever going to realistically buy a house or pay off their student loan or start a business.
0:19:58 So they might as well, they feel, gamble.
0:20:06 Whether it’s on sports betting, whether it’s on crypto, whether it’s on stock markets, whether it’s on video game skins, it’s worth, it’s not worth having $10,000 in their pocket.
0:20:15 It’s worth having a chance at $100,000 or $1 million rather than, you know, a small amount of money that, in the grand scheme, they feel isn’t going to sort of make a difference in their life.
0:20:19 And they’re willing, as a result, to gamble and gamble more and gamble in riskier ways than they otherwise would.
0:20:23 How common is Kyle’s story?
0:20:27 Roughly speaking, how many Kyles are out there?
0:20:28 Yeah.
0:20:32 Okay, so the data on this is, is a little tricky.
0:20:43 So, so indication, and I don’t, I don’t know if Kyle sort of, I think he did at some point would qualify as having a gambling addiction, but the data specific on gambling addiction is, is tricky.
0:20:45 You know, roughly one, one percent.
0:20:50 Well, before sports betting was legal, roughly one percent of American adults had a legal, had a sports betting.
0:20:50 Sorry.
0:20:54 Before 2018, roughly one percent of American adults had a gambling addiction.
0:20:57 So that wasn’t great.
0:21:03 And then we have obviously increased access and added products, sports betting, onto many people’s cell phones.
0:21:12 So, so I’ll, I’ll share the data that we do have, which is that roughly 50 percent of men between the ages of 18 to 49 have a sports betting app on their phone.
0:21:19 Seventy percent of people living on college campuses bet on sports, at least, at least somewhat, at least sometimes.
0:21:20 Seventy.
0:21:21 Seventy.
0:21:21 Seven zero.
0:21:26 And problem gambling rates.
0:21:35 We don’t have indications yet that they’re rising, but sort of this, this next category, sort of just to the right of that on the distribution of, let’s call it hazardous or at risk or problematic play.
0:21:40 That group that used to be like two to three percent of adults now seems to be rising.
0:21:50 And I think Kyle would probably fall into that category where, again, we’re talking about like three to two to three, maybe now five, maybe six, maybe nine percent of like all adults having some form of gambling problem.
0:22:02 I just have to say, if $93,000 worth of bets in a month when you’re making $65,000 a year doesn’t, isn’t a textbook case of gambling addiction?
0:22:05 What the hell are we talking about here?
0:22:06 I mean, you want to talk about the other?
0:22:07 We need a new definition.
0:22:08 Right.
0:22:11 You want to talk about the other guy in my book who lost $330,000?
0:22:12 We can do that, too.
0:22:12 You know, yeah.
0:22:14 But it’s not about the amount of money, right?
0:22:17 It’s about how you’re gambling and the way you’re doing so.
0:22:26 A gambling addict, they might have sort of an episodic character to their addiction where it’s not like they’re an addict for life and they can never gamble again or they don’t ever gamble again.
0:22:37 It might be they have a six-month, I call it in the book a rabbit hole because I talked to a lot of people who like would go into these six-month rabbit holes or whatever, six weeks, six days, and then wake up and be like, what the hell just happened to me?
0:22:38 And then they won’t gamble again for a year.
0:22:40 And then they’ll find themselves in it again.
0:22:47 And it seems that seems to be sort of a more common trait than like going on a five-year bender, losing all your money and having to restart your life.
0:22:48 Let me ask you this.
0:22:55 What percentage of the industry’s revenue comes from the Kyles of the world or the, you know, Kyle adjacents of the world?
0:23:02 Not the pros or the high rollers, but just like regular working people who are essentially, in my word, essentially addicted to games.
0:23:02 Right.
0:23:02 Okay.
0:23:05 So this is, this we do have better data.
0:23:11 60% of bettors account for 1% of revenue from NFL bets.
0:23:19 And if you sort of do the flip side, 82% of the money is coming from 3% of bettors.
0:23:25 So some of those people I’ll flag are going to be really, really rich VIP bettors like Phil Mickelson or whatever, who just gambles a ton.
0:23:31 But you can imagine there’s a lot of sort of Kyles caught up in that group or in the sort of interstitial group between them.
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0:27:56 What makes online sports betting fundamentally different, and I guess more seductive than traditional gambling?
0:27:59 Is it just as simple as it’s incredibly easy?
0:28:00 It’s just, it’s an app.
0:28:02 Well, have you tried it?
0:28:02 It’s really fun.
0:28:04 No.
0:28:05 You know why?
0:28:14 Because I live in the state of Mississippi, and we have casinos here, and because of the casino lobby, they don’t allow.
0:28:16 I can’t do DraftKings or FanDuel on my phone.
0:28:26 If I want to bet, I have to physically walk into the casino, and there are many around me, and stand in line at a kiosk and bet at their sports book.
0:28:27 That’s the law.
0:28:27 And you know what?
0:28:34 Honestly, I’m a big college football guy, and if I was going to bet on anything, it would probably be that.
0:28:40 But, and this goes to the point, because it’s such a pain in the ass, and I did it.
0:28:41 I think I did it twice.
0:28:43 I did it two Saturdays in a row, and I was like, the hell with this.
0:28:52 Because I don’t want to get up at eight in the morning and stand in a line with a bunch of degenerates, like, waiting to place a bet at the casino kiosk.
0:28:54 So I just don’t do it, because it’s a pain in the ass.
0:29:05 But if I could just, while I’m brushing my teeth, open up my phone like it’s X, and just, you know, drop a parlay while I’m, you know, mouthwashing or whatever, my God.
0:29:06 I don’t know what I would do.
0:29:09 And I’m glad the temptation isn’t there.
0:29:23 Yeah, this is exactly the point, and this is exactly what makes sports betting today and online sports betting so fundamentally different from everything that we had before 2018, which is, and what makes sports gambling today so fun, to your point, is exactly that.
0:29:24 It is the seamlessness.
0:29:33 It is the app design that’s just as good and just as seamless and just as frictionless as social media or, like, a shopping app or website.
0:29:37 And the endless, endless, endless menu of betting options.
0:29:41 You know, you can bet on, sure, the LSU Tigers to win the game.
0:29:44 You can also bet on, like, whether the first half kickoff is going to be, like, a touchback.
0:29:48 And then you can bet on whether the next pitch in a baseball game is going to be 88 miles an hour or faster.
0:29:51 You can bet on, like, the tennis, a tennis serve.
0:29:59 And then at 3 in the morning when you’re, like, on a, you’re on this bender, you’re in this rabbit hole, and you’ve lost all money all day, you can just bet on Malaysian women’s doubles badminton.
0:30:03 Because that’s available to bet on in some states.
0:30:13 And so the endless, mimicking the endless scroll phenomenon of a social media app combined with, oh, a Charles Barclay parlay of the day.
0:30:18 You can win $100,000 with a $10 bet, which is, of course, a really stupid bet if you do the math.
0:30:19 But that’s how they’re marketing it.
0:30:32 And just all these little, they can’t pump oxygen into the room, they can’t not put any clocks on the wall like they can at the casino, but they can sort of, with little behavioral nudges designed into the app, mimic some of those tricks of the trade.
0:30:41 And look, just for perspective, I highlighted this quote because it’s, again, these numbers are crystallizing, if nothing else.
0:30:55 Americans bet $121 billion in 2023, which is more than they spent that year on video games, movie tickets, music streaming services, books, and concert tickets combined.
0:30:57 $121 billion.
0:30:59 This is huge.
0:31:00 And that’s, again, mainstream.
0:31:02 This is not a fringe thing.
0:31:05 That is a large number.
0:31:13 Yeah, and what’s crazy about sports betting, and this is why someone making $65,000 a year can bet $93,000 in a month, is it’s actually really low margin.
0:31:17 Like, on average, bettors win back around 90% of the money.
0:31:20 But even so, to me, it’s just so important.
0:31:35 Like, even just playing through 90% of $120 billion, whatever, a year, that’s just so much about people’s behavior and how people are sort of choosing to spend their money and their time is on gambling, sort of more than movie tickets, books, you know, and all those other things.
0:31:38 So, what is it like to interface?
0:31:41 I mean, I guess, with these platforms, I guess you may have just really described that.
0:31:43 I mean, is it a slot machine as an app?
0:31:46 I mean, when you go on there, is it entrancing in that same way?
0:31:47 I mean, how do they keep you there?
0:31:48 Yeah.
0:31:56 Well, just for the record, in some states, there literally are slot machines on the app, including Connecticut, where I live, where they have legal online casino games in addition to legal online sports betting games.
0:31:58 But that’s for my next appearance on this podcast.
0:32:11 Yes, it is—the apps look really sleek and really nice and really inviting, to your point earlier about Kevin Hart and Jamie Foxx and those folks.
0:32:16 And it does look a little bit sort of like a math problem.
0:32:19 Like, you have to, like, figure out, oh, Milwaukee Bucks minus 115.
0:32:21 Like, what the hell does that mean if you sort of don’t already know?
0:32:27 But it is really easy, really—again, the word I’m going to come back to is frictionless.
0:32:30 They make it as easy as possible to deposit money.
0:32:38 Of course, they make it a little bit more difficult to withdraw money, to shove parlays in your face that are maybe specifically designed for Sean.
0:32:40 Like, oh, we know he loves Ole Miss.
0:32:41 Like, let’s hit him with—
0:32:42 Sir, sir, sir.
0:32:43 Yeah, I’m so sorry.
0:32:44 No, no.
0:32:46 It was a risky—it was a risky—it was a risky offer.
0:32:48 Sir, this is an LSU Tiger podcast.
0:32:48 Don’t worry.
0:32:49 I will boot you out of here.
0:32:56 Yes, okay, so maybe he hates Ole Miss and wants to parlay everything but Ole Miss, you know, and so on.
0:32:59 But you open the app, and it’s like, oh, my God, that parlay is perfect for me.
0:33:00 Like, no shit.
0:33:01 They made it for you.
0:33:16 They, like, mined your data, and they have data on your behavior, and they’re building things for you and sort of dangling, again, these sort of big money jackpot games that are really, really dumb ways to bet and really easy ways to lose money but look really cool because you can try to win $100,000.
0:33:24 I think where we get into the gray area here a little bit is on this question of manipulation, right?
0:33:30 And how far we can go before we have to call it something else, something darker.
0:33:40 So when these platforms detect, and they have plenty of data to do it, that someone is maybe trying to wean themselves off betting, right?
0:33:43 There’s a downtick in activity.
0:33:46 They’re spending less time on the site.
0:33:51 When the company spots signs of problematic play, maybe, right?
0:33:52 Losing a lot of money, yada, yada, yada.
0:33:53 What do they do?
0:33:54 What do they do in that case?
0:33:58 Do they leave that person alone and let them wean themselves off?
0:34:04 Or do they slam them with promotional credits and deals trying to hook them back in?
0:34:04 Yeah.
0:34:15 The anecdotal evidence suggests that they do the latter and that there are some reporting even that they sort of figure out when your payday is and they’ll send you more promotional credits and offers on those days.
0:34:22 If you think about it, these, you know, the data that they have on gamblers would make Las Vegas of the 1950s weep.
0:34:25 You know, it’s incredible how much data they must have on every single one of us.
0:34:35 And they claim that this allows them to protect people and to, you know, flag users who are betting problematically, who are logging in too many times, whatever.
0:34:41 But I have seen no indications from the people I talked to or other reporting that that’s how they’re using the data.
0:34:57 It seems like they’re instead using it to pair a better with someone who’s betting a lot with a VIP host and, you know, offer behavioral nudges and emails and stuff that just auspiciously timed to re-engage them and to keep them sort of in the cycle of loss chasing.
0:34:58 They’re not protecting users.
0:35:00 They’re protecting themselves.
0:35:01 I could be wrong about this, so correct me.
0:35:08 But these sportsbooks, they will sure as shit kick people off when they’re consistently winning, right?
0:35:09 Like that’s a problem for them.
0:35:09 Yes, absolutely.
0:35:11 So there you go.
0:35:12 They can clearly do it.
0:35:13 Yes.
0:35:21 And some of the professional gamblers I talk to, they make a habit of like every once in a while they’ll place like a really, really vanilla ice cream looking bet.
0:35:33 Like they’ll bet on like Aaron Judge to hit a home run or like the LA Lakers to win the championship because they want to look as stupid as possible so that the sportsbook think that they’re like a normie and not a professional gambler.
0:35:38 Because the second they realize that they’re a professional gambler or that they can have a house edge that you can win money, they’ll just kick them off the platform.
0:35:45 But as long as they can make them think they’re an idiot and they’re losing and they’re going to lose or that they’re addicted, the platforms they know want to keep them playing.
0:35:50 Apologies to Lakers Nation for that stray.
0:35:51 They might win one in 2035.
0:35:52 I don’t know.
0:36:02 So look, I guess this isn’t really a question, but there is a line early in the book that’s very easy to pass over and you just made me think about it, right?
0:36:11 And it’s about how these betting companies are really more tech companies than sportsbooks because of their reliance on this highly specialized software.
0:36:15 It just can’t, the point can’t be made enough.
0:36:19 We have come a very long way from the poker table at the Bellagio, right?
0:36:26 There’s a level of accessibility and technological manipulation that makes this different.
0:36:27 Yes.
0:36:37 And to equate it to the stock market, for example, it’s like, if you think you can beat FanDuel and its data, it’s like thinking that you can beat Goldman Sachs, like betting on the market.
0:36:38 Right?
0:36:48 But there is this dangled promise of you can win money or sports betting is really easy, it’s really fun, Jamie Foxx is playing the piano in a tuxedo.
0:36:53 Like, you can see where the incongruity and where the frustration at my end comes from.
0:37:00 So the industry loves to use phrases like responsible gambling.
0:37:06 That’s their rejoinder when people complain the way we’re complaining, the way I’m complaining here.
0:37:10 What do you make of that phrase, Jonathan?
0:37:13 What’s wrong with a little personal responsibility?
0:37:15 What is your issue with people being personally responsible?
0:37:22 I don’t have an issue with personal responsibility, and I do think people have agency and should have agency over their own life.
0:37:23 Okay?
0:37:23 Fine.
0:37:30 That being said, it can’t be like it’s Kyle against the book, right?
0:37:37 It’s Kyle against a multibillion-dollar corporation that is doing everything in its power to hook him and extract every last dollar of his discretionary income.
0:37:48 And so responsible gaming as an idea and as the umbrella under which the companies offer sort of a suite of tools on their apps that they promote.
0:37:51 They say, oh, you know, if you need to take a break, you can, like, sign up for this thing.
0:37:54 Or if you want to set a deposit limit, you want to set a time limit.
0:38:05 But they are, as you’ve sort of implied, all about rooted in personal responsibility and rooted in a user opting in to decide to set a time limit, deciding to set a deposit limit.
0:38:25 And fundamentally, what it’s doing is putting the onus of responsibility of responsible play onto the gambler, onto the individual, rather than onto the company to responsibly provision the gambler with a non-addictive product or a product that is not maliciously designed to extract every last dollar that they have in their bank account.
0:38:29 So I am frustrated with the responsible gaming logic.
0:38:34 I do think it’s probably better than nothing that they do offer these tools and such.
0:38:44 But it is fundamentally a way for the companies to absolve themselves of responsibility for protecting bettors and leaving it instead in the bettors’ own hands.
0:38:49 Well, look, there’s just a very difficult question here, and there is not a clear answer.
0:38:50 It’s just not science.
0:38:52 It’s a value judgment, ultimately.
0:39:07 And the question is, like, how hard can you make it for people to make responsible, good choices before you can no longer say in any serious way that they are free to make responsible, good choices?
0:39:13 If you make it almost impossible to do that at some point, it doesn’t mean anything.
0:39:18 Right. I mean, just to go back to the casino example, right, like, we know that they’re pumping oxygen in.
0:39:23 We know that they are, you know, that there’s no windows, that there’s no clocks, and so on.
0:39:24 And it works.
0:39:24 And it works.
0:39:31 But there are, of course, still people and many bettors on Sports Betting Today who are able to make better choices or who are able to not become addicted.
0:39:42 But why should we be surprised when a large percentage of the population, especially when you’re appealing, when you’re marketing this to, like, 25 to 35-year-olds, not the smartest, like, tools in the shed, historically speaking.
0:39:45 Like, why should we be surprised when so many of them run into trouble?
0:39:52 And that’s where I sort of have deemed this a public health crisis because I don’t think it’s a matter of individual responsibility and individual treatment.
0:39:53 And we need to fix Kyle over there.
0:39:54 We need to help Sean over here.
0:40:11 I think we need sort of some society-wide solutions or some app-focused reforms rather than fixing the moral failings of Sean, who did not listen to his responsible gambling advertising and got into trouble.
0:40:16 Well, I did see that the over-under on wins this year for LSU is eight and a half.
0:40:18 I got to say, that feels really low.
0:40:21 I really want to go hammer that over.
0:40:24 And if I had the app on my phone, I probably would have done it already.
0:40:25 And they know you want to do that.
0:40:26 They know you’re an LSU fan.
0:40:27 They know, you know, yes.
0:40:28 Yes.
0:40:36 You talk about platforms like Robinhood and crypto exchanges and social media like TikTok.
0:40:40 I mean, these things aren’t typically lumped in with sports betting.
0:40:44 But is this all basically the same thing in your mind?
0:40:47 Are these all the same kinds of systems doing the same kinds of things?
0:40:50 Yeah, I mean, maybe not, maybe not.
0:40:57 I mean, TikTok, I think, is doing many of the same things just from a, like, smooth brain dopamine perspective.
0:41:05 But I think, you know, prediction markets, cryptocurrency exchanges, stock exchanges like Robinhood, yeah, they’re fundamentally doing the same thing.
0:41:14 Of the promise of making a lot of money for a relatively small amount of money, the promise of sort of augmenting daily experiences, whether it’s politics.
0:41:27 You know, now you can bet on politics on prediction markets or, you know, crypto or the stock market, adding to the excitement of those things and maybe more to the point of making money off of those things.
0:41:34 So, yeah, I think it’s just many, sports betting is sort of yet another example of a new app designed to separate young men from their money.
0:41:43 I was a little surprised, maybe I shouldn’t have been, when I read in the book that gambling addiction is the addiction most closely connected to suicide.
0:41:46 Is that, is that right?
0:41:46 Yeah.
0:41:49 What is the, what is the explanation for that?
0:41:51 Yeah, I mean, part of it, well, I would say there’s two parts.
0:41:54 The first is shame.
0:42:03 I think we have not yet sort of destigmatized gambling addiction in the way that, even in the last few decades, you know, drug addiction and opioid addiction, for example, has been destigmatized.
0:42:05 And people know to sort of come forward and that treatment options are available.
0:42:27 And the second is, is what you’re already referring to when it comes to the mechanics is the financial nature of gambling addiction, the sense that, oh, if I disappear, if I was not here, my deaths would disappear and any harm, any negative consequences for my family would just be gone because I would be gone and my deaths would be gone.
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0:43:51 I’m Jesse Dave Fox, senior writer at Vulture and host of Good One, a show with the best interviews with your favorite comedians ever.
0:44:00 And this week on our podcast, from Severance, the Meet the Parents movies, Zoolander, Cable Guy, Ben Stiller.
0:44:02 Yes, the Ben Stiller.
0:44:06 The believability of the world I think I care a lot about.
0:44:14 That whatever reality you’re creating, there’s enough of, you know, a grounding in some sort of identifiable reality that you believe it.
0:44:21 You can watch Good One every week at youtube.com slash Vulture or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
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0:44:24 Have a good one.
0:44:31 My name’s Sean Ramos for Today Explained.
0:44:35 I’m outside the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. with one question.
0:44:37 Do you think we should go to Mars?
0:44:40 I don’t think you should live on Mars, no.
0:44:42 I don’t know why just Mars.
0:44:46 I think as Earthlings, we are a nosy group of people.
0:44:50 And I really don’t think that we have any business going to Mars.
0:44:56 Our knowledge about the solar system and the universe will grow substantially.
0:45:03 I think maybe we should just leave Mars alone, just stay with Earth.
0:45:09 Like, so many innovations are going to come out of it because so many different companies are going to be fighting to get, you know, that first ticket to Mars.
0:45:11 So I feel, I feel like we should.
0:45:14 But at the same time, we should solve some problems here first.
0:45:17 I think we need to expand what we, what we know, what we see.
0:45:19 Honestly, for our own benefit.
0:45:21 We should go way beyond.
0:45:24 Today Explained from Vox is taking a summer sojourn on Mars.
0:45:26 Join us.
0:46:00 Obviously things are still pretty bad, but is there any indications that we’re getting better, that the companies are getting better, that the policymakers are taking this more seriously in terms of identifying problem gamblers and offering resources to help them get over that problem?
0:46:03 Not on their own.
0:46:09 I think there is a, if there is a reason for hope, I would say it’s coming from outside.
0:46:11 The call is coming from outside the house.
0:46:23 It’s, you know, there are, there are advocacy groups, you know, one of which I profile at Northeastern University that are, you know, filing class action lawsuits over some of these companies’ most insidious behaviors.
0:46:33 There’s, you know, these crazy promotions that offer like $25,000 in bonus cash, but you actually need to bet like $100,000 to get the $25,000 bonus or whatever it may be.
0:46:43 And also a lawsuit ongoing in New Jersey over VIP hosts, you know, the company’s employees whose job it is to sort of find big bettors and keep them betting.
0:46:51 So that’s where, to my thesis is sort of about recklessness, right, that we sort of plunged in ahead.
0:47:04 To the degree that things are going to be pulled back and maybe we’re going to have some of the regulation that I wished we had initially had seven years ago, to the degree that there is momentum for it, I don’t think it’s coming yet from the companies themselves as much as it is from advocates sort of waking up to the harms.
0:47:10 Well, is there a viable model for ethical gambling?
0:47:14 I mean, the last chapter is about how to make sports betting safe and sustainable.
0:47:15 What does that actually look like?
0:47:18 Are there promising ideas on the table here?
0:47:19 There are all sorts of ideas.
0:47:24 Because I can’t promise that it’s going to be as profitable, right?
0:47:30 Like I think just fundamentally 82% of, yeah, 82% of the revenue should not be coming from 3% of bettors.
0:47:38 But you just have this problem where lots and lots of people are betting on the LSU over or whatever, but they’re betting 20 bucks and they’re setting it and forgetting it and they’re not going to bet again.
0:47:49 And so I don’t know sort of fundamentally if moving into a sustainable model rather than an extractive model, moving into a model that is making a little bit of money from lots of different people rather than a lot of money.
0:47:52 A lot of money from a few people if that will be as profitable.
0:47:54 I’m assuming it will not.
0:48:07 But again, I think from a public health standpoint or from a good-for-society standpoint that I’d rather start there and then work our way upwards into sort of loosening up a little bit rather than sort of what we have now.
0:48:11 I mean, you studied Europe and Canada a little bit.
0:48:12 You talk about it.
0:48:18 I mean, is that there are other countries doing this who leaned into gambling before we did.
0:48:20 Are they doing this better than we are?
0:48:27 Do they have their arms around gambling addiction or are they dealing with more or less the exact same situation we are?
0:48:27 Right.
0:48:33 So the reason I studied them is because they’re dealing with what we’re going to be dealing with in like 15 years.
0:48:43 So the United Kingdom, which is sort of often the go-to example, right, opened up online gambling in 2005 and then is now rolling things back.
0:48:57 And gambling was one of six key pillars in the British government’s report about suicide, noting that basically fixing gambling is one of the six most important ways to fix the suicide crisis in the United Kingdom, for example.
0:48:58 That’s crazy.
0:49:02 But of course, we’re America, and that means we don’t have to learn from other countries if we don’t want to.
0:49:10 And we are rushing headlong into the situation that European countries, like the United Kingdom, are in the process of rolling back and reforming and fixing.
0:49:20 So that’s where I think we could learn very, very quickly, very easily from some of these other countries, which are in the process of fixing advertising, for example, is usually sort of the first, sort of the lowest hanging fruit.
0:49:24 But we’re America, so we don’t have to do that.
0:49:30 Imagine a world where we could actually just learn from the mistakes of other countries and not repeat them.
0:49:30 Right.
0:49:31 So we still can, right?
0:49:39 And we still can in part because Texas and California, the two most populous states, don’t have legal state-licensed sports betting yet.
0:49:52 And there’s no reason why, when it comes to those two states, they couldn’t do what I endorse in the book, is the Brazilian model, which is Brazil rolled out sports betting on January 1st of this past year with all these protections already in place.
0:50:03 With all these guardrails already in place around advertising, they’re sort of doing what I endorse, which is start slow, start with lots of friction, and then as needed, sort of ease off the brake and loosen it up a little bit.
0:50:15 That’s what our two most populous states still could do, is endorse a version with all sorts of friction and then gradually, gradually make it easier and make it easier to bet.
0:50:29 Someone, you quote in the book, makes a good point about the need for federal regulations, that the industry is really only as strong as the weakest market, the weakest set of regulations.
0:50:34 And when the industry wins concessions in one state, it will pursue them everywhere.
0:50:42 So do we need something to happen on the federal level for this to really work?
0:50:47 Well, I mean, Congress is notoriously good at regulating things these days.
0:50:50 So, but that is an option.
0:51:09 And I will say, in the immediate aftermath of the Murphy decision in 2018, the unlikely duo of Chuck Schumer and Orrin Hatch proposed basically that, a federal floor under sports betting, such that if a state was going to legalize sports betting, you had to limit advertising this way and you couldn’t accept bets on credit cards and so on.
0:51:14 So there is a bill in Congress right now from that group at Northeastern that I mentioned called the Safe Bet Act.
0:51:16 It’s a really, really high floor.
0:51:21 They really are putting a lot of restrictions on it in such a way that it’s not going to pass as is.
0:51:36 But they’ve sort of set the bar really high when it comes to federal regulations, such that when something does pass, and I think all sorts of stakeholders, both the companies, the sports leagues, advocates, all have a stake in a federal regulation of some kind.
0:51:38 And they all actually want a federal regulation of some kind.
0:51:40 It’s a question of how pernicious it’s going to be.
0:51:50 I mean, you write about the gaming companies partnering with credit bureaus to identify customers betting above their means, which I suppose could help.
0:51:53 But it’s also a little creepy on the privacy front.
0:51:55 I don’t know how I feel about that.
0:51:55 Yeah.
0:51:58 Well, I’ve used credit bureau data in the past, and it’s crazy.
0:51:59 Just don’t think about it.
0:52:03 You’re going to lose sleep if you think about how much data the credit bureau have on you.
0:52:09 But that is one of the possible solutions that, again, wouldn’t require federal regulation.
0:52:17 And thank you for bringing that up because, yeah, I don’t want to sound like some big nanny state liberal that big pop of Congress has to come in and tell states what to do.
0:52:19 These companies could self-regulate.
0:52:27 They could use all this data to actually cut off players who are indicating clear signs of harm rather than feeding them more gambling ads.
0:52:31 But there’s no sort of incentive for them to do so, and there’s no sort of structure for them to do so.
0:52:34 And they really, really could, but they’re not going to on their own.
0:52:37 So where do you think we’re going here?
0:52:40 I mean, it’s not going to stay the same, right?
0:52:42 It’s going to keep changing and evolving.
0:52:44 Where do you think this is going to go?
0:52:51 One place the industry is going to try to take it is to online casino games, which are much higher margin, which make much more money.
0:52:53 You know, slot machines never close.
0:52:54 They don’t, they’re not tethered to real world events.
0:52:58 You can just like, they want people who are playing Candy Crush, like on their phone, on the train.
0:53:02 They want them instead playing on a slot machine or playing blackjack or whatever.
0:53:10 And so to the degree that, again, these sort of, these companies that were once daily fantasy sports companies have become sports betting companies.
0:53:20 They’re sort of hoping through, thanks to Kevin Hart and Jamie Foxx, you know, making this democratized and normalized, that they’re going to pivot from sports betting at some point to iGaming, as it’s called, online casino games.
0:53:22 So that’s one place that’s going.
0:53:23 It doesn’t seem great.
0:53:27 And I think that, like, I’m okay with sports betting existing and being legal.
0:53:29 And I think, of course, we should add all this friction.
0:53:31 I’m like, I’m out on iGaming.
0:53:35 I don’t think, I think we, there’s no evidence yet that it’s like safe and can be conducted safely.
0:53:40 And we need to sort of like stop it immediately before it spreads further.
0:53:49 Well, to sort of bring this full circle, I guess, the way you do in the book, you ended up flying out to meet with Kyle, right?
0:53:50 Yes.
0:53:52 What is the, what is the latest on him?
0:53:53 Yeah.
0:54:00 So, well, I’ll give you the latest on him sort of when I reported it and even sort of an update, a postscript even to the book.
0:54:05 When I flew out, when I talked to him, it was right after, must have been the U.S. Open.
0:54:09 And he, and tennis was like sort of his drug of choice, let’s say.
0:54:13 He would just like go into these crazy, crazy rabbit holes when, during the first round of a tennis tournament.
0:54:18 And he describes like being awake for 40 consecutive hours in his parents’ basement outside of Wichita, just like gambling.
0:54:20 Gambling, sorry.
0:54:24 He would take a break to like go smoke a cigarette and then come back to do more gambling.
0:54:26 So, really healthy choices being made all around.
0:54:29 And I flew out to meet him.
0:54:31 It was like a couple days after the U.S. Open.
0:54:32 It must have been.
0:54:35 And he had decided he was going to quit again.
0:54:37 He had made this choice a couple times before.
0:54:39 He had taken a couple months off here and there.
0:54:43 And he had had some bad experience, some annoying tennis match that didn’t go his way.
0:54:44 And he decided to quit.
0:54:45 Fine.
0:54:46 So, we had all these conversations.
0:54:48 He was talking for our three days together.
0:54:49 He was really talking in the past tense.
0:54:52 Like, oh, when I was gambling, I was blah, blah, blah.
0:54:54 But like it was like literally three days prior.
0:54:59 And like actually the week or two later, he, like I saw, I have this app that lets me follow his betting.
0:55:00 He signed up for this.
0:55:01 Like he knows I have it.
0:55:02 Yeah.
0:55:04 And so, I can sort of like track him.
0:55:06 I don’t know if he knows that I check it regularly, but I do.
0:55:12 And so, so then a couple months later, as I was finishing the book,
0:55:18 this must have been right before the French Open, he basically is like, hey, like European soccer is starting next week.
0:55:19 Like, I’m really excited.
0:55:22 And I was like, what are you excited about, Kyle?
0:55:25 Like, and he basically was like, I’m really itching to bet.
0:55:36 And so, I’ll say by way of postscript, he did end up betting on, it must have been that French Open after I’d finished, you know, the copy of the book.
0:55:39 But I’ve sort of checked in with him since, and I think he really is done.
0:55:42 Like he hasn’t bet in, the book came out in April.
0:55:53 He hasn’t bet in probably almost a year, and looks back on this as like, he’s like, I can’t believe I was ever up at three in the morning betting on minor league British darts.
0:55:55 Like, I just can’t, I don’t even know who that person was.
0:55:58 But he, but of course it was him, and it was him like 13 months ago.
0:56:03 Well, I say this in complete sincerity, I hope he’s done too.
0:56:04 Yes.
0:56:07 Because it’s pretty fucking heartbreaking, stories like that.
0:56:16 Well, look, once again, the book is called Losing Big, America’s Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling.
0:56:20 It’s an outstanding book, Jonathan.
0:56:29 It’s very well done, and I hope it is clear in this conversation that it’s a book about sports gambling, but it’s about a whole lot more than that.
0:56:31 So, this is great.
0:56:31 You’re great.
0:56:32 Thanks for coming in.
0:56:33 Thanks, Sean.
0:56:34 Go Tigers.
0:56:42 All right, friends.
0:56:44 I hope you enjoyed this episode.
0:56:49 I really appreciated the book and the conversation with Jonathan.
0:56:53 As I said many times in the show, I am a big sports fan.
0:56:58 I’ve always been all around gambling, but I never really thought it through.
0:57:00 Certainly not to this level.
0:57:10 And I didn’t appreciate how much bigger a story it really was and how it folded into so many other stories and topics I’m constantly thinking about.
0:57:13 So, the book was a public service in that way.
0:57:15 I hope you enjoyed it, too.
0:57:17 But, as always, we do want to know what you think.
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0:57:52 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Ayala, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:57:55 New episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays.
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