PBS News Hour - Full Show - How sports betting is changing our brains and behavior

Episode Date: February 7, 2026

Americans are expected to place a record-breaking $1.7 billion in legal bets on the Super Bowl. With a potential casino inside every phone and computer, a rising chorus of experts who study problem gambling and addiction are ringing the alarm. Horizons moderator William Brangham explores this tidal shift in American culture with journalist Danny Funt and addiction psychiatrist Dr. Timothy Fong. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

I'm William Brangham, and this is Horizons. Sports betting is exploding across the U.S. In just a few years, what once was illegal everywhere but Nevada has now become a nationwide $150 billion industry. With every bet now just one click away, we look at how online gambling is changing our brains and behavior. Coming up next. Welcome to Horizons from PBS News.

The Super Bowl is this weekend, and it is hard to avoid, the avalanche of ads for sports betting apps, like Draft Kings or Fanduel, all offering to ratchet up the fun and deliver big rewards. One more catch, one more catch, one more yard, one more yard. No more yards, no more yards. Ahead of the big game, a slew of celebrities are urging us to put our own money on the line. It's time to bet on something new.

Football players. I'm making my bet on who's going to win. And you can bet with me or against me. Americans are expected to place a record-breaking $1.7 billion in legal bets on just the Super Bowl. This is a massive shift in a very short period of time. In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting. Now, 39 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico allow it. And the floodgates have opened.

Americans are betting an estimated $150 billion a year on sports. So with a full-bore casino potentially inside every phone, a rising chorus of experts who study problem gambling and addiction are ringing the alarms. For more on how this is changing our culture and our brains, we turn to journalist Danny Funt. He has chronicled this world of wagering for the Washington Post and The New Yorker.

His new book is called Everybody Loses, the tumultuous rise of American sports gambling. And Dr. Timothy Fong, he's an addiction psychiatrist and co-director of the Gambling Studies Program at UCLA. Gentlemen, thank you both so much for being here. Danny Funt to you first, for the uninitiated, give us a sense of the scale and scope of sports betting in America right now. You know, you mentioned the Super Bowl

and the fact that it's projected to be the most bet-on game in American history. That used to be newsworthy. Now it's something we say every year. This industry's growth has just been phenomenal. Even in states that have legalized it for several years now, they continue to set records for how much is being bet on sports practically week after week.

So many more people are betting now than ever did before. Of course, there was always a robust black market, if you were that determined to bet. but the idea that 95% of bets now are now placed over the internet has made it so much easier to deposit money to bet every second of the day on every sport you could think of. And it's brought in a whole new era, a new generation of betters, including young people, young people betting at unprecedented rates.

So what this will mean is kind of hard to process just because it's happening so quickly, the uptake has been so sudden. And where we're headed and forget, you know, decades from now in the near future has a lot of people worried. And you mentioned young people. Are those the principal people who are gambling online? Well, number one, absolutely. Danny, go ahead.

Yes, absolutely. Clearly the target demographic for how this product. is marketed, is geared toward particularly young men in like the 21 to 35 demo. You even see just a rash of college students suddenly consumed with betting. One study found that one in five college students now dip into money set aside for tuition to pay for their betting. So this is, that's one of the clearest kind of night and day differences. Again, of course, some kids would find bookies.

but the idea that it's become the default way of engaging with sports now for people of that age is really transformative for American sports. Dr. Fong, this is so right up your alley. You co-direct a program at UCLA that studies gambling behaviors, and you treat people who gamble a great deal and fall into trouble. Do we know how many people, as Danny is describing, are in this troubled problem gambling category? Well, we're starting to develop a very clear picture. We know that the vast majority of people that do gamble on sport do not incur long-lasting damage or harm.

But for about 1 to 2 percent of folks who do gamble on a regular basis, they do develop what we call gambling disorder or gambling addiction. And by definition, that is an addictive disorder that has biological, psychological, social harm and damage. I think what's really important to recognize is that the type of person coming to, into help now is, as Danny has highlighted, younger, more technologically sophisticated. I've had young men who never set foot inside a brick-and-mortar casino ever, who come into my office with several hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and expenditures, creating emotional, financial, and social pain that's really, really profound. So again, we know that number sounds low, but it's a percentage that's similar to what we see with other major mental

health problems like bipolar disorder, schizophrenia. It's not zero. The other really interesting part is by nature, since gambling is risky, there are losses. It is expensive. It is an expensive form of entertainment. So you don't have to have a gambling problem to experience problems from gambling. I think that's super important for people to recognize and understand. Absolutely. Danny, as I've been reading your book, I'm just struck by the thousands of ways that you can place a bet. I mean, I'm old enough now that if I wanted to bet on the Super Bowl, you know, I would pick my team, maybe there was a point spread, and I would bet with one of my friends, and that was basically it. That seems so old-fashioned now.

You're right. A whole generation of betters would never bother doing that. There's so much more preoccupied with prop betting on the outcomes of individual players' performance, stacking those bets together to form parleyes that have the promise of making a lot more money if you're lucky enough to get all of the components of your parley successful. That's really the new style of betting. You know, all of this flies in the face of one of the central arguments for legalization was that this would just take a black market business and bring it into the sunlight so it could be taxed and regulated. Moving it online and the innovations that some of these sports books have managed, it opens the door to such a new variety of betting. The idea that you could bet on a

pitch-by-pitch basis in a baseball game or bet on the outcome of every possession in a football game, that's a direct byproduct of making it so easy to bet online. So it's a whole new ballgame now. It's by no means just taking something that was happening illegal and converting it into a legitimate business. It's making it more potent, more accessible, and more dangerous, potentially, because it's so easy to get carried away betting in that style. I mean, Dr. Fong, please go right ahead. Yeah, Danny, one of the things you know that is that word potent, concentrated, riskier, available, anonymous, the speed, and is not dissimilar to what we saw in other areas of addiction over the last 40 years. Think like what happened when crack cocaine first,

or fentanyl, other forms that we've seen when you have a higher concentrated product that is risky and addictive could potentially lead to faster and rapid, more rapid onset of addictive disorder. So we do see that, particularly with some of these bets that you just highlighted and talked about. So with Dr. Fung, you're saying that the ability now to place bet after bet after bet after bet in the middle of a single sporting event makes it so that people who are to falling into these troubling behaviors, are more likely to do so because of the friction list of the technology?

I think that's a very good way to describe it. Number one, we know that people who develop gambling problems, biological, psychological, and social risks. One of the things that has changed, that our brains have not really changed that much in 40 years. But what has changed dramatically is the technology, the access, the stimuli, and the perception. One of the things that Danny is highlighting

why it's so-quote popular is when you normalize sports betting, when you say it is part of American culture and the fabric, you decrease the perception of risk and harm that people have. Combine that with technology that accelerates the access to gambling, accelerates the intensity, the idea that it literally never ends, all that in the brain is registered as a more concentrated, more potent experience, a more addictive, more rewarding, a more a perfect landscape to chasing losses, all these things that technology dries in terms of addiction. That's so interesting. I mean, again, not to date myself, but when I was growing up, the idea that someone would go to see a bookie, that was considered like you would hide that from your friends. You wouldn't tell anyone that you were actually doing that.

And now it's just like we all could do this right here on our phones. Danny, you talked in your book with a lot of industry insiders. What do they say when presenting, with this bill of goods about what their industry is doing? That's really one of the most striking things, I think, in my book is the idea that even people at these sports books, including at pretty high levels, some of them are concerned that they're pushing people toward overdoing it, taking advantage of the most vulnerable customers,

and not conducting this in the way that legalization was promised, that there would be consumer protections, and this would be a safer form of sports betting. I heard the founding CEO of Fandul say, the advertising is untruthful because it conveys that you can have a good shot at winning when, in fact, it's unbelievably difficult to come ahead winning, betting on sports.

And if you are that lucky, the sports books will do everything in their power to cut you off so you can't bet much anymore. I've seen people who can bet pennies on the NFL, just because their only sin was they were on a hot streak for a few weeks, and they showed they actually knew what they were doing. People who say that the VIP side of this business, catering toward people who lose a staggering amount of money,

and in return, they're treated to the most unbelievable experiences imaginable in sports and beyond sports, that that eggs on a dangerous level of losing, and that you might think, well, these are ultra-wealthy people, they can afford to be losing tens of thousands of dollars or more on a weekly basis. That's often not the case. And as soon as those people show signs of a problem, there's a lot of pressure inside these companies to look the other way because, again, these are their most valuable customers.

I could go on and on, but just hearing them say they have misgivings or they're anxious about the direction of this industry, I think should give people pause. Dr. Fong, I want to dial back to this issue of the toll that this takes. I'd like to play a little bit of sound here. This is from Senate testimony from a couple of years ago. This is Harry Levant, who's now a counselor for people with problem gambling, but he himself had a very, very serious problem.

Here's what he told the Senate two years ago. I made my last bet on April 27, 2014, and on that same night nearly took my own life. In the grips of my addiction, I devastatingly hurt many people who had loved and trusted me. This included clients, friends, my kids, and the people closest to me. Dr. Fong, is that the kind of thing that you hear in your office from your own clients, your own people that you care for? Almost every day.

And I think that's the clear message that gambling disorder is a painful disorder, physically, emotionally, psychologically, financially, financially. it can really set you back. I saw a young man just this week. You know, 19 years old, $200,000 in gambling expenditures, all online apps, all sports betting, near suicidal thinking, lethal emotional pain, the shame and the guilt he has, but also just the lost time he had as a young man. Imagine two years of just not doing things in real life and then really looking up and realizing

I have all this debt and I'm not really, quote, good at any of. And all the while, the phone and the gambling is always there calling you back. This idea that gambling and sports betting is the solution, is the pathway to success and financial freedom. All that's just completely false for a lot of folks. What Harry just mentioned there is, again, this is a hidden addiction. People can't see it. They can't smell it, but they can feel the pain and they feel the pain very, very much so

in forms of emotional, physical, as he well described there. Danny, what do you make of the argument that is put forward by some people that let's not, tragedies aside from what Dr. Fong is talking about, those are terrible circumstances. Nobody wants that. But there is an element of personal agency here. These companies are not forcing you to put your credit card down. They are not forcing you to make all these bets. Some would argue that the technological engineering of their apps are no stickier than

Instagram or TikTok are to keep. keep you on their sites and that there's got to be some personal choice in all of this. What do you make of that? No doubt. And I hear from people in recovery for gambling problems that it's essential to them getting better to believe they have some willpower, some agency. Otherwise, they'd feel kind of helpless at the, you know, like they don't stand a chance of resisting this urge.

At the same time, it's a two-way street. And people I spoke with in the industry feel like they're not upholding their end of the bargain. You know, responsible gaming you'd think would go both ways, that these companies would also have a responsibility to not push an especially addictive style of betting on people, including people who show some signs of problems. Even the fact that the industry doesn't concede that sports betting is addictive is remarkable. You know, it's contradictory to decades of medical consensus to an overwhelming amount of anecdotal experience that Dr. Fong was just describing, it's honestly offensive. And it should make us skeptical. If you're not even going to concede

that most basic point, how can we trust that you're actually looking out for the best interests of your customers? Dr. Fong, what is the pathway out for someone? I mean, I think a lot of our audience will understand the pathway out of drug addiction, out of alcohol addiction, and what that looks like, what the steps might look like, what possible medications might look like. For your clients, what does recovery from gambling addiction look like? Well, every person's recovery story is going to be different. But in general, we use the principles we use for addiction, care, and mental health care.

Biological treatments, psychological treatments, social treatments, spiritual treatments, financial support. So most folks will come in and we'll do all those things. will provide treatment of other co-occurring disorders like ADHD or depression that might be exacerbating and gambling. We'll focus on psychotherapy to reduce the guilt and shame and reverse some of the distortions and misinformation people have about gambling. We'll work with social connections like Gamble's Anonymous and other things that the gaming industry has, like gambling software blockers. But very simply, I'll just focus on people recovering their self-care. making sure they recognize that their life is worthwhile and steering them to do and take care of their body and brains and minds and have been neglected in the midst of an addictive disorder. One of the thing that Danny just mentioned is not just the gambling industry being responsible, but it's all of us, including health care providers and things that regulate gambling and people that do the advertising.

Gambling now is essentially a public health topic. It is no different than air quality, water, water quality, traffic, safety, it's part of our environment. And everyone really does have a duty, I think, to provide solutions. One of the things that I see so often with a lot of the clients I see, they were just misinformed or they were not, quote, financially educated. Or they thought, again, that gambling was a solution, or the gambling was a job. I've had so many clients of mine, they say, oh, I'm not a gambler. I'm a sports better.

I can do this because I see all the celebrities making a lot of money. I see my friends doing it. So can't I do it? Isn't this a game of, quote, skill, Dr. Fong? No, this is a game of random chance. So the thumbnail there is that when people come into office to see a professional, we provide the high-level professional mental health care, really to steer people into a life of recovery.

Danny, I want to double back on some of the industry's arguments here, that they occasionally will acknowledge that people have gambling problems. They say that they build features into these apps that will limit the amount of time you can spend on the app or limit the amount of money you can spend on any given session. And they also argue that by creating a legal market, it is much better for people to be gambling in that environment

than in the bad old days when a bookie might come and try to break your legs if you don't pay your debt. One other point that they make, and I want to pull up this quote here, this is from Joe Maloney, he's with the American Gambling Gaming Association. He says, if you suddenly start to pick and choose what can be legal or banned, you're driving betters out of the legal market and into the illegal market. That has been their argument for a very long time. What do you make of that? I pose that to a high-ranking official at one of these integrity monitors. They're companies that are tasked with observing betting patterns

and acting on suspicious bets to avert fixing in sports. And I said, you know, you hear from the industry that if you limited the types of bets, people would just go to the black market. In response, he used a word that I don't think we can say on PBS, but in short, he wasn't buying it. That is a major hurdle for a lot of people. And we've been talking throughout this segment

about how gambling has become so mainstream. sure, there are people who will find a street bookie or go to some shady offshore website. But the idea that the millions and millions of Americans who are now betting on sports would be willing to do that just to place some obscure prop bet doesn't hold water. You know, the other side of it is there's a lot of styles of betting now, again, in terms of the ways you can bet online

that seem to be so conducive to compulsive, The idea that you can bet, you know, on a second by second basis, seems like a recipe for compulsive behavior, a frenzied slot machine-like gambling experience. I ran that by an executive at a company that provides those so-called micro bets to sportsbook. The company was soon after acquired by Draft Kings. And I said, isn't this, you know, a way of inspiring compulsive behavior?

And he said, sticky. Sticky is the word that they would like to use. And a lot of us might think of sticky as sort of a tech euphemism for being glued to your phone and betting a little bit more than you might wish to. So yeah, we could go down the line, but I honestly think they're either oversimplifying or being a bit disingenuous with some of those rebuttals.

And let me add to that, Danny. One of the most addictive forms of bets you can have is a low dollar amount with a very big dollar amount with a big jackpot. So, surprisingly, or not surprisingly, the same game parlay, far and away is the most profitable type of bet that we see. Put $5 down in hopes of winning $100 or $500. So it is no longer sports betting as we Generation X know it.

It's essentially playing the lottery. This isn't games of skill anymore. These are pure randomness. The other part that I talk about it, these are fast food gambling. These are highly processed bets that are presented to you without much research or knowledge. And a number of my clients and said, well, I just kept chasing bets

and I didn't even do the research. I just bet on what was given to me or pre-built for me by the algorithms and things like that. So we're not talking enough about how that intersects with technology and AI and these own algorithms that do exactly that, that get you engage and sticky,

so then you're more likely to say, you know what, that's a very interesting bet. I'm likely to look. They know what kind of bets I like. They know what teams I follow. They know what trends I like. So, of course, on an app that gives you those things, of course you're going to spend more and spend more time

and ultimately more money. All right. That is Dr. Timothy Fong. He is the co-director of the Gambling Studies Program at UCLA and Danny Funt, author of Everybody Loses. Gentlemen, thank you both so much for being here. Really terrific conversation. Thank you.

Thank you. Before we go, we want to introduce you to an Austrian cow named Veronica, who, ever so slightly, just expanded our understanding of animal intelligence. Veronica lives with her owner, farmer Vitgar Vigala. Vitgar noticed that Veronica would occasionally play with sticks and brooms, grabbing them with her mouth, and sometimes using the bristly end to itch hard-to-reach places on her back. Deliberate use of a tool like this is well documented in chimpanzees, dolphins, and other big-brained, intelligent creatures. Crows, otters, octopuses, among others, have also clearly shown this ability.

But cows, that is a very different story. When Austrian researchers saw a video of Veronica, they raced out to test her skills. Their study, published last month in current biology, documented 76 instances of tool use. where Veronica clearly took a broom into her mouth to scratch herself. And in another surprise, they also showed she regularly used different parts of the tool for different parts of her body. The researchers wrote, quote, despite millennia of domestication for productivity, livestock have been almost entirely excluded from discussions of animal intelligence.

Veronica's case challenges this neglect. perhaps the real absurdity lies not in imagining a tool using cow, but in assuming such a thing could never exist. That is it for this episode of Horizons. You can find us on YouTube wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you next week.