Right About Now with Ryan Alford - How Unregulated Gambling Is Draining BILLIONS From the U.S. Economy | Ismail Vali

Episode Date: May 29, 2026

Ryan Alford sits down with Ismail Vali for a conversation that turns online gambling into a much bigger business and policy discussion. Ismail explains why he believes illegal and unregulated operators still dominate huge parts of the online gambling market, why legal operators have struggled to capture the economics people assumed they would, and how regulators remain behind the technology that changed the game years ago. He also lays out how offshore gambling, illegal streaming, and prediction-style products are creating a broader ecosystem that is harder to regulate and easier for consumers to stumble into than most people realize. Ryan brings the entrepreneur and free-market lens, pushing on consumer choice, overregulation, and where the line should actually be drawn. That back-and-forth makes this episode especially strong for listeners interested in business, policy, regulation, digital markets, and the unintended consequences of pretending a fast-growing market does not exist. Topics Covered The economics of illegal online gambling Why legal gaming markets are still underperforming expectations The role of offshore operators in value extraction Why some states still have no legal online gambling How prediction markets and other gray-area products fit in Why Ismail says the market is already here whether lawmakers accept it or not Consumer choice versus consumer protection Ryan Alford and Ismail Vali on what sensible regulation could look like Ryan Alford Website: https://www.ryanisright.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanalford/ Ismail Vali / Gaming Compliance International Website: https://gamingcompliance.com/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ismailvali/ GCI Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gaming-compliance-international

I'm not looking at regulated gambling as being a source of great news because they are still fighting this battle of. We got brought in over the top of what was already a dominant unregulated marketplace. It's not like when they regulated gaming from 2018 onwards in America. That stuff wasn't new. It's not like they just went, hey, how do you fancy sending some online gaming? That would be a really great idea. It was already there. It's been there for three decades, okay?

It wasn't anything new that happened then. All that we did was graft on top of an existing, illegally dominated marketplace, some regulated license gaming. You don't win by following the playbook. You win by rewriting it. 700 episodes deep with the people who actually built something real. No theory, no fluff, no shortcuts. This is right about now with Ryan Alford. Online gambling has become one of the biggest hidden economies in the world.

Most people have no idea how much of it's happening outside of legal, regulated systems. and many people have no idea whose hands is truly going into. Today, I'm sitting down with Ismail Vali, president of gaming compliance international and founder of YieldSec, to unpack the scale of unregulated gambling, illegal streaming, prediction markets, and what he calls the gamification of everything. Ismail, what's up, man?

Welcome to the show. Thank you very much for having me, right? Pleasure to be here. Where are you from, originally? I'm from England, originally, mixed race, parents from different places, father's Indian Africa and my mother was Dutch, and born and raised in London in the UK.

and I've worked on and off in America most of my life. How do you compare England in the U.S.? You don't compare England. I'm leading the witness a bit. I spend a fair amount of time overseas, but I always like to know. England to me is a country that has a lot of history. I've been out of the UK for a number of years. It's a country that I think, again, lots of people complain about it.

It's given me great opportunities. I always look to America as the country. I've always called it God's own country. This is a beautiful land, beautiful people. You have great opportunities here and an ability to the business and the workup. done in America has always been if you made money for Americans, Americans really backed you. England has a lot more of that class system, which can malign it sometimes. It can work against itself. I found America as a country where you could get on make money, make businesses happen here,

and people didn't question things about race or class or anything else. Just did you do the thing you said you were going to do? Yeah. I always value in America. True. And I don't know if it's some ways you could say a lack of sophistication over time because we're a relatively young country of far as health care and other things, but the American spirit does sort of push the innovation forward. It absolutely does. And again, that's something we'll talk about today with gambling is that you have a business. For good or bad. For good or bad. So innovation in America usually means that whenever any business comes to America, this crucible of innovation, it completely changes that business. And that hasn't really been the case with gambling.

It's actually found that legal gambling absolutely is suffering in this marketplace right now. It's kind of not got where it's supposed to after we're now eight years in to legal gambling. and it's kind of not at the place it should be. So it's not controlled, it's not contained, and it's not compliant by any means. You ready to take a risk? I'm absolutely ready to take a risk. What would you like to take a risk on? There'll be lots of puns and analysis today as I compare our gambling discussion.

But it's fascinating here in my trading card store in full transparency because even this industry is getting scrutiny now with especially online purchasing. It's called breaks, digital packs, things like that. And I want to get to that. But I do want to set the table for our audience, this Mel. let's explain exactly what it is that you do and that your business does. Let's frame it that way and then we'll get into some juicy stuff. I'll come out slightly differently.

I'll start out with why you invited me here. We had an article about us in Forbes recently. So Forbes magazine did a piece about a report we published, which we've referred to as the trillion report. How much is online gambling worth globally each year? Last year, online gambling, unregulated, illegal online gambling was worth $5.9 trillion. By $9 trillion to put that in context, It makes that the world's third largest economic flow after the USA and China.

I was doing the math. I'd say top five at least. Exactly. So this is a worrying level of illegal gambling dominance of industries that are generally regulated on a state by state and country by country basis all over the world. I came out of 20 years of experience in online gaming. I started my career here in America working for Solomon Smith Barney. I worked as their internet analyst in World Trade Center back in 1997-98.

I left that job. I went into the gaming industry because I don't know. I've written one report, which is what's going to make money on the internet. I took the view that gambling and pornography were going to make money on the internet because people craved. Did you bet on that? I didn't bet on it at the time. Look, at the time, there were no prediction market platforms at the time. I was basically suspended from my role at the bank for a week and then rehired at double my salary because so many people requested this report.

This is in the days before even downloading reports, people being faxies. I took a view on that. 20 years of experience in the gaming industry in operational terms, companies like Paradise Poker, Poker Stars, Sporting Bet, took those to global number one before regulation. existed and then had a moment of pause in my career. Around 2017-18, I was invited for a job interview in Malta for a company that owned Maltese gaming licenses. But while I was waiting for the interview to go and see this company, a bunch of people got arrested in that office. And I asked the reception, is my meeting going to happen? And they went, probably not because the guys you were going to see are the guys having just being taken out with bags over their heads. They turned out to be Sicilian

and Drangor to Mafia. Now, everyone's always known that there's a lot of organized crime interest in the gaming industry. Why does organized crime love gambling? Because they can launder a money throw it. That's always been the case for as long as there's been gambling. What's been going on recently in the online gaming industry is crime coming to find a home in this industry because they love this business period. It's not just about money laundering. It's about control of audience because gambling customer, if you get data on him, you can sell him financial loans, you can sell him mortgages, sell him gambling recovery services too. But they're an interesting audience member to target. Crime has been interested in it and that really changed during the

pandemic. That when sports was cancelled, professional sports was cancelled in 2021, what did all those people who were running sports betting sites do. Legal and illegal. The legal guys kind of went there. There's nothing we can do. What do we offer the customers? There's no product here. The illegal guys pivoted hard.

So they went to illegal streaming and they said, we need a product here. We need you to give us content that we can offer people to gamble on. And what you ended up with was children's basketball being streamed and snail racing from Thailand. I can look this up. I'm not going to. I remember.

This stuff started to break out the box. And then over that pandemic period, crime realized that the audience were willing to bet on anything. and they literally would bet on everything. And what you now end up with, what's been in our report, the business that I'm in now, I ran a company called YieldSec, which I founded.

YelSEC was short for Yield Security. We looked at all of the audience, all their activity from metadata. We have a proprietary scraping technology, and we buy data from other people. We're looking for where the audience is and what they're doing, how long for,

and we estimate an amount of money that they're spending on those things. Our estimates have been proven right year after year on things like the Super Bowl, March Madness, World Cup, European Championships of Soccer, because what we've said has come true. We're basically very good at the predicting where audiences are. In products we monitor

and know about gambling, streaming, cryptocurrencies. I sold Yilsec last year to a company called Gaming Compliance International. Gaming compliance basically look at the same thing for regulatory clients. So if you're a legal stakeholder in the online gaming business, we help you understand what's out there, awareness of what's going on, how much money is being made and making sure that revenue is audited and taxes are paid on it. The main point I see in the gaming business is this. regulated gambling has an ability to provide for commerce, community and consumers, if it's run correctly. GCI is the mechanics behind the marketplace. We help our legal stake, all the clients, control those marketplaces, because if you're not controlled, all that money is effectively

being stolen from your marketplace. Now, if you look at a marketplace like the United States, in 2024, you had an online gambling marketplace, sports betting, casino and poker, worth just over $90 billion. Last year, it was worth $125 billion. Now, how much of that market? money is staying here in America to help local commerce, local companies who hire people, local community, payment of tax, and local consumers being safe and protected, children being excluded, for example. Last year, 2025, $125 billion, regulated was $28 billion and unregulated was $97 billion. You're looking at nearly $100 billion a year theft from marketplace in America. On a state-by-state basis, that's all money that's leaving. States, it's all money that's going to fund

offshore crime. So this is basically the movement of... of consumer value extraction being taken away from the United States and given to people who are in criminal industries. I'm digesting. I've got 12 rabbit holes I want to go down. Let me start with this. I'm good at dissection and I hear things. Let me just boil this down.

And the first thing that came to mind was actually another question. Who do you serve? I hear you say that and I go, somebody writes the check. And are we for the consumer? Are we for the company? I get it. Are we looking out for the organized gambling companies so that they make more money? money in an organized fashion? Or are we looking out for people?

GCI serves and in my role as president, who do I serve? Regulators are our main clients. Outside of that, there will be other legal stakeholder clients, trade associations, for example. We don't work for operators directly and we obviously don't work consumers either. The point here is get the control that delivers a benefit for your local commerce, community and consumers. In terms of looking after the consumer, the consumer would be looked after in a regulator system if so much of the gambling activity wasn't being taken by offshore companies. who are completely unregulated and beyond local controls. And if you don't remove that unregulated gambling presence and its availability to consumers,

you don't get control of your marketplace, which means losing the money and losing the ability to provide a fair and safe environment for consumers. Right here in South Carolina, you have no legal online gambling of nature. We're forcing people with free will that get to do this in other places. Exactly. So there is demand and desire out there. Two very potent forces. People are going to find some of that gambling, whether you give it to the

them or not. The problem is, who are you giving it to? You're giving it to unregulated offshore gambling firms, taking the money out of America, quite often not paying their customers, even if they do when they win, kind of thing, and abusing those customers and selling their data for lots of other things, like financial loans, like mortgages, etc. Because they realize that gambling customers, sometimes banks look at that data and go, we don't trust this guy with money, because he's willing to throw it away on bets. So basically, we're not going to give them a cheap loan. Yeah. So South Carolina, basically, let's put this in context. How much is South Carolina worth? Five and a half million people gambling every year.

year. We look at all of that audience activity, so we know. So GCI numbers, 558 million was $208 million, is the value of GGR, gross gaming revenue. The profitability to unregulated gambling firms is nearly three quarters of a billion dollars last year. You're getting on for a marketplace, which has produces substantial revenue, substantial potential potential wealth for local companies, and substantial benefit for American consumers if that environment could be monitored, police, enforced and optimized effectively. You're forcing people to basically choose, well, I'm going to find some illegal gambling, some offshore gambling. I'm going to use workaround methods to find that gambling. You're effectively giving the audience a means to criminalize their behavior very

quickly. And it also makes them encounter and deal with content that will push them into other forms of criminality too. Some of that's the product of South Carolina still living in 1950, just to be frank, older politicians that have been empowered too long and belief systems that are grounded in faith and other things in religion, which I support. But we also hold on to things, that aren't necessarily the norms of the country, but they're the norms of what a select few have said should be the standard. But there's always unintended consequences. That's really what we're talking about.

It's the unintended consequence of, hey, we don't believe in gambling. It's against the core religion, Christianity here. We're not going to support it. But yet, the temper of the nation has changed the acceptability of it, if done responsibly. Again, there's always the outliers. And it forces them into these channels that are unregulated. Any marketplace is just a jurisdiction.

So South Carolina has its core. own marketplace for online gambling. Overall, there are then 50 states of America, the United States online gaming marketplace. We have this problem in every market that comes to us. So we work for governments and countries globally all over the world. Everybody comes to us and either, they take a moral view of this product. You have to divorce it somewhat from the morality here, if the audience are doing it anyway. If the activity is out there, it's not policy to simply put your head in the sand and say, we're going to ignore this because we don't like it. We don't believe in it. Regardless of what your view is of this product, the activity,

is taking place. Warren Buffett recently said, gambling is like a tax on the stupid. So that's what he said. So he's saying that America at the recent Bargha Hathaway conference in earlier this year, he said to investors that basically

America's never been in a more gambling mood than right now. All the gambling activity, all the expansion of gambling into other forms. And we'll talk about that. We recently said that gambling is nowadays in America,

regulated, unregulated and unacknowledged as gambling. So there are three spheres to the gambling that we have right now. Warren Buffett said it's a tax on stupid. I think you can play that quote slightly differently. What Warren Buffett said is it's a tax on stupid people because you shouldn't be doing this kind of activity. There's a moral aspect to that. But if the economic

activity is already taking place, surely it's stupidity if you don't regulate tax and control it, because that money is right now leaving the United States. That money is leaving the United States to the tune of $100 billion in last year. If you add that up over three decades of the internet, how much are we looking at here, right? My firm are actually working on that. GCI actually working on that number right now. We're working on give us the seasonality version, the kind of regressive analysis version of this, to work out what happened to that money? So from the early days of the internet in 96, then through the poker boom, through 2003 to 2010, then through the expansion into other products with Daily Fantasy Sports and Live Sports betting,

the arrival of firms like Draft Kings and Fangio. Let's look at this over three decades. You're probably on for around a half a trillion dollars, I think. So the figure's not final yet, but I think there is a room there, which is how much has America been stolen from? On a national basis, on a state-by-state basis, and then on an individual consumer basis. This needs to be a regulated tax and control model here. Otherwise, it's basically your setting up policy as we just want to ignore this thing. Pretend it doesn't exist.

It does exist. Well said, I go to this place and this is how I even describe. We mentioned trading cards, things like that. America's built on, and I think why sport has increased here is because we like to be entertained. Absolutely. We work hard as Americans. We do a lot of things. And responsible entertainment on your own time is the American way.

I get to this space a little bit. As long as it's done responsibly, who's to say what kind of entertainment? If you're a responsible gambler, and they do exist, it can lead to the other end, but so can golf and so can drinking and so can anything else. It becomes a compulsion. And yes, there's triggers and gambling that certainly feed into that. Absolutely. But how we choose to be entertained and where we do it, for someone to be guiding that, do you want it to be regulated or do you not want it to be? Do you want it to go overseas?

That's really the argument because it's happening. I can go down the route as someone being in media. TV is shit. It sucks. movies suck. So they watch sports because it's entertaining. It's on the screen behind you. Exactly. And gambling is it's a form of entertainment. People come to our space here and rip packs. And we don't push the gamble part. We push the have phone with your friends somewhere to hang out and do it responsibly. It is a real miss by our people of power within our state and other places to, again, when the mindset has shifted, when people are doing these things anyway,

you just wash your hands of it because you don't believe in it or you think it's stupid or whatever is very short-sight. Yes, it's a form of entertainment that we've ignored for three decades, the gambling on this, okay, because the older generation didn't really notice it until it was legalized in some states. 31 states have legal sports betting in the United States. Seven have legal online casino right now. What you've noticed there is when those firms were legalized and regulated, they advertised on TV. They did sponsorships of sports teams. And that's happened across America now. So you're seeing the top of the iceberg there is what you're seeing.

You're noticing that, okay, I see this stuff exists now. You didn't notice it when it was all unregulated gambling, did you? You didn't pay any attention to it then. But that was entertainment that was being passed off as the greatest value extraction by crime from American consumers, probably in history. That's what's happened in the last three decades. Everybody else were kind of looking the other way

until Draft King's Fan Jewel bet MGM started advertising everywhere. And now you're noticing it more because you have Polymarket and Kalshi who are advertising financial futures products under the regulation of the CFTC in the United States, but it looks, smells and feels a lot like it's gambling on anything. That's the problem with prediction market platform. So you're looking at a mass expansion into these areas of as regulated gambling.

Lotteries, sports betting, casino gambling, with a few companies. And let's just put that in context. Regulated gambling in this country, this crucible of commercial innovation that America is, regulated online gambling went from 123 firms three years ago to 90 to 50 last year. Wow. They're not going out of, that number's not getting smaller because of M&A activity and commercial consolidation. That number's getting smaller because they are going bust. There is basically less and less money for them in the regulated space.

Then we look at the unregulated sector, just growing like gangbusters at the moment, going through the roof. Unregulated gambling is anybody in that part of the iceberg that you don't see. They have no licensing, they have no legitimate business here in the United States because they either cannot get a license or they did not bother getting a license. I use the phrase quite openly. Guys are some crooks, aren't they basically. A lot of these firms will also say things like they'll often argue with me. Bear in mind here, no one ever sued me for saying this, okay? So lots of firms argue with me when they say,

hopefully don't start that. Well, we have a license in Curisal. We have a license in Malta. We have a license in Anjuan, one of the Comoros Islands in the Indian Ocean. You have a license somewhere where? So why do you have a license in Curisau but not in New Jersey or New York? Why? Why do you have a license in Curisale?

And that license, what does it give you rights to do? So you got a license in one of these offshore jurisdictions. Why? Well, it looks good for consumers. They like to see a license. Oh, because that's what's normal in the regulated sector, isn't it? Why did you get a license in one of these tropical island destinations? because they all generally tend to be that.

I got a license there because it helps you move money. Dirty money. That's what it helps you do. So that's why you got that license because a dodgy bank wants to see that license because then it knows that, okay, well, the revenues come in. You've got a license for the wonderful online gaming business. So that's why those people have those licenses. They didn't get a license in New York or Nevada or New Jersey.

Why? Because they weren't going to be given one because they got dirty hands from having been black market operators for decades. So that's where those people came from. To set up as an online gaming company, what does it involve? How much CAPEX do I need to invest in this thing? About 50 grand will buy your license in one of these places. And then you can get all of the other services, your platform, your accounting software,

your payment provision, your games, all of that comes off revenue. So you basically pay people when you make money. But the upfront cost, no less than 50 grand to set yourself up as an offshore gambling, king being crook of gambling. That's how you get into that business. So it's not exactly a big upfront cost. Now, your listeners, a lot of people are basically, want to be CEOs, want to be entrepreneurs. They might be hearing this and thinking, well, that online gaming business sounds like a great business to be in.

If you want to face the rest of your life in jail, yeah, if you want to lose all your money in the future, because there is a piece of this which is you break a law in America. America I know from the outside, having studied law, America always gets this man. You do something wrong to America. America will never forget. America will always come for you. This is one area, the unregulated gambling area, where America hasn't shown itself yet in that way, but I believe it will.

I want to play the other side of this coin or the consumer side. This is the American way. You're going to hear it. You're going to know what I mean. as soon as I start saying it, but start regulating everything, and especially in South Carolina. Nobody wants more laws, more government, more regulation. They're messing with everything. They get involved, get in the way, make it more expensive, make it harder, and they don't

know how to run a business anyway. Sort of the general consumer sentiment a lot of times when they hear regulation. You framed it well with money leaving. That's as well as I've heard it. And I don't know why it took that long for someone to simply stay like that. Okay, okay, now it makes sense because now people in South Carolina don't have jobs that they could have had if they had a technology partner here doing it and legalizing something that's happening anyway. I think you understand the sentiment that I'm carrying and how a lot of people

when they hear that regulation. Let's frame why it's needed and how to maybe turn that sentiment towards not such a negative towards regulation. This is a business that features products with risks. We all know that about gambling. So we don't know that if we choose the number 29 on Ruehler, is that going to happen or not. Okay. So we all know that we're buying into the unknown there. We're putting money into the unknown. If it pays out for us, it can be the biggest return you've ever bad way better than the stock market, way better than a bank account. However, there is room for criminality to be very closely involved with that because of that risk-based product. If you don't have regulation, you will have mass consumer misunderstanding, you'll have mass consumer abuse and

the entrance of crime where it dominates the business, even more than it already does around the world and in America today. So you need regulation to get rid of the crime. Let's take an example of Vegas, okay? So there is what I call a Las Vegas lesson. Vegas was dominated by the mob for decades, set up by the mob, run by the mob until the late 70s, to the point where American consumers were scared to go to Vegas. They hated the violence, they hated the scams, they hated the crime, and they stopped going in droves. When did all that Wall Street money come into Vegas? When did all these big palaces that we now know of modern Vegas? The land-based resort model. Where did that get built? It got built in America, in Las Vegas, then taken to Atlantic City, in New Jersey, and then

exported around the world in Macau, where I was just speaking last week. And all that was led to by American innovation. That came from regulation and an understanding that we wanted to kick some crime out of Nevada. So they got fed up in the late 70s to the point where they went, if we don't control this, we don't have Vegas in 20 years time. So we need to control what's going on here, get rid of the crime and own our marketplace. So in the brick and mortar world, that was done in Vegas. The last Vegas lesson is own and control your marketplace and put in place processes for the future. Keep crime out, keep consumers safe and keep this business entertaining. Keep it focused on that. That's been forgotten about online.

We basically thought that we could legalize and regulate everywhere in the world. I'm not blaming anybody for this. Lawmakers came to this too late after decades generally and went, okay, let's get some tax out of that because there's a lot of money. Yeah, online gaming stuff, isn't it? We're behind on that, marijuana and lots of other things. Let's get us some of that internet money. Let's go grab some of that.

So everybody came to it late. They put in place fast, quick regulation that sounded like it made sense. But what you have to understand with illegal gambling is this. It's not one problem. It's many because crime is not one problem. It's many. And it leaves behind many consequences. The point here is, unless you can control this properly, you won't unless you tax and regulate the marketplace effectively.

So legalize and regulation, whatever way a jurisdiction wants their marketplace to be, my view, GCI's views, we're like Burger King to you guys. You can have the marketplace your way, but you need to say what that way is. So if your voters are telling you, we want no gambling, zero, then monitor police, enforce and optimize so that you have no gambling online. So that nobody in the state, nobody in the country can reach those services. But you can't be like a government that basically says, We just want to forget about it. This thing's not our problem to regulate. This is bad people do this immoral activity.

It's still economic activity that can provide substantial economic and societal good when you run it right. All that my work and all that GCI's work is control the mechanics of the marketplace for the regulator or treasury for government to be able to achieve the right results in their society. We work a lot in the developing world, right? Those governments come to us, why? Because they realize that the hundreds of millions, the billions of dollars that come in on the tax that you can. legitimately put on top of all that profitability of gambling, and that doesn't need to be more than 15, 20, 25% of the economic activity of regulated license firms. When that money can flow back into your borders, into your treasury coffers, that buys a lot of roads, schools, hospitals and health care.

Of course you want that money. Now, here in America, we're kind of ignoring that activity is going on out there. And we're saying, well, do we need all this regulation? And doesn't it add to more bureaucracy? It doesn't need to add to more bureaucracy. But however, that's executed in the marketplace, there can be criticism of it, but you do actually have to execute something first. Just saying that we're not going to do anything about this, economic activity is already taking place. That value extraction, if you add it up, the reason me and my firm are working on that number for the last three decades here in America, that number will be frightening. That number will be scare-inducing to the point where people hopefully act and go, we can't keep letting this money,

leave the American treasury coffers, leave our state treasury, and also harm our consumers in the way it has been for the last three decades. I've developed ad campaigns for some of the biggest brands in the world and I'm sitting here and I'm going, you need an ad campaign because we need to fight the stigma of regulation and paint the other side of that rush of what it actually means, the taxes, the thing the dollars are leaving. Because I don't think people to realize the other side of the coin, especially as it relates to gambling and the other way. They just go, oh, my fees are higher and it's not as easy or it's not as fun. It's a perception. And perception's reality with regulation. but the framing of what the maybe the unintended consequences and marketing that in the right way.

A lot of what we're doing here, hopefully, opening minds and hearts to what that is. Because even for me, grew up in South Carolina, I leaned towards, oh, God, the government's involved again. When things become at a certain scale, you have to have systems, if they have processes, it's the same thing. And so when you maybe stop calling it regulation and more calling it organization. I'd say it's policy, process, practice. That's what this comes down to. And there shouldn't be the harm for. Three peas.

Three peas. Okay. There shouldn't be the. You know, PPP? You can't have the harm here for consumers. You can't have the harm for children either that's been taking place and also the loss of money. So all that money coming in, yes, we know that this is a industry that features products with risks. Some people are going to get hurt here.

You should not have children involved with this product. But how do you police this thing effectively when you have no resources? Those resources can all come if you're taxing people the right way. Now, when all of that value is just being extracted out of America, I have never known a period or an industry in America that was not looked at properly because you're making way too much money and we ain't getting our share. Now they're looking at the regulated gambling industry now, Draf Kings, Fandlingel, etc. Let's ask an interesting question here. Are any of those firms making money profitability?

The answer is no. The numbers I've seen say no, but I don't know how because there's so much money going in. I think Drafkin's a fan general of each had one, and Bermg. Spending it all in marketing. They've each had one quarter of profitability in the last. Why is that? Because they're not in a sustainable, safe. marketplace where they can actually go out there and find their consumers. They are spending money

in a vacuum against 80% of the marketplace that is run by unregulated gambling right now. And you've got this three ring circus now of regulated, unregulated and unacknowledged as gambling, which is diluting the take for regulated gambling companies too. So if I'm in the prediction market business, in America, I've convinced everyone that we're not really gambling. We are somehow a financial futures product. Everywhere else in the world is looking at this going, it's the biggest form of unregulated gambling there is. So in America, we've called it something. We've got some regulation on it. Our consumer is safe right now.

We don't know that yet, but it's early days, but at least it's being looked at. For regulated gambling, they are the last dog to the bowl in America right now. This is literally an era where I've been looking at the regulated gaming industry in America, sports casino and poker, and saying that it's the silent death of the departed, basically. These guys are just silently dying out, going from 123 to 90 to 50 firms that are regulated and licensed and operating, and that number will get less this year. And we're in a year with a World Cup. And we're in a year where there's been a Super Bowl, a March, Man.

And there's been no cancellations because of pandemics and stuff. But American gaming companies are not making the money they should. Why? Crime is there. Unregulated gambling's there. Now you've got unacknowledged gambling also being there, which is diluting what's coming in. Because consumers have only a finite amount of money to spend on this activity, but they are spending more of it every year, more of their disposable income goes towards gambling

on a per capita basis. And not enough of us are looking at this to say you need to be monitoring it so that it can be policed and forced against and optimized correct. How do we divide these lines? that's not, it should be that's not. But what if people and companies that are in that bucket are in the U.S. are paying taxes, when you move them from one, kind of like a tax bracket or anything else, when you go from one place to another, it has consequences.

Who's the judge, jury, an executioner of when that should or shouldn't take place? We can agree. Anyone with half a brain, even those idiots that tax themselves with gambling a lot, could hear what we're talking about and go, yeah, we don't want going to organize crime. This makes a lot of sense. We don't want money leaving America that should be here. a lot of things that are in this gray area of potential gambling and the regulations that would or could be associated with that. How does that serve them or Americans for there just

to be more governance on our free will on certain things that are in the gray area? Gray area is an overused term. Okay. It's a dangerous one. Gambling gray area. There are a lot operators in the gambling space who say that they are a gray market operator. They have a license somewhere and they sell their gambling everywhere. When I say gray area, I just mean there's differing opinion. Yeah. Let's have a look at that in terms of three tier ways. of looking at a marketplace. Regulated gambling. So on its hands and news in America,

not making any money and doesn't have a great future. So I'm not looking at regulated gambling as being a source of great news because they are still fighting this battle of. We got brought in over the top of what was already a dominant, unregulated marketplace. It's not like when they regulated gaming from 2018 onwards in America. That stuff wasn't new. It's not like they just went,

hey, how do you fancy having some online gaming? That would be a really great idea. It was already there. It's been there for three decades, okay? It wasn't anything new that happened then. All that we did was, graft on top of an existing, illegally dominated marketplace, some regulated license gaming. And consumers have flocked to it now and they've seen it. So as regulated gambling grows,

illegal gambling is still growing in any marketplace. Now we've got the unacknowledged fair, which if you ask me where that came from. A lot of people looked at the patchwork quilt of legality in America. 31 states for sports betting after eight years. Seven states for legal online casino. Now, that's up to lawmakers to decide what they want, isn't it? That's why we're in this kind of weird Catch-22 situation where you can have North Carolina, all forms of gaming, and South Carolina with none. Some reason we thought we could just throw it all in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. And you were getting stolen from.

The internet came. We have not adapted. This is just like everything else. Some of this conversation is we have not adapted to the technology realities. It's a consequence of the tech. Yeah. It's a consequence of the tech. You know, internet, ubiquitous at high speed internet, smartphones and the web.

We are operating because that took it way out of Las Vegas and Atlantic City 30 years ago. Took it away years ago. And also, this was already happening with the telephone, because we had telephone betting. Why do we have things like betting over state lines and all this kind of stuff? Because all that telegraphic transfer stuff was meant to keep all the money in Vegas, and it didn't. And the mob got behind that immediately.

So everyone's exploited the tech, everyone's exploited legal loopholes. The point now is... Politicians are just behind. We're telling you what's going on out there. We're showing you where the marketplace is. You need that awareness to have ability and then action comes from that ability. Right now in America, you're at a point where you need to do something about the regulated space because you need to be able to be a bit.

basically say they are dealing with a whole raft of consequences which nobody saw years ago. Now we can clearly show you it's a marketplace that's dominated by unregulated operations. They are stealing money from your state, stealing money from your country, and abusing your consumers and your children too. There's an audience to an unregulated gambling company. I don't care if you're a self-excluded gambler. I don't care if you're a problem gambler. I don't care if you're a child.

I'll take your money. As long as you can get me a credit card number, you're good. Your bet's good here. If you win, I may not pay you back, but that's another risk of dealing with unregulated. people. The unacknowledged area, so things like what not, the growth of trading card platforms, prediction market platforms, even social casinos and sweepstates casinos. Why did

they exist, Ryan? They exist because you have a vacuum in America, because you have a lot of unregulated gambling and this unsatisfaction of the consumer on I want to have some entertainment on my sports. I want to have betting on my sports. If you can't get it, if you can't get the bet you want, at the liability

level, I want to win this much from it, you will go somewhere that gives it to you. And the ability of consumers to basically do deals with unregulated gaming companies. At the micro betting level, it's not being satisfied. So where's that moving to now? It's moving to fantasy sports. It's moving to social casinos, sweepstates casinos. It's moving to other forms of things that look very much like gambling, but right now they're not called gambling. And who's losing money out of all of this stuff? American consumers and American taxpayers, ultimately who loses here. And the American states, who basically should be getting the benefit

of this and aren't. I guess the argument, though, on the gray area of companies that are, I mean, there's a lot of American-based companies in that. And who benefits? fits, if it's an American-based whatnot, or eBay, or insert name here. And I'm not necessarily saying everyone of the, every country.