Tech Won't Save Us - How Sports Betting Is Fueling Gambling Addiction w/ Alex Shephard

Episode Date: April 18, 2024

Paris Marx is joined by Alex Shephard to discuss the legalization of sports betting in the United States, the growing influence of gambling in professional sports, and its negative impact on the lives of sports fans.Alex Shephard is a senior editor at The New Republic.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.Also mentioned in this episode:Alex wrote about sports gambling for The New Republic.The Wall Street Journal recent explored the wider backlash to sports betting in light of the Shohei Ohtani scandal.Last year, the New York Times gutted its unionized sports section to replace it with non-union writers at The Athletic.Psychologist Meredith K. Ginley explained how sports betting apps hook people on regular gambling.Support the show

People like sports gambling. They're not concerned about the other problems in part because I think, you know, that's a part of the larger discussion we're having. It's an atomization issue, right? Gambling addiction is something that happens to other people. But like the ultimate result here for me is a situation in which everything is being degraded. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks. And before we get into this week's episode, just a reminder that this month, April, is our fourth birthday. You know, it's four years of making this show from way back in the

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you can get a shout out on the show, you can get access to premium episodes that we did from our last special series about Elon Musk in October. The full version of the interviews that we did for the guests of that series are available for paying supporters. So if you want all of that, and to help us hit our goal so we can make this special series on AI hype and data centers, make sure to go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and become a supporter. And of course, that will also make sure that tech won't save us is sustainable and we can keep making this for a long time to come. at the New Republic. And he recently wrote a piece about sports gambling and how much these gambling apps like DraftKings and FanDuel have increasingly become part of sports and just how it works in the United States since it's been legalized in 2018. How much that is changing the way sports are done, the way sports are broadcasted, the way sports are reported about,

but also what it means for the fans of sports who are engaging in it and are now being increasingly pressured and incentivized to get into gambling to a much greater degree than they used to in the past and how that is leading to a real epidemic and crisis of gambling addiction as a result of this because of the types of people that these apps are targeting. That also leads to serious questions about the sports themselves and the integrity of those sports as you have these incentives to push people to gamble. But also when you're making bets on different ways that the game could play out, there are incentives there, of course, to try to change the way that the game is played so that certain bets become more likely to succeed over others. So there are a lot of serious and important questions here. We touched on the problem of

sports gambling last year with Ed Ongwezo Jr. when we talked about the financialization of everything, but I thought that this was a topic that deserved its own specific attention. As you can tell from the interview when we get into it, I am not a big sports person myself. I'm not someone who watches the sports. I don't have a favorite team or anything like that. But I've certainly seen my grandfather or my father watching sports on TV. I've seen the way that sports betting has increasingly worked its way into the way that sports are presented. And of course, even just as someone who doesn't watch sports a lot, I've heard a lot of ads for things like DraftKings and FanDuel on other podcasts and in other media, because these businesses have just become so significant in the past few years,

and are hard to dislodge because so many people are making money off of them, even if they're not, you know, the gamblers who directly engage with them. And that makes it difficult to actually tackle this problem. So I hope you enjoy this conversation. I had a great time speaking with Alex and learning more about this whole field of things that he's talking about. Because as I say, there's a lot on the sports side of things

that I'm not super familiar with. So I hope you enjoy this conversation as well. If you are a sports fan, I hope you feel that I did this topic justice, even though I'm not watching sports all the time, like some people. And I certainly don't mean that as a dig, just to be clear. Totally fine if you watch sports. It's just not my thing. So with that said, if you like this week's episode, and if you just enjoy the show in general and the critical conversations that we have on here, I would ask you to go to patreon.com slash tech won't save us this month to become a supporter and help us hit our goal.

In doing so, you can join supporters like Nathan from the UK, Peter from Sweden, Sylvia in Calgary, Matt in London, UK, Aka in Cape Town, South Africa, JPC from Chicago, Blaine from Texas,

and Birgitta Jonsdottir in Reykjavik, Iceland. Thanks so much to those supporters and the hundreds of others supporting the show over on Patreon. And with that said, enjoy this week's conversation. Alex, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. It's good to be here. Great to speak with you. You have this new piece in The New Republic, digging into this increasingly large problem of sports gambling. And of course, anyone who watches sports regularly, or even

occasionally will have seen how much these apps like DraftKings and FanDuel have become prevalent throughout these sports. You know, even if you're not someone who regularly watches sports, you might just see it advertised on other shows or on podcasts that you listen to because these ways of betting on these games have become so common. So I wanted to start with where this really came from, because I feel like 10 years, we didn't see so much of this. So why has it become so common recently? Yeah, so basically, there was a law that was passed in 1992, that essentially banned states from creating their own laws regulating sports gambling, right? And it effectively banned all forms of sports betting in the country. There are certain, I think, casinos that may have had it, but for the most part ruled that the law that had banned sports

betting was unconstitutional. The way that we've seen kind of conservative Supreme Court do again and again, it just sort of kicked issues that have been regulated by the federal government in some way back to the states. And since then, there's just been a total explosion. New Jersey was first because they had sued. They were basically ready to rock as soon as this law was passed. I think here in New York, I could take the train to the Meadowlands and did a couple of times to place bets, I think as early as 2019. But basically, by the end of the pandemic, or the quote unquote end of the pandemic, there were laws that have passed to legalize betting in dozens of states. Right now, it's at 38 plus Washington, D.C. So, you know, I think in theory, what you had was a situation in which, you know, it

was a kind of classic states' rights issue, right? You know, a classic kind of dry constitutional problem. But the states wanted to legalize sports betting because it's a revenue generator, right? You can tax the hell out of it and you can make a ton of money, right? So when this ruling came down, I think the estimates were that it could open up something like $150 billion nationally. And you basically see in a steady increase up to close to that number now, just in the intervening five years. And for the most part, there are some restrictions depending on the state. But for the most part, if are some restrictions, depending on the state. But you know, for the most part, if you want to gamble on sports, you know, I think the thing that the Supreme Court

probably didn't consider at the time was that you didn't need to go to a casino anymore, right, that you could just do everything, you know, on your phone. And I think that that's been actually the shift that I don't even think that, you know, when I was reading through some of the coverage at the time that people didn't quite anticipate happening, that what you've seen is an explosion, you know, yes, at sports books and like, you know, you can even go to some arenas, right, where there is an actual sports book in the lobby somewhere. But for the most part, if you want to bet, if I want to bet on sports here in New York, I can, you know, load DraftKings on my phone or FanD fan duel and then various casinos mgm being the biggest one also have their own sports

books as well but what you've seen is a really fast embrace of sports gambling both by states but also by what are essentially tech companies that have gamified sports betting even more than it already is right so the explosion of kind of like prop bets in particular is a big one. Those are extraordinarily profitable for gambling companies because they don't hit very often. And if you're doing individual profits, you're almost always going to lose money. And you're very rarely going to make a lot of money. And that's sort of like where the door got kicked open here, I guess, is that, you know, all of a sudden, you know, in 2018, if I was watching, let's say, Liverpool versus Manchester United or the Knicks versus the Atlanta Hawks, I would just be watching the game.

I might be looking at Twitter or something, but now I can watch it and say, I think that Mitchell Robinson's going to get more than 11 and a half rebounds in this game. And Josh Hart's going to hit X amount of threes. And all of a sudden, you're watching the game differently. For states, there was a push here because essentially, it's free tax revenue. So you don't have to think about difficult things like, let's say, here in New York, state and local taxes are a huge deal, right? So you can kick that to the curb. But for sports leagues, I think, and this is another thing that was not anticipated in 2018, when this happened, essentially, there was a sort of hockey stick curve in terms of revenue from TV deals. And part of that was based on the assumption of globalization, right? That you could open up new markets. So if you're the NBA, you're looking at China. China's got a billion people, right? So

you're selling TV rights on the presumption that you're going to have this huge explosion of money coming in. And for cable companies, for a long time, sports was like the most important moat, right? That if you want to keep people locked in, right? Like if I want to watch the Super Bowl, I can't go anywhere else for it, right? I have to have a TV and a connection somewhere. But what you've seen is I think with the rise of the Netflix model, there's been a huge surge in cord cutting that has diminished the ability for sports leagues to sell their TV rights to other companies and to create these kinds of bidding wars, right? You had a situation, for instance, last year in which the Women's World

Cup, which is a huge event growing in popularity, in a lot of countries, they were struggling to sell TV rights to it. So for leagues that require constant influxes of money, sports gambling also provided a new revenue stream at a time that it was desperately needed. And I think those two things have, there's been a confluence there, right? That states want the money, sports leagues want the money. And so what you've seen is just this huge exponential rise almost every year. And with that, which we'll talk about in a second, you know, an explosion of social problems as well that I think have not been thought through at all. Yeah, that's fascinating to hear. And

unfortunately, not surprising, but also very disappointing, you know, especially when we started to get into the broader effects. There are a number of things I want to pick up on there, but you talk in particular, and I feel like DraftKings and FanDuel are the big ones, but you can, of course, inform me if there are other kind of key ones there. Were these companies that were already kind of ready to go in 2018 when the Supreme Court decision was decided in order to kick it back to the states and so the states could start legalizing it in the way that they have? Or are these companies that really kind of saw the opportunity of 2018 and then launched after that? And does the fact that

a lot of these bets are being placed through apps and through these tech companies, does that diminish the amount of revenue that states potentially receive from it? Or does it not really matter in that case? This is where I'm not an expert fully, but I believe that what happened was that DraftKings is American and was founded essentially in 2012. Again, with the assumption that sports betting was going to come, gamified, appified sports betting was going to come. FanDuel was started in Europe where sports betting has been endemic for a very long time, and particularly in the UK, or at least that's the area in which I have the most sort of knowledge or expertise of it and experience. And so FanDuel was started,

I think, in Scotland, and it quickly merged with sort of Paddy Power, which is the big sports book in the UK. You know, again, the assumption was that this was going to come to the US at some point. And I think basically, what you saw was by the end of 2018, they were really ready. So, so, you know, DraftKings and FanDuel started to really advertise heavily in the US in 2015, 2016, slowly sort of built up with the getting ready, essentially, to take over the online sports betting here in the U.S. And, you know, in terms of the principle of it, it's not that different from the way that you would bet on sports 40 years ago, right? Like there too, you would have an odds maker and they would, you know, usually have some

form of expertise that they would use to screw you over in some way. But I think what you've seen now, which is the big shift is just that it is so easy to do. And, you know, they were essentially using the exact same kind of tech that you see in social media and, you know, even things like Candy Crush or something to essentially be nudging you all the time. And at the same time, I think the advertising strategy has been really aggressive. You know, if there was a long period in which you couldn't watch sports, listen to sports media, you know, engage with sports media and not just be constantly bombarded with offers of free money, essentially, you know, so you still get them now. It's a little less, but, you know, where it's essentially like, oh, we'll match. You give us $1,000, we'll give you

$1,000, right? And obviously that money stays in your account. So you have to keep gambling from it. That's more or less how it started. But I think there was another element as well, which again, is something we should probably get into a little bit later, which is that obviously it's not a particularly great time for the media industry. And I think sports media in particular has really struggled for a long time, you know, local newspapers, you know, or even larger regional newspapers were kind of hotbed of where you would get information about the Knicks or whatever. There's been a huge contraction in that type of coverage. And the advertising money has just been completely destroyed by Google and Facebook.

So companies like The Athletic, which was found in the mid-2010s and was purchased by The New York Times a few years ago, partly as a way to get rid of their unionized sports section, which they successfully did last year, which was evil. When you look at that kind of coverage, what you see, it's all sports betting stuff, like all the time. Everything is sponsored by FanDuel, right? Shams Churania, who's the sort of big scoop guy for The Athletic, he has a kind of video show that I think is sponsored by FanDuel, right? And, you know, for a long time, I couldn't listen to it because the athletics, you know, sort of flagship soccer podcast, which was started by a bunch of guys who used to be

at the Guardian, that was also sponsored by Paddy Power. And like, when you listen to it, you're just constantly being overwhelmed with offers to bet. But what you've really seen, I think this has been over the last two years, is like on TV and in media in particular, it's just people are talking about gambling all the time, all the time. And it's sponsored by everything. And that, I think, has been one of the sort of insidious like creep elements here where you've just seen this sort of slow rise, this little infection essentially of gambling in sports itself. So that, you know, if you're watching baseball now, you see a win probability like thing, which is stupid because, you know, the win probability is the score, right? If the Mets are

up four to nothing, you're saying, well, the Mets are winning, they're probably going to win. But that too is like, I think where you're seeing this kind of shift, right? It merges with the rise in analytics and sports as well, but it's a nudge. And, you know, again, like, you know, if I have ESPN on, which I sometimes do while I'm working, you get the lines all the time. So heat versus the hawks, over under 190 and a half points or something. It'd be more than that, but 212 and a half, let's say. That I think has been one of the more interesting elements here is that as we've come out of the zero interest rate era, is that the ads and podcasts have shifted, right? So it used to be that you have a company to say, we're going to disrupt the underwear

industry, right? And investors were like, well, screw it, we have free money. So we will invest in the underwear company, that money is gone now. And like, you know, when I listened to Bill Simmons, or whatever, you know, I'm not hearing about disruptions to food service or disruptions to clothing or disruptions to analog radios. I don't know. I'm what I'm hearing is two things. One is a return to just sort of more ordinary advertisements, like listening to Simmons, right? He's advertising shell gas and like cars or something. But the one exception here is sports gambling, right? That's the sort of one tech company that is doing it. And it's because, you know, they know that if

they can get people on board, you're kind of stuck there for a really long time. I wanted to ask you about how the introduction of sports betting changes the way that the game is presented. And I hadn't even considered the aspect of, you know, the media industry itself has been in a lot of trouble. The advertising has been declining. And so you need these new revenue sources to bring it in. And so the introduction of sports betting then provides this whole new revenue stream, not just for the leagues and not just for the state and local governments and people like that who are taking advantage of it, but also the media who is presenting it to a lot of people who are watching online or watching on TV or even on streaming and being presented to them that way. How does that change the way that fans relate to sports? And when you go to watch a game, whether it's in the stadium or whether it's just sitting and watching it on your TV, how does it change the experience of that game and the enjoyment out of it? Like, is it more annoying because all the sports betting is there?

Or does it feel like, oh, I have this new opportunity to engage with it because now there are all these new stats that are being presented to me and I can maybe make some money? Like, what's the shift there? Yeah, I mean, I think it's profound, right? Because you just hear about it all the time. Like, I go to the knicks with some frequency here um i watch sports a lot out too and like you're just overhearing people talking about betting all the time or profits that they've that they've made and i think one one point i i overlooked earlier is the other aspect of it as well which is that the leagues have been obsessed too with essentially another kind of cliff, which is just that Gen Z or sort of younger people have been, are much less inclined to like watch full games, right?

That, so, you know, there have been all these kinds of crazy proposals, particularly in soccer for how to deal with it. And I think the chairman of Real Madrid was talking about, we need to make soccer more like Fortnite or something. And what the hell does that mean? But, you know, I think it's particularly, sports leagues saw this as a way to sort of keep young men on board. And what the hell does that mean? But, you know, I think it's particularly, sports league saw this as a way to sort of keep young men on board. And I think it's worked to at least some extent. But yeah, you're constantly hearing about prop bets, right? People are constantly just talking about this. And I think the thing that I've noticed, which has affected my ability to enjoy it is like, there's a real brittleness, I guess, that's kind of crept in. People are just pissed off all the time. Prop bets are hard. They're

really difficult to do. Just to explain, a prop bet is essentially a series of bets. When you think about betting, you think about, oh, I'm going to bet on a team to win. I'll put $10 on the New York Rangers to beat the Buffalo Sabres. And again, that actually tends to be a better bet for sportsbooks tend to make less money on it. Prop bets, you can theoretically make more money, but they're harder to hit. And so the companies really aggressively push prop bets because that's where most of their money comes from. And that is essentially you're making a series of bets.

So they all have to hit for you to win. So ordinarily, to use my Rangers and Sabres thing, let's say the Rangers have a one and a half to one chance or two to one chance to make it simpler to win. I put down 20 bucks, right? Then they win, you get whatever. But with a prop bet, it will be a series of things. So it might be that the Rangers win

and that some guy scores a goal and some guy gets in a fight or gets a foul or something. And then when you do that, like if all three of those things hit, technically the odds are better, right? You suddenly take a bet that was two to one and it's now 18 to one, right? So your $20 becomes 350 basically, but like that never works. And like, people are just talking about this all the time. And then the other aspect of it as well as people are like yelling at the players, you know what I mean? Like, they want to use the example of Alex Ovechkin to score a goal or somebody to do something. And like, they're furious when it doesn't happen. I think, you know, especially because of the amount of alcohol in particular that's involved in sports watching, I think you

see this kind of extension. And there's been a real interesting. I think you see this kind of extension and there's been a real interesting, I think, rise right now. And you see with social media too, I think that the players themselves hate it, right? Because people are just yelling at them about their bets. They open Twitter or whatever, and people are yelling about their bets. And I think social media was already bad, right? Because it turns everyone into a heckler and a troll, but it's become significantly worse. And again, because people are like, you cost me $200 or whatever. I was reading in the Wall Street Journal that the point guard for the Indiana Pacers, Tyrese Halliburton, said that he was talking to a sports psychologist because of the negativity on social media, because so many people were

placing prop bets on him. And of course, then losing money and then getting really angry. The head coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers said that he was getting texts from people because again, they were losing money and they were angry. Apparently, this is a big problem in college football and stuff like that as well. Yeah, it's a real shift to, I guess, the way that people engage with the game because now you're not just going to watch it or not sitting on your couch to watch it and enjoy it. But now it's a way that you're making money or more often, I guess, losing money, you know, and much more common than in the past. Again, because you're saying you could often bet anyway, but it would have been more difficult.

The prop betting in particular, is that something that is like made more common and easier to do because it's all on apps instead of, you know, some other more traditional way of betting on the games? It's a couple of things. I think one is just that you could always place prop, but you know, like I would go to Vegas and place prop bets on stuff before, right? And because they are fun, but the reason why they're so common is I think kind of similar. I think one is it's a sort of lottery system, right? So it's not as big of an accomplishment. You don't get as much money if you just, you know, bet the money line or you just bet on one team to win. It creates, I think, you know, a sense that there's an extraordinary amount of money to be made somehow or somewhere. And, but again, the

big reason is just that they're really hard to hit. And most of the time you lose, right? And you might lose by one rebound or one steal or, you know, a foul or a couple of free throws. And that I think makes people furious. But the reason why they're being pushed is just because that's where they make their money, right? So, you know, if you're just betting the line, particularly just the money line or something, you know, you're not going to make a ton of money, but the, you have like a 30% chance of essentially winning. I think that number goes down to 10 or lower with prop bet. And, you know, when you multiply this by several million bets or, you know, whatever you want to call it, several tens of billions of dollars, it's a ton of money.

So the sports books themselves really, really, really push prop bets. And that was the thing as well. Like, you know, there are a lot of like sports podcasts I listened to for a while and they would do a prop bet at the end. You know what I mean? Like, you know, they'd be sponsored by a casino or something, but that would be part of it as well. And I think, you know, to go back to the earlier conversation, sports always make people mad, right?

Like I get mad about sports all the time. You know, I'm sure I have a cracked phone from the Buffalo Bills losing in the playoffs, even though I knew they were going to lose. But I think what you've seen, I think, and this gets to part of the other problem as well, is like, at least theoretically, they also exist as a way to form some kind of social bond with other people. And you're sharing the same experience, right? And that experience is theoretically like, I want the Knicks to win, right? I want Liverpool Football Club to win. And prop bets, I think, erode that sense of solidarity, right? Like in that sense of communal enjoyment, right? Because you have this kind of individual financial relationship with the game, whereas before, I'm from Elmira, New York, so I

like the Bills, I like the Knicks, right? You know, I'm Irish and depressed, so I like Liverpool. And in this instance, what you're seeing is the degradation of that. And I think that's one of the things that really hits me is like, it kind of creates this atomization of sports fandom itself, where all of a sudden, you're not just invested in the Knicks winning, the Knicks have to win and Josh Hart has to hit more than three and a half, three pointers and get two steals. And that sucks. Like it's stupid. And again, like it creates the other issue as well, which is, I think one reason that I like sports too, is like, you know, I look at this thing all the time, right? Like, and it is one of the few things that I can just engage with, like on a kind of psychic level

and like, yeah, every now and then I'll tweet something stupid during it. But for the most part, like I want to watch them. I want to hang out with my friends. I want to experience a kind of social bond. And you see that cracking, I think with, with the rise of betting. And again, to also with the larger infection of sports gambling here too, where it's like, you're never just experiencing the game anymore, right? You're also being reminded of what's the line, you know what I mean? And, and how can you make money on it? And, you know, are the Mets going to get more than six and a half runs? And that sucks. Yeah, it absolutely does. You know, even as someone who like is not someone who really watches sports, but they hear you describe it, like, I'd be super disappointed if, you know, there was something that I really loved. And I was seeing this kind of change happen to it, right?

Where kind of this communal aspect, this kind of aspect of, you know, enjoying it with other people was being eroded because people want to make more money off of it, basically. I feel like hearing what you're saying too, it sounds like the prop bets also take advantage of people's love of the game and people's feeling of the expertise, right? Because they're watching it so much, they're paying attention to the players. They're like, oh, I know this person can do this so i'm gonna put some money on it and then you know it doesn't happen and they feel like that person has like betrayed them personally or something yeah yeah and one thing there's another thing too which is like part of it as well which

kind of there's a FOMO element as well right or like there's an infection of kind of like hustle culture right that's like you should be making money while you're watching this game and if you're not betting like you're not doing it right and that's like the way that it gets pushed on you all the time i think that's like one of the things that really makes me recoil is that i think it like exploits the kind of you know whatever you want to call it crisis and masculinity or something and people's economic precariousness as well where you're just like yeah it's giving you a sense that this thing that again was like you think about the way that these teams started for the most part like there are sources

of local and regional identity and pride and that's not really true in like the era of mass culture anymore but it still exists to some extent and i think there's been a real erosion in that too and it's like the games themselves are seen as just another way for you to make money to rise and grind. And like you're getting ripped off and you do it too. Yeah. I wanted to pivot away from talking about the fans and kind of their experience of this to talk about the players itself, because I feel like one of the things I picked up from the piece that you wrote was that there's a growing number of scandals around the players engagement with sports betting and what it's doing to that side of things. You know, I was reading in the Wall Street Journal that the NFL

had to suspend 10 players for betting last year. And the NBA has had a growing number of complaints from players and head coaches about the influence of betting. And it seems in particular, this scandal around Los Angeles Dodgers Shohei Otani has really blown up recently. Can you tell us what that has been all about and what it says about the influence of betting when it comes to the players as well? Yeah. So, I mean, I think you see it kind of everywhere. So the Otani scandal is a goofy one. So he's a Japanese player. He doesn't speak English. He just signed this like massive, I think it's a $700 million contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers. He's an Japanese player. He doesn't speak English. He just signed this massive, I think it's a $700 million contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers. He's an amazing player. He's the best player in

baseball. And it's sort of like this baseball savior kind of. He pitches, he hits, he does both things extraordinarily well. But he's also this kind of weird cipher. No one knows anything about him. People didn't know what his dog's name was for a long time. It was revealed when he signed with the Dodgers. He got married and he was just like, hey, I'm married now. And everyone was like, well, to who? And they found out like 48 hours later. And part of that is just he's a private guy, but also he is essentially everything that he did was mediated through this translator, who was also his best friend. And then, basically, it happened very quickly. It was a weekday evening. And the Dodgers fired the translator. And kind of nobody knew why. And then quickly, it became clear that Otani's account had sent $4.5 million to a guy who was running an illegal sportsbook in Anaheim or somewhere in Southern California. And the question was immediately like, well, is Otani betting on baseball, right? There was famously the Pete Rose scandal in the 1970s,

1980s, that, you know, ultimately led to Pete Rose, who is the most, I think the most hits of any player ever being banned from baseball and from entering the Hall of Fame. Going back even further, there was the scandal in 1919 which ended i think resulted in eight players who were banned forever for throwing the world series because of the mafia involvement there's a good john salis movie eight men out that's about that you know so there was this concern it does seem like what happened was actually that the translator was a gambling addict and did steal this money from otani he's uh facing federal charges now for doing that. But I think that raised the salience of this issue. You know, there in basketball, you had another situation

where this guy, Jonte Porter, who plays for the Toronto Raptors, he's the scrub, end of the bench player. But, you know, it seems like what was happening was that he was in this kind of Discord chat or WhatsApp group, I think Discord chat, with a bunch of guys. And they would say, look, you know, play a little bit and then call out Sick. And they would place these kind of prop bets on him getting less than four rebounds, less than one three-pointer, right? And this was flagged by, I think, FanDuel, maybe DraftKings, maybe both, because they were like, oh, we're seeing the biggest payout that they did

for these two games that he allegedly did this were on prop bets made on this guy who plays six minutes a game for the Raptors and who stinks. His brother's a freak too, but that's a whole other subject. But his brother's good. And you've also seen this in European soccer. So in Europe, Europe is interesting because they've had legal sports betting for much longer. And you can really see this. If you go to a place like Blackpool in England or something, you see societal rot in which sports gambling is playing a major role. I've been wandering around there and you just see dead-eyed people. Because when he was in the lower league, he had placed hundreds of bets. There's a big scandal in Italy, essentially, in which three of their best young players, who I think had all played together, also had placed hundreds of bets. One of them plays at Juventus, had lost over a million dollars.

Tonali has been banned, I think, for over a year. He's going to miss the European Championships this summer. And it was found out recently, or at least alleged recently, that he had continued to bet on sports even after he had been suspended. And there are a couple of things here, right? I think there's a needle to thread. And I think when you talk to people who are defensive of the gambling industry, what they will say for the most part is like, oh, well, these companies like flag these bets, right? You saw that with Jonte Porter, and like the Tonali bets, they were made via illegal apps. And they say, well, those are illegal bets. The players aren't supposed to bet on themselves anyways. But I think you're seeing two things. One is

a question about the integrity of sports themselves. And I think it's probably likely that Jonte Porter will get a lifetime ban, just to be made an example of. Tenali, again, is going to miss out on two years of what is essentially his prime or close to him. He's young, but he's a very, very good midfielder. And it's because sports are trying to protect the integrity of the game. But I think what people overlook here is that the target demographic for sports gambling is essentially men in their 20s, right? And athletes are men in their 20s for the most part. And they are going to get caught up in the same types of societal rot that other people are, you know, like, Sander Tonali is probably a gambling

addict, right? Ivan Tony probably has a gambling problem. To move it into an even bigger picture, the thing that's interesting about Ivan Tony is that he plays for Brentford FC. Brentford is owned by a professional gambler. They are sponsored by a gambling company. And you create this weird world in which the players rightfully are banned from betting because it screws up the question of, you know, is this real, right? Are the players trying to win? But everywhere they look, right? Like Ivan Tony, when he came back from being suspended for gambling would look down on his shirt and it says Hollywood bets, right? And you're being just reminded all the time, just bombarded, right? The sides of the stadium are paddy power ads. But usually that's certainly the case in some parts of Europe too. And William Hill or whatever they have there. And I think that that's the sort of like larger hypocrisy question here. Obviously the integrity problem is a big one. And I think it's one that the leagues are trying to solve by dishing out pretty severe punishments to players to try to make examples of them. But gambling is an addiction, right? With the exception of the Porter scandal, which is pretty

minor, there hasn't been anything major that I've seen that suggests that there's been anything that's really screwed up, like in the way that the 1919 World Series was literally thrown by the mafia. But you see it in all these other little ways, right? And, and again, it's being done just for stupid reasons. So people make money, or even just that they feel like they have a sense of control. And I don't really know what they can do about it. I mean, I think to some extent, there's going to be a huge rise of just enforcement. And I think I'm sure that the teams are going to be monitoring what their players are doing as well, to an extent. But like, at the end of the day, these are guys in their 20s, like guys in their 20s gamble, and they gamble because everywhere

they look, they're told to gamble, you know, it's become a societal norm, they want to be a part of this thing. I have people in my family that have gambling problems or have had gambling problems. And again, I think how you control that is an interesting question. But yeah, I think they're what we're seeing. And I don't know how it stops, essentially. It's like you're seeing a slow just increase in minor... I think they're still relatively minor scandals. I mean, Ivan Tony, Sander Tenali, these guys may have bet hundreds of times, but Tony never bet on a game he was playing in. Tenali, there have been some allegations that he may have picked up

a stupid yellow card here and there for gambling reasons, but it's not something that affects the outcome. But I think what you're seeing is you introduce poison into the water. Everyone drinks the water, and that's going to include players who are involved in this too. Yeah. So I guess the bigger issue or the bigger concern is less than using like, you know, insider knowledge from the sport to make their own bets, but rather starting to change how they play because they have relationships with people who can place bets and are going to make money off of that because of it, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. I think that that's probably the larger concern at this point. I mean,

they do have very protected inside information. It's proprietary, right? Like, there's a guy who got arrested for stealing information. This is not gambling related, but you know, who works for the Timberwolves, right? And you see things like leak out with like lineups and other things like that, that can affect gambling, right? Or, you know, like, I like to play a fantasy Premier League or something and like i always get mad because some guys know who's playing and who's not you know beforehand and i don't know that and that doesn't matter because it's free and doesn't really affect anything it's 100 possible that you will see some sort of major event that is skewed you know in favor of gambling interest at some point but i think what you're

more likely to see is just like a thousand cuts scenario in which you know every now and then it's the jonte porters of the world that i think are probably more concerning right because they might just want to be cool they might want to feel like they're participating in something but also like you know jonte porters on a a couple of 10 day contracts for the Raptors. Like his brother's got a hundred million dollars or whatever, but he's taken more than me, but not a lot. And I think that, you know, it's an opportunity for them to cash out too. And I think that shouldn't be overlooked either.

That makes a lot of sense. You know, when you were talking about the broader impacts and, you know, what the players were doing and how they're still in their 20s as well, and they have these same kind of pressures and wants to, you know, do this gambling like anyone else. I think that gets us into the bigger question that your piece was really getting to, you know, when you called this sports betting, sports gambling, to be very clear about what it was and the broader impacts of having these gambling ads everywhere. Every time you see sports, you see these encouragements to place a bet or place a bunch

of bets when we're talking about prop bets on different things that are happening in the sport and how that pushes this greater prevalence of gambling within society. And of course, this addiction to gambling, because then you lose some money and then you want to try to make it back and you're constantly making more and more bets. So talk to us a bit about that aspect of this, how by legalizing sports betting, you now have a lot more people who are engaging in this gambling, getting addicted to it and the crisis that that causes in their lives. The extent to which it's normalized as well as like, and I think like binge drinking is a reasonable comp here too. Right. And that it's like, you look at the way that Budweiser is marketed or something.

It's like, you hang out with your friends, you drink a bunch of beer or whatever. Don't you want to hang out with your friends and drink a bunch of beer? Gambling has a similarly kind of insidious soft marketing side to it, right? It's just like, oh, don't you want to just hang out at the bar with your boys and bet on college football or whatever. And what you've seen really quickly is just a huge explosion in addiction, which is not surprising at all because it's so easy, right? Like it used to be, you would still have to do something, right? Like you would have to get money. You would have to call somebody. You'd have to give the money to somebody else. You have to, you know, usually you'd have to get in your car. There was some friction in the process of placing

the bet. Yeah, exactly. I think now you have a situation in which there is no friction at all. That's, I think, a huge, huge problem. It's still pretty early, but there are states, I think, particularly in the Northeast, that have been really good at studying this. New Jersey was the first state to legalize sports betting. And they've essentially seen a steady climb in calls to gambling addiction hotlines over the last five years. In Connecticut, they legalized gambling in 2021. They saw a 91% increase in calls to gambling addiction hotlines. There was a paper that came out that I thought was really interesting late last month, I think on April 1st, actually, from the University of New Mexico that essentially found extremely high rates of correlation between binge drinking and sports gambling,

which is not surprising. But I think, again, too, it's one of the things that's overlooked here is like, that's also the way that it's kind of sold as well, right? That this is the thing you go out and you do, you go to the bar and you place bets. And again, I think like you're just seeing, you know, you look at the credit crunch right now, you know, that's an inflation problem more than anything else. But I think that it's also true that people are looking for magic ways to get more money and sports then you're like, well, the way I can get this money back is it's easy. It's place another bet. Right. And you just get trapped in that cycle really quickly. And like the bets hit sometimes, you know, some of the bets work. You need to occasionally win to keep coming back. Yeah. Yeah. But like overall you, you lose. Right. And I think that the way, you know, it works with your brain is a kind of similar thing that it gives you a sense of, yeah, of control over these kinds of events.

And you feel like, okay, if something bad happens, I can make something good happen just by, you know, picking up my phone and clicking a couple of buttons. And it's that type of sort of vicious cycle that I think is ensnaring a lot of people. And, and again, like the companies are just extremely aggressive in the way that they, they sort of onboard people. You know, I think there's going to be a point, I don't think it's, you know, a situation in which there will be exponential growth forever in terms of sports gambling, but you know, there's a huge amount of market capture here and like the apps themselves claim that they're good at flagging problem bettors but like you know at the point that

you're flagging a problem better too it's you know maybe too late for somebody as well and again some of them accept credit cards which is insane to me and it's just a completely screwed up system in which you can ruin your life with a couple of stupid bets. Yeah, and I've read as well, you were talking earlier about how a lot of these apps, I don't know if they still do it, but would basically say you can kind of have free money to start getting into it. And then once you do sign up for the app, once you're into it, especially when you're watching one of the games, you're constantly getting these notifications to like place additional bets on things that are happening as you're watching. So like, you know, we know with Facebook and the social media platforms and the way that many of these apps have been designed over a long period of time to use these push notifications to get you to come back and even learn from gambling techniques in order to design their systems. It's no surprise

then to see gambling apps that are designed to get you to bet on these games, and I'm sure things beyond that as well, to use these same tactics to get you to come back, to get you engaged in the system, to make sure that they're keeping you engaged and spending money, essentially. I like sports radio too, but it plays on a kind of similar impulse, right? Which is that people want to feel like they understand what's, you know, they have some sort of mastery over, over these systems and the games themselves. And I think that that's the other way that prop bets work too, is that it's like all a cart, right? Like you're kind of not just doing the same thing that everybody else is, right? So when one works, you have this special, it's because you're,

you have special knowledge of, I don't know why I keep using Josh Hart as an example, but whatever, you know, New York Knicks swing man, Josh Hart. And I think that that's part of it as well, right? Is that what it's selling to you is the sense that you understand what's happening right now. And like, you don't like the casinos no like they're really good you know the handful of times i've done prop bets on drafting fan duel like you're just like oh yeah they're usually you know they're not far off right like when they say four and a half rebounds they mean four and a half rebounds right like you know you're probably going to miss a prop bet by one or two and that i think is the other element of this right is that you know you may hit two of the three in a prop that right but like you're going to miss by just a hair and that near miss feeling is actually like the thing that makes you kind of

hooked because you're like i was this close but i can get it next time because like i got it right like i figured out the points assist rebounds but you're always going to be this close because they have large computers that are running huge numbers of simulations to figure these things out, I assume. But however they're doing it, like they're usually very good. You're not going to beat the casino. Like that's the whole thing. Only Donald Trump can lose money running a casino.

And I think that that's a big part of it, right? It's just that. And again, like it's almost impossible to watch anything without there being of it, right? It's just that, and again, like, it's almost impossible to watch anything without there being some reminder, right? Like, the American soccer coverage is a little bit less than most, but even there, it'll just be like, the odds, you know, the odds for Liverpool, Arsenal, Manchester City to win the title right now, you know, and, and you're just kind of like, they're all one point away from each other, right? Like, of course, the bookies think Manchester City is going to win because they won it for the last five years right so it doesn't

really tell you anything like that's the other that's the thing that makes me crazy about it because i'm just like i'm not learning anything useful here what i'm being told is just like what have you bet on this right now you know what i mean liverpool's plus 450 right definitely you know when you think about the broader impacts of it, as you were describing with so many more people calling into these gambling hotlines and just, you know, the fact that the economy itself is not in the greatest place right now, a lot of people are struggling in the sense that, you know, because we're in this inflation crisis, because the cost of everything has gone up so much because people's mortgages have gone up so much. There is this just kind of like general stress

that companies like this can take advantage of in saying, hey, you need a bit more money, try placing one of these bets. And then of course, naturally, when they lose many of those bets and lose a lot of money, you end up in this spiral. And in your piece, you talk about the connection between gambling addiction and then, you know, substance abuse and alcohol abuse and binge drinking and things like that. And it's completely understandable how that happens, right? Because you can already be in this desperate situation, then you're even more strapped for cash because these bets have failed. And then of course, you start drinking more because, you know, I'm in this terrible place, right? Yeah. I mean, I think like there's another possibility too, which is just that if you're predisposed to high-risk behavior, then being introduced to

another easy way to do high-risk behavior. And if you're engaged in something that, for instance, decreases your sense of inhibition or your ability to manage risk, or even your ability to really look at things in a longer term, which is essentially what's the appeal of alcoholism to some extent, to the extent that it has an appeal of alcoholism to some extent to the extent that it has an appeal it's sort of all of the above right that but again the larger situation is like again it i go back and forth on it right like in some ways alcohol is a really good a really good example and that um it's there are most people can just have a glass of wine or whatever, or two glasses of wine, you know, sometimes three glasses of wine and they're fine, but there are other people that

if you have one glass of wine, then you're going to have 15, you know, you know, 15 glasses of wine that would be horrible for the sugar intake, but, but whatever. And I think that, you know, the problem here for me is also just like the phone element, right? Like it just makes it, you know, again, too, there are two, you at least still have to go out and buy a bunch of wine or a bunch of beer or whatever you want. And here, it's just so easy to get hooked on it and to be just trapped there once you get there, that I think it's really, really dangerous. And there's just nothing, there's nothing to be done. So. Yeah. And on that point, you know, obviously we're talking about how a lot of state governments, you know, governments kind of legalize this over

the past number of years after the Supreme Court decision, because they saw the opportunity of the revenue that came with it. And I'm sure, you know, they were being lobbied by the companies that want it to be legalized so they can, you make their money on sports betting have we seen as these potential impacts have been growing as states like you know as you were talking about as states have seen calls to these gambling addiction hotlines increase significantly since the legalization of sports betting has there been any move to try to rein this in or at least play some rules around how it works? No. No, not at all.

You're not really seeing anything like that, I think, anywhere. I mean, I was doing a sort of cursory search earlier. No, I mean, I think the problem with it is, in the same sense we've been talking about this kind of vicious cycle that leads to gambling addiction like there's a kind of it may sound crass but there's like a virtuous cycle that has led to the spread of this right or virtuous if you are making money off of it right which is that obviously betting interests law spend a ton of money to make sure that this is that they can legalize gambling everywhere because they make a lot of money and states are strapped for money and you can tax this heavily you know you maybe you don't have to pass a you know tax levy or something to because you're getting more revenue from gambling and you know that was like why new jersey wanted to do it um and sports leagues are looking

at a very very uncertain future i think that that's something that's been kind of undercovered recently but they had been pitching themselves to owners as essentially a font of unlimited growth. They're going to take over the world and there's going to be cable revenue and everything else. And like, they're seeing that dry up. So they're looking at other places too. And, and gambling provides a window there. And again, as I was saying before, I think that there's, you know, they're also, I think that they're also extremely anxious about the TikTok generation or whatever. And this is a way that you can literally capture people to watching sports. And then there's sports media too, which is similarly in pretty deep trouble because it's media and everything else.

And it's very quickly reorienting itself and pushing gambling stuff and you see they're just huge go to the athletic that's a great example like just gambling stuff all over it advertisements are gambling they're just tips about gambling and and again like part of that again is you're just that's what your readers want and you're providing it to them but i think for all of those entities, all of which need money, or at least want money very much, but this has been a real boon. And it's relatively undercovered still.

And again, if you look at places like Europe and England in particular, there's a lot of really good writing and has been particularly in The Guardian, which has been very good about sports gambling, that drills in on just the societal impact that the premier league in particular that it's you know embrace of gambling has had on british society which was you know mess before anyways you know but they haven't done anything there either right and and i think here as well like it's sort of being treated like any other

kind of you know addiction problem which is that it just kind of gets swept under the rug right like it's like alcoholism or something as well you know you're not going to see a prohibition it's crazy that that was ever a constitutional amendment but like that era is long gone and again i think that like for the states it's free money and i think they're not thinking about it you know in terms of the larger societal cost as well. Like there is an actual cost to both the societal fabric, but also an economic cost too. And that's not being considered here either. But I think, again, it can be a problem, but Joe Biden wants young men to vote for him, right? Donald Trump wants young men to vote for him. They're not going to be like, sports gambling is terrible, right? Like it's not a winning political issue in that way. People like

sports gambling. They're not concerned about the other problems in part because I think that's a part of the larger discussion we're having. It's an atomization issue, right? Gambling addiction is something that happens to other people. But the ultimate result here for me is a situation in which everything is being degraded, right? The sports are being degraded. The societal fabric is being degraded. You're constantly just being told to do things that cost money that are outside of the actual enjoyment that you get from something. You're getting further and further away from the sense of connection and joy and pain and

whatever you feel from watching sports. It's being replaced by a sort of synthetic version of that that I think is really gross. Yeah, I think that's an essential point that, you know, obviously we're seeing far beyond sports and in many other parts of society. Yeah. And the only thing I was trying to look up any kind of initiatives to try to rein this in, and the only thing that I saw was the College Sport League, NCAA kind of trying to push to stop player specific bets. And a few states have done that, but that's about it. Alex, this has been a sobering, not particularly positive conversation.

You know, it hasn't told us the world is getting better or anything, but I think it is good to understand the impact of this, what it's actually doing. I really appreciate you taking the time to come on the show. Thanks so much. Yeah, it was great to talk to you. Take care.

Alex Shepard is a senior editor at The New Republic. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazineard is a senior editor at the New Republic. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Eric Wickham and transcripts are by Bridget Palou-Fry. Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week. Thank you.