Sports Betting: From Vegas to Our Smartphones

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BROADCASTER Breaking news, the FBI is sweeping in, making more than 30 arrests tonight, including an NBA star and an NBA coach who was coaching a big game just last night. Authorities say all part of a massive NBA and mafia gambling scandal.

JOSEPH NOCELLA JR: Your winning streak has ended. Your luck has run out. Violating the law is a losing proposition, and you can bet on that.

DAVID GREENE, HOST: Earlier this year, the FBI announced arrests in a sweeping sports betting probe involving current and former NBA players, accused of leaking insider information and taking part in rigged poker games. My first thought when this news broke recently was, what the hell? But why should we be surprised?

Over the last decade, pro sports leagues have gone from shunning gambling to embracing it, encouraging fans to do it. And it’s changed sports culture. So yeah, here we are now. The mafia swindling people out of money. NBA stars manipulating the outcomes of games by faking injuries. What’s led to this? Well, a Supreme Court ruling in 2018 opened the floodgates. Now you can bet on everything. Who scores first? Who tweaks an ankle? How many rebounds in the first half? But thanks to the apps, gambling is now something you can also do any time, anywhere, on the couch, at work, even while a game is being played in front of you.

For those of us vulnerable to addiction, it’s a perfect storm. The rush of the win and the illusion that control is just one more wager away. What used to take a trip to a casino now takes a few seconds on a phone, and the human toll from this is showing in mounting debt, broken relationships, and a growing number of people seeking help.

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DG: From WHYY and PRX, this is Sports in America. Today, we’re taking a hard look at our country’s complicated relationship with gambling. How it went from a backroom vice to a billion-dollar business you can carry right in your pocket. And how this phenomenon shapes teams, athletes, and particularly our experience as fans. Oftentimes on the show, we talk to athletes, but in this episode, we’re gonna try something a little different. We’ll start with the wild story of Vegas veteran, Beth Raymer, who was so immersed in the dizzying highs and lows of professional sports gambling that they made a movie about her life. We’ll learn how addiction affected her closest relationships. And then we’ll sit down with author and gambling expert, Jonathan Cohen, who helps us understand the implications of this addictive practice, once confined to the casinos in Vegas, moving to a momentary click on all of our phones.

And I gotta say, all of this is really personal for me.

When my mom died in 2006, I had to pay off all of her debts. And that meant going to this really sketchy dude’s house in Pennsylvania. It was her sports bookie. This is the guy who took her bets on the outcomes of games. And when she lost, she owed the bookie whatever amount she wagered, plus some interest, fees if it was done off the books, which it was.

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DG: The debt piled up fast, and the pressure to pay him back pushed my mom into some unsavory situations, including going to this guy’s house. So I now owed him a few thousand dollars, and the last thing I wanted was to have some guy chasing me down just as I was trying to grieve.

I have to say, I have a really complicated relationship with gambling. And if I’m gonna be totally honest with you here, paying off my mom’s gambling debt, it was actually kind of healing. It brought back so many joyful, fun memories of me and my mom gambling together. There was the traditional betting like craps and blackjack at the casino, but we’d also go over all of her bets on NFL games every Sunday morning.

But then I also do remember being scared as a kid when she would occasionally send me home and stay out at the casino herself all night long. And then she would come home a loser. I mean, it wasn’t tens of thousands of dollars, but it was enough to make me wonder sometimes if we would afford our rent that month. Bedding is intoxicating. I watched it with my mom. I still feel it myself today. And this is where I want to start understanding the roots of this. How we can learn this behavior from parents. How gambling can take over your life. And remember, this was before our phones, and all the encouragement from the sports leagues made things even worse.

This is all why I wanted to talk to author Beth Raymer. She also fell into a gambling obsession that was shaped by a parent. I actually talked to her for another show that I work on. It’s called David Green is Obsessed from Campside Media, and you can find it wherever you get your podcasts. We talk there about all kinds of obsessions, big and small, and what they say about us. Beth Raymer told me how crazy her life got. She ended up in Las Vegas working for a professional sports bettor named Dink. Hollywood turned her memoir called “Lay the Favorite” into a movie with Bruce Willis, Katherine Zeta Jones, and Vince Vaughn

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REBECCA HALL IN LAY THE FAVORITE: I came to Las Vegas to do something exciting and different. Do you know where I could find a job? So you’re a bookie?

BRUCE WILLIS IN LAY THE FAVORIE: Absolutely not. I’m a gambler. You can bet on anything.

REBECCA HALL IN LAY THE FAVORITE: Minus two, game two, two, four, $50.

DG: Beth like me learned to gamble as a kid.

Tell me about childhood, tell me about the parent who gambled, and tell me some of the memories there.

BETH RAYMER: Oh, gosh, it’s kind of, I mean, just listening to you talk, I had a very similar childhood. My dad was the gambler. Blackjack was probably his biggest game, but really, he would bet on anything. But being at the blackjack table with my father. Still, I mean, just the feelings just come back because when I was growing up, my dad would take me gambling. Like I always just went with him, and we would go, we lived in Florida, so we would take junkets to the Bahamas, and in the late eighties or even early eighties kids were allowed in the casinos, it’s not like how it is now.

DG: Ugh, I’m so jealous! I wanted to be in there so much! (Laughs)

BR: So I would just go sit with my dad at the table. The dealers would deal me in as almost like a, it’s the equivalent of like when you go to the bar, when I would go to the bar with my Dad, the bartender would give me a Shirley Temple. It was like just so I could be part of the environment. Well, this was the same thing. They would deal in the game, and I knew how to play about blackjack. I played blackjack a lot with my dad.

DG: What age were you now? Are we talking like nine, 10?

BR: I was probably like 10?

DG: Blackjack player 10. I love that.

BR: So, but it was very emotional. My dad, you k now, just the way that he would choose a dealer, we would have to look for a dealer. My dad did not like dealers who talked. He liked the like very silent dealers.

DG: Oh interesting. I like the talkers. I like the conversation.

BR: Oh, my dad would, if we got a talk, if like there was an exchange and the one dealer left and a new chatty dealer came in, my dad would like stop the game, stand up. My dad had a real big physical presence, very tall, good looking, charismatic. And like, I remember just being like, oh God, you know, my Dad would just like say “Cash me out” and we would go find another silent dealer. (Laughs)

DG: Mhm.

BR: So, being at the table, it wasn’t such a joyful thing. It was an intense thing where my dad was throwing down thousands of dollars. And you know, and I am just sitting there like riding the wave with him. (Laughs) And it was just intense. I remember the big losses. I remember the big wins. But of course, it’s all very poker face, and there’s not the celebration until you step outside. When you leave the table. And like my dad would sit there for hours and hours and hours and I would sit there with

DG: And were you, were you enjoying it the whole time? Or do you remember like being, being afraid, being like, should I tell him to leave? I mean, was there conflict?

BR: I would not dream of telling my dad to leave the blackjack table. I was just like, dream blackjack companion when my dad won, “Oh dad,” when he lost, “Oh it’s okay, next one we’re gonna win.” I was like this champion mascot to my gambling addicted father. (Laughs)

DG: So after she graduated from college, Beth was trying to find her path. She had a career in social work, but she decided to move to Las Vegas, drawn by the culture of excitement there. And that’s when she met Dink.

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SPEAKER 1: Holly, what about Dink? Doesn’t he need anybody?
SPEAKER 2: What’s Dink?
SPEAKER 3: Dink!
SPEAKER 4: Dink!
SPEAKER 5: Oh yes, I am Dink.

DG: For people who don’t understand the way Las Vegas works, like who is Dink and what role did he play in the gambling world?

BR: Dink was a professional gambler and, you know, but in Las Vegas, and he’s a professional sports gambler. So this required like an, and he had an operation. He had an office, um, a lot of staff, all the televisions, the hundreds of thousands of dollars on the desk that I, as a runner, would just like grab, throw in my backpack, go and make bets at the casinos. It was a very… He wrote, it was like a real operation. I did not know any of that. When I met this person who introduced me to Dink, I was clueless as to what to expect, but he was the one who showed me the ropes.

DG: What did you like about this world once you know, Dink brought you in, and he was a professional gambler and making tons of mone,y and we should say, I guess, “Lay the Favorite,” I mean, the name of your book, that’s what you learned from Dink. It was playing against the favorite and kind of playing the spreads on really wisely on games and so forth to know how to maximize your profits. But like what, I mean what did you like about it? It sounds like you were brought into this world so quickly and so immersively.

BR: (Laughs) Yes, it was like, the learning curve was just tremendous. I was the only woman most of the time. I was one of the youngest. Almost everyone I was working with was in their like 40s, 50s, 60s. I loved the freedom. I loved having very unconventional bosses. All of them were geniuses in one way or another. Usually, with math, almost all of them had worked on Wall Street at some point and just did not want that, you know, the square life. And I liked that I had to have like a very similar mindset. I didn’t want to set alarm, set an alarm, and go to work and do all that. I wanted to be free and have fun and wear my tank top, and converse just to work every day. When I wanted to go work out, I’d go work out and I’d come back to work. It was just so free and easy.

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BR: But of course, it’s not because underneath of that, just like being at the blackjack table, there’s so many emotions and so much darkness and people going broke and suicide and gambling really truly does ruin families. But it’s hard to see when you’re so deep in it and when your boss is winning and when you are making money, you know, so just this world of just such high stakes, high emotion, the backdrop of it all was just a lot to take in about human nature.

DG: I wanted to ask you about kind of how you’ve reflected on your dad, you know, now that you’re a writer and, you know, write for places like the New York Times and write books I know he passed away in the pandemic, right? I’m so sorry.

BR: No, it’s okay. Thank you.

DG: You wrote a piece in the New York Times about, and the way you framed it was that your father taught you the benefits of delusion, which seems to capture a lot of what we’re talking about.

BR: Right.

DG: Why do those words, do you think, capture this relationship?

BR: The relationship I had with my father?

DG: Yeah.

BR: Well, you know, because he kind of walked this thin line of being this hard worker person in the world. It’s really hard to describe, but you know my father ended up homeless, on the streets, homeless. And a big reason why he got there was because of his gambling and just bad, bad financial habits, which I have completely inherited. (Laughs) Which I try so hard, and I do all these things to kind of not do them, but yeah, they’re definitely a part of me. They’re inside of me, it’s how internal, external, this is totally what my father passed down to me. But my dad got so far in life with the having fun attitude. Maybe this is what happens to older people when they take a lot of risks. I’m glad my dad didn’t have some conventional life that he modeled to me. I wanna show him how much I appreciate this spirit that he passed down to me. I’ll keep getting in these apartments. And I would spend so much money, and he would just like leave the apartment and just go onto the streets.

DG: By choice, I mean he had lost his house you were trying to support him

BR: Yes, it was such a choice! It was almost like his obsession with freedom and his maverick ways like just overcame his entire brain, like he couldn’t even stand to be like enclosed in a house. (Laughs)

DG: Sounds a little like you loving Vegas. I mean, the kind of the freedom, the unconventional…

BR: I know it’s so scary, and this is what scares me, kind of like when you were talking about how it’s kind of scary when you have, when you’ve been exposed to this, because it’s like all I can think is I’m capable of that.

DG: Mm-hmm

BR: If my father, if it happened to my father can happen to me. It’s like, there’s no, that I have sold books, that I have a master’s degree. Like, none of it matters.

DG: Because we’re always on the brink because of who we are and where we come from in some way.

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BR: Yeah, and the modeling or like I think you said, like “I’m always afraid I might take it too far. “

DG: Mm-hmm

BR: Yeah, like I have those feelings too. And I’m, you know, raising a child on my own. So it’s like, I have to, in New York City as a writer, and so I have really stay focused. I mean, your story about how you, you know, how you felt toward your mom, and also just kind of like the son paying off her gambling debt. I had, when you were telling that story, I was like, oh my God, that could like be my son talking about me in the future, like how it was just the two of you. Not that I’m gonna have gambling debts, I don’t think, but like, what if I own a loan shark money? Who knows? (Laughs) But like, I have to like really rein it in because I’m so attracted and open to risk.

DG: Of course, it wasn’t until feeling almost at rock bottom that Beth decided to get out of gambling. Coming up, the moment she decided to move on.

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DG: Welcome back to Sports in America. Beth Raymer’s gambling journey took her far from the casinos of Las Vegas. She was actually in Costa Rica with a professional bookie when she decided it was time to get out for good.

Take me back to Costa Rica. What was the moment when you decided, like this sort of gambling profession is not the right path?

BR: Oh my gosh, well, they were like two. I mean, there were many times through Lay the Favorite where I’m like, this business is too crazy. I wanna leave, and I would always get drawn back to it for all different kinds of reasons. But in Costa Rica, basically, the business went bust in Curacao, Island of Curacao. So we moved to Costa Rica to kind of like recover. And I just found it depressing. It was during rainy season, the sun would set at four o’clock, there were some earthquakes. I think just environmentally, I was like, get me out of here, and I just remember eating this empanada, sitting in this parking lot, and I’m just like, what has happened? And I was getting older, you know I was like 28, which now seems like so young, but of course, all my friends by now have graduated law school, they’re having babies, and I am just in this park lot. You know, whatever. I think I wasn’t even wearing shoes in the image I have in my memory. And so I was like, I’m leaving, and I left like the next day. And then I went on an interview. I’m like, I’m really gonna like try to be an upstanding person in society. I don’t even care. I will work at Citibank. Whatever. I went on an interview, and during, I think I put on my resume that I had worked in sports gambling. I actually I didn’t know any better. And the guy interviewing me was like, “You know, you work in sports gambling? I love to gamble.” He’s like, you know. (Laughs)

DG: (Laughs) Like I’m trying to get away from this

BR: Exactly! But this guy was such a square, and he’s like, I swear, he’s, like, wearing New York Jets from head to toe, his whole outfit. And I’m just thinking, “Oh, my God, if I put him in an office, I will kill it, because I’m going to get a percentage of his losing, you know, what he loses.” So, he’s like, “Do you know anybody I can gamble with?” And I’m like, “Yes.”

DG: Oh my God.

BR: And so this started a whole new kind of like my last part of being in gambling.

DG: Did you take the job that you were interviewing for?

BR: He didn’t offer me the job.

DG: Oh, he just wanted to use you for your connect…

BR: I became his bookie.

DG: Oh, you became his bookie, so you kept going a little bit longer.

BR: I was like that, yes. I became the person, like the middleman, and I made some money from him. He, of course, he introduces me to all of his friends. I’m now putting them in offices. But this is how the world works. But again, rather quickly, because he actually didn’t pay. He didn’t pay me one week after losing a ton of money. And very soon after that, I quit again. And that’s when I also got accepted to graduate school at Columbia.

DG: And you went on to begin your writing career.

BR: Yes, that all happened around the same time. Like I remember being in my Vegas apartment, and I was really trying to get this guy to give me money. And I was having people call him and threaten him and pretend that they were my boss, all this stuff. And I was in my Las Vegas apartment in Summerlin. I’d never, it was like the nicest apartment I’ve had in Las Vegas. And a 212 number popped up on my cell phone. And I like, it’s Dave Greenberg, that was his name. He’s calling from a payphone, and I’m like, “Okay, I’m gonna, this is my one chance to like tell him I need this money.” And I answered it, and it was Mike Janeway at Columbia telling me that I had gotten accepted.

DG: What an amazing moment!

BR: I know, and right when that happened, I hung up the phone, and I was like, I do not care about Dave Greenberg, I cannot care about the money, I will get it, I know I will. But I just completely kind of like my spirit just moved out of the gambling world like instantaneously.

DG: I know this is a bigger question that we could spend a lot of time on, but what advice do you have for people who are, you know, not rock bottom and having to call for, but like sort of trying to manage this, this love in their life, and also have other responsibilities, a job, maybe kids, but also, I love gambling.

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BR: I don’t know. I don’t think I have any advice. I mean, I don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how anyone does it. A lot of people aren’t able to do it. A lot of people are able to balance it for a short amount of time in their life. I mean, how many gamblers I have been in this business for so long. I have met hundreds and hundreds of gamblers. How many of them own a house and have an intact family at the age of like 65? Zero. I don’t know one. And those are successful ones who are making money. So…

DG: So, recognize the dangers, I guess that’s one important.

BR: Definitely recognize the dangers. That’s a big one. I mean, are we talking actual physical gambling? Of course, there’s money management, but I’ve never been able to do that. I have no self-control with anything like that. So I don’t know. I’m sorry, I don’t have any answers for anyone. (Laughs)

DG: No, I think the answer is it’s hard and there’s no magic solution, but I love that… I feel like we’ve really gotten a picture with each other in terms of A, don’t assume that anyone is not a gambler, and B, it goes so much deeper. It’s not just, oh, you know, I love the thrill. There can be relationships involved, there can be memories of parents, there could be experiences. It goes a lot deeper than we might think.
Well, everyone out there, if you wanna read Beth’s writing, her memoir is “Lay the Favorite,” a memoir of gambling. Her newest novel is called “Fireworks Every Night.” Beth Ramer is a New York-based journalist and writer. Beth, thank you for being so honest and being so game to talk about this. I really appreciate it.

BR: (Laughs) Oh, thank you so much. This was fun. Thank you.

DG: Beth Raymer’s story is a reminder of how intoxicating and how dangerous the gambling world can be when you’re living inside it. But these days, you don’t have to be in Vegas to feel that pull. The gambling that Dink and Beth made a living off of was once confined to casinos and sports books, but now it’s spread to every corner of American life, onto our phones, into our fantasy leagues. I mean, baked right into the way we watch sports now. To understand how we got here and what changed after 2018, we turned to author Jonathan Cohen, who has been tracing the history and the fallout of gambling’s rapid rise.

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DG: The full-on embrace of sports gambling would have been baffling to lawmakers in the late 80s and early 90s. Back then, there were whispers of games being fixed, rumors about mob ties, and fears that the integrity of the games themselves was all at risk. In response, Congress acted. They passed something called the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, or PASPA, in 1992. It basically froze sports betting where it already existed, mostly in Nevada. And it banned everyone else from legalizing it. For more than 25 years, that was the status quo. If you wanted to bet legally, you had to go to Vegas. But then in 2018,

BROADCASTER 1: To Washington now, where the Supreme Court will allow states to legalize sports betting. The court struck down a federal law that banned gambling on sports games in most of the country.

BROADCASTER 2: Justices ruled seven to two on the case, and CBS News chief legal correspondent…

DG: The Supreme Court struck PASPA down, saying that the federal government could not tell states what they could or couldn’t legalize. Jonathan Cohen says that ruling opened the door, and within a few years, sports betting had grown into a mainstream, multi-billion-dollar industry.

Why was gambling becoming more and more of a thing in our culture, which then, as you say, started putting pressure on the sports world to allow it in?

JONATHAN COHEN: Right. So I think a couple of things. So first of all, I think gambling is some, some amount of gambling is in fact inevitable, like, we have ancient artifacts from 3000 BCE of in ancient Mesopotamia, of like dice. I think there was some part of the human brain that is hardwired for gambling, and it’s just sort of always going to be with us. Fine.

DG: It’s not going away.

JC: Yeah, yeah, right. But that doesn’t mean that, like, you should, FanDuel should let you gamble your mortgage payments on your phone. But like, that’s another, we’ll get to that. So that being said, that why the sort of the law enforcement activity against gambling and the league’s cracking down on gambling over the course of the 20th century, of course, doesn’t actually make it disappear because people…anywhere there’s two people and two sports fans, especially, there’s going to be sort of a will for competition and a desire to bet. And there’s just a general growing comfort. You know, I’m not old enough to remember Jimmy the Greek, you know, the old-time NFL announcer who would have to sort of like subtly allude to gambling on broadcasts. You know it’s, and then I think it’s 2009 ESPN as the point spread to its ticker. And it’s like, okay, even before this was legal, we were clearly moving in this direction, whether we liked it or not.

DG: So, but I, I just, before we leave the question of the leagues, why do these leagues like the NBA, the NFL go from opposing gambling to literally embracing it, advertising it, making it easy? I mean, I was at a Washington Nationals game, baseball game in D.C. a few weeks ago, and there’s an MGM like sports book attached to the stadium and literally every sign everywhere and my phone are encouraging me to leave the stadium during the game, go into the sports book and like make bets. And it’s, I’m like, you know, major league baseball, the Washington Nationals, everybody’s like, you should be betting as much as you possibly can, even if you’re in the stadium watching a game.

JC: The short answer is money; the long answer is also money.

DG: Okay. (Laughs)

JC: But the long answer is money but in a different way, in that the fear in the early 90s was that fans wouldn’t care about the outcome of the game, they would care about gambling, or that they would no longer interpret routine error, referee error as part of sports, which of course it is. They would interpret it as, instead, evidence of corruption and rigged outcome. And then after 2018, all of a sudden, you start hearing a different story from these leagues that had hated gambling for so long. In the NFL’s parlance, the way they call it is fan engagement, which is we will, to use the FanDuel catchphrase, “Make every moment more.” We will let fans sort of get more excitement from the games. We will make it more likely that they will watch our games. They will certainly make it more likely to watch a game that’s like a baseball game that’s been decided by 20 runs, but you need like the third baseman to get a single or whatever to hit your parlay. So you get more butts in seats. You get advertising dollars from this whole new crop of companies that are now sort of invested in the sports economy. All these, this is a whole other podcast that would put everybody to sleep, but all these, like data purchasing agreements like the leagues basically forced the gambling companies to buy their official league data. So it’s another sort of revenue stream for them behind closed doors.

DG: Oh, interesting.

JC: And so between all of those things, it just generates so much money for the leagues. And especially at a time when, not the NFL, but other leagues were sort of worried about their viewership, right? If you think about the sort of the cord-cutting phenomenon really peaking, let’s say late 2010s, early 2020s. Or the narrative about it at least, and this was a way to, in the short term, keep the revenue error pointed upward, so that’s the long way of saying money, but the short answer again is just money.

DG: Of course, beneath the headlines about all of this, there is a quieter and more widespread danger, the addiction. All the stuff that drew Beth, her dad, my mom, me into this world. But now it’s so much closer and constant. Our phones have made this truly a public health crisis.

Speaking of gamblers, I really wanna spend some time with you on kind of the personal stories of gambling. You know, you have described sports gambling as a public health issue. Why is that? And what do you mean by that?

JC: So public health as an idea, right? You can sort of apply to anything. But I treat it, I call it a public health issue because, well, I’d say for two reasons. One is because of the harms that are happening and the experiences people are having, which is that, just to rattle off some statistics, states that legalize online sports gambling see a 25 to 30 percent rise in bankruptcies, a decline in credit scores, a increase in auto loan delinquencies, an increase in credit card delinquency, reduced savings and investment in low-income households, and so on.

DG: And that the response to things like this from FanDuel, from DraftKings, from people who support sports gambling, is that we are giving people tools to control their behavior, and we are being very open about the dangers. Say more about that, and say how convinced you are that that can help people control themselves.

JC: Yes, perfect. This is the other half of my argument about public health, which is so there’s, that’s sort of the evidence of that is why I would call it a crisis or a public health problem. And then the other way, the other reason I think to adopt a public-health framework is there are clearly so many people running into such big problems or so many problems that it’s not enough to say, “Hey, you, David, you need to stop. And this is your fault when you sort of get bed over your skis.” It is happening again to so many different people and so many different places and so many different ways, such that it’s clearly a systematic problem with the product itself as it is currently designed and the gambling companies which preach, you know, they call it responsible gaming. This I, which which really foists the responsibility for gaming onto the individual, with the implication that it is sort of their fault if they run into trouble because they did not successfully play responsibly.

DG: Right, and the idea that you can control yourself is literally against all the research into what addiction does to you.

JC: Exactly, exactly, yes. And even before addiction, but yes, but like even before addiction, they want you to, the phrase, “Please play responsibly.” It’s like, “Please, sir, will you please play, you know, it’s a joke.” So that’s where, again, and to liken sort of a common metaphor for this, if there’s, you know, a river in the middle of your city and people keep falling into the river, all right, maybe the first two people are just dumb and they’re silly and they weren’t paying attention, but if it keeps happening, at some point, it’s an nfrastructural problem, and you need to set up some guard rails around the river to stop people from falling in. So that’s where I would say we’re reaching that point where it’s not enough to say, “Hey, don’t walk near the river, and if you fall in, it’s all your fault because you’re a big dumb dummy.” It’s like, no, maybe we need to put up a big fence because there’s clearly something about the design of the city or the phone or the app in this case that is making it too easy for people to fall in and to run into trouble.

DG: Coming up next on Sports in America, we will continue our conversation with author Jonathan Cohen.

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DG: Welcome back to Sports in America. The story of sports gambling isn’t just about the integrity of the game. It’s about the toll it takes on the people who can’t stop playing. Behind every chart showing record revenue or every scandal about a player’s suspension are real people, fans, families, and athletes whose lives are quietly unraveling.

You spend a lot of time in your book, focusing on people and their individual journeys and relationships with sports gambling. Who stands out that you’d want to share their story with us, that gives us an idea of, you know, what can happen when someone goes too far?

JC: I thought I’d focus on Andrew, who’s emblematic in a different way and an interesting way, in that he started betting with a bookie, as was the birthright of many young American men for, you know, 100 years. And he actually developed a gambling; he’s in the one percent of American adults who under seemingly any circumstance will develop a gambling addiction, and he had a gambling addiction before it was legal. He lives in Connecticut, in southwestern Connecticut. And he was getting with the bookie. Bookie cut him off because he owed $100,000. He started gambling online through these sort of offshore illegal websites. Okay. But then FanDuel arrives in Connecticut. And part of the promise of legalization was there’s all this black market gambling out there that’s illegal and bad. It’s not raising any tax revenue when we can’t monitor it, and by legalizing it, we will not just capture that revenue for the state, but we can put up some of these guardrails for the first time because, of course, these online illegal offshore casinos don’t offer any of those things. Except his experience was the exact opposite.

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JC: FanDuel didn’t slow him down at all, didn’t offer any protections. In fact, paired him with a VIP host whose job it is to sort of entice him to play more and keep him betting on FanDuel, and he kept gambling just as unsafely and just as irresponsibly on FanDuel as he had been offshore, and they didn’t cut him off, they didn’t stop him, they didn’t send him any warnings, they didnt ask him to prove that he could afford how much he was betting and so on. So to me, he’s sort of not emblematic of, and he sort of had, I’ll just say, to put a cap on his story, sorry, he has, you know, by his own admission, has like a full-blown gambling addiction, was caught by his family, because of course he was caught, and eventually he was caught. He did miss a couple of mortgage payments as a result of his gambling. Like, he was in therapy, went to Gamblers Anonymous, he hasn’t been in a couple of years, but it really, he also sort of has this, it ruined his relationship, he broke up with his fiancée, or, you know, she just fundamentally couldn’t trust him. He also sort of has this extended period of his life that just gone, and $330,000 of money he should have that are just gone. And to me again, he’s not emblematic of every single person who runs into trouble gambling is going to have sort of an extreme experience like his, but he does expose, I think, the lie in many ways behind the promise that legal gambling is safer or better regulated somehow than illegal gambling was.

DG: Well, and I mean, it speaks to the larger point that you can bet on anything, and there are things to bet on at any time of day, at any time of night, whenever you want to bet on something. I mean, you can bet on it from your bed on your phone.

JC: Right, and which is, going back to our friends in ancient Mesopotamia, like a sort of a new phenomenon and one that young men in particular are sort of having to reckon with and deal with, and they are the first generation, you know, to have that exact problem.

DG: Why do you think it’s hitting young men in particular?

JC: This generation is growing up with gambling in a new way online, not just because of sports betting, but even if you think about RobinHood and stock trading and you think of crypto, do you think that video game skins and loot boxes and all these sort of gambling mechanics within video games that young men have been brought up to since they were like seven, if they’re playing Roblox. And then I have one more reason, which is I think there’s some, and I guess this is confessional on my own part, but going back to this theme of the American dream of young men today, or young people, generally, who have discretionary income, but not like a realistic chance to buy a house or like pay off their student loan or buy a business. So what’s the point of having $10,000 where I’d way rather risk that money, maybe even on a long shot parlay and a chance to win $100,000, a million dollars? And so that leads to financial nihilism among young men who are predisposed to gambling, not just because it’s fun and it’s on their phones, or whatever. But also because it maybe offers this shot at the American dream.

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DG: One of the most unsettling parts of this new gambling landscape is how close it sits to kids. Sports betting is built into the same apps, games, and highlight reels that kids are scrolling through on their iPads. The language of odds and parlays has become part of everyday sports talk, often packaged to look like harmless fun or fandom. But for a developing brain, that constant exposure to risk and reward can be dangerous, normalizing the idea that every play is something to win or lose money on. Parents see how easily curiosity can turn into habit and habit into compulsion. And that’s what makes this moment feel so precarious.

JC: For me personally, you know, boys or girls or whoever, you know there are all these seemingly innocuous games for kids that are effectively gambling. And so kids, parents know to, you know, my kid doesn’t have an iPad, but like parents know to like put safety locks on their kids iPads, so they can’t like find nudity or violent content or whatever on their own. But I think there’s not yet this awareness of, there are always like, games designed for kids that effectively have gambling mechanisms built into them that you don’t realize are gambling. And so I think putting aside sports betting, even that that’s almost like, that’s like the fentanyl, and we need to like still talk about weed, or I don’t know. That’s a belabored metaphor, but like, I think, I think that that that, that that I think about, and that’s what I worry about is people getting into gambling again, this sort of new generation dealing with it for the first time from an extremely young age. And parents are being caught unaware by what their kids might be doing.

DG: Well, so I keep hearing you say things like that for, you know, a parent and their kid to bet a little bit on the New York Mets game that they’re so excited to watch is okay. So, clearly you’re not suggesting that this whole thing should be banished. What sort of solutions are you calling for or suggesting?

JC: Yeah, so one is this cultural conversation, which, of course, sort of has this policy flip side, which is like, you know, everything you learn about gambling shouldn’t come from Kevin Hart in a DraftKings commercial. There should be, like, public awareness campaigns or something that provides some counter-messaging, some countervailing messaging.

DG: Or this, I mean, you being out there on shows like this, I mean, talking about this in a nuanced, academic, disinterested way because you’re not making money off it.

JC: So there’s that there’s the cultural side. And then on the policy side, I think there are all sorts of interesting things. The North Star, so the goal for me is not making it impossible or difficult even to bet $5 on the Cubs, but making it almost impossible, such that like betting $5 on the Cubs can be the start of a dangerous journey that leads you down a road into a story like Andrew’s. So all, and the byword here is friction is adding friction to the sports gaming experience such that you are, if you imagine sort of a slippery slope, you’re just like, you bet $5 on the Cubs, you lose, you get mad, you wanna bet $5 more. Oh, actually, you can’t; you need to wait 12 hours. You can deposit more money, but you have to wait for 12 hours for it to hit your account. And by then, like maybe you’ve cooled off and you’re not gonna sort of start this spiraling process. So that’s my overriding goal. And I’m happy to talk about the very, very specific sort of wonky policies I think might get us there. But at a 30,000-foot level, that’s the thesis.

DG: So friction is important, and I’m just playing devil’s advocate. Like, as someone who has gambled, doesn’t that take a lot of the fun out of it? Knowing that, like, if you lose this, you’re done. You can’t make it up and become a winner tonight.

JC: Yeah, but okay, so if let’s think about what gambling will look like before 2018, for example, where you’re in a casino, there’s of course all sorts of things in the casino that are designed to reduce friction. You know, there are no windows, there’s ATMs everywhere.

DG: There is. oxygen being pumped even though I don’t know if they’ve ever admitted to that, but I think it happens. Yeah.

JC: Free alcohol, like all sorts of things that are meant to sort of establish or reduce friction. But there’s still the fundamental fact that you need to be sitting at the roulette wheel, awake, placing chips on a table, like conscious. There’s some modicum of corporal reality, like physicality, that needs to be involved when you’re physically at the table, telling the dealer to hit you on this hand of blackjack or whatever. And that’s what we’ve totally lost, where you’re now at home just swiping, like imagine swiping on social media or on your phone or whatever. You can just like, “Yeah, sure, I’ll just bet whether the next pitch will be 88 miles an hour,” and then in seven seconds, the pitch will be thrown, and then I can bet on the next pitch and then the next pitch and the next pitch. And so that’s where I think what we have now is just so fundamentally different from what we’ve had before, and where friction has some possibility of actually slowing things down. Yes, maybe reducing some people’s fun, but hopefully doing a lot more good than harm.

DG: Yeah. Are you optimistic that stuff like that is actually being contemplated by policymakers and we could see it enacted, or is this just, have we lost control?

JC: Do I have any confidence in lawmakers to do literally anything that’s intelligent, especially to regulate an industry that is so notoriously good at sort of slithering out of regulations and finding loopholes and finding ways to deliver dopamine to people, you know, around these recommendations? So, not necessarily, I would say part of the problem is downhill of a single fact, which is if you look at the mission statements for the gaming commissions, the bodies of government that are charged with regulating gambling, you know, the Maryland gaming board, for example, their mission statement is, I’m gonna butcher the direct quote, but it’s something to the effect of “Produce as much revenue for the state of Maryland from sports betting as possible,” or something to that effect. And I think that’s the exact wrong approach. I think the approach should be preserve the well-being of people in the state while making it possible for them to bet on sports.

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DG: Yeah, I think you’ve really helped me understand this. I mean, I do think about my own mother who, I don’t know if I would call her an addict, maybe, but I was scared a lot of the time. She grew up in Atlantic City. We would go every summer, and I was a kid, I would wander the boardwalk while she was in gambling, and then she’d be like midnight, and the scariest nights would be when she would say, “I’m down a lot, but you should go home with Nana, and I’m gonna keep going.” And then she’d come in at like five, six in the morning, you know, occasionally, like in tears because she had lost so much. And you know I mentioned that, you know, she would place sports bets every single Sunday, go to her office and do it. But there was built-in friction. Like we couldn’t be in Atlantic City every day of the year because she has a job, and she couldn’t go to her office and you know make sports bets all the time on her phone. It was like this weekly thing, and listening to you, you know, she passed away long ago, but if she were here today, I’m terrified. Because if that behavior was available to access and act on 24/7, like that’s the real difference in our society today. And like friction, as you’re saying, it’s like friction means something totally different than it did 20 or 30 years ago. And we’ve got to figure out a way to create it in this world of 2025.

JC: Right. In today, she would be gambling on Malaysian women’s doubles badminton at three in the morning.

DG: Absolutely, and that’s what scares me to death. Absolutely.

JC: And then and so that’s and that’s where I mean, again, just the easy friction is you deposit money. You need to wait 12 to 24 hours before you can gamble with it.

DG: Yeah.

JC: You know, full stop, which is just you chasing your what she was doing in that story is chasing her losses. Right. She lost. She, you know, doubling down or whatever to get more and more and more, and if there’s some way for the apps to stop you from doing that, we have more information. We have more data on any gambling operation in recorded human history. Surely, we can find ways with a few technological tweaks to slow it down if we wanted to, and if there wasn’t so much money to be made off of these gamblers.

DG: Let me finish with just one more personal question, when your sons do reach the age where you know you could have a conversation with them about sports gambling. What do you imagine your message is going to be? What’s the conversation going to be like?

JC: Yeah. So I would say a couple of tenants or a couple sort of pieces of information, right, that I would want to deliver, and I would probably deliver, you know, multiple times in multiple ways. The first being that the house always wins, and you, ight-year-olds, you know, we’re probably gonna maybe even have this before your eight- year-old, but like, you might think you’re smart or clever, but I promise they know more than you, and I promise that you are not going to win, even if you win your first bet, which is, again, a very dangerous thing to happen to a sports bettor, is for them to win their first bet and then they get this overconfidence that they can’t shake. Imparting this idea that it is for fun. I like this idea from a UCLA psychologist, Timothy Fung, that when you say “You bet money,” instead, you say “You spent money.” So it’s not like you are risking it. It’s like, you treat all the money that you gamble as sort of like gone. And it’s almost regardless of whether you win or lose, it’s like you treat it as a discretionary spending. The second point would be not to, and this is what drives me crazy about advocates sometimes, right? Is not to shy away from the fact that gambling is fun, like you’re not going to avoid or hide that fundamental truth and instead I would lean into it, but treat it as like, “Okay, we know ice cream is delicious, but you’re having it for dinner” in the same way of like, yeah, you can gamble, but this is not going be the only way we watch sports or you’re not going do this all the time and you need to recognize that your video game or whatever has this built-in mechanic and what it’s doing to your brain. It’s a lot for like an eight year old to take in, but I think those are the high level sort of messages that I would want to distill in some way to allow them to go in, children, I mean, to go into sort of clear-eyed or a little clear-eyed or as clear- eyed as a nine year old or whatever it can be, rather than running into trouble or setting themselves up for problems down the road.

DG: John, real pleasure. Thank you for talking to us. I enjoyed this a lot.

JC: Thanks. And I like the Phillies under for tomorrow night.

DG: (Laughs) I wish it were still baseball season, Jonathan. That was journalist Jonathan Cohen there. Earlier, we heard from author Beth Raymer, the author of Lay the Favorite. You can hear that full interview over at my other show, David Green is Obsessed from Campside Media. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts.

Next time here on Sports in America.

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DG: We are going to talk about one of the most successful and most controversial plays in football right now.

BROADCASTER: Wanting the tush-push ban because teams can’t stop it is dumb.

DG: The tush push, you know, the play where the Philadelphia Eagles essentially shove their quarterback over the goal line to score a touchdown. If you’ve watched any drive of Eagles football in the last few years, you’ve probably seen this done, but maybe you don’t know its surprising origin story.

JASON KELCE: This Scottish guy came in, and he says, Well, let me see if I can do my best Scottish impression. He says, “There ain’t nothing you can do to stop it.”

DG: We will talk to the guy who made this play unstoppable and helped deliver the Eagles a Super Bowl victory.

RICHIE GRAY: To see that play and the way that it evolved, you know, the difference it made to the Eagles, I played maybe a one or a two percent part in that. That’s great, but I’m always thinking of the next play.

DG: The tush-push origin story that is next time on Sports in America.

This is Sports in America. I’m your host, David Green.

Our executive producers are Joan Isabella and Tom Grahsler.

Our senior producer is Michael Olcott. Our producer is Michaela Windberg, and our associate producer is Bibiana Correa.

Our engineer is Mike Villers. Our tile artwork was created by Bea Walling.

Sports in America is a production of WHYY in Philadelphia and is distributed by PRX. Some of our interviews were originally created by Religion of Sports, with special thanks to Adam Schlossman. You can find sports in America on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Amazon music, the iHeart radio app, you know, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Executive Producer: Tom Grahsler
Senior Producer: Michael Olcott
Producer: Michaela Winberg
Associate Producer: Bibiana Correa
Engineer: Mike Villers
Tile Art: Bea Walling

Sports in America is a production of WHYY, distributed by PRX, and part of the NPR podcast network.

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