Legal Sports Betting and Public Health

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Matt Katz: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Welcome back, everybody. I'm Matt Katz filling in for Brian today. Now, we continue with the health and climate story of the week. As some listeners know, Brian Lehrer Show is building on its Climate Story of the Week series from the past years. It's an effort to keep stories about the environment and public health from getting lost in the shuffle during Trump's first 100 days in office.

Today, with March Madness in full swing, we'll take a look at online sports betting, how it became so ubiquitous, and why some experts are sounding the alarm on what they believe is the early stage of a public health crisis. In 2018, following a lawsuit from New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, the United States Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on sports betting. Since then, 38 states have legalized it, with most permitting gambling on any device with an Internet connection.

About 1% of US adults have a severe gambling problem, according to the National Council on Problem Gambling. 2 to 3% have a mild or moderate problem. That might sound small, but that amounts to somewhere between 7.5 and 10.5 million people. Crucially, in states across the country that have legalized sports betting, calls to addiction hotlines have been on the rise.

Our next guest writes the result of the nation's sports gambling boom is a crisis, an epidemic of a gambling disorder, and financial disruption, especially for young men. With the final four just ahead, we're joined now by Jonathan Cohen, historian and author of the new book Losing Big: America’s Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling. Jonathan, welcome to WNYC.

Jonathan Cohen: Hi, Matt. Happy March Madness to you and yours.

Matt Katz: Thank you. You as well. Listeners, how many of you have participated in sports or gambling since it went legal? What's your experience been like? How much did you win? How much did you lose? Maybe you or someone you know have had your sports betting experience go out of control and you found it difficult to stop. What do you wish people knew about online sports betting? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. You can also text that number.

Jonathan, you write that modern sports betting is so dangerous, specifically because it's available online. It is totally ubiquitous. Before we get into this, you call it an epidemic. How big of a problem is it? Can you frame it for us a little bit?

Jonathan Cohen: Sure. You pointed to some of the most telling stats right at the top. Indications are that as many as 40% of Americans have tried their hand at sports betting over the last few years. I point to it as an epidemic because of, as you alluded to, the rates of problem gambling and actual gambling addiction. Then also this more amorphous category of hazardous play or risky play or at risk for gambling addiction, which, as of the last time, the National Council on Problem Gambling took a survey, was around 2 to 3%. Indications are that group has grown a lot and is growing a lot. T

hen there are lots of people, again, particularly young men, who are just getting over their skis with sports betting, whether they're having a singular bad experience and a bad night, or they're falling down a rabbit hole for a few weeks or a few months and losing a lot more than they intend and it's fracturing their mental health and it's fracturing their financial health. There are lots of different ways to define an epidemic, but I think there are, clearly, harms being inflicted along a large variation of gradations for lots of different kinds of people.

Matt Katz: You wrote that in 2023 alone, Americans spent $121 billion on online sports betting. That's more than on video games, movie tickets, music streaming, books, concert tickets combined. It's just extraordinary. It's almost as if for large swaths of the American public, this is their main form of recreation.

Jonathan Cohen: It's meant to be that way. I'll just be really clear that one reason Americans are able to spend so much on sports betting is on average, sports bettors get around 90% of their money back through winnings. You can imagine though, what happens when you spend $100 on sports betting. You win or you get $90 of it back. Then you spend $90 on sports betting, you get $80 back, and so on. That's how the number can increase so quickly, specifically because it is framed as entertainment, even if it is one that will quickly depart someone from their money.

Matt Katz: It's mind-bending how quickly this has all happened. You wrote about how American sports betting is as old as the country itself, but it wasn't until 2018 that the Supreme Court overturned the federal ban. This was a case originally filed by Chris Christie in New Jersey. It became Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association. This is Phil Murphy, who then was the Democratic governor who succeeded Republican Chris Christie. How quickly did states move to legalize sports betting after the Supreme Court ruling?

Jonathan Cohen: Well, in the case of Delaware or New Jersey, it was a matter of weeks, not months, not years. They were really, really eager to get going. Overall, for the country as a whole, I think a helpful comparison would be the state lottery system, where it took over 30 years for us to get 30 states or over 30 states with lotteries, and it took us less than six years to get to over 30 states with sports betting.

Matt Katz: Incredible. How much revenue are states collecting from sports gambling?

Jonathan Cohen: Not nearly as much as you'd think. That's the dirty secret behind all of this is over the course of the last seven years, states have made in total around $8 billion in tax revenue from sports betting, which is like, okay, $8 billion is a lot of money, but that's what the New York lottery makes in two years is $8 billion. Sports betting is a really, really small-margin business, which is why it wasn't legalized earlier and why these promises of sports betting as a silver bullet for tax problems have always been more illusion than reality.

Matt Katz: The two big companies, FanDuel and DraftKings, with their celebrity-filled ads, how much money are they making?

Jonathan Cohen: They're doing just fine, thanks for asking.

Matt Katz: [laughs]

Jonathan Cohen: They have 70 to 80% of the market share, over $100 billion in revenue. These are, of course, global companies as well, but they are in some states, taxed at a very, very low rate, which accounts for that low tax revenue. That's what pays to keep all those ads on TV.

Matt Katz: Wow. Listeners, any comments or questions on sports betting coming up as you listen to our guest? As we're hearing, some of the people most likely to be negatively impacted by this are young men. Maybe you are or know one. I certainly do. Share your stories or ask a question of our guest. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can also text us.

I've been amazed how aggressively the sports leagues have embraced sports betting and all of the apparatus that goes with that, like all the sports channels. You write that the NFL revised an anti-betting ethos that had defined much of its existence. Why did the NFL change its mind on betting? How do they profit from it?

Jonathan Cohen: Right. That's it. The NFL really likes money, and that's about it. The NFL, until 2018, until May 14th, 2018, the day of The Supreme Court decision, had to avowedly be anti-gambling, and, in fact, used gambling as a foil and says, "You can trust the integrity of our games, not just because we're the NFL, but because we hate gambling so much and because we do so much to keep gambling so distant from our operations and from our games."

After the Supreme Court decision, lo and behold, it's the exact opposite. It's, "The only way to keep the integrity of our games is not to keep gambling at bay, but to work with gambling companies and to profit as much as possible from the sales of NFL data to gambling companies. That will let us monitor gambling and profit from it." As the owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars said in 2021, the NFL doesn't leave a lot of money on the table, which, of course, they don't. Once gambling was going to be legal, it was inevitable that the NFL would do a rapid 180 and reverse its long-standing opposition to gambling in favor of making money from it.

Matt Katz: Now you can get live updates on the betting odds while watching a game. I was watching a Mets game last week. It was my son's 10th birthday. We're watching on Apple TV. That's the only place he was streaming. Ninth inning, close game, there's plenty to be excited about, but then the money line comes on the screen. They literally just put the money line on the screen, how much you win or lose if you bet on the game right now as if it's like a statistic from the field.

It is worrying to me how much my son, who both loves sports and numbers, how he will, seems like inevitably, get drawn into this stuff. Is there any good advice on what you should be telling our kids, particularly our sons, given that there seems to be more of a proclivity for young men to get into this? Should I be saying something to him while the money line pops up? What kind of advice did you hear about how to handle this issue in people's homes?

Jonathan Cohen: Well, I have a three-year-old, so I can't speak from personal experience on exactly this question just yet.

Matt Katz: He hasn't made a parlay yet?

Jonathan Cohen: He's working on it. He would love to if he could. I would say what you're seeing and what you and your son are seeing is the normalization of sports betting. For a lot of people, including high school teachers who I talked to, who reported that a lot of their students have found ways to bet is that this current generation of young people and young men was caught flat-footed, just like state lawmakers were, just like lots of other people were, by the rapid rise of sports betting.

I think I would hope that for a 10-year-old, you wouldn't have to be caught flat-footed. You already, it sounds like, understand that this might be a problem for him. It's something that, in the same way that parents might talk to their kids about drugs or about sex, that they, I think, should do more to talk to their kids, specifically their sons, about gambling to let them know, for example, that gambling addiction exists.

I think a lot of people just don't fundamentally understand that and also how insidious it is and how it's that moment when you think you're really smart because you win your first bet. That's a high, that's really inescapable and is really, really hard to shake. That can be the start of a dangerous journey for people. Again, going into betting, starting a gambling career, knowing that can make all the difference from coming in completely blind and getting hooked without even realizing what's happening to you.

Matt Katz: We have a lot of callers. Mook in State College, Pennsylvania. Hi, Mook. Appreciate you calling in. You're on with Jonathan Cohen.

Mook: Hi there. I just wanted to make two points. For someone who has struggled with sports gambling, it's so addictive, the platforms that these companies use. Initially, it seems very innocuous, where you can maybe make one bet on, say, fantasy football. Then the way that the software works is that it automatically points you towards betting and then gambling. It's so easy the way that our brains are wired to just move from one thing to the next without realizing how much money you've spent. That's one observation.

The other one is that I'm a professor at a large university in the northeast, and something that I've been seeing in faculty meetings is that faculty have been talking about how in class, students are just on their laptops doing sports betting and doing gambling in general. It is, again, young men who are the ones who are doing this. I feel like this just relates to what's been said already on the air, that we're just not ready as a society equipped to handle this ridiculous, crazy thing that's happening.

There's so many different consequences of this, particularly for young men, that I would just encourage everyone listening to this, be a bit more aware of what the consequences are and how do we try to manage this from a policy standpoint.

Matt Katz: Thanks so much, Mook. Jonathan, it does seem that our addictions to the phones are so tied into the sports betting. I'm pulled into Twitter and scrolling news and social media on my phone, and I find that my friends, I'm in my 40s, who don't do that. What they're doing when they're scrolling is sports betting. It's almost like it's all the same thing. We are getting that rush from scrolling and clicking, and this particular habit, the sports betting one, is particularly insidious.

Jonathan Cohen: This is a little bit by design, too. Mook alluded to the seamless design of the apps, and I'm happy to talk about the specific tricks in the app, the ways it's designed to keep people engaged. Going back to the years of daily fantasy sports a decade ago, DraftKings and FanDuel and the like wanted to cultivate sports as a second screen experience. It's no coincidence that in all of their ads, it's invariably someone watching TV while holding their phone because that's what they want to inculcate. They want to inculcate you, Matt, sitting, watching the Mets game with the DraftKings app open on your phone at the same time placing a bet. That's the kind of behavior they want to normalize and they want to see everybody doing, basically, such that betting on sports is as normal as it is to watch sports.

Matt Katz: Fred in Bergen County. Hi, Fred. You work with high schoolers?

Fred: I work with high school students all day. What you're describing is just so true. Watching every day more and more, less and less gaming, and just betting away. They'll bet on anything. I know the earlier caller was reflecting on maybe policy changes, which may be important. I think a lot of it is also messages from the parents who grew up in a different time and may not really be aware of how quickly this goes from something entertaining, even creating brackets together with your son, sharing an account with your son, watching Sunday football, like you're saying, with the phone out and talking it through and stuff and not realizing that the rest of the week, your kid is off the rails.

We've had kids lose thousands of dollars and really dig themselves into a hole. Other kids just sound like really on the way to an addiction. They're invincible. They're great. They're the best bettor ever. Really, really in a scary spot. A lot of it is really linked to just that non-stop holding on to their phone at all times.

Matt Katz: Fred, this might be a naive question, but you have to be 18 to gamble. How are they logging in? Is it because they had accounts maybe with their dads and then they're able to move on to doing it on their own?

Fred: Some of them are unshared accounts, some of them have someone else set up an account for them or figure it out. A lot of them do really start with shared accounts with their dads. It seemed like a fun kind of unthreatening thing, like you said, entertainment. What a nice way to spend a Sunday watching a football game and thinking it through together with your kid beforehand. I think by and large, the parents, at least that we're dealing with, really don't have a clue how scary this is. What the teachers and faculty are seeing in school is really frightening.

Matt Katz: Thanks so much for calling in, Fred. I have shared fantasy teams with my son. Jonathan, that seems like a little bit of a step toward full-on gambling, right?

Jonathan Cohen: Yes. Fantasy has always been a bit of a stepping stone. I think it's okay if you want to have a fantasy league with your son.

Matt Katz: Thank you.

Jonathan Cohen: I think it's not okay to share an account and give someone who's under 18 or under 21 unfettered access to gambling using your debit card. There are, just so you know, these gray market games, they're called Daily Fantasy 2.0. They're basically sports betting, but they technically are known as fantasy sports, which is the loophole that they exploit. They have really, really weak age verification systems. All you have to do is put in your birthday. You could claim to be born in 1929 and you can log in and create an account. It could be that these students are using these companies called Prize Picks and Underdog and are just walking in right through the front door.

Matt Katz: I know you wrote about this, and a texter has reiterated it. One issue I want to highlight is the sucker bets that we get fed; teases and parlays or sucker bets, and they are relentlessly promoted and loved by the masses. I don't bet on sports because it's a losing proposition, for sure, but teases and parlays are criminally bad. What are those?

Jonathan Cohen: It used to be you'd bet on a team to win the game, and that would be exciting and cool. The new frontier of American sports betting are parlays, which are actually particularly popular among the younger male audience that we've been discussing already. A parlay involves not just a team to win the game or a single result, but a string of results, all of which have to happen.

It wouldn't be just the Milwaukee Bucks to win. It would be the Milwaukee Bucks to win, Giannis Antetokounmpo to get at least nine rebounds, Kyle Kuzma to have at least four assists, Damian Lillard to have at least 25 points, on and on and on, and you can add as many different lines onto this parlay as you want, each one slightly increasing the odds and therefore increasing the payout.

What we're basically describing is ways to turn sports betting into a lottery ticket to bet $2, and all of a sudden, you're winning $100,000 because you have so many different possibilities in your parlay. As the texter is describing, it's a suckers bet. The companies are delighted with all these parlays because they make more money off of parlays than they do off of traditional sports bets. For these young men who are in it to make money, as Fred alluded to, are trying or think they can make money, or they're trying to make money. It's not exciting to turn $100 into $110, but it sure is exciting to turn $10 into $15,000, or at least to have this infinitesimal chance of doing so. That's how Americans have been choosing to bet over the last few years.

Matt Katz: Beth in Glen Gardner, New Jersey. Hi, Beth. You have children in high school?

Beth: Hello.

Matt Katz: Hi there, Beth. You're on the air.

Beth: Hi. Yes. Okay. Hello.

Matt Katz: Hi.

Beth: Yes, I do. I have two sons, one who plays Division 1 football. We are attending a lot of sporting events and watching at home and following along with competition. Then I have a 17-year-old son who is at home. He and his friends are using an online app that they can access from their phones. They're betting and they're talking about points and over and under and winning. It is not actual gambling. They're not putting any money into an account, but it's like an indoctrination. Then I'm watching all of the sporting events, just piggybacking on everything else that you were talking about. DraftKings is constantly advertising to these kids, too. It's just like culturally, it's become a very big part of kids in sports, too.

Matt Katz: Yes. Thanks so much. Jonathan, do you have any thoughts on maybe what Beth can be talking with her family about?

Jonathan Cohen: Yes. Part of the problem is, as I alluded to earlier, the transformation or the transmogrification, if you want to go that far, of a sports culture into a sports gambling culture. I think being explicit, for example, about the fact that DraftKings is trying to make money off of you and that the house always wins and it truly does in the case of sports betting, because the second that the companies realize that you're good at betting on sports, they cut you off and they stop letting you bet as much as you want.

The house truly will always win. You truly cannot make money betting on sports. To think of it as anything other than a fun, cool way to throw down a couple cents here and there is folly and is a waste of time. I would say that these companies do know that young men, for example, have a prefrontal cortex that is not fully developed and are trying to take advantage of their reduced inhibition, especially when it comes to money.

I think that's a really-- I don't know, I'm not a teenager, but I hope that that's an easy way to destigmatize it for young men and to make it less cool is to say, "Hey, you think you're being so countercultural and grown up by betting, but this is just a company taking advantage of you and you don't really know what you're doing." I hope that that's a message that would resonate.

Matt Katz: A friend just casually the other day told me how his sports gambling had gotten out of control. He's in his 40s. I'd say fully half of the men I know gamble on their phones to some degree. Some while watching games and others just all the time. My friend tells me this, and I'm like, "That's why they have the 1-800 gambler number on the DraftKings commercials." You could call, but I didn't know what else to say. Before I let you go here, what else could I have said? What other solutions do you lay out in your book? Can you give us a little overview of a few?

Jonathan Cohen: Yes. I'll say I'm not a gambling counselor by any means. I don't know the right thing to say either other than, I would say approach those kinds of difficult conversations in a way that you might with someone who has an addiction to alcohol or drugs, which is an acknowledgment that it's not entirely their fault, that gambling, for example, or drugs or alcohol has gotten its hook into their brain. Gambling is classified by the American Psychiatric Association as a addictive product in the same way that drugs or alcohol are categorized as addictive.

At some point, I don't know when, but at some point, they are no longer actively making a conscious choice to bet. They are being pulled by these inner demons or these neurological processes to bet. Seeking help is not embarrassing because they are not in control and it is not all up to them and entirely their fault whose fault it is. Lots of the bettors, including the problem gamblers that I talk to, they, of course, assume responsibility for their own addiction and say, "I shouldn't have gotten into this in the first place."

There's some responsibility here, too, for the companies and for the design of the sports betting setup, which brings me to the solutions that I propose in the book, which involve a whole host of ideas, and I won't bore you with all the policy particulars, but ranging from things like reducing advertising to denormalize sports betting a little bit or to slow the normalization of sports betting, but also adding friction, making it so when you deposit money into your account, you maybe have to wait a couple hours until you can bet or you can only deposit, make a certain number of deposits within a 24 hour period.

The companies themselves keep breaking all these rules that they, of course, helped write in the first place. The states need to take a firmer hand and not just levy a bunch of $25,000 fines on multibillion-dollar companies as if that's going to stop them from marketing to problem gamblers, which is what DraftKings and other companies have been found to do in New Jersey a couple times over.

There's all sorts of policy solutions. I think the big solution that we've been talking about involves a cultural shift and a conversational process with young men. Lots of things that I would like to see happen. Again, the industry could do these themselves, states could do them, or if need be, and if Congress gets its act together, maybe Congress could do them.

Matt Katz: Historian Jonathan Cohen is the author of the new book Losing Big: America’s Reckless Bet on Sports Gambling. Jonathan, thanks for having this conversation with us and joining us on the Tuesday health and climate section of the show.

Jonathan Cohen: Good luck with your fantasy season.

Matt Katz: Thank you very much. This is The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Stay with us.

 

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