A Year in the World of Online Sports Betting

Support for the Radio West podcast comes from Harmon's Grocery. Roasting chilies for the annual chili roast starting August 21st, every Friday and Saturday and Labor Day. Chili cheese balls, chili enchiladas, chili mac and cheese, and more. Details at Harman's Grocery.com. McKay Coppins and his editors at Atlantic Magazine wanted to publish a piece about the rise of legal online sports betting in the U.S. For most of American history, gambling has been heavily regulated and it carried this heavy social stigma. But in 2018, the Supreme Court overturned a federal law that banned sports betting and it opened the door for states to legalize it. And it didn't take long for sports books and betting apps and celebrity endorsements and partnerships with pro leagues to just spread like wildfire. So it's a good idea for a story, right? But Coppins editors were looking for an angle to tell it. And I think it was my editor who said, you know, it would be really good if you actually experienced it firsthand. And I said, yeah, no, I'm sure that would be kind of funny. But, you know, for religious reasons, I don't gamble. And he said, yeah, no, we know, you're Mormon. But we have this idea. And they basically proposed what was essentially like a theological workaround. They said, what if the Atlantic stakes you $10,000 to gamble with over the course of the upcoming NFL season? We will cover any losses. But in order to kind of ensure that you remain emotionally invested in the project, we will split any winnings 50-50. I will say I was like intrigued. I had never been a gambler before. I really was never even that tempted to gamble. It seemed like a waste of time to me. But also I'm a sports fan. So through almost like cultural osmosis in the last few years, I had learned a little about, you know, point spreads and money lines and things like that. And so I decided that I should go consult my bishop.

So I sat down with my bishop and explained this experiment and kind of watched as a look of pastoral concern came over his face. He sort of tentatively said, look, I know you're not asking for my permission necessarily. I don't think you're necessarily doing anything wrong, but I do want to give you a word of warning. And he told me stories about people who had let Vice ruin their lives, specifically gambling. He had heard of all these people who started out with a modest gambling habit and let it kind of wreck their lives. And, you know, I kind of brushed him off a little bit. I was like, look, you don't have to worry about that. This will really just be a journalistic exercise. The last thing I remember him saying to me before I left our meeting was be careful. I think I actually laughed. And it was kind of, you know, I actually appreciated it. I was like, he's being a good bishop. That's good ministering, right? To give me that warning. But also, like, I was maybe a little bit smug about it. Like, I was like, I really don't think that you need to warn me. I will be fine.

I really thought of this as kind of a, like, fun little journalistic gimmick to make the story a little bit more entertaining, right? It would be like the dessert with the vegetables of, you know, all the important reporting I was going to do. And I wasn't even sure, honestly, how much I would write about it. I was like, maybe I'll write, like, a little section about my own experiment. And... I was definitely surprised by the extent to which it bled into almost every facet of my life. This is Radio West. I'm Doug Fabrizio. Today in the program, McKay Coppins is with us to talk about his story for the Atlantic. It's called Sucker. My year is a degenerate gambler. The story about this new way to gamble is interesting enough. It wasn't so long ago that if you wanted to bet on a game, you had to make a trip to a casino or find a bookie. Now it's instant and it's riskier. As McKay discovered, it started as a reporting experiment, but it pretty quickly became a test of his own limits. There were kind of two things that interested me about this. One is that, you know, gambling has become... really almost overnight omnipresent in American sports and culture and almost every part of American life. You can gamble on who will win the Oscars. You can gamble on, you know, what words Donald Trump will use in his next press conference. You can gamble on regime change in Iran, how many people will be deported in the United States. I mean, you can bet on almost anything. I'm old enough to remember that not that long ago, while I was still an adult, there was a pretty healthy social stigma attached to gambling. And it feels like that stigma has just melted away. I'm a sports fan. You can't watch a football game, basketball game without being bombarded by this like onslaught of neon-soaked ads for online sports books. If you listen to sports podcasts like I do, almost all the conversation seems to revolve around gambling now in a way that was not true a few years ago. So that part of it interested me. And I felt like it was bigger than sports. I felt like it was a manifestation of this kind of fraught American moment that we're in, this kind of casino vacations. of American life. So that definitely interested me. But it is also true that I can't help but separate this from my own kind of religious background, right? Like, I think I, you know, grew up being taught that there were certain vices that were, you know, soul rotting, right? They were bad for the soul. And gambling was one of them. And...

You know, it's interesting, I really didn't think that much about gambling because for most of my life, the American consensus seemed to be roughly where my kind of moral and religious teachings were. For the most part, there was a conventional wisdom in America that gambling was a vice that should be kept at bay, right? That, like, in a liberal democratic society. You know, maybe we need to make a little bit of allowance for certain vices. We need to tolerate them, but also stigmatize them and regulate them, right? And at least in the case of gambling, it feels like just in the last decade or less, all of a sudden we have unlearned that lesson. And I'll say one other thing about this. That consensus, by the way, is the product of millennia of accumulated wisdom, right? Every civilization before us has come to the same conclusion about gambling. I mean, look at what Aristotle said about gambling. Look at what St. Augustine said. Look at what George Washington said. I mean, you can kind of march through human history in it, basically every stage, the leading thinkers and religious leaders and... political leaders of the time have come to the conclusion that gambling is a threat to civilization, that it is bad for the soul, bad for communities, that it fosters kind of greed and a something for nothing ethos. And I think that what kind of compelled me about this piece was that all of a sudden that conventional wisdom, that consensus was melting away. And I was fascinated by kind of the consequences of that. Give us a sense of how prevalent this is. How many people are doing this? Like every day. And let's talk about why it seems to be mostly almost always men. Well, just since 2018, Americans have wagered more than half a trillion dollars on sports. Roughly half of men ages 18 to 49 have an active account with an online sports book. And even for those who are not. legally of age to gamble, gambling is becoming much more pervasive. One survey found that one third of 11-year-old boys in America say that they've gambled in the past year. Wow. And so, you know, it is clearly becoming more prevalent. It's, you know, much more culturally accepted. It's much more pervasive. But you're right that it is kind of... Not exclusively, but largely a male phenomenon. You know, when it comes to sports gambling in particular, it's about 70% of people who use online sports books are men. If you look at just people who would be identified as problem gamblers in sports, that rises to 98% of them are men. And, you know, there's a whole body of like neuroscience research that looks at this. And, you know, there are apparently elements of male brain chemistry that lead to men.

being willing to take larger risks, having more optimism, whether it's rational or irrational about their financial futures. And there's kind of this unique cocktail and I guess the man's brain chemistry that makes them more susceptible to the temptation of gambling and more susceptible to gambling addiction in particular. Yeah. Well, let's go to your first bet. You're scrolling through the wagers on draft kings. And I like the way you do this. So you bet that the Eagles would beat the Cowboys by at least nine points. And the way you came up with that was, as you put it, this sophisticated premise that, well, the Eagles won the Super Bowl last time. The Cowboys didn't, so there you go. That seems to make sense. So talk a little bit about the way you're going about this, at least at first, because it seems like this – I wonder how typical that is. Amateurs who like you are betting on hunches or just really basic general ideas or how many are really, as you eventually do, get – get to really start to dig into all of the statistics. In the industry, this is known as vibes betting. And that was definitely what I was doing at the beginning. You know, I just kind of had some general impressions as a casual sports fan and was making my bets based on those impressions. But. I will say, I think this is how most people gamble. You know, the vast majority of people who download draft kings or fan duel are just betting based on their hunches, based on vibes. And that's what I was doing that first night. I will also say that I was completely at a loss when it came to like gambling vocabulary. I didn't know about profit boosts or alternative spreads or same game parlays or any of that. So the first few bets that I made on that. first game of the NFL season were almost kind of random. You know, I was I was just punching in bets on this app that I had never really used. And, you know, the results were mixed. It's interesting, though, the way it makes you feel right away. Because you describe that experience as strangely mesmerizing, you say. And then you also write about how... you had purchased an artificial rooting interest in a game that you had no reason to care about. Yeah, I mean, that is the magic of sports gambling. Like, I had no reason to care about the outcome of that first NFL game, right? I'm not a fan of the Eagles or the Cowboys. In my normal life, I might have put that game on while I was, like, folding laundry with my wife, watched the first half, and then turned it off and gone to bed, right? That would be my normal experience. And by having a couple hundred bucks riding on the game, I found that I was like much more locked in. I cared way more about this game. I was up the whole time. I watched the very last play. I, you know, I cared way more than normal. And it was kind of amazing. It was like a thrill, right? It was like...

unlocking this cheat code that suddenly made sports come alive in a way that even as a sports fan, I had not experienced apart from the teams that I rooted for, right? And I remember that very first night being like, oh, this is why people do this. It makes it so much more fun to watch sports. I think the... The history part is really interesting. You write about how in this country it was mostly discouraged, heavily regulated. Explain why. I just wonder what the Puritans and others saw as being wrong with it. Like what were they saying is wrong with it? Because it'll get us to why people don't see anything wrong with it now. Well, there's this great quote that I found from George Washington where he said that every possible evil could be linked to gambling. And his quote was, it is the child of avarice, the brother of inequity, and the father of mischief. And I think there was this sense among the Puritans and then later the founding fathers that gambling was a peril. for a nation, a community, a civilization. And, you know, different states kind of treated it differently and the regulations and laws evolved over time. But the kind of underlying idea in the way that America had always treated gambling was that if it had to happen, it should happen in kind of... unseemly places that are like containment zones for vice, right? Like you should have to go on a riverboat or go to a red light district or go to like a city in the desert in Nevada that makes you feel a little bad about yourself. And in that way, you are... you know, creating the sort of like necessary cultural release valve of the vice existing, but also introducing just enough friction that it's hard to do all the time to the point where it can become truly ruinous. So we, for decades and decades, hundreds of years as a country, practically, we discouraged it, we attached a social stigma to it. We, made it illegal in most places, except for, as you say, those exceptions. When did this start to change? Like, what was the turning point? Because it wasn't that long ago. It was really not long ago. This is the thing that I think that people have a hard time grasping. Like, this new Wild West era that we're in, this new sudden kind of cultural consensus that gambling, you know, is everywhere and we just have to live with it. It's less than 10 years old. I mean, so the story kind of starts in 2012 in New Jersey when Governor Chris Christie wanted to boost the flagging economy of Atlantic City. And so he signed a bill expanding sports betting to licensed locations in his state. Deep indignation about it. Oh, my gosh, thundering indignation, thund, righteous outrage from the sports leagues, right? It was the leagues were actually the ones.

that sued to stop New Jersey from implementing this law. And it ended up winding through federal... court. But I talked to Christy about this and he kind of recounted with some amusement being cornered at an event once by the NBA commissioner, David Stern, who like shouted at him and, you know, said, we're going to come after you with everything we've got. We're not going to allow you to ruin professional sports. And what Christy said was, you know what, David, after I win this thing and I am going to win it, you're going to thank me. Yeah. And he ended up, I guess being right. I mean, the case ended up before the Supreme Court in 2018, which overturned the federal ban on sports betting, essentially returned regulation of gambling to the states. And one by one, very quickly, dozens of states legalized online sports betting. And literally overnight, the sports leagues got on board with sports betting. They rushed into partnerships with the big online sports books. State legislatures across the country started legalizing it. Athletes started signing up to endorse it, right? It became kind of culturally ubiquitous in a very short span of time. And all of the people who had once been you know, participants in this consensus that gambling should be regulated and stigmatized kind of unlearned that lesson. And it's shocking to me that we as a society almost without really thinking about it, without giving any thought to why these regulations were there in the first place, discarded them, defenestrated them, and rushed into this new era where gambling would take over sports, culture, and every other element of American life. McKay Coppins, he's a staff writer at the Atlantic. His story is called Sucker. My year is a degenerate gambler. We'll put a link to it on our website, RadioWest.org. We'll take a break. Come back in a moment. You're listening to Radio West.

Support for the Radio West podcast comes from Harmon's Grocery. Roasting chilies for the annual chili roast starting August 21st, every Friday and Saturday and Labor Day. Chili cheese balls, chili enchiladas, chili mac and cheese, and more. Details at Harman's Grocery.com. This is Radio West. I'm Doug Fabrizio. Today in the program, we're talking with McKay Coppins about the astonishing rise of legal sports betting. For most of U.S. history gambling carried a heavy stigma and strict rules, but today it's just within the reach of your phone. The Atlantic magazine gave Coppins $10,000 to bet on the NFL season. And he writes about this new ecosystem, what it's doing to the experience of being a fan. But it's also about what it did to him, how he found himself invested in a way he didn't expect, made him wonder if the guardrails in his life had kept him from discovering a darker streak. The story is called Sucker. My year is a degenerate gambler. So to get the story right, you figured you're going to need to, as you put it, a gambling guru, which gets you to, and this made a lot of sense, Nate Silver. I think people know that name, even though he's not on the scene in the way he used to be. Of course, he's the, as you say, America's most famous statistics nerd, the founder of 538, that election forecasting website, no longer exists, actually. Talk about Nate and what you wanted to get from him. Who's become a terrific gambler himself? Right. I mean, he kind of citing a midlife crisis, ditched politics or at least moved away from politics a little while ago, started focusing more on gambling content. He writes a newsletter about gambling. He wrote a book about gamblers. And... What I liked about him was that he was bringing the kind of sophisticated statistical rigor that he had applied to polling analysis when he was more of a political pundit to sports betting. And so I kind of figured, like, if there was anybody who could teach me the best practices of respectable sports betting, it would be Nate Silver. And so I... called him and asked, you know, could I bring you on as my advisor for this experiment? And he said, yeah, sure, it sounds fun. Send me your bet slips for your first week. Right. He's not terribly impressed. It was pretty humiliating, honestly. I remember I sent them to him, and we got on the phone, and he started to scroll through them as we were talking. And he started to like audibly react. to do my betting from the first week. And he said, okay, okay. Oh, no. Right. He actually started to laugh, which is how I realized that it is possible to be emasculated by Nate Silver. But he, you know, it was, it was helpful because.

He was the first one who taught me kind of the basic realities of the sports betting economy and like how it works, right? Well, explain that. Take us through that. Here's the thing that I was really drawn to. You said that so the books will charge you about four and a half percent for every bet you place, which you write means that it isn't enough to win 50.1 percent. You have to win 52.5 percent just to break even. And that's before taxes. Right. And what he said was like, everybody has a story about somebody who's made a ton of money in sports betting. But what you have to understand is that the people who actually bet on sports successfully are exploiting like microscopic edges. They're grinding day in, day out through data, through roster reports, through, you know, weather reports, like finding every possible little edge that you can. And they follow certain rules. Like, he said, you know, don't use prop bets on individual players. Like, you know, Patrick Mahomes will throw for over 250 yards. Or parlay bets, which is basically they pay out if multiple different outcomes hit. Like the chiefs to win, the Ravens to win, the Chargers to win, right? He said those are actually how the sports books make the vast majority of their profits, their suckers' bets. He also told me one mistake I was making is that I was only using draft kings. He said, To really maximize your advantage as sports better, you need to be checking three or four sports books at least every week and shopping for the best betting lines, right? And so, you know, he taught me all these rules, and I wrote them all down. And I remember at the end of the conversation, I said, okay, so I'm starting with $10,000. What would be a successful season? You know, like what should be my goal? What should I be aspiring to? He was almost like confused by the question. And he said, if you make one penny, that would be better than 98% of people for an entire season. Which kind of like shocked me. Because, you know, he had told me that over the course of his gambling life, he had made in the mid six figures in profit. But he said most of that was from poker tournaments. And that actually betting on the NFL in particular is incredibly difficult. He said the lines are too sharp. The teams are too evenly matched. And he said that even he would count it as a win if he broke even for the season. But then comes this critical moment in the story, at least I found it really instructive, is you said to him that you understood what he was saying.

But you say that some part of you didn't believe him, that somehow you figured you could beat the odds. And there seemed to be a sort of a secret in that response that gets at the sort of the mind of a gambler. Yeah. I mean, I didn't recognize it as such at the time. But this was like. the quintessential, like, psychology of a gambler, right? Even though I understood everything he was saying, intellectually, it made sense to me. As a journalist, you know, it checked out as a gambler, I was convinced that I would be in that 2%. Like, I was like, I mean, look. I made $20 my first night of gambling. Why couldn't I do that, you know, three or 400 more times over the course of the next five months? And like, again, if I interrogated it for like 20 seconds, I would be, I would kind of, you know, check myself. I'd be like, well, no, you're. You're not an exception. It would be incredibly unlikely that you would end up beating the odds. But the thing about being a gambler is like you don't interrogate those instincts. That's not fun. That like takes away from the experience of gambling. You want to believe that you will be the one that beats the odds. Like somebody has to. Why can't it be me? It seems like the appeal or the draw is more than just the money then. It seems like it's the process because you write about being really proud that you'd started to master the lingo. And you said it made you feel like a sharp. And how time consuming it was and how you'd lose track of time. So there's a process there. I remember, you know, like going out for an errand that my wife had sent me on and parking outside of a big box store in northern Virginia. And, you know, before I went in, like, checking draft kings. And then before I knew it, I looked up in 45 minutes had passed, right? It did make me, you know, there was like, especially as like, you know. wholesome Mormon boy. There was a certain like perverse thrill to like, oh wow, I can speak the gambling language now. It's part of what I think makes gambling and sports betting in particular kind of an identity, you know? Like since this story has come out, it has been amazing the degree to which gamblers have like had very visceral reactions to it, almost as if I had, like, you know, written about their, like, church in a way that they didn't, you know, they didn't like. Well, the intensity of that emotion comes into play in the story. You write about one of the players in a game that you had bet on fumbled the ball at the goal line, basically. And you lost money. And you write about being filled with...

as you put it, an irrational hatred for this person I had never met. And you go on to sort of write about the intensity of that feeling because you felt really unnerved by it. And the experience that at least you write about one particular French tennis player who talked to you about just being the target of this intense kind of abuse because of this culture. Say something about that. As a sports fan, I know that athletes are used to getting heckled, right? Like, that's part of performing, you know, on a court or in a field. Like, there are people there who yell at you. I've been to, you know, Fenway Park. I've seen my share of, you know, angry fans. Yankee suck. Yankee suck. Yeah. Exactly. But this was different than being like a fan, right? And that's what unnerved me. Because just speaking about my own experience, I have. not somebody who yells vulgar things at athletes, right? Like, I get into the games that I watch. I get mad when my team loses. But, like, I would never think of angrily shouting at somebody, let alone sending abusive messages on social media or certainly not death threats, right? But, like, watching that Cardinals player. fumble the ball right before the end zone, which ultimately led to me losing a few hundred bucks. Like... I couldn't believe how angry I wasn't. You know, I had no reason to be angry at him for real. Like, he seems, I'm sure he's a perfectly nice guy. But I was watching and rewatching the clip of the play. I was obsessing over his comments to reporters afterward in the locker room. I was making, like, moral judgments about him based on this fumble, which is. preposterous. Like, that is insane behavior. I did not recognize it in myself. It is certainly not the way that I normally am. But when I talked to the French tennis player, you mentioned Caroline Garcia, I was a little ashamed to realize that I could, like, relate on some level to the gamblers who had spent, you know, her entire career sending, you know, death threats and abusive messages. I mean, she talks about, like, The first abusive message she received from an angry gambler came when she was still a teenager. And she talked about like, you know, she would get the most like vulgar, unhinged message you can possibly imagine from somebody on Instagram and then look at his profile. And it's like him with his one year old baby. And she is like, what is wrong with you? But this is a huge problem with the rise of gambling culture. The more popular. gambling has become, the more people who are gambling, the more harassment athletes have gotten.

Part of what you also get at in the piece, it was kind of how the experience of betting on sports changed the experience of just being a fan. And you tell the story of driving to North Carolina for the Brigham Young East Carolina football game. And you're a big, you know, you went to BYU, you're a big fan. And at first you decide, I'm not going to bet on this game. But then at the tailgate party, you're like, you were kind of good this year. I think I should. But will you talk about, I mean, the Coors win. You're happy. But then you also wonder, maybe I should have bet more or maybe I should have bet differently. So just explain what's going on here, the transformation of you seeing that game as a fan. A better, you know, a gambler. It's funny because I should not have had to gamble on a BYU football game to be invested in it, right? Like, I'm a big BYU fan. I've always watched the games. And I knew going into it, like, I don't need to do the thing that I did with that random Eagles Cowboys game and purchase a synthetic rooting interest because I already have a rooting interest. And I'm here with my family, and it's going to be a great, you know, family memory. And I had taught my kids the fight song. And it's, you know, like, I'll just enjoy it for what it is. But then I'm at the tailgate party and I talked to a BYU administrator actually who, you know, says like, oh, our defense looks really good. They're locked in. And, like, that thought kind of occurs to me, like, well, I should bet a little bit on BYU. I mean, and in fact, there's this, like, rationalizing instinct that kicks in. It's like, well, I'm kind of almost a bad fan if I don't bet on BYU, right? Like, I'm betting on all these other games. I should put a little bit of money on the team that I love. And so I think I put $100 on BYU to win the game. So, BYU does win, and it's a great experience, and my kids are singing the fight song. And then I have this, like, intrusive thought, oh, I should have, I should have bet BYU to cover the spread. Like, that was better juice. I would have won more. Yeah. And it was kind of one of the first moments where I noticed that my experience as a sports fan was being kind of transmogrified by my gambling. If I go on the Draft King's app on a phone, on my phone, what's it like? Because you talk that they're designed kind of like Candy Crush or TikTok. Like the idea is to keep you moving and tapping. It's a strategy. Yeah, of course. I mean, it's like any... good app on your phone. It's like very slickly dislined. It's very glossy. It is designed with all these, you know, little features that make you want to keep scrolling, the endless scroll, the colors.

It seems like it's basically designed to keep you in like a hypnotic stupor, which I will admit to having found myself in more than once. But they also have all these strategies to keep you gambling, right? So, for example, on Draft Kings, if your account is nearing empty and you haven't reloaded it in a while, Draft Kings will offer you what they call a reload bonus, which is basically free gambling credits to entice you to deposit more money, right? Or if you go a few days without placing a bet, Fandual might send you a push alert, offering what they call a no sweat bet, which is promising to refund a loss with site credits that you can use for more gambling. And so these apps basically are designed to turn people into, if not gambling addicts, then regular, you know, I would argue, compulsive gamblers. McKay Coppins. His article is Sucker. My ear is a degenerate gambler. We'll put a link to it on our website, RadioWest.org. We'll take another break. Come back in a moment. You're listening to Radio West.

Support for Radio West comes from our members. Find out how at KUER.org. This is Radio West. I'm Doug Fabrizio. Back now to our conversation with McKay Coppins of the Atlantic. We're talking about his latest piece in the magazine, his exploration of the rise of legal sports betting. It's called Sucker. My year is a degenerate gambler. One of the things that you do in the story that I think is really interesting is that you compare the difference between betting, you know, on an app in your phone anywhere, like, you know, you're in the bathroom at work or in your office or, you know, waiting for the, you know, takeout. There's a difference between that and betting in a place designated for betting, like in the desert in Las Vegas. And, of course, you go there and sort of explore that idea. And you meet up with a man named Tom Nichols. And at this point in the piece, we get a sense of Vegas because Tom loves Vegas. He loves the kitsch of it. He loves the community of it. So will you talk about this part of the story? Because I think the difference, you know, this idea of having a containment zone for gambling as compared with having it everywhere is really interesting. Yeah, that was actually one of the more surprising revelations to me that I developed an unexpected appreciation for Las Vegas. If not as a place that I would want to spend a lot of time in, then as a place that provides a certain social utility, right? So, you know, Tom Nichols is actually another writer at The Atlantic. He writes these very authoritative pieces about geopolitics. He's a former U.S. Naval War College professor. And I had no idea until I... started reporting this piece that he's actually also a recreational blackjack player. And he was basically sent with me as like my chaperone on this trip. And what he, he almost kind of convinced me of his love for Vegas. Like I started to share it in a way. Like he took me to the blackjack table. You know, I had never really played blackjack. And we sat down and he taught me how to play the game. What I noticed was that, like, this is one of the rare places in America today.

which is increasingly atomized and divided, where people from all different segments of life are sitting down and hanging out together, right? Like, I played Blackjack with a couple of, you know, ladies in their 60s from Green Bay who told me about their, you know, one of their weddings where they wore Packers jerseys and they were chain smoking and, like, you know, heckling me for not hitting on 16. And like, it was like a kind of Americana experience. It was almost like Rockwellian. Yeah. And like that sounds like an absurd thing to say about gambling in a Las Vegas casino. But compared to the isolation and omnipresence of the casino in your pocket, you know, the online sports betting apps, like it almost felt wholesome. What I came away with was just this kind of appreciation for the idea that like in a liberal democratic society. you do have to make certain vices available up to a certain point, right? Like as much as I would, you know, the kind of on a moral level would love to just end all gambling in America. And I do actually think that everybody would be better off. I also recognize that like not everybody sees the world the same way I do. Not everybody has the same values that I do. And so you probably do need to allow. gambling to exist, but there should be some social friction to do it, right? It should be contained to places like Las Vegas where the kind of sensory overload makes it so that you can't really be there for that long, right? I found that like... It was really fun for the first day. And by the third day, I was, like, exhausted and bleary-eyed and the colors and the lights and the sounds and all the, you know, fried food I had eaten was just kind of like, I was like, I got to get out of here. You know? And, like, that's kind of where you should have to go to gamble, I think. Tell us about the effort to slow or stop this wave. This gets us to a congressman from New York, Paul Tonko. He says fighting the sports betting industry is a lonely job. Tell us about him and the efforts that he's encountered. He has a kind of hope. that eventually people will realize, but not now, it seems. Yeah. Well, the way that he came to this issue was because he's a co-chair of the Addiction, Treatment, and Recovery Caucus in the House. And so he actually, a few years ago, was shown the social media feeds of some of his younger aides on his staff who were like, hey, look at all these ads for sports betting apps. Like, they're everywhere, you know? And when he saw them, the first thing he thought of was the cigarette ads from a generation ago, right? That they're like very glossy, very predatory, clearly designed to hook young people. And he was kind of like scandalized by it and also.

couldn't believe that there's no regulation for these ads, which there really is not very much regulation, certainly not at the federal level. And, you know, the way he put it to me is they're delivering a known addictive product. So clearly they should be regulated. He started to work on a bill that would regulate advertising for online sports books and was surprised by two things. First, there was a ton of energy around the issue. Like once he started working on this, he started hearing from, you know, moms whose sons had gambled away tuition checks and, you know, encouraging him to keep at it. He heard from politicians in the UK and Australia, which are countries that are a little further ahead of us on this trajectory and told him, like, you need to crack down on this now. We wish that we had cracked down on it earlier in our countries. But he also found that in Congress, there was almost zero appetite to tackle this issue. This was four years ago. More recently, he told me that as the problems have become more apparent, as gambling culture has become more ubiquitous, he is finding more prospective legislative partners. And... His best case scenario when I asked him, you know, do you think that your bill will pass? He said, look, this industry's got a ton of money, so I don't kid myself. It's an uphill battle. But he said, you know, give it some time. In a few years, things might be so bad that Americans will be like clamoring for regulation. I'll just add this, though. Since the story has been published. I have been really struck by kind of the cross-ideological bipartisan consensus on this issue. I do think that there is a growing awareness of how dangerous this epidemic of online gambling is. And it's really not a partisan issue. A lot of people on both sides are seeing the problems, realizing there needs to be more regulation, realizing there is a place for legislation. And so I'm hopeful that we can get more traction. I am a little frustrated, though, by how many people have texted me and emailed me who work in politics, whether they're, you know, they work on Capitol Hill. Some of them are elected officials themselves saying, this is an amazing story, great story, such powerful journalism. And I kind of want to be like, Well, what are you going to do about it? You know, like, I don't have the power to pass legislation. You do. Like, I hope that the growing awareness of this issue will spur a little bit more serious consideration by political leaders to tackle the problem. Here's something you write in the piece. You say to watch sports in 2026 is to become almost inevitably a kind of conspiracy theorist. How is this changing our trust in what we see at a sports event as a fan?

Yeah, I mean, if you remember last October, there was this big kind of announcement by the FBI and the Justice Department that they had arrested more than 30 people in this kind of interlocking gambling scheme that involved rigged poker games with the mob, but also involved... Apparently, a years-long mob operation drawing on insider information to manipulate NBA games to win bets. And, you know, Terry Rozier, who was a player for the Charlotte Hornets, was accused of tipping off associates that he would leave a game early with a foot injury so that they could bet on the under, you know, for his points and rebounds and assists. And when something like that comes out... The immediate question that a gambler asks is, well, how widespread is this? And, you know, this bet that I just lost is it because it's rigged in some way, right? Like, you can't help but wonder if the game that you're watching is being manipulated by gamblers, like whether it's players or referees or coaches. And it's possible that... you know, this is actually just a fluke, right? The handful of scandals that have come out in the past year or two are actually not that common, that statistically it's very uncommon for athletes to manipulate their performance. But even just one or two of these scandals coming out is enough to cede doubt. And that poses an existential risk to the leagues. Let me go back to something we were talking about earlier, and that is your own sort of personal involvement in all of this. Did it surprise you how kind of dark things got, how personally affected, how it kind of had a, not a big, but it kind of impacted your relationship with your wife for a minute? Did that surprise you? Yeah, there was a stretch around Christmas time where... I was what gamblers would call on tilt. That is like kind of the term for the frenzied emotional state that a gambler gets into where they start making really unwise decisions. They're chasing their losses. They're taking increasingly risky bets to try to win back money that they've lost. And that happened to me. I had this one terrible beat. a couple weeks before Christmas while I was watching an NFL game with my father-in-law, and something inside of me snapped, and I became obsessed with winning back everything I had lost. And for like two weeks... I just threw out all the rules that Nate Silverhead taught me. I started making riskier and riskier bets. I dramatically scaled up the size of my bets. I was betting $500 a game in some cases.

And it really bled into my personal life. Like, you know, this was Christmas time. So we were like doing all these festive family outings together. And I was like, you know, hiding in the minivan to put in my six leg parley bed for the NBA. Or. While my daughter was practicing for a church choir performance, I was like sitting in the minivan in the church parking lot, chewing on my fingernails, sweating a, you know, a chief's game where I was watching on my phone. And that two-week period kind of passed in a blur. By the end of it, I started doing the math and realized that I had lost more than $2,500 in 13 days. about it is I didn't even realize I had lost that much. Like it all just kind of went by in this like blur of maniacal betting. And it was a little bit of a wake up call. Like it made me realize that like what had started is a very kind of self-aware experiment had devolved into something a little bit, you know, more dark and bleak and real. I think listeners are going to want me to ask how you did at the end of the season, but I'm not going to. I want them to read this piece. You're fine. We'll just say that. Let me ask you this finally. You mentioned in your article that as a society. we are making this really risky bet. And the question is, can we reap the rewards and not pay some kind of price? Because it's always been connected to vice and addiction and isolation and cheating and all of those kinds of things. And this time the question is, can we keep all that in check? Where do you think we are with that question right now? Not every, you know, consensus of the past is worth clinging to. People have been wrong in the past. You know, it's important to look at the world and develop new ideas. I think this is a case where the civilizational consensus that has existed for thousands of years is right. Gambling is enormously dangerous to societies, to cultures, to individuals. You know, I came across when I was finishing the piece, actually, a 1907 article written in the Atlantic by a Unitarian minister who said, The Long and Costly Experience of Mankind bears uniform testimony against gambling. It is a dangerous or unsocial form of excitement. It hurts character, demoralizes industry, breeds quarrels, and tempts men to self-destruction. I think you could write that today. I think that is absolutely true. And as a society, we need to have a kind of reckoning with our decision to allow this industry to get completely out of control and figure out ways to rein it in before it's too late. McKay Coppins. Thank you very much. Thank you.

McKay Coppins, he's a staff writer at The Atlantic. His article is called Sucker. My ear is a degenerate gambler. We'll put a link to it on our website, RadioWest.org. He's also a co-host for the Deseret News Podcast, Deseret Voices. Radio West is a production of KUER. You can subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. We're on Instagram at Radio West. We're on YouTube at KUERr 90.1. You can email us at Radio West at kUER.org. Our intern is Aidan Oneida, the program produced by Benjamin Netanyahu Bombard and Tim Slover. I'm Doug Fabrizio.