How Sports Gambling Apps Are Rotting Society

25:44We don't really know what to do with that. And, you know, they're playing him in coverage and the quarterbacks are doing their job. It feels cruel, but you got to do it. They're throwing at his coverage at the hand that he's missing to see how he handles not playing with the full extension that you'd normally get. And, you know, he impresses the scouts enough that he ends up making the Seahawks with his brother Shaquille. It's not standing. This might be a little bit into the weeds, but he worked really well with Seattle Scheme because of that kind of hybrid linebacker type. Yeah, yeah. It's a body type because in football, you have a bunch of different positions and there are kind of body types that tend to fit in those positions and they tend to be somewhat static.

26:24And so there's very few teams that can fit. So it was kind of like a perfect situation to find the right team culture in Seattle that would encourage that kind of thing, to find the right team that had basically a position available for the type of football that he played. and it emerges as this really wonderful story where... To be clear, by the way, neither of them are still on Seattle. Shaquille is still playing. Who is he? He just played for the Vikings. His contract just ran out, so we'll see who's out of the agency. But point being, very short time together in Seattle and it is still top five Seahawks moments for me because of just the narrative storytelling that you were getting at.

27:01And the thing is, this depth is necessary. Understanding why people are so emotionally attached to these teams and why people have such cultural awareness to really explain how evil these apps are. Because you're not just, it's not just like betting on numbers and the excitement of gambling. It's, and this is a very, very overwhelmingly wanky way of putting it. It's exerting control over something that you have even less control over than numbers, than odds. So Caleb, you have, And Arif, I know you've written some about this as well, but you've definitely complained a lot in our sports related group chat about these fucking ads as well.

27:43So describe some of these ads, the way they target people for these sports betting apps. Well, I mean, it's kind of hard to pick one because it's such a deluge. It's everywhere now. And it seems like I just blinked and then it was there. For context, I didn't want to interrupt, Arif, what you were saying earlier. when you were explaining the fantasy stuff, I had no idea about any of that because none of this is even legal in Washington state. I have never done this. I've never been able to do this. And up until, I think it was yesterday, when crypto.com just said, you know what, I don't care about the laws on the state level.

28:17We're just going to start doing this. And so you're probably going to see ads for that on the Super Bowl today, I would imagine, where they're like, yeah, we're just going to ignore the law and we're going to advertise to you cynically that you can just do this now. They offer a product that is, according to them, not gambling, which is why they can offer it in whatever state, but it functionally is gambling. It's also not fantasy, which is why they can offer it in whatever state. But you buy a token in whether or not a player will accomplish a particular goal or won't accomplish a particular goal, and then the token cashes out based off of the player's performance, which again is somehow not gambling.

28:57And on a real basic level, the way they kind of trick you into believing you have more control is by saying, oh, you would pick a team. So in fact, we've kind of gone over this, but not hard to reaffirm it, where you go, oh, I think that these guys will all score the most, right? So you pick like Patrick Mahomes in the regular season, Patrick Mahomes, wide receiver, running back and all them. and then you kind of submit that with a bet on it, right? Yeah, well, so there are like bets for game day, right? But there are season-long bets and there is season-long fantasy as well. But the way that these ads are kind of marketing the concept of gaming on sports or whatever is just game day betting and sometimes even live betting in games.

29:46And that's what the most of these were because it wasn't really clear to me so just again to distinguish there are the ones where you bet on outcomes and then there are ones that you bet on whether you have chosen the correct amount of boys like the correct guys that will score the most points well again I think they're both gambling they are both gambling I'm just trying to delineate which one is the most which is the one that has penetrated so far I would say more people are sick of fantasy ads because they've run for longer but gambling ads have done a lot more in the past two years to saturate the market.

30:23But it's also kind of difficult to tell the difference between a fantasy ad and a gambling ad. And I think most consumers that are just watching sports... Most of the people listening to this will not know the difference. Yeah. And so, sorry, I actually came into this with a slight mistake. And this is a common one, I think. I thought, I didn't know that gambling gambling was so prevalent. I didn't, so it's, how many states can you just boot up an app? I want to say it's 21. That's insane. So just. Well, now it's 50. Well, okay. If they start ignoring regulation. Yeah. But just to be clear to the listeners, non-sports fans, sports fans alike, what we are discussing is that basically in 21 states, anyone can pick up their phone and start gambling like they're in Vegas, specifically on the outcomes of sports events.

31:07This is. Individual plays. Like in the time that it would take you to send a tweet, you can lose a hundred dollars. So the last I looked, it was 21. Now mobile online sports betting is legal in 30 states plus D.C. Well, 31 states, but it's not yet operational in Missouri. And retail gambling, which is you have to physically go in, in additional eight states. Yeah, so that is legal in Washington. I have to go to a place to gamble. And I guess that's a little less insidious. So we're talking over 100 million people. Oh, easily. Yeah, well, especially because it includes New York and Florida. Oh, God.

31:45We were talking about this earlier before we started recording, Ed. You were in the other room, but I was reading about this. Today, just today,$1.5 billion will be bet on the Super Bowl. Just on the apps or in general? In general. In general.

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35:03This is real rot economy shit as well, because anyone can gamble. So you've got this system that's already not great. And the things you can bet on, just to be clear, aren't just like guy wins game or guy scores points. It's like the coin toss. Yeah, the level of, well, absurdity like with the coin toss, but the level of absurdity and precision on the things with which you can bet on are absurd. And so some of them are just called novelty bets. And the coin toss, by the way, is whether the coin will be heads or tails? Correct. Or you can bet on who will win the coin toss, which is the same odds, right?

35:36Great. So two bets on the coin. Yeah. Well, and then there's correlated bets. So there's I was offered when I logged into FanDuel earlier, I was offered a bet on Chiefs win the coin toss and the game. And when you say offered, how do you mean? When I logged into the app, a splash screen showed up telling me that there was this bet that I would be available for. It was like a bright... Available for in what... Would you not otherwise be allowed to bet on it? No, if I navigated to the... But was there a special deal or was it just telling you you could do this? In this case, there wasn't a special deal.

36:14It was just informing me that... So here's my understanding of how this operation works. Right. when they come up with unique bets like that one for most games you don't get to bet on the coin toss in most books but books refers to the apps the operators but when they come up with these they start kind of testing which ones are the most popular and then also using the data that they have to determine which ones are the most profitable, which is another way of saying which ones people lose the most money on. So they are just, so we're clear, advertising specific bets. Yeah, advertising specific bets and telling you, and then highlighting the ones that are the most profitable and most likely to generate interaction.

37:06So trying to actively advertising something that they ideally need you to lose on, and the thing they're promoting is... And their data tells them that you are very likely to lose on. So when you say you are likely to lose on, are you saying that they customize it based on your actual betting history? Yes and no. So they can customize their offers to the category of bets that you typically make and will engineer kind of the ones that are most profitable to them to show to you. But the specific ones, like the one I just showed, that one's offered to everybody when you show up. And so the specific bets, they don't really they're not like, man, this guy loses a ton of money on the Jaguars.

37:53Let's throw some more Jaguars. I'm surprised they don't. It's probably worth noting that the way that they target these offers to you depends on whether you are a casual gambler or if you are somebody who puts a lot of money into this who's losing quite a bit. In some cases, if you hit a certain threshold for how much money you've lost they will assign you a personal bookie who will text you directly specific offers and they'll even comp you bets a concierge yes so does which services so we're talking fan duel draft this was i read a story about this in npr the other day and this one was i believe fan duel yeah well so i've covered this a little bit on uh in my piece on sports gambling um we'll link that in the notes uh the uh both fan duel and draft kings do this uh bet mgm from my understanding has begun doing this.

38:41But yeah, specifically the ones that have primarily an online presence, which I know people understand BetMGM to have a casino in Vegas, but they've massively expanded their online footprint. And so the ones that do that will interact with a lot of their most valued customers, maybe is the best way to put it. The people who are losing the most money. And if you look into the stories of some of the people that have been contacted by a concierge, it's very much, it's almost like beat for beat the script you would write for a drug dealer engaging with an addict. And I don't say this lightly. I've lost a couple of people in my life to drug addictions.

39:19And I know other people in my life who are currently struggling with addiction. And some of those people have also, in addition to their drug addiction, have become addicted to gambling, not necessarily sports betting. And this is all exacted through software. This is all directly predominantly. Yeah, and so the software will flag someone as like, hey, this person's lost like$30 ,000. You should get more money from them. And then they'll assign a concierge and that person will email them like, hey. It's also possibly worth noting here that this might sound like the people they're targeting are like high rollers.

39:54But predominantly speaking, this affects low income earners more than any other group. How so? Because those are the people that typically gamble the most. And that's the thing. This is inherently predatory in a way that I don't think would be possible without the current digital ecosystem we have, the penetration of consumer apps and also the kind of fuzzy legal definitions that allow them to just do this bullshit. Yeah, I think it's a combination of a couple of things. One, I think the nature of gambling is that it provides a lot of hope to people, which is one reason it targets people in lower income strata.

40:31but two the current gambling environment is frictionless like I just mentioned and this would be something with the BetMGM live product so let's say we're watching the Super Bowl and the Eagles are on the 5 yard line which is to say they're 15 feet away from scoring a touchdown and I'm in the BetMGM app and I'm in the live section of the BetMGM app and I've got$0 in my account I look up, I see the screen I see that they just made it to the five-yard line, and I immediately go, hey, it looks like Saquon Barkley is, and I'm going to throw a number out here that a lot of people are not going to know how to interpret.

41:11I'm going to skip past that in a second. But he's minus 230 to score a touchdown on the next play. So I press yes, minus 230. I want to bet$20 on it. And immediately a pop-up will say, hey, you don't have enough money in your account to bet$20. Do you want to deposit it right away and I go yes and it takes me to the deposit screen it says this is your automatic like this is your you know um default payment method press yes and you press yes and then the 25 gets deposited in the account and then you go back to the bet slip that you made and you press yes and that all occurs within three to five seconds and then the next play runs and Saquon Barkley did not score a touchdown he went to the three-yard line and now I've just lost my money And it's gone.

41:54And it's gone. And now I want to make it back. So I'm going to do it on the very next play. And it is that quick. It's so quick. Yeah, you could do it between. So many people do it between plays. Have you ever seen someone physically do this? Yeah. It's completely normal for them to be while the game is happening. I've seen them do it in arenas. Yeah. And this is why I wanted to do this episode so badly. Because so much of this, though everyone hears sports and there are definitely some, oh, is a sports ball on type people who can be like, I don't like the sports ball. I read book. I watch PowerPoint.

42:29But nevertheless, these people need to know, it's like, this is one of the most evil things tech has done. It's very much like management consultants plus tech, but this is evil perpetuated only through technology. Yeah, I think for people who are unfamiliar with sports, it feels like an exaggeration to say people are commodifying your relationship with your family. but there are a lot of people that are closer, emotionally speaking, to the teams that they follow than the family that they have. And I don't regard that necessarily as a tragedy. I don't have a great relationship with my family. So that's just the nature of what they are taking advantage of.

43:10They're commodifying this relationship. And to an extent, it's always been commodified. Sports are there at a professional level to make money. And I've always had thoughts on the tension between that, between the relationship a team has to a consumer or a fan, in this case, that are identical things, and vice versa. But I think that teams don't attempt to ruin their customers' lives. And the way that a lot of these books operate, I would argue essentially every one because smaller books get bought by larger books. Books meaning the apps, right? Yeah. I think the official term is operators, but I just call them books.

43:51But it is almost explicitly to ruin people's lives because they want to extract as much money as quickly as possible. And so there's this story in The Athletic about somebody who began gambling. And at first they were a casual bettor. They saw like a$50 promo. And typically what these promos are is you deposit$50 and then you receive$50 in promotional cash, which you can only use to gamble with. And so they go,$50 free dollars. Okay, you bet with all of it. And at the end of the week, he's run out, so he deposits 100. There's no more promo because he was a first-time customer until he got the original promo, and so on.

44:32And he just keeps going, and he's got a wife, he's got children, he's got a house, right? And he bets larger and larger sums to make up for what he had lost previously. And he's describing the thrill of a win a lot like you would describe a high, right? And the wins are becoming rarer and rarer because he is betting on longer and longer shot outcomes because the long shot outcomes have the highest potential payout. So essentially what he's doing is he's buying a ticket for the lottery, but instead of paying$1 at the gas station for like a mega millions ticket, he's paying a thousand dollars for you know something that'll multiply that by and they do special offers and special bets right sometimes they'll be like they'll improve like the i've seen offers like that yeah and so and so what what began happening to this guy is um you know he started betting at odd hours of the night he started betting on sports he clearly was unfamiliar with russian tennis you know uh estonian basketball and you can bet and this is actually important detail.

45:35You can bet in some cases on just the most obtuse stuff. Yeah, just really obscure. You can bet on snookers. Snookers is the very strange kind of billiards variant that you have back in England. We say snooker. Now I'm not sure which one of us is correct. Anyway, continue. Well, you're British, so you're probably wrong. But, yeah, you can bet on anything almost anywhere in the world. People have been betting on high school games and stuff like that. And so the app is tracking his activity. They notice that he's making deposits at odd times of the night. They notice that he's betting on obscure sports that he's probably not familiar with.

46:12And so in response to that, they assign him a concierge. And the concierge emails, he's like, hey, you're one of our most valued customers. I want to offer you a$500 promotion. You don't even have to deposit anything. He's like, oh, wow, that's$500 free dollars. And then he bets it all and it all withers away. And they're like, wow, that's really tough. And so he ends up losing thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars. And he's trying to hide this all from his wife and he's taking out additional loans, personal loans at high interest. And he decides, oh man, this is awful. I'm going to stop.

46:46I'm about to lose the house. I have to find some way to do it. And so he stops. For two weeks he stops. Then he receives an email saying, hey, you haven't bet in a really long time. Is there something that we can do to kind of repair our relationship between the two of us? Because hey, we've become friends, man. You and me. This is the concierge. We're in this together, man. I want to see you succeed. So what I've done is I've placed$2 ,000 of promotional cash in your account. You can do that what you want. And he emails back, like, hey, I think I've developed a problem. I don't think I can do this anymore.

47:22I'm not going to do this anymore. And the guy responds with, and I'm paraphrasing from an article I read a couple months ago. We'll find it and link it as well. It was over at The Athletic, which is now a New York Times gig, so it'll be easy to find. But the guy responds with, oh, wow, I wish the best for you. That really sucks. I'm sorry to hear that. Take care of yourself. But if you ever come back, those$2 ,000 are still there for you. And so it's just always in his mind for the next couple of weeks and he decides he's going to do it and he does it. And the guy emails like, oh, wow, I'm glad to see that you've taken care of it and you're back or whatever.

48:02And he's like, yeah, I don't know if I can still do this. And he's like, okay, yeah, I understand. We don't want you to put yourself in a bad spot. But we've got this great promotion coming up that I just want to make sure that you take advantage of if it's there. If there's some way that you can pull together what you need in order to act. And he has said multiple times, I think I'm an addict. And they give lip service to the idea that he shouldn't do anything about it. And then they enable him. And this is done like fucking software as a service sales. This is exactly, you have a customer that's churning, you email them, you have a look at the analytics, people aren't using it within their company.

48:40You reach out and you say, hey, look, so you've got a bunch of users who aren't using it. Hey, we'll cut those off. We'll refund those. But have you considered this add-on for this team? Except instead of like business software, this is like life-ruining gambling. Yeah. The guy lost his house. Yeah, that happens all the time. One in four Americans will be betting on the Super Bowl today. Jesus. That$1.5 billion is like got to be one of the most single-day transfers of wealth from lower income brackets upward in human history. I mean, even if you're cynical about the individualistic aspects of, I don't know if you're an egoist or whatever, this is what individuals should be able to do, whatever, whatever.

49:22Or, you know, as a problem that society continues to have as people are starting their lives later, they're not buying houses, they're not having kids, they're not financially stable enough to do these things, these are the same people that are being targeted directly by these apps. Because the idea is, it's kind of like the crypto ads of 2022 where it was like, seize the day. Like this idea that you can have hope and accumulate wealth. Yeah, exactly. It combines that predation on hope with all of the lessons we've learned from mobile gaming about the gamification of our experiences. And it is the gamification of gambling, while also on every show you see the odds of the play and this sense that you could somehow influence the outcome.

50:04This is, I think, one of the most insidious things about this whole thing is that all of the leagues or the broadcast partners that carry the league, or both, have relationships with these companies. Jesus. And some of the relationships are not sponsorships or advertising mechanisms. Like the NFL gets paid by William Hill, which is a sportsbook slash operator, to provide real-time data so that Will Hill can set lines in real time. Whatever. Okay. Sure. Fine. Whatever. I don't care. But also, the NFL has a relationship, I believe, with DraftKings. It's either Fanduil or DraftKings. It's almost always one of those two.

50:43I think it's DraftKings. I don't know. and so on the NFL network, they talk about the lines set by DraftKings. There are promotional spots for DraftKings. On the broadcast, you'll see some stuff about DraftKings, and then on top of that, Fox Sports has a relationship with, I think, FanDuel, and so the broadcasters will reference the FanDuel line, and so you'll see, like you mentioned, like in a basketball game, you'll see a ticker at the bottom saying like, hey, you know, Victor Womanyama is like plus 230 to get a triple-double this game, you know, bet, you know, whatever, right? if you don't watch basketball Victor Wembenyama is like 7 foot tall yeah they should deport him he's the only person in America I think that ICE should deport we do not actually we're not pro-ICE they should eradicate ICE before they do that well Mia will love that I'm trying to think of the terms to put this because I know and I'm very obviously anxious about this people don't like sports hear this they get annoyed but think of it like if you were watching game of thrones and like will ned stark live and it's like you can bet on the outcome and they had a thing at the bottom right like severance like will adam scott find out like this and it's like except imagine if it was being written in real time so different but something you deeply cared about emotionally or something that you would go and attach to with your friends something that you remember from your childhood that is now through the apps, and it's like on the fucking app store advertised by Apple.

52:11Apple, I don't think makes a cut on these, but I'm sure there's something weird there. But it is that abstraction layer higher than just the kind of manipulative microtransactions you'd see in like a free-to-play game. Yeah. Except the money goes so quick, like in a snap. Yeah. Like you said, like just if the thing doesn't happen, the money is gone, you're not getting a refund, they're not going to do this, you just gambled, they got your money. Yeah. Yeah. So actually here's a dumb question. You said there's the$50 free credit. Aren't there people who take advantage of that surely? Like who like sign up an account and are good at gambling?

52:46Uh, yes. So how do they, no, but that's the thing. No, but the reason I ask this is not because I'm trying to convince people they have any more industry. I'm trying to find out like, what is so like, how do they make the free money go? Like how does the free money go? Because they offer it quite a lot. Yeah, so there's like a couple of things. One, we found kind of psychologically that if you're offered free money, even if you have to pay to get the free money, right, you are more likely to bet the free money on long shot odds. So as a whole, that money is not going to turn into real money that they have to pay.

53:22They don't give that. I didn't want to interrupt when you were talking about this earlier, but it just kind of goes to show you, they'll throw $50,$500 bucks, 2 ,000 bucks at this because they know with a statistical certainty almost that they're going to get that money back and then some. Yeah, and so there's a percentage of customers that they retain and those customers they retain, the vast majority of the retained customers will pay back and that'll make up. And they've got a cost of acquisition like you can, I mean they're publicly traded, you can look at their filings for like a quarter or two or whatever and they've got a cost of acquisition and they talk about like reducing the cost of acquisition and increasing you know uh or hold which is the percentage that they make on each bet um it's a whole kind of element but one thing that is kind of interesting about the way that they manage these books is that if you begin winning and and here's this is going to go super in the weeds there's a different definition of winning they use for this particular um determination which i'll get into in a second.

54:25But if you begin winning a lot at a really high percentage, they will start reducing your limit. And your limit is the amount that you can bet on a single bet. And so if I'm a new FanDuel customer, I believe my limit is$1 ,000. And if I get pretty bad at gambling, my limit will expand to$2 ,000,$5 ,000,$20 ,000. But if I'm pretty good, they'll start reducing my limit to $500,$250, all the way down to$1. And so you get good, you actually don't really have a lot of opportunity to make money. And so the thing I was going to get at is they don't actually determine it based off of whether or not you've made money.

55:06They determine it based off of whether or not the bet that you made at the time you made it anticipated the closing line value of the bet. So betting markets move based in response to who's doing the betting. And so it's actually not critically important that the people setting the odds for any particular bet are laser precise accurate about what those odds truly are. They have to be accurate to a certain degree. But what ends up happening is that a certain amount of money goes one way on a bet and a certain amount of money goes on another way in a bet. And that moves the line. And over the course of the lifetime of that bet until the game actually starts, you get a closing line value.

55:46And if you beat the closing line value, they determine that you're a sharp gambler. and if you do that I think like 60 % of the time they start reducing your limits so it's really hard to make money it's not even like the traditional idea of winning is the thing it's like this weird matriculated bullshit so that they can well never let you win then you never win on your terms even when you win they advertise this as like a skill based situation and you just need to understand that even if it was a fair fight if they didn't move the lines, if they didn't do all these things that Reef was talking about.

56:22They still have, you will never outsmart them because they have teams of analysts that make these bets and they're very good at it and they've been doing it for a long time and they have algorithms to watch this stuff. So access to proprietary data too that you won't have access to. Exactly. I mean, so for example, there's a product that I think is very good called Pro Football Focus Ultimate. Pro Football Focus is a data firm that covers football. and their ultimate package, which gives you access to granular-level data, like every individual play, you can see if a pass was caught, at what yard line that pass was caught, how many yards after the catch that player generated after the catch, how many tackles that player beat on the way to doing that.

57:09So in saying the granular, do they have a level below that somehow, these people, or do they get access to that? They get access to that because it's a$200 ,000 package. Oh. So they have advantages that we could never even, unless we were insanely rich. Yeah. And no one who's doing that is doing that. Yeah, nobody who's doing this has the money to spend on that. Yeah, and so they get access to the proprietary data, which they can use to kind of create these models. Those models help set the lines. It's very difficult to beat. And then they give that insanely granular data to a team of analyst perverts that will then set the lines.

57:44Yeah. It's almost like the ultimate management consultant and think because it's barely about sports anymore it's not even about winning and another betting thing that i only recently understand and came to understand even was the concept of unders and overs where they will set a point amount like actually caleb can you explain what an over and under is because it's important to explain that you can't just bet on whether someone wins or loses yeah um i could do my best again just the very basic of what it means yeah and if you may have to correct me this because again it's not legal in my state so i've never actually done it So they don't, like it's called the spread, right?

58:21So if the team is under, this is kind of confusing, if the team is the under, that means they're the favorite by however many points, right? Kind of. So we wouldn't call them the under, right? But if the team is the favorite, they're like minus one and a half, right? Or whatever. So for example, the Chiefs in this game opened at minus one and a half. That means that the betting line is essentially, if you subtract one and a half points from the Chiefs, who wins the game? and if you bet on the Chiefs you bet on the Chiefs to win by at least two points or more if you bet on the Eagles you either bet on them to win outright or lose by about a point or less so you can't just bet win or lose you can but the odds are so that's called a money line bet where you just bet outright on the winner or the loser but there are different odds for that so that's where you get stuff like plus 230 and minus 110 and minus 150 So what plus 230 means is if I bet$100 and I win, I get the$100 back plus$230.

59:23If I bet minus 230, I would need to bet$230 in order to get not just my original bet back, but$100. It is kind of confusing. No, and I assume by design. Sure. I mean, this is a system that is like 60, 70 years old, so I don't know. But it's everywhere. For people that are on the strip back, the hoople heads that are seven beers deep, they're going to say, yes, we ball, put 50 on the Packers, or whatever, right? Yeah. And so you can convert those odds into the percentages. So like a minus, okay, it's actually more complicated than this. But the minus one hand would suggest, I believe, like a 46 % or whatever odds that, you know, whatever the bet is.

1:00:10But the problem is, if two teams are evenly matched, so if the spread is PK or Pick 'em, right? Zero, right? Either way. So if the spread is Pick 'em and each team was equally likely to win, right? You would get probably in most books, well, most books a couple years ago, minus 105 odds. So the thing is, I'm sure people are a little bit lost now because I slightly am. But actually, I think that's kind of illustrative of how fucking weird this is. Because these are the numbers that are just on the TV being thrown at you all the time. Yeah, minus 105, plus 210. And you open the app, and the app is screaming at you, just like, hey, you should try this.

1:00:50Why don't you fucking try this, pig? Saquon Barkley is minus 230, sure, what the hell? Yeah, and the thing is, so I described that both of those even bets are minus 105. If you bet on a coin toss, it's minus 105, right? Like that's the... So you would need to put$105 down to make$100? Correct. Got it. Which obviously suggests that your odds of being correct have to be not just higher, but substantially higher than what the implied odds are by the book because they're going to make money on the coin flip. There's no question that they're making money. And yet, by the way, while we were talking about this before, I googled it.

1:01:32hundreds of thousands of dollars will be bet on the coin today. hundreds of thousands of dollars yeah it's so fucking horrible this is the thing like earlier on in the show's existence i was definitely like mad at the tech industry and people like why are you so mad it is stuff like this because they've managed to find a way to do to turn gambling into online gaming to turn it into to introduce the concepts of gambling and microtransaction gaming and just the horrors of online advertising because this is selling hope and industry over something you could never hope to understand. Well, the stuff that we talked about, the ostensibly good aspects of sports, whether you agree or not, all of that, even from my perspective, somebody who does love them, is being destroyed by this.

1:02:18Every aspect of tradition, all the ostensible social good that could come from this is being completely gutted by this industry. And how do you mean? Because it's like the anti-sport. It takes it something that could be a potentially positive thing, and it turns into like a torment nexus. You know what I mean? Yeah. So there are a couple of things that kind of stood out to me that motivated me to write about it, which was that every interaction that you see in a game is no longer taken for the implications that it has for the team or the player, no longer taken for kind of the narrative value that that has, but it's all concentrated on this, did someone win a bet on this kind of question.

1:02:59So for example, ESPN, which is the worldwide leader in sports coverage, a name they made up for themselves and earned in fairness. They are the dominant, they're the hegemony when it comes to sports coverage. They have a partnership with, I think it's Penn Sportsbook. So they have a product called ESPN Bet, which in my opinion, undercuts their journalistic integrity. but that's a different topic. So they've got a bunch of social arms called ESPN Bet, right? They've got a TikTok channel, YouTube channel, whatever, right? And there's this Giants game where Devin Singletary, one of the running backs for the Giants, it's near the end of the game, and he broke free, right?

1:03:45So he got the ball. Did a big run. Big run. He gets past all the defenders. He broke free. To the end of the game, the Giants are already ahead. and so if he scores that doesn't meaningfully change the Giants odds of winning but it does give the other team the ball so in fact it might even decrease the Giants odds of winning because the other team now has an opportunity to respond they've got possession and they can score points so what he does is he runs all the way to the 5 yard line and then goes down so that the Giants retain possession they can drain the clock, finish the game with a win Great move.

1:04:24Tactically correct. It's a tactically correct move. It's selfless. It's a team-based move, yes. Yeah, because he benefits. He's got contract incentives, and when his contract comes up, he's going to negotiate for a new contract. The statistics, those extra five yards, a touchdown, whatever, those statistics will be used in his negotiation. And maybe he has a contract incentive that gives him more money for touchdowns. So he's making a selfless move to improve the team's odds of winning. it's always a good story running backs will do this maybe a couple times a year it's awesome I love it and ESPN Bet put out a TikTok saying Devin Singletary goes down to ensure the Giants hit the under and the under is the total amount of points scored in the game and in that game I forget who the name is, maybe Washington the Giants and Commanders go under the projected point total by the books.

1:05:22And I think my opinion is that ESPN Bet really poorly used the language of their platform because it suggested that Singletary did that on purpose in order to accomplish a gambling goal in order for whoever was betting on the under to cash in. But I think they just meant he did this and so therefore the under hit. Right. Either way, I don't like it. It's poisonous. It's poison to culture.

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1:08:33this shouldn't be happening at all yeah to begin with it's destroying like the product is becoming almost unrecognizable at this point can you go into more detail on that yeah i mean just even just a few years ago that would have never happened we wouldn't have even heard about that yeah just even two seasons ago probably i would say two three seasons you might get a mention on um sports center because scott fenpelt does a bad beat uh kind of thing but it was like a fun like, oh, if you bet on the under, oops. Whatever, it's some wacky corner of the site that's not really that important. Versus what is likely a huge revenue driver.

1:09:06A media narrative, especially considering like, and I mean, I'm not going to be the person that says the NFL is rigged. I think that there's no evidence to really suggest any level of that. But as these lines get blurred, and the NFL does have a history of, there's Daniel Day's book, Interference goes into this. This is, mind you, published in the late 80s or something. So he's talking about the 60s and 70s. when the NFL was acutely aware of owners and players' relationship with gambling, sportsbooks, organized crime. And it's not conspiracy stuff. This is like all police cases and FBI files that he is sourcing this from.

1:09:40And I just think that for the league's perspective, it is a really, really bad look that these lines are as blurred as they are now. And the thing is as well, this is, again, a uniquely software-based thing and a uniquely internet culture-based thing because you can see these stats in minutiae, the minutiae of them. You can see them instantly. Your little fucking phone with the beautiful internet connection that used to allow you to send posts to friends is now just like an actual portal to Vegas. In a more craven way though, I say this with our beautiful slot machines, which we love so much. It feels like an evil version of gambling, which is already fairly evil in that it is now poisoning the actual culture around it because so you don't need to know anything about basketball for this.

1:10:26So right now there is a big scandal going on with Miami Heat player, Terry Rosier, who's under investigation in connection with sports betting scandal. Yep. And now there is just this weird thing of, like you said, Caleb, it isn't scripted or anything, but our players doing shit now with fears of that. Like there is more financial incentive. Here's what I will say. There's more financial incentive than ever than ever. The lines are more blurred than ever. I don't know. I don't, yeah. And so what I don't like is that whenever a player makes a mistake, we have to ask that question. That's the thing that really bothers me because now we can't think of players as people who can make mistakes.

1:11:04And one of the beautiful things about sports is recognizing the humanity in others. Right. Right. Understanding like that these mistakes occur and that, you know, they weigh heavily on or whatever. The randomness of the phrase any given Sunday is for a reason. Right. Exactly. You know, the Giants beating the Patriots and the Patriots are undefeated. It was just an outstanding story. Right. And now you're thinking, wow, you know, a lot of people had money on the Patriots going undefeated. Did the Patriots throw the – no. And they're promoting these stories on their sites. They're saying how much – Yeah, and so this is – Now that's the media focus.

1:11:34Yeah, and so that's the thing that, like, really bothers me is that all of this content, which I already kind of hate the word content, but all of this content is now about gambling. So you talk about how your phone is this portal to Vegas, but also when you try to, you know, get out of – You actually cannot use these apps in Nevada either, which is really funny. Yeah, I do think it's, well, you can if you go physically into the sportsbook and enable the sportsbooks app from inside. It's very funny. I didn't know that. Yeah, it's very funny. That's crazy. I found that out. Nice. But yeah, and so like you can like, you'll get like a notification.

1:12:13Like I've got like four notifications on my phone right now from like various fantasy whatever and they're like, hey, you haven't bet in like a week. Here's$100, please. You could do that. Or I can just get rid of the notifications. But then the notifications from The Athletic, which I follow for my work as a football writer, are like, hey, here are the lines on the Super Bowl and I get rid of that. And then the next notification will be from my Google News alerts. And the Google News alert will be, hey, did Devin Singletary do this in order to do that? And it's just like, everything is either gambling or content about gambling or content that points to gambling.

1:12:53And it's like, the storylines are about gambling, the way I engage with the game is about gambling, and it's my fault for installing the fantasy apps on my phone. But then the fantasy apps are just like, it's all, everything orients itself around the ability to make money off of what is ultimately a storytelling device. And it just, it sucks. and it's and so Caleb you you don't gamble right no now I depends how you define it right I want to be clear about this I play fantasy football every year and I have so and just just to delineate fantasy football is not a money-based thing unless you put yeah yeah you don't yeah people who play fantasy don't put in more than like 10 bucks we all put in about 20 to 30 bucks to make sure everybody stays accountable sets their lineup it's not really about winning money right right But it's not like in Mish, you don't have to like give your credit card or anything.

1:13:46You can just like, it's informal. Yeah, you like Venmo or whatever. But that isn't really gambling. That's just like kind of dicking around with friends. Right. And he's describing what's season long fantasy. Which is separate though from the money fantasy though. Yeah, from the type of fantasy that's being promoted, which is daily fantasy. Right. They call it daily for football. It's weekly, but whatever. It's daily for basketball, baseball, whatever. but you can set your fantasy lineup for the day that day, put in like$20 on your lineup and then repeat that lineup 20 times, put in$20 every single time, right?

1:14:20And then at the end of the day, you'll have made or lost money and you can react to that and do it again the next day. Whereas season long, you do it once a year for like 20 bucks to win maybe$150. It's like, what are we doing? Yeah, I just wanted to say also, So that, what I described to you of like, oh, I'm going to Venmo my friend for fantasy. You actually have to lie on all the apps when you send your fantasy winnings because that's illegal and they can shut down your account for that. Which is crazy because I just use emojis. Yeah, exactly. I never tell my Venmo what I'm doing. But they can flag it.

1:14:56If you say fantasy football in like the note or whatever, they can do that. Oh, wow. I don't know. Oh, there you go. And that's more regulated than crypto.com doing their Rube Goldberg system of crypto bets or whatever. If you buy a token which is on the Ethereum chain and that token activates when Patrick Mahomes passes for 225, it's okay. Which, again, to be very clear, should be, and I think many judges would agree, is also illegal, but who's going to stop them at this point? And I think one of the things that I'm sure people will find insufferable, but I think it's worth talking about, is this is another thing really heavily targeted to guys as well.

1:15:34It's a very heteronormative, cis-hat guy. It's very much for the fellas, and it's very male-oriented, even the color schemes and the actors. It's very aggressively. And so you've got this other fucking problem with guys now. Just add another one, yeah. And guess what? Outside of sports, who's the number one purveyor of ads for this shit as like red pill guys. Because it's more kind of noxious, nebulous masculinity thing of being like, be a big strong man and lose your money. Don't tell your bitch wife that you lost$50 ,000 or whatever, right? Like that's rise and grind. That's how the memes are.

1:16:16It's very much in the rise and grind culture. A lot of, one of the, I don't know if New York has actually done this yet, but one of the proposals in New York State was to ban advertisements for these apps on college campuses. Oh my God, they can legally do that. Yeah, and that's where a lot of the advertising is. So they advertise them outside the college basketball games as well? Oh yeah, buddy. Damn, this is so fucking, but actually this does kind of play into it because it's like, what is happening to young men who are not the fucking victims? I'm not doing that, don't worry. It's just like things to terrorize people.

1:16:48It's like young men now, and again, I'm not saying that they shouldn't be able to count on both the victims, but it reminds me of like those baby turtles that are born in the sand and they have to race to the ocean before the birds swoop down and eat them all. And the birds are like crypto ads and red pill guys that are swooping up and eating these turtles. That's kind of, then they all just become bastards, you know? Yeah, and the thing that happens to women is those men. Right, no, exactly. Yeah, maybe there's a lot of people. No, no, no, I'm just saying this because any time I bring up the male loneliness epidemic, it's never a kind of, well, men need to be treated.

1:17:23No, it's perhaps we need to look at the fucking conditions of society itself. Right. We're throwing another kind of, because like one of the natures of like, one of the things about patriarchy is that it isolates people into particular roles. Right. And those roles for men include things like breadwinner, right? And they're the ones that are like, you know, imbibe with the entrepreneurial spirit, right? Which is, I guess, gambling is entrepreneurship. No, no, it is though. It's the same rise and grind shit. No, it is. It is. Because it's like you have power over stuff that you don't have power over.

1:17:55You just work hard and money will come out. Same way with this. You just gamble, right? Yeah. And so this is kind of another one of the pressures among the extant pressures that exist in patriarchy that produce these responses among young men that then those young men will like act out in the world, often on women, but like also another young man. Right. Yeah. Patriarchy produces the drywall punchers, right? Yeah, exactly. And this is just that. And it's funny, and you've mentioned the entrepreneurial spirit because it really is exactly that same genus of focusing on guys and being like, yeah, you know, what's going wrong in your life is not actually something caused by a system.

1:18:41Yeah, we shouldn't look at the system. Don't look at the system. And definitely don't worry about being responsible for this. This is all happening to you. And instead of looking at the stuff actually happening to you, Let's just look at woman. And you know what you actually need to do? You need to just, it's neoliberalism, but right wing, I guess. Well, maybe I repeat myself, but it's the sense of selfish kind of producer that only comes from hard work. It's the egoist thing, for sure. Yeah, but despite the fact that hard work is not what any of this is. Being an entrepreneur, a successful entrepreneur, is like tons of luck, having the privilege to be in the right place at the right time.

1:19:17If you look at a lot of the entrepreneurship YouTube videos or whatever, a lot of it's just dropshipping. It's just a scam.

1:19:33Another episode we'll talk about dropshipping. There's a reason we can find a lot of the same figures throughout all of these micro-trends of entrepreneurship masculinity. like Gary Vaynerchuk is doing like motivational dropshipping content. And then he does crypto content and then he does NFT content. And now he's doing sports gambling. I'm so sorry, but the concept of somebody who did for many years work in e-commerce and like not dropshipping, but just like as an actual e-commerce marketing person, motivational e-commerce content makes me want to blow my brains out. And you know, I'm describing a thing that's real.

1:20:09Yeah, of course I know. I know I'm acutely aware of the thing that you're talking about. I feel like an animal on the Serengeti where I just, my predator prey sense went off. Like, oh my God. But yeah, someone like Gary Vee was in all of those. Is he doing sports betting content? Yeah. Jesus Christ, that man's a fucking monster. He's evil. We should do a Behind the Bastards episode and that piece of shit. Fuck you, Gary Vaynerchuk. I hope you hear this, you freak. You'll never buy the Jets. Anyway, it's just, the reason I, another reason, I mean, that I wanted to do this episode is, it feels uniquely part of a way in which the internet is being poisoned, where so many content empires are now based on the same ones that do the article that's what time is the Super Bowl so they can rank on Google.

1:20:59Now you've got, oh, the right picks for sports gambling. It's the same problem, just in a different shape, right? Yeah. And it's really sad as well. And again, I'm going to repeat this every time. I'm like, it's not saying men don't, men have fucking accountability regardless of whether they've been twisted by the internet. But we should at least consider the forces twisting. If you're ever going to fix the problem, you eventually have to look at the system in which these people are brought up, right? Right. And it's, you see, it's the same thing you've seen with red pilling. It's the same thing you see with pretty much any MGTOW thing.

1:21:28It's just this sense of, hey, you feel helpless. Do you want to rise up against the thing that makes you feel helpless? Oh, sorry, but don't worry. We won't make you do the inconvenient work of actually understanding things. Well, that's why, like, when we were talking about this before, one of the things that football or sports is important is because even if you're from a utilitarian perspective, you don't care about sports, it is too big of a ground to cede to these kinds of people. You should never cede that ground, right? We can't allow them to take this over. And they're trying. They're trying really fucking hard.

1:21:58They're doing a very good job of it. And the reason they're able to is because there's these noxious companies that are twisting people up. Young people, and it is not just young men, but really it's heavily targeted against men. they grow up they can't get a house they can't ever hope to get a house now it's not been the case for like 15 20 years the average person just can't fucking save the money men men are and as as many people are but like very targeted on men told you must be big strong and you must have money good big and if you don't have those things you're not man you're not man at all you're woke and you are soy and you are woke yeah you're so beta cook and then they attack aggressively with both convenient excuses and convenient ways to allegedly make money with these incredibly craven marketing systems perpetuated by the app stores.

1:22:46It's just fucking it. Every time I think about this, I feel a little crazier because even coming into this, I didn't realize that the most common thing was just straight up gambling. I thought it was that you got, they kind of like dodged around like teehee, you just bet on a few players, right? No, it's just the straight up gambling now and it's everywhere. And it doesn't sound like they even do like KYC, like I know your customer stuff or if they do it's like so so gambling does do know your customer stuff but fantasy does despite money going into it yeah fucking brilliant yeah it's just like i and it's not just like we can't even say i hope it's made illegal they're never gonna do that no that's definitely not happening yeah i feel like everyone involved should be put in prison personally so it It doesn't look like Apple actually.

1:23:31They did try that with the DFS people like 15 years ago. And about three or four of them did. And then the rest invented DFS. What is DFS? Daily Fantasy Services. So the people that were doing online poker stuff way back when Chris Moneymaker was big, like 2004-ish, I want to say. those people it turns out were violating a bunch of laws about internet gambling three or four of them got tagged for it and the rest of them left and invented daily fantasy right now by the way on the app store they don't actually advertise this stuff so perhaps I was wrong saying they did but it is the like number number let's see the number three and number four so it's DraftKings and then FanJuel and then PrizePix.

1:24:25Those are the three, four, and five top apps right now. Yeah, I'm going through my PrizePix promos right now. If it's not clear, I do engage in this. Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. Yeah. And I've got like$1 million Super Sweat lineups. What is that? I don't know. It's a combination of like, you know, they like hire these influencers to like put together, well, in theory, they hire these influencers to put together their picks for the game. and then you can hail their picks essentially horrifying but yeah there's like tons of promos like in my but as we wrap up Arif so you do gamble on this stuff yeah do you win I have net made money on the year right I think a good chunk of that has been luck why do you do it it's fun like I it's that's it like one like the smallest but the first reason is because it's important for me to be familiar with the stuff, with the work that I do.

1:25:27But I wouldn't be gambling as much if that was the only reason. But no, I've been making a small amount of money on it. And so I've been doing it. I set some pretty clear limits for myself because I'm always concerned about having an addictive personality. Everything we've been discussing. But what's interesting is that if I play for a couple of weeks and then I stopped playing for weeks to see how the apps engage me. Because I get notifications, I get emails. When I went to London for the Vikings game, I also spent a week prior to that game just taking a vacation in Ireland. Gambling is legal in both of those places, or sports gaming is legal in both of those places, but the apps I was using were not authorized in those places.

1:26:13I couldn't do it, and I was like, well, I'm not going to get a new app. I'm not going to do whatever, right? I had to bet in person in London. It was awful. I hated it. You had to walk into a William Hill or a Ladbrokes. I couldn't do a place called Ladbrokes. Did you bet on the dogs? No, I only bet on football. Do they still do greyhound racing? Yes, they definitely advertise that when I walked into the Will Hill country. But yeah, and so I do it because it's fun. I do it because it's my work and I do it because so far I've made a little bit of money, but I've been really hyper careful about like I've got a spreadsheet that keeps track of everything.

1:26:54And I pay attention to what are called like reverse line moves when the majority of the tickets are on one side and the majority of the money is on the other side. Tickets mean? The number of bets. So you would have, let's say three people bet on Saquon Barkley to get 110 yards in this game. Got it. And then one person bets that he's going to get fewer than that many yards, but that person bets way more than those three people combined. What you get is a reverse line move where the line moves in the direction of the guy who bet a lot of money, even though there's more tickets on that side. You pay attention to that, and you can see maybe there's some edges here or there.

1:27:31It's way in the weeds. But they've got their hooks into you to some extent. Absolutely. No, I'm forsaken. It's so great. And you're a very intelligent person. and you're not someone I would consider easily tricked even though you're in the system. It's interesting how it can get its claws in. Yeah, and when I started, I knew that I had to set really hard limits and I knew that I had to make rules about not chasing good money after bad. Right. And so I set a limit for myself on the number of times a year I can deposit, which is three. I set a limit to how much I can put on one bet which is, I think the limit I set was like 8 % of the total amount of money I have in that app on each individual bet.

1:28:27And I say I think because I just started doing it kind of like by feel because it's like, oh, I've got 150, I'll just put 10.

1:28:35But yeah, and so the only times I have broken that limit once, but it was because I was offered an obscene promo, which is how they get you. But I was like, oh, I'll deposit again, because that's$250. Right. So I put in$250, and then I bet the$250 promo dollars on a minus$10 ,000 bet, or something like that. And you did the thing they wanted you to? No, I did the opposite. It was a minus$10 ,000 bet. What does that mean? That means if I won, I would get no money. But the$250 turned from a promo into real money, and then I just withdrew it. Okay. so a minus 10 ,000 bet is you have to bet $10 ,000 to win$100 and so the percentage return on that is minuscule and so I bet the$250 promo bet on a just to get the money out yeah it was a 99.9 % chance yeah and most people don't do that you can do that I promise you and I think the funny thing is is like this is all data I'm not just trying to pull it back because it's a tech podcast but it really is this is just when you remove the word sport this is just like what crypto does except more craven and on television all the time and it's the same fucking people or at least the same fucking people who do like crypto channels or kind of do some sports shit or they kind of flirt with the same linguistics it's just yeah well it's disgusting the again like the people who were doing online poker were the people that did dfs that ended up going into crypto and then they go back into we call them pick 'ems now, this version of fantasy, which is basically also daily fantasy.

1:30:09But yeah, it's the same. And so they use the same language. Like when you see kind of the communications between them or the way they even, even sometimes when they talk to the public, they use like poker language. And that's the way that they talk about crypto. It's the way they talk about NFTs. That's the way they talk about AI. It's the way they talk about this. It's all just one big scam. So let's wrap up there. Arif, where can people find you? You can find me at wideleft.football. That's the newsletter I run. It covers sports, politics and sports, culture and sports, and all of that. Otherwise, on socials, I'm at arif.bsky.social on bluesky and arifsonnfl on Twitter.

1:30:49Caleb, where can people find you? I've got a podcast called Western Kabuki. It's kind of an irreverent look at internet culture. It's wonderful. I've been on multiple times. Yeah, it's incredible. Both of you have, and I thank you for that. with a, I guess, a comedian, Juniper, and Alex Goldman, formerly of Reply All, where we just kind of talk about people's relationship with the internet, I guess, predominantly. You can find me there at Western Kabuki. You can find me. I'm no longer on Twitter. I'm on Blue Sky at BirdRespector. And you can find me everywhere you're going to hear about after this.

1:31:20Matt, I'm going to re-record this at some point, but I'm not going to do it now. You're just going to have to hear it. It's going to go do-do-do-do-do-do. The whole theme will go on. It'll be amazing. anyway I've been Ed Zitron you can find me at edzitron.com on blue sky I'm still on twitter but I don't give a shit about it and yeah if you haven't done this please go to everyone you know tell them to download the show tell them to download every single god damn episode I need the downloads okay do this for me thank you for listening and then you're going to hear me say thank you for listening again you're going to be so mad

1:31:58thank you for listening to better offline the editor and composer of the better offline theme song is matt osowski you can check out more of his music and audio projects at matt osowski.com m-a-t-t-o-s-o-w-s-k-i.com you can email me at easy at better offline.com or visit better offline.com to find more podcast links. And of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.wheresyoured.at to visit the discord and go to r slash better offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better offline is a production of cool zone media. For more from cool zone media, visit our website, coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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