How Unregulated Gambling Is Draining BILLIONS From the U.S. Economy | Ismail Vali

21:48Lawmakers came to this too late after decades generally and went, okay, let's get some tax out of that because there's a lot of money in online gaming stuff, isn't it? We're behind on that, marijuana and lots of other things. Let's get us some of that internet money. Let's go grab some of that. So everybody came to it late. They put in place fast, quick regulation that sounded like it made sense. But what you have to understand with illegal gambling is this. It's not one problem. It's many because crime is not one problem. It's many. and it leaves behind many consequences. The point here is, unless you can control this properly, you won't unless you tax and regulate the marketplace effectively.

22:19So legalize and regulation, whatever way a jurisdiction wants their marketplace to be, my view, GCI's view is, we're like Burger King to you guys. You can have the marketplace your way, but you need to say what that way is. So if your voters are telling you, we want no gambling, zero, then monitor, police, enforce, and optimize so that you have no gambling online, so that nobody in the state, nobody in the country can reach those services. But you can't be like a government that basically just says, oh, we just want to forget about it. This thing's not our problem to regulate. This is bad people do this immoral activity.

22:48It's still economic activity that can provide substantial economic and societal good when you run it right. All that my work and all that GCI's work is control the mechanics of the marketplace for the regulator or treasury or government to be able to achieve the right results in their society. We work a lot in the developing world. Those governments come to us. why? Because they realized that the hundreds of millions, the billions of dollars that come in on the tax that you can legitimately put on top of all that profitability of gambling, and that doesn't need to be more than 15, 20, 25 % of the economic activity of regulated license firms.

23:23When that money can flow back into your borders, into your treasury coffers, that buys a lot of roads, schools, hospitals, and healthcare. Of course, you want that money. Now here in America, we're kind of ignoring that activities going on out there. And we're saying, well, do we need all this regulation? And doesn't it add to more bureaucracy? It doesn't need to add to more bureaucracy. But however that's executed in the marketplace, there can be criticism of it, but you do actually have to execute something first. Just saying that we're not going to do anything about this. Economic activity is already taking place.

23:49That value extraction, if you add it up, the reason me and my firm are working on that number for the last three decades here in America, that number will be frightening. That number will be scare inducing to the point where people hopefully act and go, we can't keep letting this money leave the American treasury coffers, leave our state treasury, and also harm our consumers in the way it has been for the last three decades. I developed ad campaigns for some of the biggest brands in the world. And I'm sitting here and I'm going, you need an ad campaign because we need to fight the stigma of regulation and paint the other side of that brush of what it actually means, the taxes, the thing, the dollars are leaving.

24:24Because I don't think people realize the other side of the coin, especially as it relates to gambling and the other way. They just go, oh, my fees are higher and it's not as easy or it's not as fun. It's a perception and perception is reality with regulation. But the framing of what the maybe the unintended consequences and marketing that in the right way. A lot of what we're doing here, hopefully opening minds and hearts to what that is. Because even for me, I grew up in South Carolina. I lean towards, oh, God, the government's involved again. When things become at a certain scale, you have to have systems, you have to have processes.

24:53It's the same thing. And so when you maybe stop calling it regulation and more calling it organization. I'd say it's policy, process, practice. That's what this comes down to. And there shouldn't be the harm for consumers. Three Ps. Three Ps. Okay. There shouldn't be the harm. You down with PPP? Well, you know me. You can't have the harm here for consumers. You can't have the harm for children either that's been taking place and also the loss of money. So all that money coming in, yes, we know that this is an industry that features products with risks. Some people are going to get hurt here. You should not have children involved with this product.

25:25But how do you police this thing effectively when you have no resources? Those resources can all come if you're taxing people the right way. Now, when all of that value is just being extracted out of America, I have never known a period or an industry in America that was not looked at properly because you're making way too much money and we ain't getting our share. Now, they're looking at the regulated gambling industry now, DraftKings, FoundJool, etc. Let's ask an interesting question here. Are any of those firms making money? Profitability? The answer is no. The numbers I've seen say no, but I don't know how because there's so much money going in.

25:54I think Dawkins and Foundry will have each had one and BetMGM. Spending it all in marketing. They've each had one quarter of profitability in the last... Why is that? Because they are not in a sustainable, safe marketplace where they can actually go out there and find their consumers. They are spending money in a vacuum against 80 % of the marketplace that is run by unregulated gambling right now. And you've got this three ring circus now of regulated, unregulated and unacknowledged as gambling, which is diluting the take for regulated gambling companies too. So if I'm in the prediction market business in America, I've convinced everyone that we're not really gambling.

26:26We are somehow a financial futures product. Everywhere else in the world is looking at this going, it's the biggest form of unregulated gambling there is. So in America, we've called it something. We've got some regulation on it. Our consumer is safe right now. We don't know that yet, but it's early days, but at least it's being looked at. For regulated gambling, they are the last dog to the bowl in America right now. This is literally an era where I've been looking at the regulated gaming industry in America, sports, casino, and poker, and saying that it's the silent death of the departed, basically.

26:52These guys are just silently dying out, going from 123 to 90 to 50 firms that are regulated and licensed and operating. And that number will get less this year. And we're in a year with the World Cup. And we're in a year where there's been a Super Bowl and March Madness. And there's been no cancellations because of pandemics and stuff. But American gaming companies are not making the money they should. Why? Prime is there. Unregulated gambling is there. Now you've got unacknowledged gambling also being there, which is diluting what's coming in. Because consumers have only a finite amount of money to spend on this activity, but they are spending more of it every year.

27:22More of their disposal all income goes towards gambling on a per capita basis. And not enough of us are looking at this to say we need to be monitoring it so that it can be policed and forced against and optimized. Correct. How do we divide these lines? A bucket that's not, that should be, that's not. But what if people and companies that are in that bucket are in the US, are paying taxes, when you move them from one kind of like a tax bracket or anything else, when you go from one place to another, it has consequences. Who's the judge, jury and executioner of when that should or shouldn't take place.

27:52We can agree. Anyone with half a brain, even those idiots that tax themselves with gambling a lot, could hear what we're talking about and go, yeah, we don't want going to organized crime. This makes a lot of sense. We don't want money leaving America. It should be here. There's a lot of things that are in this gray area of potential gambling and the regulations that could be associated with that. How does that serve them or Americans for there just to be more governance on our free will on certain things that are in the gray area? Gray area is an overused term. Okay. And it's a dangerous one.

28:22Gambling gray area. There are a lot of operators in the gambling space who say that they are a gray market operator. They have a license somewhere and they sell their gambling everywhere. When I say gray area, I just mean there's differing opinion. Yeah. Let's have a look at that in terms of three tier way of looking at marketplace, regulated gambling. So on its hands and needs in America, not making any money and doesn't have a great future. So I'm not looking at regulated gambling as being a source of great news because they are still fighting this battle of we got brought in over the top of what was already a dominant unregulated marketplace.

28:50It's not like when they regulated gaming from 2018 onwards in America, that stuff wasn't new. It's not like they just went, Hey, how do you fancy selling me some online gaming? That'd be a really great idea. It was already there. It's been there for three decades. Okay. It wasn't anything new that happened then. All that we did was graft on top of an existing illegally dominated marketplace, some regulated licensed gaming and consumers have flocked to it now and they've seen it. So as regulated gambling grows, illegal gambling is still growing in any marketplace. Now we've got the unacknowledged fare, which if you ask me where that came from, a lot of people looked at the patchwork quilt of legality in America.

29:2331 states for sports betting after eight years, seven states for legal online casino. Now that's up to lawmakers to decide what they want, isn't it? That's why we're in this kind of weird catch 22 situation where you can have North Carolina, all forms of gaming and South Carolina with none. Some reason we thought we could just throw it all in Las Vegas and Atlantic city. And you were getting stolen from the internet came we have not adapted this is just like everything else some of this conversation is we have not adapted to the technology reality yeah it's a consequence you know internet ubiquitous high-speed internet smartphones and the internet the web we are operating because that and i took it way out of las vegas and atlantic city 30 years ago took it away years ago and also this was already happening with the telephone because we had telephone why do we have things like betting over state lines and all this kind of stuff right because all that telegraphic transfer stuff was meant to keep all the money in vegas and it didn't and the mob got behind that immediately so everyone's exploited the tech everyone's exploited legal loopholes the point now is politicians are just behind we're telling you what's going on out there we're showing you where the marketplace is you need that awareness to have ability and then action comes from that ability right now in america you're at a point where you need to do something about the regulated space because you need to basically say they are dealing with a whole raft of consequences which nobody saw years ago now we can clearly show you it's a marketplace that's dominated by unregulated operations, they are stealing money from your state, stealing money from your country and abusing your consumers and your children too.

30:47There's an audience to an unregulated gambling company. I don't care if you're a self-excluded gambler. I don't care if you're a problem gambler. I don't care if you're a child. I'll take your money. As long as you can get me a credit card number, you're good. Your bet's good. If you win, I may not pay you back, but that's another risk of dealing with unregulated people. The unacknowledged area, so things like whatnot, the growth of trading card platforms, prediction market platforms, even social casinos and street states casinos. Why did they exist, Ryan? They exist because you have a vacuum in America, because you have a lot of unregulated gambling and this unsatisfaction of the consumer on, I want to have some entertainment on my sports.

31:20I want to have betting on my sports. If you can't get it, if you can't get the bet you want at the liability level, I want to win this much from it. You will go somewhere that gives it to you. And the ability of consumers to basically do deals with unregulated gaming companies at the micro betting level, it's not being satisfied. So where's that moving to now? It's moving to fantasy sports. It's moving to social casinos, sweepstakes casinos. It's moving to other forms of things that look very much like gambling, but right now they're not called gambling. And who's losing money out of all of this stuff?

31:47American consumers and American taxpayers are ultimately who loses here. And the American states who basically should be getting the benefit of this and aren't. I guess the argument though on the gray area companies though are, I mean, there's a lot of American based companies in that and who benefits if it's an American-based whatnot or eBay or insert name here. And I'm not necessarily saying every one of the every company. If you've got kids in middle school or high school, you already know homework can turn into a whole situation. What should take 20 minutes somehow turns into two hours and half the time it ends with frustration on both sides.

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32:56It's also just practical. You don't have to deal with scheduling a tutor or trying to find things that line up around sports and everything else. It's there whenever they need it. And it's a lot more affordable than traditional tutoring. Honestly, it just takes a lot of pressure off. Finals are coming up. Build your teen study plan now. It only takes minutes. Go to brainly.com backslash Ryan to get 50 % off your first Brainly subscription. with my code Ryan. That's B-R-A-I-N-L-Y.com slash Ryan. My name is definitively only American.

33:38More taxes for them, more regulation for the customer. Who wins then? I'd say this is more about regulating the marketplace is what you should be looking at here. It's not about putting a whole bunch of burden on the firms, a whole bunch of burden on the consumers. You know that this economic activity is taking place. try and bring it under some common sense framework. Look at the money that's coming in from it. Make sure that the companies who are there are rewarded for their economic activity. They should be able to make money and make money quickly for their investors as well. For the consumers, if they take part in an activity that has risk at its heart, they should understand, okay, I could win money, lose money.

34:09If I win, I get paid. If I lose and I keep losing, maybe I have an issue with this and that can be identified early. So that's therefore as a consumer safety measure as well. And we're all in an era where no one wants this to become a nanny state where it's kind of like we want to stop you prevent you from doing the things that you enjoy that's the whole point of american culture was basically it's free will you guys get to choose how you use or abuse things at the abuse level this shouldn't turn into predatory behavior that comes from firms regulated or unregulated should not be allowed to do that so you need effective common sense regulation across the piece here but it is down to every lawmaker behind the lawmakers are the voters it's down to those two groups to determine how do you want your marketplace.

34:45It is like Burger King here, but surely nobody wants a marketplace that is dominated by crime, benefiting crime and run by crime. There's always two sides of the coin because there's a reason marijuana is struggling to get to probably where it should be, which is regulated behind the counter 21 and up, just like alcohol. Who doesn't want it? Who's keeping that from happening? Tennessee whiskey. Literally, they funnel money into politicians' pocket to keep marijuana off the shelf. I don't smoke marijuana, but I'm pro-choice and I have common sense of regulation. And I know this is about gaming, but I think the parallel is interesting because there's always someone on the other side financing.

35:21It's hard to get down to the truth sometimes when, oh no, it's a moral decision. We don't want marijuana or we don't want gambling. No, there's usually a check going in somebody's pocket the other direction. Okay. Mark Twain said, it's the prohibition that makes anything valuable. So you've had prohibition in America across a number of things, most notably alcohol. You've had prohibition across gaming for decades as well. That didn't work out too well. So you saw here that basically we had a period in the 1920s on alcohol where it was basically what that led to the TV show Boardwalk Empire. So a bunch of crooks making money out of alcohol.

35:54What you're living through now is boardwalkempire.com. Absolutely. So what you've got right now is a bunch of people making money out of an imperfect industry that's being run badly on the internet. The regulation isn't up to speed with the technology. You have the growth of regulated, unregulated and unacknowledged. Nobody's making money in the regulated sector. The unregulated are growing at scale. And now you've got a whole bunch of people who are trying to bring things in via the back door and call them financial futures, call them financial products, call them whatever you want, but they look, smell and feel like gambling.

36:20Someone gambled on what this conversation would be. Exactly. So how many times would I mention regulated? Over or under on regulation. Exactly. So when you've got that going on and where the prediction marketplaces started from was they were on the financial platforms to make the product more interesting. They were giving more entertainment to things like, do I want to buy Bitcoin? Do I want to trade in these things? So you got to a point where the financial platforms went, why don't we just let the audience do this? Because it's audience generated content then. And that means we don't need to police it or manage it.

36:45It can just be done by them. The people can do it. Let the audience do it. And the audience did do it. But what we ended up with was betting on whether Bybra Streisand was going to die next week, betting on whether Donald Trump's going to be assassinated at another assassination attempt. So you've got the room of crazy, which consumers clearly do love is the problem from the monitoring. And consumers clearly do love that. You've got sanitized, regulated versions with Polymarket and CalSheet, but you've also got that unregulated cannibalizing that area already. So they're also looking at that going, which is another revenue stream for us.

37:12We'll take everything that prediction market platforms offer. We'll let people have whatever they want on those platforms too. We'll give them the room of crazy. One of the biggest bets in the world two years ago at Christmas was, will Tupac and Biggie be resurrected along with Jesus Christ on New Year's Day? People were buying that bet, not to bet on it, but just to put it on their social media feeds because their lives aren't that interesting. but that bet was funny and people liked it in a way that they didn't like other things. So you're now seeing, exactly, you're now seeing a whole room of crazy that's coming into the gaming industry.

37:39Prediction market platforms were the harbinger for that, but they're by no means the end of it. Prediction market platforms are going to change consumer behavior with gambling platforms, period. And our marketplaces may not be up to the right level of regulation and control for what is gambling, what is not gambling. How do I control that gambling? How do I extract the value for my state, my consumers, my community. That's what lawmakers need to be looking at in the future rather than always thinking, well, this gambling thing is something we need to do something about. That horse has already bolted.

38:05What we need to now do is something that gets up to speed with where we are today. NIL, name image likeness for young athletes. College has been paying kids under the table for years. They finally acknowledged, hey, maybe they should get paid. They're making billions of dollars and they still haven't regulated it. That's still the wild, wild west. It's getting there like everything else slowly, but it needs regulation as bad as anything. It's getting there Decades of American consumer extraction of value. That's what all you've had here is value extraction over three decades. If you are saying that that's going to carry on at the pace, the gambling is growing in the United States, just on the sports casino and poker side of it, a hundred billion dollars extracted during 2025.

38:44That's like 15 to 20 % growth on the previous year. So you're looking now a marketplace that's got great growth, great potential, and is completely unregulated, uncontrolled, and uncontributing to American consumers and the uncontributed American community. You need to bring it under control. What's the roadmap for all this? How do we start changing hearts and minds more broadly? And how do we make it to where it doesn't seem like someone wins and someone loses? Obviously, everything you're super intelligent. Yes, we need to do that. We don't want these dollars leaving America. We don't organize crime coming in here, the back door.

39:17But who wins, who loses? And who's the judge, jury and executioner of all this? Look at it like this. We work in developing countries a lot. Why? Those governments want us, need us, absolutely demand our services. Why? We look at the marketplace for them, but we're not Batman. We're not helping them defeat crime. They get to be Batman, put on the mask and cape and defeat crime because they're the ones who are acting on the right data, finally. So you can be aware, able, and then you can act, make the best decisions possible. Those governments love us because it's more roads, schools and hospitals from that money.

39:46They can actually do something with that money. Governments who basically are looking at government budget deficits every year, But then they look at the gambling industry and think, there's got to be some good money over there, hasn't there? Yes, there is if you run it right. So if your regulated industry is able to make the money it should from the majority of the audience, now you can tax it at a reasonable rate, 15, 20, 25%, whatever you choose to as lawmakers, now you get the benefit from it. In America, you need to be looking at this as, maybe we made some mistakes on the road to the online gaming marketplace.

40:13Every country did. Why did we make mistakes? All of us did because we were all fooled by crime into believing, like the devil did, make it the biggest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing everyone he didn't exist that's exactly exactly that one with with the online gaming everybody was convinced it didn't really exist and if it did it was harmless and who cares about this stuff surely you had to use a vpn and all these weird technology things to find it it's hiding in plain sight it's there everywhere look at american streaming right now america watching sports we love that we want some entertainment i believe it's more like religion in this country sports okay everybody has got their sports team Everybody is a fanatic about their sports.

40:50Michael Rubin will like that comment. Looking at sports streaming in America. So we look at sports and the sports broadcast because obviously people who watch sports potentially gamble as well. So we started looking at streaming. We monitor lots of things online. So we're looking at streaming online. So 84 % of illegal streaming is advertised upon by who? By illegal gambling. So you find streaming, you're going to find some illegal gambling there too. The big problem with this driving illegal streaming is this. If I'm an NFL fan, I want to watch the NFL. It's going to cost me$1 ,600 as a customer on average from preseason through to the Super Bowl.

41:22I need seven separate streaming accounts to watch that. What's going to happen? I'm not going to do it. I'm just going to basically go on illegal streaming and find it there. And if you find it on illegal streaming, you will be finding illegal gambling. Because behind 84 % of that illegal streaming, it's illegal gambling advertising. So there's a piece here, which is there are consequences not just across commerce here, not just across the community and the lost tax, not just across consumers in those harmed by gambling. you're also looking at killing your sports industry as well. Because if they're not making money out of the streaming, and there is an absolute dark nexus between illegal gambling and illegal streaming across the world now.

41:53Yeah. That's a really interesting, we could spend two hours on that topic alone, of streaming and rights and who's paying the toll, the advertisers. Because people don't realize, even to this day, that their cable bill would be$3 ,000 a month if there wasn't an advertiser. Exactly. You know, that's who, yeah, they don't like that 80 to 120. Nobody does. and they think everybody's getting rich. As you saw with PGA and LIV, this stuff costs a lot of money. Exactly. It takes a lot to run the channel. You know, the content's got, and then the entertainment content is also just got between re-scripts and Mega Man, Redo, Superman.

42:28All we do is go back to the well and I think people are probably tired of it. So they're looking to other things. More in sports, more in gambling, more in live shopping on whatnot. They're taking bets on standard athletes, aren't they? That's what the superhero franchise is to me. It's just people basically saying, I'm going to take a bet on this. See how much money it can make. I'd be interested to know, again, back to sort of the American way of thinking and just reality, almost everything that gets purchased is incentivized. The line between gambling and purchasing something out of choice that gets incentivized or motivated.

42:59Yes. I know there are two different things and maybe both are right or wrong or gray or whatever. Okay. But you could make the argument of, well, is this gambling? If you get something of value, and I'm going to defend trading cards because I own a store, And I'm even going to defend live streaming to a degree done the right way. Yeah. That with digital packs, yeah, you've got a chance to win something much higher, but you're getting something of value. This isn't a scratch card. So we, you know, digital pack, I don't know how familiar you are with this. I'm familiar. Yeah. And you pay$30 and you might win something that's 300, but you get a card with value.

43:31It's a collectible. You don't get nothing, which 99 % of scratch cards get. How do we lump all these things in the same thing? Because there's headwinds. There's wins towards it becoming regulated and or taxed or bucketed somewhere, hopefully more positive than negative. But I could argue if you're getting something of value, everything is incentivized, rebates, otherwise. Where do you fall on how things get designated in this gambling space? You could break it down into there's a very simple way of looking at this is just value, uncertainty and risk. Every purchase we make has risk. Most gambling has a heightened aspect of risk to it.

44:02Consumers are looking at this and I think there's a piece here which on our work we published and which Forbes talked about recently. We said that we're in an era where everything has been gamified. Gamification of everything. That happened, in my view, at scale during a pandemic. So consumers had a lot of idle thumbs and they used them during a pandemic. And they found a bunch of stuff that maybe we never would have considered to be gambling. But we were kind of heading in this direction for decades now. Look at video game loot crates, okay? So I can't get the Star Wars Galaxies in a video game in 2012 and 13.

44:30You couldn't play as Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader unless you got a loot crate. And that loot crate was very similar to a slot machine. that when it dropped, you had to basically open it. And then most people would be frustrated to find that they couldn't play as Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader. They could play as a bunch of other people they didn't want to play as. And they kept buying more and more loot crates. How many Darth Vader? It had for some concern. All the advertising was for Darth Vader. All the advertising was built on that. The whole franchise is. So when you get it, then you realize, as my nephews did, they were like, there's no Darth Vader in this.

44:57And I was like, well, what do you need to do to be Darth Vader? You need to buy a loot crate. Okay, so here's my debit card. And you notice the debit card balance got cleared. really quickly. So there's a piece of this, which is we've been moving in this way. There's value there. There's an entertainment piece to it there. Some consumers will treat it, however, like another form of gambling. But we're in an era when everything has been gamified. Everything from our social media platform engagement, right through to different forms of gambling, right through to new financial products with prediction market levels.

45:23So everything's been gamified. And you need to start looking at this as we need to be looking at this with gambling regulation as more common sense regulation. It's not just the old casino sports betting poker stuff from the brick and mortar experience. It's now moved into a new area, which is loot crates and video games. It's maybe trading card platforms. It's definitely, in my view, in the future, things live contests between influencers on TikTok. Because the way that people are throwing money at that stuff, I read a story recently in Business Insider, a lady saying that she spent her life savings in a year on TikTok influencers and going, I'm going to throw you hearts and likes, and then realizing that she got through 25 grand a month.

45:59Okay. So is that a form of gambling? She's not getting much value from it, basically. She's getting a certain amount of increase in her followers. I need to find her account. Send her some love. Exactly. So there's a terrifying piece of this, which is when everything's become gamified, how do you regulate any of it? But I think this needs more common sense regulation. And there's a piece of this, which is the experience that regulators gained in regulating and controlling gambling. Brick and mortar and now online, that experience is invaluable in looking at how consumers interact with products that feature risk.

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49:21dot com slash Ryan. No one knows that better than gambling regulators. Nobody in the world.

49:32I still feel like we need like a neutral body. And I don't know how you do that. Every neutral body ends up getting a... Look, we're independent and neutral because we're just a silent machine behind a marketplace looking at how people are basically finding, interacting and engaging with it. Gambling is the most incentivized business in the world, which is why it leads to some of the excesses. it has in the way that high reward exactly but incentivization happens even at the level of i just want to get you interested in clicking on this ad i'm an influencer attractive looking woman attractive looking guy i'm offering you something free i'm offering you new followers if you do this i will bring you x okay so there's a whole bunch of incentivization in it right down from how the audience is found how the audience register for accounts how the audience redeposit which games they play because they've been incentivized most of that is being done through social media now at scale, industrial scale.

50:17So there's a piece of this, which is incentivization is embedded within the gaming industry economics. Every ad ever made is built to, with persuasion and incentivization in mind. Slippery slope. I mean, there's some common sense dividing that can happen. Absolutely. That is this thing. We got to just be careful that we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater sometimes, which is consumer choice. We can all put everything that we've talked about that is clearly in the US's best interest. Yes. Organized crime out, more money here, more roads, better healthcare, wherever that money's going, because it's happening anyway.

50:48We all agree with this. But then there's the, do we change the dynamics of a company or who wins and who loses from those things beyond the obvious? Because it seems like someone's always incentivized on the other side for the wrong reason, which is because if I'm organized, I want unorganized out, right? Yeah. And for good reasons, but also to their bottom line, who's wearing the cape and who's wearing the bad guy? Sometimes it's not clear as organized crime mafia. Exactly. I think there needs to be a piece of this, which is you just need to get rid of the crime now is the most important and urgent issue.

51:19Yeah, let's get rid of that. And then there is an absolute area of free market economics and then nuance in how you regulate these things. But that's up to regulators, not me. I'm mainly the person behind it. I know what you are now. I'm going to call it, and I use this a lot, but I call it, you're the purveyor of signals. Signals intelligence. And you remove noise. Yeah. I've done a lot of research for us, satin focus groups, done quantitative, qualitative. of all that. I've seen so much data for brands and I love it. I actually dig into it and I'm seasoned enough to know when there's noise and when there's signals.

51:50And I think that's what you guys are doing for these countries and these companies is this is noise, but these are signals that need to be acted on. Well, it's a very good way to put it. Cause again, I didn't come from a big data background. I hated it. I basically looked at it and went, I've got so much data. I can't make a decision anymore. Yeah. It's a paralysis analysis. I mean, right. Okay. I don't know. I need to know what to do next. And you could see in this market, place that there is a piece of this which is up to governments and regulators and the electorate decide what you want from your marketplace if you want no gambling you can have it your way like burger king but you need to decide you have to make a decision you need enough data to make a decision and that is comes from that signals intelligence that we provide get to a decision if that can be profitable for everybody it can also protect consumers wonderful but those are decisions for you we are independent and neutral on that side of things we're not here to tell you how your gambling should be but we're near here to tell you if you want your marketplace to feature gambling or not feature gambling.

52:42This is how you run it right. You're a data guy. You're doing signals and not predictions, but you've got enough data and you've probably looked at it and it's probably on your radar. Where do you see the live selling, the digital goods that have high risk, high reward and where do you see that going? I see that very firmly sitting in the unacknowledged as a form of gambling bubble that we've identified recently. There are people who treat these products like gambling products, even if they're not intended that way. So there are unintended consequences there. There is definitely a sphere of unacknowledged gambling activity.

53:15In some marketplaces, I would put prediction market platforms in there. I would definitely include social casinos, sweepstakes casinos. They may not be telling you they're gambling. And certainly for people who play social casinos, I don't understand what you get out of them, apart from entertainment, because you can't cash out from any of those platforms. Yeah, exactly. To me, it completely turns on its head, the economics of gambling. I win more money to play more money. You need to just keep putting money in to buy chips and you never get to cash anything out. you'll never even get prizes. No.

53:40Like you're giving me a cuddly toy, at least like they do with Pachinko in Japan. I maybe would be more interested. So I don't understand that. We give you a card. There are younger generations who do understand the stuff and they want to play these things. I would say that that sphere of unacknowledged as gambling is expanding, that calls for a different kind of regulation going forward. What it doesn't call for, in my view, is probably this opening up of multiple new regulatory agencies. That's what turns into the overburdening of that space and the death of commercial ingenuity and entrepreneurship.

54:07That's what you want. That's the fine line, isn't it? Exactly. Sometimes we turn the dial too far. It's really good as we start to kind of wind down these topics. The good place to get, because the American way is to not overturn that dial so that you don't stop ideas and ingenuity. There's a lot of things that people, even myself, I've considered getting into. I see all the red tape that's been put up. And I'm not a criminal. I'm not trying to wire it. But if you make it hard enough, we're not going to do it. But there's a piece of this which you can look at the American national marketplace experience of online gambling and look at the companies that got in line, queued up, went through vetting, went through auditing, got their checks done, got their license, paid for their license, then started operating.

54:44They all thought it was a brand new day and they were going to make money. And nobody made money from regulated online gaming in America. They're still not making money from it eight years later at any scale. One quarter here, one quarter there of profitability does not make a profitable thing that investors want to put money in. Unregulated gambling saw the same thing. It just carried on doubling down every single year. So it's basically kept on growing at pace and it's become the greatest value extraction from American consumers probably in history. And why aren't more people offended by that, bothered by that?

55:13Because effectively, that's the money that they stole from you, from your country, your commerce, your states, your communities. And they gave you all that at the same time as basically saying, I'm going to abuse your kids and community too, because we don't care where the money comes from. We just want the money. Who's going to carry that towards? It's been mine for the last six years. I know. Yeah, clearly you are. On a global basis. I'm bothered about this because I feel that sting when someone steals my napkin, right? Okay. I feel that sting when somebody steals anything from me. So of course, I want everyone to feel that sting and know this is how much they took from you.

55:45And to bring that to heal, to bring that to stop, you don't necessarily need to go on the biggest FBI mission to go after all these companies that are offshore and would be out of jurisdiction and very hard to litigate against. What you do need to do though, is allow American commerce to benefit from that. Allow American consumers to be safe within that framework and also make sure that the money stays in this country. That's what's most important. We got to get rid of laws that make things illegal that shouldn't be illegal. Bringing morality into this one, where you have three decades where I can point to a number.

56:12And in the past six years of us having a platform that could build that with AI and tech and machine learning and expert humans behind it, where our ability is to really look at that number and go, we know it's the number. We know what legal is. We know what illegal and unregulated gambling is. We can tell you how much your marketplace is worth. And when you're looking at a marketplace that's worth$125 billion last year in America nationally, and you're looking at 78 % of that going to crime, it has to end. We have to make that end. It should be incumbent on all of us. And in my time, I saw something that if I had an ability to change it with my words, do it.

56:44To change it with my actions, do it. But I can't just be sat there thinking, I think it's bad. I'm not doing anything about it. That was wrong. The stuff that's in the non-categorized. Unacknowledged. Unacknowledged. There we go. That's a word for my reign to say. Unacknowledged. I like to be acknowledged, you know, like I don't like. Does regulated gambling want the unacknowledged to be acknowledged and regulated? I think regulated gambling right now is just in a mission for survival, basically. Its reason for being right now is we just want to survive and get to profitability. They've also had investors, many of whom are Americans, who've invested in them for years, who had been, who believed in 2018 that there was going to be an American gambling gold rush.

57:21And that American gambling gold rush looks like a busted flush right now. So that doesn't seem like it worked out for anybody, but it did work out for crime. And that's not fair. So there's a piece of this, which is the unacknowledged bubble is growing. There are people who are joining that unacknowledged bubble. DraftKings and FanDuel declared their hand and already have gone into prediction market platforms because if you can't beat them, we may as well join them because they might make money faster than we make it. But there's one thing to bear in mind here for anybody thinking about investing in those things.

57:44Prediction market platforms make money at far lower clip than gambling companies do. So a lot less money. So they make money on fees and charges. So they want you to trade up your position all the time. But they are not the house. The house has an ability to make a substantial amount of money, the same as consumers do in those gambling models. So prediction markets are another thing altogether. So calling them gambling is also misleading in that way. A lot of the activity there is gambling light, but the outcomes are very gambling different. So there's a piece of this, which is they're not going to make the substantial amount of money that gambling platforms do when they run right.

58:15And there's a piece of this, which is consumers will get bored of this constantly needing to change their trade positions. Right now, we're seeing unprecedented levels of engagement with these platforms, unprecedented levels of growth. But will consumers tire of, I need to constantly trade positions all the time? Has it turned from entertainment into this is more like a job? Because that's kind of where that activity started, wasn't it? It was meant to be financial futures traders. And if every consumer is now doing this, and maybe I like it when I'm doing it on the election outcome. Maybe I like it when I'm doing it on sports.

58:42Maybe I like it when I'm doing it on what tomorrow's weather in South Carolina is going to be. But how long is this going to last before crime also cannibalizes those platforms and offers the bets that prediction market platforms won't be able to. So states that prediction market platforms are operating pretty much with impunity across most of America right now, saying that their financial future is regulated product. Everyone's gone to them and said, we don't like you being around sports. We don't like you being around elections either. We don't like you being around certain things. And there's been some sensitivity and some play with those platforms to go, okay, we'll remove certain things.

59:10We didn't know it was there. A lot of the stuff that was conflict betting on the Iran war recently, for example, prediction market platforms were like, we didn't know it was there. We got nothing we can do about it. We're going to change it. There's a problem there in that you're going to be looked at to know exactly what's going on on those platforms and that room of crazy that we showed you was going on with bets like the kind of biggie and two-part resurrection with jesus that kind of stuff might not be on calcium polymarket but it is on prediction market platforms elsewhere on the internet so that room of crazy will be leaned into by social media platforms it's content that shocks it will get clicks so there's a piece of this which is then consumers will bet on that and they clearly did on that bet a couple of years ago so there's a piece of this which is how do you control that area the unacknowledged as gambling area is absolutely going to grow the fastest thing that's going to grow in the marketplace.

59:51We need to have common sense regulation and a view of this stuff to make sure we're controlling it and getting the benefit from it. Commerce, community and consumers. As we close out, I think of the argument that I hear. I bet you have some data on this. If we allow gambling, here's the argument for South Carolinians, a lot of older ones. It'll bring violence and crime and it'll tear down the cities because people spend too much. Like, what's the data say about the states or places that have legalized it and what happens to the economy and the people and the roads and the crime levels? Is there data around that?

1:00:25If you legalize it, this will happen. You've already lost$700 million last year in South Carolina. So the piece here is that there's a piece of this which is what's going to change. But you know, right or wrong, that's perception, isn't it? The perception is that this is new. This is not new. It's always been there. For as long as we've had human behavior on this earth that has been gambling, two cavemen sat in a cave going, what fly is going to come off the wall first? That left or right one? I'll put your bones on it. So it's always been nature. It's in human nature. It's part of human nature.

1:00:55So there's a piece of this, which is it's already going on. I'm not one for kind of the excuse legislation, which is, well, it's already going on. We need to do something about it. Just make it legal. No, you decide what you want in your state, in your country, in your marketplace. You decide. Voters and lawmakers. because you decide, have it your way. It's always going to be like Burger King the way I see it that way. Have it your way. But you then need to monitor, police, enforce and optimize to ensure that that is the reality. That what we see, our silent machine operating on all the anonymous audience data behind it and their activity.

1:01:26From that data, make the right decisions, put the right processes, policy and practice in place. But what you can't do is do nothing. Doing nothing, in my view, is acting in a violent way towards your audience and your economic possibilities and your taxation and community possibilities in your marketplace. So doing nothing is not excusable. But is there any data that support the argument that... The market will collapse. Society will collapse. No. I mean, obviously, I know that that hasn't happened. Well, let's take one example. Middle Eastern government came to us a few years ago, and they said, we don't have any gambling.

1:01:54We're Muslims. We don't have gambling. It's against our religion. We told them from the monitoring, there were 15 million commercial connections to online gambling sites every day. And then they said, okay, can you blame it on the tourists? So we said that's got nothing to do with blaming it on anybody. Exactly. Whatever you want to say about your marketplace is up to you. You can have it your way. But the main thing you need to do is know what's out there, make a decision on what's out. That's it. Where can anybody that's been listening learn more about these fascinating topics and everything that you're fighting for, that you're passionate about?

1:02:25They can go to gamingcompliance.com. They can go to my website, ismailvali.com, I-S-M-A-I-L-E-A-L-I.com. And they can look me up on social media and TikTok and Instagram. Very happy to talk to anybody. A lot of people say about me that I turn this thing into my passion. I think it's my cross to bear, this one, because I had an academic background in law. I spent 20 years in the gaming industry. I have never once regretted any of that time I spent in the gaming industry. I believe that when this business is run right, it has the ability to provide substantial benefit on most community consumers.

1:02:55In my time, having seen that and known it with the right team, technology and people behind me, we're trying to do something about it. So we're always happy to talk to people who help make that happen. As you said, we're doing these activities anyway. They need to be done and managed in a way that benefits everyone instead of beating those that beat upon us. And putting your head in the sand is doing exactly that. Crimes shouldn't get to win. Unfairness shouldn't get to win. Scams should not get to win. And nobody should be able to take advantage of American commerce community and consumers with impunity like these people have.

1:03:26I see them as crooks because they may not like that label. But if you're not making your money in legitimate ways and paying taxes on it, you are a thief. It's been fascinating. Has been. Thank you very much, Ryan. I really appreciate your energy and for coming on. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you for inviting me. It's been wonderful to be here today. Thank you. Hey guys, you know where to find me. A lot of bad business advice out there, but that's why we are Right About Now. We appreciate Ismael from coming far here. He's passionate about it. He makes a lot of sense. You need to think about these topics as you explore what it really means when we put our head in the sand versus embracing what is already happening right now.

1:03:59We'll see you next time on Right About Now. Here's the truth. Information doesn't change your life. Execution does. So don't just listen to this episode and move on. Take the idea. Make the call. Launch the thing. Fix the problem. Build what you keep talking about building. For more, follow Ryan Alford on Instagram, at RyanAlford. And watch or listen to every episode at ryanisright.com. This is right about now. Now quit waiting. Go win.