Inside the life of a 'degenerate' sports gambler

More than half of men under 50 in the U.S. have an open online sports book. Public health experts warn it's easier than ever to get addicted to gambling. Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins spent a year exploring the world of sports betting, and why the pastime is particularly bad for young men.

McKay Coppins, staff writer at The Atlantic. His article “Sucker: My Year as a Degenerate Gambler” was published in the magazine in March of this year.

Isaac Rose-Berman, fellow at the American Institute for Boys and Men, where he focuses on gambling research and policy.

Michael Holms, 25-year-old sports gambler.

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: McKay Coppins is an author and staff writer for The Atlantic, and he's covered everything from the importance of attending a Trump rally to sports competitions arranged by cartels, his journalism has won the Aldo Beckman Award from the White House Correspondence Association and the Wilbur Award for religion journalism, and his recent book, Romney: A reckoning, which came out a couple of years ago was universally lauded by everyone from The Guardian, the New Yorker and the New York Times. And McKay keeps plugging away at trying to understand the fundamentals of American life now. And he recently published a piece in The Atlantic titled Sucker: My Year as a Degenerate Gambler.

This article comes at a critical time because back in 2018, a Supreme Court ruling cleared the way for sports betting in this country, and the business immediately exploded, combined the excitement of betting and a smartphone in every pocket, and you have this current statistic.

More than 50% of men between the ages of 18 and 49 have an active sports betting account with an online sports book. And overall Americans wagered more than $166 billion on sports just last year. One survey from U.S. News from last July showed that one in four sports betters have missed bill payments due to the wagers they're making. So what did McKay learn in his year as a quote-unquote degenerate gambler? McKay Coppins, welcome back to On Point.

McKAY COPPINS: Thank you for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So can you tell me, McKay, what the genesis of this idea was?

Because there's some, let's say it, like personal conflicts that, you, yourself had in like spending a year gambling money.

COPPINS: Yes. Last year I was talking to my editor about embarking on kind of a big investigation of the sports betting industry. And the topic was obviously relevant for all the reasons you just went through.

And I started to plot out my plan for reporting the story. I was going to talk to executives at the big online sports books. I was going to talk to people who struggling with gambling addiction. I would interview athletes and it was all the normal reporting things you do for a story like this.

And then at one point my editor said you know what would be really great is if we gave you some money to gamble with so you could experience the phenomenon firsthand. And I said, yeah, I see the idea there. But I do have certain religious constraints as a practicing Mormon.

I don't gamble. And the guy said, yeah. That's what makes it so great though. And so they said, we have this idea that it's a workaround. We'll give you $10,000 to gamble with. We will cover your losses, so it's not technically your money that you're putting at risk, but we'll split the winnings with you 50/50, with the idea being that you'll still be emotionally invested in it and feel what it's like to be a gambler.

And I took that idea to my bishop in my local congregation and basically explained the experiment to him and watched as this look of pastoral concern bloomed across his face. He was not wild about it.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. He's probably thinking, McKay, do we need to go over some of the edicts of the LDS church?

Because it's pretty much banned, right? In the LDS church.

COPPINS: Yeah. Games of chance, gambling, are forbidden. My case was this is for journalism. It's not my money; it's my employer's money. And to be fair, he said I understand all that and I don't think you're doing anything wrong.

This, I'll admit he sounded a little tentative when he said that, but he said, the last thing he said before I left his office that I remember was, be careful. And I will tell you that when he said that, I shrugged him off. I was like, look this is like a stunt for a magazine story.

It's a journalistic gimmick. You don't really have to worry about me. And when I look back on that moment now, he was prophetic.

CHAKRABARTI: He also, as you write about in the story, he also actually gave you some examples of other men he had counseled who had fallen prey to addictions, including gambling addiction.

COPPINS: And the thing is, as you noted at the top here, gambling has become so prevalent among American men in particular, that there's no subset of men that are spared. Mormon men are struggling with gambling addiction. I've heard from Muslim men also. Muslims similarly don't allow gambling.

Gambling has become so prevalent among American men in particular, that there's no subset of men that are spared.

McKay Coppins

This vice that has been with us for millennia, has in very short amount of time, just the past few years, become so omnipresent, so frictionless in its accessibility on everybody's phone. That my bishop and pretty much every other religious leader in America has probably experienced or counseled somebody who is experiencing gambling addiction.

So he was right to be concerned.

CHAKRABARTI: That very ubiquity though, is one of the reasons why, as you well know, you received a lot of pushback for this article and we'll actually go through some of that pushback later in the show. But one of them is, well, it is so popular that in the events that people do become addicted, they're a minority of the people who practice in online sports betting. But we'll get back to that. Okay. Because the article has been out for a while and there's some, I'd love to give you a chance to respond to some of the criticisms you got. But let's get back to your actual experience.

So you're a newbie, you're a sports betting newbie. You download one of the apps on your phone. And I would love for you to describe what your first bet was, because it seems delightfully naive.

COPPINS: I will start this by saying I am a sports fan, right? I watch football, I watch basketball, baseball, but I've never gambled on sports. And so I downloaded DraftKings 15 minutes before kickoff on the first game of the NFL season, and I had no idea what I was doing. I will say, it's incredibly easy I found out, to download and set up this app, it was just a few taps, and I had deposited $500 into my account.

I just started scrolling through the app in a state of bewilderment. The first game was the Cowboys versus the Eagles. And my very sophisticated premise was the Eagles had just won the Super Bowl, so therefore I should bet on the Eagles. But I think I ended up putting five or six bets in and they were prop bets on individual players and parlay bets, which only pay off if multiple different outcomes occur.

And I really didn't even know the vernacular. I barely knew what I was betting on, but I was astounded, Meghna, by how locked in I was on this random football game. Like it was like I had purchased a synthetic rooting interest in a game that in normal times, I probably would've casually put on while folding laundry with my wife and then fallen asleep at halftime. Instead, because I had a couple hundred bucks riding on the game.

I watched every play, every down. I was scrolling frantically the whole time on my app trying to see how my bets were doing. There was a weather delay in that game that pushed the game past midnight. I stayed up past midnight to watch it. And at the end of it, through some kind of insane fluke of luck and fate, I ended up 20 bucks ahead.

And I remember feeling oh my gosh, this is why everyone does this. This is amazing. This is so fun.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. And I was interested to see that you were also like, Hey, if I win more, what could I do? Even your wife was like, let's redo the kitchen. (LAUGHS)

COPPINS: Yeah. But the next morning I remember telling my wife, Hey, I won 20 bucks last night, and she high fived me.

And we immediately started to fantasize about all the things we could do with our winnings. We're like, think about it, we won 20 bucks on just the first night. Think about how much we could win over the course of the whole NFL season and then we'll bet on NBA and college football too. And we were talking about, could we replace the dying KitchenAid mixer we have, could we redo the pantry in our kitchen?

I mean we had all these big home improvement ideas. And that is, and I should say the serious thing about, that is fundamental to the business model of the sports books and really any gambling institution, right? You often talk to gambling addicts and they say the worst thing that ever happened to me was that I won, right?

You often talk to gambling addicts, and they say the worst thing that ever happened to me was that I won.

McKay Coppins

Because that first win, there's nothing like it. You created money out of thin air, basically, and you end up chasing that feeling for the rest of your gambling experience. And certainly, I did.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. On the other hand, though, and here's how I'm going to offer you some of the pushback that I've been reading to your article.

The very, the same heightened experience that you had in that first game. There's a lot of people out there, millions of people who have online sports books, who say. Look, that's exactly the thing that gets me more invested as a sports fan, right? It just adds to the fundamental excitement of watching a game, of being knowledgeable about my teams, of understanding player strengths and weaknesses better.

It's like the literal skin in the game and it's become an important part of their experience of being a fan.

COPPINS: Yeah, I wouldn't refute that necessarily. I do think for a lot of people, having a little money on a game can make it more fun to watch, that happened with me at the beginning.

But I would push back a little bit on the idea that's how most gamblers think about betting on sports. Because in the pushback that I've received, which has primarily come from the gambling industry. And then the kind of gambling community, the online gambling community. A lot of them are not just arguing, Why are you trying to take away my fun? They're saying the only reason you lost money is because you were bad at gambling and you didn't have a process. You didn't have a system. I know what I'm doing and because I know what I'm doing, I'm going to win. And I remember one of the first phone calls I made when I started this experience after the first week, I called Nate Silver, who is a statistics wonk.

And he is really into gambling. He's won a bunch of money in poker tournaments and sports betting, and he gave me all the kind of rules of sensible sports betting. And I will say, most of these rules are not things that the average sports better follows, but because it makes it less fun.

But he walked me through everything, and I said at the end of that conversation, okay. If I'm starting with $10,000, what would be a successful season? And he said, oh, if you win one penny, that'll make you better than 98% of sports betters.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: McKay you talked about it's not enough to win 50.1% of the time. That's the number that you quoted in your piece. And it reminded me of years and years ago I was talking to an expert in the casino gambling world, and he explained to me that how it works in casinos is that you win enough to keep you going.

But when you look overall at the volume of bets being made and the number of times people play, it might actually be that you're winning 49.9% of the time, but that the house is winning 50.1% of the time. And when you scale that up, that means overall everybody but the house is losing. Now what I found was really interesting in your article is that Nate Silver told you, Okay, say you are a good gambler and you win 50.1% of the time in the online sports book world. He said that's actually not even enough to break even or make money.

COPPINS: That's right. So the books effectively charge you 4.5% for every bet you place. So if you only win 50.1% of the time, you're losing money.

You have to win 52.5% of your bets just to break even. But that's actually before taxes. And let me tell you, having just finished my taxes for last year during my gambling experiment, it's actually quite aggressive. So you have to win closer to 55% of the time to break even. And any serious kind of statistically minded person who has studied this industry will tell you that almost nobody wins 55% of the time.

That is, that would be an anomaly. I will also say there are all these other things that the industry does to tilt the scales in their favor, if, for example, you do somehow consistently win, you're winning 55%, 56% of the time. Most sports books will limit you. Meaning they will not allow you to place bets larger than $25 or $50.

CHAKRABARTI: It's like being a card counter at a Blackjack, at a poker table. Yeah.

COPPINS: Yes, exactly. Although they don't have evidence that you're actually cheating. They just have evidence that you're winning.

CHAKRABARTI: Good at it.

COPPINS: Yeah. So they'll kick you off. And so it is remarkable that this industry basically out in the open, rigs the entire system against the gambler, and yet gamblers continue to flock to it.

CHAKRABARTI: If they're, wow. So they're actually limiting the bets that the people who are really good at it can make. That's really interesting. I didn't know that. So take me back to then your, as you go further and further into this world did you follow Nate's advice, you said you may not have followed all of it, avoiding prop bets. Explain to me again, what parlays and multi-leg parlay. What is all this?

COPPINS: So one of the things that Nate said is that the sports books generate the majority of their profits.

Through prop bets and parlay bets, a prop bet is on an individual player. So you could bet Josh Allen to rush for more than 50 yards in a given game, or a parlay, which basically has multiple legs. So you could bet over the course of a weekend on the Chiefs to cover the spread, the Ravens to win their game and the Chargers to score more than 24 points.

And if all three of those things happen, you get a payout which is significantly larger than a typical bet. But you almost never win those, the average bet on those because they're fun, right? It's fun to have one bet to follow over the course of the weekend. The sports books know that, they're constantly packaging new parlays and pushing them on you.

They allow you to assemble your own parlays. It's a fun little game and by some accounts, they make 80% of their profits that way. And so those are considered suckers bets. Stay away from those bets. Another thing that Nate told me was, don't bet during live games, right? These apps allow you to be betting throughout the game, and the line is constantly shifting based on what's happening on the court or the field. The problem is that most people are watching these games on tv, which means you're watching on a 20 or 30 second delay, whereas the sports books have real-time information. So you are effectively betting against somebody who lives 30 seconds in the future.

You don't know yet that the running back fumbled on the one yard line, but they do. And they've shifted the line accordingly.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow. Okay. There's another thing that Silver suggested to you, which I found really interesting, and a lot of people who are very serious gamblers approach it this way, and that is, take any and all emotion out of it. Turn yourself into actually something of a monk, right? Have a ritual on every morning where you analyze all the information you can get, you do your sort of statistical analysis, et cetera, and you make your favorite bets, and then that's it, right?

It becomes as serious as another job.

COPPINS: That's right. And the thing is, I did actually follow this advice for the first couple months of my betting experience, after he gave it to me, I was determined to be a respectable sports gambler, if such a thing exists. I wanted to stick to a system, see if I could actually win money. And for the first couple of months, I did this, I would sit down early in the week before the NFL games, and I would pour over the lines. I would gather roster information, look at weather updates, all the other factors that can affect a game, and then I would choose six or seven bets.

And put a hundred dollars on each one. And that's what Nate said to do, because the sports books want you to gamble emotionally. That's when you make mistakes, right? If you are a serious sports better like Nate, you're taking all emotion out of it. You're following a proprietary model or a process of some kind.

And so I did that, but I was shocked by how much time it took, right? I write in the piece about being sent on an errand by my wife. And I was parked outside of a big box store in Northern Virginia on a rainy afternoon, and I was like, I'm going to look through the bets really quick, because I have a bunch of young children.

It's hard to find a quiet moment ever. And so I was in my car, let me look at the bets. I started to look over all the information, I was writing down the bets that I liked. All of a sudden, I looked up, 45 minutes had passed. And I was just sitting in my car, and this happened again and again.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow.

There's one more thing about Nate Silver before we leave this part of this story, that he said, which really, that he told you, which really took me aback, right? Because while you were talking to him about strategies for being successful in the online sports betting world, and you're like, Hey Nate, you've won hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Like what's so hard about this? And what did he tell you?

COPPINS: He said, most of the money that he has won gambling is in poker tournaments, right? He said, gambling on sports is a game of razor thin margins, microscopic edges. It's incredibly difficult to actually win money. He said he himself, who has developed a very sophisticated proprietary model that he follows, who, you know, is a pretty well-regarded stats wonk, would be thrilled if he came out even at the end of the NFL season.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow. Okay, so McKay, hang in here for just a second because we wanted to hear from someone who's squarely in this demographic. And I keep quoting about 18 to 49-year-old men in the United States.

So Michael Holms is one of those folks. He's a 25-year-old. From Oklahoma. He's been online sports gambling for more than five years.

So essentially since before he turned 20. He bet on the Lakers game this week and was planning on betting on the Timberwolves as well. And Michael told us that sports betting is fully integrated into his friendships.

MICHAEL HOLMS: All of my buddies and me, we always watch sports games, and I think the simplest thing about it is it makes any sports game automatically more entertaining. If you want to place like a small wager around the game, especially if it's your team or just a team you're interested in, throwing 20 or 30 bucks on them if there's good value, immediately makes everything more entertaining.

You got a small stake in the game.

CHAKRABARTI: So the social part of it is important to Michael, but he also told us that even though he loves the pastime of online sports betting, he also admits it is a powerful force in his everyday life.

HOLMS: It takes up a lot of my time outside of work. Like yesterday, I would've rather gone to the gym honestly, but I had to leave myself some time to go pick up my buddy so we could all watch the Lakers game.

But like I'll be watching games that I don't really care about because I know that I wanna place a gamble on or just make a wager on one of the teams. Because I think there's good value where God knows what.

CHAKRABARTI: And here's one more thing Michael told us about how being such an active online sports better is really changing his skills in other areas.

He's been successful, he says, in that online sports gambling world, but it's made a difference in how he thinks about money, the economy, or even the idea of saving.

HOLMS: I've been thinking to myself, if I like gamble this money, if I bet this on sports games, because that's all I do, it's just sports gambling.

No traditional gambling. But if I wager this money, I think I could get a much better return, which was stupid, but I thought I could get a better return than just letting it sit in stock market. And of course this was not true. I would've been much better off letting all that money sit. God knows how much that would be worth right now.

But yeah, I just, I didn't believe in the economy back then, especially now I do not believe in the state of the economy. The few thousand dollars that I do have I don't think that would do me better investing, even though it probably might, but that's just not where my opinion takes me.

CHAKRABARTI: so that's Michael Holms. He's 25 and is from Oklahoma. And McKay, I have to say if Michael had actually put that money in the stock market over the past five years, he would've received a double-digit return. It's been crazy. But so respond to this. Did you find that as you got deeper and deeper into online sports betting, did it have the same sort of effect in changing how you thought about other things.

COPPINS: Yeah. What he's describing is so interesting. In my case, what I found was that and something I really didn't like about the experience was that I was thinking about money much more than I did before I was gambling. In my day-to-day life, I'm very lucky.

I have a good job, I'm able to provide for my family. I don't think about money that much day-to-day. I'm not constantly thinking about how to make more money, how to get richer. That's not, it's just not part of my personality, it's not a huge part of my mind share. Right?

When I was gambling, I was constantly thinking about money and it wasn't just in gambling. It started out with, can I win enough money to replace our KitchenAid mixer or redo our kitchen pantry? But then it was other things. I started thinking, man are there other kind of get rich quick schemes?

Like my algorithm on Instagram started feeding me like these kind of weird, shady videos for like multi-level marketing businesses that promise huge returns. Like something about the algorithm clearly new that I was in that mindset and I just, I would never have been thinking that way except for gambling.

And the thing that he's describing though is really interesting. And I think it might be part of why sports betting has become so popular among young men. It goes hand in hand with the crisis of authority and trust that young men in particular have in the big institutions of American life, including financial institutions, right?

People under 30 just don't have a lot of faith in that they can make money and get ahead the way that past generations did. So why not put it all on black to use another metaphor, right? Why not? Why not take my chances on FanDuel or DraftKings and see if I can somehow beat the odds?

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So let's move forward to about, let's say, halfway through your year in this experiment, what was going on? Were you winning, were you losing, were you getting better at betting or not?

COPPINS: Around Thanksgiving, I checked in with Nate Silver again and I gave him a status update, and I think I was at that point up a hundred bucks, 100 or 200 bucks.

And I had gambled something like $10,000 at that point. So to me it felt like a wash. He actually encouraged me. He said, oh, you're doing better than the vast majority of gamblers.

CHAKRABARTI: You're beating the odds.

COPPINS: Absolutely. That's what, and he almost sounded impressed. And you know what I will say. Not to blame Nate, but that conversation was terrible for me because it convinced me subconsciously that maybe I was in that 2%, maybe I was somebody who was actually really good at sports betting.

I was a secret savant at sports betting that had just come to it late in life. And now I was going to make all this money. And so almost immediately I started breaking all the rules that Nate had taught me, and I started making riskier and riskier bets. I started doing those suckers bets.

And at the same time, gambling was completely permeating my life, I was routinely staying up past midnight to watch games and then to gamble more. I was like in bed in the middle of the night, my face illuminated by DraftKings or FanDuel. As I scrolled thoughtlessly through these apps forever, I was hiding in the bathroom or the kitchen pantry to put in bets so that my little, my young kids didn't see how much I was gambling.

Gambling was completely permeating my life, I was routinely staying up past midnight to watch games and then to gamble more.

McKay Coppins

And yet at the same time, they knew I was gambling. Because I would talk about it all the time. And my, like 7-year-old daughter knew the difference between a point spread and a money line. It was really, I was shocked by how quickly it was taking over my life.

CHAKRABARTI: Is this the same daughter who as you were placing a bet on, was it, you're at a BYU game or something?

Said, that's not very Mormon of you.

COPPINS: That was my other daughter. That was my 12-year-old daughter. Both daughters learned a lot about their dad throughout this experiment.

CHAKRABARTI: So let me say one of the, again, the pushback, pieces of pushback that I've been reading, as you said, from the industry is exactly what you just said. They're like Coppins has admitted that he went to Nate Silver, who's really good at trying at placing bets, got all this advice from him, and then stopped listening to Silver's advice, right? So if you had a bad experience, that's on you, that's not a fundamental flaw or predatory nature of the industry.

COPPINS: Yeah, I think that's fair. Except that I would say that my experience is much more similar to the average newbie sports better than Nate Silver's. It is possible to come to sports betting, read about all the rules that Nate Silver gave me. And stick to them religiously, monastically, and maybe you don't end up losing that much money.

I would say you probably still end up losing money, but probably not that much. But the thing is, most people don't stick to those rules, because it makes it less fun. The whole point of gambling is the emotional charge, the thrill, the adrenaline rush, right? Nobody gets into this to sit down on a Tuesday morning and monastically study the NFL lines and then put in six or seven very sensible bets, and then not return to them until Sunday.

That's not how gambling works. Most people end up breaking those rules and the sports books know that, and they design their entire industry, their apps, all the promotions that they push on you, the push notifications are designed to get you to break those rules. And so I think my experience in that way is much more reflective of the typical gambling experience.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: I want to just introduce some thoughts from yet another person who thinks a lot about gambling and particularly its impact on men and boys. And that's Isaac Rose-Berman. He's a fellow at the American Institute for Boys and Men, and he's written on the public health dangers of online sports betting.

But Isaac's overall view of gambling isn't what you'd expect.

ISAAC ROSE-BERMAN: I love gambling. I think it's a lot of fun. I enjoy it. I enjoy doing it with my friends. I think it can be an informative and social activity. Obviously, some dangers associated with it. I am generally against gambling companies who are the operators who provide this product and this activity.

CHAKRABARTI: And here's the reason why. Rose-Berman says sports betting companies make their product impossible for young men to ignore. They flood the media landscape, not just in podcasts and online platforms where young men gather, but sports broadcasts as well, which bombard even casual viewers. Hearing people talk about sports betting all the time and seeing ads celebrating sports betting everywhere all the time has normalized betting as a regular part of sports culture.

ROSE-BERMAN: When I was a young kid watching sports, there were no gambling ads on tv. I didn't have athletes and celebrities telling me to sign up, now I'm gonna win big. This is a super fun activity. And so I think when you have the deals, not only with the sort of broadcast companies, but with the leagues and the teams themselves, and the way that this product has really been embedded, not only into sports, but into media coverage more generally.

It normalizes the activity, and then you combine that with the accessibility and it's going to be a lot more dangerous and a lot more frictionless.

CHAKRABARTI: More specifically, online sports betting companies have partnerships with sports media companies, with teams, with individual players, with influencers, for example, there's a multi-year partnership between DraftKings and Barstool Sports.

There's also FanDuel's extensive partnership with the NBA.

ROSE-BERMAN: It's no coincidence that you basically cannot find a sports content creator who if they are not currently being sponsored by a gambling company has tried to sponsor them. Because the gambling companies want to normalize this activity.

They want to make it a part of the way that people engage with sports because that means that more people will gamble and when more people gamble, gambling companies make more money because people lose money gambling.

CHAKRABARTI: But Isaac Rose-Berman says there are ways to disentangle sports and gambling.

ROSE-BERMAN: There's so many different policies that you could implement, whether it's no athletes, no celebrities, no gambling ads during games, what are called whistle to whistle bands, gambling free broadcast options. There are all sorts of things you can do for advertising. I'm generally in favor of almost all of them.

I just think that even if you are someone who gambles and likes to gamble, such as myself, I'm like, okay, I'm sick of all these freaking ads. And yeah, basically any kind of marketing restrictions I tend to be in favor of.

CHAKRABARTI: But Rose-Berman admits that kind of regulatory change would take time. So he's also focused on ways to help people who are at immediate risk for gambling addiction.

He frequently talks to high schoolers about the potential hazards of online sports betting, and he says there's one tactic that often helps these high schoolers grasp his point. He appeals to their ego.

ROSE-BERMAN: The message that I've found to be most successful when talking to boys and young men, specifically about sports betting is that if you are good at this activity, they will kick you out. Because they are for-profit companies.

And if you win your bet, it means that the gambling company loses their bet. And so the opposite of that is that, okay, if I'm good, if when I'm good I get kicked out, it means that if I haven't gotten kicked out, it means that I'm probably not good. And so you can see the gears turning when I talk about this in classrooms sometimes, and the kids are like, wait, if I'm still allowed to bet at this place, it's because they've deemed me to be a sucker.

CHAKRABARTI: That's Isaac Rose-Berman, a fellow at the American Institute for Boys and Men. And I want to say clearly to everyone that we did reach out to the major online sports betting companies like DraftKings and FanDuel, and they did not send us a response to our questions or a statement they did not agree to have anyone join us today, but McKay, you are actually able to talk to major people in the industry, including the president of FanDuel. So tell me, what did they say about the kinds of accusations that you hear Isaac making there?

That they're really not just rigging the betting platforms, but they are basically predatory by putting themselves in front of the eyes and fingers of young men all over the country all the time.

COPPINS: Yeah, when I put that idea to Christian Genetski, the president of FanDuel, he said that the idea that FanDuel or other online sports books prey on compulsive gamblers, gambling addicts is, quote, a bit of a trope. And he said the company actually goes out of its way to identify users who are exhibiting reckless or addictive behaviors and to slow them down.

Betters who start spending more time or money than usual on the app will receive notifications alerting them to the anomaly. It actually happened to me a couple times, so I can confirm that this is true. He says that if they disregard omany of these notifications, FanDuel will actually limit their gambling or kick them off the platform. Now, I should say an executive at DraftKings told me that they had a similar policy, and he argues, we don't want revenue at all from someone who has a gambling problem. We're not trying to target gambling addicts. And I think that he means that sincerely. I don't think that the people at FanDuel or DraftKings think of themselves as being predatory institutions.

That said, they're running up against a kind of basic economic reality. Which is that something like 80% of the revenue that's brought into these sports books comes from the 10% of users who gamble the most. And they don't really have a strong economic incentive to kick off people who are gambling a lot and maybe who are gambling compulsively.

Unless they're very small amounts. If there are large amounts, they want those users to keep gambling. Because that's where most of their profits come from.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. And in that way, it's very similar to the casino gambling industry, because I've seen numbers like that coming out of casinos that like, it's actually a small number of gamblers who produce their greatest revenues.

Which is why we see all sorts of ways that casinos use methods that they use to keep their high rollers there. Okay. Now I want to get back to, again, your experience here, because in the story you also talk about how you met with a gentleman named Craig Carton, I believe, and he talks to people who suffer from gambling addiction.

And you had asked him like, what are some of the warning signs that gambling may be starting to take up more of your life in an unhealthy way? What did he say?

COPPINS: He started to go through the questions that a potential problem gambler should ask themself. Are you going to sleep and waking up thinking about your bets?

Are you staying up late to watch random games that you don't know anything about because you have money on them? Are you chasing, this is a term that means you're making reckless new bets to try to win back money that you already lost. Are you placing bets on your phone in the bathroom so your family doesn't see you gambling?

And I have to tell you, as he was going through these questions, it dawned on me that I was ticking a lot of those boxes. And when I talk about this, since the story's come out, I've done some interviews and I've talked about it, and I'm always careful to say that I don't know, and I don't think that I check every box of being a diagnosable gambling addict, right? Most people say, most experts say that only between 3% and 5% of gamblers will become full blown addicts, but a much larger percentage will exhibit reckless or compulsive behaviors. And I think that my experience is not that uncommon. People might want to say that oh, that it just happened to be that this journalist was in the very small percentage of gamblers who were especially susceptible to addiction.

I don't think so. I think that these apps are so well designed to keep you coming back. I think these sports books know what they're doing, and I think the compulsive behaviors that I exhibited are experienced by a lot of people.

CHAKRABARTI: There was even a moment that just made my throat, my heart jump into my throat where I think one of your kids said, told you, you're hiding again.

COPPINS: Yeah, my son caught me in the pantry, or I had gone to get them snacks and then I ended up looking at FanDuel or DraftKings and got sucked in. And then they came and found me in the pantry, and he announced to the family, dad's hiding again.

And this became a pretty common occurrence for me because even though they knew I was doing this for a story. I didn't want them to see how obsessed I'd become with it. And so I was hiding it. And that is a hallmark of gambling addiction that you're hiding your gambling from your family.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Just to remind folks, until 2018 sports betting, most if not all types were illegal in this country. But then the Supreme Court in a major ruling, basically said, Nope, we're going to undo that. You can bet on sports. And of course, this is happening right at the same time where phones are in everyone's pockets, and it's the two in combination, which I mean, McKay. Your whole story is about how that is the poison pill essentially. But I want to just play a quick bit of tape here from Bill Miller. He's the chief of the American Gaming Association, and back in 2024, he was on 60 Minutes and he was asked about the potential rise in problem gambling related to sports betting.

And Bill Miller said it's not gambling, that's the problem.

BILL MILLER: I don't believe that there is an addiction to mobile betting any more than there is an addiction to utilization of your phone for any other reason.

CHAKRABARTI: What do you think about that, McKay?

COPPINS: I think that it's half true. I think that clearly the online gambling epidemic has been supercharged by the omnipresence of smartphones.

By the fact that it is so easily accessible. But I also think that gambling as a vice, basically every philosopher, theologian, religious scholar, political leader over the course of human history has come to the same conclusion that this is a potentially ruinous vice that needs to be kept in check.

I came across an article published in 1907 in The Atlantic by a Unitarian minister who said the long and costly experience of mankind bears uniform testimony against gambling. And he called it a dangerous, unsocial form of excitement that hurts character, demoralizes industry, breeds quarrels and temps men to self-destruction.

That is true today. Gambling is incredibly poisonous. Now that said, I'm not necessarily a prohibitionist. I'm not saying we need to ban all gambling, shut down Las Vegas and Atlantic City. I think that in a liberal democratic society, you can make space for vices that are potentially destructive.

Or damaging. But we should also be able to figure out how to regulate them, how to stigmatize them, how to increase the amount of friction to access them.

And I don't think anyone anticipated this Wild West era where everyone would have constant access to gambling on their phones at all hours of the day.

I don't think anyone anticipated this Wild West era where everyone would have constant access to gambling on their phones at all hours of the day.

McKay Coppins

CHAKRABARTI: There's one more voice I want to bring in here because this gentleman brings in not just the moral questions that you raise in the piece, but also just fundamental economic ones. So this is Warren Buffett, you'd mentioned him before at the end of March. He spoke with CNBC and he talked about how he was critical of online sports betting specifically because it actually only benefits, in his opinion, one class of people.

WARREN BUFFETT: Rich people love it because they don't have to pay. To the extent that the states raise money from people who, when the dollar really means something to 'em actually relieves the taxes on me or other rich people. It's not direct, but it's the net effect.

So I don't like things that make a sucker out of people. I don't like them. I particularly don't like them when the government sponsors 'em. I don't think the government should play its, I don't think a function of the government is to play its people for suckers.

CHAKRABARTI: So McKay, Buffett there saying as sports betting gets more popular, or state lotteries, what have you, that it's essentially a tax on people who aren't billionaires. What do you think?

COPPINS: I think it's a really compelling argument. He's been on this for a long time. He called gambling attacks on ignorance. And you know what's funny about this is that when the Supreme Court overturned the federal ban on sports betting, the sports books hired lobby.

And they started traveling state to state, to convince state legislatures to legalize online gambling. And the case that they always made was you're going to be able to legalize it, regulate it, and tax it, and it will bring all this tax revenue to your state where you'll be able to do all these great things.

And I've looked at the numbers. I frankly, it's true that some tax revenue has  been generated. Some experts will say it was less than they were promised. It has not gone as far as they thought it would, in part because, by the way, the sports books will then turn around and start lobbying state legislatures to make those taxes as low as possible because they want people to keep gambling.

But I will also say the trade-offs are enormous, right? You mentioned that there's evidence that people are missing bills. There's evidence in states or localities where online gambling is legalized. There's an increase in missed credit card payments, in bankruptcies.

And on top of all of that, we are creating millions of new gamblers. And I just don't think that we can do that. We can allow this runaway industry to convert millions of young men into gamblers and maybe even compulsive gamblers without reaping some social consequences.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. We have just a minute to go, McKay.

Two quick questions. Ultimately, what happened to that 10k and two, do you occasionally even still think about gambling?

COPPINS: I'll answer the first question first because that's the easier one. I lost $9,891. That last $100 and change I returned to the Atlantic with a note of apology.

So that was my experience. But losing the money was not the worst part of the experience. And you mentioned, do I still think about it? I think about it all the time. I watch; the last bet I placed was on the Super Bowl. I have remained on the wagon since then, but I'm watching the NBA playoffs right now.

I'm a Celtics fan. I'm watching with my son. I can't tell you how many times I've wondered, I wonder what the in-game line is right now. I wonder if I could make some money betting. And it is a constant, it's constantly tugging at me.

The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.