Push Kim.
Hey there everyone, it's Michael Lewis here. Welcome back to Against the Rules.
Just now.
There are lots of political conversations happening in the United States that some of us might have thought were over. Politics feels upended, chaotic, certainly distracting.
But here's my point.
This conversation we've been having here on this show about the rise of sports betting in the United States. Many people once thought that conversation was completely over. This sports betting was de facto illegal forever, with only a few exceptions, and furthermore, that the issue would never come up again because politicians had decided it. As you may recall, way back in the early nineteen nineties, a new Jersey Senator named Bill Bradley introduced a bill to keep most states
from legalizing sports betting. Bradley wasn't just any old senator. He'd been a beloved college and professional basketball star. When he spoke out about the corrosive effects of sports gambling, people listened.
So I passed this little bill. Who it was not a big bill. It was a little bill that banned sports betting in the states that didn't have it, and it was the law of the Land, and I felt good about it.
That law was called the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act PASPA, and it held for a couple of decades. Earlier this season, I told the story of what happened next. Basically, a single state began to challenge PASPA, New Jersey in twenty and eleven, and folks in the state of New Jersey voted yesterday to legalize sports betting. So eventually the issue went all the way to the Supreme Court, and
the Supreme Court overturned PASPA. Starting in twenty eighteen, states were allowed to legalize sports betting, and as of now, thirty nine states.
Have done so.
For most of the season, I've been reporting on the consequences. We've heard about gambling addicts who ruin their lives, college and pro athletes who are threatened by angry fans, state regulators trying to do anything at all to stop companies from luring in under age betters. So the last place to go this season is a question who now is in a position to do anything about any of this? Are there any lawmakers stepping in to be Bill Bradley
this time around? Democratic Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal has stepped into this role. He's been on a mission to regulate sports betting since it was legalized, and with a US Congressman from New York, he's introduced a bill that would place restrictions on sports gambling company's ability to advertise and offer inducement bets, among other things. The lawmakers say sports gambling is turning into a public health crisis.
I called up Senator.
Blumenthal and I asked him, how did this issue get on his radar In the first place.
I was working on addiction in various spheres of life. I sued the big tobacco companies because they were attracting and addicting kids to nikochine. I have been active on alcohol issues, drunk driving, and I got to know some people who had real life stories about how sports betting literally ruined their lives, broke apart, their families, ended their careers, and I became more and more interested in how sports
betting operates. I was approached by people who heard that colleges had entered into contracts with the casinos they're promote gambling. Absolutely mind boggling that colleges would promote gambling among kids who were not permitted legally to gamble. So it is a pervasive and huge industry in America, and nobody's focused on the serious damaging consequences.
It's kind of shocking to me that more people aren't upset right now.
First of all, it appears so benign. I mean, what could go wrong sports betting? Sports is good betting, Hey, everybody bets. Second, a lot of it is invisible. You know, it's no longer placing a bet to a physical person the bookie who then in the old days was a part of the mob in essence and could use the mob to extort. There were physical consequences and crime involved in sports betting. Third, I think that there is a kind of denial that takes place, as it does with
any addiction. You know, people are in denial often about alcoholism or drug addictions, and gambling addiction is no different. People don't want to acknowledge they're going through a divorce or separation because the financial problems and the frustrations of the spouse or significant other rose to a level that would no longer sustain the relationship.
I learned about sports betting.
My tool is the pen. I can write about it, I can talk about it. You're a senator, you can do something about it. How does the issue rise to the level of concern with you and then that you might actually take some action, introduce some legislation.
How does a legislator get the idea for a new law. It's often just by listening or reading. So I was listening to people who told me about this problem. I am not a sports better nothing wrong with sports betting, per se. Keep in mind, I'm not trying to ban in sports betting. Yeah, just make sure there are safeguards to stop problem.
Gambling before you even write the law.
Do you just kind of even sound out your colleagues to see if there's any hope for such a law passing.
I do talk to colleagues to determine whether they're interested, whether other like minded colleagues would want to join me. And I also talk to experts in the field, because I don't trust my own judgment alone. I want to talk to the problem gambling experts, and I talk to leaders in the Senate, for example, what are the chances of this thing getting passed? What do you think about it? Let me have a hearing. That's the second part of
what we do. Try to build the public case for legislation, and then that you know, after the legislation is written and I introduce it and we have hearings, then at some point the committee will hopefully vote it out of committee to the floor of the United States Senate where it would pass. Obviously it has to go through the House of Representative as well. That's the legislative process. In thumbnail sketch.
And you're after talking to experts and talking to the people in your districts, and what did you decide needed to be done at the federal level, what did the law need to do.
I was a federal prosecutor back in the day. I was the US attorney and connected. We did some criminal cases against the mob extortion people, and I learned something about bookies and sports betting and so forth in the
old days. What impressed me about this industry was how advanced it is technological, how they can target you because they know you really like to bet on whether the quarterback is going to be tackled eighteen times in the first quarter, or whether you want to bet on whether so and so, you know running back will catch a
touchdown in the third quarter. There are all these are kain different ways to bet these days prop betting as it's called, and the reason it's possible is because the technology is so advanced that you can make that beack. But also it enables them to pitch you with promotions and bonuses, and if you haven't bet before, they can offer you a free bet no lose bet. Yeah, And then if you win, of course you're going to bet again, and they'll pitch you again and again. And here's the
other dirty little secret here. If you're losing, they will continue to target you. That's the way they make money. If you're winning, they throttle you. That's the term. They don't want you to bet because when you win, it
means less money for them, the sports betting company. So that's what attracted me in the sense of wanting to do something about it, because it seems so unfair that the house, so to speak, had this technological advantage through algorithms and artificial intelligence that could put you at a disadvantage not just in a single bet, but also make you more vulnerable to problem gambling.
When we return, I find out exactly how Senator Bluementhal wants to regulate sports camp like on the federal level and encourage states to regulate it as well. We're back with Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal. I will say that his bill, introduced in the fall of two thousan twenty four with the New York Democratic Congressman Paul Tonko, has a much better acronym than PASPA. It's called Supporting Affordability and Fairness with Every Bet, or the Safe Bet Act.
There are two approaches to the legislation. One is to try to set standards for those promotions and pitches and the hours when they can do advertising. And the other bill is to take money from the excise tax. You know, there's a point zero two five excise tax on all gambling, and to use part of it for treatment of problem gambling. So I kind of took a while to come up with the two approaches.
The first approach is the one that interests me most because the gambling industry is perfectly happy to have all the attention focused on the problem gambler like it's their fault. It has nothing to do with the way the environment is designed to create in mind addiction, and in fact, the playbook of the gambler industry from before sports gambling has been to sort of like, oh, people need to learn how to control themselves. And there's some people who
have an illness and we'll just treat them. So this first part attempts to kind of constrict the industry.
What do you think needs to be done?
The framework of this bill is fairly straightforward. First of all, betting anywhere in any state requires that there be state standards. We want the states to be actively involved, but the standards have to comply with certain minimums set in federal legislation, and those minimums prohibit, for example, sports betting broadcast advertising between eight am and ten PM. Prohibits sports betting advertising during the sporting event, advertisements designed to induce gambling with
bonus no sweat bonus bets. We prohibit sports betting advertising designed to induce use of gambling products by showing audiences how to gamble or explaining how wagers work. But those are all advertising constraints.
What's number two on your list?
Second aspect relates to affordability, and that is for the promoters or the sports betting businesses to avoid exploiting people when they know they can't afford what they're doing. Basically prohibits operators from accepting more than five deposits from a single customer in a twenty four hour period, prohibits operators
from accepting deposits via credit card. It requires affordability checks if there is a certain amount of gambling, and it requires a national clearinghouse for people to be able to exclude themselves. This point is really important. It is, you know, the self exclusion part. A lot of people know they're betting too much, you know, they know they're getting in over their heads, and they want to be able to stop.
But the nature of addiction, obviously is they can't stop as long as you know the betting is out there right in front of them. So if you know, you know you're looking at your wife, you're looking at your kids, you're getting into death, that's going to force you to give up your house, and you say yourself, I got to stop. I need help. I want someone to tell me you can't gamble. So there is a possibility for self exclusion to stop not just the advertising, but also potentially the access.
So if I put my name on this list, I can't just take my name off that the list when I want to when I want to gamble, I put it on the list, and it's I'm stuck.
That's roughly the way it works. I mean, at a at a certain point you could probably take your name off the list. It's not you're not bound forever, but at least then you turn on you know, your computer or you know your cell phone. This is how you bet your smartphone now is your casino. You're in a casino, yep. And we want you to be able to say to that smartphone, look, I just picked it up. I want to gamble, and it says no. And then I realize
this is how I get into trouble. And you put the smartphone back down and you go on to do something else and it catches you before you used to come Now, I'm far from naive. This is not a full proof that method of breaking an addiction, right. You know, there are all kinds of different ways to break gambling addiction, just as there are nicotine you know, some people use a patch, some people can do it without anything. It's hard to break nicotine addiction, just like any drug addiction.
But it's also hard to break gambling addiction.
You know, it's interesting you're in this piece of the legislation where you're dealing with the kind of like forcing some of the responsibility for the behavior of the gamblers onto the companies that are benefiting from their behavior. One of the things that's just been shocking to me is state by state, the gambling industry has has persuaded regulators that that they of course need to be able to
monitor the activity of their customers, the gamblers. And the reason is that they say is that we want to you know, we want to be able to identify gamblers who are doing things they shouldn't be doing it's bad for them. In fact, the only thing they do is monitor for the people who are winning and know what they're doing so they can chuck them off the platforms.
And the state regulators we've talked to know of no case like where the company said you've got to stop because you have a problem, and a lot of cases where people come and say, I have a problem. You know, you got to kind of limit me, and and the companies continues to pitch to them. We know that the companies know they have such great data on their on the gamblers. We know that they can identify problem gamblers
better than problem gamblers probably could ever be identified in history. Uh, how do you how do you how do you regulate this, like, how do you actually force the issue so that they get in real trouble. Do you put regulators inside the gambling companies? Do you you just you trust them to report?
That question goes to the next provision of the legislation, which relates to artificial intelligence. This legislation would prohibit the use of AI artificial intelligence to track and individual gamblers habits yep. And it would also prohibit the use of
AI to create individualized offers and promotions the customers. I was describing earlier hypothetical and how the gambling industry can target people who are winning and if they are losing, and what kinds of bets they like to place, what sports and so forth, and the sports betting companies can't do it without artificial intelligence. So the prohibition against that kind of tracking and individualized promoting is very important. So, no,
we don't put regulators inside the companies. And you know, in an ideal world, we might be a little bit more heavy handed in terms of the intervention in the companies. I've tried to think through this concept of a duty of care. You know, if you're a bartender in a bar and you serve somebody who is drunk a drink and that person hits and kills another person behind the wheel. You have in most states, I think it maybe all states now a liability. The tobacco companies have been held liable.
I know because I sued them and we got quite a bit of money. But we also changed their practices and now they are often held liable if they deceive people. We can't stop them from selling cigarette, but they can be held responsible for breaches of their duty. And the importance here of taking or eliminating some of the means that are used that promote addiction. The goal here is to increase the standards that states apply when they regulate gambling.
They are the regulators. Ultimately, we're not going to regulate it with a federal gambling regulatory authority. We're not creating a new bureaucracy. We want to make sure that these standards are enforceable.
Who make sure at the federal level that the states are meeting the minimum standards.
There's got to be some federal oversight.
In effect, the federal government would ban gambling if they fail to meet the standards, and the enforcement authority for taking action by the federal government would be the Department of Justice. The Department of Justice has ultimate authority to say those standards in Connecticut or New York meet the federal minimums. They're doing everything they need to do. We also prohibit the use of AI to create gambling products like micro bets on amateur sports.
Oh, you ban bets on amateur sports.
We prohibit bets on amateur sports, with some exceptions for Olympics, Paralympics, and some college sports. We also prohibit all proposition bets featuring college or Olympic athletes.
So this is very clearly a dark side of this is the pressure on young people who are playing sports to modify the betters who are betting on their behavior, and the threats they're getting are it's just it's crazy. They feel like they're essentially they feel like they're all working for the mob, and the mob is going to come decap them if they don't do the thing they're supposed to do on the field, or don't do it. On that thought, I'm going to interrupt myself so we
can take a quick break. When't we return, Senator Blumenthal talks about why it's important to get sports gambling on the nation's radar as a public health issue? Can I do a little lobbying of my own? I'm back with Senator Richard Blumenthal. I asked him what else he wants to see happen besides the passage of his own Safe Bet Act.
This may sound inconsequential, but it could be important. A Surgeon General report on the public health impacts of sports betting, which goes to the very first question that you asked me. Why aren't there others who care about this issue? There's a very powerful, well resourced in industry that wants to squelch awareness. And the challenge here is to elevate to raise awareness, partly to get this legislation done, but also because erasing the self denial, getting families to focus on
the problem. Gambler, Well, maybe people will begin asking that question like they do now with alcoholism, you know, bring it out in the open.
What I'm curious, does the sports gambling industry and the sports gambling problem remind you of anything specifically?
What's the precedent?
It reminds me a lot about tobacco. You know, there was a time when advertisements for smoking actually had doctors in their white coats recommending Chesterfield I remember very vividly because my mom smoked. Eventually, unfortunately she died from diseases related to tobacco. But I can remember the ads that said, in effect, doctors recommend Chesterfield cigarettes like this is healthy for you, helps you lose weight well in a certain way.
I'm reminded of it because it's a seemingly harmless activity with an invisible effect that can be highly disruptive. Sports bending industry is tremendously powerful, Needless to say, I've heard from them and they want me to go away. They have huge resources to lobby and to do advertising, and
they are engaged in both to a great scale. But the tobacco industry was also very, very powerful, and they spend a lot of money to try to keep us silent and stop our litigation and in effect, to see people.
You think the future is for the bill.
I think at some point the bill will pass. I can't tell you when. I also think that states will raise their standards on their own, because the public awareness we're generating will affect state legislatures. I was a state attorney general of Connecticut, and before that job, I was in the state legislature. It is so much easier to get things done in state legislatures than it is in the United States capital because the stakes are so much higher here. I want to put in a plug for
my other act. I do think that channeling money into problem gambling addiction treatment is very, very important. You know, we have programs to treat all the other addictions, literally, all the other addictions, none for gambling addiction. And so taking a part of the revenue that comes to the government as a result of gambling or sports betting, I think appropriately could be used for state programs as well
as federal programs to treat gambling addiction. And I think that bill is the more likely to pass more quickly because it may arouse less opposition from the industry for the very reason that you have said. A lot of the companies are more than happy to say, oh, we have no problem gambling, and whenever we encounter it, of course we offer programs to deal with.
Right, I'm gonna let you go, but I do I do want to pitch you what I think needs to be done.
So at the top of my list and my wish list for any bill would be a ban on advertising explicit a statement of the odds of the bets so so that you see so there's some transparency there and the how the how this gets done is again tricky. But the using of the technology, they have to understand the gambler for the purposes that they say they're using it for, which is to identify the problem gambler and prevent them from getting into trouble. Unlike the cigarette companies
who don't know their customers. You know, they knew generally that people were getting addicted, but in this case, you know that Joe Bob has got a problem, and and you could just stop Joe Bob from gambling, and it's it's it's it is in theory really.
Fixable in some ways.
And to foist that responsibility upon them because they have the knowledge and so those would be like the big my Big three. There's a whole gray market which isn't fan duel and draftings because they don't want to get in this kind of trouble, but the marketing of an exploitation of minors. There isn't a high school in the country, I bet where there aren't kids gambling on sports. And in college it's like sixty percent of the men on college campuses.
Are gambling on sports.
Most those people are underage, So hammering people for taking underage bets because that's a period, especially with young men, those brains are very vulnerable and if you can if you can protect people in that window, they have a much better chance of never getting into trouble in the first place.
Those are great ideas. I love all of them. On the underage gambling issue, enforcement has always been a problem, you know, whether it's tobacco, liquor anything involving social media. Age verification is really problematic because kids are ahead of our technology.
Yeah, I understand you, and I yes, I understand. I understand, but at least banging that drum a little bit.
I really appreciate you giving us all this time. You got important things to do, and so thank you, and good luck with dealing with this tornado.
Thank you, take care, Bye bye bye bye.
Richard Blumenthal is a Democratic US Senator from Connecticut who introduced the Safe Bet Act with New York Congressman Paul Tonko in twenty twenty four. With everything else that's going on in Washington right now, he's realistic about the bill's chances. But nothing ventured, nothing gained. I like to think that's a spirit of Against the Rules too, along.
With anybody can win, but everybody's going to lose anyway.
Thanks so much for coming along this season.
I've got to take a break here so i can start reporting from my next book. You'll be hearing about it soon enough, and I'll be popping back into this feed with other announcements and projects before you know it. So don't go away, and don't gamble your life away. It's a hard way to make an easy living. Against the Rules is written and hosted by me Michael Lewis and produced by Lydia gene Kott, Catherine Gerardeau, and Ariella Markowitz. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our engineer is Sarah Bruguier.
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