Al Zone Media.
Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I am your host ed Ziitrum. We are sitting in my living room and we're going to talk about sports gambling today. Now at sports Gambling, we're focusing on the US because this is a US focus podcast. There is a hell of a lot of weird shit in England where I grew up, and in Europe at large with gambling. We have to focus somewhere. We're going to focus on the US. Now. We are in my living room in Las Vegas because
it's the Super Bowl Sunday weekend. That was a great sentence that we're keeping. But nevertheless, I have another podcast. I have an NFL podcast football podcast called the Sixty Minute Drill, and I'm joined today by my co hosts on that podcast. To my left is a Refassan of Wide Left. Hello, and to my right is Caleb Wilson of Western Kabuki.
Happy to be here.
Okay, So the reason I wanted to focus on this because those out I know this is happening in Europe as well, but in America we've seen this insidious intrusion of sports gambling apps into modern life. Now, if you're not sports van are actually really gonna take great pains to explain why this is an important thing, but also why people like sports in general, so that you can
understand how insidious this whole thing is. So for the uninitiative, for people that don't watch sports, you will literally be watching basketball and you will get a strip at the bottom that says the odds on particular plays. You'll see this across every sport now, and it used to be at least or if maybe you can enlighten a little on this as well, it used to be that you couldn't just start gambling by having a phone. There was a you had to like go to a casino and say it up.
Yeah, no, that was the that was the whole setup. It's more complicated than that because of the way that we've defined sports gambling and how it doesn't include fantasy sports. But pre twenty sixteen, you know, you couldn't really go on your phone right gamble really quickly unless you knew a couple of work around. There's exceptions to every rule, but yeah, for the most part, it wasn't normalized to be able to just very quickly bet on aline.
And now you can just bet money because you have an iPhone and a debit.
Con yeah, and well some connect directly to your bank account.
Oh good.
Most places will connect to a credit card or a debit card. You can connect some of them directly to a PayPal account. It's very convenient, and this is probably going to be a theme throughout the episode. But it's
frictionless in many ways. And so you can navigate through these apps that have these like bright colors and haptic feedback and all of these wonderful reward mechanisms we'll talk about and instantly deposit, you know, twenty five dollars, bet that twenty five dollars, lose that twenty five dollars, and then do it again, all in this span of like five seconds.
And is there, like age verification, is there any efforts to do like anything to stop people underage?
For gambling apps, there are. For fantasy apps, there typically are, but not universe.
It's the separation between a gambling and a fantasy app.
It is an entirely legal distinction. In my opinion, I think that there isn't much of a difference. But fantasy is legal in different states than gambling is, and so a fantasy app is trying to distinguish itself legally from like a gambling product by offering kind of the things that are traditionally scored in fantasy football. And then they're kind of expanding beyond that. But let's say that for now.
So you know, hey, I imagine you know that Patrick Mahomes will pass for over two hundred and twenty five yards in this sanse.
The quarterback from the quarterback from Kansas City League quarterback, the guy who throws the ball, guy catches the ball for him. Two hundred yards would be the completed the completed.
Yardage of those successful passes. And so you know this, this fantasy app will be like, hey, do you think it's more than or less than that? You go, well, I think he's very good, so go more then, and then you can't actually play a bet on that exactly otherwise that would be gambling. So you have to pair it with another pick. They call them picks and bets. And so you'd say, well, alongside that, I think that Jalen Hurts, the opposing quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles in
this week's Super Bowl. You know, I think he'll pass for over one hundred and ninety yards, right, And so you combine those two and maybe three, four, five however, right, and that is your pick them for that week, and you submit it. You put like, let's help, put twenty dollars on it, and you've got a couple of ways to do it. In gambling, they would call them, you know, parlays or teasers, but in fantasy, you just get like their flex picks or all.
And you're just betting on what a plan might do effectively.
Yeah, and you can do that in gambling, yeah, with real money. That's it. And so the fantasy distinction is that you cannot pick multiple players on the same team without adding another player on a different team.
Oh, so they find a way to make it.
Yeah, So it's definitely not gambling. It's just fantasy. So you have to have multiple teams and you can't just bet on one single outcome. I'm sorry, you can't pick one single.
Outcome, right, And this is all they're trying to pretend it's skill based. Then correct, Very cool. So one of the things I wanted to get into as well is why people give a shit about this? So for them not We have a lot of nonsports listeners and I'm very very aware of this and I don't want anyone to think this is going to be an hour of us just talking about like really specific sports stuff. In fact, I kind of want to explain to people who aren't in sports, white people give a shit so much, Why
is why do you love sport? Like, what is the thing that gets you excited about this and how does that kind of lead into this sports sports gambling world.
Kayla, Well, for me, I mean there's a lot you know in I guess as broadly as possible, we're in one of the most lonely times in human history, right. This is one form of entertaining as opposed to something like you know, reading a book or watching a TV show. These are predominant things that you do alone. When you're watching sports, particularly when you go to a game or to tailgating, you're doing something that's that's communal in nature.
You're doing something that builds tradition. I think that anybody who doesn't maybe they don't dislike sports, but they just don't understand it. Go tailgating one time.
Immediately it will click for you and tell gettang full. The European Listeners is actually kind of a fun thing where you just outside the stadium, drink a bunch and eat a bunch. Yeah. People set up like grills and smoke and it's very communal, like.
When there's no money involved. It's like people just do this. They spend thousands of dollars dollars off their own money just to build social bonds.
Into and deadly serious. So when I went to Penns nine in two thousand and five, I remember just walking around kind of confused. I was like, genuinely was like do I pay? And I walked up to someone who just had like a roast suckling pig and I'm like, wow, what is that? He goes it's a pig. I'm like, oh yeah, I mean and he and he was like do you want some? I'm like what what? Sure? They're like okay, and they like made me like a pile
of meat and they were like cool. And then they just kind of turned away from me, like not in a rude way, but they.
Went by, like I've done with this time.
They just gave this random person food. But I like the tailgate example because it's the same thing in like a bar. It's like a thing you will get upset about together.
Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely, And one thing that I find kind of interesting, like you compared it to you know, it's more communal than watching television. One thing that that kind of a recall is you know how excited everyone was for like the weekly release of like Game of
Thrones whenever that episode came out. And that was somewhat unique because now that we're in a streaming error, people don't that's like gone, yeah, and so people don't experience shows in real time, but sports are always experienced in real time. So even if you're not going to a bar or the stadium or tailgate whatever, you are experiencing it with an online community in real time reacting to the same things.
Rightyeah, Well that's that was going to bring in maybe to my next point, like it's semiotics in a way. That's like I can in my office put a football on my you know, on my on my desk or behind my desk or whatever, and somebody that comes in, they'll know, oh ye a Seahawks fan whatever they am, and then immediately any tension it involved in a professional reaction is reduced. This is a person that I can have a normal human conversation with that I might not otherwise be able to have yeah.
I think a lot of our social bonds are defined and identified in ways that this is going to sound so like basic like separate people, right, And it's not separate as in so division, but as in you know, you either identify with this or you don't, right, is that Pokey?
Yes? That you well, now we are also joined by Pokey, one of my Bengal cats.
Very adorable, beautiful, also mischievous. Oh yes, but yeah, like a lot of our our our social bonds or through these groups identities, but the identities are generally pretty harsh categories, right, you know, male, female, right, Which is not to suggest right that you know you can't be friends with men or women, but rather that this is not an area that typically you cross the social boundary and have some
shared experiences. It's kind of like an all or nothing thing, and a lot of our stratifications of identity kind of fit along those lines in a lot of ways. But with sports, you've got kind of this like ladder of identity that you can find at some point some level of connection. It can either be you know, hey, we have the same favorite player on the same favorite team.
Let's talk about you know how cool Patrick Mahomes is or whatever right, Or you can go up a level and say, hey, we're both Chiefs fans, let's talk about how cool it is to be Chiefs fans, or you know, up a level and say, hey we both love football. Let's talk about you know whatever, right, And you can get broader and broader and it creates something you always
have a level of conversation about. But you always immediately can you know where the other person is coming from right, which is invaluable I think in a lot of social interactions.
And I would say like I got into sports pretty much because of the Internet. Casey Kagawa, the fifth Beatle of Better Offline, He's talked over many ideas. He also got me into baseball. And I got into football because I went to Penn State and the people around me all wanted to do stuff on Saturday or leave me at home. So I wanted to go to Penn State. I want to go to Penn State football. I was made to but the sport. But I got into baseball
almost entirely online. Like it was. Casey took me to games, but he would send me YouTube after YouTube and help me discover things like foolish baseball. Bailey is a legend outstanding, incredible channel, and I don't even like baseball. I like that channel and the way that this is computers, by the way listeners is. I did not grow up in America. I moved here in two thousand and eight. I did a year in Penn State, so all of my understanding
of baseball in particular is completely digital. Like Ricky Henderson, who recently passed one of the greatest players of all time, no fucking clue who he was. I had no idea.
I had no idea who that was. He's so incredible And the only reason I will ever be able to see Ricky Henderson do anything is because foolish baseball Bailey over there pulled together every bit of footage of this guy who played in like the seventies and eighties, or maybe it was just the eighties eighties, Yeah, yeah, And I was able to discover this guy while looking at
the stats online. And I feel like that has kind of deepened the numerous ways people can access sports and get into sports and connect thus connect with other people. I mean, the Reddit communities can be very funny or they can be terrible.
Some variants.
Yeah, but I think it's something that I love trying to explain sports to people that don't watch them more like them or don't understand them, which leads them one or the other, because it's like there's something genuinely lovely about it that has It's brought a lot to my life despite me being like very much a computer person.
Yeah yeah, well there are like say, you're listening to this in your cynical and that doesn't that has not sold you on this. There are still like just utilitarian social reasons that sports are important too for young people.
I mean, study after study after study shows that kids that are involved in team sports or team based activities always almost across the board, have better outcomes in life because they're taught things like cooperation and you know, all the things that you would learn in sports or other you know, team based activities. But beyond that, you know, sports is like the frontlines always for social issues. Yes, historically that people don't really understand marginalized groups that don't
have a voice in politics. You are, you know, a black man or a woman. None of your elected officials look like you. They don't represent your interests. All you have is if you're Muhammad Ali, you can use your platform to avoid the draft. You can do Colin Kaepernick and take a knee, the US women's soccer team fighting for equal pay. These are things that happen in sports because they can't necessarily happen in other avenues.
Right, And it's and I think it makes sports important to people on a level that things like the computer will never be, though I personally approve in that differently with this podcast, I feel like you get the same attachments maybe to like Marvel comics or something, or like
whatever fandoms they may be. But sports, I feel like goes like one level deeper because you can have a history with the team, and the team can have a history, and you can have a history with friends as a result of watching like case And for example, my experience of baseball has been colored very heavily by like the last five or six years of Dodgers baseball. As Casey has desperately tried to educate me, I now get it. I now fully get the game. This poor guy, I mean,
I would bring him to baseball game. So yeah, But it's that is something that I will always have with one of my best friends. I love so much. And I feel like sports is singlely unique with them.
Yeah. Well, especially as as Kyler mentioned, we're like entering this period of increasing social isolation. There's all kinds of data on how unlikely it is that we're going to interact with people in real life in social spaces in a lot of ways. And I think that that, you know,
all plays a really significant role. But to speak to Taka's point about like social progress and stuff like that, I think people have an understanding of like these are historical moments, but they don't always necessarily place them on a timeline, right, So like, for example, Jackie Robinson spearheaded the integration of baseball in nineteen forty seven.
And what was the instgration of baseball?
Just to Yeah, so for a long time in baseball only, especially at the professional level, but for most of the minor leagues.
I'm also going to say, I'm going to guess you're going to say a word beginning with en at some point with this, And I want to be very clear that when aarif says this, he is referring to a specific thing.
Yes, we'll get there. Yes, I just.
Wanted a real war.
Yeah, but there was a color barrier in Major League baseball that prevented people of color, but specifically black people from playing baseball. This was enforced mostly from my understanding, without a rule. It was just everyone had an understanding.
Everyone agreed.
Yeah, everyone just kind of agreed we were employing. And so, you know, with a lot of talented black baseball players that were playing in the Negro leagues, in which there's a Negro League Museum and Baseball Reference and a couple of other statistical organizations have finally started recognizing those as official professional statistics.
Right, and they did a realignment of all the stats, like there's two black players who were better than Tykob who was one of the most racist men to walk the f It's beautiful, it's wonderful.
But yeah, so Jackie Robinson spirit hit of the integration of Major League baseball in nineteen forty seven, which is.
And how did he do that? Just fun? Did he like, like what did he do to spit.
When he started at first base? But yeah, I mean, oh, he's just that well, I mean, he was an outstanding player. He's one of the best players we've ever seen, and statistically, you know whatever, But no, I mean I think was it was it. It was the Kansas City Monarchs. And then it was the was it the Dodgers? Are we Yeah, it was the Bokland Dodgers. Yeah, you mentioned the Dodgers, and the Dodgers came out of my mind, like am I remembering that just because? No, it was the Brooklyn Doughters.
So the Brooklyn Dodgers decided like hey, you know, like I'm not a historian on this particular topic, but the Brooklyn Dodgers decided that this would be the time to bring in a black baseball player.
And so capitalism, Yeah, no, that.
Definitely was a big part of it. And there's a whole history about you know, Jackie Robinsons approach. They were very particular about the player they selected. We don't need
to get into that. Nevertheless, though it was twenty years prior to a lot of the stuff we associate with the civil rights movement in the nineteen the mid nineteen sixties, right, And I think a lot of that is just because that's the the locus of a lot of social change can occur prior to you know, the way people understanding the mainstream in sporting arenas, right, And I think that a lot of people always attempt to just aggregate kind
of social movements and sports without understanding that sports are not just you know, embedded in the culture of society and the fabric of society, but very often can be like Canaritians in the coal mine for social change.
It kind of feels like that's where the whole horrifying attack on trans athletes is really is really making it like, Yes, and by the way, if you agree that trans athletes shouldn't be in sports, I have another idea for you. So if you've followed my lost constructions, you should be in your garage in your car now. I want to make sure those windows are up. Check all those windows now, and I want you to turn the ignition now. You
may start feeling sleepy. That means that it's working now moving on, I feel like and the reason I really wanted to explain what makes people love sports?
There's one more.
Oh no, no, sorry, sorry now that I've threatened some people, Please continue.
No. One of the things that really appeals to me about sports is that it is one of the ultimate storytelling art forms. And you can attach yourself to a team or a player, or a larger league wide trend, whatever. But what's really cool about sports is that it constantly creates storylines, tensions, and conflicts that people can follow along and enjoy, not just in real time, which always has like this added kind of you know when it comes
to storytelling, but it is truly unpredictable. Like we know about tropes in storytelling, and very often you can read a very good book and you recognize a trope and understand the direction that they.
Even headed in even some modern writing kind of like is affected by fandoms.
Right exactly, and not that like tropes are bad are a necessary, you know, element of writing, but it can impact your experience because you know the direction that the writing is going to be headed in, right, just because you're familiar with the tropes, right, and tropes are unavoidable in writings. Is not about that, but rather that we can identify tropes in sports, but that doesn't mean we know what the conclusion of this story is going to be.
And so when you see someone you know kind of struggle through a lots which teams five or six times or you know whatever and accomplish you know, this remarkable dream or this goal which can be you know, winning
the Super Bowl. Of course that's like the classic example, but some of the best stories are the guy made the team right like it's like, there are some really outstanding stories where it's like, you know, this person, you know went to a junior college because he didn't have the grades to make it because of the system he grew up in just didn't give him access to the
resources he needs to get good grades. Goes to junior college, gets good grades there, transfer to, you know, a Division two school, and a Division two school for people unfamiliar, are essentially multiple levels below the level that typically NFL
athletes come from. But you know, maybe they go to a Division two school or Division three school where they're barely even any athletic scholarships at all, and you know, they grind it out, they work hard, they're an outstanding star player for their program, and it comes time to declare for the draft. They declare for the draft a team. No team drafts them, you know, because there's only two hundred and fifty six odd picks in the NFL Draft, and so then they have to advocate for themselves as
a potentially undrafted free agent. These are people that get a lot less consideration when it comes to making the team make a lot less money. It's much more difficult.
A lot of them making it through a professional team is extremely unlikely.
Yeah, and so they make what's called the ninety man roster, and from the ninety man roster they cut down to the fifty three man roster. And that process is onerous. And maybe you know that first year, that guy, you know, that guy from co college or whatever, doesn't make the team, but he makes this supplementary practice squad. And then the next year he gets another opportunity the attentry to make the team. He makes the team. And that's the whole story, and it rules.
Can I interject with my favorite example of that.
Just make sure it's like really simple.
For Yeah, the Griffin brothers in Seattle, Oh, twin brothers and Shaquille. Yes, the Shakim is he's disabled, it doesn't have a he doesn't have a hand, a right hand with the physical disability, still makes the roster. Twin brothers both on the Seahawks. Wonderful story.
Yeah.
And when when Shaquille was deciding which college to because they both went to UCF, right, yeah, uh deciding so, yeah, deciding which college to go to, he said, you have to offer my twin brother, Shakim otherwise I'm not going And so he was like a four star recruit or something like that, which, again for people who are unfamiliar,
there's you know, three four and five star recruits. Five star recruits get recruited by the blue bloods Alabama, Georgia, whoever, and at the time you get a ton of under the table money. Now you just get over the table money. Fantastic, as they should. Yeah, but like you know, there are several hundreds of thousands of dollars ventually that these big programs can offer. And he said, no, I'm playing with my brother. That's key, and UCF was like, yeah, we'll
play both of them. And Shaquima was a really good player at the college level too, so like it turned out to be a great event, But that wasn't the reason. It was because the team wanted to respect Shakiel and they're like, well, if there's a there's a spot for Chaquem on our program, you know certainly he can play, and he played his way into a spot. He's actually one of the more unique players and not going to get into that that has nothing to do with his hand.
One of the more unique players just from the way that he plays and then you know, he goes to a college all star game, the Senior Bowl, and they're like, well, we'll see what you can do. We'll play you at this position, this position, this position, this position, because you have a really unique body type. We don't really know what to do with that. And you know, they're playing him in coverage and the quarterbacks are doing their job.
It feels cruel, but you got to do it. They're throwing at his coverage at the hand that he's missing to see how he handles not playing with the full extension that you normally get. And you know, he impresses the scouts enough that he ends up making the Seahawks with his brother Sequille. It's outstanding.
That might be a little bit into the weeds, but he worked really well of Seattle scheme because of that kind of hybrid linebacker type.
Yeah, yeah, it's a it's a it's a body type because in football, you have a bunch of different positions and there are kind of body types that tend to fit in those positions and they tend to be somewhat static,
and so there's very few teams that can fit. So it was it was kind of like a perfect situation to find the right team culture in Seattle that would encourage that kind of thing, to find the right team that had basically a position available for the type of football that he played, and it emerges as this really wonderful story where.
To be clear, by the way, neither of them are still in Seattle. Shaquilla is still playing was.
He He's just played for the Vikings. His contract just ran out, so we'll see.
Yeah, we'll see where he But point point being very short time together in Seattle, and it is still top five Seahawks moments for me because of just the narrative storytelling that you were getting at.
And the thing is this depth is necessary understanding why people are so emotionally attached to these teams and why people have such cultural awareness to really explain how evil these apps are. Yeah, because you're not just it's not just like betting on numbers and the excitement of gambling. It's and this is a very very overwhelmingly wanky way of putting it, it's exerting control over something that you
have even less control over than numbers than odds. So Caleb, you have and Reef, I know you've written some about this as well, but you've definitely complained a lot in our sports related group chat about these fucking ads as well. So describe some of these ads the way they target people for these sports betting apps.
Well, I mean, it's kind of hard to pick one because it's such a deluge. It's everywhere now, and it seems like I just blinked and then it was there for context. I didn't want to interrupt a ref what you were saying earlier when you were explaining the fantasy stuff. I had no idea about any of that because none of this is even legal in Washington state. I have
never done this. I've never been able to do this right, and up until I think it was yesterday when Crypto dot Com just said, you know what, I don't care about the laws in this on the state level. We're just going to start doing this. And so you're probably going to see ads for that on the Super Bowl today. I would imagine where they're like, yeah, we're just going to ignore the law and we're going to advertise to you cynically that you can just just do this now.
Despite they offer a product that is, according to them, not gambling, which is why they can offer it in whatever state, but it functionally is gambling. It's also not fantasy, which is why they can offer a lot of But if you buy a token in whether or not a player will accomplish a particular goal or won't accomplish a particular goal, and then the token cashes out based off of the player's performance, which again is somehow not gambling.
And on and on a real basic level, the way they kind of trick you into believing you have more control is saying, oh, you would pick a team. So in fact, we've kind of gone over this, but no, not hard to reaffirm it. Will you go, oh, I think that these guys will all score the most, Right, so you pick like Patrick Mahomes in the regular season, Patrick Mahomes wide receiver, running back and all them, and then you kind of submit that with a bet on it. Right.
Yeah, Well, so there are like bets for game day, right, but there are season long bets, and there's there there is season long fantasy as well. But the way these ads are kind of marketing the concept of gaming on sports or whatever is just game day betting and sometimes even live betting in game.
And that's and that's what the most of these were because it wasn't really clear to me, So just again to distinguish. There are the ones where you bet on outcomes, and then then then there were ones that you bet on whether you have chosen the correct amount of boys, like the correct guys that will score the most points.
Well, again, I think they're both gambling and they almost cat.
I'm just trying to delineate which one is the most like, which is the one that has penetrated so far.
Like I would say more people are sick of fantasy ads because they've run for longer, but gambling ads have done a lot more in the past two years to saturate the market. But it's also kind of difficult to tell the difference between a fantasy ad and a gambling ad. I think most consumers that are.
Just watching the people listening to this will not know the difference.
Yeah, and so sorry. I actually came into this with a slight mistake, and this is a common one. I think I thought I didn't know that gambling gambling was so prevalent. I didn't. So it's how many states can you just boot up an app?
I want to say, it's twenty one.
That's insane.
So now it's fifty.
Well, okay, it's not ignoring regulation, but just to be clear to the listeners, non sports fans, sports fans are like, what we are discussing is that basically in twenty one states, anyone can pick up their phone and startling like they're in Vegas, specifically on the outcomes of sports events.
This individual plays like in the time that it would take you to send a tweet, you can lose one hundred dollars.
Yeah, so the last I looked at was twenty one. Now, mobile online sports betting is legal in thirty states plus DC, well thirty one states, but it's not yet operational in Missouri, and retail gambling, which is you have to physically go in in additional eight states.
Yeah, so that is legal in Washington. I have to go to a place to gamble, and that's I guess that's a little you know city.
So it's looking out for one hundred million people, oh easily. Yeah, well, especially because it includes New York and Florida.
Oh god, we were talking about this earlier before we started recording. Ed you were in the other room, but I was reading about this today. Just today, one point five billion dollars will be bet that in the Super.
Bowl, just on the apps are in general in general, in general, this is real rot economy share as well, because anyone can Campbell see you've got the system that's already not great. And the things you can bet on, just to be clear, aren't just like guy wins game or guy scores points. It's like the coin toss yet the level of well, absurdity like with the coin toss, but the level of absurdity and precision that on the things with which you can bet on or absurd and
so some of them are just called novelty bets. And the coin toss, by the way, is who whether the coin will be heads or.
Tails correct, or you can bet on who will win the coin toss, which in the same arts right.
Great, So two bets on the coin yeah, ah.
You've got well, and then there's you can there's correlated bets. So there's a I was offered when I logged under fan Duel earlier, I was offered a bet on Chiefs win the coin toss and the game.
And when you say offered, how do you mean?
When I logged into the app at the splash, Green showed up telling me that there was this bet that I would be available for. It was like a.
Bright available for in what like I would not always.
No if I navigated. Was there a special deal or was it just telling you could do this? In this case, there wasn't a special deal. It was just informing me that and I assume. So here's my understanding of how this operation works. Right, when they come up with like unique bets like that one which for most games you don't get to bet on the coin toss in most books, but.
Books refers to the like the the operators cool.
Yeah, uh. But when when they like come up with these, uh, they start kind of testing which ones are the most popular and then also using the data that they have to determine which ones are the most profitable, which is another way of saying which ones people lose the most money on.
So they are just so we're clear, advertising specific bets, yeah, advertising specific bets and telling you and then highlighting the ones that are the most profitable and most likely to generate interaction. So trying to actively advertising something that you will they ideally need you to lose on. And the thing they're promoting.
Is and their data tells them that tells them that you are very likely to lose on.
So when you say you are likely to use lose on, are you saying that they customize it based on your actual bets in history?
Yes? And no. So they can. They can customize their offers to the category of bets that you typically make and will engineer kind of the ones that are most profitable to them to show to you. But like the specific ones like the one I just showed, that one's offered everybody when you when you show up, And so the specific bets they don't really they're not like, man, this guy loses a ton of money on the Jaguars, let's you know, for Jaguars.
I'm surprised they don't.
It's probably worth noting that the way that they target these offers to you depends on whether you are a casual gambler or if you are somebody who puts a lot of money into this who's losing quite a bit. In some cases, if you get if you hit a certain threshold for how much money you've lost, they will assign you a personal bookie who will text you directly specific offers, and they'll even comp you that concierge.
Yes, so this which services. So we're talking fan jewel drops.
This was I read a story about this in NPR the other day and this one was I believe FanDuel.
Yeah, well, so I've covered this a little bit on in my piece on sports.
Gambling pooling that in the nose.
The both FanDuel and DraftKings do this. Bet MGM, from my understanding, has begun doing this, but yeah, specifically the ones that have primarily an online presence, which I know people understand. BEDMGM def like a casino in Vegas, but like they've massively expanded their online footprint, and so the ones that do that will interact with a lot of their most valued customers. Maybe it's the best way to
put the people who are losing the most money. And if you look into the stories of some of the people that have been contacted by a concierge, it's very much I mean, it's almost like beat for beat, the script you would write for a drug dealer engaging with
an addict. And I don't say this lightly. I've lost a couple of people in my life to drug addictions, and I know other people in my life who are currently struggling with addiction, and some of those people have also in addition to their drug addiction, have become addicted to gambling, not necessarily sports betting.
And this is all exacted through software.
This is all directly predominantly Yeah.
And so the software will flag someone as like, hey, this person's lost like thirty thousand dollars, you should get more money from them, and then they'll assign a concierge and that person will email them like hey.
It's also possibly worth noting here that this might sound like the people are targeting are like high rollers, but predominantly speaking, this affects low incomers more than any other group, how sorry, because those are the people that are typically gambled the most.
And that's the thing. This is inherently predatory in a way that I don't think would be possible without the current disial ecosystem. We have this penetration of completely impossible consumer apps and also the kind of fuzzy legal definitions that allow them to just do this bullshit.
Yeah. I think it's the it's a combination of a couple of things. One, I think the nature of gambling is that it provides a lot of hope to people, which is one reason that it targets people in lower income strata. But two, the current gambling environment is frictionless, right, like I just mentioned, And this, you know, would be
like something with the bed MGM live product. So let's say we're watching the Super Bowl, right and they're on you know, the Eagles are on the five yard line, which is to say, they're fifteen feet away from scoring a touchdown. And I'm in the bed MGM app, and I'm in the live section of the bed MGM app,
and I've got zero dollars in my account. Right I look up, I see the screen, I see that they just made it to the five yard line, and I immediately go, hey, it looks like Saquon Barkley is And I'm going to throw a number out here that a lot of people are not going to know how to interpret. I'm going to skip past that in a second. But he's minus two thirty to score a touchdown on the next play. So I press yes, minus two thirty. I
want to bet twenty dollars on it. And immediately a pop up will say, hey, you don't have enough money in your account to bet twenty dollars? Do you want to deposit it right away? And I go yes, and it takes me to the deposit screen. It says, this is your automatic like, this is your default payment method, press yes, and you press yes, and then the twenty five dollars gets deposited in the account. And then you go back to the bet slip that you made and
you press yes. And that all occurs within three to five seconds. And then the next play runs and Saikwon Barkley did not score a touchdown. He went to the three yard line and now I've just lost my money and I want to go and it's gone and now I want to make it back. So I'm going to do it on the very next play.
And it is that quick.
It's so quick. Yeah, you could do it between So many people do it between plays.
Have you ever seen someone physically do this?
Yeah, it's it's completely normal for them to be while the game is happening.
I've seen them do it in arenas.
Yeah.
And this is why I wanted to do this episode so badly, because so much of this though everyone hears sports, and there are definitely some oh is a sports ball on type people who can be like I don't I don't like the sports bool. I read book, I watched the power Point watch. But nonetheless, these people need to know. It's like this is one of the most evil things tech has done. It's it's very much like management consultants plus tech, but this is an evil perpetuated only through technology.
Yeah, I think for people who are unfamiliar with sports, it would it feels like an exaggeration to say people are like commodifying your relationship with your family. But there are a lot of people that are closer emotionally speaking to the teams that they follow than the family that they have, and I don't regard that necessarily as a tragedy. I don't have a great relationship with my family, so
that's just the nature of what they are taking advantage of. Yes, they're commodifying this relationship, and to an extent, it's always been commodified. Sports are there at a professional level to make money, and I've always had like thoughts on the tension between that between the relationship a team has to like a consumer or a fan in this case, they
are identical things and like vice versa. But I think that teams don't attempt to ruin their customers as lives and the way that a lot of these books operate, I would argue essentially everyone because smaller books get bought at large books meaning the apps. Right, Yeah, I think the official term is operators, but I just call them books. But it is almost explicitly to ruin people's lives because they want to extract as much money as quickly as possible.
And so there's this story in The Athletic that about somebody who you know, began you know, gambling, and you know, it's just kind of at first, they were a casual better they saw like a fifty dollars promo, and typically what these promos are is you deposit fifty dollars and then you receive fifty dollars in promotional cash, which you can only use to gamble with. And so they got fifty three dollars. Okay, you bet with all of it, and you know, at the end of the week he's
run out, so he deposits one hundred. There's no more promo because he was a first time customer, got the original promo and so on, and he just keeps going. And he's got he's got a wife, he's got children, he's got a house, right, and he bets larger and larger sums to make up for what he had lost previously.
And he's describing the thrill of a win a lot like you would describe a high, right, And the winds are becoming rarer and rarer because he is betting on longer and longer shot outcomes, because the long shot outcomes have highest potential payout. So essentially what he's doing is he's buying a ticket for the lottery, but instead of paying one dollar at the gas station for like a mega million's ticket, he's paying one thousand dollars for you know, something that will multiply that by it.
And they do special office and special bets, right, sometimes they'll be like that'll improve like that.
I've seen offers like that, Yeah, and so and so. What began happening to this guy is, you know, he started betting at odd hours of the night. He started betting on sports. He clearly was unfamiliar with Russian tennis, you know, uh stony and basketball.
You can bet and this is actually the important detail. You can bet in some cases on just the most obtuse stuff. Yeah, just really obscurred. You can bet on snookers like you can bet on snoocas. Is the very strange kind of billiards variant that you have back in England. Sure, we say snooker. Now I'm not sure which one of us is correct anyway, continue.
Well, you're British, so you're probably wrong, but uh yeah, you can bet on anything almost anywhere in the world. People have been betting on like high school games and stuff like that, so they know, and so the app is tracking his activity. They notice that he's making deposits at odd times of the night. They notice that he's betting on obscure sports that he's probably not familiar with, and so in response to that, they assign him a concierge.
And the concierge emails is like, hey, you know, you're one of our most valued customers. I want to offer you a five hundred dollars promotion. You don't even have to deposit anything. He's like, oh wow, that's five hundred three dollars okay, and then he bets it all and all withers away right right, and they're like, wow, that's
like really tough. And so he ends up losing, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars and he's like trying to hide this all from his wife and he's taking out additional loans, personal loans at high interest, and he decides, you know, oh man, this is awful. I'm gonna stop. I'm about to lose the house, right, have to find some way, and so he stops for two weeks.
He stops.
Then he receives an email saying, Hey, you haven't you know you know Bet in a really long time. Is there something that we can do to kind of repair our relationship between the two of us, because hey, we've become friends. Man, you and me.
You know, we we were together.
We're on this together.
Man.
I want to I want to see succeeds. So what I've done is I've placed two thousand dollars of promotional cash in your account. You know you can do that what you want. And he emails back like, hey, I you know, I think I've developed a problem. I don't think I can do this anymore. I'm not going to do this anymore. And you know, the guy responds with and I'm paraphrasing from an article I read a couple of months ago.
So we we'll link We'll find it and linkage.
Yeah, it's over at the Athletic, which is now in your Times gig, so well, it'll be easy to find him, but you know the guy, you know. The guy responds with, oh wow, that you know, I you know, I wish the best for you. That really, you know, sucks. I'm sorry to hear that. You know, take care of yourself, but if you ever come back, those two thousand dollars
are still there for you. And so it's just always in his mind for the next couple of weeks and he decides, oh, he's going to do it, and he does it, and you the guy emails like, oh wow, I'm glad to see you know that you've taken care of it and you're back or whatever. And he's like, yeah, I don't know if I can still you know, do this.
And he's like, okay, yeah, I understand. We don't want you to put we don't want you to put yourself in a bad spot, but we've got this great promotion coming up that I just want to make sure that you take advantage of if it's there, if there's some way that you can pull together all of the you know, pull together what you need in order to act it,
and it's just they wreck. Like he has said, multiple times, I think I'm an addict and they say, they give lip service to the idea that he shouldn't do anything about it, and then they enable him.
And this is this is done like fucking software as a service sales. This is exactly. This is exactly. You have a customer that's churning. You email them, you have a look at the analytics. People aren't using it within their company. You reach out and you say, hey, look, so you've got a bunch of users who want using it. Hey, we'll cut those off, we'll refund those, but have you considered this ad on for this team? Except instead of like business software, this is like life ruining gambling.
Yeah, well the guy lost his house. Yeah, that happens all the time. One in four Americans will be betting on the super Bowl today. Jesus, that one point five billion is like gotta be one of the most single day transfers of wealth from lower income brackets upward in
human history. I mean, that's even if you're cynical about the individualistic aspects of and if you're an egoist or whatever, this is what individuals should be able to do whatever, whatever you know as a problem that the society continues to have as people are starting their lives later. They're not buying houses, they're not having kids, they're not financially stable enough to do these things. These are the same people that are being targeted directly by these.
Apps because the idea is it's kind of like the crypto ads of twenty twenty two where it was like seize the day. Like this idea that you can have hope and accumulate wealth.
Yeah, yeah, it exactly.
It combines the predation on hope right with all of the lessons we've learned from mobile gaming about the gamification of our experiences, and.
It is the gamification of while also on every show you see the odds of the play and this sense that you could have somehow influence right outcomes.
This is one of I think one of the most insidious things about this whole thing is that all of the leagues or the broadcast partners that carry the league or both have relationships with these companies, and in some of the relationships are not sponsorships or advertising mechanisms, like the NFL gets paid by William Hill, which is a sports book slash operator to provide real time data so that will will Hill can set lines in real time whatever. Okay,
sure find whatever. I don't care. But also, the NFL has a relationship I believe with DraftKings. Is there is there, it's either fand old, right, it's almost always a thing you do. And so on the NFL network they talk about the lines set by draft Kings. There are promotional sponsored DraftKings. On the broadcast, you'll see some stuff about DraftKings. And then on top of that, Fox Sports has a relationship with I think F and so the broadcasters will
reference the fan duel line. And so you'll see, like you mentioned, like at a basketball game, you'll see a ticker at the bottom saying like, hey, you know, Victor woman Yama is like plus two thirty to get a you know, triple double this game. You know, but you know whatever, right.
If you don't watch basketball, Victor women Yama is like seven foot tall.
Yeah, they should deport them. Actually the only person in America I think that Ice should deport everybody. Okay, we do not.
Actually we're not pro ice. We're like, we've not probe deportation things.
No, No, they should eradicate Ice before they do that.
Okay, well me I will love that. So I it's just I'm trying to think of the terms to put this book because I know and I'm very obviously anxious
about this. People don't like sports. Hear this, they get, but think of it like if you were watching Game of Thrones, the like will ned Stark live and it's like you can bet on the outcome and they had a thing at the bottom of or like severance like well Madam Scott find out like and it's like except imagine if it was being written in real time, but something you deeply cared about emotionally, or something that you would got attached to with your friends, something that you
remember from your childhood that is now through the apps, and it's the like only fucking app store advertised by Apple. Apple I don't think makes a cut on these, but I'm sure there's something weird there. But it is that that abstraction layer higher than just the kind of manipulative micro transaction to you'd see in like a free to play game. Yeah, except the money goes so quick, like in a snap. Yeah, it has got like you said, like just if the thing doesn't happen, the money is gone.
You're not getting a refund. They're not going to do this you've just gambled. They got your money.
Yeah.
Yeah, So actually, here's a dumb question. You said, there's the fifty dollars free credit. Aren't there people who take advantage of that surely, like who like sign up an account and are good at gambling? I? Yes, so how do they know? But that's the thing. So No, But the reason I asked this is not because I'm trying to convince people they have any more industry. I'm trying to find out, like what is so, like, how do they make the money go? Like there money go? Because they offer it quite a lot.
Yeah. So there's like a couple of things. One we found kind of psychologically that if you're offered free money, right, even if you have to pay to get the free money, right, you are more likely to bet the free money on long shot odds. So as a whole, that money is not going to turn into real money that they have to pay.
They don't give that. There's I was I didn't want to interrupt in your talk about this earlier, but it just kind of goes to show you they'll throw fifty bucks, five hundred bucks, two thousand bucks at this because they know within a statistical certainty almost that they're going to get that money back, and then some yeah, and.
So there's there's a percentage of customers that they retain, and then those customers they retain, the vast majority of the retained customers will pay back and that'll make an that'll make up. And they've got a cost of acquisition, like you can I mean, they're publicly traded. You can look at their their you know, filings for like a quarter or two whatever, and they've got a cost of acquisition.
And they talk about like reduce seeing the cost of acquisition and increasing you know, or hold, which is the percentage that they make on each bet. That it's a whole kind of element. But one thing that is kind of interesting about the way that they manage these books is that if you begin winning and here's this is going to go super in the weeds. There's a different definition of winning they use for this particular determination, which
I'll get into in a second. But if you begin winning a lot at a really high percentage, they will start reducing your limit. And your limit is the amount that you can bet on a single bet. And so if I'm a new fan duel customer, I believe my limit is one thousand dollars, and if I get pretty bad at gambling, my limit will expand to two thousand and five twenty thousand. But if I'm pretty good, they'll start reducing my limit to, you know, five hundred and
two fifty all the way down to a dollar. And so you get good, you actually don't really have a lot of opportunity to make money. And so the thing I was going to get at is they don't actually determine it based off of whether or not you've made money. They determine it based off of whether or not the bet that you made at the time you made it anticipated the closing line value of the bet. So markets
move right. Betting markets move based in response to who's doing the betting, And so it's actually not critically important that the people setting the odds for any particular bet are laser precise accurate about what those odds truly are.
They have to be accurate to a certain degree. But what ends up happening is that a certain amount of money goes one way on a bet, and a certain amount of money goes on another way in a bet, and that moves the line, and over the course of the lifetime of that bet until the game actually starts. You get a closing line value, and if you beat the closing line value, they determine that you're a sharp gambler.
And if you do that I think like sixty percent of the time or something like that, they start reducing your limits.
So it's really hard to make money. Even like the traditional idea of winning is the thing. It's like this weird matriculated bullshit so that they could will never let you win, then will never let you right, you never win on your terms.
It's even even when you win that kind of They advertise this as like a skill based situation, and you just need to understand that even if it was a fair fight, if they didn't move the lines, if they didn't do all these things that Drip was talking about, they still have you will never outsmart them because they have teams of analysts that make these bets, and they're very good at it, and they've been doing it for a long time, and they have algorithms to watch this stuff.
So access to proprietary data too that you won't have
access to exactly. I mean, So, for example, there's a product that I think is very good called pro Football Focus Ultimate Profoble Focus is a data firm that covers football and their Ultimate package, which gives you access to granular level data like, you know, every individual play you can see, you know, if a pass was caught at what yard line that pass was caught, how many yards after they catch that player you know, generated after the catch, how many tackles that player beat on the way to
doing that?
So that you insane the ground here? Do they have a level below that that somehow these people or they get access to that.
Well, they get access to that because it's a two hundred thousand dollars package.
Oh so they have advantages yeah, d never even unless we were insanely rich. Yeah, and no one who's doing that is doing that.
Yeah, nobody who's who's doing this has the money to spend on that.
Yeah, And so they get access to the proprietary data which they can use to kind of create these models. Those models help set the lines. It's very difficult to beat.
And then they give that insanely granular data to a team of analyst perverts that will then set the lines.
Yeah, it's almost like the ultimate management consultant thing because it's barely about sports anymore, it's not even about winning. And another betting thing only recently understand came to understand even was the concept of unders and OVAs, where they will set a point amount. Like, actually, Caleb, can you explain what an over in and under is? Because it's important to explain that you can't just bet on whether someone wins or loses.
Yeah, I could do my best. Again, just the very basic of what it means. Yeah, and if you may have to correct now this because again it's not legal in my state, so I've never actually done it. Okay, So they don't like it's called the spread, right, So if you're if the team is under, this is kind of confusing. If the team is the under, that means they're the favorite by however many points.
Right, kind of, so we wouldn't call them the under rights. But if the team is the favorite, they're like minus one and a half, right or whatever. So for example, the Chiefs in this game opened at minus one and a half. That means that the betting line is essentially if you subtract one and a half points from the Chiefs, who wins the game?
Right?
If you bet on the Chiefs, you bet on the Chiefs to win by at least two points or more. If you bet in the Eagles, you either bet on them to win out right or lose by about a point or less.
So you can't just bet win or lose.
You can, but the odds are yeah, and so what and so that's called a money line bet, where you just bet outright on the winner of the loser. But there are different odds for that. So that's where you get stuff like plus two thirty and minus one ten and minus one thy. So what plus two thirty means is if I bet one hundred dollars, I will receive and I win, I get one hundred dollars back plus
two hundred and thirty dollars. If I bet minus two thirty, I would need to bet two hundred and thirty dollars in order to get not just my original bet back, but one hundred dollars. It is, So it's it's kind of confusing.
No, it's and I assume by design.
Sure, I mean, this is a system that is like sixty seventy years old, So I don't know.
It's four people that are on the strip back. They're the hoople heads that are seven beers deep. They're going to say, yes, we ball put fifty on the packers or whatever.
Right, yeah, And so you can convert those odds into the percentages, so like a minus. Okay, it's actually more complicated than this, but the the minus one hand would suggest I believe like a forty six percent or whatever odds that you know, whatever the bet is. But the problem is if two teams are evenly matched, so if the spread is pk or pick them right, zero right
either way. So if the spread is pick them and each team was equally likely to win, right, you would get probably in most books, in well most books a couple of years ago, minus one hundred and five odds.
So the thing is, I'm sure people are a little bit lost now because I slightly am but actually I think that's kind of illustrative of how fucking weird this is. Yes, these are the numbers that are just on the TV being thrown at.
You old minus five plus two ten and.
You open the app and the app is screaming at you just like, hey, you should try this. Why don't you fucking try this?
Saicon Barkley is minus two thirty is sure? What the hell?
Yeah? Yeah, And like the thing is so I described that like both of those even bets are minus one of five. If you bet on the coin toss, it's minus one of five, right, Like, that's the So.
You would need to put one hundred and five dollars down to make one hundred.
Dollars correct gone, which obviously suggests that you know, you, your odds of being correct have to be not just higher, but substantially higher than what the implied odds are by the book, because they're gonna make money on the coin flip, right, Like, there's no question that they're making money.
And yet, by the way, while we were talking about this, before I googled it, hundreds of thousands of dollars will be bet on the coin today.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yeah, that's so fucking horrible. This is the thing Like earlier on in this show's existence, I was definitely like mad at the tech industry, and
people like, why you're so mad? It is stuff like this because they've managed to find a way to do to turn gambling into online gaming, to turn it into to introduce the sets of gambling and micro transaction gaming and just the horrors of online advertising because this is selling hope and industry over something you could never hope to understand.
Well, every like the stuff that we talked about, ostensibly good aspects of sports, whether you agree or not, all of that, even from my perspective, somebody who does love them is being destroyed by this. Every aspect of tradition, all the ostensible social good that could come from this is being completely gutted by this industry. And how do you mean, because it takes away it's like the anti sport.
It takes it something that could be a potentially positive thing, and it turns into like a torment nexus, you know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah, Well, so, like there are a couple of things that kind of stood out to me that like motivated me to write about it, which was that, like every interaction that you see in a game is no longer taken for the implications that it has for the team of the player, no longer taken for kind of the narrative value that that has, but it's all concentrated on this. Did someone win a bet on this kind
of question? Yeah? So, for example, ESPN, which is the worldwide leader in sports coverage, a name they made it for themselves and earned in fairness, they are the dominant, they're the hegemony when it comes to sports coverage. They have a partnership with I think it's Penn Sportsbook, So they have a product called ESPN bet, which, in my opinion, undercuts their journalistic integrity. But that's a different topic. So they've got a bunch of social arms called ESPN Bet, right,
the kind of a TikTok channel, YouTube channel whatever. Right, And there's this Giants game where Devin Singletary, one of the running backs for the Giants, is it's near the end of the game and he's and he broke free, right, so he you know, he got the ball. Run, big run, He gets past all the defenders. He broke free to the end of the game. The Giants are already ahead, and so if he scores, that doesn't meaningfleet change the Giants' odds of winning, but it does give the other team
the balls. In fact, it might even decrease the Giants odds of winning because the other team now has an opportunity to respond. They've got possession and they can score points. Right, So what he does is he runs all the way to the five yard line and then goes down so that the Giants retained possession, they can drain the clock finish the game with the win. Great move, like it's a tactically correct move. It's selfless, Yeah, because he benefits.
He's got like a contract incentives. And you know when he when his contract comes up, he's going to negotiate from new contract. The statistics, those extra five yards a touchdown, whatever, those statistics will be used in his negotiation there. And maybe he has a contract incentive that gives him more money for touchdowns. Right, So he's making a selfless move to improve the team's odds of winning. It's always a
good story. Some running backs will do this, maybe a couple of times a year or whatever.
It's awesome. I love it. Yeah.
And and ESPN bet put out a TikTok saying, Devin Singletary goes down to ensure the Giants hit the under and the under is the total amount of point scored in the game. And in that game, I forget the thing. Maybe in the Washington the Giants and Commanders go under the
projected point total by the books. And I think my opinion is that ESPN bet really poorly used the language of their platform because it suggested that singletary did that on purpose in order to accomplish a gambling goal, in order for the for whoever was betting on the under to cash in. And it's just that I think they just meant he did this, and so therefore the underhit. Either way, I don't like it.
It's poisonous. It's poison to culture.
This shouldn't be happening at all. Yeah, to begin with, it's destroying, like the product is becoming almost unrecognizable at this point.
Can you go into more detail then?
Yeah, I mean just even just a few years ago, that would have never happened. We wouldn't have even heard about that. Yeah, just even two seasons ago, probably, I would say two three seasons.
You might get a mention on Sports Center because Scott Van Pelt does a bad beat kind of thing. But it was like a fun like, oh, you know if you bet on the under, like ooh.
Whatever, it's some wacky corner of the site that's not really that important.
Versus what is likely a huge revenue media.
Narrative, especially considering like and I mean I'm not going to be the person that says the NFL is rigged. I think that there's no evidence just to really suggest any level of that. But as these lines get blurred, and the NFL does have a history of there's Daniel Day's book Interference goes into this. This is Mind You, published in the late eighties or something, so he's talking about the sixties and seventies when the NFL was acutely
aware of owners and players relationship with gambling sportsbooks. I'm gonized crime and it's not conspiracy stuff. This is like all police cases and FBI files that he's sourcing this from. And I just think that for the league's perspective, it is a really really bad look that these lines are as blurred as they are now.
And the thing is as well. This is again a uniquely software based thing and a uniquely Internet culture based thing, because you can see these stats in minu shape, the minutiae of them. You can see them instantly. Your little fucking phone with the beautiful Internet connection that used to allow you to send posts to friends is now just like an actual portal to Vegas in a more craven way. Though, I say this, with our beautiful slot machines, which we
love so much. It feels like an evil version of gambling, which is already fairly evil in that it is now poisoning the actual culture around it, because so you don't need to know anything about basketball for this. So right now there is a big scandal going on with Miami Heat player Terry Rosier, who's under investigation in connection with
sports betting scandal. Yep, and now there is just this weird thing of like you said, Caleb, it isn't scripted or anything, but all play is doing shit now with.
Fizz of that, like there is more financial incentive. Here's what I will say, there's more financial incentive than ever. Than ever, The lines are more blurred than ever, you know.
I don't yeah, And so what I don't like is that whenever a player makes a mistake, we have to ask that question. Right. That's the thing that really bothers me, because now we can't think of players as people who can make mistakes. And one of the beautiful things about sports is recognizing the humanity in others, right, right, understanding like that these mistakes occur, and that you know they weigh heavily on or whatever.
Rights of the phrase. Any given Sunday is right exactly.
And you know, the Giants beating the Patriots and the Patriots were undefeated. It was just an outstanding story, right, and now you're thinking, wow, you know a lot of people had money on the Patriots going under the Patriots throwing.
And they're promoting these stories in their sites. They're saying how much.
Yeah, and so this is the media focus.
Yeah.
And so that's the thing that really bothers me is that all of this content, which already kind of hate the word content, but all of this content is now about gambling. So you talk about how your phone is this poor old of Vegas, but also when you try to, you know, get out of.
You actually cannot use these apps in the which is really funny.
Yeah, I do think it's well, you can if you go physically into the sports book and enable the sports books app from inside this. It's very fun Yeah, it's very funny. Crazy I found that out. But but yeah, and so like you can, like you'll get like a notification, Like I've got like four notifications on my phone right now from like various fantasy whatever, and they're like, hey, you haven't bet in like a week is here's one hundred dollars please you could do that, or I can
just get rid of the notifications. But then the notifications from the Athletic which I follow for my work as a football writer, are like, hey, here are the lines on the Super Bowl, and I get rid of that, and then you know, the next the next notification will be from my Google News alerts, and the Google News alert will be, hey, did Devin Singletary do this in
order to do that? And it's just like everything is either gambling or about content about gambling or content that points to gambling, right, And it's like the storylines are about gambling. The way I engage with the game is
about gambling. And the end, you know, it's my fault for installing the fantasy apps on my phone, but then the fantasy apps are just like it's all everything orients itself around the ability to make money off of what is ultimately, you know, a storytelling device, right, and it just it sucks.
And it's and so Caleb, you you don't gamble right?
No, now, I depends how you define it, right. I want to be clear about this. I play fantasy football every year and I have.
So and just just to delineate, fantasy football is not a money based thing unless you put into a yeah you don't.
Yeah, most people play fantasy, don't put in more than like ten bucks.
We all put in about twenty to thirty bucks to make sure everybody stays accountable, sets their lineup. It's not really about winning money.
Right, right, But it's not like in mission. You don't have to like give your credit card or anything.
You can just between it's in form.
Yeah, you're like venmo or.
Whatever, but that isn't really gambling. That's just like kind of dicking around with friends, right.
And he's describing what's season long fantasy.
Which is separate though from the money fantasy though.
Yeah, from the type of fantasy that's being promoted, which is daily fantasy.
Right.
They call it daily for football, it's weekly, but whatever, it's daily for basketball, baseball, whatever. But you can you can set your fantasy lineup for the day that day, put in like twenty dollars on your lineup, and then repeat that lineup twenty times. Put in twenty dollars every single time, right, and then at the end of the day you'll have made or lost money, and you can react to that and do it again the next day.
Were a season long, you do it once a year for like twenty bucks to win you know, maybe one hundred and fifty dollars, Like it's like, what are we doing?
Yeah, I just wanted to say also that what I described to you of like, oh, I'm gonna Venmo my friend for fantasy you actually have to lie on all the apps when you send your fantasy winnings because that's illegal and they can shut down your account for that.
Which is crazy because I just use emojis. Yeah, exactly, never, it doesn't really happen.
But if you they can flag it. If you say fantasy football and like the note or whatever, they can do that.
Oh wow, I don't know. There you go.
And that's more regulated than crypto dot com doing their Rube Goldberg system.
If you buy a token which is on the Heerium chain, and that token what activates when Patrick Mahomes passes for two hundred and twenty five.
Which again, to be very clear, should be and I think many judges would agree, is also illegal. But who's going to stop them at this point?
And I think the one of the things that I'm sure people will find insufferable but I think it's worth talking about, is this is another thing really heavily talked at the guys as well. Yeah, very heteronormative, says hat guy like, like, it's very much like for like the Fellas, and it's very male oriented, even the color schemes and the actors, and it's very aggressively And so you've got this other fucking problem with guys now where guys.
Just add another one.
Yeah, and guess what, who's uh the outside of sports, who's like the number one preveyor of like of ads for this ship is like red pill guys.
Yep, yeah, you know, because it's more more kind of noxious, nebulous masculinity thing of being like, be a big strong man and lose your mind.
I don't tell your bitch wife that you lost fifty thousand dollars or whatever. Right, Like, that's right.
Rise and Grind.
It's very much in the Rise and Grind and culture. A lot of one of the I don't know if New York has actually done this yet, but one of the proposals in New York State was too bad and advertisements for these apps on college campuses.
Oh my god, they can legally do that.
Yeah, and that's where a lot of advertise.
On outside the college basketball games as well. Oh yeah, buddy, damn, this is so fucking But actually this does kind of play into it because it's like, what is happening to young men who are not the fucking victims. I'm not doing that, don't worry. It's just like things to terrorize people one of the.
Young men now, and again not saying that they shouldn't be able to count by the victims whatever, but it rids me of like those baby turtles that are born in the sand and they have to race to the ocean before the birds swoop down and eat them all. And the birds are like crypto ads and red pill guys that are swooping up and eating these turtles. That's kind of and then they all just become bastards.
Yeah, and the thing that happens to women is those men right now. Yeah, maybe there's no no, no, no, it's the I'm just saying this because anytime I bring up the male load me in this epidemic, it's never a kind of well, men need to be treated, No, it's perhaps we need to look at the fucking conditions of society itself. Right, And then.
We're throwing another kind of because like one of the natures of like one of the things about patriarchy is that it isolates people into particular roles. Those roles for men include things like bread winner, right, and they're the ones that are, like, you know, in vibe with the entrepreneurial spirit, right, which is I guess gambling is entrepreneurship.
No, no, it is, though it's the same rise in grind it is. It is because it's like you have power over stuff that you don't have power over. You just work hard and money will come out. Same way with this, you just gamble.
Right, yeah. And so this is kind of another one of the pressures among the extant pressures that exist in patriarchy that produce these responses among young men that then those young men will like act out in the world, often on women, but like also another young man, right yeah.
Patriarchy produces the drywall punchers, right.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah, And then this is just that and it's it's funny and you've mentioned the entrepreneur asper because it really is, that's exactly that same genus of like focusing on guys and being like, yeah, you know, what's going wrong in your life is not actually something caused bias system.
Yeah, we shouldn't look at the system.
Don't look at the system and definitely don't worry about being responsible for this. This is all happening to you, and instead of looking at the stuff actually happening to you, let's just look a woman, and you know what you actually need to do. You need to just it's neoliberalism, but right wing. I guess, well, maybe I repeat myself, but it's the sense of selfish kind of producer that
only comes from hard work. Well despite the fact that you, yeah, but despite the fact that hard work is not what any of this is. Being an entrepreneur, a successful entrepreneur is like tons of luck, having the privilege to be in the right place at the right time.
If you look at a lot of the entrepreneurship like YouTube videos or whatever, a lot of it's just like drop shipping. It's like, okay, cool, just a scam.
Yeah, but like there's a there's a reason.
Like another episode we'll talk about drop shipping.
Yeah, but like there's a reason, Like we can find a lot of the same figures throughout all of these like micro trends of like entrepreneurship masculinity. Like Gary Vaynerchuk is doing like motivational drop shipping content and then he does crypto content, and then he does NFT content, and now he's doing sports scampling content.
Sorry, but the concept of somebody who did for many years work in e commerce and like not drop shipping although yeah, but just like as an actual e commerce marketing person motivational e commerce content makes me want to blow my brains out.
You know, I'm describing a thing that's.
Really I know, I'm acutely aware of the thing that you're talking about. It's like a like I feel like like an animal the serengety where I just my predator prey sense went off, like oh my god.
But yeah, like someone like Gary Vee was in all of those.
Is he doing sports patting content? Yeah, Jesus Christ, that man's a fucking monster.
He is evil.
I want to do we should do it Behind the Bastards episode and that piece of shit. Fuck you, Gary Vaynerchuk. I hope you hear this, you freak. You'll never You'll never buy the jets anyway. It's just the reason. Another reason I mean that I wanted to do this episode is it feels uniquely part of a way in which the Internet is being poisoned, where so much, so many content empires now based on the same ones that do the article that's what time is the Super Bowl? So
they can rank on Google. Now you've got oh the right picks for sports gambling.
It's the same problem, just in a different shape, right.
Yeah, and it's it's really sad as well. And again I'm gonna repeat this every time, like it's not saying men don't. Men have fucking accountability regardless of whether they've been twisted by the Internet, but we should at least consider the forces twisting.
You're ever gonna fix the problem, you eventually have to look at the system in which these people are brought up, right.
Right, And it's you see, it's the same thing you've seen with red pilling. It's the same thing you see with pretty much in any mgtow thing. It's just this sense of, hey, you feel helpless. Do you want to rise up against the thing that makes you feel helpless? Oh? Oh sorry, but don't worry, we won't make you do the inconvenient work of actually understanding things. Well.
That's why, like when we're talking about this before, one of the football or sports is important, is because even if you're from a utilitarian perspective, you don't care about sports. It is too big of a ground to seed to these kinds of people. You shouldn't ever seed that ground, right, We can't allow them to take this over.
And they're trying, they're trying, really fucking a very good job of it. And it's the reason they're able to is because there's these noxious companies that are twisting people up, young people, and it is not just young men, but really it's heavily targeted against men. They grow up, they can't get a house, They can't ever hope to get a house. Now it's not been the case for like fifteen twenty years. The average person just can't fucking save
the money. Meant, men are as many people are, but like very targeted, and men told you must be big, strong, and you must have money, good, big, and if you don't have those things, you're not man. You're not man at all. You're woke and.
You are soy, and you are woke.
And then they attack aggressively with both convenient excuses and convenient ways to allegedly make money with these incredibly craven marketing systems perpetuated by the app stores. It's just fucking it. Every time I think about this. I feel a little crazier because even coming into this, I didn't realize that
the most common thing was just straight up gambling. I thought it was that you got they kind of like dodged around, like t he you just bet on a few players, right, No, it's just the straight up gambling now, and it's everywhere. And it doesn't sound like they even do like kys like I know your customer stuff, or if they do, it's.
Like so so gambling does do know your customer stuff.
But fantasy that's despite money going into it. Yeah, fucking brilliant. It's just like I And it's not just like we can't even say I hope it's made illegal. They're never gonna do that.
That's definitely not happening. Yeah.
I feel like everyone involved should be put in prison personally. So it doesn't look like Apple.
Like they did try that with the DFS people a lot of like fifteen years ago, and about three or four of them did, and then the rest invented DFS. What is DFF Daily Fantasy Services. So these are so the people that were doing online poker stuff way back when Chris Moneymaker was big, like two thousand and four ish I want to say they those people, it turns out, were violating a bunch of laws about internet gambling. Three or four of them got you know, tagged for it.
Then the rest of them left and invented Daily Fantasy, right.
And it's right now, by the way, on the app store. They don't actually advertise this stuff, so perhaps I was wrong saying they did. But there is the like number number let's see the number three in number four size DraftKings and then fangil and then prize picks. Those are the three, four and five coupaps right now.
Yeah, I'm going to my prize picks promos right now. If it's not clear I do engage in this, Yeah, I was gonna ask you about that. Yeah, and I've got like one million dollars super Sweat lineups.
What does that?
I don't know. It's a combination of like, you know, they they like hire these influencers to like put together well in theory, they hire these influencers to put together their picks for the game, and then you can you can then nail their picks essentially horrifying. But yeah, there's tons of promos like in my.
But as we wrap up RAF, so you do gamble on this stuff? Yeah, do you win?
I have net made money on the year, right, I think a good chunk of that has been luck. Why do you do it? It's fun like it's that's it like one like the smallest. But the first reason is because it's important for me to be familiar with the stuff with the work that I do. But like, I wouldn't be gambling as much if that was the only reason. But no, I've been making a small amount of money on it, and so I've been doing it. I set like some pretty clear limits for myself because I am
always concerned about having an addictive everything we've discussed. But what's interesting is that if I play for a couple of weeks and then I stopped playing for weeks to see how the apps engage me, because I get notifications, I get emails, Like when I went to London for
the Vikings game. I also spent a week prior to that game just taking a vacation in Ireland, right, And so gambling is like legal in both of those places, but or sports gaming is legal in both of those places, but the apps I was using were not authorized in those places, and so I couldn't do it, and I was like, well, I'm not going to get a new app. I'm not going to deliver it. And I had to like bet in person in London. It was awful.
Waiten to William Hill.
I wouldn't. I couldn't do a place called lad Brooks. I couldn't.
Did you bet on the dogs?
No?
I only bet on football.
There's still Do they still do greyhound rice? Yes?
They definitely ever has that when I walk into the listing country. But yeah, And so I do it because it's it's fun. I do it because it's my work, and I do it because so far I've made a little bit of money. But I've been really hyper careful about like I've got a spreadsheet like this track of everything I've and I pay attention to what are called like reverse line moves when the majority of the tickets are on one side and the majority of the money is on the other side. I think it's the number
of bets. So you would have let's say three people bet on Saquon Barkley to get one hundred and ten yards in this game, and then one person bets that he's going to get fewer than that many yards. But that person bets way more than those three people combined. What you get is a reverse line move where the line moves in the direction of the guy who bet a lot of money, even though I have tickets on that side. You pay attention to that, and you can see maybe there's some edges here or there. It's way
in the weeds. They but they've got their hooks into some extent. Absolutely, no, I'm I'm forsaken.
This is it's so great. And you're like a very intelligent like person, Like it's not You're not someone I would consider easily like tricked even though you're in the system. It's interesting how it can get its claws in.
Yeah, And when when I started, I knew that I had to set really hard limits, and I knew that I had to make rules about you know, not chasing you know, good money after bad. Right, And so I set a limit for myself on the number of times a year I can deposit, which is three. I set a limit to how much I can put on one bet, which is I think. I think the limit I set was like eight percent of the total amount of money I have in that app on each individual bet. Right.
And I say I think because I just started doing it kind of like by feel, because it's like, oh, i've got one hundred and fifty, I'll just put ten, you know, so right?
Yeah?
But yeah, And so the only times I have broken that limit once, but it's because I was offered an obscene promo, which is how they get you, right. But like as I got all deposit again because I that's two hundred and fifty bucks, right, So I put in two fifty, and then I bet the two hundred and fifty promo dollars on like a minus ten thousand bet or something like that.
You did the thing they wanted you to.
No, I did the opposite. It was a minus ten thousand bets. So does that mean that means if I won, I would get no money? But the two hundred fifty turned from a promo into real money, and then I just withdrew it, okay. So a minus ten thousand bet is you have to bet ten thousand dollars to win one hundred, okay, And so the percentage return on that is minuscule. And so I bet the two hundred and fifty dollars promo bet on a.
Just to get the money out.
Yeah, it was a ninety nine point nine percent chance that I was going it. Yeah, and most people don't do that, and no, because you can't do that, I promise you.
And I think and I think the funny thing is is like this is all data and I'm not just trying to pull it back because it's the tech podcast, but it really is. This is just when you remove the word sport. This is just like what crypto does. Accept more craven and on television all the time, and it's the same fucking people or at least the same fucking people who do like crypto channels that kind of do some sports shit, or they kind of flirt with the same linguistics.
It's just yeah, well disgusting the again, like the people who were doing online poker or the people that did dfs that ended up going into crypto and then they go back into like the we call them pickums. Now this this version of fantasy, which is basically also daily fantasy. But yeah, it's the same. And so they use the same language. Like when when you see kind of the communications between them or the way they even even sometimes when they talk to the public, they use like poker language,
and that's the way that they talk about crypto. It's the way they talk about NFTs. That's the way they talk about AI. It's the way they talk about this.
It's all just one big scam. So let's wrap up that. Or if we can people find you. You can find me at Wide Left dot Football. That's the newsletter I run.
It covers sports, politics and sports culture and sports and all of that. Otherwise on socials, I'm at a reef Sky at social and Blue Sky and a Ressa on NFL on Twitter, Caleb, we can people find you.
I've got a podcast called a Western Kabuki. It's kind of an irreverent look at Internet culture.
It's wonderful. I've been on multiple times.
Yeah, it's incredible.
Both of you have, and I thank you for that. With a I guess a comedian Juniper and Alex Goldman formally of reply All, where we just kind of talk about people's relationship with with with the Internet. I guess predominantly you can find me there at Western Kabuki. You can find me. I'm no longer on Twitter. I'm on a Blue Sky at bird respector.
And you can find me everywhere. You're gonna hear about off of this, Matt, I'm going to re record this at some point, but I'm not gonna do it now. You're just gonna have to hear gonna go do do Do Do Do Do Do. The whole theme will go on. It'll be amazing. Anyway. I've been at Zitchra and you can find me a at ed zeitron dot com on Blue Sky. I'm still on Twitter, but I don't give
a shit about it. And yeah, if you haven't done this, please go to everyone you know tell him to download the show, tim to download every single goddamn episode and need the downloads. Okay, do this for me. Thank you for listening, and then you're gonna hear me say thank you for listening again. You're gonna be so mad. Thank you for listening to Better Offline.
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