Hey everyone, Manny here with a quick shameless plug before we start today's episode. If you're in or around New York City, Noah, Devin and I are putting on a live event book talk on March twenty ninth. Now, you may be wondering whose book we're going to be discussing at this show. Is it Gavin Newsom's, Is it Josh Shapiro's. Is it a third future presidential candidate? Well maybe, because
we're gonna be talking about my new book. It's called Colored People Time, A Case for Casual Rebellion, and it's a collection of humorous essays about my personal life, about politics, about video games, about revolutions, and partying and gardening. There's a lot packed into this book, and it's all connected by the theme of the concept of time. Now, one great thing about this book is how short it is. Take it to the beach, take it to the doctor's office.
You can tell your friends that you read a whole book and they don't have to know that it only took you ninety minutes. In the description for this episode, you can find my book and you can find the tickets to the live event where we will talk about said book. Thank you for your attention to this matter, and enjoy today's episode. I'm Manny and this is no such thing. The show where we settle our dumb arguments
and yours by actually doing the research. In today's episode, we're going to be taking a deep dive into the world of sports gambling.
Antiop what people say, There's.
No no such thing, no touch thing, touch, thank.
Touch, thank touch thang.
All right.
By now, we've all heard about sports betting. Yes, not only have you heard about it, you've seen it everywhere. You've seen Kevin Hart promoting DraftKings with Lebron James.
Are you a little too old to be playing football?
Wait? What they want?
Somebody that can run it?
Forty?
Now, somebody that is forty.
You've seen fucking John Hamm promoting bet MGM. So they pulled out the BETMGM app and put together a live parlay.
But what would the fourth leg be?
The big you are and those are just during commercials. You've also seen this stuff, like literally during the games. I feel like I'm watching sports most days, probably more than the average person. But I'm curious how often have you two seen sports gambling promotional material in your lives?
I don't really watch sports besides baseball, but it's become really annoying the amount of just sort of sports gambling, odd stuff that like Apple has now started broadcasting baseball games and they all have like the likelihood that this next ball is going to be a strike. Just stuff that's just like so inconsequential. Yeah, like graphics on screen the entire game.
And like I feel like on baseball they have it on the actual like not on the bottom.
I feel like I've seen it.
Like it's Apple doesn't like Apple does it on screen. Yeah, like, which is really crazy. Yeah, it's ins insane. The local stuff, the local like my local s and ys, the Mets local they don't do. It's not as in your face, but it's like you're saying, it's every single commercial they come back from break, they're talking about the odds. Yeah, it's it's it just feels like in the beginning it was really like, oh my god, it's just crazy. Now
it's just like so normalized. I don't even think about it anymore.
Yeah, and during basketball games you'll get like the live odds thing, which just feels wrong, like they're literally trying to win the game and it's like all these stats and graphs and shit for me anyway ruins the like experience of watching the Ax game.
Yeah, yeah, I agreed.
In case people don't know, sports betting is a type of gambling, except instead of risking your money on poker or roulette, you're risking your money on, for example, whether the Lakers are going to win a game against the Celtics. Now, it used to be the case that if you wanted to bet on sports, you'd get your ass in the car and drive all the way to like Atlantic City or some casino in your area, and you'd place a
bet there. But in twenty eighteen, the Supreme Court struck down a law that banned sports betting in most states. So because of that, you're now seeing this proliferation of sports betting all over the place, and you can now legally place a sports bet on your phone, which was, you know, not the case before. I you know, I'll be honest, I've I've dabbled. I've probably probably more than dabbled.
On the record. Yeah, you're very much on the record talking about it's got.
To be transparent about this, and I think like, if you're responsible, obviously it can be like a fun way to kind of heighten the urgency of the watching experience. Have you guys ever placed a bed or I've dabbled.
Yeah, I'm clean now, but yeah, I mean there have been times when, you know, I used to go to a lot of NETS games and it would add a layer of excitement to what would otherwise be a pretty boring, yeah, unclimbactic game regular season when you you know, maybe you want the Nets to win, but you need Julius Randall from the Knicks at the time to score over a certain amount and it's down to the last minute.
It's exciting stuff.
Yeah.
Now, I never bet anything, you know, more than I think fifty dollars in yeah, yeah, yeah, but yeah, making some crazy parlay, which is, you know, laying a bunch of random things to happen essentially and hopefully they all happen to make you know, say one thousand dollars on that fifty dollars.
Yeah, it was an exciting high, you know.
But yeah, I think I remember we went to a Nets game together once and we would both have kind of a bet riding, and I remember you won a decent amount once.
Yeah, how to quit? Yeah, pretty much.
Devin have you partaken at all?
No, nothing in my body wants to bet on sports, especially because you know, I'm a fan of the Mets and there's just so such an unpredictable team that I'm like, I have I watched them every single day and I have absolutely no idea what is going to happen day to day. Yeah, so I am not putting money on
the line for this. Although you guys have You haven't convinced me yet, but I guess my initial thought with sports betting was like, you just got to pick who wins and who loses, And I was like, I would never do that because I don't know day to day whether or not I'm actually gonna win. Yeah, But then y'all talked about, oh, you can bet on smaller things, right, you can bet on whether or not somebody gets a
certain amount of hits her. So that's a little bit more fun because it's less you know, you're kind of leaning into the uncertainty. Yeah, yeah, versus like trying to make calculated decisions. It's a little bit more like feels a little bit more like the lottery to some degree of like, oh, right, you know I'm gonna put some amount of money down and like if I lose it, whatever,
but you're not like thinking so much about it. You have you know, obviously you have a little bit of insight, but it's a lot of it is up to chance.
Yeah, I mean there's this kind of idea. I think that it's different than regular gambling because you know, people feel like they know sports, they know a team in and out, and they feel like they can affect some money coming their way because you know, they know that show hao Tony's gonna get one hit per game. I don't know if that's a real stat. I don't watch baseball, but if you bet on that every game and he does it most games, you know you're not gonna win that much money.
If it's an easy bet, then you're not gonna win them.
Yeah, exactly. Just really quickly, I'll just go through like the popular kinds of vets. One of them is called the money line, which is literally just choosing which team is gonna win. One of them is called the over under. You're just choosing whether the amount of points in a game will be over x amount or under that amount,
and then the other one is the spread. So like if the Vegas will determine that the Lakers are gonna win by seven points, and then you can bet on the Lakers covering that spread if you think they're gonna win by more than seven points. Now, sports betting has
gotten a lot more complicated. There's like a million more things you can do now, one of those things being in recent history, the parlay, which is, for example, saying that the Lakers are gonna win, they're gonna win by over seven points and Lebron James is gonna score twenty points. And the more things you add to the parlay, you know, your bet becomes lottery esque. It just multiplies the amount of the payout that you're gonna get, but also makes
it that much more unlikely. And I think it's that kind of bet that I feel like, as you know, the all these sports betting apps are promoting the most because they know it's they're so unlikely, and that feels kind of like dark and insidious to me. They're like giving you free money to do these things so that you can get hooked on it. And I have seen people get hooked on it, like I know people.
Who are parlay specific parlays.
But also like once you're in the app. I think the app is like designed in a way almost like social media, where like you're there's these like little dopamine.
And there's promos and stuff like that too, so it's like, oh, you'll get an extra point, like you'll get some credit if you do a five leg parlay instead of a three leg one.
The worst kind of promotion I've seen is like, all right, we're gonna give you free money to work with if you make a parlay bet that's plus five hundred or longer, which means like you're only you're only gonna get free money if you make a bet. That's impossible. So it's just like this kind of loop the cycle that keeps you in there.
My introduction to the parlay was uncut Gems.
That's right, se Yeah, famous example.
This is me, all right, I'm not a fucking think. This is my fucking way. This is how I went.
Look how that turned out did not did not work out so good for Sandler.
Yeah, that I think maybe Uncut Gems was that was a little bit before uh it was not like betting popped off online. Yeah, and I think it kind of popularized it too.
I think they did a great job explaining what it was too. Yeah in the movie, because I had no idea. By the end, I understood.
Everyone pause this and come back in two hours. Yeah, pull up you know, HBO Max. Yeah, if our explanation didn't make sense, Yeah, So we'll talk to our guests Danny in a little bit about kind of the detrimental aspects of sports betting, what it's done to us as a society.
But briefly, there's also been controversy with sports betting fiascos in the NBA, particularly where players are getting caught up in allegedly rigging games. And so we know this has happened with Johntay Porter. Michael Porter Junior's brother.
Toronto Raptors forward Johntay Porter has been banned from the NBA for life, the league announced. The NBA said that Porter provided confidential information to betters, limited his own participation in games for gambling purposes and bet on.
NBA games, and he's alleged to have like basically played worse because someone else that he knew bet on the game, bet on his unders. So maybe instead of jumping up to get that rebound, he would let someone else do it so that his friend's bet could hit. And then more recently we've seen Terry Rozier.
All right, tim breaking news.
Is catching everybody by surprise, the FBI arresting NBA.
Player Terry Rozier early this morning.
In connection with a widespread sports betting investigation.
And he's not the only.
One we know that that's bad, right, So, like sports gambling is starting to permeate in actual sports. It's like jeopardizing the kind of purity of the game when the sports is supposed to be very merit based. Now you've got the case where like this new phenomenon is causing these players to play differently.
It's come up of baseball too.
Yeah, we just walk us through some of the baby to Cleveland Guardians.
I heard really, yeah, Guardians pitchers Emmanuel class and Luis Ortiz had been charged with fraud, conspiracy, and rigging pitches. Prosecutors said in the indictment that class A and Ortiz through specific pitches for balls so betters could place prop bets in profit.
So this is like you're like, you're talking about like sick people like to be voting on a specifically pitch type. It's crazy. But these two pitchers have been indicted for throwing specific pitches, and one of these was in the playoffs, like purposely throwing a type of pitch you know, not for a ball, they purposely like out of the strike zone and having someone you know in connection to them betting on that specific pitch type a lot of money down and you know, getting a lot of money he
paid out for being correct on those pitches. And you can say, oh, this is like, you know, what's the big deal? You know, like these pitches didn't change the outcome of a game. Sure, maybe not, but it is like the sort of thing that like, Okay, this is how you start right like you do to really Okay, I'm just gonna throw this one pitch out of the strike zone and then start out this batter not the
way I naturally would. But then you start to wonder, Okay, if this is the only thing we caught, what else are you actually doing behind the scenes.
Yeah, it's really disturbing because there's clips now circulating of like Terry Rozier like, yeah, putting up some horrific shots or like losing the ball all the time, and in ways that just look a little bit weird.
And look he made that. May it may be legitimate, right, maybe like you were just trash today, Yeah, Like these pictures may be like, hey, you just didn't have your stuff today. But now when you find out that, like, oh, there may be something happening here, you start to question on this.
Yeah, And that's what makes it so dangerous because I know people are getting caught now, but I think it is relatively easy to hide your assistance on someone else's bet. There was a clip of Lebron last year where he was like in a postgame interview and he said that some fan was screaming at him that he just needed one more rebound from Lebron, yeah, so his bet could hit. And then Lebron was like, so I just helped him out, jumped up to get a rebound.
He definitely yo at me, got my intentions rebound. I'm like what he was like, more so I got one more and I pointed at him to acknowledge that I was listening.
And that's kind of like a funny moment, I guess, but like underneath the surface, it's like, oh, that's kind of dark. Yeah, all right, So we know that sports betting has invaded the sports infrastructure in such a way that is detrimental to the purity of the game. But I am curious. It made me think about, like, what if a player is betting on him or herself to do well? M what if Lebron can bet on himself to score, you know, thirty points? Should should that be allowed?
Because it it incentivizes him.
Exactly to do well.
I'm kind of curious, like what the pros and cons I'm.
Trying to think of, you know, I'm trying to make the argument. Of course, that sounds great. Maroone says, Hey, I'm gonna try to score at least twenty points today and if I get.
That, I win whatever, two thousand dollars.
Like he needs it, whatever, whatever he wants to twenty thousand dollars in the wine cellar.
Whatever.
Yeah.
But the issue, though, I think it's like, if you can do that openly, then it's like, who's to say he's not making a little carve out for his friends on the Celtics who he's playing against.
Yeah, to make sure, you know, to make sure he does now points.
Okay, I'm not gonna block him so hard so I can get a piece of this.
Yeah, I think.
It's it seems simple, But then it's like so easily opens it up to anything else.
Yeah, so unless you you all.
Have secret bets and some it's some system that then like why are we making it?
Like why no, can't be secret, gotta be all out and open. Yeah. So you know, like you want to put all these other odds and stuff on the screen. I want to see what Lebron is betting on himself. Yeah, and it's like, you know, there's no more underground. There's no no more underground, you know, get rid of the on it. We're legalizing, you know, like you say legalized drugs, We're gonna legalize sports betting.
So like it's just gonna.
Just all out in the open. I think, you know, I think about it.
Or what if it was as simple as you know, he's only allowed to bet on the Lakers to win, not like necessary.
Yeah, you could pick out what like you know, I think there's ways you could work it out. So you're not getting so specific that like it's altering, like you're saying whether or not somebody's gonna put up a shot or something. But I think about this, like I don't know how it works with contracts and you know, the sports that y'all watch all the other sports besides baseball.
Yeah, sounds a degree, watch sports if you call those sports.
But like in baseball, right, especially with say someone has kind of like an off year, or they're injured to what, or there'll be incentives that like, hey, in this contract, if you start a certain amount of games, if you win whatever award, if you you know, get a certain amount of strikeouts or home runs, whatever, you'll get a bonus added to your contract. Exactly. How is that so
different than betting? Right, Like, if someone because this has come up where it's like someone may have let's say, you know, a pitcher needs you know, one hundred and fifty innings to get that contract clause, and they have one hundred and forty nine and it's the last game of the season, and the manager is like, do I got Do I take this guy out or give him? Do I give him another pitch?
You know?
And people start the second guess like, oh, they took himut because they didn't want to pay that out. You know. So like that sort of stuff does happen.
That's a good point. I mean that happens in football all the time, where let's say there's a wide receiver who needs one more touchdown to like trigger some clause in his contract.
Do you drop up a play knowing that and then you.
Know, if it's a substantial amount of money, could you then talk to the guy on the other team, like who's covering you? Be like, hey, I thirty some of this. If you let me get you, let me get this touch.
Games out of hand, let me catch Yeah, I'm gonna.
I hadn't thought about performance bonuses, that them being similar to you know, betting on yourself.
Yeah, I guess those are long term goals.
Though, Yeah, like you can't do it every game.
I think the per game ones is I think scary or like, I think that's a bad, bad hole to go down.
Because then even if we decide it's ethically okay, it's still I think affects the like sanctity of the game. Where like, let's say Lebron James is allowed to bet on the Lakers to win, he might be making different decisions at the end of that game than he would have. He might feel like, oh my god, the only way we're gonna win is if I take this last shot instead.
Who cares?
Who cares that the team?
I guess Yeah, I just mean it's it changes the dynamic a little bit.
Yeah, I guess I think I think it should be more for either full games or more team based than individual based.
I think once we're.
Doing this individual stuff, that's when you're gonna get kind of the more selfish play from maybe players who aren't Lebron who can Maybe.
People are egos that are bigger than so.
I think it's like, yeah, if the Detroit Pistons say, hey, we're gonna try to win sixty games this year and Kate Cunningham wants to bet on that, that seems fine to me because he wants to win.
Yeah, but I can see your concern that you were saying earlier with essentially it opens the door to maybe working with some other team to let there's just too many to let them perform a certain.
Unknown unknowns, as Donald Rumsild would say.
Too many unknown unknowns. This is just like the war in Iraq. Well, the good news for us is going to learn a lot more about this with our guest today, Danny Funt. Danny is the author of Everybody Loses The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling, and we're going to talk to him right after this break. All right, we are back, and we're joined by Danny Funt, the author of Everybody Loses, The tumultuous Rise of American sports gambling,
which happens to be exactly what we were just talking about. Wow, Danny, thanks for joining us.
What's up man? Thanks for having me on first.
I just wanted to ask if you could briefly walk us through just the history of sports betting in the US in general. I know there were some kind of big sports betting controversies I think in the twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties. If you could just walk us through that, how did we get here today?
There's been betting on sports since there have been organized sports in America, even going back to like the very first baseball games in New York City eighteen fifties. It was such a big part of why people cared about baseball in the first place that the New York Times wrote an editorial that said, we can't even think of this as a national pastime because, as they put it,
it's a contrivance for gambling. And then the National League was created in large part to rid the game of gambling because it felt like it was corrupting the sport and putting off a lot of prospective fans. And then that leads us to the Black Sox scandal in nineteen nineteen. You probably know about that, eight players on the Chicago White Sox colluding with gamblers to fix the World Series, and the Commissioner of Baseball was established after that specifically
to get gambling out of baseball. There were scandals basically every decade, most notoriously in college men's basketball in like the fifties and sixties, getting caught up with mob people
who wanted them to fix games. And all of that brings us to two when the leagues lobbied Congress to officially ban sports betting outside Nevada, where it had been legal since about the fifties, and then that law was struck down in twenty eighteen, and things were often running from there as far as states legalizing sports betting.
And what was kind of the sports betting environment so to speak in the fifties and sixties. I know there were some of those, like specific scandals, but how did like your average American get involved with that?
So in Nevada, as I said, they had a legal book making infrastructure, but it was really an afterthought and it was mainly just to draw to get people into casinos, and it remained that way honestly to today. Like in the casino business, sports betting is almost a rounding error, like it's really just yet another thing, you know, along with restaurants and other gimmicks to get people to come in and then go to the blackjack tables and the
slot machines. Were they really make money. In the rest of the country, it was largely mob run, which is why you might have heard of the Kofaver Commission, which was this massive congressional inquiry in the fifties that looked into how gambling was funding the mob. And this senator from I think Tennessee made it a huge TV attraction, these congressional hearings where they would bring in gang leaders to testify about how much they were taking in bets.
And that was the first time a lot of Americans even heard the word mafia, and it led It led the Kennedy administration to push for a number of laws that made it officially illegal, and.
Then, of course, the mafia responded by killing John F.
Kennedy right right. A fun historical fact, the guy who invented the point spread was I think JFK's elementary school teacher.
Oh yeah, go to the top.
Yeah yeah, yeah.
But after nineteen ninety two, you basically could not bet on sports unless you travel to Nevada? Is that true?
Or you had a bookie?
Yeah okay, And just for the audience, like, describe what a bookie is? How like how was that allowed or is it it wasn't It was like under the table.
Totally under the table everywhere but Nevada. And basically that's someone who you know will take your bet on a game, is probably only against the point spread. Maybe they took over unders on the point total, and they're kind of writing numbers down in a book, hence the name bookmaker, and you know, hopefully paying you if you win. Most of that's done on credit. You're not like handing the money and saying, you know, pay me back if I win.
It's it's the honor system, which is why knees get busted and thumbs get you know, chopped off if you're not paying. But yeah, that was a pretty big business. I remember there was a book maker in Nevada who was I think it was a Sports Illustrated article where they were talking about, you know, trying to figure out the size of the illegal sports betting industry in like the middle twentieth century. And this guy was like, I know of a town in Wisconsin that has thirteen thousand
people and two book makers. So just think about you know, if like a middle of nowhere town in Wisconsin has two bookies, it probably suggested there were a ton of them across the country.
Mm hmmm. That kind of leads me to my next question. Like when I bet on a game today, I'll open the app and it'll and I'll bet on whatever the Lakers to win, and it'll say plus two hundred. And I understand that that means if I bet one hundred dollars, I'll win two hundred. But where the hell do they get that number from? Who actually is responsible for providing the odds on a given sports match.
That's an important point because we still say colloquially like Vegas thinks, you know, Vegas thinks the Seahawks are a three point favorite. It really almost has nothing to do with what anyone in Vegas thinks. It's an aggregation of worldwide betting trends. And usually when they'll open with numbers.
They're basing it on betting markets in like Asia and other parts of the world that might be ahead of us, just on the time difference, and then going from there, and then the numbers get sharpened, mainly by the bets that you see coming in from professional gamblers. A lot of bookmaking is just responding to what these sharp betters are doing and then massaging the numbers accordingly. It's not like a genius odds maker who posts a number and then takes on all these different people and you know
it's trying to outsmart them. It's it's the wisdom of crowds, as it's sometimes said.
And people would say colloquially Vegas because those bookies were normally in Vegas before the Supreme Court action.
Yeah, and a lot of these companies, you know, based in Vegas, whether it's Caesars or MGM or what have you.
So then what is the format of that business? How exactly do they make money? Like I know how I lose money to them, but like what is what's the structure exactly?
So the simple answer is they bake an edge into the odds so that they win no matter what. And there's complexity to that. But basically it's the reason why if you bet twenty bucks on both sides of a bet, it's not going to be a wash, right, You're going to lose a certain amount, and that certain amount is
roughly what the sports book is making. It's complicated because there's a common misconception that the art of bookmaking is posting odds or spread or whatever that's going to attract fifty percent money on both sides, and then you get the vig that house edge that I just mentioned, and that's how they make money. They're really not going for fifty to fifty. They're going for on the side of the professional gamblers, but posting a number that's gonna get
a lot of money on both sides. But the sportsbook wants to basically bet on the side of the sharps because they're right more often than not. And if that happens, then they're gonna the house is gonna win even more than that edge that they bake into the odds. So gets a little complicated, but that's the business. It's not like, let's figure out what's gonna get half and half on both sides.
Well, I was gonna ask if you could clarify a little bit about the vig. Okay, the Lakers and Celtics are playing, and I bet twenty dollars on each of them to win, I'm gonna win twenty dollars, right.
So you're gonna see minus one ten typically on both sides. So if you bet one hundred and ten dollars and you win, you make a hundred. If you bet one hundred and ten and lose, obviously you get nothing, So that ten bucks the difference there is the thig, right.
So typically it's why in order to beat those sorts of bets and make money, you have to win about fifty two and a half percent of the time because if you just won fifty to fifty, the house has that edge and they're going to beat you, and it's really really hard. It's really hard to win more than half your bets. Conversely, if you think about it, it's really hard to lose more than half your bets if you're betting those types of straight bets.
That's what I tell my wife. In your book, you interviewed and talked to a lot of people who have influence. I think at some of these companies like FanDuel and DraftKings, like what did you learn from talking to them about how about like the average Americans relationship to sports betting and how they try to recruit more people into it.
There was a bunch because some of it I think is pretty sinister, and I definitely wanted to get into that of some of the predatory tactics they're doing. But some of it also was just interesting to me of how this business actually works. There was someone who was in like marketing insights at FanDuel, and she told me
a bunch of things that I found really interesting. One was that people are always thinking like there's so many ads that must turn off a lot of people because they're like, I just can't stand seeing all these fandel ads. I'm never gonna give them my business. And she said, from their research, that's not true at all. No matter how much you hate a company's advertising, it doesn't stop
you from patronizing them. So that's instructive. But another thing she said that was interesting was although these companies like to brand sports betting as this social activity and you know this idea of like you know, all me, me and my buddies like gather and replace our bets, and
that's like a way that we socialize around sports. Based on her research, a lot of people are doing it when they're alone and they don't like to talk about they don't like to talk about their betting because they're kind of embarrassed about it, that it's this thing they do to like liven up a boring night alone. And I mean I do that, you know sometimes, So I'm not here to judge, but I think that's maybe maybe a huge percentage of this business is people like that.
Yeah, I mean it's an interesting dynamic. When sports betting it was legalized in New York, like me and some buddies, I think I noticed that we were socializing more often than we were before, and part of me was like, oh, this is kind of nice that, like, you know, in what so many people are calling a male loneliness epidemic, we're kind of like we've got this like discord channel
now and we're hanging out. But you know, I think it's very easy to see how that turns sour because sometimes I see people who are just really deep in it, like really addicted to trying to make their money back for sure.
And also think about a lot of states legalized, including New York during COVID so people were extra isolated and bored and like doing anything, you know, baking, sour now and sports.
Right, Yeah, what are some of the more predatory behaviors that these companies are engaging in to keep me on the app?
I'll get into some of the messed up ones, but one that I I find interesting that I think you and your listeners might too, is maybe not as predatory, but it's just a it's a counter argument to this idea that sports betting just enhances fandom, which is an argument you hear the leagues make. It's like this just makes you extra locked in as a fan. It's just taking an interest you already have and like putting it
on steroids. And I remember talking to this guy at a company called simple Bet, which creates these so called micro bets, which are like bets on a shrunken down time frame, like will the next pitch in a baseball game be a ball or a strike? In a football game, you know, will they score a touchdown, pund get a
field goal, whatever. And he was telling me that when they're setting the odds on those bets, they do what's called shading, which is they recognize that fans have a bias to overestimate the likelihood of positive outcomes, Like if you're watching a football game, you're you're gonna overestimate the odds that a team scores in a given possession, right, either just because you're rooting for them, or it's nice to think that the good thing is going to happen,
And so the payouts on those bets are less than if you're betting for the negative thing to happen. So basically they're taking the inherent optimism that comes with being a fan and using that against you so that you
make less money if you bet on optimistic things. And I just I heard that and I was like that that's really shrewd from a business standpoint, But it totally goes against this idea that betting is just like, you know, encouraging people to be fans, because they're basically using your fandom as a vulnerability to make more money off of. But as far as as far as the predatory stuff goes, I think one is these enticements that dangle what sounds like free money, and then you read the fine print
you're like, this is not free money at all. Furthest thing from it. Whether it was no sweat bets, but sometimes advertised really enormous dollar figures like you know, three
thousand dollars risk free bet or no sweat bet. Risk free was like the term of art for a while, and then they realized that was just even two outrageous for betting companies, so they dialed it back to no sweat, which really conveys the same thing, which is, you don't have any reason to worry that you're going to lose this money, and that couldn't be further from the truth, and that's a gigantic bummer to people when they figure that out.
Yeah, because it's like no sweat. If you bet twenty five dollars on this and you lose, we'll give you twenty five dollars in the app that you can you can't withdraw. You can only use it on another bet which you are likely to lose.
And you know, if you bet twenty five bucks, let's say you bet twenty five bucks on an overwhelming favorite, you might win twenty five plus two dollars, Like you get your twenty five back and then the two. In the case of those free bets, you don't get the steak of the bet bet. You would only get the
two bucks, you're really down twenty three bucks. And I've I made this mistake when I was in New York and like an idiot about these promotions, and a lot of people did as well, where they're like, Okay, if I lose my no sweat or risk free bet, I'm just going to bet it on favorites and have a really high chance of you know, coming back. Even does not work that way.
When sports betting became legalized, I remember states were talking about this, will you know, be an influx of you know, money for the state. Has Now that it's been a few years, has that kind of come to fruition, Like are states actually making money off this too, or is it kind of marginal or do you have any insight on that it's.
Mostly a drop in the bucket, Like it does not solve their budget problems at all. New York is a slight exception just because they get away with taxing online sports betting at fifty one percent, which is way way higher than the rest of the country. And these companies feel like, how could they not operate in New York? You know, it's what the bulls is and where they're baded to just be insane not to, but they're being
taxed through the roof. So New York has generated almost half of all the tax revenue on sports betting in the country.
We should.
Yeah, I'm like a third event.
And for a lot of the country it's it's like, you know, it's a trivial amount of money. And then the other side of that is like they make it sound like it's just found money, like they you know, struck oil or something, but people aren't spending that money on other things, you know, or they don't or they're not investing it, or they have health problems now, or like you know, debt that people need to deal with, and that's a that's a cost on the other end.
So I think people when people start studying that holistic picture of this, it's going to be pretty bleak for that argument.
Yeah, what are some of the other social costs we've seen from this proliferation of sports because I saw I read in an article I think that domestic violence, for example, has increased since twenty eighteen when this was all allowed to happen. Curious about that and like any other negative effects that we've seen.
Yeah, that's study. I wish I remember the College to shout them up, but it was so dark it was I think they looked at with the home football team wins or loses in states with or without legal sports betting, and in places where it's legal, and then the home team loses, domestic violence incidents were demonstrably higher than in places where it's illegal.
Yeah, and I found that that is University of Oregon. They found that when a professional football team has an unexpected loss, intimate partner violence and its home market can increase by ten percent.
While one of the things that I find just so upsetting and scary is the amount of abuse that athletes are getting from enraged gamblers. Now I lead my book off of that, just because to me, it's one of the strongest examples of how things are totally different now. Even if people used to bet, you know, under the table, the fact that they're betting so easily and so much on so many different things is creating a lot of new problems. And the online abuse that they get is
just grotesque and relentless. I remember Jalen Brunson on the Knicks was like, I think this was with the athletic He's like, think of the worst stuff you might think we're hearing, and it's way worse than that. But then it goes way beyond that sort of harassment, where you know athletes have been stocked at their team hotel or at their home.
JB.
Bickerstaff, the Pistons coach, said people were texting his personal cell phone that they knew the identities of his kids and where he lives. The manager of the Padres just resigned last season in part because he was so exhausted from all these death threats. And like there's there've also been people arrested for like really credible death threats to getting athletes when they lost a bet. And I just
think inevitably someone's going to try to kill someone. And I heard that from the former chief security officer of the NFL, who, as he put it's only a matter of time before there's a gambling related murder. That's just super grim to think about. But yeah, when we talk about what would actually have to happen for lawmakers to say, you know, enough is enough, this is way out of control, I think that would be on that list.
Yeah.
I mean, when you think about being a fan of sports, there's like an emotional stake you have in it. But then once that is converted into a financial stake, you can easily see people kind of going down the wrong path. But okay, so we talked about like how this has been affecting athletes and managers. I am curious too about the betters themselves, Like are people we of course know they answer to this question, but are people being responsible
or are they spending money they shouldn't be spending? Like, is there any data about, you know, how how like the better is has been affected?
Yeah, And like the industry always says, you know, oh, the majority of people bet and they have no issue and it's just something they do now. It's like, no different than spending money to go to a movie. I think there's studies. Of course that's true and on a simplistic level, but there's studies that indicate a lot more people are betting more than they wish they were than
you might think. So there was one study that found that a third of people who bet on sports have felt ashamed after the fact that how much money they lost. Oh god, Half of people who bet concede that they're not honest with family and friends about how much they're losing and how often they're betting. Even just like the
amount being lost. I remember DraftKings in one of their quarterly earnings reports, the average customer loses more than one hundred bucks a month, which you know, on average, that's a lot. If you're losing hundred dollars yeah a year, and the amount that you have to bet to lose that much is a ton. So I think it's designed to get you to bet more than you intended. A moment ago, I told you about that executive who crafts
these micro bets and was talking about shading. Let's say someone's okay betting fifty dollars pregame, if they're betting constantly during the game, they might bet ten dollars ten times and then look up and be like, oh, I just bet twice as much as I intended. And this guy was like, yes, exactly, that's the goal. That's what we're going for. And yeah, I mean it's again like, from a business standpoint, it makes total sense, but from a customer safety standpoint, it's problematic.
For sure.
Do you feel like the legalization of sports betting was a mistake.
I think the way they went about it is undoubtedly a mistake, and too often this gets boiled down to like prohibition or legalization with no guardrails, and there's so much in between. It would be pretty hard to defend the manner through which so many states decided to do this.
For one simple reason, among others, is they were often completely oblivious to what could have been learned if you looked at the UK and elsewhere in Europe and Australia and other places that have had sports betting for a while and have had arguments and dealt with the fallout from all the things we've been talking about, you know, misleading ads, excessive ads in general, types of bets that
encourage compulsive behavior, on and on. Those are all tired arguments in a lot of elsewhere in the world, and they've had to learn the hard way that you shouldn't allow that stuff, and they had to reregulate after a while. And from my reporting, it sounds like Americans just paid no attention whatsoever to that when they were writing their laws. It was like, this is this grand American experiment. We're
going to figure things out as we go. And I guess that's pretty typical this country to just be completely arrogant and oblivious that way. But there was so much that was ignored that would have informed these laws in a pretty profound way.
So before we let you go, we earlier were having a very brief debate about whether it would be okay for athletes to bet on themselves to excel, So like, would it be okay for Lebron James, for example, to bet on the Lakers to win, because technically that would only incentivize him to, you know, play better. Just curious your own thoughts that you see any kind of pitfalls with after one hour of talking about how terrible this is.
I mean, the risk would be it's hard to stop at betting on yourself, and then they just start betting on everything, and that's where they get into trouble. But if we're just being like purely intellectual about it, I don't think there's anything wrong with betting on yourself to win if there's no caveats. I'm pretty sure. I hope I don't get this wrong. I'm pretty sure fighters are allowed to bet on themselves to win outright, but they can't bet on like I'm gonna win after the eighth round.
And I remember for the I think it was the Mayweather Jake Paul fight. Mayweather tried to bet On like I'm gonna win in the seventh round, and they were like, absolutely not.
Because he could totally effect he could play with him for six rounds and then knock him out.
Yeah, which I think he did.
All right, Well, thank you so much for joining us, Danny. This was illuminating my pleasure.
Thank you for having me.
All right, we're back on Manny Noah, and we just had a conversation with Danny Funt about the sports gambling world. One takeaway. One thing I found interesting. I would have assumed that sports betting what was actually a big chunk of the gambling industry, but Danny was saying, it's basically a way to get people interested in more classic versions of gambling like roulette and blackjack and craps and all that.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I mean those are obviously more time consuming in a way mm hm. So I can see once you get in there, you're going to be really in there. Versus the sports spending. It's it is relatively easy to dip your toe in.
Yeah, and if you.
Only follow maybe one sport and maybe only one team, maybe you're only doing it a little bit.
That's at first at least, but.
Should think about. I don't know if y'all have gamblers in your life, like family members who like are obsessed with the casino. But people lose a lot of money when they have a casino in a way that would be very hard gambling on your phone to lose, Like people will go and lose thousands of dollars, you know, like spending a day or two in a casino.
You're not going from there and spending ten dollars. Yeah, that's what I did when I went to Atlantic City. But that's me, Yeah, most ready to spend spending country money. So there's probably maybe there's a scale.
It's not as easy you know, to get as many people in the door as a casino, you know, as opposed to your phone, But you're going to people who get in the door big spenders.
They're spending like as if they're ten sports gamblers.
Yeah, exactly.
At the right the thing of like solutions if like, okay, we're too far gone on this, how do we pull back or put in guardrails?
It's like one thing.
It's like, yeah, well, like having to go somewhere in person to bet on sports or anything is a big difference. Then I'm in my basement. You know, my family's upstairs and I'm just watching.
I would literally never be It's like it would change it so much trying to go somewhere to do it. Yeah, that would immediately curb the activity. And I think, yeah, just in terms of like guardrails, you know, ask someone who does enjoy like here and there throwing like the cost of a couple of you know, lattes on a sports.
A vague alcoholic drink day.
That's more accurate in instead of buying like a cocktail, I might throw that on a on the game. I think one way to kind of reel this back a little bit would be to only allow people to bet on the outcome of a game, like.
Who is always simplifying stuff.
Who's gonna win the game? That's the only thing you're allowed to bet on. You can bet as much as you want on that. But this whole thing with like the really intricate, nuanceding, Yeah, that that kind of stuff is what I think get trapped.
So there is a story recently about Russell Westbrook's wife got a email threat saying like I hope you die or something over over someone who's betting on her husband.
That is so terrible. I mean, yeah, you see every day Kevin Durantz on Twitter fighting some guy who needed him to get an extra rebound. The idea that this is so such a big part of your life that you need to go confront the person who has inadvertently lost you money is really bleak.
Damn someone betting on him is respectfully.
He's He's no such thing. As a production of Kaleidoscope Content. Our executive producers are Kate Osborne and Mangesh Hatzekador. The show was created by Manny Fidel, Noah Friedman, and Devin Joseph. The theme and credit songs are by me Manny, and the mixing was done by Steve Bone. Thank you to our guest Danny Funch, the author of Everybody Loses The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling. You can find that
book in the link in our bio. Visit No Such Thing dot Show to subscribe to our newsletter, and if you have feedback for us or a question, our email is Manny Noah Devin at gmail dot com. See you next week.
He's He's no such thing.