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About this Episode
On this week’s edition of Le Show, Harry brings us regular segments like News of A.I., News of the Atom, News of Smart World, Follow the Dollar, The Apologies of the Week, and Truth Social Audio with Donald Trump. He also speaks with journalist and author Danny Funt about his latest book, Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling.
Transcript
Here it is!
From Deep inside your audio device of choice
Your condition just may worsen
Cause you think you're talking to a person
If your chatbot is a shrink
You might just end up in the cling
Best to step back from the prank
Don't let your chatbot be your shrink
Only young people are likely better off texting a random stranger than talking to a chatbot
That's according to a new study research from University of British Columbia
Found that first semester college students who texted a randomly selected fellow first semester student
Every day for two weeks experienced a 9% reduction in feelings of loneliness
The same two weeks of daily messaging with a chatbot reduced loneliness only around 2%
Which turned out to be the same amount as daily one sentence journaling
Research included 300 first semester college students who were either randomly paired with another student
Or put into a discord server with a chatbot running on chat GP2 at T
The students were instructed to have at least one interaction per day in each of the groups
The human-human pairs were instructed to message each other however they wanted
While the researchers instructed the bot to quote
Listen actively and show empathy
And to be a friendly, positive and supportive AI friend to help the student navigate their new college experience
Unquote, the human participants ultimately acted pretty similarly in both types of chat
Sending between eight and ten messages a day in both their human text chains
And their discord conversations with the bot
However, participants who were paired with a human partner reported significantly lower loneliness
And those paired with the chatbot did not
The research looked at college students specifically to try to understand whether large language models could be a scalable tool to help with the isolation
That people can feel when going through a big change
More news of AI citing the need to treat adult users like adults
Open AI chief executive Sam Altman had last year floated the idea of enabling erotic conversation
In its chat GPT and dropping the ban on such x-rated content
Plants park vigorous debate internally over the potential risks
Members of the advisory council of open AI
They have backgrounds and feels like you know your psychology and your cognitive neuroscience
Also expressed strong reservations then open AI dropped a bombshell despite the concerns
It was forging ahead with its erotic plans
When they assembled for a January meeting council members were unanimous and furious
They warned that AI powered erotica could foster unhealthy emotional dependence on chat GPT for users
And that miners could find ways to access sex chats
People said that one council member citing cases where chat GPT users have taken their own lives
After developing intense bonds with the bot claim that open AI risk creating quote
A sexy suicide coach
Unquote is the latest flashpoint in the continuing conversation about how to anticipate the potential positive and negative impacts of AI
In proposing to allow a sexually explicit conversations with its popular chatbot open AI exposed fractures
Over how to balance rapid user growth and digital freedom with safety and child protection
Of those
Earlier this month open AI announced it's going to delay the launch of adult mode
But one issue the company is tackling
It's new age prediction system aimed at keeping miners from having adult theme chats
At one point was misclassifying miners as adults about 12% of the time
That error rate could allow millions of the companies approximately 100 million under 18 users each week into erotic chats
Open AI talked dirty to me
Meta has dumped the metaverse the thing that gave it its name
Horizon worlds its social VAR platform virtual reality is going to be removed from headsets entirely by mid-June
The shutdowns clear a signal yet the metaverse has been quietly unwound
It launched with something called Horizon worlds in late 2021 never found its footing according to courts
Platform never drew more than a few hundred thousand monthly active users not enough for a project that consumed billions of dollars
In fact 80 billion dollars in losses since 2020
Mark Buckerberg is Zuckerberg had promised the metaverse would reach a billion people and generate hundreds of billions in commerce
Pulling back means admitting those projections were wrong meta is now focusing on AI
AI is apparently good for the bottom line of business if your business is crime financial fraud schemes carried out with the help of artificial intelligence
Our four and a half times more profitable than those that aren't so enhanced according to latest estimates from Interpol
The agency said AI greatly boosts both efficiency and effectiveness making each interaction with a fraudster more convincing and all the more likely to continue growing in popularity
Interpol says criminals can now create convincing voice clones with just ten seconds of reference material
Like audio ripped from a social media post and the CEO of Pricewaterhouse Cooper the worldwide accounting firm says there is no room at the corporation for AI skeptics
Telling the financial times indicates anyone who believed they had the opportunity to opt out of AI quote is not going to be here that long
That approach from the CEO comes despite research undertaken by the very same firm published a couple months ago that indicated more than half of businesses using AI saw little or no benefit
Survey of 4,500 business leaders across 95 countries found neither increased revenue nor decreased costs from deploying or using AI tools and services
Deloitte another professional services business found similar results of its state of AI in the enterprise report
It said 74% of organizations wanted their AI initiatives to grow revenue but only one in five had seen results
AI is great. Hello ladies and gentlemen welcome to the show and now news of our friend the Adam
Cleaned save to see to see to see to see to see to see to see
Well here's good news the principle that radiation exposure should be as low as possible to protect human health
As endured of the nuclear regulatory commission for more than half a century the commission is now taking its first steps to end that standard
According to E&E news from political under a policy proposed and it's circulating inside the commission nuclear power plants would no longer be required to keep radiation doses as low as reasonably achievable
The Alara principle low as reasonably achievable instead nuclear power operators and medical workers would need to keep radiation levels under maximum dose limits
Some of which would be it loosened under a draft rule that's according to three people familiar with the thing
The principle has been the subject of fierce debate since it was first put forward in the 1950s and then made into a regulatory standard 20 years later
Many in the nuclear industry argue it has made it more expensive to build and maintain nuclear power plants without enhancing safety
Regulators have defended the principle as appropriately conservative in light of limited data about whether a low dose radiation causes light
You know cancers
Quote we've learned a lot more about the impact of radiation exposure on public health
It's time we reconsider that said the chair of the commission last week
Proposed rule relaxation comes as the Trump administration this is a coincidence pushes to expand nuclear power after decades of slower no growth
The White House has thrown support behind the development of smaller scale advanced reactors corner of the nuclear industry that has attracted Silicon Valley startups
It's all connected in it the administration has set the goal of quadrupling use US nuclear output in like 24 years largely to power energy intensive AI data centers
The commission action comes 10 months after the president they fell in in chief to you and me sign an executive order calling the standard flawed and telling the agency to reconsider reliance on it
The energy secretary signed a memo to remove it from all energy department directives and regulations that only applied to department of energy sites but the NRC's move would apply to nearly the entire US nuclear industry including all 54 nuclear power plants and thousands of medical facilities that use radioactive materials
Of course this move
Pits proponents who see it as a necessary step to accelerate nuclear energy against critics
One that weakening such foundational safeguards is a danger to public health
Sources with knowledge of the NRC proposal granted anonymity said the draft rule would discontinue
ALRA terminology the linear no threshold model and a two million hourly dose limit from NRC regulations
The proposal would further add regulatory mechanisms to enable licensees to exceed the annual radiation dose limits of five
Rams for workers and a hundred milligrams for the public it would increase the maximum dose a caregiver of a medical patient exposed to radiation treatments could get by tenfold
And at a 1960s industrial building by the German Baltic Sea coast special building inside where one of the former nuclear power plants parts of the wall are uneven and pockmarked the result of workers hammering off layers of concrete hunting for radioactive contamination
It's been one of the most difficult buildings to decontaminate and dismantle can explain in explains Kurt Radloff who handles communications for the plant this from Deutschewelle
Lee Soviet era nuclear complex in former East Germany closed down 35 years ago dismantling it was supposed to take about 25 years
25 years it's still nowhere near finished and has become one of the world's most expensive civil nuclear decommissioning projects
Nuclear power as you know has existed for over 70 years out of more than 600 reactors ever built only a third have been closed only 20 have been fully decommissioned
The current life span of reactors 30 to 40 years hundreds are heading into retirement even though decommissioning is costly and complex
Countries in Europe and around the globe are looking to revive the industry to achieve energy independence in the face of the latest energy crisis precipitated by the war in the Persian Gulf
Clean cheap safe to wacky to meet our friend the atom and now ladies and gentlemen news of the smart world will inhabit numerous accounts on the social media platform Instagram
Same owner as the former metaverse those accounts have been publishing glorifying photos of the verimax
And SS officers from the period of national socialism in Germany under what's his name oh yeah Hitler the accompanying texts highlight the individual's bravery courage and strategic skill their participation in war crimes and in the Holocaust goes you know one mentioned
This has been documented in a investigation by that German news agency Deutschewelle the posts reach millions of people around the world many users respond to the photos of the war criminals with approval adding heart and applause emojis any form of critical engagement is absent from these publications
The dissemination of hate symbols generally does not seem to have motivated meta or its platform to flag or remove the corresponding content and accounts
They're too busy making glasses to let you record video of women and how well aside from the $200 billion the Pentagon is requested to you know carry on our little thing
There's this a federal arts commission this week prove the final design for a 24 carat gold commemorative coin bearing the image of the felon and chief
Thing in to help celebrate America's birthday until I fourth vote was without objection it clears the way for the U.S. Mint to begin production on the coin whose size and denomination more or under discussion might not be a gold dollar
The move marks yet another example of circumventing conventional past presidential practices and even the law according to the Associated Press federal law says no living president can appear on U.S. currency
But Megan Sullivan the acting chief of the office of design management at the mint said the Treasury Secretary has the authority to authorize the meeting and issuing of new 24 carat gold coins said a special assistant to the president and deputy director of the obel office of the
executive size of the coin quote I think the larger the better the largest of that circulation I think would be his preference said one of the commissioners I think the president likes big things
Now the apologies of the week last car driver Daniel die was indefinitely suspended this week that's the second known major penalty of his racing career for mocking Indie car driver David Malukas during a recent live stream in the video
Die was on a live stream he was opening trading card packs and recalled speaking with Malukas last month at the Indie car Firestone Grand Prix die said he asked Malukas if he quote races on any ovals
quoting he's like oh gosh yes we race into napless to love any napless and Roger Penske I love Roger love you Roger die said using voices that made inferences about Malukas sexuality as soon as I start doing a David Malukas gay voice I get a gold so let's keep it going
unquote now dies apologize to Malukas and a social media post calling his comments careless quote I chose my words poorly I understand white upset people I'm sorry to anyone who was offended that's not how I want to represent myself I have some close friends in the LG BT key key plus community said who would never want to feel less of themselves because of what I said and that's exactly why I should hold myself
to a higher standard he said conversations with the friends made him recognize that a true friend would know better than to act the way I did unquote die Malukas a 24 year old driver for team Penske often post pictures on social media with a girlfriend and a hospital
is apologizing after recently leaving a patient on an MRI scanner for nearly six hours leading to changes in shift and over procedures incident occurred during the early hours of late February at a top care provider in Wuhan in China
an individual with surname of town reportedly underwent imaging with one attending physician manually marking the procedure is completed at 12 10 a.m. then he rushed on to achieve other tasks the man was still reportedly in the machine remaining immobile because he thought moving might cause him physical harm he remained there until 6 a.m. cleaning staff found him hospital apologize for its handling of the situation on Friday
it charged that the incident was caused by violations of both work rules and the hospitals shift change procedures multiple staff members involved have been suspended the institutions implemented a system wide investigation to prevent future such incidents from occurring so nobody else will be trapped in an MRI for six hours the apologies the week a copyrighted feature of this broadcast
you open your eyes but you can't see the sky
you don't get high from the various dies
best of me into the cylindrical pan
I feel like a mummy getting a tan
is it getting louder or just the same?
the temple is changing with no drummet blame
the dog is a tall type the nurse is a bitch
there's not all over if I even twitch but I'm getting claustrophobic like a pounding tongue
I don't know if I'll ever get out
I'm turning pale white in this prominent night
and some kind that is louder than sight
it's not cute
see if I can relax they're packing your head for you
don't move
don't move
you are way a meadow
can I bring your snack?
don't move
don't move
where'd I go?
I'm riding the tube
let's start the shot
I'm leaving
don't move
hey
I'm leaving
oh
I'm leaving
oh
I'm leaving
oh
I'm leaving
oh
It's buzzing, I'll like it to hang, I'm digging the buzz, enjoying the pain!
Yours and your eyes, but you can't see the sky!
You won't get high from the barrier, dies!
It's not quite music, it's almost violence!
It's not life, it's not life!
Not things for sure, he's done his painfulest silence!
Direct from the situation room, not the one on the stupid scene,
and this is Iran's least favorite present
with a brief addition of true social audio brought to by Trump's shoe polish
for that floor-shime glow, whatever you're wearing.
We've had Maga, make America great again,
and then thanks to the brilliant RFK Jr. Maha, make America healthy again,
and now thanks to me in the great Pete Hague Seth, we have Mawa,
make America war like again.
This war, not really a war, but was stupendously successful war,
is almost over, although in May go on for a while longer.
The unbelievably evil regime in Tehran is on its knees,
and thanks to our brave and ridiculously efficient armed forces,
the best that has ever existed in the universe,
that regime has no knees.
I told you last June we had obliterated a ranch nuclear program.
This month we've given it a total real obliteration,
and what we didn't obliterate, we decimated
our so-called allies have turned out to be what I'm, you know,
being nice, I'm calling what chickens leave in the yard.
We felt them so much, and yet when we spring a surprise excursion on them,
they have the stupidity and the nerve to act surprised.
Of course, we don't need them, we don't need anything or any one.
They know we could obliterate them too if we wanted to,
but of course we don't.
Not yet.
I'm very pleased and grateful that the Fine Arts Commission,
which I pointed to be totally under my control,
has decided to issue maybe the biggest and most beautiful solid gold coin
since like forever.
It will have my face on the front,
and on the back, for the first time in forever,
a picture of the best looking backside any president has ever had,
I wanted to have.
Somewhere on the coin, which will also be huge,
will be these words which I'm so grateful to have written myself,
the great obliterator,
and to the wonderful Japanese Prime Minister,
who I had the privilege of joking with here this week,
I have only three words.
Remember Pearl Bailey.
Thank you for your attention to this matter, and stay loyal.
True social audio is also brought to you by Trump Pencils.
You wouldn't believe how sharp they are, so long.
I'm out of town and the track loves me.
It don't look like a good thing.
Your horse will jump in when we pack a gun while
it don't look like a sure thing.
You must be crazy to gamble us with.
Because our home is broken.
You ran away.
You ran away.
You ran away from me.
But I must be crazy to gamble on you.
You ran away from me.
You ran away from me.
But I must be crazy to gamble on you.
We are experiencing, ladies and gentlemen,
a cultural change which it could be argued
is the most sudden and drastic since the end of prohibition.
And that would be the transition from gambling
being illegal in most, if not all, parts of the United States
to it being absolutely ubiquitous to anywhere
that there may be a phone.
And my guest today has written a splendid book on the subject
called Everybody Loses.
He most recently was a sports writer for the Washington Post.
But that ain't there no more as we say in New Orleans.
But he's written this, as I say, a splendid book.
And he's my guest today, Danny Font.
Danny, welcome to the show.
Thank you, my pleasure.
Let me start with a story that made some big news this very week
about Polymarket, a prediction market outfit,
which allows people to bet on everything.
And the story is, as I understand it,
that a couple of people threatened a newspaper reporter
in Israel who reported on either the status of an attack
or a lack of attack on Iranian target.
And they threatened his life because his reporting contradicted
their bet.
Have you followed that story?
I have.
It seems like there's a bizarre and frightening development
with these prediction markets on a no-most daily basis.
Would that one, I think, what's noteworthy is,
when you allow gambling, which is really what this is,
on so many things outside of sports,
all these current events from the Oscars to Wars
to the weather in different cities,
you have to decide who's going to determine the winners and losers
because we know who wins a ballgame,
but pinpointing what exactly happened
in one of these markets where you're betting on more exotic things
can be an imperfect science.
And sometimes it comes down to journalists
and what they conclude.
So, yeah, it's just one of many things that seems very difficult
to regulate in police and scary in some respects.
Okay, well, let's get back to the beginning.
Your book begins with a period of time
when gambling was almost universally illegal in this country.
And one of the reasons for it was the objections
of the religious community.
Talk a little about that side of things.
So, as you and your listeners likely know,
a lot of the people who settled the colonies
in what became the United States were religious refugees.
So, they brought with them this Puritan tradition
that looked very critically on gambling.
At the same time, there was a remarkable amount of gambling
in Louisiana and across the colonies from the beginning.
You know, people were betting on horse races in the 1600s on Long Island.
There were reports of cock fights and bear fights and boxing matches
and everything you could think of was fodder for gambling.
And yet, there was this tension with religion.
And that's why a number of states banned gambling ultimately
saying, you know, this is a vice that prays on people
is a road to addiction and conflicts with religious teachings,
not just in Christianity, but Judaism, Islam,
and a number of other faiths.
So, there's been this tension in the United States
for centuries of a culture that's really curious about gambling
on all sorts of things, especially sports,
and faith tradition that is wary of them.
Probably the incident that most people are aware of
where gambling kind of took a space that was reserved for fair play
and almost destroyed it was the 1919 Black Sox scandal.
Tell us a little about that.
So you might have seen Eight Men Out or read the book
or Field of Dreams also deals with the Black Sox.
This was eight players on the Chicago White Sox
who colluded with gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series.
It was such an existential threat to baseball
and really all of sports that baseball established the office
of the commissioner explicitly with the assignment
to read the game of gambling because it had infected the game.
It was in the stands, not just fixing games,
but there was just a huge culture of gambling on baseball
and because it had tarnished the most important series
in sports, it was a real existential threat to the game.
But what I had found interesting was there was a lot of gambling
on baseball from the very beginning.
You read about in the 1850s and 60s,
people betting on baseball constantly,
so much so that the New York Times in the 1870s said
that paper would have a hard time calling baseball
the National Pass time because back then
it was essentially a contrivance for gambling.
So it was something that baseball was always dealing with,
but when it ruined the outcome of the World Series at a time
when business was booming for baseball
and games were setting records for attendance
and Babe Ruth was about to come on the scene.
It was something that the owners of the teams recognized
they had to do something about.
Now, all these people who were betting on sports,
where were they placing their bets with whom?
Through street buckies.
For many years, the mob was behind bookmaking.
There's also certain ethnic groups that have a long history.
As a Jew, I'm not embarrassed to say there's a lot of Jewish bookmakers
over the years, a lot of Greeks who were big in the bookmaking business.
Yeah, it wasn't too hard to find a illegal book
you'd take your bets in a lot of the country.
And yet, it was something you had to pursue.
If you owed them money, you could get in a lot of trouble.
And because it was such a big part of the mob's business,
that's why in the 1950s and the 1960s,
the federal government got involved with the Kennedy administration
passing the Wire Act, which made it a crime
to conduct the business of bookmaking across state lines.
They also made it a federal crime to fix a sporting event.
It was mainly because they recognized that the mafia was behind it
and they saw the mafia as a major issue of nationwide.
So at one point, gambling becomes legal
in one part of the United States, Las Vegas.
How did that happen?
So gambling took off in Nevada, I believe, in the 1940s
and pretty soon after that sports betting was available.
The mob, of course, as we've seen in the Godfather
and Goodfellas and other movies was behind the rise of Nevada,
but eventually they had people like Howard Hughes pouring in money
so it had a veneer of legitimacy.
But really, for a long time, sports betting
was an amenity at Nevada casinos.
It was not the main draw.
You could even compare it to all you can eat buffets
or other things that pull people in through the front door
and then hopefully they mosey over to the crap stables
and the slot machines where casinos really make their money.
So you could bet on sports since the middle of the last century
but it was not a huge deal as far as the business of casinos was concerned.
When I've been to Las Vegas and I've done so on a few occasions,
I've seen the growth in not only of the hotels
but within the hotels of the sports book section of the hotels.
When did that become just much, much bigger?
There's always been a federal excise tax on sports betting
but it was so steep for a while.
It really prevented bookmakers who were doing it legally in paying taxes
from actually turning a profit because traditionally,
this was a very narrow margin business.
You might make $5 for every $100, your customer's wager.
So if you're paying a steep federal tax,
that's going to eat into that margin pretty quickly.
But I would say around the 1980s,
the business of bookmaking took off.
Part of that was a clever bookie at Caesar's Palace invented the prop bet
which is betting on games within the game,
things like how many touchdowns a quarterback will throw,
how many home runs a player might hit.
All of that created a whole new variety of sports wagering.
They also digitized betting so they were able to log their bets on computers
as opposed to scribbling it down on pieces of paper that was great for business.
So I'd say since the 80s sports betting did become a big attraction in Nevada.
But it was limited in Nevada until recently, more recently,
and your book Spotlight,
something that I never knew anything about,
which is there were these fantasy sports competitions online starting,
I guess, in the 1990s.
And they were, I guess, season long events.
And all of a sudden they turned into daily events, daily competitions.
Tell me about that.
Yes, so fantasy sports actually was invented in the 1960s,
strangely enough by the owner of one of the NFL teams, the Oakland Raiders.
And they realized that it would be a lot of fun to assemble the imaginary lineups of players
from all sorts of different teams.
And then based on how they performed,
you would tally up their stats and have a point systems.
You'd have winners and losers in your leagues.
And fantasy sports became not just a big business,
but a real motivation for people to take interest in all sorts of games
that they otherwise didn't care about.
And the leagues came around on that, especially major league baseball.
And the NFL, which saw fantasy sports,
is really boosting their TV audience and attracting young people to be fans.
But then in the mid 2010s,
Fandall and Draftkins in particular were two startups that put a spin on fantasy sports,
where they said,
the main fun is putting together that your roster of players
and then watching them play week after week can get a little tedious.
Why not make that all you do is putting together your lineups?
And so they shrunk it from a season long activity to a week long
or even a daily, hence the name,
daily fantasy sports.
And in that situation,
when you're doing it on such a condensed timeline,
money was a big draw, maybe the main draw,
because you'd have entry fees to play in a daily fantasy tournament.
And then the hope of winning a lot of money was what made people participate in this.
So daily fantasy was in many ways the predecessor to legal sports gambling.
And one thing I'll point out here is around this time,
the Super Bowl came into Orleans in 2013.
And I think it's just such a useful way of highlighting how quickly
the league's posture on gambling changed,
because what I heard was during that 2013 Super Bowl,
the NFL issued a warning that none of its employees were,
they were prohibited from setting foot in a casino.
And then you fast forward to about a decade later
when the Super Bowl came back to New Orleans.
And now the stadium is called Caesar's Super Dome after the gambling company Caesars.
And you've got the Caesars logo on Blackjack tables at Caesars, Casinos.
So it couldn't be more night and day barely a decade's time.
Yeah, so that's really the fascinating part of all this is the speed
with which this change has happened.
As I say, it's a comparable only, I think,
an American history to prohibition.
But how did, and I think it comes as news to most of us,
that draft Kings and Fand will go back that far,
but how did the transition from daily fantasy to online sports betting happen?
The simple story is that the Supreme Court in 2018 struck down a federal ban
on bookmaking outside of Nevada,
that had been the law since 1992,
and that opened the door for Louisiana in 37 other states
to eventually pass bills legalizing sports betting.
The more nuanced story that I get a new in my book
and I'll try to give you the quick version here is,
even before that decision,
the leagues had been meeting privately with representatives
of the gambling industry,
and they explained in those meetings how, yeah,
they would make a lot of money,
but really the thing that got the leads attention was,
this would turbocharge their TV audience,
because the gambling industry had commissioned studies that demonstrated
that gamblers watch way more sports than the average fan.
More than twice as many games,
they also watched to the ends of blowouts to see how their bets lay out
when most people have changed the channel or moved on with their day,
because the game has long since been decided,
and that is what I've learned convinced the leagues to abandon,
basically a century of opposition to gambling
and opposition on the most serious terms possible,
calling it an evil and the deadliest thing that could happen to sports.
After a while, they said, you know,
forget all that we're going to become the biggest proponents
for legalization as quickly as possible.
And you report that not only are the leagues now tolerant
or approving of gambling,
but they're in bed with the gambling industry.
They make billions of dollars off it,
not just through partnerships.
I brought up Caesars by the way I learned that Caesars pays the NFL
about $50 million every year to be an official sponsor of the league.
Wow.
And then multiply that by all the other sports books and all the other leagues,
and every team has official betting partners.
That adds up to a lot of money,
but the leagues also profit from selling,
it sounds ridiculous,
but they're official data,
which is basically games, statistics.
They sell to these sports books because you need official stats
to determine the outcomes of bets.
That is a big money maker.
And then indirectly,
the fact that it's made their TV audience so much bigger.
And you hear about these multi-billion dollar deals
that the league strike with TV networks
and now streamers for the right to show their games.
I think gambling has played a big part
in increasing the value of those contracts.
So I think it's safe to say that the NFL and the other leagues
are making billions off legalization.
But they're also dealing with a lot of real consequences of that
and downside.
It's because it's corrupting games.
It's making more people addicted than ever.
Some fans are fed up with losing so much money gambling
and that becomes a turn-off eventually.
A number of other things.
So it's a real trade-off
and the leagues are having to reckon with that now.
Are you talking the book a little bit about pro athletes
who now have an after-career
after they leave the sport,
becoming shall we say ambassadors for online sports books?
No doubt.
So many of them.
And also some who are still playing,
which you thought they wouldn't allow that
and then there were some work around.
So you've got LeBron James
and practically every draft king said.
Deilo Neal, Derek Jeter,
Peyton and Eli Manning.
Gosh, I could spend an hour rattling off those names.
You've also got a list of movie stars.
Jamie Foxx, John Hamm, Halley Berry.
That has such a big effect in terms of normalizing gambling.
And I think I heard from a couple of lawyers
who were very influential in exposing predatory tactics
that the tobacco industry used, especially targeting kids.
At one parallel they draw between that
and what's happening with sports betting
is the use of celebrities
and just beloved figures in popular culture
to make this seem safe and harmless
and like the cool thing to do.
And I think they have a point.
So many TV shows used to be brought to you
by tobacco companies.
And now so many sporting events
are sponsored by sports betting companies
and they've got these heroes pitching gambling
to the masses.
So I think that has a profound consequence.
And when we see such an alarming rise in youth gambling,
I think that's a big part of it.
We see at the end of every gambling commercial
that little tiny message at the bottom of the screen
that's there for not enough time to read it.
But gambling problem, call blah, blah, blah.
Has the rates of people calling those numbers
increased drastically recently?
No doubt, by several multiples.
The thing that worries me the most
maybe is I live in North Carolina,
half of the calls to our state's problem gambling hotline
now come from parents
who are so worried about their kids
being suddenly obsessed with gambling.
You know, the addiction rate is alarming
and the rule of thumb had been
that about 1% of Americans were susceptible to a gambling problem.
And now I hear health experts saying
that could be as high as 6% or 8%.
But what I find is that way more people
than have a bona fide addiction
are betting more than they wish they were
or spending more time on this than they hoped.
And I heard a lot of people inside these companies say
that's what they're seeing.
And that's got them worried.
People who work at the sportsbooks.
There was an executive at a sportsbook
who told me when you think about it,
his job is basically to bleed customers dry.
I heard from a responsible gaming official
at one of the top sportsbooks in the country say,
there are such powerful disincentives inside these companies
to look out for customers best interest
because doing so would cost these gambling operators money
that as they put it,
anything beyond the lowest common denominator
of consumer protections is seen as a competitive disadvantage.
I even heard from the founding CEO of Fandall,
a guy named Nigel Eccles,
who said, they're advertising is untruthful
because they're selling that you can win and you can't.
And here maybe the most influential person in America
as far as the spread of sports betting
say that the advertising of this product
is deceptive.
Really set off alarm bells in my head
and hopefully gets people thinking
because again, just hearing, you know,
you might have expected health experts
or other people with an outside view of this
being worried about how this is going.
The fact that I heard so many people
inside major sports betting operations say
they themselves are concerned about
this industry getting out of control
and taking advantage of people and praying on
some of the most vulnerable customers
that I think is quite concerning.
On the subject of deceptive advertising
you spent a little bit of time in the book
on something called risk-free bets?
Yeah, that was one of the main ways
that sports books seduced new customers
across the country by dangling
what they called risk-free bets.
They would say, sign up and we'll give you
a thousand dollar risk-free bet
or sometimes even more money than that.
And to me, or I'd guess you and your listeners,
risk-free means I don't have any risk of losing that money.
Yeah.
And yet it was such a rude awakening
for people to realize, no, in fact,
you could lose every penny.
That thousand dollar risk-free bet
could cost you a thousand bucks
if you were unlucky.
And some people said, you know,
how could this be?
That's fundamentally unfair.
And they persuaded states to acknowledge that.
But I would guess millions of people
fell for those deceptive ads and promotions.
And it's the reason why they signed up.
And the trick is you can get people
to sign up for a sports book using
deceptive tactics like that.
But once they do sign up and get a taste
for this product,
it's very hard for them to quit.
So they were able to use that sort of misleading promotion
to make this something
that millions of Americans now do.
And I just find that so telling
that one of the main arguments for legalization
was this would take something
that's happening illegally
and allow people to do it fairly
and get treated honestly
and get paid when they win
and all these sort of consumer protections
you would hope for.
And by and large,
a lot of that hasn't been the case.
People are still getting taken advantage
of left and right.
Well, wouldn't that outcome
necessarily depend on regulation?
It would.
But what I reported my book is that
the industry was so influential
at getting states to pass bills
that were written by the industry.
And as favorable as could be,
these states also rushed to set up regulations
and put people in charge
who knew little to nothing
about the ins and outs of sports betting.
There's some pretty laughable stories
in my book of just how clueless
certain regulators were
when it came to making sense
of online sports betting
and how to officiate disputes
between customers and these companies.
And as a result,
the industry has just been able to barrel ahead
and do whatever they want.
And I heard one person in particular
who's a very successful gambling entrepreneur
in Britain where they've had legal sports betting
a lot longer than they have in the US.
He's basically,
these companies will do whatever they can
until they're told to stop.
You might say they'll extract every last dollar
from their customers
by any means necessary
until lawmakers tell them not to.
And so the idea in the US has been
we can trust these companies to self-police.
And if you read my book,
I think you'll find that's laughable.
And that's just the furthest thing from the truth.
So if we want any sort of consumer protections
or any real guardrails
so that customers can do this safely,
it's going to take a lot more action
from states and maybe even Congress.
You know, I've observed two friends
that one characteristic of American society and culture
is that in many ways we're on a pendulum
and we go from,
oh no, no, no, no.
Marijuana is totally illegal too.
Here's your neighborhood dispensary
and gambling has sort of been another example of that.
And I'm going to ask you for something
that's probably not in your wheelhouse
but any idea of how long it's going to take
before the pendulum swings back
on regarding all of this.
I've been thinking about that
and it has swung back in other countries.
I mentioned the UK,
but across Europe, Australia.
A lot of places in the world have had online sports betting
longer than we have.
And so they've had more time to come to terms
with some of the dangers,
especially when you leave it to these operators
to self-police.
And so they have had a wave
of what they sometimes call re-regulation
where they say, okay, we need to raise taxes,
we need to limit advertising,
we need to restrict the types of bets,
we definitely need to restrict the types of promotions
that can be so misleading
and get people to sign up
because they're tricked in a doing so.
I think all of that could be possible in the US.
The question is just what would it take
because unfortunately in talking to experts
in the US and abroad,
it sounds like things might have to get really bad
for people to recognize, okay,
we must do something about this.
And I heard three hypotheticals
of what that might involve,
a rash of suicides among people with gambling addiction,
which we've seen in the UK,
potentially an enraged gambler murdering an athlete
because they cost them money.
That's far fetched.
We see so many death threats now,
targeting athletes from crazed gamblers
who've lost money and won an exact revenge.
And then the third possibility
was a major match fixing scandal,
a modern version of the 1919 World Series.
And I spoke with one expert
who threw out those possibilities
and he said, he's rooting for the match fixing scandal
because that wouldn't involve people dying.
I'm forced to agree,
but I think they're all pretty grim.
And unfortunately, that might be what it takes.
You mentioned Australia.
I spent some time down there
and there was so much controversy
about the pokies as they call them,
the poker machines that were basically drawing in.
These were not online at the time,
but they were just in every establishment,
every gas station, every drugstore,
and people becoming absolutely obsessed
with playing the pokies.
So it's a very powerful thing we're talking about here.
The book is full of great reporting.
And you talk to so many gamblers
and people on all sides of the gambling industry
for a really great insight into how they think
and how they operate.
It's really a fascinating book.
It's called Everybody Losers.
I really thank you for doing it
and thank you for talking with us today, Dan.
Hey, my pleasure.
Thanks for having me on.
A tip of the Lesho Shappos to the San Diego
and Hawaii desks,
thanks as always to Pam Holstead and Thomas Walsh.
You can follow me if you so desire at substack.com.
Lesho comes to you from century of progress,
productions, and originates
through the facilities of WWW and on New Orleans,
flagship station of the changes easy radio network,
so long from the Crescent City.
Thank you.
