How Sports Gambling Apps Are Rotting Society

In a live-to-tape recording in Ed Zitron's living room, Wide Left writer Arif Hasan and Western Kabuki Host Caleb Wilson explain in detail the cultural power of sports, and how software has been used to poison every corner of sports with predatory gambling schemes. The Athletic story on sports gambling: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5777632/2024/10/14/sports-betting-addiction-problem-fans/ Wide Left article about sports gambling: https://www.wideleft.football/p/has-legalized-gambling-poisoned-the Arif Hasan: https://bsky.app/profile/arif.bsky.social https://x.com/ArifHasanNFL Wide Left: https://www.wideleft.football Caleb Wilson: https://bsky.app/profile/birdrespecter.bsky.social Western Kabuki: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/western-kabuki/id1647062210 The 60 Minute Drill Podcast (Ed, Arif and Caleb’s NFL podcast): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/60-minute-drill/id1768225605 --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 2:54Ed Zitron?

  Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I am your host, Ed Zitron.

• 3:09Ed Zitron?

  We are sitting in my living room and we're going to talk about sports gambling today. Now, sports gambling, we're focusing on the US because this is a US-focused 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 60 Minute Drill, and I'm joined today by my co-hosts on that podcast. To my left is Arif Hasan of Wide Left. Hello. And to my right is Caleb Wilson of Western Kabuki.

• 3:46Speaker 04

  Happy to be here.

• 3:47Ed Zitron?

  Okay. So the reason I wanted to focus on this is because those are, 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 a sports fan, we're actually really going to 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 uninitiated, 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, and Arif, 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 set it up?

• 4:32Speaker 04

  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-2016, you know, you couldn't really...

• 4:46Speaker 04

  Go on your phone and gamble really quickly unless you knew a couple of workarounds. There's exceptions to every rule, but for the most part, it wasn't normalized to be able to just very quickly bet on a line.

• 4:57Ed Zitron?

  And now you can just bet money because you have an iPhone and a debit card?

• 5:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, and well, some connect directly to your bank account.

• 5:05Ed Zitron?

  Oh, good.

• 5:06Speaker 04

  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, $25, bet that $25, lose that $25 and then do it again all in the span of like five seconds.

• 5:38Ed Zitron?

  And is there like age verification? Is there any efforts to do like anything to stop people underage?

• 5:45Speaker 04

  For gambling apps, there are. For fantasy apps, there typically are, but not universally.

• 5:51Ed Zitron?

  What is the separation between a gambling and a fantasy app?

• 5:53Speaker 04

  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.

• 6:10Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 6:11Speaker 04

  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 225 yards in this week's game.

• 6:27Ed Zitron?

  And that's the quarterback from Kansas City, lead quarterback, the guy who throws the ball, guy catches the ball for him, 200 yards would be the completed.

• 6:35Speaker 04

  Yes, the completed yardage of those successful passes. And so, you know, this fantasy app will be like, hey, do you think it's more than or less than that? And you go, well, I think he's very good, so I'll go more than. And then you can't actually place a bet on that exactly, otherwise that would be gambling. So you have to pair it with a. Another pick, they call them picks and not 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 190 yards.

• 7:10Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 7:11Speaker 04

  And so you combine those two and maybe three, four, five, however, right? And that is your pick 'em for that week. And you submit it, you put like, let's say I'll put $20 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, it's like they're flex picks or all in.

• 7:34Ed Zitron?

  And you're just betting on what a player might do effectively.

• 7:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, and you can do that in gambling. Yeah, with real money.

• 7:39Ed Zitron?

  That's good.

• 7:40Speaker 04

  And so the fantasy distinction is that you cannot pick multiple players on the same team without adding another player on a different team.

• 7:48Ed Zitron?

  Oh, so they find a way to make it?

• 7:50Speaker 04

  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, or sorry, you can't pick one single outcome.

• 8:01Ed Zitron?

  Right, and this is all they're trying to pretend it's skill-based then?

• 8:05Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 8:05Ed Zitron?

  Very cool. So, one of the things I wanted to get into as well is why people give a shit about this? So, for the, we have a lot of non-sports 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 why 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 gambling world, Caleb?

• 8:37Speaker 06

  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 entertainment as opposed to something like, you know, reading a book or watching a TV show. These are predominantly 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 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.

• 9:14Ed Zitron?

  And tailgating for the European listeners is actually kind of a fun thing where you just outside the stadium, drink a bunch and eat a bunch.

• 9:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, people have set up like grills and smokers.

• 9:24Ed Zitron?

  And it's very communal, like when I

• 9:26Speaker 06

  There's no money involved. It's like, people just do this. They spend thousands of dollars of their own money just to build social bonds and to

• 9:33Ed Zitron?

  And deadly serious. So when I went to Penn State in 2005, I remember just walking around kind of confused.

• 9:39Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 9:40Ed Zitron?

  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. And 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 back to like watching like

• 10:04Speaker 04

  I'm done with this task.

• 10:05Ed Zitron?

  They just gave this random person food. But I like the tailgating example because it's the same thing in like a bar. It's like a thing you all get upset about together.

• 10:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 10:13Speaker 04

  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 I, that kind of I 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 era, people don't

• 10:33Speaker 06

  That's kind of gone.

• 10:34Speaker 04

  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 or whatever, you are experiencing it with an online community in real time reacting to the same thing.

• 10:49Speaker 06

  Right. 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, Seahawks fan, whatever they am. And then immediately, any tension involved in a professional interaction is reduced. This is a person that I can have a normal, human conversation with that I might not otherwise be able to have.

• 11:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. I, I think a lot of our social bonds are defined and identified in ways that

• 11:24Speaker 04

  Um, this is gonna sound so like basic, but like separate people, right? And it's not separate as in so division, but um, as in, you know, you either identify with this or you don't, right? Um, is that Poki?

• 11:37Ed Zitron?

  Yes, that you are now, we are also joined by Poki, one of my Bengal cats.

• 11:42Speaker 04

  Very adorable.

• 11:43Ed Zitron?

  She's beautiful.

• 11:44Speaker 04

  Also mischievous.

• 11:45Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yes.

• 11:45Speaker 04

  Um, but yeah, like a lot of our, our, our social bonds are through these group identities, but the identities are generally pretty um, 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 either kind of like an all or nothing thing. And a lot of our um, 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.

• 12:30Speaker 04

  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 football, you know, whatever, right? And you can get broader and broader and it creates something you'd always have a level of conversation about, but you always immediately, you know where the other person is coming from.

• 12:55Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 12:56Speaker 04

  Which is invaluable, I think, in a lot of social interactions.

• 12:57Ed Zitron?

  And I would say, like, I got into sports pretty much because of the internet. Casey Kagawa, the, the fifth Beatle of Better Offline. Uh, he's talked to him 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 wanted to go to Penn State football. I was made to, but I learned 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.

• 13:30Speaker 04

  Outstanding channel.

• 13:31Ed Zitron?

  Incredible channel.

• 13:34Speaker 04

  I don't even like baseball. I like that channel.

• 13:35Ed Zitron?

  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 at 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 have, 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.

• 14:11Speaker 04

  Eighties, yeah.

• 14:11Ed Zitron?

  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 can thus connect with other people. I mean, the Reddit communities can be very funny or they can be terrible.

• 14:30Speaker 06

  Some variants.

• 14:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:31Ed Zitron?

  But I, I think it's something that I love trying to explain sports to people that don't watch them or like them or don't understand them, which leads to 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.

• 14:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 14:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:49Speaker 06

  Well, there are like, um, say you're listening to this and you're cynical and that doesn't, that has not sold you on this. There are still like just utilitarian social reasons that sports are important to. 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, in, in sports or other, you know, team based activities. But beyond that, um, you know, sports is like the front lines always for social issues.

• 15:23Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 15:24Speaker 06

  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.

• 15:49Ed Zitron?

  Right. And it's.

• 15:52Ed Zitron?

  And I think it makes sports important to people on a level that things like the computer will never be, though I personally have proven 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 Casey 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 games, so, yeah.

• 16:35Ed Zitron?

  That is something that I will always have with one of my best friends, who I love so much, and I feel like sports is singularly unique with that.

• 16:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, especially as Caleb 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 Caleb's point about like social progress and stuff like that, I think people have an understanding of like, these are historic 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 1947.

• 17:21Ed Zitron?

  And what was the integration of baseball, just to...

• 17:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, so for a long time in baseball, only, especially at the professional level, but for most of the minor leagues...

• 17:30Ed Zitron?

  I'm also gonna say, I'm gonna guess you're gonna say a word beginning with N at some point with this, and I want to be very clear that when Arif says this, he is referring to a specific thing.

• 17:40Speaker 04

  Yes, we'll get there in a second.

• 17:43Ed Zitron?

  I just wanted a real warning before that didn't surprise anyone.

• 17:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, but there was a color barrier in Major League Baseball that prevented people of color, but specifically black people, from playing baseball.

• 17:59Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 18:00Speaker 04

  This was enforced mostly, from my understanding, without a rule, it was just everyone had an understanding...

• 18:08Ed Zitron?

  Just everyone agreed?

• 18:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, everyone just kind of agreed, we won't be employing, and so, you know, with a lot of talented black baseball players that were playing in the Negro leagues. Um, in which there's a Negro League Museum and uh, baseball reference and a couple of other statistical organizations have finally started recognizing those as official professional statistics.

• 18:27Ed Zitron?

  Right, and they did a realignment of all the stats, so like, there's two black players who are better than Ty Cobb, who was one of the most racist men to walk the earth.

• 18:34Speaker 04

  It's beautiful.

• 18:35Ed Zitron?

  It's wonderful.

• 18:36Speaker 04

  Um, but yeah, so Jackie Robinson spearheaded the integration of Major League Baseball in nineteen forty-seven, which is-

• 18:42Ed Zitron?

  And how did he do that? Just, pardon, did he like, like, what did he do to spear-

• 18:47Speaker 04

  Well, he started at first base, but yeah, I mean-

• 18:49Ed Zitron?

  Oh, he was just that good?

• 18:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, I mean, he was an outstanding player. He's one of the best players we've ever seen, statistically, you know, whatever. Um, but no, I mean, uh, I think was it, was it, it was the Kansas City Monarchs and then it was the, uh, was it the Dodgers? Are we, yeah, it was the Brooklyn Dodgers, yeah. Um, is, you mentioned the Dodgers and the Dodgers came into my mind, like, am I remembering that just because, no, it was the Brooklyn Dodgers. Um, so the Brooklyn Dodgers, um, decided, like, hey, you know, I'll be, like, I'm, I'm not a historian on this particular topic, but the Brooklyn Dodgers decided that this would be, uh, the time to bring in a black baseball player.

• 19:27Ed Zitron?

  And so capitalism-

• 19:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, that definitely was a big part of it, and there's a whole history about, you know, Jackie Robinson's approach. They, they were very particular about the player they selected. We don't need to get into that.

• 19:39Ed Zitron?

  Nevertheless, though-

• 19:40Speaker 04

  It was twenty years prior to, um, 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 understand the mainstream in sporting arenas.

• 20:00Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 20:01Speaker 04

  And I think that a lot of people always attempt to, um, disaggregate 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, um, can be, like, canarys in the coal mine for social change.

• 20:20Ed Zitron?

  Kind of feels like that's where the whole horrifying attack on trans athletes is really, is really make it like-

• 20:26Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 20:27Ed Zitron?

  And by the way, if you agree that trans athletes shouldn't be in sports, I have another idea for you. So if you follow my last instructions, 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.

• 20:59Speaker 04

  Well, there's, there's one more.

• 21:00Ed Zitron?

  Oh, no, no, sorry, sorry. Now that I've threatened some people, please, continue.

• 21:05Speaker 04

  No, one of the things that really appeals to me about sports is that it is one of the ultimate storytelling art forms.

• 21:13Speaker 04

  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, oomph 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 the book is headed in.

• 21:45Ed Zitron?

  Even some, even some modern writing, kind of like, is affected by fandoms.

• 21:49Speaker 04

  Right, exactly. And, not that like, tropes are bad, tropes 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.

• 22:01Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 22:02Speaker 04

  Just because you're familiar with the tropes, right? And tropes are unavoidable in writings, it's 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 gonna be. And so when you see someone, you know, kind of struggle through a lot, switch 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, some of the best stories are, the guy made the team.

• 22:32Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 22:32Speaker 04

  Like, it's like, there are some really outstanding stories where it's like, you know, this person, you know, uh, went to a junior college because he didn't have the grades to make it because of the, the system he grew up in just didn't give him access to the resources he needs.

• 22:46Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 22:46Speaker 04

  Get good grades, goes to junior college, gets good grades there, transfers to, you know, a Division II school. And a Division II 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 there are barely even any athletic scholarships at all. And you know, they, 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 256 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.

• 23:30Ed Zitron?

  So then making it to a professional team is extremely unlikely.

• 23:33Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so they make what's called the 90 man roster and from the 90 man roster, they cut down to the 53 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 the supplementary practice squad. And then the next year, he gets another opportunity to potentially make the team and he makes the team. And that's the whole story and it rules.

• 23:53Speaker 06

  Can I interject with my favorite example of that?

• 23:56Speaker 04

  Please, please.

• 23:57Ed Zitron?

  Just make sure it's like really simple for

• 23:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 24:00Ed Zitron?

  For the non-sports people.

• 24:01Speaker 06

  The Griffin brothers in Seattle.

• 24:02Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 24:03Speaker 06

  Twin brothers.

• 24:04Speaker 04

  Shaquem and Shaquille.

• 24:04Speaker 06

  Yes. The Shaquem is, he's disabled, he doesn't have, he doesn't have a hand, a right hand with a physical disability, still makes the roster, twin brothers, both on the Seahawks. Wonderful story.

• 24:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. And when, when Shaquille was deciding which college to, because they both went to UCF, right?

• 24:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 24:23Speaker 04

  Deciding which

• 24:23Speaker 06

  I think so.

• 24:24Speaker 04

  Yeah. Deciding which college to go to, he said, you have to offer my twin brother Shaquem, 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.

• 24:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 24:45Speaker 04

  It's fantastic.

• 24:46Speaker 06

  As they should.

• 24:46Speaker 04

  Yeah. But like, you know, these are several hundreds of thousands of dollars potentially that these big programs can offer. And he said, no, I'm playing with my brother.

• 24:54Speaker 06

  That's so cool.

• 24:56Speaker 04

  And UCF was like, yeah, we'll play both of them. And Shaquem was a really good player at the college level too. So like, it turned out to be a great invite, but that wasn't the reason. It was because the team wanted to respect. Shaquille and they're like, well, if there's a, there's a spot for Shaquille 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. I'm not going to get into that. That has nothing to do with his hand.

• 25:16Speaker 06

  Right.

• 25:17Speaker 04

  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, um, you know, they're playing him in coverage and the quarterbacks are doing their job. It feels cruel, but you gotta 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'd normally get. And, um, you know, he impresses the scouts enough that he ends up making the Seahawks with his brother Shaquille. It's outstanding.

• 25:54Speaker 06

  This might be a little bit, uh, into the weeds, but he worked really well with Seattle's scheme because of that kind of hybrid linebacker type.

• 25:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. It's a, it's a, it's a body type that, because in football, you've 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.

• 26:17Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 26:18Speaker 04

  That would encourage that kind of thing, to find the right team that had, uh, basically a position available for the type of football that he played. And it emerges as this really wonderful story where.

• 26:28Speaker 06

  To be clear, by the way, neither of them are still on Seattle. Um, Shaquille is still playing. Was he?

• 26:34Speaker 04

  He just played for the Vikings. Uh, his contract just ran out, so we'll see.

• 26:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, we'll see where he goes. 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.

• 26:48Ed Zitron?

  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.

• 26:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:59Ed Zitron?

  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, than odds. So.

• 27:18Ed Zitron?

  Caleb, you have, and Arif, 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.

• 27:33Speaker 06

  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 Arif, 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.

• 27:55Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 27:56Speaker 06

  And up until, I think it was yesterday, when crypto.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, 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.

• 28:16Speaker 04

  They, they, 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 it. But 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.

• 28:43Ed Zitron?

  And on a real, and on a real basic level, the way they kind of trick you into believing you have more control is by saying, oh, you would pick a team. So in fact, we've kind of gone over this, but not, not hard to reaffirm it, where 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?

• 29:10Speaker 04

  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 that these ads are kind of...

• 29:25Speaker 04

  Marketing the concept of gaming on sports or whatever is just game day betting and sometimes even live betting in games.

• 29:33Ed Zitron?

  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 there are ones that you bet on whether you have chosen the correct amount of boys, like the correct guys that will score the most points.

• 29:47Speaker 04

  Well, again, I think they're both gambling.

• 29:49Ed Zitron?

  They are both gambling. I'm just trying to delineate which one is the most like, which is the one that has penetrated so far like.

• 29:56Speaker 04

  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. And I think most consumers that are just watching sports.

• 30:18Speaker 06

  Most of the people listening to this will not know the difference.

• 30:19Ed Zitron?

  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?

• 30:34Speaker 04

  I want to say it's 21.

• 30:35Ed Zitron?

  That's insane. So.

• 30:37Speaker 06

  Well, now it's 50.

• 30:38Ed Zitron?

  Well, okay. If they start ignoring regulation. But just to be clear to the listeners, non-sports fans, sports fans alike, what we are discussing is that basically in 21 states, anyone can pick up their phone and start gambling like they're in Vegas, specifically on the outcomes of sports events.

• 30:54Speaker 06

  Individual plays, like in the time that it would take you to send a tweet, you can lose a hundred dollars.

• 30:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. So the last I looked at was 21. Now, mobile online sports betting is legal in 30 states plus DC. Well, 31 states, but it's not yet operational in Missouri. And retail gambling, which is you have to physically go in, in additional eight states.

• 31:17Speaker 06

  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, less insidious.

• 31:24Ed Zitron?

  So we're talking over a hundred million people.

• 31:26Speaker 04

  Oh, easily. Yeah. Well, especially because it includes New York and Florida.

• 31:31Ed Zitron?

  Oh, God.

• 31:32Speaker 06

  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, 1.5 billion dollars will be bet.

• 31:42Ed Zitron?

  That's just on the apps or in general?

• 31:45Speaker 04

  In general.

• 31:45Ed Zitron?

  In general.

• 32:24Ed Zitron?

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• 35:12Ed Zitron?

  This is real rot economy shit as well, because anyone can gamble. So you've got this 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.

• 35:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, the level of absurdity, like with the coin toss, but the level of absurdity and precision that on the things with which you can bet on are absurd. And so some of them are just called novelty bets.

• 35:37Ed Zitron?

  And the coin toss, by the way, is who, whether the coin will be heads or tails?

• 35:41Speaker 04

  Correct. Or you can bet on who will win the coin toss, which same odds, right?

• 35:45Ed Zitron?

  Great. So two bets on the coin.

• 35:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:49Speaker 04

  You've got, well, and then there's you can, there's correlated bets. So there's a, I was offered, when I logged into FanDuel earlier, I was offered a bet on Chiefs win the coin toss and the game.

• 35:59Ed Zitron?

  And when you say offered, how do you mean?

• 36:01Speaker 04

  Uh, when I logged into the app, a splash screen showed up telling me that there was this bet that I would be available for. It was like a bright.

• 36:11Ed Zitron?

  Available for in what, like, would you not otherwise be allowed to bet on it?

• 36:15Speaker 04

  Um, no, I, if I navigated to the.

• 36:18Ed Zitron?

  Was there a special deal or was it just telling you you could do this?

• 36:20Speaker 04

  In this case, there wasn't a special deal. It was just informing me that, and I, so here's my understanding of how this operation works.

• 36:28Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 36:29Speaker 04

  Uh, 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, uh, in most, uh, books, but, um.

• 36:40Ed Zitron?

  And books refers to the, like, the apps?

• 36:42Speaker 04

  The operators. 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.

• 37:01Ed Zitron?

  So they are just, so we're clear, advertising specific bets?

• 37:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, advertising specific bets and telling you, uh, and then highlighting the ones that are the most profitable and most likely to generate interaction.

• 37:15Ed Zitron?

  So trying to actively advertising something that you will, that they ideally need you to lose on, and the thing they're promoting is.

• 37:22Speaker 04

  And their data tells them that you are very likely to lose on.

• 37:28Ed Zitron?

  So when you say you are likely to lose on, are you saying that they customize it based on your actual betting history?

• 37:35Speaker 04

  Uh, 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 to everybody when you, when you show up. Um, 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, throw in some more Jaguars.

• 38:03Ed Zitron?

  I'm surprised they don't.

• 38:05Speaker 06

  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 bets.

• 38:27Ed Zitron?

  A concierge.

• 38:27Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 38:28Ed Zitron?

  So does which services? So we're talking FanDuel, DraftKings?

• 38:32Speaker 06

  This was, I read a story about this in NPR the other day and this one was, I believe FanDuel.

• 38:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, so I've covered this a little bit on, in my piece on sports gambling.

• 38:41Speaker 06

  We'll link that in the notes.

• 38:42Speaker 04

  The, both FanDuel and DraftKings do this. BetMGM, from my understanding, has begun doing this. But yeah, specifically the ones that have primarily an online presence, which I know people understand BetMGM to have like a casino in Vegas.

• 38:57Speaker 06

  Right, right.

• 38:57Speaker 04

  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 is the best way to put it. 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, it's almost like beat for beat, the script you would write for a drug dealer engaging with an addict. And I, 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.

• 39:40Ed Zitron?

  And this is all exacted through software? This is all directly?

• 39:44Speaker 06

  Predominantly.

• 39:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so the software will flag someone as like, hey, this person's lost like $30,000. You should get more money from them. And then they'll assign a concierge and that person will email them like, hey,

• 39:56Speaker 06

  It's also possibly worth noting here that this might sound like the people they're targeting are like high rollers, but predominantly speaking, this affects low income earners more than any other group.

• 40:08Ed Zitron?

  How so?

• 40:09Speaker 06

  Because those are the people that are typically gamble the most.

• 40:12Ed Zitron?

  And that's the thing, this is inherently predatory in a way that I don't think would be possible without the current digital ecosystem we have.

• 40:19Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 40:19Ed Zitron?

  The penetration of

• 40:20Speaker 06

  Completely impossible.

• 40:21Ed Zitron?

  Consumer apps and also the kind of fuzzy legal definitions that allow them to just do this bullshit.

• 40:26Speaker 04

  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 it targets people in lower income strata. But, but two, the current gambling environment is frictionless, right? Like I just mentioned, and this, you know, would be like something with the Bet 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 15 feet away from scoring a touchdown. And I'm in the Bet MGM app and I'm in the live section of the Bet MGM app and I've got $0 in my account.

• 41:06Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 41:06Speaker 04

  I'm 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 230 to score a touchdown on the next play. So I press yes, minus 230, I want to bet $20 on it and immediately a pop up will say, hey, you don't have enough money in your account to bet $20, 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, you know, default payment method. Press yes and you press yes. And then the $25 gets deposited in the account and then you go back to the bet slip that you made

• 41:51Speaker 04

  and you press yes, and that all occurs within three to five seconds. And then the next play runs and Saquon Barkley did not score a touchdown. He went to the three yard line and now I've just lost my money and

• 42:02Ed Zitron?

  And it's gone.

• 42:03Speaker 04

  And it's gone. And now I want to make it back, so I'm going to do it on the very next play.

• 42:06Ed Zitron?

  And it is that quick?

• 42:08Speaker 04

  It's so quick. Yeah, you could do it between, so many people do it between plays.

• 42:12Ed Zitron?

  Have you ever seen someone physically do this?

• 42:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:15Speaker 06

  It's completely normal for them to be while the game is happening.

• 42:19Speaker 04

  I've seen them do it in arenas.

• 42:21Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 42:22Ed Zitron?

  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 ball. I read book. I watch PowerPoint.

• 42:38Ed Zitron?

  But nevertheless, 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 evil perpetuated only through technology.

• 42:50Speaker 04

  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 in, there are a lot of people that are closer emotionally speaking to the teams that they follow than the family that they have.

• 43:07Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 43:07Speaker 04

  And I don't regard that necessarily as a tragedy. I don't have a great relationship with my family. So that's just, that's just the nature of what they are taking advantage of.

• 43:18Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 43:19Speaker 04

  Is they're, they're commodifying this relationship. And to an extent, it's always been commodified. Sports are there at a professional level to make money.

• 43:26Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 43:26Speaker 04

  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 that are identical things and like vice versa. But I think that teams don't attempt to ruin their customers' lives. And the way that a lot of these books operate, I would argue essentially every one, because smaller books get bought by larger books.

• 43:53Ed Zitron?

  Books meaning the apps, right?

• 43:53Speaker 04

  Yeah. I, I think the official term is operators, but I just call them books.

• 43:58Ed Zitron?

  Sure.

• 44:00Speaker 04

  But the, 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 $50 promo and typically what these promos are is you deposit $50 and then you receive $50 in promotional cash, which you can only use to gamble with.

• 44:27Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 44:28Speaker 04

  And so, oh, $50, okay, you bet with all of it. And, uh, and you know, at the end of the week, he's run out, so he deposits a hundred. There's no more promo because he was a first time customer.

• 44:38Ed Zitron?

  Right, right.

• 44:38Speaker 04

  Got the original promo, uh, and so on. And he just keeps going and he's got, you know, he's got a wife, he's got children, he's got a house, right? Um, and he bets larger and larger sums to make up for what he had lost previously.

• 44:53Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 44:53Speaker 04

  And he's describing the thrill of a win, a lot like you would describe a high, right? And the wins are becoming rarer and rarer because he is betting on longer and longer shot outcomes because the long shot outcomes have the 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 millions ticket, he's paying a thousand dollars for, you know, something that'll multiply that by.

• 45:21Ed Zitron?

  And, and they do special offers and special bets, right? Sometimes they'll be like, they'll improve, like the, I, I've seen offers like that.

• 45:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, and so, and so what, what began happening to this guy is, um, 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, Estonian basketball.

• 45:42Ed Zitron?

  And you can bet, and this is actually an important detail, you can bet, bet in some cases on just the most obtuse stuff.

• 45:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, just really obscure, you can bet on snookers, like you can bet on.

• 45:51Ed Zitron?

  Snookers is, is the very strange kind of billiards variant that you had back in England.

• 45:56Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 45:57Ed Zitron?

  We say snooker. Now I'm not sure which one of us is correct, anyway, continue.

• 46:01Speaker 04

  Well, you're British, so you're probably wrong.

• 46:02Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 46:03Speaker 04

  Um, but, uh, yeah, you could bet on anything, almost anywhere in the world. People have been betting on like high school games and stuff like that. And so they, and so the app is tracking his activity. They noticed that he's making deposits at odd times of the night. They noticed 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. Um, I want to offer you a $500 promotion. You don't even have to deposit anything. He's like, oh, wow, that's 500 free dollars. I don't know, it's okay. And then he bets it all and it all withers away, right?

• 46:38Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 46:38Speaker 04

  Uh, and they're like, wow, that's like really tough. And so, uh, 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. Uh, and he decides, you know, oh man, this is awful. I'm gonna stop, I'm about to lose the house.

• 46:56Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 46:56Speaker 04

  I have to find some way to, 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.

• 47:11Ed Zitron?

  Ah.

• 47:11Speaker 04

  You and me, you know, we, we.

• 47:13Ed Zitron?

  This is the concierge.

• 47:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is the concierge. We're in this together, man. I wanna, I wanna see you succeed. So what I've done is I've placed $2,000 of promotional cash in your account. Um, 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 gonna 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.

• 47:38Ed Zitron?

  Well, we'll link, we'll find it and link it as well.

• 47:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. Uh, it was over at The Athletic, which is now a New York Times gig, so it'll be easy to find. Um, but, uh, you know, the guy, you know, the guy responds with, oh, wow, that, you know, I, I, you know, I wish the best for you. That really, you know, sucks. I'm sorry to hear that. Um, you know, take care of yourself, but if you ever come back, those $2,000 are still there for you.

• 47:59Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 48:00Speaker 04

  And so it's just always in his mind for the next couple of weeks and he decides, oh, he's gonna do it and he does it. And, you know, 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. Um, but we've got this great promotion coming up that I just wanna 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 just, they, they rec, 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.

• 48:38Ed Zitron?

  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, uh, so you've got a bunch of users who aren't using it. Hey, we'll cut those off, we'll refund those. But have you considered this add-on for this team? Except instead of like business software, this is like life ruining gambling.

• 49:04Speaker 04

  Yeah. The guy lost his house. Yeah, that happens all the time. One, uh, one in four Americans will be betting on the Super Bowl today.

• 49:11Speaker 06

  Jesus. That 1.5 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, 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.

• 49:44Ed Zitron?

  Cause the idea is, it's kind of like the crypto ads of 2022 where it was like seize the day, like

• 49:49Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 49:49Ed Zitron?

  This idea that you can have hope and accumulate wealth.

• 49:52Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 49:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, it, it

• 49:53Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 49:54Speaker 04

  It combines that, that predation on hope, right? With all of the lessons we've learned from mobile gaming about the gamification of our experiences.

• 50:05Ed Zitron?

  And it is the gamification of gambling while also on every show you see the odds of the play and this sense that you could have somehow influenced the outcome.

• 50:13Speaker 04

  This, this is one of, I think the, 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, um, have relationships with these companies.

• 50:24Speaker 06

  Jesus.

• 50:24Speaker 04

  And some of the relationships are not sponsorships or advertising mechanisms, like the NFL, um, gets paid by, uh, William Hill, which is a sportsbook slash operator, um, to provide real time data so that Will, Will Hill can set lines in real time. Whatever. Okay. Well, sure. Fine. Whatever. I don't care. Um, but also the NFL has a relationship, I believe with DraftKings. Is there, is there, it's either FanDuel or Draft, it's almost always one of those two.

• 50:52Speaker 06

  I don't know.

• 50:52Speaker 04

  Um, and so on the NFL Network, they talk about the line set by DraftKings. There are promotional spots for 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 FanDuel. And so the broadcasters will reference the FanDuel 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 Weminyama is like plus two 30 to get a, you know, triple double this game, you know, bet, you know, whatever.

• 51:21Ed Zitron?

  If you don't watch basketball, Victor, Wemba Nyama is like seven foot tall.

• 51:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, they should deport him. Actually, he's the only person in America I think that ICE should deport.

• 51:31Ed Zitron?

  Everybody else can stay.

• 51:32Ed Zitron?

  We do not actually, we're not pro ICE, we're not like, we're not pro deportation, thank you.

• 51:37Speaker 04

  They should eradicate ICE, but before they do that.

• 51:40Ed Zitron?

  Well, Mia will love that. So I, it's just, I'm trying to think of the terms to put this, but because I know, and I'm very obviously anxious about this, people don't like sports, hear this, they get annoyed, but think of it like if you were watching Game of Thrones and they're like, will Ned Stark live? And it's like, you can bet on the outcome and they had a thing at the bottom, or like Severance, like, will Adam Scott find out like that? And it's like, except imagine if it was being written in real time, so different, but something you deeply cared about emotionally. Or something that you would go and attach to with your friends, something that you remember from your childhood, that is now through the apps and it's like on the fucking app store advertised by Apple.

• 52:19Ed Zitron?

  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 microtransaction to you'd see in like a free to play game.

• 52:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:33Ed Zitron?

  Except the money goes so quick, like in a snap.

• 52:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:36Ed Zitron?

  It is 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.

• 52:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:44Ed Zitron?

  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?

• 52:54Speaker 04

  Uh, yes.

• 52:57Ed Zitron?

  So how do they, but that's the thing. So, but the reason I ask 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 free money go? Like, how does the free money go? Because they offer it quite a lot.

• 53:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, so um, there's like a couple of things. One, we found kind of psychologically that if you're offered free money.

• 53:17Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 53:17Speaker 04

  Even if you have to pay to get the free money, right? Um, 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 out.

• 53:31Speaker 06

  They don't give that. There's, I didn't want to interrupt when you were talking about this earlier, but it just kind of goes to show you, they'll throw 50 bucks, 500 bucks, 2,000 bucks at this because they know within a statistical certainty almost that they're going to get that money back and then some.

• 53:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, and so there's a percentage of customers that they retain and on those customers they retain, the vast majority of the retained customers will pay back and 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 filings for like a quarter or two, whatever, and they've got a cost of acquisition and they talk about like reducing the cost of acquisition and increasing, you know, our hold, which is the percentage that they make on each bet. 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

• 54:28Speaker 04

  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 FanDuel customer, I believe my limit is a thousand dollars, and if I get pretty bad at gambling, my limit will expand to 2,000, 5,000, 20,000. But if I'm pretty good, they'll start reducing my limit to, you know, 500, 250, 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

• 55:13Speaker 04

  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.

• 55:54Speaker 04

  And if you beat the closing line value, they determine that you're a sharp gambler. And if you do that, I think like 60% of the time, something like that, they start reducing your limit. So it's really hard to make money.

• 56:06Ed Zitron?

  It's not even like the traditional idea of winning is the thing. It's like this weird matriculated bullshit so that they can, we'll never let you win then, or never let you. You never win on your terms. It's even, even when you win, kind of.

• 56:19Speaker 06

  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 line, if they didn't do all these things that Reeve 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.

• 56:42Speaker 04

  Access to proprietary data too, that you won't have access to.

• 56:44Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 56:45Speaker 04

  I mean, so for example, there's a product that I think is very good called Pro Football Focus Ultimate. Pro Football 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 the catch that player, you know, generated after the catch, how many tackles that player beat on the way to doing that.

• 57:18Ed Zitron?

  So that you insanely granular, do they have a level below that somehow these people? Or they get access to that?

• 57:23Speaker 04

  Well, they get access to that because it's a $200,000 package.

• 57:27Ed Zitron?

  Oh. So they have advantages that we could never even, unless we were insanely rich.

• 57:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 57:33Ed Zitron?

  And no one who's doing that is doing that.

• 57:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, nobody who's who's doing this has the money to spend on that.

• 57:38Speaker 04

  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.

• 57:46Speaker 06

  And then they give that insanely granular data to a team of of analyst perverts that will then set the lines.

• 57:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:53Ed Zitron?

  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 that only recently understand and came to understand even was the concept of unders and overs where they will set a point amount. Like, actually, Caleb, can you explain what an over and an under is? Because it's important to explain that you can't just bet on whether someone wins or loses.

• 58:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, I could do my best. Again.

• 58:19Ed Zitron?

  Just the very basic of what it means.

• 58:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, and I don't know if you may have to correct me on this because, again, it's not legal in my state, so I've never actually done it.

• 58:26Ed Zitron?

  Oh, OK.

• 58:26Speaker 06

  So they they don't, like, it's called the spread, right? So if you're if the team is is under, this is kind of confusing. If the team is the under, that means they're the favorite by however many points, right?

• 58:36Speaker 04

  Kind of. So we wouldn't call them the under, right? 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? And if you bet on the Chiefs, you bet on the Chiefs to win by at least two points or more. If you bet on the Eagles, you either bet on them to win outright or lose by about a point or less.

• 59:03Ed Zitron?

  So you can't just bet win or lose?

• 59:05Speaker 04

  You can.

• 59:06Ed Zitron?

  But it's based on that terms.

• 59:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, and and so what and so that's called a money line bet, where you just bet outright on the winner or 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 fifty. So what plus two thirty means is if I bet a hundred dollars, I will receive and I win, I get the hundred dollars back plus two hundred and thirty dollars.

• 59:32Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 59:32Speaker 04

  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 kind of confusing.

• 59:44Ed Zitron?

  No, it's and I assume by design.

• 59:47Speaker 04

  Sure. I mean, this is a system that is like sixty, seventy years old. So I don't know.

• 59:51Speaker 06

  But it's everywhere. Four people that are on the strip back there, the the hoopla heads that are uh seven beers deep, they're gonna say yes. We ball, put fifty on the Packers or whatever, right?

• 1:00:00Speaker 04

  Yeah. And and so you can convert those odds into the percentages. So um like a minus one. Okay, it's actually more complicated than this. But the the minus one hand would suggest, I believe, like a forty uh 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 'em, right, it zero, right, either way. So if the spread is pick 'em, 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, uh minus one hundred and five odds.

• 1:00:41Ed Zitron?

  So the the 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.

• 1:00:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:50Ed Zitron?

  These are the numbers that are just on the TV being thrown at you all the time.

• 1:00:53Speaker 04

  Minus one oh five, plus two ten.

• 1:00:55Ed Zitron?

  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?

• 1:01:00Speaker 06

  Saquon Barkley is minus two thirty. Sure, what the hell?

• 1:01:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, and and like, the thing is, so I described it like both of those even bets are minus one oh five. If you bet on the coin toss, it's minus one oh five, right? Like, that's the um.

• 1:01:16Ed Zitron?

  So you would need to put a hundred and five dollars down to make a hundred dollars?

• 1:01:19Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 1:01:19Ed Zitron?

  Got it.

• 1:01:20Speaker 04

  Uh, 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 um the book because they're gonna make money on the coin flip, right? Like, there's no question that they're making money.

• 1:01:37Speaker 06

  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.

• 1:01:44Ed Zitron?

  Hundreds of thousands of dollars?

• 1:01:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:47Ed Zitron?

  It's so fucking horrible. This is the thing, like, earlier on in the show's existence, I was definitely like mad at the tech industry and people like, why are you 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 concepts of gambling and microtransaction gaming. And just the horrors of online advertising, because this is selling hope and industry over something you could never hope to understand.

• 1:02:16Speaker 06

  Well, every, like, the stuff that we talked about, the ostensibly good aspects of sports, whether you agree or not, all of that, even from my perspective, as 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.

• 1:02:34Ed Zitron?

  And how do you mean?

• 1:02:35Speaker 06

  Because it takes away, it's like the anti-sport. It takes it, something that could be a potentially positive thing, and it turns it into like a torment nexus. You know what I mean?

• 1:02:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. 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 or 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.

• 1:03:07Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:03:07Speaker 04

  So, for example, ESPN, which is the worldwide leader in sports coverage, a name they made up 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.

• 1:03:36Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:03:36Speaker 04

  So they've got a bunch of social arms called ESPN Bet, right? They've got a TikTok channel, YouTube channel, whatever, right? And there was this Giants game where

• 1:03:47Speaker 04

  Devon Singletary, one of the running backs for the Giants, is it's near the end of the game and he's and he he broke free, right? So he, you know, he got the ball.

• 1:03:55Ed Zitron?

  It's a big run.

• 1:03:56Speaker 04

  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 meaningfully change the Giants' odds of winning, but it does give the other team the ball. So in fact, it might even decrease the Giants' odds of winning.

• 1:04:14Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:04:14Speaker 04

  Because the other team now has an opportunity to respond. They've got possession and they can score points.

• 1:04:18Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:04:19Speaker 04

  So what he does is he runs all the way to the five-yard line and then goes down.

• 1:04:26Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:04:27Speaker 04

  So that the Giants retain possession. They can drain the clock, finish the game with a win. Great move. Like

• 1:04:32Ed Zitron?

  Tactically correct.

• 1:04:33Speaker 04

  It's a tactically correct move. It's selfless.

• 1:04:36Ed Zitron?

  It's a team-based move, yes.

• 1:04:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, because he benefits. He's got like contract incentives and, you know, when he when his contract comes up, he's going to negotiate for a new contract. The statistics, those extra five yards, a touchdown, whatever, those statistics will be used in his negotiation. And there and maybe he has a contract incentive that gives him more money for touchdowns, right? So he's making a a selfless move to improve the team's odds of winning.

• 1:04:59Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:04:59Speaker 04

  It's always a good story. Some running backs will do this, maybe a couple of times a year, whatever. It's awesome. I love it.

• 1:05:05Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:05Speaker 04

  And and ESPN Bet put out a TikTok saying Devon Singletary goes down to ensure the Giants hit the under. And the under is the total amount of points scored in the game. And and in that game, I forget who the name, maybe Washington, the Giants and Commanders go under the the projected point total by the books. And I think my opinion is that ESPN Bet really poorly used the language of 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.

• 1:05:50Ed Zitron?

  Right. And it's just like

• 1:05:52Speaker 04

  But I think they just meant he did this and so therefore the under hit.

• 1:05:56Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:05:56Speaker 04

  Either way, I don't like it.

• 1:05:58Ed Zitron?

  It's poisonous. It's poison to culture.

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• 1:07:14Speaker 06

  This shouldn't be happening at all to begin with. It's destroying, like, the product is becoming almost unrecognizable at this point.

• 1:07:20Ed Zitron?

  Can you go into more detail on that?

• 1:07:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, just even just a few years ago, that would have never happened. We wouldn't have even heard about that.

• 1:07:26Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:27Speaker 06

  Just even two seasons ago, probably, I would say, two, three seasons.

• 1:07:30Speaker 04

  You might get a mention on SportsCenter, 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, oops.

• 1:07:40Speaker 06

  Whatever, it's some wacky corner of the site that's not really that important.

• 1:07:43Ed Zitron?

  Versus what is likely a huge revenue driver.

• 1:07:46Speaker 06

  A 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 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 80s or something. So he's talking about the 60s and 70s, when the NFL was acutely aware of owners and players' relationship with gambling sportsbooks.

• 1:08:14Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:08:15Speaker 06

  Organized crime. And it's not conspiracy stuff. This is like all police cases and FBI files that he is 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.

• 1:08:28Ed Zitron?

  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 minutiae, 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

• 1:09:09Ed Zitron?

  with Miami Heat player Terry Rozier, who's under investigation in connection with sports betting scandal.

• 1:09:15Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:09:16Ed Zitron?

  And now there is just this weird thing of, like you said, Caleb, it isn't scripted or anything, but are players doing shit now? With fears of that, like.

• 1:09:25Speaker 06

  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. 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.

• 1:09:39Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:09:40Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:09:49Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:09:49Speaker 04

  Right. Understanding like that these mistakes occur and that, you know, they weigh heavily on or whatever, right?

• 1:09:54Speaker 06

  Randomness of the phrase any given Sunday is.

• 1:09:57Speaker 04

  Right, exactly. You know, the Giants beating the Patriots and the Patriots were undefeated, right? 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 undefeated. Did the Patriots throw the, no.

• 1:10:09Ed Zitron?

  And they're promoting these stories on their sites. They're saying how much.

• 1:10:12Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so this is.

• 1:10:13Speaker 06

  Now that's the media focus.

• 1:10:14Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so that's the thing that like really bothers me is that all of this content, which I 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 portal to Vegas, but also when you try to, you know, get out of.

• 1:10:30Ed Zitron?

  You actually cannot use these apps in Nevada either, which is really funny.

• 1:10:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, I do think it's, well, you can if you go physically into the sportsbook and enable the sportsbook's app from inside this. It's very funny.

• 1:10:40Speaker 06

  I didn't know that.

• 1:10:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's very funny.

• 1:10:42Speaker 06

  That's crazy.

• 1:10:44Speaker 04

  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 a 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 Devon Singletary do this in

• 1:11:24Speaker 04

  order to do and it's just like everything is either gambling or about content about gambling or a content that points to gambling and it's like the storylines are about gambling the way I engage with the game is about gambling and the and 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 and it just it sucks.

• 1:11:57Ed Zitron?

  And it's and so Caleb you you don't gamble right?

• 1:12:00Speaker 06

  No. Now I it depends how you define it right I want to be clear about this I play fantasy football every year and I have since I was a teenager.

• 1:12:08Ed Zitron?

  And just just to delineate fantasy football is not a money based thing unless you put into a pool.

• 1:12:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, most people who play fantasy don't put in more than like 10 bucks.

• 1:12:17Speaker 06

  We all put in about 20 to 30 bucks to make sure everybody stays accountable sets their lineup it's not really about winning money.

• 1:12:23Ed Zitron?

  Right, right, but it's not like in mission you don't have to like give your credit card or anything you can just like it's informal.

• 1:12:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're like Venmo or whatever.

• 1:12:30Ed Zitron?

  But that isn't really gambling that's just like kind of dicking around with friends.

• 1:12:33Speaker 04

  Right and and he's describing what's season long fantasy.

• 1:12:37Speaker 06

  Which is separate, though, from the money fantasy, though.

• 1:12:39Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, from the type of fantasy that's being promoted, which is daily fantasy.

• 1:12:43Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:12:44Speaker 04

  Um, 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, uh, 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, uh, 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. Where a season long, you do it once a year for like twenty bucks to win, you know, maybe a hundred and fifty dollars. Like, it's, it's like, what are we doing?

• 1:13:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, it, I just wanted to say also, uh, 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.

• 1:13:31Speaker 04

  Oh, that's crazy, because I just use emojis, so I never tell by Venmo what I'm doing.

• 1:13:36Speaker 06

  They can flag it if you say fantasy football in like the note or whatever, they can do that.

• 1:13:40Speaker 04

  Oh, wow. There you go.

• 1:13:42Speaker 06

  And, and that's more regulated than crypto.com doing their Rube Goldberg, uh, uh, system of crypto bets.

• 1:13:48Speaker 04

  If you buy a token which is on the Ethereum chain and that token activates when Patrick Mahomes passes for two hundred twenty-five, it's okay.

• 1:13:56Speaker 06

  Which, again, to be very clear, it should be, and I think many judges would agree, is also illegal, but who's gonna stop them at this point?

• 1:14:04Ed Zitron?

  And I think the, and 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 targeted to guys as well. It's a very heteronormative, says heck 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-

• 1:14:32Speaker 04

  Just add another one, yeah.

• 1:14:33Speaker 06

  And it- And guess what? Who's, uh, the, like, outside of sports, who's like the number one purveyor of like, uh, uh, of ads for this shit is like Red Pill guys?

• 1:14:42Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, because it's more, more kind of noxious, nebulous, uh- Eleganity thing of being like be a big, strong man and lose your money.

• 1:14:49Speaker 06

  Don't tell your bitch wife that you lost fifty thousand dollars or whatever, right? Like that's rise and grind.

• 1:14:57Speaker 04

  It's very much in the rise and grind culture. A lot of, um, so 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 to ban um, advertisements for these apps on college campuses.

• 1:15:09Ed Zitron?

  Oh my God, they can legally do that.

• 1:15:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, and that's where a lot.

• 1:15:14Ed Zitron?

  The college basketball games as well.

• 1:15:17Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, buddy.

• 1:15:17Ed Zitron?

  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 and not doing that? Don't worry. It it's just like things to terrorize people.

• 1:15:28Speaker 06

  It's like, young men now, and again, not saying that they shouldn't be able to count on by the victims, whatever, but it reminds 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 and red pill guys that are swooping up and eating these turtles. That's kind of, then they all just become bastards, you know?

• 1:15:48Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and and the thing that happens to women is those men.

• 1:15:55Ed Zitron?

  No, no, no, it's the, I'm just saying this because that anytime I bring up the male loneliness epidemic, it's never a kind of a, well, men need to be treated. No, it's perhaps we need to look at the fucking conditions of society itself.

• 1:16:09Speaker 04

  We're throwing another, um, kind of, because like one of the the natures of like, one of the things about patriarchy is that it isolates people into particular roles. And those roles for men include things like breadwinner, right? Um, and they're the ones that are like, you know, in Bible, the entrepreneurial spirit, right? Which is, I guess gambling is entrepreneurship.

• 1:16:30Ed Zitron?

  No, no, it it is though. It's the same rise and grind. 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?

• 1:16:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, and and so this is kind of another one of the pressures among the extent 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 on other young men, right?

• 1:17:02Speaker 06

  Patriarch who produces the drywall punchers, right?

• 1:17:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. And then, yeah, and then this is just that.

• 1:17:08Ed Zitron?

  And it's, it's funny, and you've mentioned the entrepreneurial spirit, 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 by a system.

• 1:17:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, we shouldn't look at the system.

• 1:17:22Ed Zitron?

  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 at 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, it's the sense of selfish kind of producer that only comes from hard work. Despite the fact that, 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.

• 1:17:58Speaker 04

  If you, if you look at a lot of the entrepreneurship, like YouTube videos or whatever, a lot of it's just like dropshipping. It's like, okay, cool.

• 1:18:06Ed Zitron?

  It's just a scam.

• 1:18:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:18:12Speaker 04

  But like, there's a, there's a reason, like.

• 1:18:14Speaker 06

  Another episode, we'll talk about dropshipping.

• 1:18:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. But like, there's a reason, like, we can find a lot of the same figures throughout all of these, like, microtrends of, like, entrepreneurship masculinity. Like Gary Vaynerchuk is doing like motivational dropshipping content, and then he does crypto content, and then he does NFT content, and now he's doing sports gambling content.

• 1:18:35Speaker 06

  Sorry, but the concept of, of somebody who did for many years work in e-commerce, and like, not dropshipping, all right? But just like, as an actual e-commerce marketing person, motivational e-commerce content makes me want to blow my brains out.

• 1:18:47Speaker 04

  But you know I'm describing a thing that's real.

• 1:18:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, of course I do. I know, 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 on the Serengeti where I just, my predator prey sense went off, like, oh my god.

• 1:19:02Speaker 04

  But yeah, like someone like Gary Vee was in all of those.

• 1:19:06Ed Zitron?

  Is he doing sports betting content?

• 1:19:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:19:08Ed Zitron?

  Jesus Christ, that man's a fucking monster.

• 1:19:11Speaker 04

  He's evil.

• 1:19:12Ed Zitron?

  I want to, we should do a behind the bastards episode on 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 I, 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 mu- 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.

• 1:19:43Speaker 06

  It's the same problem, just in a different shape, right?

• 1:19:45Ed Zitron?

  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.

• 1:19:57Speaker 06

  If you're ever gonna fix the problem, you eventually have to look at the system in which these people are brought up, right?

• 1:20:01Ed Zitron?

  Right. And it's, you see, it's the same thing you see 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 wanna 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.

• 1:20:19Speaker 06

  Well, that's why, like, when we were talking about this before, one of the, the football or sports is important is because even if, okay, you're, you, from a utilitarian perspective, you don't care about sports, it is too big of a ground to cede to these kinds of people. You should never cede that ground, right? We can't allow them to take this over.

• 1:20:37Ed Zitron?

  And they're trying. They're trying really fucking hard.

• 1:20:39Speaker 06

  They're doing a very good job of it.

• 1:20:40Ed Zitron?

  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. Men, men are, as mu- as many people are, but like, very targeted on 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 men. You're not men at all. You're woke. And-

• 1:21:11Speaker 06

  You are soy and you are woke.

• 1:21:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're soy beta cuck.

• 1:21:15Ed Zitron?

  And then they attack aggressively.

• 1:21:18Ed Zitron?

  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 they kind of like dodged around like tee hee, you just bet on a few players, right? No, it's just the straight up gambling now.

• 1:21:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:21:43Ed Zitron?

  And it's everywhere. And it doesn't sound like they even do like KY, like I know your customer stuff. Or if they do, it's like.

• 1:21:49Speaker 04

  So so gambling does do know your customer stuff, but fantasy does.

• 1:21:55Ed Zitron?

  Despite money going into it.

• 1:21:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:21:57Ed Zitron?

  Fucking brilliant.

• 1:21:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:21:59Ed Zitron?

  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 now.

• 1:22:06Speaker 04

  That's definitely not happening. Yeah.

• 1:22:07Ed Zitron?

  They I feel like everyone involved should be put in prison personally. So it doesn't look like Apple.

• 1:22:11Speaker 04

  They did. They did try that with the DFS people along of like 15 years ago. And about three or four of them did, and then the rest invented DFS.

• 1:22:24Ed Zitron?

  What is DFS?

• 1:22:25Speaker 04

  A daily fantasy services. So these so the people that were doing online poker stuff way back when Chris Moneymaker was big, like 2004 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.

• 1:22:49Ed Zitron?

  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 in saying they did, but it is the like number number, let's see, the number three and number four, so it's DraftKings and then FanDuel and then PrizePicks. Those are the three, four and five top apps right now.

• 1:23:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm going through my PrizePicks promos right now. If it's not clear, I do engage in this.

• 1:23:15Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I was gonna ask you about that.

• 1:23:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. Um, and I've got like $1 million super sweat lineups.

• 1:23:22Ed Zitron?

  What does that?

• 1:23:23Speaker 04

  I don't know. It's a combination of like, um, 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 hail their picks essentially.

• 1:23:37Ed Zitron?

  Horrifying.

• 1:23:38Speaker 04

  Um, but yeah, there's like tons of promos like in my.

• 1:23:41Ed Zitron?

  But as we wrap up, Arif, so you do gamble on this stuff?

• 1:23:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:23:46Ed Zitron?

  Do you win?

• 1:23:47Speaker 04

  I have net made money on the year.

• 1:23:50Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:23:50Speaker 04

  I think a good chunk of that has been luck.

• 1:23:53Ed Zitron?

  Um, why do you do it?

• 1:23:55Speaker 04

  It's fun. I like I it's that's it like um, one like the smallest, but the first reason is because it's important for me to be familiar with the stuff for the work that I do.

• 1:24:07Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:24:07Speaker 04

  But like, I wouldn't be gambling as much if that was the only reason.

• 1:24:11Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:24:12Speaker 04

  Um, but no, I've been making a small amount of money on it.

• 1:24:16Ed Zitron?

  Uh huh.

• 1:24:16Speaker 04

  Uh, 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.

• 1:24:24Ed Zitron?

  Everything we've been discussing.

• 1:24:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:24:26Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:26Speaker 04

  Um, but um, what's interesting is that if I play for a couple of weeks and then I stop playing for weeks to see how the apps uh engage me because I get notifications, I get emails like when I, when I went to London for the Vikings game, I also um, spent a week prior to that game, just taking a vacation in Ireland.

• 1:24:44Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:45Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:24:53Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:24:53Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:24:56Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:56Speaker 04

  Whatever, right? Um, and I had to like bet in person in London. It was awful. I hated it.

• 1:25:02Ed Zitron?

  Into a William Hill or Ladbrokes.

• 1:25:05Speaker 04

  I I couldn't, I couldn't do a place called Ladbrokes. I couldn't.

• 1:25:10Ed Zitron?

  Did you bet on the dogs?

• 1:25:11Speaker 04

  No, I I only bet on football.

• 1:25:13Ed Zitron?

  There's still, do they still do greyhound racing?

• 1:25:14Speaker 04

  Yes, uh, they definitely advertised that when I walked into.

• 1:25:17Ed Zitron?

  Scusting country.

• 1:25:18Speaker 04

  Um, 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 that keeps track of everything I've. Um, and uh, 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.

• 1:25:44Ed Zitron?

  Tickets mean?

• 1:25:45Speaker 04

  The number of bets. So uh, you would have, let's say, three people bet on Saquon Barkley to get a hundred and ten yards in this game.

• 1:25:52Ed Zitron?

  Got it.

• 1:25:52Speaker 04

  And then um, one person bets uh, that he's going to get fewer than that many yards, but that person bets way more than those three people combined.

• 1:26:01Ed Zitron?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:26:01Speaker 04

  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 there's more 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.

• 1:26:14Ed Zitron?

  But they've got their hooks into you to some extent.

• 1:26:17Speaker 04

  Absolutely. No, I'm forsaken.

• 1:26:20Ed Zitron?

  This is, it's so good. 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.

• 1:26:32Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:26:44Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:26:45Speaker 04

  Uh, and so I set a limit for myself on the number of times a year I can deposit, which is three. Uh, I set a limit to how much I can put on one bet, which is, um, I think, I think the limit I set was like eight percent of, um, the total amount of money I have in that app.

• 1:27:04Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:27:05Speaker 04

  On each individual bet, right? Um, and I say, I think because I just started doing it kind of like by feel because it's like, oh, I've got a hundred and fifty, I'll just put ten, you know?

• 1:27:13Ed Zitron?

  Right, right.

• 1:27:14Speaker 04

  Yeah. Um, but, uh, yeah. And so, uh, the only times I have broken that limit once, but it was because I was offered an obscene promo, which is how they get you.

• 1:27:24Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:27:25Speaker 04

  But like, it's like, oh, I'll deposit again. Cause like, that's two hundred and fifty bucks.

• 1:27:28Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 1:27:29Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:27:36Ed Zitron?

  You did the thing they wanted you to.

• 1:27:38Speaker 04

  No, I did the opposite. It was a minus ten thousand bet.

• 1:27:40Ed Zitron?

  What does that mean?

• 1:27:41Speaker 04

  That means if I won, I would get no money, but the two hundred and fifty turned from a promo into real money and then I just withdrew it.

• 1:27:48Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 1:27:50Speaker 04

  So a minus ten thousand bet is you have to bet ten thousand dollars to win a hundred.

• 1:27:54Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 1:27:54Speaker 04

  And so the percentage return on that is miniscule. And so I bet the two hundred and fifty dollar promo bet on a.

• 1:28:02Ed Zitron?

  Just to get the money out?

• 1:28:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. It was a ninety nine point nine percent chance that I was gonna. Yeah, and most people don't do that.

• 1:28:08Ed Zitron?

  No.

• 1:28:08Speaker 04

  You can't do that, I promise you.

• 1:28:10Ed Zitron?

  And I think, and I think the funny thing is, is like, this is all data, and not just trying to pull it back because it's a tech podcast, but it really is, this is just, when you remove the word sport, this is just like what crypto does, except 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 are kind of do some sport shit, or they kind of flirt with the same linguistics, it's just

• 1:28:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, well

• 1:28:35Ed Zitron?

  disgusting.

• 1:28:36Speaker 04

  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 pick'ems now, this, this version of fantasy, which is basically also daily fantasy. Um, 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, 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.

• 1:29:07Ed Zitron?

  It's all just one big scam. So, let's wrap up there. Arif, where can people find you?

• 1:29:12Speaker 04

  Uh, you can find me at wideleft.football, that's the newsletter I run, it, uh, covers, uh, sports, politics and sports, culture and sports, uh, and all of that, uh, otherwise on socials, I'm at arif.bsky.social on Blue Sky, and Arif on NFL on Twitter.

• 1:29:29Ed Zitron?

  Caleb, where can people find you?

• 1:29:31Speaker 06

  Um, I've got a, a podcast called A Western Kabuki, it's kind of an irreverent look at internet culture.

• 1:29:36Ed Zitron?

  It's wonderful, I've been on multiple times.

• 1:29:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's incredible.

• 1:29:38Speaker 06

  Uh, both we have, and I thank you for that, um, with a, uh, I guess, comedian Juniper and, uh, Alex Goldman, formerly of Reply All, where we just kind of talk about, um, people's relationship with, with, with the internet, I guess, predominantly. Uh, you can find me there, at Western Kabuki, you can find me, I'm no longer on Twitter, I'm on Blue Sky at @birdrespector.

• 1:29:58Ed Zitron?

  And you can find me everywhere you're gonna hear about after this. Matt, I'm gonna re-record this at some point, but I'm not, I'm not gonna do it now, you're just gonna have to hear, it's gonna go doo doo doo doo doo doo doo, the whole theme will go on, it'll be amazing. Anyway, I've been Ed Zitron, you can find me, uh, at edzitron.com on Blue Sky, I'm still on Twitter, but I don't give a shit about it. And yeah, uh, if you haven't done this, please go to everyone you know, tell them to download the show, tell them to download every single goddamn episode, they 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.

• 1:30:39Ed Zitron?

  Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M A T T O S O W S K I dot com. You can email me at [email protected] or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot wheresyoured dot at to visit the Discord and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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