This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNWC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick. When I worked at the Washington Post early in my career, one of my colleagues had a little bit of a side hustle. Late in the week in the fall, he'd go around the office taking bets on the weekend's football game, and then he'd relay those bets to a bookmaker. Now a lot of us would put some money down small bets, nobody was losing their shirt, but still, we had a sense that it was somehow illicit something you did on the QT. Now it sounds like I'm describing life hundreds of years ago, because these days we are absolutely inundated with ads offering same game parlays and no sweat bets. You just can't turn on pro football or listen to a colon sports talk show without hearing the odds, without emphasizing gambling. Wageering on the game now seems practically as important as watching it. How did things change so much and so fast? Literally I was watching the last World Series and right before the first pitch, they said, and by the way, here's a parlay you might want to consider placing. Danny Funt has been reporting on the gambling boom for The New Yorker. We've seen some pretty startling headlines lately. The former coach of the Portland Trailblazers was arrested in part for allegedly providing insider information to gamblers, and then there were those two pitchers on the Cleveland Guardians who were indicted for rigging individual pitches. They were purposely throwing wild pitches to align with live bets. They've all pleaded not guilty. Danny Funt's new book about the boom in sports betting is called Everybody Loses. So can you give me a sense in dollar terms of how big a business this is now? About $150 billion are wagered every year. Just last November, New York set a record with more than $2 billion wagered in the state of New York alone. It's hard to wrap your head around those numbers. Who's gambling? Probably young men. That's the target demo, 21 to 34. It's hard to know exactly how many people total our betting. I've seen like 30% is a good ballpark. 30% of that demographic. No, of Americans. 30% of all Americans are laying down bets on what? What are the most popular things? Pro football? Absolutely. The NFL is king. All the major sports. I mean, even in Colorado where I used to live, when it was legalized during the pandemic, the sports were shuttered. And all they could bet on was Eastern European table tennis. And they continued to bet millions of dollars every month. I guess they got hooked on ping pong. So from the title of your book, it's pretty clear what your POV on legal sports gambling is. Am I getting this wrong? That's fair. I hope you'll trust that I didn't have that title locked in as I started this. It was a realization of talking to hundreds of people mainly in the industry and seeing how they think about their customers, how they think about their business, left that impression. That not only are we losing a staggering out of money, as we were just talking about, but the credibility of sports, the integrity of sports, the independence of sports journalism, the list goes on. Are you a gamble yourself? Yeah. There's a stat that about half of people who bet. They admit that they're not honest about how much they bet and how often they bet. I'm in that demographic. How would you describe the dimensions of your own activity? Mostly when I'm watching a Lakers game, particularly when my wife is out of town, I've got nothing better to do. I'm trying to liven up a night alone. So you're scared of your wife and your gambler? Exactly. Like a lot of people. It's a thing to do in your board and lonely. Yeah. I'll be honest with you though, just hearing again and again, how impossible it is to win how these sportsbooks do everything they can to prevent you from coming out of head long term. I've backed off a lot in the last year. Explain what a sportsbook is for the uninitiated and then talk to me about how they do their work. So a sportsbook is a company that takes bets. They have bookmakers and odds makers and hundreds of not thousands of people who are dedicated to offering as many things as they can possibly think of on every sport in existence practically. 95% of this business is now conducted online. So back in the day, this was kind of an amenity to lure you into a casino, just like all you can eat buffets or whatever. It was, let's bring people in. Hey, you can bet on sports, but hopefully you'll play some crafts while you're here. So how am I gambling now? On your phone predominantly. What are the big companies? Fandall and draft kings control three quarters of the market. Why are you so tough on the gambling industry? I mean, people pay their 50 bucks and they lose a little bit more often than they win. What's the harm? The idea of legalization was that among other things, this would install consumer protection so that you could, people have always been gambling. Let's make sure you can do it fairly, get paid when you win, not get chased around town. Oh, someone's some money. There's a lot of your thumbs, your thumbs won't get broken. Exactly. But just learning so much about how this business is done, you hear the word predatory again and again. There was an executive who told me, you know, if you think about it, he said, my job is basically to slowly bleed someone dry and the techniques that they do to do that. I don't think you have to be more realistic to find issue with that. So I'm old enough to remember Barty Amati being running baseball and other sports commissioners were staunchly against any betting at all. They thought it would really have a deleterious effect on a number of fronts. And betting was made illegal back in the 90s with the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act. Yes. Passpa, I guess you would call it, although Nevada was grandfathered in. How did that get overturned? You mentioned in your book that Adam Silver, who is the very popular commissioner of the NBA right now, was really the first to come out in support of this change. Talk about that a little bit. So his predecessor, David Stern, was among the commissioners who testified during the Passpa hearings and said this is an evil. He went even further with that, speaking with Chris Christie, who was leading the charge for. The governor of New Jersey. Yes. That David Stern, who's passed away, said that gambling treats athletes like chattel. And he just got very animated describing how awful it was. The year that Stern resigned and his deputy Adam Silver took over, he wrote an op ed in the New York Times in 2014 saying legalize and regulate gambling. What was Adam Silver's rationale? Publicly. That this was happening underground anyway. He quoted a number that $400 billion were being wagered illegally every year, which I think is a what? You said publicly as if he had another motivation. Yeah. My understanding is he was looking mainly at the at British soccer, at the English Premier League and how that, you know, incredibly it had grown in recent years in large part because teams there embraced gambling and got all this interest from foreign gambling sponsors that put their brands on the fronts of jerseys and poured all this money into the EPL. And Silver, who very clearly wants the NBA to grow internationally, said, what are we doing missing out on that opportunity? I think the most famous gambling scandal, there have been many, you know, city university had its days in basketball. But the most famous scandal was the 1919 infamous Chicago White Sox. Do we fear that this kind of large scale scandal will happen in modern sports because we're seeing signs of that now? Yeah. Hard to understate the, what an existential threat the 1919 World Series was to the future of baseball and sports in general after eight players on the White Sox, including Schulis Joe, obviously in others, colluded with gamblers to throw the World Series. It was eventually sniffed out by a reporter. They were prosecuted. They were exonerated ultimately and there's a funny scene that someone else reported that they in the jerseys celebrated at a Italian restaurant after that verdict was read. But there's so much to learn from that. And as you alluded to every decade since then, there's been a gambling scandal and you might say athletes make too much money nowadays. They would never do something so foolish. Yeah, but now you've got, for example, there's a picture at the Cleveland Guardians, the manual classie who was allegedly throwing wild pitches on purpose because he was making bets on himself. And well, we had in the NBA recently, you had the trailblazers coach, Troncy Phillips, was arrested and charged for gambling with insider information and other incidents who are starting to pop up. I assume you have part of your concern is the integrity of these sports themselves. Yeah, which once again was exactly what Bud Seelig of Major League Baseball and David Stern and Paul Tagliaboo and all these commissioners predicted was you would have actual instances of corruption and a general degradation of trust in the integrity of what we're watching. And immediately after Classe and Troncy Phillips and others were arrested, a poll came out that showed that 65% of Americans think some athletes are colluding with gamblers to affect the outcomes of games. A key argument for legalization was in fact, it'll strengthen the integrity of games because we'll be able to monitor all this betting activity. Why are they wrong? I've spoken with the company's task with doing that monitoring and they say, A, there's still a lot of betting going on under the table. We can't monitor that. Any savvy fixer is not going to go bet on fandall. They'll go offshore or with a streetbookie. We'd have little chance of catching that. So we haven't snuffed out that threat. And beyond that, there's simply too much ground to cover when you carve up a game and do thousands of betting opportunities. Like you were saying, a single pitch is something you can risk a lot of money on. These companies can't possibly investigate every suspicious bet tied to a pitch in a baseball game. I'm speaking with Danny Funt. His new book is called Everybody Loses. More in a moment. Ever open up your podcast app, scroll forever and still not know what to listen to? And there are millions of podcasts and most of them, they just don't grab you. That's why I created something you should know. Every episode is built around surprising, useful and fascinating ideas. We're consistently ranked in Apple's top 200 with thousands of five star reviews. Try one episode of something you should know right here on the platform you're listening on right now. If I were to bet on Fandall or the like over time, can I win? In other words, I watch these movies like Uncut Jamrs or Rounders and you've got these savvy professional gamblers who figure out how to beat the house and win consistently. Is that ever true for sports gamblers? Well, let's not accuse Adam Sandler's character of beating the house. I think he's a mess. He's a mess. He's a mess. He finally did not only do about 1% of customers come out ahead long term, but as soon as you show any signs of competence, not even winning, but just placing the sorts of bets that might give you a chance of winning, they'll limit how much you're able to wager down to literal pennies. I've seen guys who can't get down more than a cent on an NFL game. Of course, there are ways that you can bend the rules and they'll definitely show you the door in that case. What I'm talking about has nothing to do with that. It's simply outsmarting the bookmakers and they'll say, we're not going to take your bets because of that. Well, now gambling has gone well beyond sports. You've also written for the magazine, the New Yorker, about companies like Polymarket and Colchie who they set wagers on everything from election outcomes to interest rates. A recent Polymarket user made a bet and he made more than $400,000 betting on the Venezuelan president, Nicholas Maduro, being captured. Unbelievable. Is this more or less concerning than whether some player might throw a game? Of course. By the way, insider trading, that seems to be at hand and how else could you have been so confident that the US would invade at that moment? Of course, betting on natural disasters or wars or things like that is much more serious business than sports. But why? It's unattractive. It says we say a bad look in some way. Well, we can have an easier time understanding that if you're betting on elections, it could cheapen how you engage with politics. Is that possible? In this model? People like Elizabeth Warren would say so. Tell me about that. They think that, of course, people vote at times based on who they think will influence their pocketbook in a more favorable way. But if you've got a bet on the line, could that be an even more problematic way of thinking about who you should vote for? I think when we're talking about what someone's going to say on a talk show or will it reign tomorrow, that seems like we're just turning every single thing in our lives into an occasion to gamble. But that's an argument that's moral above all, right? And how are you going to get legislators excited about that? If they see surging rates of gambling addiction, particularly among young people, yes. So many educators I talk to say they're panicked at how suddenly preoccupied with gambling. Kids as young as elementary school are, if you can believe that in college, 20% of students dip into tuition funds to fund their bets. And I spoke with an expert in this named Jeffrey Derivinsky, whose specializes in youth problem gambling. And he pointed out that one of the dangers of gambling versus drug addiction or other things where you can kind of tell quickly if someone has a problem, typically with gambling, it can take years for a problem to take shape. So I've spoken with so many problem gamblers in recovery who say I was fine until I suddenly won $10,000 and I spent every day chasing not only that money but that feeling and that is so dangerous. Finally, now that we've seen some of the really negative outcomes of legal sports gambling, death threats for players, fixed games, users going bankrupt, you know, the levels of gambling addiction that you've described, is there any push in the government to regulate this activity again? Yes, particularly after those arrests in the NBA, Major League Baseball, the House and Senate sent letters to Adam Silver saying, please help us make sense of what you're doing so that more of this doesn't happen. Brian Schatz, the Democrat from Hawaii in the Senate recently proposed regulating prop bets. A New York assembly member has proposed banning live betting, which now makes up more than half of betting activity is placed during games. Whether there will be a bill in Congress that reaches the president's desk, I wouldn't bet on it anytime soon. It's hard for anything to pass, obviously. But people like Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut have really made it. Senator from Connecticut. Yes, have said, this is so out of hand and the industry is so brazen in what they're doing to defy just common sense of what's fair for customers. The federal government needs to weigh in. Danny Funt, thank you so much. My pleasure, thanks for having me. Danny Funt's new book is called Everybody Loses and you can also read him on the gambling industry at NewYorker.com. And of course, you can always subscribe to the New Yorker there as well, NewYorker.com. That's the New Yorker radio hour for today. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time. The New Yorker radio hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbis of Tunearts with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Boulton, Adam Howard, David Krasnell, Mike Kutschman, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul and Ursula Somme, with guidance from Emily Boateen and assistance from Michael May, David Gabel, Alex Barish, Victor Guan and Alejandra Decket. The New Yorker radio hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund. I'm Merrill Lombards. I'm Nigel Pore, we're the hosts and creators of Ear Hustle from PRX's Radiotopia. When we met, I was doing time at San Quentin State Prison in California. And I was coming in as a volunteer. The stories we tell are probably not what people expect from a prison podcast. Like cooking meals in a prison sale, keeping little pets, prison nicknames and trying to be a parent from inside. Stories about life on the inside, shared by those who live it. Find Ear Hustle wherever you get your podcasts.
