1311: Online Gambling | Skeptical Sunday

1311: Online Gambling | Skeptical Sunday

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Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, writer and researcher Nick Pell, which means you know it's gonna be a banger 'cause he only gets the topics that nobody else will do. Here on The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people, and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.

Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker. During the week, we have long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers. On Sundays, though it's [00:01:00] Skeptical Sunday, a rotating guest, co-host and I are gonna break down a topic you may have never thought about and debunk common misconceptions about that topic, such as GMOs, toothpaste, crystal healing band foods, chem trails, recycling, and more.

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Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. All right, here we go. Let me set the scene. A guy at a bar whips out his phone. He's six beers deep and in the middle of watching his favorite team play. Not exactly drunk, but definitely not sober. He decides it's time to put his mortgage payment on an in-play bet.

A bet placed after the game has started. He follows the sport closely. He knows both teams well. He even knows the spread. Plus it comes with a risk-free bet that if he hits both, it's gonna pay his mortgage for the entire year. So why [00:02:00] not? Right? Well, of course the bet doesn't hit. And now five second spend on his phone has him wondering how he's gonna stay in his house this month.

He's not a habitual loser. In fact, he wins more than he loses. But when he loses, he loses big and often finds himself worried about how he's gonna make ends meet this month. And he is not alone. Since the legalization of sports betting at the federal level, there's been a flood of apps that make it easier than ever to put your hard-earned money on a sure thing.

But is any of this a good thing? Who's making the money and who's losing it? And what are the broader social effects here today to help me raise the stakes as writer and researcher? Nick Pell. Are you a gambling man, Nick? I think I know the answer.

Speaker 2: No, no, no. I trade crypto like a respect to voltage generate.

Speaker: Oh, right. Yes. Totally. Not gambling, I forgot.

Speaker 2: No, no, not at all. I, I use charts and graphs for my gambling. I mean trading, it's called technical analysis. It's totally not astrology for crypto bros.

Speaker: You actually, you came to me with this topic, which I was a little surprised by because, well, because [00:03:00] you trade crypto, which is kind of just like gambling for nerds,

Speaker 2: not gambling, Jordan, not gambling, gambling, trading.

There's charts and graphs.

Speaker: Charts and graphs.

Speaker 2: Yes. So I wanted to do this because I think gambling should be legal because anytime you say something should be illegal, what you mean is state resources should be expended on putting people in prison for this, which I don't believe about gambling, but that doesn't mean that I'm not critical of it.

I don't have to be uncritical of things just because I don't think there should be laws against them. I think drugs should be legal, but if a business was making billions of dollars, door, dashing, crack to people. I don't think that legality shields them from criticism or prevents people from discussing the negative implications of quick and easy crack delivery.

Speaker: The ease of access to online gambling is a different issue as opposed to should gambling be legal? It's a different question.

Speaker 2: There's also a secondary issue involved where it's like, do [00:04:00] you want people who traffic in human misery having any kind of influence in your society? I don't, and I don't care if they're involved in voluntary commerce it, if they're trafficking in human misery.

I don't want these people having any kind of voice in our society.

Speaker: Right. Okay. Yeah. It is really crazy how fast sports gambling went from something illegal. Basically, you needed to, you used to need to know a guy to even do it. Now I see ads constantly for it and I'm constantly banning them from this podcast.

Basically the, the advertisers are rejecting them as sponsors, much to the chagrin of my podcast network. 'cause they come in with truckloads of money.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And the fictional story you described at the beginning of the show is very real. If I download FanDuel, I can be absolutely hammered and put my kids' college fund on a thousand to one shot.

Should anyone be in jail for this? I don't think so, but our people who make this easy for me to do [00:05:00] morally questionable. I think they absolutely are Fun fact, my family was involved in the gambling business such as it was in the seventies and the eighties. Uh, my uncle was a bookie. And my father was in what we would euphemistically call collections.

Speaker: Okay.

Speaker 2: They did not work together.

Speaker: There's an element of danger to gambling during that time period. I, I, well, right, because there's somebody who didn't pay your uncle, they're gonna get a visit from your dad.

Speaker 2: Yes. And like you said, it was not as easy as downloading an app. I mean, you could not even gamble on Sportsbook in Vegas until 1975.

Speaker: Really? That's wild to me that it was illegal to bet on sports at a building dedicated to gambling.

Speaker 2: It wasn't illegal. It was taxed into oblivion. Ah, there was a 10% tax and that made it unprofitable. In 1974, lefty Rosenthal, the guy, presumably not his given name, uh, the guy who Robert De Niro's character in casino is based on.

He successfully [00:06:00] lobbied to get it dropped to 2%.

Speaker: I don't need Google to tell me that. Lefty Rosenthal was some kind of gangster that's

Speaker 2: Yeah. He, he basically built Vegas, at least the, the sports betting side of things.

Speaker: Mm.

Speaker 2: Prior to that, the closest you were gonna get was off track betting, where you went and gambled on horse races over the television in Rhode Island when I was a kid, you could also gamble on Hili, which most people have never heard of and probably couldn't pronounce if they saw how it spelled.

Speaker: Is that the sport with the little, you use like little basic big ice cream scoops to whip a ball around?

Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. There's a little tiny clip of it at the, in the opening montage of, um, Miami Vice.

Speaker: That's

Speaker 2: funny. If anybody is as big of a Miami Vice fan as I am. You could do that in Newport, Rhode Island.

Sports gambling wasn't legalized in Atlantic City until 2018, and that was when the Supreme Court ruled that the law banning sports betting was unconstitutional. It is worth [00:07:00] mentioning that sports book is the safest form of gambling for people who actually know what they're doing.

Speaker: So explain what you mean by that.

Presumably you don't mean safe 'cause they're not gonna get taken out back and worked over with a shovel if they welch on a bet,

Speaker 2: a sports book along with horse racing, which we're kind of gonna take horse racing out of the equation, but these are the two forms of gambling that you can realistically make money on.

The playing field is much more level and lots of guys do make money just playing the horses. I worked at a newsstand next to a horse track once upon a time, and there was a guy who would come in every day and get the racing form, which is like the daily newspaper about horse racing. He got it every day because his job was betting on horses.

It's really grueling work. But if you love horse racing, why not?

Speaker: Why is that? What makes that different?

Speaker 2: There's lots of reasons. First of all, table games and slots are just hard coded, so the house always wins on a long enough timeframe. The [00:08:00] math does not math for you coming out on top at table games and card games and slots unless you're extremely skilled.

Maybe over the years, casinos have basically figured out how to prevent Rainman from coming in and cleaning house in sports and permut betting, that's horses. You're not betting against the house. The odds are determined by what other people are betting on. It's peer-to-peer. You're betting against other gamblers.

The house makes its money on volume, not by winning bets over time. In fact, a bookie's dream is equal amounts of money on both sides of a bet. That's why they'll move the line to make one side more attractive if the other side is getting too much action. If you've ever seen the movie The Grifters with uh, John Cusack and Angelica Houston, Angelica, Houston's job is to go into horse tracks when the odds are too lopsided and throw a bunch of money to even them out.

'cause that's how they make their money. It doesn't matter [00:09:00] really who wins to a bookie because they're getting their juice, which is typically 10% of all the action. They're not trying to out bet anyone. They want to manage the line and the VIG makes that profitable.

Speaker: All right, so this is one of those terms I've heard in every gangster movie ever and every episode of the Sopranos or whatever, and I have no idea what it means.

Vig, you apparently do so can you explain what the Vig is for me and everybody else who didn't grow up with an uncle who was a bookie,

Speaker 2: did grow up in a mobbed up family,

Speaker: right?

Speaker 2: The VIG is mostly an interest rate thing. It's usually how it's used, but in gambling terms, it's the house advantage that's baked into every bet.

You're not wrong in a certain sense that crypto is sportsbook for nerds for sure. And much like in crypto trading or other forms of trading, you know you can place bets in Sportsbook in a way that makes sense. You can get partial wins, you can make wins that easily compensate for your losses. And if you're a whiz at [00:10:00] arbitraging your bets, this is called ditching.

In the world of gambling, you can lose most of the time and still win. If you just bet the minus one 10 line, you only have to be right 52% of the time to make money.

Speaker: Okay, without getting too deep in the weeds, what does that mean slash what would that look like?

Speaker 2: A one 10 line means you spend a buck 10 for every $1 you hope to win.

And the 10 cents is the vig or the juice. That's the house advantage. Bookies want to take money from the losers and give it to the winners and then pocket the 10 cents. So it actually is quite a bit like trading crypto stocks. I mean, we're talking market maker fees and stuff, so super simple math here In terms of how you would win by losing, say I'm at the horse rack and I put a dollar on a 10 to one shot and five bucks on a three to one shot.

Well, the three to one shot loses, so I lose five bucks, [00:11:00] but the 10 to one shot comes in, so I made 10 bucks. So I'm still up like I think the actual math is four bucks. You're up four bucks, multiply it by 10 or a hundred, or whatever. You played the odds. That's what you do. You play the odds. This is effectively what day traders do.

You know If your trade is unprofitable, you throw more money at it at a lower price so that you're in profit more quickly. DCA down. The math is somewhat more complicated here because there are fees, but the basic point remains that the thing is you play the odds.

Speaker: So at the very least, it's slightly less stupid than just pumping your money into video poker.

Speaker 2: You can actually get an advantage on video poker, but the squeeze is not worth the juice on that. But it can be done with sportsbook. You can manage the downside and take home decent profits. And do you want to know how online betting apps deal with guys who know how to arbitrage their bets properly?

Speaker: I see.

My guess is they ban those users. [00:12:00]

Speaker 2: Your guess is correct. They call it non recreational play. Recreational gamblers want a high win rate. Pros known as sharps in the field of sports gambling are ditching their bets and they focus on things like expected value and arbitrage.

Speaker: Okay. What's expected value, again for people who didn't take statistics slash gambling class in college?

Yeah.

Speaker 2: Or never took gambling. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's a method of calculating risk versus reward. In sportsbook, you want to bet on lines with positive expected values and avoid negative expected values. But yeah, these platforms, they use AI to ban people who actually know how to bet. Which should tell you everything you need to know about these abs.

Speaker: Yes. That is definitely really sus like, oh, you're too good. You're outta here. And it's not cheating. You're not cheating, you're not hacking anything. It's not even like sports book version of card counting or whatever that might be. You just happen to [00:13:00] know what you are doing, so they throw you out. What I don't, I don't get is why ban them?

They're still making money off those users. I don't, I don't really understand.

Speaker 2: You're messing up their business model. There are places that are specifically for the Sharps, and they love Sharps because you're creating data for them. You're helping them set a better line so they don't care. They welcome sharps.

Oh,

Speaker: because they're using your brain as part of their computer to train where the bet line whatever should be if you're smart.

Speaker 2: Yeah. They will literally say, Sharp's welcome. Like you said, their business model is like, well, these guys know what they're doing. Let's use them to set our line.

Speaker: Right, right.

Crowdsource data. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Most guys, and they are overwhelmingly guys using these apps, are just gonna YOLO a thousand bucks a clip at a 10 game parlay because all they see is, oh man, if this hits, I get 75 grand. And that's the business model of retail gambling apps.

Speaker: Explain what a parlay is again, for people who are not compulsive gamblers.

Speaker 2: Sure. So [00:14:00] a parlay is when you link a number of bets together, making them into one. They can kind of be compared to meme coins for gamblers. For people who may understand the world of meme coins, your chances of buying the next dogecoin is like zero,

Speaker: right?

Speaker 2: But if you throw a thousand bucks at Dogecoin at launch, you're gonna make a mint.

So a simple example of what a parlay is is if you bet on 10 different games and make them into a 10 game parlay, you're now betting on all 10 games as a single bet.

Speaker: So if you win nine and you lose one, you go home with nothing.

Speaker 2: Correct. Which might be a good risk to reward ratio if you throw 10 bucks at it, but it's closer to a lottery ticket than a bet.

Speaker: I see.

Speaker 2: Pro gamblers don't go 10 for 10.

Speaker: Yeah, well, of course, yeah. How prevalent is online gambling now? Do we have any idea on how many people are problem gamblers?

Speaker 2: It's a huge market. Globally. It's between 77 and $101 [00:15:00] billion. With North America being the biggest market. In the United States, it's a little under $7 billion a year, and it's expected to be just under 13 billion by 2030.

Speaker: Geez. So people are gambling the GDP of Serbia. That's just crazy.

Speaker 2: Yeah. About 22% of all Americans reported having a sports book account in late 2025, including nearly half of all men between 18 and 49. That's according to a survey from St. Bonaventure University. A survey taken by the American Psychiatric Institute in March, 2025 found that 28% of all American adults gamble online daily, which is insane to me.

Speaker: That is insane to me as well, mostly because of the daily part. How do these people have the money for this?

Speaker 2: No idea, but mobile devices account for about 80% of all these wagers according to a [00:16:00] Mordor intelligence study.

Speaker: Dude, that is just, wow. Take these people's phones away, I guess. I don't know.

Speaker 2: It would not be the worst idea 'cause it's gonna get very, very greasy the further we get into this.

Speaker: Yeah. So lots of people are gambling with their phones, but, okay. Devil's advocate, who cares? You of all people would agree, this is not a problem in and of itself. And so how do we know when gambling is actually a problem versus just a really dumb hobby?

Speaker 2: Absolutely. The Mayo Clinic offers us a comprehensive list of signs of problem gambling.

You're constantly obsessing over gambling, uh, including figuring out ways to get more money for gambling. You're probably a gambling addict like any other. Addiction, gambling addiction requires increasing amounts of the drug to get the same thrill. You're taking bigger risks with bigger bets. Just to feel something in the words of Axel Rose.

I used to do a little, but the little wouldn't do it. So the little got more and more?

Speaker: Yes. Uh, okay. Now I can relate.

Speaker 2: [00:17:00] Axel explained it for you.

Speaker: Axel explained everything. Yes.

Speaker 2: Another common symptom of addiction that applies to gambling. Trying to quit without success. Irritability, when not gambling. Or gambling.

To avoid your problems. Chasing losses, which is gambling. More money to win money back. Lying to your family about losses or otherwise letting gambling interfere with your personal or work life. Finally there's borrowing money to to cover your gambling expenses.

Speaker: I'd probably also add to that gambling money you don't really have, which I guess is covered by borrowing money, but it seems worth pointing out that once you start gambling money you can't afford to lose slash is not even yours.

That is a problem. So how common is problem gambling then, specifically related to mobile and online platforms?

Speaker 2: According to the National Council on problem gambling, between two and 2.5 million adults have severe gambling addiction with another four to 8 million with gambling problems that impact their lives, but don't tick enough boxes to officially be gambling [00:18:00] addicts.

The lifetime risk is that between one and 2% of all Americans will experience a gambling problem at some point in their life.

Speaker: We talked earlier about how it's mostly men who are gambling. How does this work out? When it comes to problem gambling,

Speaker 2: men are twice as likely to have gambling problems as women, according to a poll from Fairly Dickinson University.

This is especially true of young men. As many as 10% of men under the age of 30 have gambling problems, Asian Americans and black Americans are twice as likely as white Americans to have a gambling problem.

Speaker: And how does that compare to the past? How much is this a growing problem as opposed to one that always existed, but we just started measuring or discovered?

Speaker 2: We don't have super specific stats, but we do know that problem gambling has increased, not just with the legalization of sportsbook, but also with the dissemination of online gambling. Searches for help for gambling addiction spiked between 30 and 67% after the mass legalization of [00:19:00] online gambling. We know that frequency of play is the biggest red flag according to recent national polling.

35% of people who gamble even casually already report at least one problem behavior such as chasing losses or lying to loved ones. When you look at. High intensity groups like Online Sports Betts, the number nearly doubles with 68% showing signs of problematic play. That's from the Fairleigh Dickinson University study cited earlier.

Speaker: For those of you listening at home, if you and two of your friends use FanDuel a lot, one of you likely has a gambling problem. That's how serious these stats are. I feel like it goes without saying that the problem isn't just a need for greater self-control on the part of people gambling. I mean, some of it maybe, but it's not just that.

Speaker 2: I want to be careful because people do have agency and we shouldn't be blaming their gambling addiction on the fact that they can download a betting app. [00:20:00] I can download a betting app and I never have

Speaker: No, you gamble on illiquid. Shitcoin. Cryptos

Speaker 2: guilty, but I have bought a house twice doing that, so, okay. I, I don't think I'm taking any of those boxes.

Speaker: I can stop anytime I want. I've done it a hundred times. One of those. Yeah.

Speaker 2: I'm working on the third house. In any event, I think that we can say that more people have access to these tools and that has a clear negative impact on society without painting. These people as helpless victims refer to the addiction episode for more about this, but the fact that they're reaching out for help shows that a decision to stop gambling is within their ability.

And I'd also say that for many problem gamblers, the only way to stop is going to be to get some outside help. Both of those things can be true at the same time. It's not simply about greater self-control, but self-control is eventually going to have to be at least one component of quitting.

Speaker: We talked earlier about how sports gambling used to be a thing you needed to [00:21:00] know a guy to be able to do.

So how did this blow up?

Speaker 2: Yeah. How did this become a thing that everybody does?

Speaker: Yeah,

Speaker 2: so everything traces back to the Supreme Court decision that overturned Pspa in 2018. Before this legal sports betting was largely a Nevada phenomenon and as I said, that wasn't even a thing until 1975.

Speaker: So what is PASPA and why is it such a big deal?

What happened here?

Speaker 2: PASPA is the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 and overturning this law is our pivot point. This is why sports betting goes from an underground thing to something that every sporting event is wallpapered with ads for it grandfathered in states that already had sports betting, which basically meant Nevada, Oregon, Delaware, and Montana had super limited sports betting and they were allowed to keep it.

Speaker: So repealing this is what makes sports gambling accessible to basically everybody.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Before the repeal, you had to know a guy or hop a flight to Vegas Murphy. The National Collegiate [00:22:00] Athletic Association is the case that overturns PASPA in 2018 and it was brought by the state of New Jersey. They argued that the federal government had no authority to prevent states from legalizing sports betting,

Speaker: presumably because they were mad that Vegas had sports betting, but Atlantic City didn't.

I don't know.

Speaker 2: I mean, that would be my guess. Now, here's the important thing. The Supreme Court doesn't magically make gambling on sports legal from coast to coast. It just says that the federal government does not have the authority to prevent states from legalizing sports gambling.

Speaker: So how many states legalized it because of the Supreme Court decision?

Speaker 2: 38 plus dc. Now, one thing that's important and interesting to note is the timing, because this happens just as apps and mobile technology are really hitting their stride with massive penetration. I mean, think about what apps were like in 2015.

Speaker: Yeah,

Speaker 2: it was goofy stuff. It was stupid for the most part, or social apps.

But apps really are hitting their stride when they pass this [00:23:00] decision. So it's like a nuclear bomb. If the Supreme Court overturned the law. Right after it was passed in 1992, like who cares? It wouldn't have been a big deal. You couldn't download an app on your phone that let you put your life savings on a 10 game parlay.

15 minutes after some guy tells you about an app that you can gamble your life savings on. And by the way, your eight beers deep at the bar.

Speaker: How much of an impact does the legalization of sports gambling have financially speaking? Well, how big did this all get? That's what I'm asking.

Speaker 2: Before the repeal, we had a $5 billion industry that was effectively confined to one state.

Afterwards. It's a $120 billion enterprise.

Speaker: Wow. Okay. That's like 25 times what it was before. Holy smokes.

Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a big deal now. This is where it ties into digital gambling. 94% of bets are now placed online or via mobile. In 2025, American gambling platforms closed their fourth consecutive year of [00:24:00] growth.

When we include both sports betting and online slots and table games, which it's insane to me that the people can do slots on their phone. We also have some data about how online gambling is impacting problem gambling in the United States. If you gamble online, you're three to eight times more likely to develop a gambling problem than a brick and mortar gambler.

Speaker: You are listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show. We'll be right back.

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Speaker: All right, back to Skeptical Sunday. Yeah, my friend James Clear, he wrote this book called Atomic Habits. He's been on this show before super bestselling book.

He's got this concept of adding friction to things that you don't want to do. So if you play too many video games, unplug your Xbox and put it in the closet. And then when you want to play video games, you've got to go to the closet. Plug in the wires, get the controller set up, and then you play for a few hours and then when you're done, you take it all down so that you don't just walk in your house and you're like, oh, I'll just play for 15 minutes.

And then five hours later you're still playing frigging video games. Right. So this is the opposite of that. So that we had this with gambling before, right? Where you would have to get in your car and like call the bookie and then you get ahold of him and you realize he's at a bar or something. You've got to drive to the bar.

You have plenty of time to talk yourself out of it or decide that you're gonna [00:28:00] do less of that or, or whatever. Now you're just like on the toilet and you're thinking, oh, I'm just gonna pop in and bet. And it's like, it's just way too easy to do now.

Speaker 2: Yeah. When I lived in Ireland, there were bookies absolutely everywhere.

It was legal. These were as common as Dollar Generals are in poor rural towns in America. And I lived in the absolute middle of nowhere. We have multiple places you could go gamble, Patty Power and stuff like that. But the thing is, even if we had a situation like that in the United States and mobile gambling was not legal, you still have to get in your car to come make a bet.

Speaker: And the other thing is that at some point you leave the casino or you leave the bookie bar when you're done. But when you've got an app on your phone and it's sending you a push notification if you've got a gambling addiction or even just poor impulse control like an, it's, it's, this is like an alcoholic getting push notifications from the liquor store all day.

Except in this case, your iPhone actually pours the shot into your mouth without you having to drive over even to pick up the booze [00:29:00] that you bought on your phone app. Like there's just nothing that quite compares to the same thing. Maybe like porn addiction, right. Except you, it's cheaper.

Speaker 2: That's probably the best analogy.

In general, I think that there's a real problem with people being able to indulge their vices whenever a, a stray thought floats through their head. And, you know, presumably we had, we also had way less porn addiction. When you had to drive to a sketchy part of town and park your car in front of the place where somebody might see it, there was friction there and there was a stigma and that kept a lot of people from getting in over their heads.

The University of Maryland did a study that found that disordered gambling increased from four to 5.7% since legalized mobile betting.

Speaker: That doesn't sound like a lot. Uh, it's a 1.7% increase, but I know you're gonna push back on that. I, I hope

Speaker 2: it's an increase of 42% in three years.

Speaker: Wow.

Speaker 2: It's a big jump. 1.7%, uh, [00:30:00] over 4% is, that's a big jump.

Did all the people with a propensity to become problem gamblers just make the leap because it was easier. Maybe only time will tell. But I do think mobile gambling platforms present problems that you just can't hand wave away with. Well, you know, people are allowed to gamble.

Speaker: There's a reason I've never accepted sponsorship from gambling platforms.

I mean, I have offers all the time. I'm just pretty firmly in the demographic of guys that they want as customers, and so is much of the audience listening right now. But to me it's kind of like being sponsored by cocaine. You know, can hear me out. Can some people do it responsibly? Maybe is it fun? Maybe, or So I've heard, right.

I mean, I can stop anytime I want. I've done it a hundred times, right? I made that joke earlier. But most people who are willing to try it in the first place, they're not going to be able to do that. And I just, I don't feel comfortable chilling for a gambling platform. Some things are just not for sale or maybe, I don't know, I'll sell [00:31:00] out later.

I'm holding out for more cash and I just don't realize it yet. Like you said earlier, time will tell, but I just, I don't know. I just, I don't like giving people a taste of this because clearly most people can't actually handle that.

Speaker 2: No, and the problem is really sharp when it comes to Gen Z. A 2025 TransUnion report found that Gen Z and millennials who use cryptocurrency apps are significantly more likely to engage in high frequency mobile sports betting.

The worst problem is that they see gambling on sports and meme coins as an investment strategy.

Speaker: Oh my God, that is bleak, man. I can't tell if this is just ignorance or sort of like cope because the financial situation for that generation is so cooked.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's pretty cooked and, and you know, maybe it is their best shot.

But it's bleak regardless.

Speaker: Yeah,

Speaker 2: and I don't want to like lean too heavily on this, but I do kind of want to throw out that millennials and Gen Z have been prepped for online gambling and mobile gambling to a [00:32:00] certain degree by loot boxes and video games. I, I don't think it's a direct pipeline, but I do think it's kind of easier psychologically to see gambling the way that they do when you've been avoiding in-game purchases by finding loot boxes for like your entire life.

Speaker: For those of you who aren't gamers, loot boxes are what boxes full of in-game treats, like skins for your weapon and make things, ways to make your player look different, that you could also, you can either find them or buy them. Right. Am I getting it right?

Speaker 2: Yeah. I think that like special weapons and armor, I don't, I'm not a gamer either, but I think that's what they are.

And I'm not saying ban loot boxes, I'm just saying maybe this is, makes it easier for Gen Z and millennials to become problem gamblers.

Speaker: I see. Because they're Oh, right. 'cause they're prime for it. Yeah. This is like why I don't like my kids watching what they call 'em unboxing videos. 'cause it's just like, Hey, it's not consumerism.

You're watching another kid open toys and then put it aside and then opening another toy and then putting it aside. I'm like, no, no, [00:33:00] no. This is just consumerism training. Speed run. We don't need this.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It's about to get a heck of a lot Bleecker though, man.

Speaker: Yeah. Okay. Well, everyone knew they were in for a cheery, sunshine filled episode when they saw your name on the podcast today, like I said at the top of the show.

So, yeah, let's do it. Let's go for it.

Speaker 2: In 2024 alone, call volume to 1-800-GAMBLER, which is the helpline for problem gambling that spiked by 33%. When Sportsbook was legalized in Ohio in 2023, their state managed helplines saw their call volume skyrocket by 27% in the first month. Compared to the previous year.

That is a really, the Ohio stat is important 'cause it gives us a much more granular view of the topic. This is perhaps the darkest stat on the entire show. Gambling disorder has the highest suicide attempt rate of any addiction according to the Ohio Casino Control Commission. It's roughly one in five with 80% [00:34:00] experiencing suicidal ideation.

Speaker: Geez. So it's not Ohio against gambling, it's the actual government agency in charge of gambling in the state.

Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's because people are facing financial ruin that they've probably been hiding from their friends and family. And to kind of put a, you know, dark lining around this dark cloud, because it's mostly men we're talking about.

The chances of those suicide attempts being successful are much higher. Men are remarkably effective at suicide.

Speaker: That's so sad. I mean, not to state the obvious, but there's, there's just no amount of money worth taking your life over.

Speaker 2: I agree. But you know, the only time in my life I ever wrote a note, it was over money.

And the thing people don't understand who've never been in the situation of losing a lot of money, is that it's not just about the money. It's about I failed my family and I have to face them. You know, I'm the guy who just lit five figures on fire because of my [00:35:00] stupid gambling habit that is so much more crushing than the loss of money.

And when I lost a lot of money, I had it to lose. Some people might correctly think that they're going to lose their house, their car, their entire way of life. All because they made one bad bet or a series of bad bets, or you know, a lot of little bets that add up over time.

Speaker: I think their families would rather just be broke, but have them alive.

But you know, I guess I understand the logic,

Speaker 2: you're not wrong, but let's look at it from the perspective of the gambler. There's a concept called a, a psychological cliff, and it's a lot steeper with gambling as a point of reference. Let's talk about opioid addicts. There's a very long, slow curve from, I tried Vicodin for the first time to, I just sold all my furniture to buy a bag of dope.

And I know a guy who did exactly that. Good luck hiding your opioid addiction from anybody, especially now that heroin has been chased outta the market [00:36:00] By fentanyl, you look like shit. You can't keep up your basic obligations to work. And family and friends, people are gonna know something's up. Even if they can't specifically nail down that you're using dope, even alcohol, people are gonna know a lot of the time if it's severe enough.

It's not gonna be a surprise to anybody when they find out you have a drug addiction.

Speaker: That's a pretty good point. I'm not used to this, but a lot of my Asian friends, they just love. They love love, love, love, love, love, love gambling, and you can hide it really well. Let's say you're wealthy. No one's gonna be like, what happened?

Because you're not gonna lose your house. You're just gonna lose a ton of money that you were gonna spend on something else or hand to your kids. So I know people that they can gamble like a hundred thousand dollars in a week over New Year and they're like, oh yeah, it's fine. And I'm thinking like, is it though, like I know you have money, but holy smokes, there's a better use for that kind of money.

But with drug addiction, I don't really know that many people who are [00:37:00] like, yeah, I'm holding it all together just fine with my heroin addiction. I mean, there are high functioning heroin or there were now they're probably fentanyl, there were high functioning heroin addicts. But it makes you feel so miserable that eventually it catches up with you.

Right. So I, I don't know. You're right, it is quite obvious to see something like this. People do know something is up, but you can really hide gambling so Well, huh.

Speaker 2: You can hide it forever, right. Up until the moment when your life is completely ruined.

Speaker: Yes.

Speaker 2: Nowhere is the phrase where there's a will, there's a way more true than it is with addicts.

Say you have a joint bank account with your wife, you're gonna find a way to get that money. The same way a crack addict knows where to find crack. And I mean, I know a guy like who was a, a heroin addict and he moved to my little town, my little providence suburb I grew up in because he didn't know where to score.

And he literally did not make it through the day that he learned where he could score.

Speaker: Oh my God.

Speaker 2: Addicts are [00:38:00] gonna find a way.

Speaker: What did he do? I'm so curious. What did he do? Just go to like the worst part of town and walk around asking people basically.

Speaker 2: Probably, I mean, I don't know specifically. I kind of lost touch with him then and I, yeah.

Hope he is okay. But it was literally that day.

Speaker: Geez.

Speaker 2: So yeah, you're gonna find a way. And with gambling, when you reach the point where it's, you just can't hide it anymore, it's gonna be really bad. So bad that maybe you think your family's better off without you.

Speaker: Yeah. Which

Speaker 2: is not true, but to you it is.

Speaker: Right, right.

Speaker 2: Which is insanely sad. And whether you gamble or not, you should be aware that this is the effect this is having on people. It is not the harmless pastime or the victimless crime that it is made out to be.

Speaker: Yeah. The gambling industry loves to point out that, because I've pushed back, you know, they push back on, why don't, why don't you want this?

I'm like, 'cause it creates addiction and dah, dah, dah. And they're like, no, no, no. The overwhelming majority of people, you know, somewhere between 95, 90 8% or whatever, they just put [00:39:00] 50 bucks on the Super Bowl once a year. They move on with their lives. But I'm like, okay, then why are you offering me $500,000 to be on my show?

Because I'm gonna get that many people to put down 50 bucks. Like, no, nah, it's not, that's not why. Right? Because it's 'cause you know that you're gonna make more than that, and how are you gonna do that? How does that math work if everybody just puts down 50 bucks once a year? That's just, so I'm gonna ask you a question I already know the answer to.

Is that even true? That 98% of people just put a couple bucks on the Super Bowl and move on?

Speaker 2: Yes. Yes it is. The overwhelming majority of adults have bet on the Super Bowl at some point in their life and nothing happened. That is fair. That is accurate. That is true. The issue is the people. This is not true of.

Speaker: Yeah. Well, yeah. I think that's, I probably asked the question wrong, but the Yeah, I see where you're going. Okay.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It's incredibly asymmetrical. The entire business model of gambling apps is based around exploiting people with gambling addiction, and we should be completely candid [00:40:00] about that. We should remember that when we're watching a game and see ads for gambling apps, people are disgusted at the Sackler family who invented Oxycontin.

One of their distributors wasn't, it's sometimes attributed to them as one of their distributors said, uh, they're like Doritos, you keep beating them and we'll keep making more.

Speaker: Geez,

Speaker 2: it's this very callous attitude and people hate the Sackler family. Oh, yeah. 'cause of their role in the opioid epidemic in this country, and people should hate the Sackler family.

Speaker: Mm-hmm.

Speaker 2: That's an absolutely correctly placed anger that people have at the Sackler family. People making their money from gambling apps should be viewed with the exact same visceral disgust that we have for drug dealers.

Speaker: Yes, I noticed that drug cartel people in interviews, they're always like, Hey, this is a business.

You know, if there was no demand for it, we wouldn't do it. And I'm like, but you're also creating the demand and the making it harder for people to kick [00:41:00] and poisoning them, right? Like, no, you have people outside of schools selling this and getting fentanyl at users hooked on tran dope or whatever. It's, it's like a, no.

It's not just you're supplying a demand that was already there. Like you're not, not culpable because somebody wants your illegal, dangerous product that kills you. That's not how any of this works.

Speaker 2: So a really good example of how sketchy the mobile gambling apps, online gambling stuff is micro bats. And this is, it gets to the frictionless part of things too.

Speaker: Okay,

Speaker 2: so let's say you buy lottery tickets. You go to a gas station, you drop 10 bucks, 20 bucks, let's call it a hundred bucks. A hundred bucks every week on mega millions scratchers, whatever your poison is. There are so many barriers to doing that. In a lot of states, you have to go get cash outta the bank.

'cause the state I grew up in, you could not buy lottery tickets with even a debit card. And that's true in a lot of states. You've got to buy 'em with cash.

Speaker 3: Wow.

Speaker 2: Then you've got to go to the gas station, then you've got to stand in line with your numbers picked or pick out your [00:42:00] scratchers, whatever it is. So that's all kinds of points of friction where you could stop, where you could do less.

Whatever you open up your phone, you can place 50 micro bets in an hour on a single tennis match.

Speaker: Wow. Okay. So for me and everyone else who doesn't gamble, what exactly is a micro bet?

Speaker 2: So a normal bet is who's gonna win? That can take hours to resolve. And if you're a mobile app gambler and you've got a problem and you're desperately chasing dopamine, that is way too long to wait.

So you can place micro bets on things like when the next strike will be thrown or whether or not a team is gonna make a first down on this drive, and it kind of turns sportsbook into a slot machine. The National Council on Problem Gambling and Addiction Experts like Dr. Harry Levant have pointed out how micro betting transforms sports betting into a high frequency loop.

Speaker: Okay? So rather than having to wait three hours for your dopamine rush, you can get it every two minutes,

Speaker 2: [00:43:00] which compounds the problem of frictionlessness we discussed previously,

Speaker: right?

Speaker 2: You can put down big bets, or even just a bunch of little ones that add up to a big bet without anything stopping you from spending all day and night doing it.

I mean, there's always sports going on somewhere. So, back to our lottery ticket analogy. There's a real thing that happens when you want to spend a thousand bucks on lottery tickets, but the ride to the store makes you only want to buy a hundred bucks worth. Your body and brain have time to talk sense.

Plus, I'm guessing a lot of guys find themselves up by a hundred bucks from the the micro bats, but then they piss it all away because I can make more.

Speaker: Yeah. It's funny you should mention there's always sports going on somewhere. I did a show about sports in human trafficking. That was episode 1204 with Chris Dalby.

I talked a little bit about human trafficking and sports gambling, but like rigging games and stuff. And you mentioned there's always sports going on somewhere. I was asking him, how come I [00:44:00] see these weird clips of like guys playing soccer, but there's only two of them and they're fat and they're not clearly not athletes.

Or there's guys playing table soccer where they're both seated and they're just doing this for hours and hours, like who's watching this? And he said, this is just exclusively for gambling. Because maybe there's not a sport on in, I don't know, Europe at four o'clock in the morning when some dude is awake and there's nothing going on in America.

So he's got to tune into something. And the answer is two drunk Russian guys in a windowless room pretending to play soccer and just like kicking a ball around and calling it two on two soccer. They even pretend to be like Barcelona and I don't know Ray Madrid, but it's just the same two drunk Russian dad bods, kicking the ball around, switching jerseys every hour.

And they're doing it for like six to eight hours a day. Right. They're just miserable. They're basically slaves playing a sport, A fake sport. I

Speaker 2: don't mean to laugh, but it is a little, little, yeah.

Speaker: It's a funny visual. Yeah, [00:45:00] but this is for gambling. 'cause I was like, who's watching this dumb crap? And he's like gambling addicts who just need to bet on something.

I'll bet that like in the next minute, that table soccer guy, player one is gonna score a goal and then they win 10 bucks and then they lose 20. It's just absolutely nuts. So there's hundreds of channels of this by the way. Like there's an unlimited amount of fake sports anyway. I see the whole gambling.

I'm up, I'm not gonna cash out, I'm just gonna do more. I see this in crypto all the time. Guys will get 10 x return on something, but then they'll hold it without taking any profit. I this funny, this is all just coming together for me. The same guys that I talked about who were gambling tons of money, they were up in crypto back in the day.

I remember when everybody had a million dollars in crypto back in like 20 17, 20 18. Even though like the guys who you think like, wow, you're not even smart and you have a million dollars. Those guys, the

Speaker 2: ICO era.

Speaker: The ICO era? Yes.

Speaker 2: ICO era.

Speaker: Yeah. So this was when there was basically like fake quote unquote IPOs for new coins.

Anyway, there was one every [00:46:00] five minutes. I knew guys that had made $900,000 and. You can't even tie your shoes and you're up 900 grand. And then two, three months later, they were broke. And I was like, what? And they're like, yeah, I wish I'd sold, but blah, blah, blah. And I remember telling these guys, take money off the table.

Take at least take the 40 grand you borrowed from your grandma off the table. 'cause then you won't have that over your head. And they were like, yeah, that would be smart, wouldn't it? LOL. And now they're like, wow, I'm a loser and I owe my grandma 40 grand and I'm broke. And I'm like, how did you lose that?

And they're like, yeah. Every time I had profited off of a new coin offering, I just spread it out to 10 other coin offerings. Well, they were all scams. So instead of quitting while you were ahead, they got Rugiet pulled and were left bag holding. And it's like, oh gosh. And speaking of feeling low, yeah, you feel pretty low when you lose all that money.

But you feel really low when you lose your grandma's money when you could have just paid her back and it wouldn't have cost you much of anything. And by way of opportunity. [00:47:00] So these guys, they don't get a return. 'cause they're like, but it could go higher. I've already made a million bucks. There's, what if I make 10 million more?

You know, they just keep moving the goalpost. I'm not, okay. So I'm not doubting anything you're saying is true, but is there a real scientific reason for why the micro bet thing is more dangerous?

Speaker 2: Yeah, it's the feedback loop we uh, discussed earlier. The sooner the dopamine comes after an action, the more addictive the behavior is.

A study published in the Journal of Gambling Studies,

Speaker: that's a thing.

Speaker 2: That's a thing,

Speaker: okay.

Speaker 2: Found gambling with high event frequencies, which is short intervals between the bet and the outcome. They prevent your prefrontal cortex from resetting.

Speaker 3: Wow.

Speaker 2: You stay in what players call the zone or the machine zone because rather than having one discreet beginning and end to what you're betting on.

You're just bombarded with offers to bet on whether or not the next pitch is gonna go above 95 miles an hour.

Speaker 3: You are listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show. [00:48:00] We'll be right back.

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Now for the rest of Skeptical Sunday. Why do I feel like the Journal of Gambling Studies is totally funded by gambling companies? In order to make really, really smart people figure out how to hack our brains and just like call it? Yeah. I mean, it is science. It is science, but it's also like who's hiring these scientists?

Oh, wait, right. Nevermind the game of the companies we're talking about right now. Hey, I need a million dollars to see if we can make people bet more by making the bets more frequent. Here you go.

Speaker 2: Yeah,

Speaker: because they're gonna make that back in a day. If they [00:51:00] figure out how to hack this, geez. All right. I'm just picturing, I'm picturing a super sweaty guy at a roulette wheel, yelling, baby needs a new pair of shoes and half of these sort of little micro bet things.

This is, Ugh, gross.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Honestly, that's about right. And it's not the only effect either. High speed play induces a state of disassociation.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker 2: So researchers have found that at fast playing speeds, gamblers become less aware of their surroundings and their mounting losses.

Speaker: That sounds really bad. So they start disassociating.

They aren't keeping track of how much money they're losing because they're out in space.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It's a big part of why they lose so much money.

Speaker: Oh man.

Speaker 2: We got a 2025 study from the University of California San Diego that found that 96% of high frequency online gamblers lose money in the long run, which shouldn't come as a shock to anybody because these companies are not in business to lose money.

What might be slightly shocking is that they have [00:52:00] no idea that they're losing money because they're betting so fast and it's about to get even worse. Near misses are processed by your brain's reward center, almost identically to a win. So you keep getting dopamine hits that tell you to try again because you were just, you were so close last time.

Speaker: Wait, wait, wait. So you're okay. You're saying even when I lose, if I'm close, my brain says, Hey man, you're not so bad at this. You should definitely just try again and again and again and again.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I have this with, there's this Frogger game at Dave and Buster's where I take my kid.

Speaker: I'm very familiar. Yes.

The huge one, right? The huge

Speaker 2: one. Yeah. It's got like Minecraft skins on

Speaker: it. Yes. It's like Crossy Road. It's very similar to that one

Speaker 2: dude, I will, I will just dump so much money into that thing. 'cause I'm like, oh man, that train just got my guy. I'm gonna get it. I'm gonna get like a thousand tickets. I'm gonna get the, the Jack Botted tickets if I just keep playing this game.

Speaker: You know, I actually see an example of this [00:53:00] because my wife Jen, she loves those claw machines. Yeah. The ones where there's like stuffed animals inside and you use a claw and you try to get the claw to grab it and then of course it, lets go right away. Or it's really weak. They have them in Taiwan as well.

They're, it is just a huge thing. She loves it. I, I won't say she's addicted to it, but you know, that's 'cause I don't want to get in trouble anyway. She will do this for hours in Taiwan where it's really cheap. But the difference is, in Taiwan, if you play long enough, if you put in enough coins after, like you try 10 times, it doesn't work.

The machine just gives you the item, you know, it, it's, it actually would just reach in, grab it normally and drop it in the hole. It's supposed to be fun and a challenge and you can do anything from getting chips or a cola or something like that. It's not about the item and you often trade in the items to get something else, but it is addicting, right?

Because you get it and then it rolls and it almost rolls in and then it rolls back and you just do it again and again and again. It's kinda like gambling. I guess the difference is, in Taiwan it's like 10 cents and eventually you're guaranteed to win because you know you're pumping money into a stupid machine like this.

But yeah, this brain hack is [00:54:00] really something that gets a lot of people hooked on just about any type of game of chance.

Speaker 2: That's micro betting. You know, micro betting creates this constant stream of near misses. The ball was just out of bounds. And then, you know, the brain scans show that the, uh, ventral striatum, which is the reward center in your brain, it reacts almost exactly the same to that near miss as it does to a win.

It releases a hit of dopamine and, and you're like, I'm gonna try it again immediately. Gosh. Because the wind fell just I was so close. I got it this time.

Speaker: Oh my God. I think, well, actually, I know my brain also does this. Thank God I don't actually gamble for real, because. I'm the same way with a lot of video games and stuff like that.

The thing is, I own the game so I can play 500 times and I paid my 20 bucks already, or I'm at, I don't know, whatever the equivalent of Chuck E. Cheese, Dave and Buster's type thing is. And even if I play for like two hours, I'm out $18 or I don't know, 30 [00:55:00] bucks, whatever. Right. It's, it's just not that bad.

And also at that point, I'm so sick of it, I can't wait to get out of there. It's not like I, I'm gonna win it back. Right. I know it's over. Yeah. You're just not that good at Hot Wheels racing Jordan. But yeah, we discussed earlier these companies, you

ever

Speaker 2: spent six hours playing Tetris or something because you're just like, I got it, I got

Speaker: it.

I mean, it has happened, but yeah. Now these days, no, I don't get hooked in like that anymore. You know, like it's not as bad. We discussed earlier, these companies, they're not in bus. Well, actually, here's the difference, right? Dave and Busters at some point are like, I'm hungry, I want to go to the bathroom. I want to wash my hands on a bathroom.

That doesn't smell terrible. I want to eat food that isn't pizza and wings. Yeah, like you're gonna leave, right? You're gonna leave the casino. It's different when you have this in your house. So we discussed earlier, these companies are not in business to lose money. Is the game rigged against the betters?

There's a house advantage to almost every game in a casino, right? Roulette and blackjack and poker, whatever. How does that play out in terms of sports gambling?

Speaker 2: So traditional sports betting inside a casino has a vig,

Speaker: [00:56:00] which right, we talked about.

Speaker 2: Yeah, it's the cool gangster term for the House Advantage or the wildly exorbitant interest rate.

The VIG is about 5% inside a traditional casino. For the micro bets on the betting apps, the VIG is like 15 to 25%.

Speaker: Wow.

Speaker 2: The drain rate for micro bets is way higher, so you might lose a hundred bucks in three hours betting in Vegas on, you know, Rams versus chiefs or whatever.

Speaker: Sure.

Speaker 2: You can lose a hundred bucks in three minutes on an app.

Speaker: Yikes.

Speaker 2: Because now you're betting on like, is the umpire gonna blink or whatever. You're chasing the dopamine hit of the next hit before you even get the dopamine off of the last bet.

Speaker: Yikes. Losing a game's worth of money before the first commercial break. Yikes. That's pretty nuts. And a really good way of illustrating how sports betting apps are different from more traditional forms of sports betting, because even if they introduced micro bets in Vegas, you'd have to get up, stand in line, fill out a form or something.

[00:57:00] All these steps which create more time and more decisions and more places for you or your friend to stop you and be like, Hey man, we're good. You're I'm good.

Speaker 2: Yes. No, there's no friction. I know we've said it, but like, let's just belabor the point. And micro betting is the fastest growing segment of the industry.

It's projected to account for $20 billion in wagers by 2027,

Speaker: which is more than the entire gaming industry was, was making before the legalization of sports betting nationwide. Yikes. Wow. That's yikes.

Speaker 2: Yeah. This is crack. These people are crack dealers and we should view them in the exact same way that we view crack dealers.

Do people have a right to engage in business with predatory actors? I think so. Maybe you don't, that does not remove your ability to view predatory actors as pons scum.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker 2: Which is they are, they're not good people. And then there's like the whole tech dystopia aspect where these companies use [00:58:00] AI to target their micro adss.

Speaker: Yeah. I do think people have the right to engage with predatory ai. You want to go get a payday loan?

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker: And pay a crazy rate on your check because you're either hurting bad or a dummy. Go ahead. But that, yeah, I think the payday loan guy is a piece of crap and I don't want him in my neighborhood. I don't care if he's got a race car or whatever.

These people are terrible. Yeah. The AI thing also, I'm a little grossed out by that because I'm guessing what are they doing with AI now? Just figuring out how to lower our defenses even more and take advantage of us.

Speaker 2: Yeah. That's the, got it. That's the super short version of it. Of

Speaker: course. Yeah. What, why not?

Speaker 2: What else would they use it for? Um, they know so much more about you than just who you bet on. They know what time you bet, what teams make you emotional, how you react when you lose. And they use all that to pick your pocket even deeper. They predict things like high state of arousal or emotional vulnerability.

So if you just lost a 10 micro bet, parlay off one or two [00:59:00] bets, they offer you five bucks to bet on the next one, and maybe you win and they lose money. The point is just to get you to keep the app open.

Speaker: Mm.

Speaker 2: And they've used AI driven personalization to drive a 58% increase in inplay betting engagement.

Speaker: So say you do close the app and you don't open it for three days.

You are not just gonna get some generic email that sits in your inbox. You're gonna get a highly specialized push notification straight to your phone, tailored to your habits sent at a time that you are most likely to gamble, and the offer's probably gonna be, what are they? Like? Some sort of boost on a micro bet that fits the profile of a bet you consider low risk because you've given them all of this data.

On a team that you like, on a sport, that you like whatever. Again, the point is just to keep you opening the app again and again and again. So it becomes a habit that you can't break.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Here's five bucks.

Speaker: Right.

Speaker 2: To bet on the thing that we know. You're gonna bet on.

Speaker: How is this, it's so insidious and targeted.

I hate it.

Speaker 2: The industry framed all of this as a way to identify what [01:00:00] they call erratic gamblers.

Speaker: Right. Uh, not gambling addicts or problem gamblers, just erratic. Nice turn of phrase. And also, I love that they're like, we want to identify these people. Oh, so you can avoid them? No. So that we can target them more specifically because they give us all their money.

Oh, okay. You're terrible person.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It's the Anakin meme.

Speaker: Yeah.

Speaker 2: So you can help them. Right,

Speaker: right.

Speaker 2: The Safe BET Act, which is currently languishing in Congress, that would ban many of the more egregious aspects of the industry.

Speaker: Okay. Such as

Speaker 2: prohibiting sports betting, advertising during live sporting events, or between the hours of 8:00 AM and 10:00 PM So they're like, you know, sexy 900 ads used to be like they're on late at night.

Banning advertisements using terms like bonus, no sweat or odds. Boost language to induce gambling and prohibiting the purposeful targeting of problem gamblers or individuals under the age of 21.

Speaker: Say that. I like sports betting. I just think it's [01:01:00] fun. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose. Maybe I lose more than I win, whatever, but I'm not giving Tony Soprano my kid's car to cover my gambling debts and I'd like to keep it that way.

How do I keep making, watching sports more interesting? By putting money on the line without becoming a cautionary tale or you know, leaving my kids without a father. Like, can you do this safely?

Speaker 2: Yes. And this guy is totally a guy, like this is a guy, he just throws a little money at it. It's whatever.

Sometimes he wins, sometimes he loses. It mostly is probably just a revolving account of like 500 bucks. You know that like sometimes it's 600, sometimes it's 400, whatever. You like doing it and you're not ruining your life. Who am I to tell you not, but what you should know. Is that professional betters do not think in dollars at all.

They think in units and units are a portion of their total bank roll, which is usually one or 2%. So if you decide that your entertainment budget for the NFL sees it is 500 bucks, your unit is five [01:02:00] bucks. Even if you feel locked in on a game, guess what? It's 15 bucks. 'cause you're doing three units, you know?

That's it.

Speaker: Okay. And then you start building that bankroll. You can bet more because it's still the same 500 bucks. You just turned it into 800 bucks. Congratulations.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And now your unit's eight bucks.

Speaker: Okay. That makes sense.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And that's the name of the game for pros. Pros are not looking to hit a 10 game parlay pros are looking for a batting average.

They want to have consistent base hits that pay over time. It's a slow game

Speaker: so you can manually insert friction. Right. Every online mobile app is required by law to allow you to set a deposit limit. I know that much. I think. Can't you also lock yourself out with for three days or something like that?

Isn't that a thing?

Speaker 2: Yeah. It's called the cool off feature. For what it's worth. Like I, when I trade. I allow myself to lose two trades a week and then I go and it's a thing I got from another trader. It's called the LOSES club. You're a loser. Mm-hmm. Go sit in the loser's box for the rest of the week. I don't even let myself look at [01:03:00] charts.

That's a self-discipline thing though,

Speaker: Uhhuh. Yeah.

Speaker 2: It's maybe a good tip for people.

Speaker: I assume people want to avoid micro bets. Just bet on the game. Put the damn phone away. The end.

Speaker 2: Yes, they're crack. Just stop it if you must parlay. It's a lottery ticket. You got a dollar for it.

Speaker: Right? Drop a buck or two.

Leave it there at the end.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, are you gonna be mad be about winning $10,000 because you could've Oh, I could've won a million. I mean, maybe. But don't be, it's free money man. Do not gamble. Drunk or high?

Speaker: Yeah. I cannot stress enough. This is nearly as dumb as drunk driving. You're just not going to make good decisions and be able to control your impulses drunk or high, obviously, that's kinda the point of drugs and alcohol.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Track your winnings and losses. Your brain is hard wired to remember big wins and gloss over small losses. Gambling is a lot like alcohol. It's not evil, but it's not neutral either. And some people just planes shouldn't do it.

Speaker: This is all really sound advice from the man who [01:04:00] bets on things like fart coin.

Speaker 2: I never actually held any fart coin.

Speaker: Wait, is fart coin real? I was kidding. I thought I made that up just now.

Speaker 2: No. Yeah, it's a thing. I'm, wow, I totally missed that.

Speaker: Okay, so that was with the thing that actually made people money. Fart coin.

Speaker 2: Yeah, man.

Speaker: Wow.

Speaker 2: Fart coin. Minted millionaires.

Speaker: Oh my god. Imagine explaining that.

Like, oh, how did you make your money? Crypto? Yeah. Yeah. I got some Bitcoin. What do you trade? Oh, I mostly held fart coin and then sold at the top.

Speaker 2: Yeah, bought at the bottoms old stuff.

Speaker: Bought at the bottom. Yeah. Was early in the fart coin game. Unreal.

Speaker 2: I do want to make one last point before we wrap this up.

So, I hate gambling, I hate gambling companies. They prey on vulnerable people. They disgust me. So why don't I want it outlawed?

Speaker: My guess is a hand wavy thing about individual liberty.

Speaker 2: No. I mean, well, yes, but also people who want to gamble are gonna do it. And I would way rather they do it with someone who isn't charging them 20% interest compounding weekly, which is what the, the interest vig [01:05:00] typically is, and then breaking their thumbs when they can't pay.

So as bad as these apps are, you do have to compare them to black market gambling, which is demonstrably worse in a lot of very important ways.

Speaker: Right. But like you said, fear and friction keep people out of those markets.

Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely fair.

Speaker: If there's one thing to take away from this, it's that online gambling addiction isn't some fringe issue affecting a handful of reckless people.

It's a predictable outcome of a system designed to be fast, frictionless, and psychologically sticky, and then scaled to millions of people via their phone. So that doesn't mean nobody has agency, people still make choices, but it does mean that pretending this is just about personal responsibility, it's kind of a convenient way to ignore incentives, design, and policy failures that quietly do real damage.

We've seen this movie before with cigarettes, opioids, payday loans, when harm is baked into the business model, the fallout isn't accidental, it's structural. None of this requires panic or [01:06:00] prohibition, but it does require honesty. Gambling is, it's not just entertainment once, it's always on, always personalized and always one tap away from your bank account at that point.

It's a public health issue, whether we'd like to admit it or not. Ignoring a problem doesn't make it go away. It just guarantees that someone else pays for it later. Thanks to Nick Pell for helping us call the bluff on online gambling. Thanks to all of you for listening. Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to me: Jordan@jordanharbinger.com.

Advertisers, deals, discounts, ways to support the show, all searchable and clickable On the website at jordanharbinger.com/deals. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Tadas Sidlauskas, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

Our advice and opinions are our own. I might be a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. Also, we try to get these as right as we can. Not everything is gospel, even if it's fact checked. So consult a qualified professional [01:07:00] before applying anything you hear on the show, especially if it's about your health and wellbeing.

Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love. If you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism and knowledge we doled out today. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.

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Speaker 3: Most of us have big goals that we'd like to accomplish, anything from getting in better physical shape, to quitting a lifelong vice, to learning a new language. Habits Academy creator James Clear shares, processes, and practicals we can use to incrementally change our own lives for the better.

It's not a single 1% change that's gonna transform your life. It's a thousand of them. Remember, I feel like giving up, I think about the stone cutter who pounds a stone a hundred times without a crack showing, and then on the hundred and first below, it splits in two. Mm-hmm. And I know that it wasn't the hundred first that did it.

It was all the hundred that came before. Newsworthy stories are only about outcomes. When we see [01:08:00] outcomes all day long on social and on the news, we tend to overvalue them and overlook the process. Like you're never gonna see a news story that is like, man, eat. Salad for lunch today, like it's just not right.

It's only a story six months later when man loses a hundred pounds. The real reason habits matter is because they provide evidence for the type of beliefs that you have about yourself, and ultimately you can reshape your sense of self, your self-image, the person that you believe that you are. If you embody the identity enough.

A lot of people watch too much TV or don't want to play as many video games they do or whatever. If you walk into pretty much any living room, where do all the couches and chairs face? They all face the tv. So it's like, what is this room designed to get you to do? You could take a chair and turn it away from the television.

You could also increase the friction associated with the task. So you could take batteries out of the remote so that it takes an extra five or 10 seconds to start it up each time. And maybe that's enough time for you to be like, do I really want to watch something or am I just doing this mindlessly? Yeah.

The point here is if you want to build a good habit, you've got to make it obvious. If you want to break a bad habit, you just make it invisible [01:09:00] your entire life. You are existing inside some environment. Mm-hmm. And most of the time you're existing inside environments that you don't think about. Right? You're like, and in that sense, you're kind of like the victim of your environment, but you don't have to be the victim of it.

You can be the architect of it.

Speaker: For more with James Clear, including what it takes to break bad habits while creating good ones, and how to leverage tiny habits for giant outcomes. Check out episode 1 0 8 on The Jordan Harbinger Show with James Clear.