When I was a young man, I entered a shiftless phase where I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I stayed up too late, played too many video games, watched too many movies, etc.
I didn’t have the choice to engage in same day fantasy sports, or options trading, or any of the other traps that can cage young men.
It took me a few years (more then I would have liked) but I was able to turn my life around. I’m not sure that would have happened if I’d gotten mired in gambling.
As a society we are failing young men by allowing this sort of predation.
Societies generally try to restrict vice to either limited places (Vegas, Atlantic City, red light districts, etc), or to times (mardi gras, Carnival, Yule, etc).
The impacts on vice in our pockets at all time have been pretty damning, and I don’t know how we come back from the brink.
Thanks for sharing. I don’t have kids but the concept of giving kids access to this stuff is terrifying. I have to think that as it gets exponentially worse pretty quickly with the advent of ai-powered experiences (grok3 does sex chatting with voice now, for example) there will be a growing recognition that this stuff is a lot like drugs
But how you restrict it is a very difficult question
I have a 5 year old son and I think about this a lot because of him.
The short version is we probably can’t ban it, but we can add friction at every point in the process.
We could apply vigorous KYC laws to the platforms that do this to make it hard to pay them, and get money out of them.
Something that often gets left out of the analysis on places like draft kings is that they are very good at identifying the customers who can win and either banning them or limiting them.
So anyone who can spend a lot with them is bad at it, and that should become a form of social stigma. (I can’t take credit for this idea, I heard it on a podcast).
The central challenge is all of this involves having conversations about public morality and that’s not one that people outside the evangelical movement are much interested in, and those in the movement are less interested in discussing it and more interested in evangelizing their take.
I move in pretty secular circles and I can’t ever recall anyone ever talking about what society can do to enable people to live moral lives, or what it means to have a moral citizenry.
That's a good point. I read Nate Silver's new book and was surprised by how quickly they can shut down or limit people who are + EV sports gamblers
And likewise, on the conversation around morality. I sort of think that for better or worse, we're going to be confronted with such stark challenges on that front that we will have to talk about it a lot more than we do now
This is phenomenal research. Thanks for pulling it together!
I would love to explore the data set around crypto, which has a very similar demographic as sports betting and is also a form of gambling. I’d love to see how the mentions of crypto correlate with crypto bear / bull markets.
Sports was never a big part of my childhood, but have really gotten into watching live sports over recent years (baseball in particular!). I’ve never been drawn to the betting side of things, but almost all of my male friends do frequently + for fun, though most are in their late 20s/early 30s. Really interesting (and sad) analysis, especially around the sports betting apps ubiquity on podcasts and how they act as an entry point for young people.
yeah it's tough! And I don't really know what I would do if i were in charge of the policy -- I think generally restricting people's freedoms isn't great, but this just seems like it lets corporations prey on vulnerable people. Idk :/
I'm kind of surprised "sports" gambling still not catching up to "casino" gambling in these forums.
I wonder if since sports gambling has a defined start/end period, it may make it harder to become extremely addicted (addicted enough to post to a Reddit forum).
Maybe sports betting is more of a "silent killer" than the casino. It seems like something that could slowly eat away at you and your finances over time, like smoking cigarettes, while getting addicted to the casino seems more dramatic and immediate, like doing hard drugs.
It seems to me that society has a hard time putting together a more cohesive opinion on "silent killers" like this, and likely will not have political movement/pressure to ever restrict sports betting again.
I do think sports gambling is inherently less addictive than casino gambling, just literally the amount of dopamine you can get in an hour is lower in sports gambling
A weird thing though is a lot of this is online / crypto casinos -- just playing slots or whatever on your phone. Grim.
It seems to me that there are other activities that are not recognized as gambling but involve the excitement, the hope (or even the belief) about the outcome, and the lack of information that motivate gambling--such as the way that some persons 'invest' in stocks, commodities, and currencies.
Certainly. And as those activities have gotten more accessible they've started to look a lot more like gambling; you can just buy and sell high-volatility stock options on your phone
The Reds local TV broadcast would even promote a parlay for each game this past season. Majority of them were long shots and the last I saw it was a winner nine times after 129 games.
Awesome data, Joe! (As always.) Would be interesting to go into the psychology of the parlay. Maybe endorphins from these wins are much higher than winning less risky bets?
Yeah i wonder. And they're staged (multiple things have to go right), so you get sort of increasing levels of excitement, which i could see being more of a rush than a low-probability bet that pays off all at once
I think about this phenomenon a lot.
When I was a young man, I entered a shiftless phase where I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I stayed up too late, played too many video games, watched too many movies, etc.
I didn’t have the choice to engage in same day fantasy sports, or options trading, or any of the other traps that can cage young men.
It took me a few years (more then I would have liked) but I was able to turn my life around. I’m not sure that would have happened if I’d gotten mired in gambling.
As a society we are failing young men by allowing this sort of predation.
Societies generally try to restrict vice to either limited places (Vegas, Atlantic City, red light districts, etc), or to times (mardi gras, Carnival, Yule, etc).
The impacts on vice in our pockets at all time have been pretty damning, and I don’t know how we come back from the brink.
Thanks for sharing. I don’t have kids but the concept of giving kids access to this stuff is terrifying. I have to think that as it gets exponentially worse pretty quickly with the advent of ai-powered experiences (grok3 does sex chatting with voice now, for example) there will be a growing recognition that this stuff is a lot like drugs
But how you restrict it is a very difficult question
I have a 5 year old son and I think about this a lot because of him.
The short version is we probably can’t ban it, but we can add friction at every point in the process.
We could apply vigorous KYC laws to the platforms that do this to make it hard to pay them, and get money out of them.
Something that often gets left out of the analysis on places like draft kings is that they are very good at identifying the customers who can win and either banning them or limiting them.
So anyone who can spend a lot with them is bad at it, and that should become a form of social stigma. (I can’t take credit for this idea, I heard it on a podcast).
The central challenge is all of this involves having conversations about public morality and that’s not one that people outside the evangelical movement are much interested in, and those in the movement are less interested in discussing it and more interested in evangelizing their take.
I move in pretty secular circles and I can’t ever recall anyone ever talking about what society can do to enable people to live moral lives, or what it means to have a moral citizenry.
That's a good point. I read Nate Silver's new book and was surprised by how quickly they can shut down or limit people who are + EV sports gamblers
And likewise, on the conversation around morality. I sort of think that for better or worse, we're going to be confronted with such stark challenges on that front that we will have to talk about it a lot more than we do now
This is phenomenal research. Thanks for pulling it together!
I would love to explore the data set around crypto, which has a very similar demographic as sports betting and is also a form of gambling. I’d love to see how the mentions of crypto correlate with crypto bear / bull markets.
Thanks Ted! Yeah the crypto aspect is pretty fascinating; DM me your email and I’ll share the dataset
Sports was never a big part of my childhood, but have really gotten into watching live sports over recent years (baseball in particular!). I’ve never been drawn to the betting side of things, but almost all of my male friends do frequently + for fun, though most are in their late 20s/early 30s. Really interesting (and sad) analysis, especially around the sports betting apps ubiquity on podcasts and how they act as an entry point for young people.
yeah it's tough! And I don't really know what I would do if i were in charge of the policy -- I think generally restricting people's freedoms isn't great, but this just seems like it lets corporations prey on vulnerable people. Idk :/
doing the lords work here, joe
:) appreciate it
I'm kind of surprised "sports" gambling still not catching up to "casino" gambling in these forums.
I wonder if since sports gambling has a defined start/end period, it may make it harder to become extremely addicted (addicted enough to post to a Reddit forum).
Maybe sports betting is more of a "silent killer" than the casino. It seems like something that could slowly eat away at you and your finances over time, like smoking cigarettes, while getting addicted to the casino seems more dramatic and immediate, like doing hard drugs.
It seems to me that society has a hard time putting together a more cohesive opinion on "silent killers" like this, and likely will not have political movement/pressure to ever restrict sports betting again.
I do think sports gambling is inherently less addictive than casino gambling, just literally the amount of dopamine you can get in an hour is lower in sports gambling
A weird thing though is a lot of this is online / crypto casinos -- just playing slots or whatever on your phone. Grim.
It seems to me that there are other activities that are not recognized as gambling but involve the excitement, the hope (or even the belief) about the outcome, and the lack of information that motivate gambling--such as the way that some persons 'invest' in stocks, commodities, and currencies.
Certainly. And as those activities have gotten more accessible they've started to look a lot more like gambling; you can just buy and sell high-volatility stock options on your phone
The Reds local TV broadcast would even promote a parlay for each game this past season. Majority of them were long shots and the last I saw it was a winner nine times after 129 games.
That's...grim
Awesome data, Joe! (As always.) Would be interesting to go into the psychology of the parlay. Maybe endorphins from these wins are much higher than winning less risky bets?
Yeah i wonder. And they're staged (multiple things have to go right), so you get sort of increasing levels of excitement, which i could see being more of a rush than a low-probability bet that pays off all at once