Speaker 1: Pushkin, we're back bringing this thing in for a landing.
Speaker 1: I think we can now all agree. It's not just
Speaker 1: the law that changed when the US allowed states to
Speaker 1: legalize sports gambling back in twenty eighteen. An entire region
Speaker 1: of the American brain has been wipe clean and replaced
Speaker 1: with new software. Somehow, sports gambling went from this slightly
Speaker 1: naughty activity you had to go out of your way
Speaker 1: to engage in to smack dab in the center of
Speaker 1: American culture. It's very obviously overrun American colleges. It's less
Speaker 1: obviously overrun American high schools too.
Speaker 2: What happened to one of my friends was that one
Speaker 2: of his friends tried to abandon this bookie, and then
Speaker 2: he sent him his house addressed oh my God, which
Speaker 2: she had never given to him. He distracked his ipea
Speaker 2: address from how he's placing bets.
Speaker 1: That's Andrew Mitchell, now at College Junior, but remembering his
Speaker 1: high school gambling ring and a bookie on Snapchat named Foco.
Speaker 1: He's talking to LJ, my producer, who ran down so
Speaker 1: many similar stories from boys all over the country that
Speaker 1: she no longer asked them whether their high school has
Speaker 1: a sports gambling ring. Instead, she asked them who runs it?
Speaker 1: Andrew she found in upstate New York.
Speaker 2: So there's kind of this informal insurance that it's really
Speaker 2: just a threat to kids that I don't know how
Speaker 2: much you can do with the house address or what
Speaker 2: the stakes actually would have been, but it's a pretty
Speaker 2: scary thing when you're already doing something you know is
Speaker 2: illegal and then you sent your address after you try
Speaker 2: to pull a fast.
Speaker 3: One on someone.
Speaker 2: My high school is just like one part of it.
Speaker 2: I know in the public schools in our area there
Speaker 2: were huge betting rings for kids were losing so much
Speaker 2: money and betting so much money.
Speaker 1: It occurred to me that Andrew's old problem is my
Speaker 1: new one. I have a seventeen year old son. His
Speaker 1: name is Walker. At some point i'd need to have
Speaker 1: the talk with him. Now, I say this as someone
Speaker 1: who is not a big fan of having the talk.
Speaker 1: I didn't really want to have the talk with him
Speaker 1: about sex back in the day, but that was all
Speaker 1: right because in middle school he had an entire class
Speaker 1: on the subject that went into such graphic detail. I
Speaker 1: had to keep my eyes covered with a pillow. I
Speaker 1: did say something to him, like anything you want to
Speaker 1: know about sex, just ask me. Of course he never did.
Speaker 1: He's way too smart. The gambling talk is different than
Speaker 1: the sex talk, and maybe more necessary because his school
Speaker 1: doesn't have a class called sports gambling education. Plus there's
Speaker 1: no generally accepted body of knowledge on the subject. So
Speaker 1: I wasn't even clear in my own head what this
Speaker 1: talk should consist of. I mean, apart from telling him
Speaker 1: how dumb it is to hand your lunch money to DraftKings,
Speaker 1: that would only make him want to do it more.
Speaker 1: Even if somehow I knew exactly the right thing to
Speaker 1: say to inoculate my child against this new threat to
Speaker 1: his well being, or at least prevent him from being
Speaker 1: kneecapped by some bookie, he'd be unlikely to listen. In
Speaker 1: my experience, if you want your seventeen year old to
Speaker 1: listen to you, you have to say something that could
Speaker 1: be used against you in the court of law. Then
Speaker 1: they hear every word you say and record it for
Speaker 1: future use by the prosecution. And so while I saw
Speaker 1: that I needed to have the talk, I also realized
Speaker 1: that the talk was pointless. Walker was already too old,
Speaker 1: too dismissive of me. I had to find some other
Speaker 1: way to teach my son the tools he needs to
Speaker 1: navigate a world in which sophisticated corporations will try to
Speaker 1: lead him to his ruin. Anyway, that's my excuse for
Speaker 1: why I did what I did.
Speaker 4: Next, Okay, let me give you guys the assignment formally,
Speaker 4: which is that Michael's going to give you, guys five
Speaker 4: thousand dollars and you can spend it however you want
Speaker 4: on sports betting. But you're supposed to win, like you're
Speaker 4: supposed to make more.
Speaker 5: That's always a goal, right.
Speaker 1: Yes, that's Walker, who, by the way, in his English
Speaker 1: class the other day, asks the twenty five other kids
Speaker 1: for a show of hands, who here is a sports gambler.
Speaker 1: All the boys except one those zero of the girls
Speaker 1: raise their hands, even though all of them were under
Speaker 1: the age of eighteen and sports gambling is still illegal
Speaker 1: in California. Anyway, I love him, even if he doesn't
Speaker 1: listen to me. His immune system is like the immune
Speaker 1: system of all teenage boys. What I want to create
Speaker 1: in him I think of as a vaccine. I'm going
Speaker 1: to hand him a sum of money that'll get his
Speaker 1: attention for him to use to bet on sports. He
Speaker 1: can keep the winnings, but there won't be any winnings,
Speaker 1: of course, just humiliation. The humiliation will create the antibodies.
Speaker 1: I won't be directly involved. If I were, he wouldn't
Speaker 1: be as interested. My producers will supervise his education and
Speaker 1: record it.
Speaker 6: When should you start?
Speaker 5: I'm ready to go right now.
Speaker 6: I think you're supposed to have like a learning period.
Speaker 7: It's like, Michael is.
Speaker 5: Interesting those actual skill to it?
Speaker 6: Are you asking that?
Speaker 5: I guess I was walking into this hope and it
Speaker 5: was just like, I don't know. I'm walking into this
Speaker 5: hoping to learn, but I just I doubt. I mean,
Speaker 5: you see people winning, but like, I don't know.
Speaker 3: That's the wrong attitude.
Speaker 1: And that's Tom, not his real name. We've also disguised
Speaker 1: his voice because well, I don't want to get Tom
Speaker 1: into any trouble. He's a good kid, three years older
Speaker 1: than Walker and now a student at a very fancy college.
Speaker 1: But he and Walker used to play basketball together and
Speaker 1: Walker really likes him. I roped Tom into this experiment
Speaker 1: mainly because he'd been gambling on sports since he was
Speaker 1: in high school, and I thought whatever he's learned might
Speaker 1: rub off on Walker. But as it turns, out. The
Speaker 1: main thing that Tom learned was how to evade the
Speaker 1: laws that forbid children from gambling on sports.
Speaker 3: There's an Alpha Fliff and I don't know exactly what
Speaker 3: the rules are around it, but I know that legally,
Speaker 3: on that app I can use it because I had
Speaker 3: to submit that I picture of my driver's license and
Speaker 3: then and I guess had to say that I was
Speaker 3: from California.
Speaker 1: Yes, if you're a teenager who wants to lay down
Speaker 1: five grand of your dad's money on sports, you don't
Speaker 1: even need an illegal bookie anymore. You might not be
Speaker 1: able to get an account with DraftKings or fan Duel,
Speaker 1: but you can get onto any one of a number
Speaker 1: of shady gray market apps. Fliff turns your money into
Speaker 1: fliff cash, and gambling with Fliff cash somehow makes it
Speaker 1: all legal. But since you can turn your fliff cash
Speaker 1: back into dollars, it's hard to see why cool.
Speaker 4: And I asked you this before, kind of like, well,
Speaker 4: like how you thought you were going to do.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 3: I hope to like plus five ten percent. I don't know.
Speaker 3: I guess I'll send an expectation of plus is Isa
Speaker 3: Golbank plus.
Speaker 6: Two hundred percent plus two hundred percent.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's the most.
Speaker 1: Again, their goal is to turn five grand into fifteen.
Speaker 1: My goal is for them to learn the insanity of
Speaker 1: their goal. I think my goal is admirable, but I
Speaker 1: do have a sense that not everyone in my house
Speaker 1: agrees confirmed when my producer, Catherine Gerardeau investigates.
Speaker 8: So I understand Michael has been encouraging Walker to engage
Speaker 8: in sports betting, and I wanted to talk to you
Speaker 8: about how you feel about that.
Speaker 9: The idea is that Walker will be exposed to sports
Speaker 9: betting and get guided through the process so he understands
Speaker 9: the winds as well as the losses, since that probably
Speaker 9: happens more often than not.
Speaker 1: That's Walker's mother, my wife, Kabitha.
Speaker 9: And it's supposed to be a learning experience. That's that's
Speaker 9: the glasses half version. And what's your perspective on that.
Speaker 9: I'm not an expert in all teenage boys, but from
Speaker 9: the anecdotal information I have from other mothers with teenage boys,
Speaker 9: I think that the attraction and the addiction to the
Speaker 9: dopamine response that you get from video games is complete
Speaker 9: parallel to the addiction response to sports betting.
Speaker 5: So to me, that is not a good thing to encourage.
Speaker 9: I hope that he walks away from it feeling like
Speaker 9: it's not something he wants to partake in.
Speaker 5: But I can't control that.
Speaker 9: He's almost eighteen and he doesn't listen to a word
Speaker 9: I say.
Speaker 1: When our son won't listen to my wife, she often
Speaker 1: turns to me and says, can you please talk to him,
Speaker 1: as if his unwillingness to listen to her somehow imply
Speaker 1: as a desire to listen to me. As I say,
Speaker 1: it doesn't. My son won't listen to me either, but
Speaker 1: maybe you will. Since I'm Michael Lewis and this is
Speaker 1: against the rules, So I've set my child loose in
Speaker 1: the sports gambling markets with five thousand dollars. I've told
Speaker 1: him that I'm leaving him to figure it out for himself,
Speaker 1: but that if he wants help, I know some experts
Speaker 1: he can call. Because here's another funny thing about trying
Speaker 1: to teach your seventeen year old son anything. He might
Speaker 1: not listen to a word you say, but so long
Speaker 1: as you are nowhere in sight, he will listen to
Speaker 1: your friends. I don't know why this is, but it's true.
Speaker 1: I gave Walker our phone number for Rufus Peabody. Rufus
Speaker 1: is the pro sports gambler who starred in some of
Speaker 1: our earlier episodes. What makes Rufus great as a teacher
Speaker 1: of child gamblers is that, even though he's made millions
Speaker 1: gambling on sports, he doesn't think gambling on sports is
Speaker 1: a noble way to spend your life life. What makes
Speaker 1: rufe Is less great as a teacher of child gamblers
Speaker 1: is that he's worried about breaking the law sports.
Speaker 10: Betting is I leave you in California?
Speaker 5: How the fuck am I using Cliff then?
Speaker 10: Because Fliff isn't sports betting, that's what they claim. It's
Speaker 10: the sweepstakes. Oh my god, I know it's yeah.
Speaker 5: And kids are allowed to do it or whatever. Why
Speaker 5: is there so much?
Speaker 10: Why?
Speaker 5: Why was I allowed to put my own money from
Speaker 5: my bank account in the app?
Speaker 10: Because you don't have to be what You don't have
Speaker 10: to be twenty one, you only have to be eighteen.
Speaker 5: I'm seventy.
Speaker 10: Yes, great, really, yeah, that's that's fucked up.
Speaker 5: That's yeah.
Speaker 6: But didn't you need to put your social security in Walker?
Speaker 5: Your social Security number? I don't even know it. I
Speaker 5: don't know my social Security number.
Speaker 3: It was.
Speaker 1: At that point, you can almost hear Rufus make one
Speaker 1: of his expected value calculations. He's working out that the
Speaker 1: expected value of taking a minor on a sports gambling
Speaker 1: journey in a state where sports gambling is illegal is negative.
Speaker 10: I'll connect you with Captain Jack. Have you talked to
Speaker 10: him in the pastor now?
Speaker 6: No, I don't know him.
Speaker 10: I think this is right in his wheelhouse.
Speaker 1: And with that, Rufus passed Walker and Tom off to
Speaker 1: another sports gambler, someone called Captain Jack.
Speaker 11: So I mean, off the bat, I'll let you guys
Speaker 11: know that like ninety eight percent of sports betters don't
Speaker 11: make money in the long.
Speaker 1: Run, and that's Captain Jack.
Speaker 11: It's very easy to go on like Twitter x and
Speaker 11: find somebody that says they are winning eighty percent of
Speaker 11: the time, and you go, okay, I'll just follow this guy.
Speaker 11: Most of those people aren't. In fact, I would say
Speaker 11: all of those people aren't winning eighty percent of the
Speaker 11: time because truth of the matter is, it's very tough
Speaker 11: to win fifty five percent of the time, and fifty
Speaker 11: five percent isn't sexy, So they're not trying to sell
Speaker 11: you fifty five percent. They try to sell you some
Speaker 11: unattainable number.
Speaker 1: Captain Jack tells them some stuff that listeners to this
Speaker 1: season already know why. In order to make money gambling
Speaker 1: on sports you need to make it even more miserable
Speaker 1: than an ordinary job. How the professional gambler needs to
Speaker 1: constantly scour all the world's sports books in search of
Speaker 1: odds that are out of whack. Captain Jack was inadvertly
Speaker 1: raising some obvious questions for the teenage sports gambler.
Speaker 5: Is it possible to make money just off of one
Speaker 5: site like Fliff?
Speaker 3: With Fliff?
Speaker 11: It's possible because Fliff isn't the sharpest sports book in
Speaker 11: the world. You can find edges at Fliff.
Speaker 3: Just for us, Like, how do you recommend us trying
Speaker 3: to find these edges? How do you recommend us we're
Speaker 3: looking for these?
Speaker 11: There are situations that it's called arbitrage where you're guaranteed
Speaker 11: to win.
Speaker 1: Captain Jack explains that you can win systematically at sports
Speaker 1: gambling only by having either better information or better ways
Speaker 1: to analyze the information. But there is one exception. If
Speaker 1: you can find different prices for exactly the same bet
Speaker 1: at different sports bookies, then buy the low one and
Speaker 1: sell the high one.
Speaker 11: But you guys only have one out. You guys only
Speaker 11: have fliff, So you're not going to find a situation
Speaker 11: where you can bet both sides of the game at fliff.
Speaker 5: Do you maybe I feel like, well, I feel like
Speaker 5: it'd be possible for us to, like, I don't know,
Speaker 5: use someone who is out of state or not even
Speaker 5: out of state, but just like says they're out of
Speaker 5: state and it's above the age of twenty one to
Speaker 5: like get onto all these.
Speaker 11: So most of these are regulated books in other states,
Speaker 11: and they all use geolocation software that make sure you
Speaker 11: are geographically in the state that you say you are,
Speaker 11: so it's tough to fool them.
Speaker 5: Can you just use a VPN?
Speaker 11: No, these use basically like location services on your phone,
Speaker 11: which actually knows where you are really for a site
Speaker 11: like fandol or DraftKings or Caesar's at MGM ESPN bet.
Speaker 11: They definitely put a lot of attention into geolocation because
Speaker 11: they would be a violating the Federal Wire Act to
Speaker 11: allow people to bet across the state line, so they
Speaker 11: take it pretty seriously.
Speaker 5: Ish, I sense we're a little fucked.
Speaker 1: I sense we're a little fucked. That's my child doing
Speaker 1: me proud. Seeing the world as it is rather than
Speaker 1: how he would like it to be.
Speaker 11: One word of advice is you probably do not want
Speaker 11: to create a audible record of you guys violating federal law.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I still have to get into college, don't It's
Speaker 5: not worth it.
Speaker 1: They're not going to violate the Federal Wire Act. They'll
Speaker 1: just use Fliff and then do what the vast majority
Speaker 1: of other sports gamblers do, which means that every bet
Speaker 1: they make will be less likely to win than to lose.
Speaker 1: For this reason, Captain Jack thinks they should just make
Speaker 1: one giant bet and be done with it. Put the
Speaker 1: entire wad of my five thousand dollars on a single
Speaker 1: game or even a single player, and live with the results.
Speaker 1: Maybe they'll get lucky. But before he waives them goodbye,
Speaker 1: Captain does offer one tiny glimmer of hope.
Speaker 11: Different types of sports betting are easier to beat than
Speaker 11: other types of sports betting. So if you were to
Speaker 11: go onto the Fliff app and you were to pull
Speaker 11: up a baseball game for tonight, you could bet on
Speaker 11: which team will win. You could bet on how much
Speaker 11: they'll win by, you could bet on the total runs
Speaker 11: scored in the game. But then you can also bet
Speaker 11: on player performance in the game, how many strikeouts the
Speaker 11: pitcher will have, how many hits a certain player will have,
Speaker 11: will this player hit a home run or not. Those
Speaker 11: are called prop bets, and those prop bets are far
Speaker 11: easier to beat than how many total runs are going
Speaker 11: to be scored or which team is going to win.
Speaker 11: So for you guys, I would focus on those prop
Speaker 11: bets player performance. It's also more fun.
Speaker 5: Are there greater than prop bets, like getting into an
Speaker 5: exact probit, Like having like Kitlyn Clark score like eight
Speaker 5: threes in the game. Seems pretty exact, Is there like
Speaker 5: four more?
Speaker 3: Exactly?
Speaker 11: They're usually Katelyn Clark over under two and a half
Speaker 11: three pointers in the game. Yeah, it's over unders. In fact,
Speaker 11: the exact ones are very hard to hit. That was
Speaker 11: a good good example Walker. The average sports better loves
Speaker 11: to see things happen, Okay, so they tend to bet overs.
Speaker 11: So there's usually a little more value in the under
Speaker 11: than the over. But in your brain you're always going
Speaker 11: to be wired because you want to see things happen.
Speaker 11: Nobody likes to root for an under. They don't like
Speaker 11: to root for like no, no, no, don't get a hit. No, no, no,
Speaker 11: don't get a strikeout. They tend to like to see
Speaker 11: things happen, So try to find value in some unders.
Speaker 1: Find value in the unders. That's it. That's all they
Speaker 1: got that in five bands.
Speaker 5: I'm kind of annoyed that we're in California because now
Speaker 5: we really can't game the system.
Speaker 3: I don't know. I guess what I was saying was like, oh,
Speaker 3: when you said like the five thousand dollars and like
Speaker 3: one the it's like going for it. But then he
Speaker 3: was also like, you can't do that with Flip because
Speaker 3: you only bet like two or two or fifty folks
Speaker 3: at once.
Speaker 5: And then if we win, we're like double is cool, right,
Speaker 5: we can claim its skill as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then we can start our own masterclass.
Speaker 1: People will come to us a master class for teenage
Speaker 1: sports gamblers. You don't have to have the talk. You
Speaker 1: can just PLoP your kid down in front of a
Speaker 1: master class. Now that's an idea. Your teenager might not
Speaker 1: listen to you any more than mine listens to me.
Speaker 1: But if they were to stumble online across a master
Speaker 1: class or a podcast very like this one, who knows,
Speaker 1: maybe they learned something maybe it would save them, But
Speaker 1: what would you want your child to know.
Speaker 12: I think a lot of people look at sports betting
Speaker 12: as you're betting into a machine. You're betting into the computer.
Speaker 12: The computers on the others. You know that that the software,
Speaker 12: the sports beans software, is on the other side of
Speaker 12: the bet, right, But the any any gambling, any bet
Speaker 12: takes two sides, and somebody's on one side of the
Speaker 12: bet and somebody else or some entities on the other
Speaker 12: side of the bet.
Speaker 1: In my own masterclass on teenage sports gambling, this guy
Speaker 1: would be front and center. His name is Matt Davidoo.
Speaker 1: He's a professional sports gambler who co wrote what amounts
Speaker 1: to the industry's founding text, The Logic of Sports Betting.
Speaker 1: Captain Jack actually recommended it to Walker and Tom, but
Speaker 1: I don't think they read it. They were too busy
Speaker 1: betting the unders.
Speaker 12: The reality is that's somebody, whether it's a trader who's
Speaker 12: ego or job or bonuses on the line, or an
Speaker 12: actual person with their own money, is you know, like
Speaker 12: that's who you're you're you're playing against them. You need
Speaker 12: to be better than the other player. It's the same
Speaker 12: as poker. It's the same as those the financial markets.
Speaker 1: And these other players often know things that you don't.
Speaker 12: Not correct.
Speaker 1: That's d Miller, Matt's co author, who oddly went to
Speaker 1: the same high school I went to in New Orleans.
Speaker 10: Here are the two things I think ar true about
Speaker 10: sports fanning.
Speaker 1: One is that there are people who are trying to win,
Speaker 1: and they have different.
Speaker 12: Ways of winning.
Speaker 10: They have something going on when they put a bet
Speaker 10: down there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so there's a lot of information in the prices. Yes,
Speaker 1: and the prices are dynamic.
Speaker 3: Correct.
Speaker 1: Here's the first masterclass tip, and it sounds deceptively simple.
Speaker 1: Anytime anyone offers you a bet, or a trade, or
Speaker 1: an item for sale, or even a night of passion,
Speaker 1: they have some reason for offering it, and you may
Speaker 1: be wholly unaware of whatever they know that you do not.
Speaker 1: The fancy name for this is adverse selection. A market price,
Speaker 1: like the odds on a football game, isn't some random thing.
Speaker 1: It's the result of lots of people who know lots
Speaker 1: of stuff you don't know, offering other people the chance
Speaker 1: to make a bet. You might think you know more
Speaker 1: than the market, but you better ask yourself what you
Speaker 1: know that the market doesn't Because the market knows a
Speaker 1: huge amount. But and there is another But the market
Speaker 1: is not an omniscient god. It never knows everything.
Speaker 12: Nobody could ever really figure out the true odds because
Speaker 12: there's at the end of the day an all Blomde
Speaker 12: ball bouncing around. There's many humans who are participating, both
Speaker 12: physically and mentally. It's as opposed to say, chess or go.
Speaker 1: Sports gambling is not like chess. The real world is
Speaker 1: never that predictable. In sports gambling, just like in life,
Speaker 1: you can never know the true odds. You're always just
Speaker 1: making your best guess. The difference with sports gambling is
Speaker 1: you have this thing called the house. The bookie who
Speaker 1: sees the best price someone else will make him and
Speaker 1: then makes you an even worse one. So by far
Speaker 1: the most important skill, yeah, is meticulous price shoper.
Speaker 12: Okay, that is the most important sports panting skillful.
Speaker 1: Stop by price shopping, he means finding the sports bookie
Speaker 1: who takes the smallest cut. You'll always start with the
Speaker 1: odds stacked against you. But if the bookie is only
Speaker 1: taking five percent, you'll go broke more slowly than if
Speaker 1: the bookie is taking fifteen percent. As fan duel and
Speaker 1: DraftKings do on their three legged parlays. Ed and Matt
Speaker 1: offer up a bunch of practical tips for the young
Speaker 1: sports gambler gamble on less popular sports, For instance, with
Speaker 1: fewer fans following what's going on, it's easier to find
Speaker 1: useful information than no one else knows. But before you
Speaker 1: go off and investigate the Russian rugball championships, they offer
Speaker 1: a warning, even the Russian Rugball Championships are going to
Speaker 1: be very hard to beat. Whatever you think you know
Speaker 1: about some sport is highly unlikely to give you enough
Speaker 1: of an edge against the bookie. Yet people do not
Speaker 1: get this. That's maybe what Ed and Matt find most
Speaker 1: perplexing about this boom in online sports gambling.
Speaker 12: My son, he's a my eight year old who can't
Speaker 12: watch a sporting event without becoming convinced that everybody knows
Speaker 12: who's gonna win, or everybody could beat sports betting him
Speaker 12: just by picking keeps. I've been teaching him actual becambiing.
Speaker 12: I've been teaching him sports gambling. He was starting to
Speaker 12: think that he could pick the winner because look, everybody
Speaker 12: else can, right.
Speaker 1: The marketing of sports gambling is teaching bad mental habits
Speaker 1: every time my own son turns on his TV or computer,
Speaker 1: some celebrities spokesman is trying to make him even less
Speaker 1: aware of his own limitations than he naturally is. He's
Speaker 1: going to learn humility the hard way by losing. I
Speaker 1: was counting on this.
Speaker 5: So now we're up one thousand dollars or more like
Speaker 5: nine hundred and seventy or something. But I think I
Speaker 5: want to bet everything I own now.
Speaker 1: Producers checked in on Tom and Walker a few days
Speaker 1: into our experiment. I expected them to find chaos and contrition. Instead,
Speaker 1: they found an even bigger pile of money.
Speaker 5: How does it feel to kind of start off on
Speaker 5: a wind streak and your situation now?
Speaker 10: Like, what's going on?
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, so every family dinner is it's the exact
Speaker 5: same time that the US Olympics are going on. So
Speaker 5: I'll be like betting at the dinner table, or I'll
Speaker 5: put in a bet and then I'll be watching it
Speaker 5: the entire time and refreshing my feed. I got like
Speaker 5: gambling fever at the dinner table, and my sister is
Speaker 5: visibly upset, and yeah, no one likes it, and I
Speaker 5: think I think they're jealous. They're like, oh, oh, he's
Speaker 5: up like one point five k. I can't do that,
Speaker 5: you know. And my dad is like kind of uneasy
Speaker 5: because he's like he's like, oh god, this is like
Speaker 5: my fault. I've got him into this, And he's every
Speaker 5: time I make a bet or every time I talk
Speaker 5: about making a bet, he talks about how I probably
Speaker 5: should have lost basically or not that. But he's like,
Speaker 5: he's like he argues back at it. He's like, well,
Speaker 5: this is blah blah blah blah. This is wrong because
Speaker 5: blah blah blah blah blah. And I was like, dude,
Speaker 5: the only time I've been wrong was today. I made
Speaker 5: a dumb bet and I lost this one hundred dollars.
Speaker 5: But it's okay.
Speaker 3: The same dud's tapping at my house. I blisal mad
Speaker 3: me and my girlfriend wasn't really mady because I've always
Speaker 3: on my phone. She made me second phon. Then come
Speaker 3: become the record.
Speaker 5: You'll need these days.
Speaker 3: Sorry, you stop feeling it for all the time.
Speaker 1: In any masterclass, there should be this one breakout session
Speaker 1: you discuss the effects of your sports gambling on your
Speaker 1: friends and family. If you gamble on sports, you can't
Speaker 1: do much about your odds against the bookies, but you
Speaker 1: can torpedo your odds of ever having a girlfriend. Walker
Speaker 1: and Tom already sort of know this. Every teenage boy
Speaker 1: has spent lots of his childhood on screens while surrounded
Speaker 1: by people shouting at him to get off his screens.
Speaker 1: There as prepared as two young men ever were to
Speaker 1: cope with the fallout from a life of sports gambling. Anyway,
Speaker 1: they started out on this freakish winning streak. Our whole
Speaker 1: family had gone to Paris for the Summer Olympics. Then
Speaker 1: Walker and I took a bus for three hours to
Speaker 1: lele to catch the USA basketball team playing Serbia. It
Speaker 1: was the first Olympic basketball game I'd ever seen in person,
Speaker 1: and it was fascinating. When you put a dozen superstars
Speaker 1: on one team, weird things tend to happen. But Walker
Speaker 1: barely noticed any of it because he was on his
Speaker 1: phone gambling.
Speaker 5: I I got the over in the under. If it's
Speaker 5: under one eighty four, I make nine hof another three
Speaker 5: Oh my god. If it's under one eighty four, I
Speaker 5: make nine hundred and fifty thousand flip coins if it's
Speaker 5: if it's if it's over, I lose eighty three thousand.
Speaker 1: Come just said, I hope they stopped trying.
Speaker 5: Well, there's three minutes left in USA is obviously one.
Speaker 5: There's I think for the just to preserve the players health,
Speaker 5: there's no need to continue trying.
Speaker 1: How do you feel about your bests? I think there
Speaker 1: were smart bets.
Speaker 5: They were perfect bets. I'm not even worried.
Speaker 1: The algorithm seems smarter than you.
Speaker 5: No, that's not true. I knew what I was doing.
Speaker 3: He could end up.
Speaker 1: You could. You could actually lose both bets.
Speaker 5: I could lose if I if it hits one eighty five,
Speaker 5: I lose both. That's not gonna happen, though.
Speaker 1: He's bet the over and the under. But as Captain
Speaker 1: Jackett told him, no one really likes to root for
Speaker 1: things not happening, and now Walker's stuck doing it.
Speaker 5: Oh my god, Oh my god, I swear god, anybody
Speaker 5: shoots the ball and at least my floather and oh
Speaker 5: thank god Labrone.
Speaker 1: Were it appears his bets didn't work out.
Speaker 3: That's the sound of a sick man.
Speaker 1: That's a sound made by a six sick man. I'd
Speaker 1: already said too much. Anything more would only make it worse.
Speaker 5: I'm the best, I'm the best. I'm the best fucking gamble.
Speaker 1: Other is if what we're talking about is sports bets
Speaker 1: made by my son. Okay, and he's made eight sports
Speaker 1: bets and five of them have come out. He's come
Speaker 1: out successful, he's won. How confident should he be that
Speaker 1: he's a really good sports better?
Speaker 7: He should not be confident.
Speaker 1: Joe Harden, statistics professor at Pomona College, a member of
Speaker 1: a growing movement in California to add stats to the
Speaker 1: high school curriculum because without a basic grasp of the subject,
Speaker 1: human beings are easy meat for many predators in modern life,
Speaker 1: including sports gambling companies.
Speaker 7: Five out of eight is your data value? Is your
Speaker 7: sample value?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 13: And we're trying to say, is five out of eight
Speaker 13: you know a good measure of the value that's going
Speaker 13: to be over your lifetime. So it doesn't really matter
Speaker 13: how good he is internally, he's probably not going to
Speaker 13: end up making much money.
Speaker 1: So what it is in the young male mind and
Speaker 1: it causes it to say, I'm three for three. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this industry might be really hard for other people, but
Speaker 1: I'm good at it. I'm not like other people. What's
Speaker 1: going on there? I mean, we're all like that, right,
Speaker 1: which is why statistics are so essential, both in gambling
Speaker 1: and in life. Stats give you the tools to reason
Speaker 1: from evidence instead of constantly spinning dubious stories to yourself,
Speaker 1: and education and statistics makes you aware that the world
Speaker 1: it's probabilistic, the total certainty is idiotic, that the most
Speaker 1: any of us will ever be is less uncertain.
Speaker 7: One of the other big.
Speaker 13: Things that I think is really important is sometimes it's
Speaker 13: called confusion of the inverse, and it's it's about conditional probability.
Speaker 13: So if I ask you, what is the probability that,
Speaker 13: given that you play in the NBA, what is the
Speaker 13: probability that you're six feet tall? And I don't know
Speaker 13: the actual it's like ninety five ninety six percent, right,
Speaker 13: ninety five ninety six percent of the guys who play
Speaker 13: in the NBA are at least six feet tall.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 13: But then I turn that question around and I say,
Speaker 13: given that you are above six feet tall, what is
Speaker 13: the probability.
Speaker 7: That you play in the NBA.
Speaker 1: Oh, that's interesting, and.
Speaker 7: It's basically zero.
Speaker 13: Right, So that confusion paradox, and we see in all
Speaker 13: sorts of in all sorts of fields.
Speaker 1: How do we apply this to sports?
Speaker 13: Scambling maybe, like, given that you win, what's the probability
Speaker 13: you know what you're doing?
Speaker 7: And given that you know what you're doing, what's the
Speaker 7: probability that you win?
Speaker 1: That's it.
Speaker 13: That's it, right, because given that you win, there's going
Speaker 13: to be a lot of false positives.
Speaker 7: There's gonna be a lot of people who just randomly win.
Speaker 1: That was Walker and Tom. They're still up a bunch
Speaker 1: of money riding high on false positives. I think they
Speaker 1: sort of knew it, but sort of knowing it's very
Speaker 1: different from feeling it. I wanted them to feel it,
Speaker 1: and soon enough they did.
Speaker 3: All right, So last night I made a two leg
Speaker 3: parlay against Schalker's suggestions and against everything I've read online
Speaker 3: saying the parlays are bad, but I felt like I
Speaker 3: had to do it to make up for the lost money.
Speaker 3: So we'll see if it pays out.
Speaker 5: Hello, I'm a dinner again and I just placed the
Speaker 5: dumbest bet of my life. I bet the over three
Speaker 5: thirty or the USA wins by over thirty point spread,
Speaker 5: or the minus thirty on the point spread for USA.
Speaker 5: And I put one hundred dollars on it, the daily
Speaker 5: limit on my debit card.
Speaker 1: The losses follow the games. They surely as winner follows fall.
Speaker 1: When they won, they thought they were sharp desk gamblers
Speaker 1: in the world. When they lost, they didn't know what
Speaker 1: to think, so instead they just felt and turned whatever
Speaker 1: they were feeling about themselves onto others.
Speaker 12: How do you pitch?
Speaker 5: How do you strike out seven and then decide not
Speaker 5: to strike out six? You're two? God, pull them honestly. Okay,
Speaker 5: let's let's talk strategy for like the next bet, because
Speaker 5: we need to make this back. We need to be
Speaker 5: on the come up now.
Speaker 12: Uh do you think it?
Speaker 5: We could probably we could probably make six hundred dollars
Speaker 5: in one bed. I bet you we could. We could
Speaker 5: be slightly less. No, no, no, no, we can't. No no, no,
Speaker 5: never mind. Let's not try to do it in one bet.
Speaker 5: That's a dumb idea. This is how people start losing money.
Speaker 1: Like most people, these two weren't constrained by some process,
Speaker 1: because like most people, they didn't really have a process.
Speaker 1: As LJ found during one of her regular check ins,
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 5: They can only score ten points now in four minutes.
Speaker 5: Yeah no, LJ, I'm actually lost.
Speaker 6: They have to score ten points or they can only
Speaker 6: score ten points. They're not gonna score ten points in
Speaker 6: four minutes.
Speaker 5: Yeah they will. Literally, how these guys are running up
Speaker 5: and down the court on my own, I've scored ten
Speaker 5: points in four minutes, Like it's not hard. Two teams
Speaker 5: who are at a professional level, Swear to God, if
Speaker 5: they don't play the best fucking defense of their life,
Speaker 5: I'm gonna lose my shit, maybe like a one month later,
Speaker 5: saying like, you know in movies where it's like where
Speaker 5: are they now?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's like, yeah, Walker lost all his money and
Speaker 5: just don't know where he is because he's like current
Speaker 5: homeless somewhere in their SF area, Like I live in
Speaker 5: those viewers.
Speaker 6: Now, I think you might win this. I think you
Speaker 6: could win this Walker.
Speaker 5: Oh j I think you're really really wrong. I actually
Speaker 5: have one hundred percent lost this.
Speaker 6: It's interesting that you're just watching the score, like you're
Speaker 6: not even watching the game, like you're so beyond that.
Speaker 5: Oh god, damn it. How did I let that happen?
Speaker 5: What is wrong with me?
Speaker 6: Well, good luck, I'm gonna go have breakfast.
Speaker 5: Free of shame and guilt. You didn't just lose one
Speaker 5: thousand dollars, Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 1: People pay way too much attention to winners. Winners get
Speaker 1: books written about them, Winners are constantly being asked to
Speaker 1: explain how they won. Winners get really good and making
Speaker 1: other people feel they know something. But losers have more
Speaker 1: to teach us. Losers have suffered only when you have lost.
Speaker 1: Have you experienced the deep reality of sports gambling.
Speaker 5: I can't believe that just happened.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, I lost.
Speaker 5: It's like one hundred dollars because I pressed the wrong button.
Speaker 5: Or maybe I lost five hundred dollars like an idiot.
Speaker 3: Oh that was sert.
Speaker 1: That's the reality of this new industry. It's not good
Speaker 1: for you. But it's easy to ignore that fact because
Speaker 1: we've accepted a wider frame and gotten too used to
Speaker 1: saying okay to industries that are a lot like it.
Speaker 8: I was working in a pretty benign like ad tech job,
Speaker 8: deciding which ads people saw on Expedia or what have you,
Speaker 8: some kind of travel website.
Speaker 1: That's Kathy O'Neil my son was chasing his losses. But
Speaker 1: I was still hunting for the final piece of my masterclass.
Speaker 8: But I realized quickly that the kinds of predictions I
Speaker 8: was making, which were not that different from predicting markets
Speaker 8: were really they were really profiling people by wealth, by gender,
Speaker 8: and by race, and sort of making lucky people luckier
Speaker 8: and unlucky people unluckier.
Speaker 1: Back in two thousand and seven, Kathy had gone from
Speaker 1: being a math professor Barnard to working on Wall Street,
Speaker 1: where she saw the way math was used to hide
Speaker 1: the risks that led to the financial crisis. The traders'
Speaker 1: bonuses were based on the profit they made, divided by
Speaker 1: the risk they were taking. By hiding the risk, they
Speaker 1: raised their bonuses. They also orchestrated a disaster for ordinary people.
Speaker 1: Kathy became disillusioned. She quit her job and went to
Speaker 1: work at an online advertising firm.
Speaker 5: And I was like, wait here I am again. What happens?
Speaker 8: Like how did I get here? Like I'm yet again
Speaker 8: like making the world worse. So this time I was like,
Speaker 8: I'm not doing this again. I'm going to tell the public,
Speaker 8: like what's happening.
Speaker 1: She wrote a book called Weapons of Math Destruction about
Speaker 1: the ways people who are good at math use it
Speaker 1: to disguise the exploitation of people who aren't.
Speaker 8: When I wrote it, the reception was mixed. You know,
Speaker 8: some people were like holy crap, Like This really makes
Speaker 8: me understand my work in insurance much more, and I'm
Speaker 8: much more.
Speaker 5: Worried about it.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 8: So there are a lot of people who who were
Speaker 8: I think rightly concerned, But there are a lot of
Speaker 8: people are like, I can't believe you know, you've betrayed us.
Speaker 8: You know, there's a kind of notion that we nerds
Speaker 8: are supposed to sort of keep the secrets of other nerds.
Speaker 1: Those secrets described in Kathy's book are hidden in code
Speaker 1: that the companies on the other side of your business
Speaker 1: don't want you to think too much about. It isn't
Speaker 1: just how Google serves you ads. It's how your credit
Speaker 1: is scored, your insurance is priced, and your job application
Speaker 1: is handled. Now it's also how your new sports gambling
Speaker 1: habit is managed. The ads lead you to the apps,
Speaker 1: and the apps coax you to behave in certain ways
Speaker 1: without making it clear what they're doing or why. How
Speaker 1: would you think about the algorithms, about designing algorithms to
Speaker 1: take advantage of these people? What kind of things would
Speaker 1: you build into the algos?
Speaker 8: Well, it depends on how you're trying to take advantage
Speaker 8: of them. Right, If you're trying to take advantage of
Speaker 8: people who are addicted to gambling. Then you get somehow
Speaker 8: you get money back if you've lost, but it's not
Speaker 8: really money.
Speaker 5: It's just many more opportunities to bet.
Speaker 8: And that's exactly the kind of thing you would do
Speaker 8: if you just wanted to make sure you hook somebody,
Speaker 8: and you might even lose a little bit of money
Speaker 8: as a business. But if you hook a statistically large
Speaker 8: proportion of people that way, then in the long term,
Speaker 8: you're making a lot more money off of people's addictions.
Speaker 1: And the beauty of it is how impersonal it is.
Speaker 1: No individual ever needs to acknowledge what they're doing. The
Speaker 1: sports gambling industrial complex is just another ab testing machine
Speaker 1: with a mind of its own.
Speaker 8: They try out a bunch of things and see what
Speaker 8: works the best. Let's say, let's try to get people
Speaker 8: to bet on the red sox with green letters, and
Speaker 8: also let's try the same exact words, but let's try
Speaker 8: it with red letters and see which ones they are more.
Speaker 10: Likely to click on.
Speaker 8: And the answer is going to be red letters. Now
Speaker 8: we know what letters, what about the font, what about
Speaker 8: the background, what about the pictures? What about exactly what
Speaker 8: words we use? And you're just constantly you're pummeling the
Speaker 8: audience with that, but moreover, you're pummeling different audiences with
Speaker 8: different things because you've profiled different audiences to be vulnerable
Speaker 8: to different messages, So not just the who's the home team,
Speaker 8: but like how addicted are you and how much money
Speaker 8: do you have? And what is your favorite type of betting?
Speaker 8: So they'll keep track of all those things and they
Speaker 8: will micro target your vulnerabilities.
Speaker 1: So it's taking your past behavior and your response to
Speaker 1: pass stimuli to try to manage.
Speaker 8: Right, it doesn't have to be you, people like you,
Speaker 8: So it's going to divide you into like a little
Speaker 8: granular pot and then say, okay, everyone we've seen like
Speaker 8: you responds to ads like this, and this is how
Speaker 8: we make the most money from people like you.
Speaker 1: And the case of sports betting is to manage my
Speaker 1: behavior so that I maximize my losses.
Speaker 8: And it's fair to say they're not just trying to
Speaker 8: predict your future. They're trying to condition you into a future.
Speaker 12: Right.
Speaker 8: It's like you should think of yourself as a dog
Speaker 8: that's being trained with treats, because that's how they think
Speaker 8: about it. They will give you a little treat in
Speaker 8: order to keep you interested. It's like, yeah, you're a
Speaker 8: dog at a don park. Just to I've just thrown
Speaker 8: that in to make it as humiliating as possible, because
Speaker 8: it really is actually humiliating.
Speaker 5: It's intentionally so.
Speaker 1: Right, how do I train my son to be a
Speaker 1: bad dog?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 1: How do I train? Really? How do I train him
Speaker 1: to be a bad dog?
Speaker 8: The best way to avoid conditioning is to walk away
Speaker 8: from like to say that treat doesn't work on me.
Speaker 1: That's when it hit me. That's what I hope Walker
Speaker 1: would learn to be untrainable to leap over the fence
Speaker 1: and run away from the dog park. That would be
Speaker 1: the big takeaway of my masterclass. Not something sharp about
Speaker 1: sports betting, more of a feeling about how to live
Speaker 1: your life so other people aren't leading you to live
Speaker 1: it for them. My experiment, such as it was, blew
Speaker 1: up just a couple of weeks after it started, not
Speaker 1: in the way I'd expect it, though. I'd assume that
Speaker 1: Walker and Tom would eventually just set fire to my
Speaker 1: five thousand dollars, and then we'd all stand around and
Speaker 1: stare at the flames and figure out how dumb that was. Instead,
Speaker 1: they started out winning, right, off the bat. They then
Speaker 1: hit a cold streak and panicked, and then Tom made
Speaker 1: this crazy flurry of bets, winning bets in a flash
Speaker 1: without anyone knowing why. They went from losing money to
Speaker 1: winning three and a half thousand dollars, all in secret
Speaker 1: until LJ got Tom to confess his source.
Speaker 6: So, your brother found a guy on Discord who works
Speaker 6: at Taco Bell who is giving you advice on bets
Speaker 6: that you made. That you won all those bets that
Speaker 6: you place. Yeah, yeah, and that's why you think you
Speaker 6: were you were wdding.
Speaker 3: I mean, that's why it doesn't make any sense to me.
Speaker 3: I think that. I mean, there's a great amount of
Speaker 3: luck in it.
Speaker 6: So like, what do you think you learned?
Speaker 3: I mean, I learned that it's possible to be in
Speaker 3: the sword term, but I don't know how much of
Speaker 3: its law for skill.
Speaker 1: LJ put the same question to Walker, who knew that
Speaker 1: they had broken Captain Jack's first rule of a sports
Speaker 1: betting don't listen to some random dude who works at
Speaker 1: Taco Bell on a Discord chat.
Speaker 6: Why do you do you think you guys win?
Speaker 9: Have you?
Speaker 5: Has already said this the discord the guy to Taco Bell,
Speaker 5: the guy. Yep, I didn't know if we were sharing
Speaker 5: that or not. Yeah, so yeah, we just, I guess,
Speaker 5: outsourced our problems.
Speaker 1: Not a straight answer to Lj's question. But a few
Speaker 1: days later, Walker and I were driving someplace. I asked
Speaker 1: him all casual like, so, what's your next bet? And
Speaker 1: he said, I am done with sports gambling. What do
Speaker 1: you mean you're done with sports gambling? I asked, and
Speaker 1: he said, I pulled all the money out of the account,
Speaker 1: so Tom can't bet either. He'd split the winnings with
Speaker 1: Tom and send me back my five grand. He'd jumped
Speaker 1: the fence and left the dog park. I want to
Speaker 1: know why you decided to stop betting at all.
Speaker 5: I noticed that as much as I won, I also
Speaker 5: managed to lose just as much, just slightly less, I guess.
Speaker 5: But something I realized, if you'd like, in a really
Speaker 5: short form way of saying this is everybody anybody can win,
Speaker 5: but everybody's gonna lose.
Speaker 1: Anybody can win, but everybody's gonna lose. That's about as
Speaker 1: perfect a summary of our entire season as I can
Speaker 1: think of. So why why do you think, I mean,
Speaker 1: everybody should be able to see this like it's set
Speaker 1: up to lose, but people do it anyway. Why do
Speaker 1: you think people do get sucked in? And why you
Speaker 1: think you didn't?
Speaker 3: I think.
Speaker 5: This is no hate to any gamblers out there, but
Speaker 5: I don't think you have enough gratifying things going on
Speaker 5: to sustain that sustain your attention like I have. I
Speaker 5: have a few hobbies that I just like can't get
Speaker 5: enough of when I make music, so when I'd finish
Speaker 5: a song, that would that would remain in in my
Speaker 5: like downloads folder that I could go and return to.
Speaker 5: But like, all you're doing is losing.
Speaker 1: What'd you do with the money you want?
Speaker 5: I I bought a surfboard. I bought a wetsuit. Uh.
Speaker 6: I got a.
Speaker 5: Little bit ashamed, but I bought a gaming PC uh
Speaker 5: And I bought what else did I buy? I bought
Speaker 5: a bunch of plugins for music, which is just like
Speaker 5: synthesizers online.
Speaker 1: Did you think I was a bad dad for having
Speaker 1: you do it?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 5: Mm, yeah, that was stupid. That was stupid of you
Speaker 5: to do. But I'm glad you did it. It's not
Speaker 5: good or good or evil. It's just like, wasn't a
Speaker 5: good idea? It worked out? We got lucky.
Speaker 1: Against the rules is written and hosted by me Michael
Speaker 1: Lewis and produced by Lydia Genecott, Catherine Gerardeau and Ariella Markowitz.
Speaker 1: Our editor is Julia Bartler. Our engineer is Jake Gorski.
Speaker 1: Our music was composed but Matthias Bossi and John Evans
Speaker 1: of stell Wagon Sinfinett. Our fact checker is Lauren ves pohert.
Speaker 1: Against the Rules is a production of Pushkin Industries. Special
Speaker 1: thanks to a few more folks who made this season
Speaker 1: of Against the Rules possible Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cone, Sarah Nix,
Speaker 1: Christina Sullivan, Kerry Brody, Eric Sandler, Kira Posey, Jordan McMillan,
Speaker 1: Jake Flanagan, Owen Miller, Sarah Bruguerer, Jacob Goldstein and Sophie Krank.
Speaker 1: To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts, And if
Speaker 1: you'd like to listen to ad free and learn about
Speaker 1: other exclusive offerings, don't forget to sign up for a
Speaker 1: Pushkin Plus subscription at pushkin dot fm, slash plus or
Speaker 1: on our Apple show page.
Speaker 6: Did you learn anything about yourselves that surprised.
Speaker 5: You well, in the back of my head, there's a
Speaker 5: bit of a tug that I'm it's like being pulled
Speaker 5: towards betting basically, And I now know that I can
Speaker 5: like kind of control that, which is surprising.
Speaker 6: You learned that you have like a self control that
Speaker 6: you didn't know that you had, which is pretty cool.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's nice. I feel a little bit more like
Speaker 5: confident in myself to make good decisions, which is nice.