Speaker 1: It's a big take from Bloomberg News and I heart Radio.
Speaker 1: I'm West Pasova today. The UK has an online gambling problem,
Speaker 1: and now it's heading to the US. Online gambling has
Speaker 1: exploded in the UK, especially since the pandemic. Those catchy
Speaker 1: gaining apps that entice you to play for hours right
Speaker 1: on your phone. They've hooked millions of people and sometimes
Speaker 1: drain their bank accounts. No surprise that online gambling addiction
Speaker 1: is a big issue now. The US is loosening its
Speaker 1: own online gambling laws, and with it comes concerns that
Speaker 1: the problems gamblers in the UK are experiencing will soon
Speaker 1: play out on an even larger scale in America. A
Speaker 1: little later, I talked with two of my Bloomberg colleagues
Speaker 1: who have written a deeply reported story on the pitfalls
Speaker 1: of online gambling. But first a conversation with Stuart Kenny.
Speaker 1: He made a fortune as a founder of Petty Power,
Speaker 1: one of the UK's largest gambling companies, before he walked
Speaker 1: away from it. He's now one of his industry's most
Speaker 1: vocal critics. Stuart Kenny, thanks for being here. It's a
Speaker 1: pleasure to be with your Wes Stewart. I wanted to
Speaker 1: ask you why, after being so successful in building a
Speaker 1: very large company, Petty Power, which is one of the
Speaker 1: most recognizable companies in online gambling, you chose to step
Speaker 1: away from it. In it was thirty nearly thirty years
Speaker 1: I was on the board. I just thought I was
Speaker 1: talking to myself that I thought that we were becoming
Speaker 1: the new cigarettes. We were getting a stench due to
Speaker 1: gambling addiction, and we were not taking the measures that
Speaker 1: we were going down a route trying to hunt the
Speaker 1: addicted or find people who are addicted and trying to
Speaker 1: route them out the system. But in fact the product
Speaker 1: needed to change and the safeguards need to be put
Speaker 1: in place, and the board would have to accept we
Speaker 1: would make less money, but we would have a sustainable business.
Speaker 1: They'll go into the future. Since then, the stench from
Speaker 1: gambling addiction has become larger and larger, and I don't
Speaker 1: regret the decision, and more and more governments are now
Speaker 1: seeing that they have to step in, and in fact
Speaker 1: it is a government issue. It is really expecting publicly
Speaker 1: owned companies to do their own to the police themselves.
Speaker 1: It's too much of conflict. The governments need to step in,
Speaker 1: step up to the plate and bring in restrictions. People
Speaker 1: think of gambling at just one huge thing. I mean,
Speaker 1: coming on having a flutter in the Grand National or
Speaker 1: having a bet from the World Cup is not that addictive,
Speaker 1: But getting onto the highly addictive online casino is highly addictive.
Speaker 1: You had been in this industry for a long time.
Speaker 1: What changed from the time you started to the time
Speaker 1: you decided to leave that made you think you could
Speaker 1: no longer do it? What change was probably online and
Speaker 1: the rise of casino type products in net bedding shops.
Speaker 1: The fixed starts bedding terminals became a scourge of the
Speaker 1: high street. And why is that? In order to understand
Speaker 1: addiction in gambling, the two elements that are foremost in
Speaker 1: it are how quickly between investment and result? And how
Speaker 1: quick can you repeat the dose? So you bet on
Speaker 1: Donald Trump win the next presidential election, it is two
Speaker 1: years away. Therefore, that is not an addictive product. You
Speaker 1: have to wait two years, whereas you've been on this
Speaker 1: spin of a coin and it's very quick. And the
Speaker 1: fixed arts spending in terms of the government forced them
Speaker 1: to put in a twenty second time delay between spins
Speaker 1: because it were so addictive. But even that didn't solve it,
Speaker 1: so you're really what we're looking for in anything is
Speaker 1: to slow down the process so people have time to think.
Speaker 1: Am I self distructing on the online casino? The whole
Speaker 1: process needs to be slowed down because the online casino
Speaker 1: is much faster than a normal to say. Now, now,
Speaker 1: may I say I made huge mistakes. I should have
Speaker 1: seen it earlier, and the finger can be pointed rightly
Speaker 1: at me that I did not put my hand up
Speaker 1: earlier and say, look, these concerns are real and we
Speaker 1: need to do something about them. I campaigned against fixed
Speaker 1: starts betting terminals coming into Ireland, but I should have
Speaker 1: left the board at that point because fixed dots betting
Speaker 1: terminals had no social benefit whatsoever. It was just an
Speaker 1: highly addictive product. It was the crack cocaine of gambling.
Speaker 1: And the truth is the online casino has become the
Speaker 1: crack cocaine of gambling for people who aren't familiar with gambling.
Speaker 1: Can you define what fixed odd betting is and why
Speaker 1: it's so different and why you say it's it's such
Speaker 1: a big problem. The fixed ads betting terminals were basically
Speaker 1: putting fixed odds onto a casino product. Fixed odds are
Speaker 1: you buy a lot of take that you don't know
Speaker 1: what you win or what that's not fixed ots. You
Speaker 1: bet Donald Trump for the next presidential election. It's a
Speaker 1: round of a four to one shot. So you put
Speaker 1: on a pound and you get back four pounds plus
Speaker 1: your pound backs. You get five back. That's a fixed OTS.
Speaker 1: So what they did was they made a casino product
Speaker 1: into a fixed odds betting product, and it became a
Speaker 1: huge political hot potato. Bookmakers were opening up shops, specifically
Speaker 1: in impoverished areas because the fixed odds betting terminals went
Speaker 1: so well. So you can win a whole lot all
Speaker 1: at once or lose a whole lot all at once.
Speaker 1: Then if you lose, you want to do it again
Speaker 1: to maybe win, and if you win, you want to
Speaker 1: do it again to win. And so you just keep
Speaker 1: going round and round, round and round. And there were
Speaker 1: many things they could have brought in, such as every
Speaker 1: five spins you had to cash out, take your money
Speaker 1: start again. That would have given people time to think.
Speaker 1: The whole point of this is giving people time to
Speaker 1: think before they self destruct. And one of the things
Speaker 1: I suppose that's especially problematic is that it's just on
Speaker 1: our phones. It's with you all the time, so that
Speaker 1: you don't actually have to be in one location. You
Speaker 1: can gamble and be enticed to gamble no matter where
Speaker 1: you are. That's right. Some of the measures that in
Speaker 1: order to stop people self distructing is to make gambling
Speaker 1: a little bit less accessible to everybody. You don't want
Speaker 1: to take the fun away from gambling, because the vast
Speaker 1: majority of people aren't gambling addicts. You want to make
Speaker 1: the product available because that's what society wants, but you
Speaker 1: don't want to make it so available that vulnerable people
Speaker 1: get sucked in. So for the average population, it is
Speaker 1: fine to be offered about. But if you make it
Speaker 1: too accessible to children and too vulnerable people, it becomes
Speaker 1: a problem. It will be a huge problem in the
Speaker 1: United States. Why do you say that. What do you
Speaker 1: see happening in the United States that makes you believe
Speaker 1: then it is more a free for all society. It
Speaker 1: is more a society that accepts some people fall through
Speaker 1: the cracks. Europe is different. I was speaking to our
Speaker 1: reporters who were working on this story, and they said
Speaker 1: that one of the things that makes it so addictive
Speaker 1: is that the minute you stop all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: your inboxes flooded with offers for free spins, trying to
Speaker 1: get you back in, offers to lure you back into
Speaker 1: the casino. Is that something that you saw when you
Speaker 1: were in the industry, though, and you were still at
Speaker 1: Petty Power. Yes, and I put my hands up. I
Speaker 1: should have been much more aware. Let people gamble if
Speaker 1: they want a gamble. I'm not saying restrict but don't
Speaker 1: suck the vulnerable in. We don't allow the cigarette industry
Speaker 1: to start giving out free cigarettes on the street. We
Speaker 1: don't allow the drinks industry. We brought restrictions in in
Speaker 1: all societies because they've seen the damage. The gambling industry
Speaker 1: has a danger of becoming the new cigarettes, and that
Speaker 1: will make it harder for them to get executives. Can
Speaker 1: you describe the day that you told your company, in
Speaker 1: the company that you're a co founder of, that you
Speaker 1: were walking away. I've been involved in the set up
Speaker 1: of Party Power. I had been on the board for
Speaker 1: twenty eight years, and I had made a decision that
Speaker 1: there was a thing that rose in a board meeting
Speaker 1: beforehand where they had pulled some advertising to do with
Speaker 1: what they describe as responsible gambling. Now that's a euphemism.
Speaker 1: Let's talk call it what it is. It is hambling
Speaker 1: addiction we're talking about. So they had been advertising very effective.
Speaker 1: Take a break. It's available on YouTube. You can get
Speaker 1: those ads. There were Australia with Sports pat and they
Speaker 1: had made these wonderful ads. But they were so effective
Speaker 1: that people were closing down their accounts. Well, I thought
Speaker 1: that was the whole point of the exercise. And they
Speaker 1: said that they were too effective and they were pulling
Speaker 1: them and they muttered something about that people were opening
Speaker 1: up with other people, and I said, well, look, if
Speaker 1: that's the journey that they need to make before they
Speaker 1: become aware that they have a problem, so be it.
Speaker 1: And I was the only one who spoke up against
Speaker 1: pulling these ads. And then I knew, look, I had
Speaker 1: to speak to myself and say clearly, I either be
Speaker 1: a completely propriate that they are rather than just been
Speaker 1: a minor hypocrite if I continue on. And I made
Speaker 1: my decision to go. So I prepared for the next
Speaker 1: board meeting and said I was going. It's so you've
Speaker 1: made a lot of money off the gambling industry. Now
Speaker 1: that you are raising questions about it, raising awareness about it.
Speaker 1: Are you using your own money to sort of fund
Speaker 1: anti gambling addiction treatment or initiatives? I have funded charities
Speaker 1: to do with gambling addiction. In fact, some of them
Speaker 1: refused to take my money on the basis that the
Speaker 1: money is tainted. What they asked me to do rather
Speaker 1: than put the money up front. Now there some of
Speaker 1: them I did and I will continue to give money to,
Speaker 1: but they asked me to speak out. Stewart Kenny, thanks
Speaker 1: so much for taking the time to talk to me.
Speaker 1: West there was a plasure. Thank you after the break.
Speaker 1: How did amine gambling come to this? I'm here with
Speaker 1: two colleagues from London, Gavin Inches, an investigative reporter for
Speaker 1: a Bloomberg and Harry Wilson is a finance reporter. Thanks
Speaker 1: so much for being here. Thank you, Thanks for having
Speaker 1: us Gavin and Harry. You have written this story about
Speaker 1: what you have called Written's gambling nightmare. For those of
Speaker 1: us who weren't familiar with what's happening in the UK
Speaker 1: and gambling, could you tell us sure? So, there's been
Speaker 1: a sort of explosive growth of online betting in the
Speaker 1: UK in the last decade, particularly habit forming casino games
Speaker 1: like slot machines and roulette, sort of virtual casinos, and
Speaker 1: these are extremely lucrative games for gambling companies, but not
Speaker 1: for for punters who are losing on average about fourteen
Speaker 1: billion pounds a year I think it was over the
Speaker 1: last four or five years. And when we say explosive
Speaker 1: like that, the growth in these games, that's gone from
Speaker 1: twenty seven million pounds in twenty fourteen to more than
Speaker 1: four billion pounds last year. And so this is online gambling.
Speaker 1: This isn't going down in the corner to the little
Speaker 1: gambling shower. We are going to a formal casino. But
Speaker 1: this is all taking place in apps that you use
Speaker 1: on your phone, in your computer. Yeah, that's absolutely right.
Speaker 1: This is is something very different to your traditional idea
Speaker 1: of what gambling might take. Certainly in the UK, the
Speaker 1: long traditional view of gambling was you had a store
Speaker 1: on a high street which men emerged from smoking cigarettes,
Speaker 1: and you went inside there and it was dimly lit.
Speaker 1: It wasn't a particularly sort of pleasant place to go,
Speaker 1: and but people went there, you know, were you'd have
Speaker 1: to be a sort of a commissed gambler. And what's
Speaker 1: happened in I guess the last ten fifteen years is
Speaker 1: that's completely changed. The advance of smartphones has meant that
Speaker 1: people now have a little casino in their pocket, and
Speaker 1: anyone with an app store with a bank account can
Speaker 1: open up a gambling accounts and can begin gambling away
Speaker 1: on all these variety of casino games that have all
Speaker 1: these extraordinary names, and it's a hugely lucrative business for
Speaker 1: for the gambling industry. So when gambling moved from these
Speaker 1: little shops where you'd have to go online, was there
Speaker 1: a rush of companies movie in to capture this new audience.
Speaker 1: I think there was a realization quite early on that
Speaker 1: online was going to be the new frontier for for gambling.
Speaker 1: They were trying to sort of destigmatize gambling and make
Speaker 1: it more accessible to everybody. Critics would say that the
Speaker 1: games that they've designed are intentionally habit forming. One of
Speaker 1: the big issues that we came across when we talked
Speaker 1: to gambling addicts and reformed gambling addicts was the extent
Speaker 1: to which these gambling companies have a hold of people,
Speaker 1: unlike any other kind of industriver ever come across. The
Speaker 1: v I P s and gambling are the biggest losers,
Speaker 1: so the more you lose, the more important you are
Speaker 1: to the gambling company, the more they lavish entertainment on
Speaker 1: new free flights, you know, tickets to sporting games, all
Speaker 1: the rest of it, because you're a valuable customer. We
Speaker 1: spoke to people where you know they try and stop gambling,
Speaker 1: and after a day, a couple of days, you know,
Speaker 1: they would be deluged with emails, phone calls, text from
Speaker 1: their v I P manager, you know, asking whether they
Speaker 1: are okay, you know, whether they had provide them with
Speaker 1: some tips for new bets and and giving them free
Speaker 1: spins and the casinos and things like that, And it
Speaker 1: doesn't take much for a gowning addict to succumb again
Speaker 1: to his addiction and be brilled back in herry. Are
Speaker 1: they keeping close track of each of the users and
Speaker 1: how long they're on and what they're winning or losing.
Speaker 1: You can't really under estimate how much information they have
Speaker 1: on gamblers. So from people we've spoken to, certainly one
Speaker 1: of the points made to us is that pretty much
Speaker 1: from your first couple of bets, a gambling company has
Speaker 1: a very good idea of how good a client you
Speaker 1: are going to be to them over your life, and
Speaker 1: only literally takes a few goes, a few spins, and
Speaker 1: they can pretty much predict whether you're going to be
Speaker 1: a massive loser for them, which is great, or someone
Speaker 1: who's going to be a less lucrative clients. The amount
Speaker 1: of analytics that they have is incredible. So you talking
Speaker 1: about incredibly sophisticated technology platforms here that are tracking is
Speaker 1: actually what people are doing, what they're gambling on, the
Speaker 1: gambling patterns in a way they know the gambler better
Speaker 1: than the gambler knows themselves. And you can see these
Speaker 1: patterns when when someone stops gambling for a day or two,
Speaker 1: they all know is actually how to learn someone Back
Speaker 1: in very one of the things you write is that
Speaker 1: there has been an increase in the number of children
Speaker 1: and teenagers who are gambling, spending and losing a lot
Speaker 1: of money on these apps. Yeah, and that that that
Speaker 1: kind of speaks to the way the gambling industry has
Speaker 1: has changed, right. I mean, if you think in the past, obviously,
Speaker 1: going back to our stereotypical drab gambling store, right, it
Speaker 1: would be be a lot easier to spot. And with
Speaker 1: with the way that gambling has gone online, that that's
Speaker 1: become more difficult On top of that, if you look
Speaker 1: at the games, particularly these casino games, they do look
Speaker 1: very childish. The real big money spinner now for for
Speaker 1: gambling companies are things that look basically like the kind
Speaker 1: of games I used to play as a kid in
Speaker 1: the eighties. The industry would obviously say that they don't
Speaker 1: aim these games at children, that they're all obviously you
Speaker 1: have to be over eight teens to use them, But
Speaker 1: you just look at them, they don't. They don't look
Speaker 1: like something that's aimed as a sort of a grain adult.
Speaker 1: There have been some attempts to help people break their
Speaker 1: addition to using these apps and losing a lot of money.
Speaker 1: You read about one called gam stop. What exactly is there? So?
Speaker 1: Gam Stop is a national self exclusion tool which all
Speaker 1: of the UK licensed gambling companies have to sign up
Speaker 1: to and in sorry, if you sign up to gaun
Speaker 1: stop and you say I don't want to gamble for
Speaker 1: a year or two years or three years, then you
Speaker 1: are not able to access any of the other UK
Speaker 1: registered gambling sites to put down a bet. Lots of
Speaker 1: gamblers have said that that has been a game changer
Speaker 1: for them. But if you do want to get around it,
Speaker 1: there are plenty of websites out there that advise people
Speaker 1: on how you can do that, so it's it's far
Speaker 1: from fool proof, and it also doesn't cover the entire market.
Speaker 1: There are messenger based gambling companies that aren't covered by
Speaker 1: gam stop. When you went to the companies that run
Speaker 1: these apps, what did they say about how they upgrade
Speaker 1: about the problem of gambling addiction and what they see
Speaker 1: as their own responsibility if anything, in all of this.
Speaker 1: A spokeswoman for Flutter Entertainment, the parent company of paddy Power,
Speaker 1: said the firm closed its v I P scheme and
Speaker 1: reduced the revenue coming from its highest spending customers by
Speaker 1: fifty The Flutter spokeswoman said the firm had quote invested
Speaker 1: significantly end quote in its safer gambling capabilities in recent years.
Speaker 1: A spokesman for gam stop said it has always acknowledged
Speaker 1: that quote no system can ever be a hundred percent
Speaker 1: infallible end quote. The spokesman said that gam stop had
Speaker 1: helped three hundred and thirty thousand people to self exclude
Speaker 1: since A Gambling Commission spokesman said that it would quote
Speaker 1: assess whether the industry's response to the challenge has delivered
Speaker 1: the right outcomes end quote. In the last few years,
Speaker 1: the Gambling Commission has fined quite a lot of gambling companies,
Speaker 1: quite a lot of money, millions of pounds for various
Speaker 1: failings around not doing enough to detect gambling addicts and
Speaker 1: not doing enough in terms of a m L checks
Speaker 1: and source of wealth checks. Where does a m L
Speaker 1: anti money laundering? Gavin? You right that the UK is
Speaker 1: seeing suicides that are connected to gambling addictions. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1: That was one of the most shocking things I think
Speaker 1: for us was just the number of people who were
Speaker 1: killing themselves each year linked to their gambling addiction. So
Speaker 1: government statistics put it around four hundred and nine suicides
Speaker 1: a year that can be directly linked to gambling addiction.
Speaker 1: This is definitely a a mail focus issued by farther.
Speaker 1: Vast majority of problem gamblings and gambling suicides are younger men.
Speaker 1: I think that's probably one of the reasons why this
Speaker 1: has certainly become such a front page issue in the
Speaker 1: UK is that you have these these awful stories of
Speaker 1: of young men who have become addicted to these online
Speaker 1: casino games and lost vast amounts of money that they
Speaker 1: either don't have all that they've stolen to fund their
Speaker 1: gambling addictions. So that raises the question, what, if anything,
Speaker 1: is the UK government trying to do to get hold
Speaker 1: of this and help people who are you know, gambling
Speaker 1: away are their money. For the most part, successive UK
Speaker 1: governments have done very little to reign in the excesses
Speaker 1: of the gambling industry. Way is that this massive booming
Speaker 1: in in online gaming can all be traced back to
Speaker 1: the Gambling Act of two thousand and five, which is
Speaker 1: the existing legislation that covers gambling, and you know, it's
Speaker 1: pre smart own legislation at the time, it made us
Speaker 1: one of the most deregulated major gambling markets in the world,
Speaker 1: and so it couldn't really foresee this huge boom in
Speaker 1: online gaming, and the gambling companies have been making hay
Speaker 1: taking advantage of that kind of lack of regulatory foresight
Speaker 1: ever since. And why is that? Why wouldn't the government
Speaker 1: wanted to be doing something about this? Well, there's a
Speaker 1: very close relationship historically between various UK governments and the
Speaker 1: gambling industry. The gambling industry spends a lot of money
Speaker 1: on hospitality on UK politicians. There are several politicians who
Speaker 1: are paid to give speeches or provide advice for gambling companies.
Speaker 1: There are many sitting members of the House of Lords
Speaker 1: who have positions on the boards of gambling companies, and
Speaker 1: they have a very effective, aggressive lobbying arm to the
Speaker 1: industry that has managed to persuade successive governments to largely
Speaker 1: leave them alone. When we come back the UK's gambling
Speaker 1: craze heads for the U S Harry and Gavin, you've
Speaker 1: spoken about all the problems associated with gambling in the
Speaker 1: UK and the rise of these online sites and apps.
Speaker 1: In the US, we're also starting to see an increase
Speaker 1: in online gambling. I know that I'm just always surprised
Speaker 1: at how many advertisements are for it on the radio
Speaker 1: that I come across online. It seems like more than
Speaker 1: ever before. Do you first see a similar problems heading
Speaker 1: across the ocean toward the US. Pretty much all the
Speaker 1: UK and European gambling companies are really falling over themselves
Speaker 1: to to enter the S market because the European market
Speaker 1: has become so saturated. So as the majority of US
Speaker 1: states have liberalized the gambling laws in the last few years,
Speaker 1: you know, there's already a market I think of more
Speaker 1: than one hundred million people kind of waiting to be
Speaker 1: to be tapped in the in the US. And while
Speaker 1: at the minute most of that's online gambling is is
Speaker 1: limited to sports bedding in states where it's legal, you know,
Speaker 1: you do see these companies pitching online casino games to
Speaker 1: sports spellers by offering them these these free spins, and
Speaker 1: that's a big worry for for critics of the industry
Speaker 1: who argue that, you know, these casino games are the
Speaker 1: really addictive ones, and so you will see the same
Speaker 1: problems that have happened in the UK happening in in
Speaker 1: the US. And there's an important distinction I think between
Speaker 1: the US and the UK as well, because there isn't
Speaker 1: one regulator for the for the gambling industry in the US.
Speaker 1: There's there's lots of them, each different state. Believe is
Speaker 1: I think over oversights spread amongst like a patchwork of
Speaker 1: state and tribal governments, some of whom are you know,
Speaker 1: They've been described by colleagues of ours as captives of
Speaker 1: the industry who don't necessarily understand the new technology as
Speaker 1: well as they might. Where are we seeing gambling really
Speaker 1: take off in the US right now. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think one of the real gold rush states at the
Speaker 1: moment is New York. And certainly when we were talking
Speaker 1: to people, one of the places that's seen, as I
Speaker 1: guess as the elder rado currently for for gambling companies
Speaker 1: right is New York. And despite state taxes being incredibly
Speaker 1: high on gambling revenues, you've got gambling companies literally queuing
Speaker 1: up to to get one of these licenses because it's
Speaker 1: considered so so lucrative a market. So I think, what
Speaker 1: what you've you've got are these incredibly well funded, sophisticated
Speaker 1: companies that see these opportunities in a in a liberalizing market.
Speaker 1: And my guess is obviously the the US will probably
Speaker 1: go down the same road as the UK if it's
Speaker 1: not careful. Talking to Harry's point on the New York.
Speaker 1: So the tax rate there is, which obviously is incredibly high,
Speaker 1: and gambling earnings, yeah, on gross gambling revenue, and yet
Speaker 1: gross gaming revenue rather and yet as Harry says, there's
Speaker 1: still this cue going out the door. So it just
Speaker 1: shows how profitable they see that that business as being.
Speaker 1: Since January, gambling companies have signed up one point five
Speaker 1: million accounts from one point one million customers, almost of
Speaker 1: them new too regulated sports betting, and just in that
Speaker 1: first month alone, in that January, one point seven billion
Speaker 1: dollars was waged on sports games online. In New York
Speaker 1: Gavin In the US, the Supreme Court ruled in big
Speaker 1: case that opened the door for more of this sort
Speaker 1: of betting. Can you describe what happened? Basically the allowed
Speaker 1: online gambling or or made online gambling legal on a
Speaker 1: state by state basis. Breaking news is Supreme Court this
Speaker 1: morning striking down the federal ban on sports betting. Now
Speaker 1: it leaves it up to the stat and that really
Speaker 1: opened the door to a massive influx of gambling companies
Speaker 1: into the US and in many of the states. Now
Speaker 1: you are not only able to do sports betting online,
Speaker 1: but you can also do casino game betting online as well.
Speaker 1: And so that that led to a lot of states
Speaker 1: that before didn't do this now seeing a great increase
Speaker 1: in the number of gamblers and gambling sites catering to them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's been an explosion of gambling sites in the US
Speaker 1: and in the online gambling revenues. And if you think
Speaker 1: about it, it's not so long ago that some of
Speaker 1: the executives of some UK listed gambling companies were having
Speaker 1: to avoid going to US because of cases they're under
Speaker 1: threat of arrest. So it's really is quite a substantial
Speaker 1: turnaround in in terms of the openness of the US
Speaker 1: to to um online gampling. Gavin Finch and Harry Wilson,
Speaker 1: thanks so much for talking to me today. Thank you,
Speaker 1: thanks for having us. You can read Gavin Finches and
Speaker 1: Harry Wilson's online gambling story at Bloomberg dot com. Thanks
Speaker 1: for listening to us here at The Big Take. It's
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