Speaker 1: Push Kim.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to Against the Rules everyone.
Speaker 1: I'm Michael Lewis.
Speaker 2: I'll admit I came into this season of the show
Speaker 2: with some conventional ideas about why people gamble. Of course,
Speaker 2: some people think they can make money, but also maybe
Speaker 2: they just want to impress people or hang out with
Speaker 2: their friends while at a game or a casino.
Speaker 1: And maybe that's true.
Speaker 2: For a subset of folks who like to bet, but
Speaker 2: that overlooks all the gamblers who play the slots.
Speaker 3: We often think of gambling as being a way to
Speaker 3: get something for nothing. And what I learned in my
Speaker 3: extended research with particularly slot machine gamblers, which are the
Speaker 3: Golden Geese of the industry revenue wise, that they're really
Speaker 3: after getting nothing, not something for nothing.
Speaker 2: That's Natasha Shole an associate professor in the Department of Media,
Speaker 2: Culture and Communication at NYU. She was trained as an
Speaker 2: anthropologist and she did more than a decade of work
Speaker 2: in Vegas casinos, especially among the slot machine players.
Speaker 3: They're after what they call a kind of machine zone
Speaker 3: where time and space and daily demands and worries fall
Speaker 3: away and they go into a kind of rhythmic flow
Speaker 3: of repetitive action that zones them away from the world.
Speaker 2: Natasha's book, Addiction by Design is a fascinating look at
Speaker 2: everything from casino design to the digital overhaul of Las Vegas,
Speaker 2: and she makes a very compelling case the slot machines
Speaker 2: explain not just what's happened in Vegas, but in the
Speaker 2: world far beyond, including the world inside our smartphones. Natasha
Speaker 2: had a big effect on the way I think about gambling,
Speaker 2: and I wanted you to hear our conversation in full.
Speaker 2: How'd you get interested in this in the first place?
Speaker 3: On my way out to Berkeley for college freshman year,
Speaker 3: I had a layover in Vegas, and greeting me for
Speaker 3: my two hours I spent there where it was these
Speaker 3: banks of machines right there at the exit, and I said,
Speaker 3: what an odd place this is. So when I became
Speaker 3: an anthropology major, I decided that would be an interesting
Speaker 3: topic to explore and it kind of went from there.
Speaker 1: And at that point it's all in Vegas, all in Vegas.
Speaker 3: Vegas I took as a sort of site or case
Speaker 3: study for looking at this turn in the market, both
Speaker 3: away from the sort of the Baccarah and the green
Speaker 3: felt tables toward slot machines, this more sort of childlike arcade,
Speaker 3: innocent seeming form of gambling as being the revenue lion
Speaker 3: for the city. But also looking at the disneyification of
Speaker 3: Las Vegas and the way they were appealing democratizing gambling
Speaker 3: to the mass market.
Speaker 1: What's the history of this? When does gambling take this turn?
Speaker 3: Gammin takes this turn right in line with certain developments
Speaker 3: in computer technology and video screen technology. In the past,
Speaker 3: slot machines would bring in maybe twenty percent less of revenue,
Speaker 3: and they pretty quickly, over about a decade a decade
Speaker 3: and a half, went to bringing in eighty to ninety
Speaker 3: percent of revenue. And this was all because of the
Speaker 3: technology changes and how they enabled the operators and the
Speaker 3: game designers to manipulate odds in far more precise ways,
Speaker 3: appealing to people who are sitting in front of them.
Speaker 3: So you could think of it as a sort of
Speaker 3: algorithmic turn. When is this though, late seventies, some of
Speaker 3: this technology is coming on the scenes, and it's sort
Speaker 3: of right in line with the personal computer developments. They
Speaker 3: start playing around with putting this technology into slot machines,
Speaker 3: moving away from the analog three reels with twenty two
Speaker 3: stops on each reel. That's really constraining in terms of
Speaker 3: what you can do with the machine like that. But
Speaker 3: once you've got so called virtual reels inside the machine,
Speaker 3: you can really really manipulate how a particular payout schedule
Speaker 3: can feel when you're interacting with it. So that really
Speaker 3: was the turn.
Speaker 1: Curious.
Speaker 2: If I'd have walked into a casino in Las Vegas
Speaker 2: in the nineteen sixties, how would it have looked different?
Speaker 3: So people would have been dressed a lot more elegantly,
Speaker 3: and you might find slot machines standing around by the
Speaker 3: check encounter, maybe in hallways and kind of on the
Speaker 3: peripheries of the main gaming areas. Really to serve the
Speaker 3: wives and to serve people who were waiting. They typically
Speaker 3: didn't have chairs because you weren't really meant to spend
Speaker 3: a lot.
Speaker 1: Of time at them, you said, for the wives.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there is a long standing association in this country
Speaker 3: with women and these what we think of as these
Speaker 3: little tedious arcade light games. So we associate them not
Speaker 3: only with women, but with older women, right, the cute
Speaker 3: little old ladies going to Atlantic City. We associate them
Speaker 3: with kids and arcades sort of like the equivalent to
Speaker 3: knitting in jangling, and there is something knitting like about
Speaker 3: it when you talk about the kind of repetitive flow
Speaker 3: and zoning away from yourself that you get into. But
Speaker 3: it turns out that that flow doesn't select by gender
Speaker 3: if you don't have those stereotypes hanging around. And more
Speaker 3: and more, it's pretty equal the amount of men that
Speaker 3: play these machines versus women. And with sports betting and
Speaker 3: mobile betting, your ears seeing a complet reversal of that
Speaker 3: stereotype associating women with these little apps that you engage with.
Speaker 1: So this is a cultural artfect.
Speaker 2: This is we sort of channel women towards slot machines
Speaker 2: and men towards the real men's games in the middle
Speaker 2: of the casino.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Even in the literature on problem gambling, there's a
Speaker 3: split between so called escape gambling and so called action gambling,
Speaker 3: and guess who the action gamblers are. There's also an
Speaker 3: interesting social history about how men sought out this kind
Speaker 3: of a character contest, especially in the fifties and sixties
Speaker 3: when life was relatively boring and you were probably a
Speaker 3: middle manager or a bureaucrat, and so you had to
Speaker 3: seek your thrills and your risks and your sort of
Speaker 3: confrontation with other men on the gambling floor, Whereas what
Speaker 3: women in those days and in the eighties and beyond
Speaker 3: articulated in their addiction and relationships with these slot machines
Speaker 3: was much more of getting away from people. You would
Speaker 3: often find that those in service positions, waitresses, nurses, accountants,
Speaker 3: wanted nothing more than a sort of relief or a
Speaker 3: respite from people. So it was kind of the opposite tendency.
Speaker 3: Turns out, though, that that's more of a cultural phenomenon
Speaker 3: than one that we can link to gender and a
Speaker 3: Really to prove that point, one could go and look
Speaker 3: at the case in Russia where you had young men
Speaker 3: in their twenties and they were the ones who played
Speaker 3: the exact same games with the same mathematical algorithms as
Speaker 3: the sixty year old women in the US back in
Speaker 3: the nineties.
Speaker 2: Huh, So, explain to me how what the casino does
Speaker 2: to shape the experience and shape people's behavior around the
Speaker 2: slot machines.
Speaker 3: I begin with the very bricks and mortar strategies of
Speaker 3: architecture and interior design. There are giant casino design manuals,
Speaker 3: and you know, if you go to Vegas yourself. I
Speaker 3: encourage you to look for this look down as you're walking,
Speaker 3: and you will be hard pressed to find a lot
Speaker 3: of right angles because right angles are a no no.
Speaker 3: Right angles put you up against a stocking point, into
Speaker 3: a position of a decision maker where you've suddenly got oh,
Speaker 3: now I must make a decision. It sort of forces
Speaker 3: you to decide, am I going left or right. You
Speaker 3: don't really want to put people in the stance of
Speaker 3: a decision maker, you know, engaging their prefrontal cortex, engaging
Speaker 3: their rationality and responsibility. You want to just curve them
Speaker 3: where you want them to go. And so there's you know,
Speaker 3: pages and pages in these casino manuals about how you
Speaker 3: have to gently curve people over into the gaming areas.
Speaker 3: And then once they're in the gaming areas, you don't
Speaker 3: want to have a lot of overhead space, as you
Speaker 3: might in a church or some big modernist arena. You
Speaker 3: really want to bring the ceilings down and make people
Speaker 3: feel that they're going into cozy little sanctuaries or caves.
Speaker 3: And this is the language that is in these manuals.
Speaker 3: It's very lyrical, almost about creating a physical surround and
Speaker 3: environment that makes you feel safe and alone, so that
Speaker 3: you can zone out into your own little world, because
Speaker 3: that is very lucrative for the establishment. They also do
Speaker 3: it with so called casino atmospherics, paying close attention to
Speaker 3: the acoustics, the way the sound bounces, not having too
Speaker 3: many bright lights or flashes that draws your attention away
Speaker 3: from the machine. You just want to keep it at
Speaker 3: the machine. One company designed all four hundred of the
Speaker 3: sounds on its slot machines to be in the thought
Speaker 3: to be soothing key of c to keep people. It's
Speaker 3: almost an ergonom if you think about it, it's an
Speaker 3: ergonomics of sensation that extends from the body to what's
Speaker 3: whole being. This is kind of counterintuitive to the way
Speaker 3: that we think about gambling, which is much more of
Speaker 3: a volatile, suspenseful risk operation. You know, that's what you
Speaker 3: see in all of the ads for casinos. But as
Speaker 3: I'm sure you know if you've walked into any casino,
Speaker 3: really the attitude is more one of a sort of
Speaker 3: expressionless face, a reclining posture, and maybe a slight tapping
Speaker 3: of the finger is about all the movement that you
Speaker 3: would see.
Speaker 2: No, it's advertised and kind of thought of as a
Speaker 2: social experience. But when you walk through a casino, you're
Speaker 2: not seeing people interacting.
Speaker 1: With each other.
Speaker 3: No, it's really about being away from other people. And
Speaker 3: what really drove this home for me was when gamblers
Speaker 3: kept talking about how oddly disappointed and anxious they would
Speaker 3: become when they want a jackpot. And I really tried
Speaker 3: to understand, to talk me through this, and they said, well,
Speaker 3: suddenly the game stops playing, right, you can't keep going.
Speaker 3: Your flow is interrupted, loud music plays, people look over
Speaker 3: at you, And that really drug home for me, like
Speaker 3: it's anti social what they were doing. They were precisely
Speaker 3: trying to get away from themselves and away from the
Speaker 3: social world. So those things we see in the ads
Speaker 3: with groups of people crowding excitedly around a machine is
Speaker 3: really not the way that it plays out for a
Speaker 3: slot machine gambling.
Speaker 2: So I don't want to interrupt the flow too much,
Speaker 2: but we're going to take a quick break. When we
Speaker 2: come back, Natasha and I talk about how casino design
Speaker 2: translates onto that little slot machine in our pockets the smartphone,
Speaker 2: and back with Natasha Shull, author of Addiction by Design.
Speaker 2: As more gambling moves out of the casino and just
Speaker 2: into the phone. Is there anything about from any of
Speaker 2: this design that can be applied by the bookies, by
Speaker 2: the gambling companies to affect the behavior of someone who's
Speaker 2: gambling digitally.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, all of the strategies that I just talked to
Speaker 3: you about, without even touching on math yet show up there.
Speaker 3: And these are strategies of removing friction the same way
Speaker 3: that you remove friction from a carpet. By removing a
Speaker 3: decision point, you're removing friction from the flow of the app.
Speaker 3: You're making it stickier. You're not increasing what they call
Speaker 3: in the gambling industry, time on device, but you're certainly
Speaker 3: increasing time on site. You know, these terms and these
Speaker 3: strategies so neatly carry over from the bricks and mortar
Speaker 3: casinos to anything on the website or online. So if
Speaker 3: you look closely at some of these apps that I've
Speaker 3: just mentioned, you will find all manner of slot machine strategy.
Speaker 3: You'll even find bars lining up, you'll find confetti, so
Speaker 3: so many things all geared to keep you in that zone.
Speaker 1: So I sit down at the slot machine, We're going
Speaker 1: to see analogies too. When we look at just our.
Speaker 2: Phone that keeps me going and gets me addicted.
Speaker 3: Yeah. One of the big challenges that they were facing
Speaker 3: was that they were basically saying, ough, our market is
Speaker 3: dying out. What are we going to do, Like, we're
Speaker 3: basically going to go extinct because our gamblers are fifty
Speaker 3: to sixty year old women. How do we bring in
Speaker 3: the youth? Then they said, oh, it looks like, you know,
Speaker 3: young men are liking playing this online poker, so let's
Speaker 3: try to import demension of online poker into the casino.
Speaker 3: So you would see poker tables that, instead of having
Speaker 3: actual dealers, would have avatars, and while you were waiting
Speaker 3: to take your turn, because you know, if you're online
Speaker 3: playing twenty tables at once, which is often what online
Speaker 3: poker players do, you're not going to want to wait
Speaker 3: sitting there to take your turn. So they would give
Speaker 3: you a screen on which you could play other games,
Speaker 3: usually more profitable to the house than poker while you
Speaker 3: were waiting for your turn. So they were throwing all
Speaker 3: sorts of technology and schemes at the casino floor trying
Speaker 3: to draw in young men. Nothing really was working. They
Speaker 3: were also at the time fighting very much against mobile gambling.
Speaker 3: So if you just look back at the history of
Speaker 3: how the industry has positioned itself. They were absolutely lobbying,
Speaker 3: throwing all they had against the the coming tides of
Speaker 3: mobile or online gambling. Then around twenty seventeen they just
Speaker 3: capitulate it. They said, you know, we have to accept
Speaker 3: this is the direction that things are going in. So
Speaker 3: we're just going to get on the train. Let's get
Speaker 3: on the train. And now with so many states offering
Speaker 3: legal sports betting, you see with DraftKings, with Caesars, in
Speaker 3: so many cases, this embrace of mobile online gambling, and
Speaker 3: the truth is the young men like it, not just
Speaker 3: the young men, but you know it's also getting women
Speaker 3: over it to sports betting, which has never been the case.
Speaker 1: Is that true?
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely know that. I mean, just it's the same
Speaker 3: exact rhetoric as you saw with Robin hood app and
Speaker 3: others that so called democratized day trading by making in
Speaker 3: part by making it friendlier, you didn't have that experience
Speaker 3: of being a woman who had no cultural background. And
Speaker 3: in sports betting, you're very unlikely to want to walk
Speaker 3: into a sports book with the old guys in there
Speaker 3: and figure out what a prop bet is. But you
Speaker 3: can do that online it's very friendly. No one is
Speaker 3: watching your friends or maybe doing it. So yeah, we've
Speaker 3: seen not only has the gambling industry found a way
Speaker 3: to really entice men in and sort of bring them
Speaker 3: over into other areas of gambling, it's been a way
Speaker 3: to bring women into sports betting.
Speaker 2: If I put you in charge of a sports betting app,
Speaker 2: knowing what you know about slots and women, what would
Speaker 2: you encourage them to do to encourage more women to
Speaker 2: become addicted to sports gambling.
Speaker 3: Some of the things that a company might think it
Speaker 3: should do, which are just sort of laughable and absurd
Speaker 3: but might work a little bit, would be, you know,
Speaker 3: changing the tones, making a sort of I remember, I
Speaker 3: remember there was one case on the casino floor where
Speaker 3: they figured out that men exiting a sort of dirty
Speaker 3: review show were bothering young women who were playing and
Speaker 3: you know, giving a lot of their money to the casino.
Speaker 3: And the casino didn't like this, so they advertised directly
Speaker 3: to all those women in their thirties saying, we have
Speaker 3: created a women's only slot shelter for you. We have
Speaker 3: decorated it in lavender, we have special little drink cups
Speaker 3: for you. Come be pampered like you're in a spa.
Speaker 3: It was sort of like a spa slash slot shelter,
Speaker 3: which was just so interesting gender wise, and it did
Speaker 3: actually increase their revenue. So the aesthetics do count. And
Speaker 3: if you make it less like all black with white
Speaker 3: and these sort of macho truck like symbols and sort of,
Speaker 3: you know, do a little aby testing, throw in some lavender,
Speaker 3: see what comes up.
Speaker 2: So don't you all run out to that lavender slot
Speaker 2: shelter just yet.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back.
Speaker 2: I'm back with NYU's Natasha shol Back. When we recorded
Speaker 2: this interview, I was still planning the previous episode in
Speaker 2: this feed, the one where my son Walker is set
Speaker 2: up with a sports betting account as a kind of experiment.
Speaker 1: I wanted to get Natasha's advice on all this.
Speaker 2: So his neuroscience teacher is going to try to explain
Speaker 2: to him what's going on in his brain as he
Speaker 2: gets into this. Do you think it's a bad idea
Speaker 2: to introduce my seventeen year old to sports gambling?
Speaker 3: So I don't know how that it's that bad of
Speaker 3: an idea, because that suggests that there's something super unique
Speaker 3: about this that this is sort of like some intense
Speaker 3: heroin like thing that could turn you for life, when
Speaker 3: in fact, and this is a point I always like
Speaker 3: to make, and those who would like to use my
Speaker 3: voice to sort of speak against the gambling industry don't
Speaker 3: always like it when I do this. And this is
Speaker 3: to observe that these gambling apps are part of a
Speaker 3: wider ecology that extend not only to candy crush, but
Speaker 3: also to apps for regulating your diabetes management or even
Speaker 3: your banking. It is so around us, and the idea
Speaker 3: that your seventeen year old boy would not have already
Speaker 3: encountered in spades this kind of stuff floating around in
Speaker 3: social media is just not realistic, right, So this is
Speaker 3: just going to be a sort of focused case for
Speaker 3: him of something that I think he's already very familiar with.
Speaker 3: What I would recommend is trying to have the neuroscientist
Speaker 3: riding alongside in his mind as a kind of layer
Speaker 3: of awareness. So he's almost doing like anthropology of himself
Speaker 3: auto ethnography, right, And I think that that kind of
Speaker 3: awareness isn't entirely protective, but in general it's a great
Speaker 3: way of going through the world, sort of watching how
Speaker 3: am I reacting to certain things. How are they manipulating me?
Speaker 3: That's a good attitude to have. I think anything that
Speaker 3: came in front of you, as it's going to come
Speaker 3: in front of your son. You can sort of have
Speaker 3: a rubric for performing an audit of how odious or
Speaker 3: dangerous it is. And so my rubric has four things
Speaker 3: on it, and one of them is the easy and
Speaker 3: constant access. So we know, we know for a while
Speaker 3: in the bricks and mortar landscape that if you live
Speaker 3: fifty miles or closer to a casino, you are probably
Speaker 3: that's fifty percent more likely to develop a problem. So
Speaker 3: I like to think about the mobile phone and sports
Speaker 3: betting that is five inches right, So it's just constantly there.
Speaker 3: The portal is open, it's inviting you, it's there. So
Speaker 3: you've got this easy and constant access, no friction. Right.
Speaker 3: There's also a removal of the social component. It's very solitary.
Speaker 3: That seems to be something which is fertile ground for
Speaker 3: these kind of machine zones that one could get caught
Speaker 3: in and continue to seek out in a kind of
Speaker 3: addictive way. And you might be thinking, but really does
Speaker 3: it really remove the social component? And we're talking about
Speaker 3: sports betting, there's so many other people. There's this whole
Speaker 3: culture to it, and there is like athletes on the field.
Speaker 3: The truth is, when you were doing this betting, it
Speaker 3: is you and your phone, just like when you're doing
Speaker 3: online dating. There's an odd way in which removes the
Speaker 3: other people and turns them into a game. And you know,
Speaker 3: there's a lawsuit going on right now against Hinge that
Speaker 3: says this is going on right So instead of going
Speaker 3: out and having a date, you end up in your
Speaker 3: bedroom swiping left and right, and so this is kind
Speaker 3: of the equivalent. You're not going on an outing with
Speaker 3: the buddies to this race track. You are with your
Speaker 3: phone constantly clicking away. It's very solitary and you can
Speaker 3: go your own speed. Another saying is that there is
Speaker 3: no natural end to the things that seem to grip
Speaker 3: us most tightly in this click economy. You might say, oh,
Speaker 3: but in sports there is. It's built in because the
Speaker 3: game ends, the race ends, right. That used to be
Speaker 3: the case. Addiction researchers in gambling used to talk about, oh, well,
Speaker 3: sports isn't so bad because the event frequency is one,
Speaker 3: whereas the event frequency for a slot machine could be
Speaker 3: twelve hundred hands an hour. You can only run one
Speaker 3: horse race an hour. This is no longer the case
Speaker 3: when you're bringing in apps and technology, because if you've
Speaker 3: still got that energy for doing this kind of betting,
Speaker 3: it seamlessly transfers over to you know, you could find
Speaker 3: your people, say they find themselves betting on basketball and
Speaker 3: Belgium or ping pong and China. You know, time zones
Speaker 3: don't even matter anymore. You're not even constricted by space
Speaker 3: or time, so you can just keep flowing and think
Speaker 3: about it. There is no natural end, so it's the
Speaker 3: cont it's the availability of continuity, another sort of removal
Speaker 3: of friction. And then you know, the final thing is
Speaker 3: just to go back to our friend B. F. Skinner,
Speaker 3: and perhaps your son has already had that high school
Speaker 3: class about behaviorist science. A Skinner box is a setup
Speaker 3: usually with levers or little lights and whatever ammal is
Speaker 3: in there is going to be like pecking to see
Speaker 3: what comes next. And he found, after experimenting with a
Speaker 3: vast array of different sort of output schemes, different algorithms,
Speaker 3: you could say that the one that's going to keep
Speaker 3: you pecking, ignoring your water and ignoring your friends is
Speaker 3: the one where you never know how much is coming out,
Speaker 3: and you never know when. If you know that you
Speaker 3: peck ten times and you get your pellet, you'll peck
Speaker 3: ten times, you'll get your pellet, you'll go playing with
Speaker 3: your friends. Not so if you don't know. There's something
Speaker 3: about that uncertainty. And what the slot machine and what
Speaker 3: so many of these apps that we've been talking about
Speaker 3: do is they're constantly sort of opening that interval of uncertainty,
Speaker 3: and then you can reveal it and then you can
Speaker 3: open it again. So it's open closed, open closed, and
Speaker 3: it's very very fast, so it sort of exceeds the
Speaker 3: capacity of the brain. Maybe the neuroscientist will talk about
Speaker 3: this to your son to compute and process what is
Speaker 3: going on, and you really just get caught in this flow.
Speaker 2: You know what's interesting about that is I'm just thinking,
Speaker 2: maybe this is a stupid thought. But with slot machines,
Speaker 2: the user is experiencing it as uncertainty, but the casino
Speaker 2: is totally certain that if you sit there long enough,
Speaker 2: you're going to lose all your money. It's calibrated that way,
Speaker 2: and you just can't perceive the deep certainty that's there.
Speaker 3: This is sort of the argument that I'm making about
Speaker 3: why it is predatory is because you've got this giant,
Speaker 3: well financed corporate apparatus that can use numbers in a
Speaker 3: way both algorithmically and in terms of its overall revenue.
Speaker 3: They know absolutely, certainly, down to decimal points, what they're
Speaker 3: going to get, and they are preying on the gambler's
Speaker 3: total uncertainty about what they're going to get. So I
Speaker 3: call it asymmetric collusion. You know, they both want the
Speaker 3: playing to be happening, but for utterly different reasons. The
Speaker 3: gambler wants to zone out and the corporation wants its revenue.
Speaker 2: The sports book, I suppose, might be designed in a
Speaker 2: way that's similar to the slot machine that if you
Speaker 2: play enough with it, you're going to lose m hm,
Speaker 2: although I don't think they actually are. I mean, a
Speaker 2: sharp player can come in and beat the book, then
Speaker 2: in a way, a sharp player can't come in and
Speaker 2: beat the slot, but the sports themselves are genuinely uncertain. Yes,
Speaker 2: So this thing that you said that makes it so
Speaker 2: naturally addictive is hardwired into the product in a way
Speaker 2: it's not in most casino games.
Speaker 3: Well. Interestingly, the slot machines that are most high erring today.
Speaker 3: And this is maybe since the two thousands are called
Speaker 3: multi line slot machine. And when I say multiline, I
Speaker 3: mean like five hundred lines. And so instead of betting
Speaker 3: on one row of symbols across and then you win
Speaker 3: or you lose, then they fold it in three, they
Speaker 3: added to diagonals to make five. And then when you're
Speaker 3: talking about physical reels, they maxed out. Once video technology
Speaker 3: came along and virtual reels and computers, they're able to
Speaker 3: allow you on a computer screen to bet sideways diagonal scattershots,
Speaker 3: so you don't even know where the things are lining up.
Speaker 3: It's just dots and you can't really even tell what's
Speaker 3: going on. And then, if you think about it, each
Speaker 3: each bet is a moment of learning and reinforcement in
Speaker 3: the behaviorist sense. So if you're betting hundreds of times
Speaker 3: instead of just once on the outcome of the game,
Speaker 3: each one of those bets is yet another moment of
Speaker 3: sort of reinforcing the behavior or sort of pulling them
Speaker 3: into it. So I think it's pretty clear why it
Speaker 3: would be more addictive in the online interface. There have
Speaker 3: been calls to ban multi line slot machines, because it
Speaker 3: seems that the higher the number of lines you can
Speaker 3: bet on, it's almost like diversifying your portfolio. You put
Speaker 3: one hundred pennies on the machine, and you win forty back,
Speaker 3: then you put fifty in and maybe you win sixty.
Speaker 3: Then you put the sixty in, then you win twenty,
Speaker 3: and you're just going along so fast, and most of
Speaker 3: the time you're not actually winning. You're losing, but you're
Speaker 3: taking more time to lose, and along the way you
Speaker 3: feel like you're sort of winning all along. And this
Speaker 3: has been the real formula of giving people more time
Speaker 3: on device so's to take more of their money during
Speaker 3: that time. That's the formula of the gambling industry. And
Speaker 3: you can see it a little bit. You can draw
Speaker 3: that parallel to the in game betting. You're keeping someone
Speaker 3: continually engaged and hooked in to the flow of the game,
Speaker 3: so it makes a lot of sense that when the
Speaker 3: game comes to an end, they're going to want to
Speaker 3: keep playing it.
Speaker 2: Thanks so much to Natasha Schul for a fascinating conversation,
Speaker 2: and check out our book Addiction by Design. Machine Gambling
Speaker 2: in Las Vegas. By the way, I'm not done with
Speaker 2: you guys yet. Next week, I speak with doctor Lorie Santos,
Speaker 2: host of the Happiness Lab here at Pushkin, about how
Speaker 2: the sports betting apps take advantage of the teenage male brain.
Speaker 4: But I think adolescent brains in general are prone to
Speaker 4: risk taking and prone to really seeking out belonging in
Speaker 4: whatever form it's sort of presented, and so I feel
Speaker 4: like these cues to belonging are especially salient to young
Speaker 4: boys too.
Speaker 2: Against the Rules is written and hosted by me Michael
Speaker 2: Lewis and produced by Lydia gene Kott, Catherine Gerardeau, and
Speaker 2: Ariela Markowitz. Our editor is Julia Barton. Our engineer is
Speaker 2: Sarah Bruguier. Against the Rules is a production of Pushkin Industries.
Speaker 2: To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 2: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts, And if
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